“About ten days in, I got a call from the foundation that had organized the trip. There had been some trouble in Prague. The mission was being cut short. They were arranging to get the group out of the country on various flights, but they were having problems reaching your mother. They were very vague. I think they wanted to keep me from panicking, which of course had the opposite effect. Finally they admitted that she’d been unaccounted for, for several days.”
He lifted his water glass, the rim knocking against his teeth.
“It was chaos. I stopped sleeping. I think I lost ten pounds in the first week. As I mentioned, communication was next to impossible. I tried the U.S. embassy in Prague, but the phone would ring and ring. Finally I got through to them and they started calling hospitals on my behalf. I went to the police. I went to the FBI. The best anyone could do was to take a statement or refer me to a different agency. I went to the Federal Building and walked up and down the halls, pushing you in the stroller, knocking on doors. They thought I was out of my mind. And I was, I was petrified.
“The community rallied behind me. They took care of you when I couldn’t, they scared up some local media. For the most part, we were ignored. Reporters got confused, they thought your mother was a refusenik.
“I wanted to apply for a visa to go to Prague myself and look for her. The Czechoslovakian consulate wouldn’t grant me an appointment. Abe got me a meeting with a congressman, and a few days later the consulate says, all right, you can have your visa appointment, the soonest opening is March. This was November.
“A month without contact, people began to talk as if she was already dead. I actually had someone suggest I should start saying kaddish.
“Then the embassy in Prague called. Your mother had turned up at their door. She’d had some kind of breakdown. She was covered in blood and she was raving. They tried to call an ambulance for her, but she began screaming incoherently. They had to have her forcibly sedated.
“When I finally got to speak to her, she sounded as if she was at the end of a tunnel. It wasn’t just a bad connection. Her voice—I didn’t recognize it.
“Another week went by before they got her on a flight home. They had to drug her, and they sent a doctor along on the plane, to keep injecting her so she’d stay calm.
“I met her at the airport. I’d brought you with me, and several people from the community had come along, as well. They were cheering as she came through customs. She was being pushed in a wheelchair. Jacob, when I saw how she looked . . .”
He shut his eyes against the memory.
“I tried to hand you to her, but she wouldn’t move. She sat there, with a TWA bag on her lap, staring into space. I tried to kiss her, to hug her. I could feel her bones.”
Nauseated, Jacob fingered the faint patterns in the tablecloth.
“People expect an explanation,” Sam said. “They expect their heroes to be heroic, and their victims to suffer in a way that they can understand. Your mother would not oblige on either count. She was absent. In the beginning, we had all sorts of people coming by, to say hello, drop off food. She would lock herself in the back room. Do that enough and they stop coming.
“I was just as bad—just as entitled. I can admit that, now. It hurt me to sleep apart. She wouldn’t undress in front of me. If I tried to ask her questions, she simply shut down. Whatever was happening to her was happening behind closed doors.
“I dragged her, against her will, to see a psychiatrist, but the moment she saw him she began shaking and ran out of the office. The same thing happened again and again. It was clearly torture for her, so I backed off. In those days we were living in the place on Doheny. She kept her studio on the roof. That was the only thing that gave her any peace. She spent hours alone up there, making those damned birds.
“Anger I could deal with. Fear. But what can you do in the face of blankness? I’ve replayed that period a thousand times and I still can’t find an opening. It’s my fault for not looking harder. She was in pain and I didn’t want to make it worse. I believed she would open up when she was ready. And I know it sounds like an excuse, but I was simply so grateful to have her back.
“The hardest part was watching her relationship to you change. Suddenly it was agony for her to be near you. She loved you. She never stopped loving you, you must know that, Jacob. But any sign that you were in distress overwhelmed her. If you started crying, it was as if the volume was louder for her than for anyone else. She fought and fought, but eventually she couldn’t handle it. She had to escape.
“I wish you had gotten the chance to know her as I did. Her life—her real life—began the moment you came into the world. She had seven miscarriages before you.”
Jacob said, “You never told me.”
“Why would we? Who would that help?”
“You never told me any of it.”
“I’m sorry. Does it matter that I’m sorry?”
Jacob said nothing.
“That level of stress—you can’t grapple with it every waking moment. You block it out, because you need to buy groceries. My major achievement was that I managed to get her on lithium, which allowed a minimal level of functioning, as long as she remembered to take it.
“Looking back, it was crazy to think you weren’t affected. It was my fault; I treated you like an adult. That’s how you seemed. Grave, and wise. You tried so hard to be good.”
Sam pinched the bridge of his nose. “About six months after she returned, I went up to the roof to bring her a cup of tea and found her bleeding at the wrists. I have to assume she wasn’t serious, because she could’ve just as easily jumped. And she didn’t cut the right way, thank God.
“Perhaps I should’ve kept her hospitalized longer than I did. They tried to give her ECT, and she began shrieking as if she was being torn apart. I undid the straps myself and took her home.
