“And what was the name of the man she married?”
“Ah, all the tough questions. Not sure I recall. It’s that metal plate they seem to have put in my head as I’ve grown older, Boom. I can ask around, though. Wait!” he screamed then. “His first name sounded a little like, Who’s that. Hoosmeth? A bit like that. Hoosit Jalanbani. Owns a few skyscrapers in Manhattan.”
I asked George to take a guess at the spelling. Something was scratching at me as I looked at what I wrote on the pad. After a few more words with George, and a promise to get together next time I passed through London, I hung up and continued staring at the paper. Then I recalled. I’d visited Esma in the residential apartment at the Carlyle of a woman she called ‘Madame Jahanbani.’
When I first met Esma, I’d found no photos of her on the net, although she had a significant entry in Wikipedia, focusing on her role with the European Roma Alliance. I took it that she was like many people who are camera shy, because no photo ever captures what they see in the mirror. Attila had wanted to have a picture taken of the three of us while we were eating at that streamside restaurant after our visit to Lijce, and Esma had refused, saying it would take too much time to get her hair right.
But Emira Zandi Jahanbani was far less reticent. There were dozens of images of her, posing most often in low-cut evening gowns at fund-raisers and looking—to be a wise guy—like a billion dollars. There might have been a stylist involved: dusky eye makeup, torrential hair, face tilted to the most availing angle. Yet it was Esma, smiling toward the camera, quite often with that sealed smile full of mystical allure.
I had run without Nara on Monday and Tuesday—it was starting to be beautiful many days—but on Wednesday she wandered in as I was about to go out the door. She was completely abstracted, although when I asked if she wanted to go “for a trot,” she agreed that fresh air might do her good. She dressed quickly but had virtually nothing to say as we jogged together for almost an hour. I was still far from a complete match for her as a running partner, and I often encouraged her to double-time the last mile without me, which was convenient inasmuch as it allowed her to grab a table at the fish place.
Today, she shook off the suggestion when I told her, at the usual place, that she was at liberty to canter ahead. I had thought at first it was simply our current role as opposing attorneys that had silenced her, but now I was baffled. When we started out at the apartment, she’d mumbled about going back to work this evening, saying she’d gotten nothing done during the day. Now she had no will for that. We stopped for a quick dinner at the usual place, and she had two beers before the food arrived.
I asked if her mother was okay, which she was, safely back in Jakarta.
“Lewis called me,” she said finally. “While I was at work. I expect he thought I wouldn’t be able to pick up.”
“And?”
She played with her utensils on the steel table for a second.
“I asked him if he was seeing someone else. I was surprised I had the courage. But I have been wondering for a while.”
I’d been thinking the same thing, but had kept that idea to myself.
“He gave me no answer,” she said. “He said he wanted to talk about our future. And I said, ‘You do not regard it as relevant to our future, if you are involved with someone there?’ He said he was not ‘involved,’ but I knew that was semantics. When I asked him again to just say yes or no, he accused me of avoiding the subject. I couldn’t stand it. He always has to find a way to be superior. I finally told him about Kajevic, that I could not give up a case of this importance, and said I hoped he would come home. And he answered, ‘Well, that pretty much does it, doesn’t it?’ And hung up on me.” She laughed, trying to find amusement as she continued to play with her fork. “Should I be crying?”
“Even if it’s for the best,” I said, “the end of a marriage is nothing to exult over.”
“I’ve been thinking about hiring a detective in New York.”
I made a face. I didn’t know a thing about Dutch divorce law, but I was fairly sure that would be unnecessary.
“No,” she answered. “It’s not because I doubt that he is involved with someone. I am curious about her.”
“To what end?” I asked.
Nara’s eyes, which always seemed larger and deeper without her glasses, darted up to meet mine briefly.
“I want to know if she’s like me at all,” she said. That line was enough to make her well up. I watched in silence and then briefly touched her hand.
“I knew,” she said.
I nodded.
“But it’s still humiliating,” she said.
“The exit ramps from marriages are pretty much lined with other bodies. It makes the abstract real, I guess.”
“And it is so infuriating, too. He’s running around and I have been doing everything to behave properly.” She’d had her third beer. Her black eyes again lit on me, suddenly large with alarm, then flitted about in evident confusion. She rose abruptly and walked a good twenty feet from the table, standing with her back to me. I motioned to the busboy so he wouldn’t clear our plates, then approached her. I touched Nara’s shoulder, still damp from the run, but she shirked my hand in exasperation.
“I’m being an idiot,” she said. She was crying again and trying to contain herself. She looked at me, attempted a smile, then crushed a hand to the center of her face. “Do you mind if I walk home alone?”
I should have spent Thursday organizing for our interview of Kajevic and speaking to the lawyer Attila had recommended in Tuzla, but there was just one thing on my mind: Esma. Twenty-four hours had only deepened my incredulity.
I searched ‘Jahanbani New York City,’ which brought up several hits, the most recent a small news item about the divorce of Hooshman Jahanbani from his wife, Emira. With that hint, I used the online records of the New York Supreme Court—which, confusingly, is what the trial-level court is called in New York State—to read through the ream of pleadings and and briefs in the case, now eight years old.
Mr. Jahanbani, who had fled Tehran when the Shah fell, owned commercial real estate all over Manhattan. He had been married for close to fifteen years to his second wife, who was thirty-two years his junior, and whom he had originally met because Hooshman was close friends with her father, another Persian expatriate, who was in the oil business.