Large envelope in hand, she walked toward the revolving lights that stained the surrounding houses and hilly lawns a violent red. She manoeuvred her way through the whispering crowd, hoping she wouldn’t have to watch herself on the news the next day. The uniformed officer standing guard at the front door of the duplex watched her duck beneath the yellow police tape and climb the stairs toward him.
“I have something for Detective Wanless,” she said.
Wanless stood in the hall talking to a tall man in coveralls. Rebecca could tell who was boss by the deferential way the other man bent his head forward so Wanless wouldn’t have to look up. When Wanless noticed her, his blue eyes, indecipherable as before, lingered on her face then travelled down to the envelope. The other man was explaining something. He followed Wanless’ glance and stopped speaking.
“Catch you later,” said the man, heading toward the kitchen.
Wanless stood waiting for her to speak.
“Someone broke into my building tonight. He tried getting into my office while I was there.”
A pause while he thought it over. “Yeah, I heard. You get a look at him?”
“Just his shadow.”
“Had any trouble with drug break-ins there?”
“This wasn’t drugs. He was after me.”
“Why do you say that?”
He sounded calm compared to her, rational. It made her angry. “Can’t you see? He must’ve followed me from here.”
Wanless sized her up with a look, then shifted his weight onto the other foot. “According to the report there was no sign of anyone breaking into your place, no forced entry.”
She remembered the young cop on the walkie-talkie, could almost hear him commiserating with Wanless. Yes sir, the doctor’s jumpy, I’ll humour her.
“I didn’t make it up.”
“Did I say you made it up?” He was flipping through his notes. “You had a shock tonight. Maybe your imagination’s playing tricks on you.”
The sentiment, if not the words, reminded Rebecca of herself when Mrs. Kochinsky had so often tried to convey in their sessions how frightened she was.
“I’ve brought you something,” Rebecca said, handing him the envelope. She had wondered fleetingly about confidentiality, but the woman was dead and her only relative was incommunicado. They all needed some answers.
He pulled out a thick folder filled with paper. “Mrs. Kochinsky’s file?” He perused a few pages.
“I can’t help feeling I’ve missed something,” she said. “I’ve read over my notes and all I can see is her paranoia. Maybe someone with a fresh eye can spot what I can’t. She was killed for a reason. I’m sure of that now. This ...” Rebecca waved her hand at the wrecked apartment, “this is just a diversion.”
“You weren’t sure before. What’s different now?”
“Everything changes when your life is threatened. I know how she felt now. There are too many coincidences.”
“Only if you look from a certain angle,” he said, observing her critically. “I’ll flip through it.” He replaced the chart in the envelope. “Have you been to the station yet?”
“I’m on my way.”
The April night was crisp in her mouth. And bitter. That anyone should die in spring when even the air held such promise.... Mrs. Kochinsky, who had already suffered enough.... The unjustness of it pushed her, barely aware, past the murmuring couples still waiting on the sidewalk for some news, some gossip, perhaps the taking out of the body.
She was heading for her car when she saw him. Feldberg stood on his steps smoking, three duplexes down from Mrs. Kochinsky’s, as he had said. He saw her, too. Quickly throwing down his cigarette, he stepped up to the sidewalk where she would pass.
“You are the doctor? Goldie’s doctor?”
“Yes.”
“What a shock to find her like that. I was just going to make coffee. Would you like some?”
The statement could wait.
Feldberg’s main floor apartment was laid out exactly like Mrs. Kochinsky’s, but the differences in style were startling. She had filled her living-room with the curved lines of French Provincial sofas and needlepoint chairs set in a circle, creating an impression of gentle clutter. His tastes ran to modern and expensive, a pale blue leather couch beneath the bay window, a steel and leather armchair near the fireplace. Between them stood an ultra-modern coffee table of chrome and glass. On the surface a large art book lay perfectly aligned with the couch. No carpets softened the floor of blond pine planks whose pattern converged in the centre of the oblong space that housed the living- and dining-room. The lines of the floor, and their juncture, drew the eye into the dining-room, which was almost empty except for a small table and two chairs. On a corner table sat a Mayan head carved from stone.
