The Reasons I Won't Be Coming, Page 24

  Yes, I was coming. They needed me up at the front again. What was it this time, a brass band recording of “Amazing Grace” or this year’s guide to movies on video? For fifteen ninety-five you could buy your own opinion or prop up that table in the lounge. What did we have here, a smart young man or an illiterate moron wanting music for a dance party? Couldn’t he just amplify the fridge hum? His face was red. He’d shaved too closely. I could hear the phone. Good for you, boyo! He wanted Kafka. I didn’t think we had any. He said it had to be Kafka. Well, all right, then. Did he want to drive buses too? I heard them calling: “Phone.” It was for me. This guy must be loaded. He was carrying around half the shop. Why was he bothering me? Had he tried looking under K? Could I check out the back for Kafka? Out the back the phone had been hung up. I found a copy of The Trial.

  The young man was happy, although it was not the translation he wanted. Life could be tough. The phone call, did he leave a name? How did I know it was a he? Did Rose have a secret? No name. Said he’ll call back. When? Didn’t say. I had to wait.

  2. Melbourne

  The private investigator did not call back till the following day. When one of the girls in the bookshop told me there was a phone call for me, I felt the faint stirrings of hope which, however deluded, however misguided, so often kicks in to keep us going and distinguishes us from other animals. Yes, this is Rose Gamarkin. Thank you for returning my call. It is a little difficult, I’m at work. Could I, perhaps, come to your office? Yes, I have a pen and paper.

  Bernard Leibowitz’s office had a door which had someone else’s name on it. I knocked on it anyway. The man who opened it was a soft, late thirtyish bear with big hands and a loud tie. He introduced himself as Bernard Leibowitz and offered me a seat on the door side of the smaller of two desks that took up most of the room.

  “I wasn’t sure I had the right address.”

  “Oh really, why?”

  “Well . . . the door—”

  “Oh, the door, right, of course.”

  “This is your office though?”

  “Oh yes, sure is . . . unless there’s something I don’t know.”

  “Mr. Leibowitz—”

  “Please, call me Bernard.”

  “Bernard, why don’t you have your name on the door?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I should explain. I share the office with another PI, but you should feel completely free to say anything in front of him.”

  I looked around the room. There was no one else in it.

  “When he’s here. Feel free to speak confidentially when he’s here.”

  Then Bernard Leibowitz looked around the room. “He’s not here now. I’m not actually expecting him, not that I keep tabs on him. I mean, I keep a lookout for him generally, as I would imagine he does for me, but really we just share the office. But if he does come back, or if on some other occasion you’re here and he’s here, you should feel completely free to say anything you might have said were he not here. Here’s my card, Miss Gamarkin.”

  “Rose,” I said, taking the card.

  “This really is my office, Rose. I really am a private investigator.”

  Of all the PI’s in all the Yellow Pages, I had to find this guy. Was this the man in whom I was meant, by some divine design, to put my trust? I was looking for my brother. I needed to find him in a hurry to save a life or three. Even if there was nothing more sinister in Pavel’s disappearance than a bout of juvenile delinquency, my parents were not in a position to take any such phase with equanimity. They never had been. In the absence of any real political or philosophical creed, in the absence of any religious or spiritual conviction, I had turned, in desperation, to the telephone directory and this was what I had been sent: a dancing bear. Why had I chosen him? Because he was Jewish.

  What the hell did that mean? Did I think we would have something in common? I didn’t really know what being Jewish meant, except in Russia. In Russia it meant exclusion, suspicion, ostracism, looking at the ground when you walked in the street. It meant quotas, denial of opportunities over and above that suffered by the other poor bastards. It meant blame for things beyond your control, fear for the safety of your children, unstoppable race hatred growing in people like cancer. It meant violence, seeing your own blood or that of your family unexpectedly against the snow on your way home from somewhere. What did it mean to this Menachem Marlowe in front of me here?

  “Would you like a cup of coffee, Rose?”

  He left the room to get it and that gave me a chance to look around. His desk, the desk at which I sat, was completely empty. There was nothing on it but dust, a telephone and an answering machine. His roommate’s larger desk, however, had half-scrunched-up papers strewn over the tops of more neatly piled paper. On the roommate’s side of the room was a bookshelf with motoring, sport and girlie magazines. That was more like it. Leibowitz came back empty-handed.

  “Bit of a problem, I’m afraid. There’s a place across the street. It’s on me.”

