Steve Hamilton - The hunting wind

“Call them back and apologize?”

“Yeah, I’ll do that,” he said. He dialed the number again. “Oh please, please, ma’am, I’m very sorry. Please, ma’am, don’t hang up. I’m so sorry to hear of your loss and I’m sorry to disturb you. I just spent a couple hours with the Meisners up here in Michigan. They were very good friends with, um-I’m sorry, am I speaking to Mrs. Kowalski?

… Their daughter. Oh, I see. If I could apologize one more time, ma’am. The Meisners had no idea about… Yes, in Michigan. With the Meisners. They used to live down the block, on Leverette Street… Yes… Yes… And they told me to give your parents a call, and

… Oh, your mother is there? That would be, um…”

He looked at me with panic in his eyes.

“Martha,” I said.

“Martha,” he said. “Martha Kowalski. Yes, we were all just talking about… Yes… Oh yes, please. If there’s any way I can just speak to her for a moment… Oh God bless you. Thank you…”

I listened to his end of the conversation with Martha Kowalski. It started out pretty simple, with the Meisners and the old neighborhood and Randy telling her how sorry he was to hear of the loss of her husband. When he got around to the Valeskas, a cloud came over his face. “Are you sure about that, ma’am?” he said at least three times. When he was done, he thanked her and then just sat there on the edge of the bed, looking at me.

“What happened?” I said.

“She remembers them very well,” he said. “It was just like the Meisners said. They stayed there for nine months, and then in the middle of the tenth month, they disappeared.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“She said that Valeska wasn’t their real name. It was Valenescu.”

“Valenescu?”

“That’s what she said. That’s the name that was on their checks. She said she remembers Maria’s mother using ‘Madame Valeska’ on the sign because it wasn’t such a hard name for Americans.”

“Okay,” I said. “That kind of makes sense.”

“It does,” he said. “It makes sense. And this explains why we couldn’t find her before. Or her parents and her brother. We didn’t have the right name.”

“Randy, this kind of tells you something, doesn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“You didn’t even know her real name.”

“Yeah?”

“You spent one week with her, almost thirty years ago, and you didn’t even know her real name.”

“Ten days,” he said. He picked up the Detroit phone book. “I don’t see any Valenescus in here. What do we do now?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “but Randy-”

“Wait!” he said. The cloud was gone. “Let’s call Leon!”

I let out a long breath, and then I called Leon. I gave him the new name. Maria Valenescu. Her parents, Gregor and Arabella.

“That’s fantastic work!” Leon said. “Now try and tell me you’re not a real private investigator!”

“It wasn’t that hard, Leon.”

“I’ll run these names right now,” he said. “You guys must be psyched down there! We’re getting closer!”

“I’m not so sure,” I said, looking at Randy.

“What’s the matter?”

“Let me take him to dinner and buy him a slinky,” I said. “I need to talk to him.”

“What’s a slinky, Alex?”

“It’s vodka and root beer, Leon. Don’t ask me to explain.” I said good night and hung up the phone.

“Well?” Randy said.

“Leon’s gonna work on those names,” I said.

“Good deal,” he said. “We’re back on track. Come on, let’s go to the Lindell.”

“I’m gonna take you someplace else,” I said. “Someplace a little quieter.”

“It’s your town,” he said. “Let’s go.”

I took him to a restaurant I remembered on Telegraph. I was hoping he’d see it all himself, how ridiculous this whole thing was turning out to be. I kept waiting for it to sink in. It didn’t.

I drove him back to the motel. When I turned out the light, he stayed awake, staring at the ceiling. From outside our room came the sounds of the traffic passing on Michigan Avenue. Then he started talking again. It was just his voice in the darkness, like that first night, the night he flew all the way up to Paradise to find me, waited until he was lying on my couch in the darkness to tell me why he had flown all the way up there.

“The day before the game,” he said, “Maria and I got a hotel room. Maria told her parents that she was sleeping over at a friend’s house. We got this room and we made love. For the first time, really. The first and only time. But then afterward… That’s what I really remember, Alex. I was just sitting on the bed, thinking about the game the next day. It was like my whole future was hanging in the balance, you know? I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep much that night. And Maria, she was just sitting there in a chair. And she was drawing a picture of me. She loved to draw. Did I tell you that?”

“No,” I said.

“She wanted to be an artist. She always had this big pad with her and little canvas box with pencils and charcoal and stuff in it. Sometimes in the afternoons, we’d walk along the waterfront and we’d stop and sit down somewhere and she’d draw something. But she never drew a picture of me until that night. And I was just getting so keyed up about the game the next day, I wasn’t really thinking about it, you know? I was just sitting there not talking and she was drawing her picture.”

He stopped. A big truck rumbled by outside, rattling the pictures on the walls.

“Did you ever see that painting by-who was it? Toulouse-Lautrec, I think. The painting of the girl who’s just sitting on a bench along the wall in a bar? You can tell there’s some kind of party or something going on, and there’re some people right next to her. But she’s just sitting there looking at nothing, like she’s lost in her own world. You know the one I mean?”

“I think I’ve seen it.”

“Well, the thing about that painting is that you just look at it, and you can feel how tired that woman is, you know? How lonely she is. I mean, hell, if they had cameras back then and he had just taken her picture, you wouldn’t have felt it like that. It was the way he painted it. I’m sorry, it’s not like I’m an art critic or anything.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I know what you mean.”

“Okay, so Maria shows me this drawing she did of me sitting there on the bed. And when I looked at it, I was just… My God, I couldn’t even speak. The way she drew that picture, you could feel how scared I was. Just absolutely terrified of what was going to happen the next day. I couldn’t believe it.”

He was quiet for a long moment. Perhaps he was picturing the drawing in his head again. I didn’t say anything.

“It wasn’t just that she was a good artist,” he finally said. “She could draw that picture because she knew me. You know what I’m trying to say, Alex? At that moment, she knew me better than I knew myself. I didn’t even know that I was that scared until I looked at the picture. How many times in your life does somebody know you that well? You wanna know how many times it’s happened to me?”

“How many?” I said.

“Twice,” he said. “There was you. And then there was Maria. Not my wife. Not the woman I slept next to every night of my life for eleven years. Lord knows, not my parents. Not my kids even. It was you and Maria. You were the only two people in this world who could see right through me. All the jokes and the games and the bullshit. I know it was only one season we played together, but when I was pitching and you were catching, it was like you knew everything that was going on inside my head. Everything. Even stuff I didn’t know. You knew what I could throw better than I knew. Which is why I could never be the same pitcher with anybody else. I came all the way up here and found you all these years later and it was like I had just seen you the day before. Am I right?”