“We can help you with that, can’t we, Elizabeth? I’m surprised we didn’t see you at Sunset at all. We’ve been going there for years.”
“We liked our cook,” Jeffrey said blankly. “It was also a long walk there and back. My leg—”
They all knew that they were all acquainted in one way or another with the Codringtons, but it was a subject that could not be broached without unpleasant associations and awkward questions. So it was left untouched, though its presence could still be felt. Under the table Sam felt Toby grasp her hand and hold it, as if to steady her through the dinner, and when they were on to the raki at the end Toby’s father asked them where they were thinking of buying a house.
“Brooklyn,” they said together.
But Carhargan seemed to be still thinking about Hydra, and failed to follow up on the subject of Brooklyn real estate.
“All the same,” he suddenly said, “you must have seen the Codringtons fairly often while you were there. I suppose you know the story?”
“Once or twice,” Jeffrey admitted. “But we didn’t become friends in any way. Did we, Amy?”
His wife shook her head, and yet her eyes, to Carhargan’s keen perception, suddenly sidestepped to the right.
“They’re a funny couple,” he said coolly, now interested in their reaction. “Or should I say were? They’re presumed dead, as I’m sure you know.”
“It doesn’t seem quite real,” Amy said.
“I never thought Codrington was very real in the first place, to be honest with you. He was a braggart and a blowhard. They told me he had a hard life, though.”
“Oh, in what way?”
Carhargan shrugged. “I don’t really know. It’s just what people say. Someone told me he was a mercenary in Angola back in the day. But we all know islanders gossip all the time. Some of the neighbors say—but what does it matter? I’m gossiping now myself.”
“What?” Amy burst out, but quietly.
“Nothing, nothing. I shouldn’t talk about the dead. They didn’t deserve to be murdered, if that’s what happened. I suppose we’ll never know. I’m sad about it, to tell you the truth. We had some jolly times back in the day. The story was that Phaine’s family were once friends with Onassis. Can you imagine?”
At the end of the following summer the young couple moved into their house in Brooklyn Heights and they settled into the lives they had planned for themselves. During the winter, however, she began to feel restless.
One week in December it snowed for almost three days without stopping. She put on her snow boots one afternoon when Toby was out and walked down to Prospect Park, along the slushy length of Flatbush Avenue with her podcast drowning out the noise of traffic. The park was nearly empty, soundless under the snow, and she walked deep into it until she was alone with the crows and the icicles. Choking and sobbing, she suddenly felt that someone was following her. She took out the buds from her ears, and when she turned she saw two figures indistinct in the falling snow, each moving in a different direction until only one was left. It was a man in a long coat moving toward her along the same path, blurred and lumbering as if he was as blinded as her. She moved on, but now almost running. She came into a grove of black, dripping trees and she wondered if she should call Toby.
It’s just hysteria, she thought, and resolved to not call him. Instead she walked back to Grand Army Plaza at the entrance to the park and sat there waiting for the man to exit from the park as well.
When he did, she stood up as if to confront him and she saw—as he walked past her—that there was indeed something familiar about him. Something in the gait, in the loose, limber insolence.
He strode off down Flatbush and she followed him. The snow was heavier and it became more difficult to keep up with him. When he reached the Atlantic Terminal Mall he crossed the street where a small strip of halal stores stood behind banks of black snow. He went inside one of the butchers and she arrived at the window herself. The shop was full and she couldn’t see him in the crowd. There was a line by the cash register, so she pushed her way past it and into the long, narrow store. The butcher’s counter lay at the back behind two plastic curtains. Here there was also a small crowd, and two men working at the counter with meat saws and cleavers. As she parted the curtains, the smell of blood hit her and she put a hand to her nose, stumbled into the hot room, and looked quickly into the faces. She glanced at their coats but couldn’t say if any of them were his. The eyes turned upon her were glacial and old. She went back to the front of the shop. As she did she saw a tall young man slip out of the door and she rushed back out into the street. But it was too late; he had merged into the sidewalk crowds.
When she got home she wanted to call Naomi. It was out of the question, but she wanted to ask her if Faoud had really died or whether there was a possibility that he had not. Even a tiny possibility. It was different from a total certainty.
But she never called. She thought for a while of telling Toby everything, but it was already too late for such a gesture to mean anything. It would cause her nothing but anguish.
“I think I was followed in the street today,” was all she said at dinner that night. “Some guy followed me out of Grand Army Plaza.”
“He did?”
He asked if she knew him.
“I wasn’t sure. He seemed like someone I knew. Maybe from school.”
It was as much as she could tell him to get a part of it off her chest. She went to bed early in a difficult mood and, sensing it, Toby left her alone. She opened the bedroom window a little and let the room cool with the radiators hissing against the walls and lay in the four-poster listening to the snow. Looking back on it, the day seemed empty and yet filled with riddles. The young man in his elegant long coat and woolen hat, the onetime sweep of the eyes with which he had picked her out sitting on the bench in Grand Army Plaza: a shiver of attraction, terror, and a certainty that had filled her. How did she know that Naomi had told her the truth, anyway? Maybe she would go to Prospect Park again the following day in the hope that she might see him again. Maybe he, too, went there every day. There was just the question of whether she would leave the house for no reason on any day of the week in the years to come and go wandering, blindly looking for a man in a crowd. She didn’t know. She wasn’t at all sure that she wouldn’t.
TWENTY-FIVE