THREE NIGHTS LATER JACK sat on his couch in the dark, an opened but unsipped beer clutched in his right hand. Outside the windows, below the streetlights, summer trees swelled and bowed in a night breeze, sending shifting shadows across the walls of his front room.
In the past few days, he had been rocked with too many emotions to count: jealousy, surprise, anger, disappointment, surprise, surprise again, and grief. Now he just felt drained, too tired to think of much of anything, though he couldn’t help picturing Zhenya’s sad eyes and wishing he might have done something to help her while her husband was still alive. As he puzzled over how things had played out, though, he couldn’t really see what he might have done differently. He was a good detective, and he had done his job; he couldn’t have let her just walk away from a homicide. He just wished he had never left her alone, that last fateful minute.
He set down the beer; he had no taste for it. He lay back on the couch, remembering her girlish joy during their jaunt along the boardwalk, her sadness in the middle of the nights, the taste of her sweet mouth. And he remembered their final talk. She had not betrayed him, not really, not even with that last forceful jump.
Ironically, she had even freed him from his job troubles. Before the paramedics arrived, he had started to explain the situation to Linda Vargas. They had worked together for a decade and learned to trust each other more than most married couples, and he couldn’t bear for her to think that he was abusing that trust. But Linda looked at him, standing there so stricken, and she raised a hand to stop him. “I’m going to ask you just one question,” she said. “Did you have anything at all to do with either of these deaths or with covering anything up?”
He could have gotten huffy, but he had no right. He just shook his head.
“All right, then,” Vargas said. “It’s over. Whatever happened, it’s over.” She put her hand on his arm. “Don’t beat yourself up for this. If it wasn’t for you, we might never have closed this case.” And then she left him alone.
Now he lay in the dark, musing. He had been a detective for many years, but the true mystery was never really the whodunnit or the how. It was why it was so hard for people to really see each other, and why they inflicted so much absolutely unnecessary pain. The world offered some real external troubles, from famine to hurricanes, but violence based on hatred, greed, or jealousy was a purely human creation.
(Of course, if people did manage to stop killing each other and get along, he would be out of a job. …)
He got up and picked up a DVD. He inserted it into the player and pressed the remote.
Bright digital letters flashing time code in the corner of the screen: 4:27 A.M. From a recently planted surveillance camera, a grainy view looking down: a room with bare metal walls. In the background, three men wearing bulky jumpsuits to protect themselves from the freezing cold. Two severe-looking strangers and a third figure, unmistakably Semyon Balakutis. In the foreground, a big fish company employee, standing behind a massive tuna laid out on a table. The worker picked up a circular saw and applied it to the belly of the fish, which gleamed dully in the low light. He made a deep, careful incision, then set the saw down and pried up a segment of the fish’s heavy flank. Balakutis, wearing long rubber gloves, stepped forward, reached into the fish, and started pulling out white packages bundled heavily in plastic wrap.
After a few seconds, the room suddenly flooded with people wearing jackets marked NYPD.
Jack turned off the DVD player. That was why poor Andrei Goguniv had died, that deadly powder. He thought of Balakutis’s face as he had been led, handcuffed, toward a waiting police van. Just before he’d been pushed in, he had turned and seen Jack standing there. The man had done his best to maintain a proud, scornful expression, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes, which were weak with fear.
Now Jack lay back down on his couch. He should have been feeling more satisfaction, but he didn’t. He had put two bad guys away; tomorrow two more would spring up in their place. Angry, brutal men seemed to be one of the world’s great renewable resources. He thought of his son, Ben, and of the ways in which he had failed as a father to the boy, and he resolved to try harder.
After a few minutes the angry faces faded from his mind, but another took its place. He thought again of what he had seen in Zhenya Lelo’s eyes in her final moments. There was a weight deep in his chest, a pool of Russian sadness. The clock ticked on, and the night grew long, and gradually he felt another emotion taking hold, a surprising warmth, as if he had drunk of some smooth and very powerful liqueur.
Zhenya had given him a parting gift, with her last look of love, and he would carry it with him to the very end of his own days.