Stuart Kaminsky - Always Say Goodbye

“You wrote that,” Franco said.

“Yes.”

“ The Dirt Floor, right,” said Franco. “That’s the only thing I memorized and I wasn’t trying. My wife is the real fan. No fan isn’t the right word. Respecter, admirer?”

Rebecca Strum nodded and smiled.

“In the window of his car the red sports car,” she said, “there was a yellow-and-red parking permit about the size of a sheet of typing paper cut in half.”

“Did you tell the police this?” Lew asked.

“I didn’t remember till several months ago when I saw a permit on a car exactly like it parked on 51st Street. I didn’t think the police would be interested in a minor traffic accident after four years. Had I known your wife had been killed by this car, I would have called the police. Not a sin but a misdemeanor of omission. ‘Had I but known’ is the historical cry of people who do not accept their responsibility, their guilt. How can you heal if you don’t accept that you are ill? The Germans in the town next to the concentration camp where my family died and I… I’m sorry.”

She placed her book next to her on the arm of her chair and tugged at her sleeve. She had pulled it back just enough for Lew to see the first three numbers tattooed on her right wrist.

“Now, may I anticipate your next question?” she asked. “First, yes, I would recognize the man in the red sports car. I told this to the detective who talked to me after the accident. Second, the parking pass in the window of the car on Fifty-first was for Mentic Pharmaceuticals in Aurora. Now, I’m sorry but I must finish rereading this today,” she said, putting a hand on the book. “Dante’s Inferno. I’m having a discussion of it on campus tomorrow with some graduate students who will understand it but won’t feel it. It’s not their fault. Have you read it?”

“No,” Lew said.

Franco nodded no.

“You might want to,” she said, looking at Lew. “It’s about the poet Dante’s descent into Hell and Purgatory and then to Heaven.”

She looked at the book and then at her shelves.

“At lectures, discussions,” she said, “I ask people if they have read Dante, Moby Dick or War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, The Iliad, Sister Carrie. The answers are always the same. They say they have read them all. When asked to tell me something about the book, it becomes clear that the reading was far in the past and forgotten and perhaps they have deluded themselves into believing that they have read the classics. They feel guilty. They vow to themselves to immediately read something by Thomas Mann. You understand?” she said.

Lew nodded. Franco said, “Yes.”

“It is human nature,” she said, “to believe you have learned from the past, that you remember it when, in fact, you must make the effort to keep the past alive. I did it again, didn’t I?”

“What?” asked Franco.

“I lectured to you.”

“No,” said Franco.

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve been doing it long enough to recognize my somber certitude when I hear it.”

She touched the number tattooed on her wrist. Lew’s need to find out what had happened to Catherine should have seemed small compared to that number on Rebecca Strum’s wrist, but it didn’t.

“Is there anything else?” she asked.

“Posno,” Lew said.

She looked puzzled.

“Posno? That’s a character in some book I think,” she said.

“Yes, Andrej Posnitki, Posno.”

“I’ve never read it,” she said.

Franco shrugged.

“Would you check the name on the Internet for us please?” asked Lew.

“Lewie,” Franco whispered loud enough for her to hear. “You know who you’re asking to-”

“No,” she said, getting up with the help of both hands placed just above her knees. “It’s fine. Now I’m curious about why a man with a face worthy of Munch should want to know about a character in a novel.”

She moved to the desk by the window and sat slowly, hands on the arms of the wooden desk chair. Lew stood over her left shoulder, Franco over her right.

“Years ago,” she said, “Well, really not that many years ago, I used to do this for Simon Weisenthal.”

Her dappled fingers danced over the keys of the laptop and images, lists popped up and then stopped.

“Thirty-seven-thousand six-hundred and seven hits,” she said. “Not an unusually high number even for as obscure a fictional character as Andrej Posnitki. Colley Cibber, a very minor actor, poet and playwright, has more than ninety-nine-thousand hits. Cibber was an actor known most for the fact that Alexander Pope ridiculed him in The Dunciad.”

“Posno,” Lew said. “Are there any hits for Posno?”

Her fingers danced again.

“More than eighty-eight thousand,” she said. “It seems to be a Dutch name. Let us see. Posno Flowers, Posno Sporting Goods. Is it possible to narrow the search?”

“We don’t want to keep you from Dante,” Lew said.

“Dante has waited more than six hundred years,” she said. “He can wait and the students can wait a few minutes longer. Narrow the search.”

Lew knew what that meant.

“Posno, crime, murder, trial,” Lew said.

She tapped in the words, clicked on search, narrowed and said, “One Web site devoted specifically to what appears to be your Posno. Look.”

On the screen in the upper left-hand corner in boldface was Posnitki, Andrej (Posno).

It was followed by three paragraphs. Lew and Franco leaned forward to read, but Rebecca Strum said, “I’ll print it for you.”

She pushed a button, and then another and a rumbling sound came from under her desk. A few seconds later she reached down and came up with a printed sheet. She handed it to Lew and got up, a little more slowly than she had from the green chair.

“Thank you,” said Lew.

“One more thing,” she said, and with her book moved across the room and through a slightly open door.

It took her no more than ten seconds. When she came out, she held a different, thicker book in one hand, a pen in the other.

“Your wife’s name?” she asked Franco.

“Angie.”

“Angela,” Lew said.

Rebecca Strum nodded, opened the book, wrote something in it and handed it to Franco.

“I just had a box of them delivered yesterday,” she said. “I don’t have room and I’d rather it go to someone who will read it than have it lay in a box in the darkness of a storage room.”

“Thank you,” said Franco. “You’re… she thinks you’re great.”

Rebecca Strum shook her head and let out a two-note laugh.

“My two children think I’m a petty tyrant posing as a martyr. My husband, long dead, resented my notoriety and I never noticed. I’ve been frequently duped by emotional and financial criminals and used by frauds I didn’t even recognize who played on my ego. A full list of my indiscretions, omissions and petty vices would compare with anyone who has lived as long as I have. I’m not great. It’s enough that I’ve lived this long and can still speak out and write and have visitors, especially those who don’t expect wisdom and don’t expect me to remember when I do not wish to remember.”

She touched Lew’s arm and Lew and Franco left, the door closing gently behind them.

“Can you fucking believe that?” asked Franco, looking at the book.

He opened it as they moved to the elevator.

“Listen to this,” he said. “‘To Angela, Imagine that we are holding each other’s hand and walking together through the forest of the night.’ And she signed it.”

“Nice.”

No one was inside the elevator when the door opened and they stepped in.

“What do you know about Rebecca Strum?” asked Franco.

“Not much.”