I drove the two miles back to my apartment and took one of my mother’s diamond drops from the safe. Her photograph on the dresser seemed to watch me sternly: my dad had given her those earrings on their twentieth anniversary. I’d gone with him to the Tucker Company on Wabash when he picked them out and put down a deposit, and I’d gone back with him when he made the final payment.
“I won’t lose it,” I told her photograph. I hurried out of the room, away from her eyes. As I passed the bathroom I caught sight of my own face in the mirrored door. I had forgotten the dust that I’d collected at the Insurance Institute. If I was going to be presentable at the Rossy building, I needed a clean jacket. I took a rose wool–rayon weave that hung loosely, concealing the bulge of my shoulder holster. The herringbone I tossed into the hall closet with my bloodstained gold blouse, then I remembered my idea of profiling Paul’s DNA. In case I wanted to pursue that, I wrapped the gold blouse in a clean plastic bag and put it in my bedroom safe.
An apple from the kitchen would have to do for a late lunch: I was too nervous today to sit still for a proper meal. I saw Ninshubur’s collar on the sink and stuck it in my pocket—I’d try to find time to get up to Evanston with that tonight if I could.
I clattered down the stairs, sketched a wave at Mr. Contreras, who stuck his head out the door when he heard me, and drove across Addison, past Wrigley Field, where the vendors were setting up their carts for one of the Cubs’—mercifully—final games of the season.
From a marginally legal parking space outside their building, I called to the Rossy apartment. Fillida Rossy answered the phone. I hung up and leaned back in the front seat to wait. I could give the project until six, when I’d need to leave for my meeting with the alderman.
At four-thirty, Fillida Rossy came through the front door with her children and their nanny, who was carrying a large gym bag. As she had on Tuesday evening, Fillida was fussing endlessly with their clothes, retying the girl’s sash, smoothing the collar outside the boy’s monogrammed sweater. When he jerked away, she started wrapping the girl’s long hair around her hands, all the time talking to the nanny. She herself was dressed in jeans with a crinkly warm-up jacket.
Someone drove a black Lincoln Navigator to the entrance. While the driver put the gym bag into the back, Fillida held both children tightly, apparently giving some last instructions to the nanny. She climbed into the front seat, without acknowledging the man who held the door and put her bag into the car for her. I waited while the children disappeared up the street with the nanny before crossing over to go into the building.
It was a different doorman on duty this afternoon than the one I’d met on Tuesday. “You just missed Mrs. Rossy; no one’s up there but the maid. She speaks English, but not too great,” he said. When I said that I’d lost one of my earrings at dinner and was hoping Mrs. Rossy had found it, he added, “You can see if she’ll understand you.”
I tried to explain over the house phone who I was and what I wanted. My father’s mother spoke Polish, but my dad didn’t, so the language hadn’t been part of my childhood. Still, a few halting phrases got me upstairs, where I showed Irina the earring. She shook her head, starting to give me a long discourse in Polish. I had to apologize and tell her I didn’t understand.
“I all clean on next day, and don’t see nothing. But at party, I hear you speak Italy, I ask why, if your name Warshawska.” She gave it the Polish pronunciation, with the appropriate ending for a woman.
“My mother was Italian,” I explained. “My father was Polish.”
She nodded. “I understand. Children talk like mother talk. In my family, same. In Mrs. Fillida’s family, same. Mr. Rossy, he speak Italy, English, Germania, France, but children, only Italy, English.”
I clucked sympathetically over the fact that no one in the household could communicate with Irina. “Mrs. Rossy is a good mother, is she, always talking to her children?”
Irina threw up her hands. “When she see children, she always holding, always—like—like cat or dog.” She mimed petting. “Clothes, oh, my God, they has beautiful clothes, much much money. I buy all for my children what she pay on one dress for Marguerita. Children much money but not happy. No has friend. Mister, he very good man, happy, always polite. She, no, she cold.”
“But she doesn’t like to leave the children alone, does she?” I doggedly tried to keep the conversation on track. “I mean, they entertain here, but does she go out and leave the children behind?”
Irina looked at me in surprise. Of course Mrs. Rossy left the children. She was rich, she went to the gym, to go shopping, to see friends. It was only when she was home . . .
“Last Friday I thought I saw her at a dance at the Hilton Hotel. You know, for charity.” I had to repeat the sentence a couple of different ways before Irina understood me.
She shrugged. “Is possible. Was not here, I not know where she and mister going. I in bed early. Not like today when many people coming for dinner.”