Ice Cap (20 page)

He told me to meet him at the diner in Hampton Bays. He hadn't eaten since the night before, which was a shocking admission for a guy who required about two and a half times the normal person's food intake to maintain body mass, most of which was solid muscle.

“How come?” I asked.

“Let me get off the phone and I'll tell you when you get there.”

The trip over to Hampton Bays was uneventful. Though if there had been events, you couldn't prove it by me. A herd of velociraptors could have run across the street and I wouldn't have noticed. As it sometimes is, my head was so full of noise a passenger in my car would have needed earplugs.

There was the steady, sonorous voice of Art Montrose, serving up an unrecognizable and thoroughly unwelcome portrait of Franco Raffini. There was Dayna's peppy enthusiasm, mimicking her dog's. The unpronounceable Buddhist Dinabandhu Pandey, with his own cheerful take on the sinister, as-yet-unmet Eliz Pritz, at this point just a reedy, clipped electronic monotone. It was all a cacophonous jumble in my mind, fighting for the floor, asserting positions that all seemed insightful and absurd at the same time.

I shook my head, trying to toss out some of the racket, and succeeded only in compromising what little control I'd managed to assert over my rebellious hair. This served a purpose, however, providing a distraction from the obsessive deliberations.

How's that for managing one's neurotic psyche?

*   *   *

Joe was at his usual spot in a booth facing the door, already with a plate of pancakes covered in strawberries and a side of ham. And a cup of coffee. And that was it.

“You're dieting,” I said, sitting across from him. “Never thought I'd see the day.”

He looked up darkly from his plate. “No appetite,” he said.

Oh no, I thought, looking at him more closely, searching for signs of lethal disease.

“Don't look at me like that. It's not what you think.”

“Not what?”

“I'm not sick. Not like that.” He put down his fork and looked out the window. Then he let out an irritated sigh. “My wife threw me out of the house.”

He looked back at me, not exactly defiantly but as if to say,
Okay, there, I said it out loud, to you. I shared a very intimate thing, but I'm not asking for sympathy and I refuse to show distress or weakness, so don't try to make me.

I didn't. “That sucks,” I said.

“It's been brewing. Not easy for a woman to live with a guy on the job.”

He meant the cop's life, the one where you get to work long, odd hours for short money and struggle with all sorts of deviant behavior while entangled in an often rigid and irrational bureaucracy, with little in the way of sympathy from the people you're paid to protect, except in the abstract. Oh, and you also get to occasionally risk your life. If you endure all this with dedication and commitment, like Sullivan did, the odds were good there'd be someone miserable sharing your life.

“Buddy of mine has a mother-in-law apartment in Southampton Village. It's over the garage and I get one of the bays. It's a better neighborhood than I had before, I'll tell you that. Mostly summer people. Probably terrified to have a cop living among the hoity-toity.”

“So it's, like, over, or is this a separation? If you don't mind me asking.”

He shook his head. “I brought it up. You can ask me whatever you want. It's over. We never had kids, which she also blames on me, so that's not an issue. She's got some other guy, which in my experience with domestic situations usually seals the deal. She's scared to death I'm going to kill the idiot, but I couldn't give a crap. He's just a symptom. Having a relationship with my wife will be its own punishment. I'm just as glad.”

“I'm still sorry,” I said. “It's never cause for celebration, even when ultimately the right thing.”

He bunched up his lips and gave a quick little nod. “You're right about that, Jackie. I haven't told anybody else, so if you wouldn't mind, just let it leak out on its own.”

And then, of course, the worst thing starts to happen. I could feel the pressure as tears tried to force their way into my eye sockets. Not because Sullivan's wife left him. Because he'd picked me as the first person to tell. We spent so much time locked in professional combat that when we weren't in temporary periods of uneasy alliance, I'd forget the man's authentic heart was forthright and true. And at that moment I realized I might be one of a handful who actually understood that, and was thus worthy of his trust.

