Manhattan
Nicole Berman learned a hard lesson that fall Saturday morning, prohibited from seeing her own mother until she could be questioned by the New York Police Department. She found herself livid not over the injustice of Officer Martinez taking at face value her mother’s comments while delirious but rather over her own passivity.
It made sense, of course, to eliminate both Nicole and her father as suspects in the attack on her mother. Anyone in the Berman family or circle of friends would find ludicrous the idea that her father or she would ever do anything to harm her mother. So, sure, let the cops recite all the clichés and mix all the metaphors they wanted, jumping through hoops, covering bases, dotting i’s and crossing t’s. It shouldn’t take long to rule out her and her dad.
But something about having to do nothing but sit and wait and pace and pray and wonder, unable to do a thing, awoke in Nicole something she knew she had inherited from her father. Ben Berman seldom allowed life to happen to him. He was anything but a reactor. He embodied the very definition of proactive.
Nicole knew down deep she shouldn’t be so hard on herself. She had rushed to Mount Sinai, micromanaged her mother’s care as much as she was able, and even fought to temper Officer Martinez’s report of Mom’s barely coherent comments. Given the legal ramifications and the realities of the investigation, Nicole could have done no more.
But now the inactivity, her powerlessness, ignited in her a resolve that would change the way she attacked life. That would be a laugh to friends and colleagues who already teased her about being an overachiever—as if something was wrong with that. They looked at her résumé or her curriculum vitae and scoffed at her interest in adding one more achievement. “Two doctorates not enough for you? All those digs you’ve been on and now you want to run your own?”
Her father had always been her biggest supporter. Nicole once heard him berate a colleague who intimated that she had accomplished so much only through nepotism. Dad had said, “She’s earned everything that’s come her way. Her education stacks up against anybody’s—including mine—and she’s not even forty yet. Degrees from Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and the University of Berlin, and she’s taught at Regent, Fuller, Brandeis, and Harvard. Okay, I gave her a leg up by taking her on digs since she was fourteen, but not every kid who does that gets licensed in Israel, Iraq, and Jordan. Some say archaeology is as much art as science. I say it’s more art than science, and that’s where Nic has it over me. She’s as intuitive as anyone I’ve ever worked with on a dig.”
As she sat fuming, Nicole tried to distract herself by imagining her father meeting Detective Wojciechowski at LaGuardia. The detective seemed a tough native New Yorker, and clearly his plan would be to poke and dig and unearth any fissures in the Berman marriage—anything pointing to a motive. Obviously her father had a perfect alibi, but Wojciechowski would look for his involvement, his masterminding the assault.
Knowing that could not be true made Nicole confident such a line of inquiry would lead nowhere. She just wished she could be a fly on the wall, or in the squad car, for the nine-mile ride into Manhattan. But even more, she was determined to take charge of situations, of everything she was after in life. Some accused her of being overbearing anyway, so they wouldn’t be disappointed—or surprised.
Constructive assertiveness, that was her goal. No more letting life happen to her. Nicole would keep pushing for the best care for her mother, for full disclosure from the NYPD, and for them to find the assailant as soon as she and her father were cleared.
And that wasn’t all. Regardless what she found in her mail from the Saudis, she would continue to force the issue, to push for her license to lead a dig there. If that meant insisting her dad quit playing games and commit to the financing, she’d do that too. She would even start lining up her volunteers so she could vet her team in plenty of time.
Nicole was about to burst from frustration as the morning wore on and Patrolman Duane Decker and his partner were relieved. The replacements—a man and a woman in their thirties—had apparently not been fully informed of what was going on. When Nicole tried to introduce herself, they looked wary. “Our job is to keep you out of here,” the woman cop said. “So you might as well camp out somewhere else.”
“Your job is to keep any unauthorized persons out,” Nicole said, “since we don’t know who attacked my mother.”
“Not here to chat,” the man said. “You wanna sit here quietly, fine, but you’re not gettin’ in.”
Nicole was tempted to tell him she knew better, that Wojciechowski had already said she could be present when her mother was questioned. But saying nothing for now would make that small victory all the sweeter.
Nicole’s phone chirped, and she opened a text from her father.
“Flt att just told me 2 wait til all else get off. Mom OK?”
Nicole hesitated. She could at least put him at ease about that, couldn’t she?
“Mom’s stable.”
“U here?”
“No, you’re being picked up.”
“Who? Staff?”
Now Nicole had stepped in it. What was she supposed to say to that after having been warned not to tip him off?
“You don’t know him.”
“Whats going on Nic?”
“It’s all good. See you soon.”