one was it?”
His brother-in-law rolls his eyes toward the vaulted ceiling, admiring the inlaid crystals. The Jaziri family spared no expense when it came to renovation. The enormous ivory chandeliers must have cost many an elephant life. “Von Hötzendorf, I think.”
Stefan has his own personal relationship with truth, and it seldom involves adherence to fact. Right now he’s probably trying out the field marshal business because he likes the atmosphere and is thinking of setting a scene here. Generally, Richard lets these moments glide by, but sometimes he can’t resist calling him out. “Von Hötzendorf’s from the First War,” he says. “He died eight or nine years before Hitler took power.”
“Well, then, it must have been some other von,” Stefan says cheerfully. He turns to Franek, who’s laboring over his wild boar and hasn’t said two words since they sat down. “You better get moving on that,” he tells his son. “They’ve got some great desserts here, and you’ll be ineligible if you leave that much on your plate.”
The boy’s cheeks turn red. Looking at him now, Richard senses that he feels very much alone. His mother plays viola in the Philharmonic and is often away at night, and his father makes frequent jaunts to foreign countries as new books are released. The poor kid’s by himself too much, and puberty’s on the way if it hasn’t already struck.
“Give him time, Uncle Stefan,” Anna says. “I thought old people were supposed to be more patient than the young.”
“Little lawyer!” To Richard: “I see she takes after my sister.”
“Yeah,” Richard agrees, “she’s absorbed a few of her mom’s character traits.”
“You two are discussing them as if they weren’t sitting at the same table,” Monika says. “Like it’s guys’ night out. It’s offensive.”
To Richard, his sister-in-law has always been a mystery. A small, shapely woman who dyes her hair so black it’s nearly blue, she usually doesn’t say much. But when she does speak, she stares at you like you’re the score of a concerto she’s playing. This never fails to cause him discomfort, and he’s occasionally had the feeling that she knows and enjoys it. Why that would be, he can’t imagine. But she’s the person who kindled Anna’s interest in violin and gave her her first lessons, so he thinks maybe he should apologize, though he’s not sure what for.
As though reading his mind, Stefan says, “I think maybe it’s time for the guys to go have a smoke.” He pulls a pair of cigars from inside his jacket. “Guess where these came from?”
“They’re Cuban?”
His brother-in-law grins. “The benefits of being un-American.”
Richard chews the last bit of duck and lays down his knife and fork. “The balcony?”
“Of course.”
They excuse themselves and wind their way between tables. The other diners are all well dressed—a couple of women glitteringly so—and Richard hears a smattering of German, a phrase or two that he thinks might be Croatian, a fair amount of English. There’s jazz on the sound system, “Someday My Prince Will Come.” That’s the only kind of music they seem to play here, and it’s a big reason he loves this restaurant. His father ran a seedy jazz club in one of Boston’s northern suburbs, and though it went out of business nearly thirty years ago, Richard thinks about it often, easily summoning the sight and smell of nineteen overflowing ashtrays, one on each table and three on the mahogany bar.
They step outside and light their cigars. The snow has slackened. Down below, they can see the lights of a few villas and farmhouses and, to the southwest, the airport’s runway lights. It’s cold but not that cold, especially because they’re full of food and wine.
“Is it my imagination,” he asks, “or is Monika on edge?”
“Rysiu, I’ve always felt you were wasted on journalism. With your sense of seismography, you ought to be a novelist.” He looses a puff of loamy smoke. “I had this little thing going on locally. And Monika’s not used to that.”
The protagonist in his novels, a middle-aged detective in the Krakow police department, repeatedly cheats on his wife, often with three or four different women over the course of a three-hundred-page book. The twist is that he never pursues younger lovers. They’re always at least his age and sometimes even older. His forte is highly atmospheric mature sex. He calls on them with weary eyelids, a bottle of Egri Bikaver, a tin of pasteurized roe, a chunk of smoked sheep cheese, cranberry relish. The world may be changing, but his actions affirm that in matters of the heart he adheres to the old ways: he kisses their hands coming and going.
“What kind of little thing?” Richard asks.
“She’s twenty-two, works at that record store on Florianska.”
He wouldn’t be able to conceal his dismay if he tried. “Jesus. The blonde with that milky-white complexion?” The girl looks about as old as Anna.
“If you think what you’ve seen of her is milky white,” Stefan says, “you ought to . . . Well, you don’t like hearing this. Do you?”
“Not especially.”
Stefan laughs and pats his shoulder. “I felt sure you wouldn’t. But the setup’s perfect, and I couldn’t help but want to watch your reaction.” He sucks hard on the cigar, the tip of it glowing bright orange. “Two brothers-in-law alone outdoors on a snowy night. One of them utterly, blindly infatuated with his wife. The other a hedonistic rake. Don’t be surprised if this appears in a novel.”
Richard won’t be. “What surprises me is her age.”
“Several of her predecessors were a year or two younger. Rysiu, our good detective’s consorts are camouflage. They serve their purpose, though you should see some of the women who hit on me at book signings. The problem with this latest one’s not her age. It’s the fact that she lives in Krakow. I broke it off last week, but just yesterday I glanced out the window and saw her standing on the sidewalk watching our building. I suspect I may have fucked up.”
“And Monika knows?”
“She does and she doesn’t. In other words, she hasn’t been told. I’m sure she has no idea who it is, at least not yet.”
“Are you going to tell her?”
“Is that what you’d do if you were in my shoes?”
He’s not about to say that he’d never be in Stefan’s shoes. The only people who can truthfully say how they’d behave in any given situation are, by and large, people Richard Brennan does not want to know. “I think I probably would,” he says.
“I think you probably would too. Of course, you’d never put yourself in this position to begin with.” He gestures toward the dining room. “In there at that table, you’ve got everything you need. You’ve even got everything you want.”
Why argue with the truth? In Richard’s profession, you travel a good bit and see a lot of different people, a fair number of whom are women. He spends the occasional night in L.A., where he sometimes has dinner with a film producer in her early thirties, whose love life, he knows, is a disaster. The melting nature of her good-night hugs has led to the suspicion that if he wanted to, he could get himself