“Make yourself comfortable, Doctor. I will start the coffee.” Feldberg disappeared into the kitchen, the aroma of his cologne receding with him.
Rebecca observed the painting over the fireplace: wispy, nearly translucent figures dancing in the twilight of a romantic grove of cypress. She glanced instinctively at the signature, then smiled. Corot. Who was he trying to fool? What had David told her once? Jean-Baptiste Corot had completed four hundred paintings in his lifetime, and eight hundred of them were in North America.
From the kitchen Feldberg called out, “As you can see I’m a great lover of art. Have you heard the expression: the air we find in the Old Masters paintings is not the air we breathe? I deeply believe this.”
Her eyes followed the pattern on the pine floor where it converged in the dining-room. The burled table top was large enough only for a few tea cups. The austere ladder-backed chairs did not invite the guest to stay long. Rather the room drew the eye to the art on the walls, where she was amused to find paintings signed by Utrillo — a scene of bleached houses pressed together in a village — Pissarro — a busy scene at the docks in some French town — and a lopsided Chagall fiddler flying over a house through a pink sky. They were very good copies. Not just coloured photographs on artboard, but brushstrokes that looked real on canvas. Was this the new technique of reproduction that David had scoffed at? All that money and taste and then Feldberg had spoiled it.
Enough schlock. She turned to the photos on the mantelpiece. Feldberg and Chana in summer clothes stood together on a sidewalk somewhere, not close enough to touch. Rebecca noted a sisterly resemblance to Goldie even in the wary half-smile for the camera. In another, a young Chana and Goldie, arms around each other’s shoulders, beaming in front of a large tree. Goldie’s face, small, heart-shaped, her brown hair swept up into a chic roll. And the eyes! Ironic eyes radiant with humour. How beautiful she was. They both were. No wary smiles here, no buried emotions. Then a photo caught at Rebecca’s heart. Mrs. Kochinsky wistful beside a dark-haired handsome young man, his arm stretched affectionately around her. Enrique.
“A tragic family,” Feldberg said entering the living-room, noting the photo in her hand. He carried in an elaborate silver tray that he placed on the coffee table. “Did she tell you of her past?” He had an admirable head of steel-grey hair for a man in his sixties. His fine bones and trim frame exaggerated the hair.
“I know about her experience in Argentina.”
His back stiffened as if she’d said something personal. What had he to do with it? Perhaps there was something here to find out, but she needed to put him at ease first.
“At least she escaped from Europe before the war,” she said. “Things could’ve been worse.”
“She was luckier than me, in that respect,” he said, showing Rebecca to the sofa. He sat down in the severely modern chair opposite her, crossing his legs the prim way she had seen European men do. His grey jacket was made of expensive wool, the line of the trousers creased just so. He appeared nervous though, understandable after the evening’s events. His grey eyes tended to dart around quickly. Every now and then he rubbed his patrician nose as if irked by a smell.
“You were caught in the w
ar?” she said.
He looked past her to the draped window. “At first we just ran from one town to the other, trying to stay ahead of the Nazis. Then in one of the towns, someone informed on us. Those Poles were devils. They hated Jews. And that was the end of our freedom. They took us to a camp in Poland, me and my brother.”
“How did you survive?” she asked, genuinely curious.
“We were young. I was lucky I was small. My brother was bigger than me and I gave him some of my food. I knew he needed it more than me. But he couldn’t take the hard labour and he wouldn’t listen. I helped others to survive. They valued my advice and they lived. But I couldn’t save my brother.”
The nasal voice stopped and she realized he was observing her. “Did anyone else from your family survive?” she asked.
“Some cousins. They’re in the United States.”
“Did you go there after the war?”
He squinted his eyes, squeezed his face into a grimace. “I didn’t want the States. I wanted adventure. I went to Argentina.”
