by Lisa Unger
“Mrs. Raine?”
I turned at the male voice. “I’m Detective Grady Crowe.”
Strictly by my estimate, the fiction writer notices approximately fifty percent more details than other people. These details get filed away for future use. This happens in a millisecond and I’m only barely conscious of it. In the case of Detective Crowe: I observed the clean, close shave, the tidy crease in his pants, the studied way his blue shirtsleeves peeked out of his black suede jacket. I noticed the careful cropping of his dark hair, the high arch of his brows, the polite smile that didn’t manage to offset a hard glint in his eyes.
The fiction writer then uses these details to weave a narrative. I immediately assessed the man before me as a textbook overachiever, a person who paid close attention to fine points and appearances. Possibly in paying attention to these things, he occasionally lost sight of the big picture. Something about the straight line of his mouth made me imagine that he was relentless when it came to getting what he wanted, sometimes foolhardy, thoughtless, in his pursuit of it.
Often—usually—this narrative I create is very close to the truth but sometimes—only sometimes—it replaces the reality of a situation and keeps me from seeing things as they actually are. This is not a good thing.
Detective Crowe moved into the space without invitation from me and extended his hand. I sat up with difficulty and took it reluctantly. His grip was strong and warm, his nails perfectly manicured. He smelled like coffee. He lifted one of those carefully maintained fingers to his temple, raised his chin toward me.
“Someone got you pretty good.” I thought I saw a smile play at the corners of his mouth and it infuriated me.
“Do you find what happened to me funny, Detective?” I asked, trying for a withering tone, but really just sounding sad.
Any trace of the smile, real or imagined, vanished.
“Uh, no. Of course not.” His face took on an earnest expression as he removed a neat leather notebook and a stylish Mont Blanc from the lapel of his jacket. “I’m here to talk to you about your husband, Marcus Raine. About what happened at his office this morning.” He flipped open a wallet and I saw his gold shield and identification card.
In my relief to talk to someone official about what had happened, I unspooled the string of events that had occurred. I noticed that he tried to interrupt me a couple of times by lifting his hand. I ignored him, kept going. I almost couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t stop until he knew every horrible detail, as though getting it out, getting it on paper, would be the first step toward understanding, solving, fixing everything that had broken since Marcus didn’t come home last night. He dutifully scribbled in his notebook as I ran through everything. I heard his phone vibrating in his pocket a couple of times but, to his credit, he didn’t answer it. Occasionally, there were two of him, the real man and his doppelgänger, the shadowy double my brutalized brain was creating.
He asked a lot of questions: What led me to believe the people who stormed the office were there in an official capacity initially? The vests with FBI emblazoned in their centers. No, I didn’t ask for identification. Could I describe any of them? Yes, and I did so to the best of my memory. Would I be able to identify any of them from photographs? I think so, yes. Did my husband have enemies? Any illegal dealings that I knew of? Anyone who would want to cause harm to him, me, or the business? No, no, no, no, and no.
“What do you think she meant by that?” the detective asked finally, when we reached a lull. He’d stopped writing at some point, stood now with his legs spread a bit, his arms crossed in front of him, like a beat cop on a corner.
“How should I know?” I said, annoyed. “I’ve never seen her before in my life.”
“But she knew your husband?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer; it was a loaded question. “Her statement seemed to imply that, yes,” I said finally.
The detective appeared to want to pace, kept turning a bit at the shoulder, but there wasn’t much room. He could only walk a step or two in each direction. I could hear his phone buzzing again.
“How was your marriage in general?” he said gently. “Sorry. I know it’s personal.”
“I don’t understand.” But I did.
“Were there problems?”
I saw a ring on his finger, a thick gold band. “Are there problems in your marriage?” I asked nastily.
“Yes, there are,” he said, perching on the stool that my sister had been using. “Mainly, I’m the problem. Or so I’m told. Separated more than a year, legally divorced three months ago, can’t bring myself to take off the ring. Stupid, right? She’s already engaged to someone else. Getting married in a week.”
I heard the hard edge of Brooklyn in his accent, Brooklyn in a prep-school cage. The gentleman cop with his nice clothes and fancy pen, but underneath he was a kid from the neighborhood, no doubt about it.
“Point is, I never saw it coming. I thought we were going to the Bahamas for our anniversary,” he said. “She’s going to the Bahamas on her honeymoon with another cop she met at the precinct Christmas party. How about that?”
I didn’t know what I’d done to deserve so much unwanted candor. Maybe it was just his shtick.
“Our marriage was fine. Not perfect,” I said with a shrug. “He had a brief affair a couple of years ago. It was long over. This is not about that.”
He gave a careful nod, rubbed at his chin but didn’t hold my gaze, seemed to look at some point above me. His eyes were so black that I couldn’t discern the pupil from the iris. I wanted to lie back down, I was feeling so light-headed—but I couldn’t stand the vulnerability of it. I stayed upright.
“And all that stolen computer equipment. Brand-new, right?” he said.
“Yes, that’s right. Over a hundred thousand dollars’ worth.”
“There was another breakin, right? Last month?”
“Yes,” I said slowly.