“The summer you stayed in Boston,” Sam said. “That was her second attempt. I was supposed to be teaching a class, but it got canceled, and I came home early.”
Alone in an otherwise empty Harvard dorm, listening to his mother’s last words to him, a voicemail left the day she’d supposedly died.
I’m sorry, Jacob.
Sam said, “She’d cut the right way.”
His face was riven with anguish. “I let my guard down. It had been so long by then. I fooled myself into thinking we were safe. We were a family, we’d made a life. Maybe not somebody’s ideal, but what is ideal? There is no ideal. You can get used to anything. You have a strong incentive to forget. One terrible month, in the course of a lifetime—it’s nothing. A blip.
“And we were happy, sometimes. That’s what I thought. Was I wrong? I was wrong to think we were out of danger. I’ve been wrong about so many things.
“I don’t expect this to mean much to you. And I know you don’t want more excuses. But when I told you she died, it was only half a lie. Because she did die, to me.”
The room had grown dim.
“Who’s Micah?” Jacob asked.
Sam shook his head.
“She screamed that name. She was screaming it in her sleep.”
“I don’t know, Jacob.”
“You put her away.”
“I couldn’t take care of her any longer. She was too sick. She stopped talking, she fought taking her medication. It was a matter of time before she tried again. I couldn’t keep vigil over her day and night. My eyes . . . I couldn’t handle it, Jacob. And I worried, constantly, that they’d come for her again.”
“Special Projects.”
“I was trying to protect her. Both of you.”
“Don’t you dare put that decision on me.”
“I’m not—” A rare glint of anger, quickly stifled. “I’m not blaming you for my decisions. You’re my son, Jacob. I wanted you to live free of burdens. I stuck my head in the sand. Whatever th
at makes me, I accept it. If a fool, then I’m a fool.”
“That’s not the word that comes to mind.”
Sam did not reply.
“You could have told me,” Jacob said.
“You never would have believed me,” Sam said.
“Maybe not right away, but you could’ve said something, at some point.”
Sam seemed not to agree. But he said, “I’m sorry.”
Silence.
“Two years ago,” Jacob said. “Did she really ask for me?”
“I wouldn’t lie to you about that.”
“Well, excuse me, Abba, but I don’t quite get how you draw the lines.”
Sam looked away, chastened.
“I see her every week,” Jacob said. “I’ve never heard her speak.”
“I give you my word. She said your name.”
“Prompted by what?”
Sam rubbed his temples. “It happened shortly before Rosh Hashana.”
Jacob said, “Around my birthday.”
“Yes. I suppose so.”
“I turned thirty-two that year,” Jacob said. “Meaning, thirty years since her trip.”
Silence.
“You tried to stop me from going to Prague,” Jacob said. “You thought the same thing would happen to me.”
Sam hesitated. “Did it?”
The memory pierced Jacob. An infinite climb up a trembling finite ladder. A cloak of dust. The voice of Peter Wichs, the synagogue sexton, urging him upward.
Every moment since then had been different.
He said, “I guess we’ll find out.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Leaving his father’s apartment, Jacob felt as though he had been poured full of poison, then punctured all over and drained hollow.
At home he turned on the television, staying in front of it through Sunday and most of Monday, arising only to get a new bottle or to pee. Finally, to answer the doorbell.
A courier handed him a binder stamped with the logo of the A2 agency.
You can’t grapple with it every waking moment.
You block it out, because you need to buy groceries.
Jacob tossed the binder on the couch and went to take a shower.
• • •
MAYBE ALON ARTZI FELT GUILTY, or maybe he was just a decent guy. Either way, he’d overdelivered: Jacob had asked for info on the half year before Marquessa’s death and gotten her entire booking history, along with a portfolio and several sets of headshots.
He began laying the material out on his living room carpet.
The first headshots were blurry and amateurish, probably homemade. Marquessa perched on the edge of a park fountain in jeans, platform shoes, and a white tube top that contrasted brilliantly with her glowing brown shoulders.
She’d attached a résumé listing work experience at Burger King. Cashier.
Her pluck impressed Jacob, as did the conviction shown by the agency in taking a chance on her. While she was a nice-looking girl, L.A. was full unto sickness with physical beauty.
Her first pro gig was a shoot for Ventura Blvd magazine. It paid two hundred dollars, of which the agency took a twenty percent cut.
A hundred sixty take-home.
Better than seven bucks an hour for flipping burgers. And how validating, to get paid for being pretty—for being herself.
For a while, jobs came in dribs and drabs, never paying more than five hundred, typically far less. Then her luck changed. She landed a swimwear catalog, and more lucrative offers began rolling in. At her peak she’d been netting around a grand a week.
Good enough to move out of the house.
Some of the income stream came from photo shoots, but an increasingly sizable chunk came from what A2’s filing system referred to as “personal appearances”: charity galas, red carpets. She had served as ring card girl at a boxing match.
Mostly she worked trade show booths, repping ceiling fans, industrial lubricants, network servers, skin cream, high-efficiency washer-dryers. For interacting with attendees “in a friendly and informed manner,” she earned between thirty and fifty dollars an hour.
