"How can I get my memories back?" I asked.
"Are you sure you want to remember?"
"Yes. More than anything."
"Okay," Shriver said. "Every morning when you wake up, sit in a comfortable chair with your eyes closed and think about Barbara Knowland's face. Can you get a picture of her when she was younger?"
"Yes. There's one in her book."
"Every morning concentrate on that face for a minute and then close your eyes. Try to summon her up in your memory."
"We could leave the country," Svetlana said at three in the morning.
We had not made love. My mind was elsewhere.
"Where could we go?"
"Europe. I speak many languages. Asia. I have always wanted to live in Brazil during Carnival."
"What about international relations?" I asked.
She shrugged and brought two cigarettes to her mouth. She lit both and put one between my lips.
"Things are always changing," she said. "I wanted to come to America so that life would be like Disney World. You know . . . everything safe and nice. But then I meet you and I am forced to love you. Love is not something you can say no to. You can quit a job or a club or even a country, but you cannot quit love."
I looked at her thin legs, her dense and golden public hair. I tried then to summon up in my mind some resentment about Sergei. Hadn't Lana betrayed me too? Yes. But I couldn't be angry with her. I couldn't afford the pain.
But neither could I call up the love that she was talking about.
"You can learn to love me," Svetlana said.
"Can you read my mind too?" I asked.
"Only your face," she said smiling. "You look so worried when you can't love me back."
"I don't understand."
"What do you want from me?" Svetlana asked.
"Nothing."
"No. This cannot be. Love is jealous and what do you call it . . . small-minded. You must want something from me. My body, my money, my freedom."
"But what if I wanted you to feel pain?" I asked, not knowing where the question came from.
"Then I suffer for you."
"But that's not good."
"Love is not good," she said with intense disgust on her face and in her voice. "It is not a little boy turning in his homework. Love is when you fuck me in the ass and my blood and my shit is on your cock and on my sheets and I clean you and my bedclothes and I am happy doing this. I am happy to have you back even when you have been with another woman. I am happy when you ask me to leave my husband and my children to go running where men are trying to kill us."
Lana was breathing hard. She took a deep draw on her cigarette.
"Love is when I call you in the bed with your wife and tell you to come to me."
She was lying. No, not lying, but saying what she thought I needed to hear. And she was right. I needed an example of someone giving up everything for another.
"And if I go to prison in Colorado?" I asked.
"You must ask me to come with you to see if I love you."
"But you'd be throwing away your life."
"No . . . I wouldn't," she said.
This answer was enigmatic but I had no desire to decipher it.
I leaned over and kissed her between her breasts. She crushed out her cigarette, then mine, and hugged me like a man hugs a woman.
* * *
In the morning I thought about young Star Knowland. I imagined her, tried to remember her for over an hour. I got nowhere and so I took out the beat-up cell phone that Magda gave me and called information.
"Plaza Hotel. How may I direct your call?" a woman asked.
"Winston Meeks," I said.
"One moment please."
"Hello."
"Ben Dibbuk here, Mr. Meeks."
The straight line of words stopped there for a moment. Meeks was shocked into silence.
"Where are you?" he asked slowly, deliberately.
"I'm willing to be debriefed here in New York," I said.
"My boss now says that he would like to see you in Denver."
"One step at a time, Mr. D.A. Promise me that I can leave and that you will not get the police to arrest me and I'll come over, today if you like."
"How can I get in touch with you?"
"You can't."
"Call me back in two hours," he said. "Call me then and I'll tell you."
Lana went off to school and I sat in the bed thinking about love. I was almost happy that I'd run into Star Knowland. She opened my life up like an overripe fig. I had been festering inside. I was rotting and didn't even know it.
I believed that I could never really love anyone but now I saw that I could if I allowed myself to feel the pain. This was a wholly new concept for me and it was astonishing that a virtual child had shown me the way. My careless generosity with her, my callous treatment of her life, created something that marital vows and fatherhood had not given me.
