“Your cellphone.”
“I don’t have one; I’m the last person on earth without.”
“This must be rectified.” He fetched an old mobile and charger they kept as a spare. “If you have a problem in the night, phone us upstairs.”
“Thank you, Duncan, but I’ve been making it through the night without help since approximately age thirty.”
“Feel free to call home or whatever. It’s just a Nokia dumbphone, but it’s got credit on it.”
“Thank you. Very kind.”
“The bed down here is squeaky, we were told by the last occupants.”
“I’ll get in and remain motionless.”
“So,” he said, standing taller, “before I go back upstairs, we need to touch on the big issue.”
“Yes, absolutely, please. This mugging,” she said. “What happened, exactly?”
“He doesn’t even remember it, so we’ll never know. To give you the background, I’d been dropping over to your dad’s once in a while, just checking in on him. Sheepshead Bay is way the hell out there, and I was—”
“But wait. I still haven’t heard the whole story of how you two know each other. You said you found him after I left New York?”
It was Xavi who had figured out where Tooly lived, from a marked-up map she had misplaced at their apartment. They’d trekked out to this street in Brooklyn near the Gowanus Expressway and found some old guy looking out the window. They waved for his attention, pressed the buzzer. Did he know where Tooly was? Was he a relative? Her father?
Yes, maybe he was her father, but who were they? They explained themselves, and Humphrey buzzed them in.
“So weird to think of you, him, and Xavi playing chess there,” she said.
After that first meeting, Duncan went back alone, hoping to interrogate Humphrey. But he had no more success — the old man truly didn’t know where she’d gone. When law school got crazy, Duncan quit looking. He met Bridget, and that helped. He graduated, passed the bar, joined Perella Transom Fife LLP, started a family, moved back to Connecticut, and never thought of this guy, the father of an ex-girlfriend. Until, one afternoon, they bumped into each other at a hospital. Duncan had been visiting someone there, while Humphrey had minor surgery scheduled. They spoke briefly, then the old man — mortified — asked a favor. The hospital required an emergency contact number. Could he use Duncan’s?
“I was the only person he knew in the whole city to put down,” Duncan said. “He honestly did not have one other number. A few days later, I’m at the hospital again. He’s recovering from surgery, so I drop in. He promised that, once he got better, he’d take me for dinner. I said, ‘Sure,’ in the way that you do, not expecting people to follow through. After the operation, he actually calls me. Since he’s too sore to travel, I drive down to where he’d moved in Sheepshead Bay. That’s when I saw how he was living. You’ll get a look tomorrow. After that, we kept in touch here and there.”
“Incredibly nice of you. I know how busy you are.”
“It was either me or nobody,” he said pointedly. “Anyhow, I hardly ever went down there. But flash-forward to last year. I happened to be in Brooklyn one Saturday morning, so decided to drop in. I get there, and find your dad sitting in the stairwell of his building. He goes, ‘They’ve taken everything!’ He doesn’t have his hearing aids in, so he can’t hear me. I have no way of asking anything. He’s got these marks on his throat like someone choked him. I get a piece of paper and pen, and write in big letters, ‘What happened?’ He looks up and goes, ‘Your writing is terrible. You’ll never get a job as a secretary.’ ”
She smiled sadly. That was Humphrey, all right.
Since the attack, he had declined. “I’m not saying he’s lost it,” Duncan specified. “Part of the problem is his hearing and his sight. That cuts him off. When a place is noisy, he can’t hear properly, which he finds upsetting. He stays mostly at his apartment. Goes deep into himself. I need a fishing line to reel him back to the world.”
“This is sounding way worse than you described in your messages. How is he even managing on his own?”
“There’s a Russian woman I pay a few bucks to clean up, get his groceries, hang out with him most mornings.”
“That’s really generous of you.”
“Basic decency,” he said.
“And I guess they can talk Russian together.”
“Didn’t know your dad spoke Russian,” he said. “I apologize, by the way, if I downplayed the situation. Just, this thing has consumed way too much time these last few months. My wife is upset, my kids are upset. I’ll be honest: I was getting desperate. Tried everything to find you.”
“How did you?”
“He mentioned how your actual first name is Matilda. I typed that in.”
“With his last name.”
“With Ostropoler, yeah,” Duncan confirmed. “Sorry if you were trying to get away from him, but you need to be involved.”
“Wasn’t trying to get away.”
“Well, sort of unusual not to talk to your dad for years, or even know where he was. Or him you.”
This made her sound so callous. She wanted to justify herself. But that required saying too much about their own past. Neither wanted to get into that.
“Sometimes I used to tell Bridget — I’m not even kidding — I told her I was working late on a case and actually snuck to Sheepshead to check on him,” he said. “It’s like I was having an affair. I’m the only guy in the tristate area who cheats on his wife by visiting a man of eighty-three!”
“But he knows I’m here, right?” she said. “And he wants to see me?”
“Of course. And it should be fine.” Duncan paused on the stairs, uncertain whether to say more. “But still,” he warned her, “you might want to brace yourself.”
1988
LUXURY CARS BLOCKED the entrance to King Chulalongkorn International School, engines snarling as a pair of sweat-soaked Thai guards checked credentials and pointed families toward the parking lots. The vast complex — elementary school, middle, and secondary, over acres of southeastern Bangkok — was on display for International Day, an annual celebration of the diversity of bankers, diplomats, journalists, shady expats, and spies rich enough to send their children here.
Once inside, the kids ran wild, unleashed by parents and yet to be harnessed by teachers, with classes not starting till the following week. Some had arrived in school uniform; others wore street clothing, with Izod Lacoste and Polo Ralph Lauren in abundance. Childhood hierarchies reasserted themselves, abandoned during summer and tweaked now according to the growth spurts, the arrival of new dweebs, the repatriation of schoolyard idols.
“Tooly?” Paul asked, as they waited outside the administrative offices for a tour. “Were you in those same clothes yesterday?”
She wore shorts from which her little legs jutted, one sport sock pulled high, the other at her ankle, deck shoes squashed at the back to allow entry without lacing, T-shirt specked with soup stains from the Chinese restaurant.
“You didn’t wear that to bed, did you?”
“I don’t think so.”
He glanced around, assaulted by high-pitched shrieks everywhere. The children segregated themselves according to gender but, since this was elementary school, the boys’ voices were just as shrill as the girls’.
“You don’t smell, do you?”
Before she could answer, a young teacher with ginger hair approached across the open-air courtyard.
“Let me do the talking,” Paul told Tooly, thrusting his left hand into his pocket, thinking better of it, wriggling it free, then pocketing it again, lip curling upward to catch a sweat droplet. “Don’t draw attention. All right?”