“Got it, Joe. Lips are sealed,” I said as I stood up, claiming the need for an urgent bathroom run. Once there, I sat on the lowered toilet seat and dabbed my eyes until the moment passed. I pulled myself together, brushed the mop of hair away from my face, and went back to the table.

“So, what's this confession you're talking about,” Sullivan said as I sat down.

I asked him to wait until I could boot up my laptop. After a few minutes, I had side-by-side, full-screen portraits of the Ike and Connie impersonators. I spun the computer around.

“Know these guys?” I asked.

He squinted at the images, frowning with concentration. “Not sure,” he said. “Give me the whole thing,” he added, looking up at me.

So I did, starting with the first visit by the real Ike and Connie and including my decision to drive out to the French restaurant and the subsequent conversation with the other two. I told him about visiting Ike, leaving out Sam's approach to initiating free and frank discussions. I told him I meant to bring him in as soon as I knew it wouldn't prejudice my client's case.

He listened through the whole thing without interruption, then when I was finished, he said, “Seems to me this could point the other way. These are the only elements of this case that have no obvious connection to the defendant. And the very fact that you've been warned off providing a proper defense would imply other players feel at risk, even if Franco was the one who actually committed the deed.”

“That's my feeling,” I said with vigor.

“I'd take the threat seriously. It's a pretty bad violation of the basic rules of engagement.” He meant the unwritten agreement between criminals and law enforcement that cops, judges, and lawyers—prosecutors and defenders alike—were off-limits from threat, much less physical mistreatment. “Sorry you had to go through that,” he said, running his hand along the edge of the computer screen and looking closely again at the images. “We'll be lookin' these guys up. Maybe go pay 'em a visit.”

“You'll let me know, won't you, Joe? When you find out who they are?”

He smiled with half his face, which made it closer to a smirk.

“I will, but we'll be having no independent action here. I'll let you stay close on this as long as you stay close to me. There's a lot at stake, including your client's sorry ass. And your own.”

“I'm sorry for any trouble I've ever caused you,” I said.

“Then you can pay for breakfast,” he said, standing up. “Best deal you've had in a while.” He put on his coat, a pure white parka with a fringe of fur around the hood, likely surplus from Russia's Siberian Special Forces unit or something like that. “And you and Sam stay away from Ivor Fleming. We can handle him, too, without the aid of the civilian population.”

“Roger that, chief. So you think there's a connection between Fleming and the Buczek case?”

“Just stay away from him. You poke at a snake, he's likely to bite.”

I realized I hadn't ordered anything, so I got a yogurt and a coffee and used the diner's wireless connection to browse around on the computer, mostly in search of more cold-weather gear, which incongruously led me to sites with deals on winter vacations in the Caribbean, not that I'd be able to go. I kept looking so I could see photographs of couples cavorting in the surf in evening clothes, splayed on lounge chairs, or sipping a piña colada by the pool, backlit by the crimson setting sun, staring into each other's eyes in a way no one really does, but it doesn't matter. We're all eager to rent the illusion.

*   *   *

I arrived at the office just as the sun was going down. I rebooted the laptop and had an e-mail message waiting for me from UB45JK.

“Greetings from Dystopriot Land. My stubby friend said you could use a hand with the Polack-ski. Reply if you wish.”

I checked the time. Four thirty. Cocktail hour! I turned up the heat and squirmed out of my clothes, down to the silk longjohns. I poured a chardonnay and lit a cigarette, which I finished by the time I'd reconnected and rebooted the laptop and checked the security camera record and my other e-mail. I poured another wine and clicked the Reply link on UB45JK's e-mail.

“Hi there, UB (hope you don't mind the abbreviation), I really would like some help,” I wrote. “I don't know what time zone you're in, but I'm in for the night now. Love to hear from you.”

About a half hour later, she came back.

“I'm in your time zone. I like UB, it's kind of cute. Never thought of it myself. You speak Polish?”

“
Nie
,” I replied. “And that's about the only word I know. That and
Tak
.” Meaning yes. “The last name's from my late husband. I was born Jacqueline O'Dwyer.”