Rebecca recalled an autobiography by a camp survivor she had once read. It seemed everyone was trying to get into the United States after the war but only those with relatives were allowed in. She began to wonder.
“Cream and sugar?” he asked.
Once he was sipping from his china teacup, she said, “You met your wife in Argentina?”
“Argentina? No, no! We met in a labour camp in Poland. She was so beautiful, you wouldn’t know, looking at her now. How she suffered there! She was never a strong woman. She survived because of me. You know why she lived? Because I got her a good job in the camp. I was there before her and I had friends. Friends were the most important thing — more important even than food. Food you could get with friends. So I pulled some strings and she didn’t have to go to the factory. She went every day to clean the officers’ quarters. Away from the camp, maybe five minutes walk. No danger of the quotas in the factories, or being shot by an SS out for some fun. Just cleaning up their rooms.”
Mrs. Kochinsky had mentioned Chana’s trauma in the camps but failed to cite Feldberg as her saviour. So he hadn’t chosen Argentina for adventure but because Chana could be sponsored by her sister. Water under the bridge.
“You were lucky to leave Argentina before the reign of terror there. You moved to Canada quite a while before your sister-in-law. Did that upset your wife?”
He straightened up in the chair, affronted, his eyes darting faster. “I had no choice. I had to start somewhere new. You probably heard the story about Goldie’s husband, my late brother-in-law. He didn’t like me. He was a hard man, a hard man. We were partners in a printing shop. I worked like a slave and one day he just kicked me out of the business. So unfair. I had to start from scratch in a new country with nothing, supporting a wife...”
He continued talking while Rebecca’s mind jogged back to a memory he had let loose with his story about the printing business. It was the beginning of her relationship with Mrs. Kochinsky, the only time the older woman had mentioned her brother-in-law. Apparently her husband had taken Feldberg into the business for Chana’s sake. But Feldberg had expensive tastes and proceeded to rob the business flagrantly until her husband could no longer ignore it. Mr. Kochinsky was forced to buy out the brother-in-law to save the business. He had given Feldberg enough cash to leave Argentina, where no one who knew him would deal with him, and establish himself in Canada. Rebecca vaguely remembered the bitterness in Mrs. Kochinsky’s story. Could he really have thought this was the experience in Argentina Rebecca had referred to?
“You know, they were too close,” she heard him say, finally. “It was unnatural. Even when we moved, it didn’t make a difference. They wrote each other so many letters. Chana was always writing letters. Everything that happened, Chana had to write down. But this, this is such a shock. I’m glad Chana isn’t here anymore. Ach, I’m talking too much.”
She shook her head in a non-committal way. His cologne was beginning to sicken her. “What do you think happened tonight? Your sister-in-law thought people from Argentina were still after her. You think that’s possible?”
“Ahh!” He waved his hand dismissing it. “Everyone was tired of hearing what happened to her. Lots of people were tortured. You know, Chana suffered more than her when she was in the camp. How Goldie told it, she was the only one. She wouldn’t forget. She always thought someone was after her. You were her doctor. Didn’t you know she was crazy that way?”
“But someone did kill her.”
“I’m sure it was very simple. A thief in the night. It was her bad luck he came when she was home. If he came in the day, she would be in the bakery. She wouldn’t be dead. Such things happen.”
“Have you told your wife yet?”
He grimaced, waving his hand with dismissal. “Ach! She’s a vegetable. She wouldn’t understand. I can talk to her, talk to her — she watches with those eyes. Nothing. I don’t go much anymore. It’s very hard for me. This is the woman I lived with for thirty-five years. I can’t force myself to see her like this.”
“The police will notify her, as next of kin,” Rebecca said.
He shrugged. “She won’t understand. They’ll be wasting their time.”
Rebecca looked away, recoiling with contempt. This man was still alive while David was dead.
“Mrs. Kochinsky often spoke about visiting your wife at the nursing home. Is she still at Baycrest?” Rebecca knew she wasn’t.
