Colin Harrison - The Havana Room

Walking out of the library, I remembered the mail I'd shoved in my pocket and had a look at it. Marceno had discovered what was now my former address, perhaps through the New York Bar Association, and sent me a request for interrogatories, which is basically a questionnaire used to prepare for a deposition. I threw it in the trash and flipped through the rest of the mail. There was nothing coming to me that I might look forward to, so I didn't expect to see a postcard from Casole d'Elsa, a Tuscan hill town with lovely stone towers hundreds of years old. It was from my son, in his sloppy script:

Dear Dad, Mom doesn't love Robert anymore. She says we might fly to New York City. I know the difference between gelato and ice cream.

Love, Timothy

P.S. Italian kids don't like baseball.

Never have I scrutinized a document like this one. Not when I was studying for the New York State bar, not when I was checking the final contracts for the sale of a $562 million office building in midtown. The fact that Judith had taken my address with her was at least somewhat interesting. What did Judith and Timothy say to each other about me? Did they talk about me, did she ask him if he missed me, did he ask her what I was doing? And how did he know she didn't love Robert anymore? Is this why he wrote the card? Timothy had addressed the card himself, which meant one of two things; that he'd discovered my address among Judith's things, her address book most likely, or whatever trendy little electronic gizmo she used, because he suspected or knew that his communication was forbidden, which meant that he had secreted a stamp and mailed the postcard on the sly, a complicated undertaking for a boy his age. The other possibility was that Judith had simply provided the address to him, which meant that she knew the card was being sent and may well have known its message. Which meant that she sanctioned its existence, which then was a message directly to the husband she'd dumped not so long ago: Our son wants to communicate with you, and this is okay with me. Who knew?

I had an idea. I hurried down to the great sporting goods store a few blocks away, near Grand Central Station, where fathers buy their children birthday presents before taking the train home from work. The store was open until eight. I bought a fielder's glove and a new Yankees cap and packed them, with the ball signed by the great Derek Jeter, five-time All-Star, owner of four World Series championship rings, in a box marked TIMOTHY WYETH, c/o JUDITH WYETH, AMERICAN TOURISTAS EN IL VILLAGGIO D'CASOLE D'ELSA, TUSCANA, ITALIA [POSTINO: PER FAVORE PORTARE. GRAZIE]. Close enough, and not bad for a guy who hadn't been to Italy since the Clinton administration. For a return address I taped one of my new business cards to the box. Judith would scrutinize the card, see if the address was a good one, inspect the quality of the paper. If the box arrived, that is. But I liked my chances. I've been to these little Tuscan hill towns. There's generally one post office, a public servant dutifully selling stamps, weighing packages. Nobody is in a hurry but everything gets done. The winter season is the slow time in Tuscany, very few foreign tourists. An American woman like Judith would stand out.

I took the box to an international overnight shipper.

"American tourists in a small Italian town?" said the clerk.

"Yes, the husband is an executive of an American company."

"He might be getting business mail from the States on a regular basis then?"

"Quite possibly, yes."

"Our guy over there might know who it is." He shrugged. "You never know."

Good enough. You have to shoot to score, you have to hunt to kill.

There's a nice hotel around the corner from the Public Library, the Bryant Park, and they had a room, the desk clerk said. Just the place to hide for a night or two. He asked about my luggage and I said I had none. "Late meeting at the office," I lied. "And a very early one tomorrow." He met this statement with a shrug. A few minutes later I stood at the window, watching the traffic. After my lunch with Dan Tuthill the option of going to the police about the destruction of my apartment seemed even less advisable. If he caught wind of it, Dan would rescind his job offer immediately. Lawyers breaking laws end up not practicing. No, I needed to surf and wriggle and duck my way through the problem. They'd found Poppy. Martha Hallock was coming into the city tomorrow. I'd meet her and take her to the steakhouse, try to talk to Allison again. As for Jay, I pulled out my cell phone and called. Nothing. The machine picked up the call, beeped with no message. I left my number. He could be anywhere. He could be with Allison, I realized. Maybe he was in the oxygen chamber and couldn't hear the call. Aside from his daily medications, though, he seemed to have no schedule, no routine I could anticipate, just circling around Sally Cowles. I recalled his fragment of a letter to her father about the cartilage in his own ear. Did he have a hearing problem? Did Sally? Not if she practiced the piano, not if I knew where I'd find Jay.

I tried Jay's phone fifty times over the next twelve hours, and if that sounds like harassment or stalking that's because it was. I was due to start a new job in a mere two days, and, standing at the window in my hotel room listening to the phone ring endlessly, I was keenly aware that if I could lay down several decent years in Dan Tuthill's new shop- and there was no reason to think I couldn't- then I'd have levered myself back into the game. With the gyrations in the economy, firms had shrunk and grown, splintered and recombined; no one would care what had happened to me a couple of years back. People forget, after all. (They forget that George W. Bush was once a dry-well oilman with a drinking problem, that Hillary Clinton once had a brown afro and snaggleteeth.) A few good years, that's all I needed. I could eat mountains of paper, I could clock monster hours. And maybe the firm would do well as a whole. Dan had private financing from his father-in-law if he needed it. And if he was walking the straight and narrow, he'd throw himself into the enterprise. So, my boat had come in and I needed to make sure I climbed aboard- not get caught in the riptide of Jay Rainey's strange life.

I called Allison, too, wondering where we stood, and reached her at the steakhouse.

"Well, look who it is," she said. "The man who called back."

"Of course I called back."

"They don't always, you know."

"About what happened-"

"I want you to know that, contrary to expectation and all previous behavior patterns, I am issuing an apology."

"You are?"

"I think I was a bit brittle the other morning."

"Well-"

"I had a headache."

I didn't ask why. "You're in a good mood now."

"Yes, I am."

"I was expecting crankiness and accusation."

"And until yesterday, you would have gotten it, too."

"What happened?"

"There was an arrival, a somewhat unexpected arrival."

"Who?" Had Jay shown up?

"Not a who, but a what."

"Fish?"

"Fish. It puts me in a good mood."

"You addicted to this stuff, Allison?"

"Only psychologically. Now then, are you coming to see me?"

"Yes, but I'm bringing a date."

"What?" came her shrill response.

"An older woman."

"How much older?"

"About fifty years."

"Who is it?"

"The woman who sold Jay's farm."

"This is still tangled up? There's still a problem?"

"Yes. Want to hear about it?"

"No, I don't. I want to dream about my fish."

I collected Martha Hallock at the corner of Forty-third and Third Avenue, which is where the luxury bus into Manhattan drops people from Long Island's North Fork, and in the low light of a winter's day, she stepped down with her cane, looking more tired than I remembered. This was a great effort for her; I doubted she could walk without the cane. But she'd gone to the trouble, so something was at stake. I helped her into the hired car I'd arranged through the hotel and we drifted downtown.