We chatted another few minutes about his private life. No, he’d never married. Never met the right woman, he guessed. He escorted me to the entrance, where I gave the doorman a ten for his pains. I walked across the park to my car: I hadn’t wanted to raise doubts in the hotel staff’s minds by letting them see the wreck I was driving.
As I drove home through the soft purple of early night, I thought sourly that Alex was trying to set me up. But why? Lacey Dowell clearly didn’t feel bothered by Frenada. As for Murray’s role in the errand, he was in so far over his head that my exasperation was tempered by sadness. Even though I wanted to see him and tell him what I’d learned from Siekevitz, I didn’t want to go looking for him: it would be too painful to find him with Alex Fisher. Anyway, I didn’t know where Chicago’s movers shook these days—or nights. Murray used to be a regular at Lucy Moynihan’s place on Lower Wacker, but that was a journalist’s watering hole; television personalities drink elsewhere.
Cruising around town looking for him would really waste time I didn’t have. I went virtuously home and bundled my dirty clothes into the washing machine in the basement. The phone was ringing as I let myself back into my apartment.
“Ms. Warshawski?” It was a man and a stranger. “My name is Morrell. I understand you want to talk to me.”
An hour later I was sitting across from him at Drummers, a wine bar in Edgewater. Morrell was a slender man about my height, with light curly hair. That was as much as I’d been able to tell from watching him walk up the street toward me.
At the fringe of the pavement an older couple ate a late dinner, hunching toward each other to talk across the noise of the tables full of boisterous young people. I felt a twinge of envy for the woman, white–haired in the streetlight, her hand resting on the arm of the old man. Meeting a stranger for a drink because of an investigation made me feel very lonely.
I had tried to explain what I wanted to know over the phone when Morrell called, but he said he would only answer my questions if he could see me in person. He was calling from Evanston, the first suburb north of Chicago; Drummers was a halfway point between us.
“You’re really a private investigator?” he asked when the waiter had brought our drinks.
“No, it’s my hobby,” I said, getting cranky. “My day job is wrestling alligators. Who are you, besides the man talking to people who’ve run away from jail?”
“Is that what the children said?” He laughed softly. “What I really want to know is who is paying you to ask questions about Nicola Aguinaldo.”
I took a swallow of cabernet. It was vinegary, as if it had sat open in the bar too long. Served me right for ordering pricey wine in a neighborhood that only three years ago had been proud to serve Mogen David by the bottle.
“I’d be a mighty poor confidential investigator if I told a complete stranger who was hiring me to do a job. Especially a stranger who is asking questions about an immigrant who died in an unpleasant and, as it turns out, suspicious way. Perhaps you’re an undercover INS agent? Perhaps even an agent of the Iraqi secret police—what are they called? Ammo or something?”
“Amn,” he corrected. “Yes, I see the problem.”
He tapped a finger on his coffee cup and finally decided he’d have to reveal something if I was going to talk. “My interest is in political prisoners. I’ve written on that subject off and on in various places for over a decade. My work has appeared in places like The New Yorker, but a lot of what I write is for organizations like Americas Watch or the Grete Berman Institute. They’re the ones who commissioned this particular book.”
I’d vaguely heard of the Grete Berman Institute—a man whose mother died in the Holocaust had endowed it to help torture survivors recover. “This particular book being about?”
He ate some of the nuts on the table. “I’m curious about the life political refugees can make, whether they find unusual obstacles or sources of strength in starting out fresh in a new place. If a man—or woman—was a professional in their home country, they’re often welcomed by an academic institution, here or in Europe. Anyway, professionals are the kind of people who most often have the resources and contacts to emigrate once they’ve been released from prison. But what of someone outside that professional milieu who leaves home? What happens to him then?”
The waiter stopped with the stock inquiry; I asked him to take the cabernet away and bring me a glass of Black Label, neat. “I see. Aisha’s father.”
“Yes. Aisha’s father. What led you to him?”
I smiled. “I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood much like Aisha’s and Mina’s. There’s no such thing as a secret among the children, especially if it involves someone like you—or me—coming in from the outside.”