“Let's take this to IM,” she wrote, meaning instant messaging, which would facilitate the back-and-forth. She gave me an IM site and instructions for reaching her.

“Same handle. Just ask for UB45JK.”

When we made the connection she asked, “So what's the caper?”

“I want to do a background check on a woman whose maiden name is Katarzina Malonowski. She was born, and I guess raised, in Kraków. She's thirty-two years old. Her nickname is Zina and she claims to have a degree in economics. Her parents were Godek and Halina, also native-born Poles, I assume. They're dead. That's about all I know.”

“Do you have a picture?”

I realized with some disappointment in myself that I didn't. I asked her to hold on and opened up Google to search for images of Katarzina Buczek. A slew of Eastern Europeans popped up, but only one was my Katarzina, which was all I needed. She had actually gone to a fund-raiser, which in the Hamptons can put you in the crosshairs of a party photographer. There was no sign of Tad, no surprise. I copied the image, and after opening a separate e-mail, sent it to UB.

“Wow, she's really pretty. Those Mongol eyes. Probably descended from Kublai Khan. Are those lashes real?”

That's when I was fairly sure UB was a woman. I testified to their authenticity.

“She's better-looking in real life. Do you think you could get more on her?” I asked.

“Without a doubt. I have lots of BFFs in Kraków. But I can do a lot on my own.”

“That's extremely good of you,” I wrote.

“Happy to help any friend of Gyro's. I don't care if he's a dwarf. I'm definitely not a shortist. Is that the right word? English is a very difficult language.”

Oh no, I thought. Another moral dilemma for our times. I knew damn well Randall was the opposite of a dwarf, but was she only referring to the avatar? What could I tell UB about Randall that didn't violate his privacy? Would he want me to anyway, to facilitate a better romantic connection? Luckily, she didn't ask.

“He thanks you back,” I wrote. “Where do you live, anyway? I'm just curious.”

“New Britain, Connecticut,” she wrote back. “Throw a rock in any direction and you hit a Pole.”

“So why not New Warsaw?” I wrote back.

“Good question. I'll take it up at the next town meeting.”

We went back and forth for at least another hour, her comparing her life in the States with life in Poland, me rhapsodizing over Polish food, her complaining that her countrymen were too shy about touting Poland's international accomplishments, me agreeing, but attributing this reluctance to historical persecution and arbitrarily throwing in a dollop of complaint over the treatment of the Irish, her admitting she coveted the skin of an Irish friend of hers, me reflecting wistfully over the loss of my size 4 sometime early in college (I'm still a generous 6, for the record) and so on. All in all, we had a great time, and for all I knew, she was just an automatic-rifle-toting, computer-generated elf in futuristic combat gear.

After we signed off, I felt an odd mixture of loss and relief. Glad for the conversation, intimidated by the implications. I was only in my late thirties, and yet it felt like the world was whizzing by me into the future and I was already in its wake. And yet I had no fear of catching up. It wasn't that hard, if you wanted to try.

And that was the crux. If you wanted to try.

 

15

The concept of a memorial service for Tad Buczek was so incongruous that I was taken by surprise when I read the announcement on the bulletin board inside the front door of the church. It was going to happen in a few hours. Though officially called Our Lady of Poland Roman Catholic Church, it was naturally favored by the Polish community, but also people of other ethnic stripes who would never feel comfortable in the other, much bigger Catholic church across town frequented by our wealthier brethren.

I was there to see Father Dent, a man whose capacity for unheralded imposition passeth all understanding. I had an ambivalent relationship with God. I hadn't been to church since my father died, which left no one else to make me go, my mother being a declared but uncommitted atheist. Father Dent never once told me I should. In fact, he never told me to do anything. Never scolded or criticized or even chided me. Yet for some reason, I always knew where he stood on things. I'd been intruding on him since the first time we chatted, at my mother's funeral. My father had already gone kicking and screaming into that good night, leaving my mother in a state of shattered exhaustion from which she never recovered, dying shortly thereafter herself. I didn't think this was fair of God, and I told Father Dent just that.