Why are you asking this?”
Outside the store, Rebecca and Nesha strode past the food stalls, searching the streets for a hint of Vogel. The newly-killed ducks and chickens still hung upside down, their necks dangling. Smells fought with each other as they passed a butcher’s, a bakery, another fish shop. They struggled through the shoppers down one street, then another.
What were they to make of the new information Mona had tossed out, that Vogel and Feldberg had been in the same camp during the war? If Feldberg was a Nazi, what did that make Vogel? His prisoner?
Further into the market, people jostled them on all sides as they headed toward eggplants and five different kinds of lettuce. Surprising even herself, she halted in the middle of the sidewalk like a stone in a stream, prompting the flow of irritated traffic to swirl around them and onto the road.
“We’re not going to find him here,” she said. “It’s his territory. I’ve got to go back to the hospital to check on Iris.”
“I’ll meet you later, then. I’m not going back there.”
By the time Rebecca returned to the hospital, Iris was in intensive care. When she opened the door, Joe and Martha stood on either side of their mother. Martha, the larger of the two, was a stout, unglamourous though blonde version of Iris in baggy jeans and a sweatshirt. Her older brother, his hair a dark contrast, hid a smaller, more delicate frame under a navy sports jacket and tie. Both their faces were drained of colour and carried that glazed distant look she recognized in people confronted by the possible loss of a loved one.
Joe acknowledged her with a slight nod. Martha barely looked up. “What’s going to happen to her? Will she be all right?”
“We won’t know till she wakes up,” said Rebecca.
She stepped to the foot of the bed and gazed at Iris. Her head was tightly wrapped in white bandages. She looked not at all like Iris without the uplifted waves of blonde hair to soften her round face. Her skin was transparent; Rebecca could almost see the workings of the bones beneath. The human being reduced into body parts. The IV bag hung in the air above the bed, the solution silently dripping, dripping down the tube into her arm. A plastic tube snaked into her nose and down to her stomach, a precaution against aspiration.
“We’ll be outside,” Martha said, moving toward the door, motioning to her brother to follow.
She was her mother’s daughter, after all, sensing Rebecca’s need, she thought. Once they were gone, she covered Iris’ hand with her own and watched the closed eyelids. “Iris,” she said leaning closer. “You hold on, Iris. You’re strong and you can do it. You’re going to come out of this, Iris. I need you to get better.”
It wasn’t until she was walking away down the hall that she realized how much she needed Iris. She wiped her eyes quickly, hoping Joe and Martha could no longer see her.
She had barely reached the waiting-room when her pager went off. Her answering service passed on a message from Nesha to call him. The number was unfamiliar.
“Yitz’s Deli,” said a man’s voice.
“Could I speak to Nesha?”
“Hold on.”
She had to smile.
“How do you like my new office?” he said when he had pulled himself away from his kishka platter or whatever morsel he was dispatching.
“You must be paying with American money. They’re not usually that compliant.”
“Don’t be cranky. You’re probably hungry. You want to come up and have a bite before we go to Isabella’s?”
“You’re going too fast for me.”
“Feldberg hasn’t come back. I’ve checked. I also checked his machine while I was there. Isabella left three messages. Very weepy. It seems he hasn’t called her and she’s worried. He must’ve skipped. That’s what I was afraid of. That something would scare him off. She’s our best lead.”
“But if she doesn’t know where he is....”
“Maybe she knows something she doesn’t realize she knows.”
“Alright,” Rebecca said, checking her watch. It was almost five. Isabella wouldn’t have left for work yet. “But we should also talk to the Capitán at the Spanish club I told you about.”
“Will they let me in without a tie?”
chapter thirty-one
The stretch of Bathurst Street north of Eglinton must have had the most traffic lights per inch of roadway in the city, one suspended like a winking eye over each block. Staid brick apartment buildings lined both sides of the main street while tonier highrises, chaste in the white brick beloved of the early sixties, towered over the narrower side roads, throwing shadows. According to the address Nesha had found at the back of Feldberg’s ledger, Isabella Velasco occupied one of the apartments on Mayfair Avenue, an elbow of a side street between Eglinton and Bathurst that Rebecca sometimes used as a shortcut.
Rebecca was walking toward the highrise after parking her car when she came upon Nesha leaning against his rented Olds. With his cracked leather jacket and lean insouciant pose, he looked like a character out of West Side Story, only twenty-five years later. He held a paper bag out to her. The deli-grease aroma of french fries wafted on the air. She kept away from fried foods as a rule, but the gesture, the smell, were seductive.
“Live dangerously,” he said when she hesitated.
She took the bag, which held a carton of vinegar-soaked fries, and speared them with the plastic fork he gave her.
“I didn’t think you were a ketchup girl,” he said, watching her wolf down the potatoes.
Apart from some sugarless ginger ale and an apple from the market, she hadn’t eaten that day.
He grinned as she finished the box. “I knew I should’ve brought you a hamburger.”
With her mouth full she said, “I never eat hamburgers.”
He reached through the open window of the car and brought out a can of Coke. “Here,” he said.
“I never drink Coke,” she said smiling as he popped the tin. She took a swig.
They stood inside the front vestibule of a genteel-shabby apartment building. She found Isabella’s name on the list displayed beneath a sheet of glass. There was no suite number, just a dial-in code. Rebecca tried the inside door. It was locked. She picked up the in-house phone and was about to dial the code.
“Wait,” Nesha said, taking the receiver from her hand and replacing it. He pulled her back out the front door.
Taking her arm, he strolled her down the pavement. When a young couple turned to go into the building, he steered Rebecca around and followed them. He waited until the couple was buzzed in by the people they were visiting, then casually caught the door before it closed.
“I’d rather surprise her,” Nesha said.
“I’m assuming you