“Was there an insurance payout?”
I saw how things were adding up for Detective Crowe. “Where are you going with this?”
“Was there?”
“Yes,” I said. “A check for about a hundred and fifty thousand arrived—” I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence.
“This week sometime?”
“It came Monday.”
“And where’s that money now?”
“Probably in the business bank account. I don’t have much to do with Marcus’s company. I don’t know.”
“Software, right? Razor Technologies.”
“That’s right.” An angry headache was starting, radiating out from the gash on my temple. The pain traveled down my neck and into my shoulders. The drugs they’d given me must have been wearing off.
“What kind of software?”
“Gaming software. They’re freelance designers, creating games for a variety of systems, as well as for cell phones and personal computers.”
“They do well?”
“It has been very lucrative. They sold a PC game to Sony last year called The Spear of Destiny and it was wildly popular, in fact. They have other clients, too. Smaller.”
“Like who?”
I searched my memory for names of other companies Marcus might have mentioned but I couldn’t remember. “I don’t know,” I said finally.
“You don’t know?” He looked at me with a skeptical frown and a quick cock of the head.
“You know, I honestly don’t have that much to do with Razor Tech. And Marcus is really the brains of the company, conceptualizing games, writing the code, and running the business. Rick Marino, his partner, does most of the client interface.” Distantly, I remembered Rick Marino in handcuffs. But I hadn’t asked myself what happened to him if the people who stormed the office were not FBI agents. The possibilities lurked in the periphery of my awareness, nagging but not acknowledged.
The detective scribbled something in his book.
“Look,” I said, starting to feel a terrible constricting in
my chest. “Something awful has happened to my husband. Are you going to help us?”
“Mrs. Raine,” he said softly. “I am here to help you. But I need to know everything about this situation before I can determine what happened to your husband.”
I nodded and finally decided it was time to lie back. He reached to help me but I held up a hand. I didn’t want him to touch me.
“Is there family we can call, somewhere or someone he might have gone to without telling you?”
I shook my head. “Marcus doesn’t have any family. His parents died when he was a boy. He was raised by his mother’s sister in the Czech Republic. He came to the U.S. as soon as he was able to after communism fell in 1989, earned a scholarship to Columbia and worked various jobs as he went to school, got his master’s in computer science.” I found myself smiling a little. I had always been so proud of Marcus, of his intelligence, of his strength and fearlessness, of his machinelike drive toward getting what he wanted. Even when all these things had worked against us as a couple, I was still proud of him.
“Was he having any problems with anyone? Colleagues? Clients?”
“Not that he mentioned,” I said. Then: “Well… the earlier breakin? Whoever it was had a key and knew the alarm code. That was strange.”
“A disgruntled employee?”
I nodded. “There was an investigation. Still ongoing, I think. The police were looking at a programmer Marcus had fired a few weeks earlier. He’d made some threats. I don’t remember his name.”
“I’ll look into it.”
I was staring at the ceiling, willing myself to be strong, to be solid. But I kept seeing dark spots in front of my eyes, feeling that fuzzy, light feeling that comes right before you pass out. I tried to measure my breathing.
“You okay?” I heard the detective ask.
I opened my eyes and glanced toward the two of him—the solid one and the blurry, shadowy figure behind him. “Do I look okay to you?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Not really. I’m sorry.” He put the cap on his pen, let his hand drop to his lap.
“If those people weren’t FBI agents,” I said when he didn’t say anything else, “then what happened to Rick Marino? He was there with me; they took him away. I thought he was being arrested.”
“Rick Marino is dead,” he said simply. His delivery could have used a little work. I could tell he thought it was better not to soften the blow, that it was a policy he’d decided on long ago. He continued speaking into the stunned silence, where I was having trouble processing the information and forming an appropriate response.
“We found his body in the office along with the bodies of two other employees—Eileen Charlton and Ronald Falco.”
I tried to visualize their faces, to think of the last time I’d seen them. The company party we’d had at our apartment last year. Eileen was a game designer and artist. She was petite, bookish with round wire-rimmed glasses. I remembered Ronald, a sound engineer, as lanky and shy with a mild stutter. Were either of them married? Did they have kids? I couldn’t remember.
“I’m sorry,” he added, an afterthought.
“What’s happening?” I asked, my voice catching in my throat, coming out in a raspy whisper.
“We’ll find out,” he said, putting away his pad and pen. I could see he believed it but I already had the sense of a yawning black abyss opening in my life. I was about to tumble in and I really didn’t think Detective Grady Crowe was going to be of much help. I could already see he was out of his depth. I just didn’t realize yet that I was, too.
WHEN I TOLD my sister that Marcus and I were getting married, I didn’t get the reaction I expected. She didn’t know Marcus well yet, it was true. Our courtship had been short and intense. But I had fallen, hard and headlong. And he seemed to have, as well; he proposed just a few months after we’d met.
He took me to Prague and we stayed in the Four Seasons near Mala Strana. We’d rented a car and driven about an a hour to the small town where he’d been born and had lived until he left for good. There was no family for me to meet. His mother’s sister, the aunt who’d raised him, had died a year earlier, he explained, after suffering from ovarian cancer.