It was almost beyond belief that I could have lived for forty-seven years in backward stupidity about something as simple as this.
My father beat me and I loved him for it. Not in spite of the pain but because he touched me with care, no matter how violently. He needed me to crawl and so I crawled. He needed me to hide from the light of others' feelings and so I built myself a shell out of alcohol and then later with that feeling in my shoulders.
It didn't matter. I had loved him from the first moment we met. I would keep on loving him until breath left me.
I called Cass at Our Bank and asked him to ask Joey for one more favor.
"Sure thing, buddy,'' he said. "It's no fun around here without you.''
"We are willing to make the deal," Winston Meeks told me.
"Okay," I said. "A lawyer will call you this afternoon at four. He will lay down the terms for any meeting I agree to take. When he calls me and tells me that it's okay, I'll come over."
"You don't need a lawyer just to talk to us, Mr. Dibbuk."
"Oh yes I do. And you know it too."
It took three days to work out the agreement. Meeks had to promise to leave the NYPD out of it and also to allow a "crew" (Cass's word, not mine) to come with me to the Plaza suite.
In that time I got my life together as much as I could.
I went to Augie's coffee shop at four fifteen on Friday afternoon. Mona was there. Her visits to that coffee shop were like my tight regimen of going to work. If I had wanted to kill her, I could have done it then. I thought about it but there was no reason really. Svetlana had taught me something about love—enough to know that I had never really experienced it as an adult. I couldn't blame Mona for that. I asked her if she knew about the article they published on me.
"Yes," she said, once again holding her phantom cigarette.
"Did you write it?"
She seemed like a computer program in a loop then. Her face and hands were stock-still; her eyes didn't even blink.
"Yes," she said, looking down. "What of it?"
"Are you back with Harvard Yard?"
"His name is Rollins."
"I know what the fuck his name is. I even know that you lick the end of his cock and tell him how much you like the taste."
Mona made to rise but I took hold of her forearm.
"Let me go."
"This is the last time we're ever going to speak, Mona. Let me get a little angry, huh?"
"What are you talking about?"
"I'm going to see the D.A. from Denver tomorrow. He'll try to figure out if I should be extradited and put on trial. So either I'll be in jail or otherwise gone."
"What about Seela?"
"Why didn't you tell Seela's father that there was a woman who was blaming him for a murder that he doesn't know anything about?"
Mona's face shifted then. It dawned on me that she had had a strange look on her face ever since she'd heard Star's story.
"You think I did it?" I said.
"You didn't?"
"I have no idea. I didn't remember her. I certainly don't remember killing anyone."
An unspoken, maybe even unconscious, apology crossed her face. She brought her fingers to her lips, the invisible cigarette forgotten.
"How could we be together for so many years and have this little trust?" I asked her.
"Harv said that there had to be something to it. Barbara knew too much about you."
It's funny how words are so delicate and still powerful. I could see Star at that moment lying across a couch or a bed. She was naked, big boned but young and also handsome. I did know her back then.
"But that doesn't mean I killed anybody."
"But . . ." Mona said. Here we were having our last verbal joust and she had just lost.
I smiled, relishing the empty victory.
"Could it be that you betrayed me because you love him, Mona?" I asked. "That all those years we spent building this life were nothing?"
"You never loved me, Benny," she said.
"No. But we made Seela, we made a home for her."
"I was sure that you were a murderer," she said. "I was frightened."
"Because if you told me, you thought I might have to kill you?" I asked. "Because you never knew me and you were &aid of your own mistakes?"
"I just didn't feel safe," she said. "That's all."
I was intent on allowing Mona to have the last word. It seemed right, especially since I had won our last argument.
I stood up from the stool. She touched my forearm.
"Where are you going?"
"That's not really up to me, honey."
"You smell like cigarettes," she said, and I turned away.