“Mood modeling” for VIP parties paid three times as much.
The dry language of the contracts was mute on what she did once the party ended.
Her final six months were comparatively jam-packed. It took Jacob several days to winnow the leads down. Remembering Farrah Duvall’s words—all of a sudden, she’s got bank—he homed in on elite jobs, ending up with four strong candidates.
Annual conference for financial managers.
Launch party for a “new-generation” fragrance.
Luxury car premiere.
Movie producer’s seventieth-birthday party.
He began with the perfume, finding plenty of PR-firm flackery archived on the Web. The brand name was SPF, which stood for “So Phreakin Fun.” The celebutard who had allegedly cooked it up claimed to be inspired by “corn dogs and suntan lotion—you know, everything that makes summer awesome.”
Jacob scrolled through images. A platoon of models in cleavagey orange satin cocktail dresses used oversized atomizers to spritz partygoers.
Marquessa stood near the end of the bar, the only black girl.
She seemed to be having the time of her life.
He poured himself a drink in her honor, then e-mailed the distributor, asking for the guest list. He doubted it would bear fruit, but it was a start.
The producer’s birthday party had warranted a smattering of gossip mag reportage. On a blog Jacob found mention of the A-listers in attendance: an actor couple, a rap star.
Caught canoodling! Hannah Hollowskull and Trent Numbnuts!
Referring back to the contracts, he saw that both gigs had been booked by Chiq Party Design and Catering.
He looked them up.
Defunct: your basic L.A. story.
Searching the state business directory, he came up with an expired LLC registered to a Marlee Watchorn, phone number and an address in Silver Lake.
Jacob called her. She was cheerful enough at first but turned bitter when he asked if she still had the guest list.
“I don’t have anything,” she said. “Roberto took it all.”
“Roberto being . . .”
“My ex-husband. Ex–business partner. Ex-you-name-it.”
“Do you think he might have held on to it?”
“I don’t think about him,” she said, “ever.”
“Can I get a current phone number for him?”
“Is he in trouble?”
“I wouldn’t assume that,” Jacob said.
“I’m not assuming,” she said. “I’m hoping.”
• • •
ROBERTO NOW RAN a party planning business of his own. He confirmed that the feeling was mutual.
“Under normal circumstances I wouldn’t release a guest list. To you or anyone. We cater to clients who cherish their privacy. However. Seeing as it’s Marlee who made the deal, and she’s the one responsible and who would suffer if that information should happen to get out, I would love to give it to you, and in fact I’m going to encourage you to share it with every single person you meet on the street. I’m out of the office for the rest of the week but I’ll e-mail it to you first thing Monday.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s my complete pleasure.”
Gathering intel on the other two events proved trickier. The financial managers’ conference was a massive, four-day affair attended by representatives from scores of banks. He wrote to the organizer, hoping for a response while praying he wouldn’t need it.
That left the luxury car premiere, where he ran smack into the opposite problem.
No photos. No press releases. No blogs.
No coverage whatsoever.
The name on the contract, Seta Event Management, maintained a far slicker profile than the flaming mess that had been Marlee and Roberto. The home page drew itself in black and magenta curlicues, framing a rotating gallery of glittering stills. Lusty electronica slithered through the miniature speakers on Jacob’s computer.
He muted it, moused over the menu bar, clicked CLIENT LIST.
As Southern California’s leading event management and luxury lifestyle firm . . .
He scrolled down.
Some of Our Clients Have Included:
LVMH MOËT HENNESSY • LOUIS VUITTON SE
ROLEX
NBC
BVLGARI
APPLE
VAN CLEEF & ARPELS
Rarefied company for a girl from Watts.
According to the contract, Marquessa had worked an event for Gerhardt Technologie AG. They made high-performance sports cars, more akin to low-flying rocket ships than anything earthbound. A video clip on their home page showed a blood-red blur screaming around a racetrack; Jacob had to watch it three times before he managed to spot the car. The company motto was Geschwindigkeit—ohne Kompromisse, which Google translated as Speed—without compromise.
Anyone who could afford a Gerhardt probably didn’t have to do a lot of compromising. The base price was $1,345,000. “Options” kicked that up rapidly.
He called Seta Event Management. Predictably, they stonewalled him.
“All I’m asking for is an idea of who was invited,” he said. “You don’t have to give me names, just a general sense.”
“I can’t give that information out.”
“This is for a murder investigation.”
The woman sighed. “Like I’ve never heard that before.”
Click.
• • •
WITH LITTLE TO LOSE, he wrote directly to Gerhardt. Then he had another idea. He went to the website for the LA Times.
The automotive columnist was named Neil Adler. Jacob e-mailed him asking for a phone interview and got up to take a leak. Thirty seconds later he ran out with his pants unbuckled, snatching his cell phone before it buzzed off the edge of his coffee table.
“Hello?”
“This is Neil.” Boyish, excitable voice.
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