But we wandered through the quaint cobblestone streets with the tourists, stopping in shops and having a local beer at the pub. He knew everything about the history of the town, Kutná Hora, once the second most important town in Bohemia because of its silver mines, now just a side trip tourists make while visiting Prague.
He spoke with the locals in Czech, explained to me how things had been during the communist era. How there were lines around this block for oranges that had come from Cuba, how this thriving store once was just a hollow space with empty shelves, how the communist propaganda had been taught in that tiny school.
On the way back to the city we stopped at a small Bohemian restaurant which, with its heavy oak tables, wood paneling, and thick ceiling beams, could have been plucked from the Middle Ages, if it weren’t for the jukebox and the young thugs smoking cigarettes and drinking enormous glasses of beer at the bar. The waiter brought a giant cast-iron platter of meat and potatoes. We ate until we were stuffed.
He’d been quiet all day. Not sullen or morose; just contemplative, maybe a bit sad. I just assumed that it was hard for him to be back in the place where he grew up, where so much had been lost—his parents, his aunt. I didn’t press him to talk.
“Isabel,” he said when we were done with our meal and waiting for our dessert. His accent was heavier than I’d ever heard it, had been since we’d arrived in the Czech Republic, as if being home, speaking his native language, reconnected him to a part of himself he’d neglected, even tried to quash. “I never thought I’d bring anyone here. Never thought I’d want to.”
“I’m glad you shared this with me,” I said. “I feel so much closer to you.” He was looking at me attentively; I felt heat rise to my cheeks. He wasn’t handsome, not beautiful in the classic sense. But his intensity, the hard features of his face, had a kind of magnetic power that lit me up inside. He dropped his eyes to the table.
“I want to share everything with you,” he said softly. He reached into his pocket and slid a blue velvet box across the table toward me. “Isabel. Maybe it’s too fast. I don’t care. I could have done this the night I met you.”
I opened the box to see a gleaming, cushion-cut ruby in a platinum setting. It was breathtaking.
“Isabel,” he whispered, grabbing both my hands. “This is my heart. I’m giving it to you. I’d die for you. Marry me.”
I remember being stunned but nodding vigorously, tearing as he put the ring on my finger and came to kneel beside me and take me into his arms. People around us looked on; one woman, another American—I could tell by her Tommy Hilfiger sweater and khaki pants, but mainly by her sneakers—clapped her hands and released a happy little cry.
What had I expected to feel in that moment? I didn’t know. You see it from the outside, stylized and engineered to sell in films and commercials. You hear the stories your sisters and girlfriends tell. But you only know how it’s meant to feel. It’s one of those moments in your life, in your relationship—the markers, the milestones, the important snapshots. But I could only experience the moment as I experience everything, observing, narrating. How Marcus was as close to emotional as I’d ever seen him. How the men at the bar turned to look at us, one of them sneering. How the lights were too dim for me to really see the ring. How a truck passed by and caused the bottles on the shelves behind the bar to rattle slightly. And I observed myself: happy, surprised, and, dare I admit it, a little relieved that my life wouldn’t pass without this moment. From the outside, I supposed it looked very romantic. But that’s where romance dwells, isn’t it, in the observation? Inner life is far too complicated; one doesn’t feel romance. You feel love, and even that isn’t one note resounding above all others; it’s one element in the symphony of your emotions.
“I DON’T UNDERSTA
ND,” my sister said. “You barely know him.”
Marcus and I had announced our engagement over dinner at my sister’s, and Linda and Erik had made all the appropriate noises; embraces were exchanged, there was the excited chatter about plans and when and where. But later in my sister’s bedroom while Marcus, Erik, and the kids tried out a new computer game Marcus was testing, Linda and I had the real conversation. I knew it was coming, of course, I’d seen her shoulders tense, noticed the brittle quality to her smile, the worried eyes.
“When it’s right, you know,” I said with a shrug. “Right?”
That’s when she started to cry, just tear a little, really. But still, it was enough to cause disappointment, and not a little anxiety, to wash over me.
“I thought you liked him,” I said, sinking onto the bed beside her.
“Izzy” she said, raising her eyes to the ceiling, then lowering them to mine. She took my hand. “He’s just so … cold. There’s something unavailable about him, something distant.”
I shook my head. “You just need to get to know him better,” I told her. “That’s all. It’s a cultural difference.” But there was a hard knot in my middle.
She nodded and tried to smile. “Just take your time with the wedding. You get to know him a little bit more before you dive in.”
I felt a lash of anger then. “You know what I think, Linda?”
“Don’t,” she said, lifting her hand.
“I think you don’t really want me to be happy in a relationship.”
“Stop it, Isabel.”
I lowered my voice to a whisper. I didn’t want everyone else to hear. “I think you’re happier when I’m unhappy. That you’re more comfortable when I’m alone so that you can be the one with everything—the great career, the perfect family.”
“That’s bullshit,” she spat, “and you know it. You know I’m right. That’s why you’re so angry. Christ, Isabel, he’s just like our father.”
If I didn’t love my sister so much, I would have slapped her. Instead, I got up and walked out of the room.