We'd probably see each other again. In lawyers' offices, in courts, at our daughter's graduation if I was free, but the relationship ended there. I could feel it.
Svetlana made a home for me in her apartment. She cooked every night and bought me new clothes. When I tried to tell her that I might go away to prison, she wouldn't listen.
"You and I are in love," she'd say. "God wouldn't take something like that away."
"Do you believe in God?" I asked.
"He believes in me," she said with unqualified conviction.
We set the meeting with Winston Meeks for that Saturday. I overslept but that was my only symptom of fear. I met Cass's "crew" at a coffee shop around the corner. Cass was wearing black slacks and a black turtleneck, like I was used to seeing him in.
The security expert was accompanied by Leonard Gideon, a bald white man with enough hair on his lip to make up for what was missing up top. He was bursting with energy that teetered on the verge of rage. Gideon was my lawyer. He shook my hand and asked a few questions, then he smiled under that bale of mustache, saying, "We're gonna kick their asses, Arna, all the way from here back to the Rocky Mountains."
Accompanying Cass and the lawyer was Charles Milford. Milford worked for the federal government in some capacity that was not clear to me. But Cass assured me that no city or state entity could arrest me if Milford objected.
* * *
Meeks's suite was on the ninth floor. It should have been called an apartment it was so big. There were seven people waiting for us: the stenographer, two Colorado marshals, two female assistants from Meeks's office, and the lie detector expert. The machine itself was set up on a table next to a plain pine chair. For some reason the setup brought to mind the electric chair. That made real the worry that I could be executed for the crime Star Knowland said I committed.
Gideon started the conversation. He presented Meeks with a stack of papers to sign. Whenever the Western D.A. balked, Gideon threatened to leave with his client, me.
After the preliminaries were done, Meeks and I sat across from each other surrounded by our seconds.
"Did you kill Sean Messier?"
"No," I said, thinking,
not to my knowledge.
"Did you know him?"
"No." Again with the sentence finished in my mind.
"Did you hit him with a heavy metal object?"
"I just told you that I didn't know him," I said. "How could I have hit him if I didn't know him?"
I could make out Gideon's smile through the thatch of his mustache.
"Do you mind taking a lie detector test?"
"No. But I want to know something first."
"What's that?"
"That machine scares me. This whole thing is very anxiety provoking. How can you tell the difference between me being scared and me lying?"
The lie detector expert, who had been introduced to me as Roger, spoke up then. He was a short guy with bright eyes and facial hair that failed to become either a proper beard or mustache.
"We screen your emotions with test questions distributed throughout the interrogation," Roger told me. "In other words, we factor in your fear quotient."
"How accurate is it?"
"If you're a sociopath or a deranged psychotic, it won't work, but otherwise it's a hell of a lot better than an eyewitness."
I liked Roger. He was objective. A week before we could have been friends.
I was attached to the machine by my arms and one hand, my jugular, left armpit, and temple. They took my blood pressure beforehand and then attached a thimblelike cap to my left index finger to keep track of my heart.
They started with simple questions about my name, my marital status, my job. They asked me did I love my wife and I said no. They asked did I want to hurt her and I said no. They asked me if I had ever committed a crime and I said, not to my knowledge.
We went through preparatory questions like these for twenty minutes by the digital clock that sat on a table to my right.
After that the serious questions started.
"Did you kill Sean Messier?"
"No."
"Did you strike him with a crowbar?"
"No."
"Do you know Barbara Knowland?"
"Yes."
"Where did you meet her?"
"I don't know."
"You don't remember?"
"That's right."
"How long ago did you meet her?"
"Probably more than twenty years ago, back in Colorado."
"Have you ever been to Sean Messier's house with her?"
"Not to my knowledge. You see, I only have one fleeting memory of her lying on a sofa. It seems real enough, but that's all I can remember."
When the lie detector test was over, Meeks came back at me. He asked me about Harvard Rollins.