“Baycrest!” he spat. “Who could afford Baycrest? They want you to turn over all your property to them and then they want to see your income tax return. They know how to squeeze money out of their Jews. No, I found a smaller place for Chana. Very nice, on Bathurst too, but further north. Just as nice as Baycrest. She wouldn’t know the difference anyway.” He sat back, smiling, in the leather and steel armchair and sipped his coffee.
Then came fire and burned the stick
That beat the dog that bit the cat
That ate the goat
That Father bought for two zuzim.
One little goat, one little goat.
chapter fourteen
Thursday, April 5, 1979
By half past midnight Rebecca was hurtling home along a deserted Eglinton Avenue at breakneck speed. All the traffic lights were green. All the storefronts burned their flashy neon signs into the void, turning ghostly sidewalks blue. She was going so fast she nearly missed turning off into her street.
For the past hour she had sat across from a Detective Dunhill at Thirteen Division. The station was empty except for the desk sergeant. Fluorescent lights hummed above the grey pockmarked block walls. She repeated the story of what had happened that night in a fatigued monotone, disturbed by the indifference of the man filling out the forms, the indifference of the universe.
She could have sleepwalked through the story by this time. She had not only told it to the constable and to Wanless, but had gone over and over it in her own mind, searching for answers. All the pertinent points — her concern, the violation of the apartment, Mrs. Kochinsky like a crushed bird — were beginning to sound hollow even to her. After an hour, the detective had leaned forward and sent her on her way.
She had just gotten undressed and crawled into bed when the phone rang on her nightstand. Now what? She turned on her lamp and picked up the receiver.
“Rebecca!” her mother’s warm voice crooned all the way from California. “We were a bit worried. We called earlier and you weren’t there. Did you have a nice evening, dear?”
“Uh.... yes, Mom. I’m fine.” There was no point in worrying them further.
“Hi, doll!” her father piped in on the extension. “You forgot to call your mother for permission to go out.”
“Big shot,” said Flo Temple. “Your father insisted we call till you answered. Did you go somewhere with friends?”
“Nobody you know.”
“I told him it was better than you moping around at home by yourself. Are you
feeling any better lately, dear?”
Rebecca’d had to convince her parents she was all right before they had left for California in December, two months later than their usual migration, but only three months after David died. Then they insisted she come down around Christmas when the office slowed down anyway. None of it had kept her from sinking into a mire of depression by mid-January. By February she knew she couldn’t go on. She closed the office temporarily and Iris had sent her packing to Palm Springs, where her parents doted on her with a gentle love that kept her afloat. She couldn’t worry them now.
“I’m all right, Mom. But It’ll be nice to have you back next week.”
“You sound tired, dear. I don’t want you to do any work for the Seder. We’ll be back Monday — Daddy and I’ll come over and do everything. Wait till you see the pretty Seder plate I picked up here.”
“Your mother thinks if she spends enough on a Seder plate the Messiah will come to our door instead of Mrs. Cohen’ s.”
“Who’s Mrs. Cohen?” Flo asked.
“Do we have to have a Seder?” her father interrupted. “Couldn’t we just have the guilt-free dinners we used to have before Susan married a rabbi?”
Rebecca smiled. Her sister’s husband was an academic who taught Jewish history at McGill University in Montreal.
“You know you like Ben,” Flo said. “And it won’t kill you to be a Jew once a year. Besides, you need to concentrate less on food. Rebecca, tell your father to stop snacking on chips and pretzels. All that salt and fat is pushing up his blood pressure.”
“What’s it at?” Rebecca asked.
“It’s not so bad,” Mitch said. “160 over 90.”
“Sometimes 95,” Flo added.
“Not time to panic yet,” Rebecca said. “Why don’t you try some air-popped popcorn?”
“Isn’t that girl a genius?” said her mother.
“If she was so smart, she’d know we left our air-popper in Toronto,” Mitch said. “I got to tell you a doctor story about our neighbour. Mrs. Goldblum.”
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