She followed him past the archway to the living room, in which stood a Steinway. Arranged on the lid were silver-framed photographs of Moshe and his late wife, Hanna, with children and grandchildren.
Jane had not known Hanna, who had died nine years earlier, but when she’d been here for dinner, she’d been cajoled into playing the piano for Moshe and his other guests. She performed two pieces of her choice: Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” and Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes.”
When there had been questions about her father, as there had been all her life, she explained that her mother was the one who encouraged her musicianship, and she turned the questions aside in such a way as to imply that she was most protective of her father’s privacy. She’d been aware of Moshe watching her with keen interest during this, and she’d been certain he suspected the true reason for her discretion was darker than she suggested, though he had never broached the subject with her.
Now, a step or two past the living room archway, Moshe stopped and turned to her and put one hand to his mouth as if it had just occurred to him that he had committed a faux pas. “Before I retired, many of the students at the university took great offense if anyone used the word girl when referring to a female sixteen or older. I was advised that one must say ‘woman.’ I hope I didn’t offend when I called you a girl there on the doorstep.”
“I don’t traffic in politically correct bushwah, Moshe. I like being the girl with eyes bluer than the sky.”
“Good, good, I’m so glad. One reason I retired the second time is, these days, the more infantile the students, the more seriously they take themselves. They are generally a humorless lot.”
In the kitchen, he drew out a chair for her at the dinette table.
“Coffee, tea, soft drink? Perhaps an aperitif? It is a quarter to five, only fifteen minutes short of a respectable cocktail hour.”
She voted for the aperitif, and he poured two small glasses of Maculan Dindarello.
As he sat down to his drink, Moshe said, “I was shocked and dismayed to hear about Nick. A terrible loss. I’m so sorry, Jane.”
Because he had been retired for a year and no longer consulting on Bureau cases, she had assumed that he didn’t know Nick was gone.
Jane wondered if Moshe still had active ties with the FBI—and if she had made a grave mistake by coming here.
34
* * *
THE FIRST TIME Moshe Steinitz retired, he was sixty-five. Hanna died five years later, and at seventy Moshe went back to work as a practicing psychiatrist, professor, and sometime Bureau consultant.
Upon his second retirement, at seventy-nine, he terminated all three jobs with no intention of returning to any. Or so he said.
He claimed that he knew about Nick only because Nathan Silverman, Jane’s boss, emailed him the news when it was a week old.
“By then, I imagined you’d talked about it with so many people, the last thing you needed was to go over it again with me.”
“I was grieving and furious at the same time, and didn’t know who to be furious with. I wasn’t fit to talk to anyone.”
“Genuine as it might be,” Moshe said, “too much sympathy can start to seem like pity, which only makes the grief more depressing. I asked Nathan to give you my sympathy, tell you to call me if ever you wanted. I’m sorry to hear he didn’t pass the message along.”
“He might have,” Jane said. “There were some things I just wasn’t hearing in the first couple weeks after it happened.”
In her experience, Moshe was the furthest thing from a liar. She was impelled to trust him.
She sipped the Dindarello and said, “So how’s retirement the second time around?”
“I read fiction, which I never had much time for when I worked. Take long walks. Garden, travel a little, poker with some friends who’re old coots like me. I futz and fiddle and fart around.”
By the time she got to the purpose of her visit and told him about the rising rate of suicides, he had poured a second serving of the aperitif. The sky beyond the window was a deeper shade of blue than before, gathering into it the first few sooty particles of dusk.
She took from her purse the spiral-bound notebook in which she entered coded names and facts pertinent to her investigation. There were also items written in plain English, including the contents of the final statements left by some who had killed themselves. She had collected information on twenty-two suicides, though there had been only ten notes among them.
“I’ve studied them until they’ve just become words,” she said. “Maybe there’s meaning in them I can’t see. Maybe you’ll see it.”
Occasionally she shared the notes with those she interviewed, and a couple of Xeroxes were folded in the notebook.
When she gave a copy to Moshe, he put it facedown on the table. “Please read them to me first. Then I’ll look at them. The spoken word and written word are weighted differently. There are nuances you get only by hearing, then seeing, then comparing impressions.”
She started with the most personal of the ten. “This one is what Nick left. ‘Something is wrong with me. I need. I very much need. I very much need to be dead.’?”
Moshe sat in silence for a moment after Jane had read Nick’s words. Then he said, “It’s not a typical last testament. It doesn’t explain his reasons or ask forgiveness. It doesn’t say good-bye.”
She said, “It’s nothing like Nick. It’s his handwriting, but otherwise I’d think someone else wrote it and put it with his body.”
Closing his eyes and cocking his head as though hearing those eighteen words in memory, Moshe said, “He’s saying he’s compelled to kill himself, and he knows the compulsion is wrong. A significant percentage of suicides do not think they’re doing the wrong thing. If they thought that, they wouldn’t do it.” He opened his eyes. “What was Nick’s state of mind just before…?”
“He was happy. Talking about the future. What he wanted to do when he retired from the Corps. I could read him like a newspaper, Moshe. He couldn’t pretend happiness and fool me. Anyway, he was never depressed. I was making dinner. He set the table, opened a bottle of wine. Singing along with the music, a Dean Martin album. Nick was totally retro when it came to music. He said he was going to the john, he’d be right back.”
“Read another.”
She identified the second decedent as a thirty-four-year-old network television executive, highly paid and rapidly advancing in the company. He had left the note for his fiancée, an actress. “?‘Do not cry for me. This will be a pleasant passage. I have been told. I am looking forward to the journey.’?”
“A man passionate about his religion?” Moshe asked.
“No. As far as anyone knew, he wasn’t a believer. He certainly wasn’t a churchgoer.”
“?‘I have been told.’ So if not God, if not a Bible or Quran or Torah, who or what told him the passage would be pleasant? The easy inference is that he must have been hearing voices.”
“Schizophrenia?”
“Except there’s no note of the paranoia, the sense of being oppressed, that characterizes schizophrenics so advanced in their delusions as to be contemplating such a radical solution to their suffering. Family, fiancée, fellow workers—did anyone witness him expressing false beliefs, obvious delusions?”
“No.”
“He was in a job requiring communication skills. Did anyone see disorganized schizoid symptoms?”
“Which are what?”
“The most common would be speaking in an apparently normal manner, but his sentences would have no meaning.”
“Nobody mentioned that. It’s not something they’d forget.”
“No, they wouldn’t. It’s an alarming symptom. How did he die?”
“He lived in Manhattan, on the twentieth floor. He jumped.”
Moshe grimaced. “Read another.”