  I was still thinking of leaving when we sat down in the café across the street and he ordered. Then he launched into a much-needed explanation.

  “Look, Rose . . . Do you mind if I call you Rose?”

  “No.”

  “That’s right, you said that before. I’ve got to level with you.”

  “You’re not a private investigator.”

  “No, no. I am.”

  “You are?”

  “Well, sort of.”

  “What do you mean, ‘sort of’?”

  “I am a private investigator but—”

  “‘But’?”

  “But you’re . . . you’re probably going to find this very funny one day, hopefully.”

  “What?”

  “You’re actually . . . my first client.”

  “Oh Jesus.”

  “Now listen . . . we can work something out here. Tell me why you need the services of a private investigator.”

  What Bernard offered was essentially a contingency-fee arrangement. He would not be paid unless he found Pavel. “It works for both of us: you need help and I need . . . experience.”

  Bernard Leibowitz was thirty-eight years old. He looked like he needed both help and experience. In his time he had been a construction worker, a ditchdigger, a cabdriver, a salesman in a menswear store, a shipping clerk, a carpet layer, a salesman in a department store, a waiter, a short-order cook, an insurance salesman, an aluminum-cladding salesman, the personal assistant to the spokesperson for a mining company, a real estate agent (of sorts), the personal assistant to a trucking magnate, a gardener and the guy who held the boom mike for the production company that made late-night television advertisements for one of those discount furniture kings who had gone crazy and was practically giving things away for unheard-of low, low prices. From all this he had managed to save a little money, which he put into the establishment of his very own antique shop. Twelve weeks before I met him he had sold the antique shop at a loss. Resolving to try his hand as a private investigator, he had just managed to get himself into the “Private Investigators” classification of the latest Yellow Pages minutes before they were printed. He really needed me.

  “I’ve had a very rich life already. Believe me, I’m not complaining. It’s not that I deliberately set out to eschew the conventional things—”

  “You mean like a spouse, children, a house and a job?”

  “Well, I am actually, in effect, part owner of the house. You see my mother was a joint owner, with my father, of course, of the family home. So when she passed away she left half of her half to me and half to my brother, Adam. Now that he’s in Israel, there’s only me and Dad, and since my father would want me to call him just about every day anyway . . . you know we may as well—”

  “Live together.”

  “Yes. Why not?”

  “Does your father still work?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s a . . . teacher.”

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p; “Really?”

  “Yes . . . for years now,” he said, taking a sip of coffee and swallowing a capsule he had taken from a little plastic container in his pocket.

  “What does he teach?”

  “Bar mitzvah.”

  “Bernard, I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but I’m really worried about my brother. I don’t know where he is or what’s happened to him and I think I better get a real . . . I mean, a more experienced private investigator.”

  “Listen, Rose.” Bernard Leibowitz cleared his throat. “I know you’re worried about your brother. I really want to find him. I mean that. I’m not as stupid as I look. Give me two days. I have a car. We’ll work out a plan. I’m more motivated than the next guy in the phone book. We’ll find him.”

  He took my hand just below the wrist, not in a sleazy way but in the way that I had not realized I needed. I was tired. I thought that perhaps he had tears in his eyes when he spoke, but I couldn’t be sure. Without warning I had tears in mine, for Pavel, for my parents, for myself and for this thirty-eight-year-old bear in a bright tie who was offering me two of his days to drive me around so that I could find my brother.

  “Bernard, don’t you need some kind of license to call yourself a private investigator?”

  “You know . . . that’s probably right. That makes sense. I think that’s right.”

  The first thing he said he would do was call around all the hospitals and police stations to see if there was any word on Pavel. Bernard said that if the hospitals and the police had no record of him, it meant he was all right. I wasn’t so sure about this but it was comforting to hear it. He said I should go home and act normally in front of my parents. He would go back to his office and start making the calls immediately. I wanted to go with him. I needed to know that Pavel was alive and well as soon as possible. But Bernard said it would take a while and that I would just sit there, tense and nervous, which wouldn’t help anybody. He said he would call me at home if there was anything to report.

  “No, no. You’ll have to call me either way, otherwise I’ll sit there thinking you didn’t call because what you’d heard was so bad.”

  “Okay, but won’t you have to explain to your parents who this man is who’s calling you all of a sudden?”

  “Yes, you’re right. I’ll tell them you’re someone I met in the bookshop. You’re a regular customer and I’ve given you my home phone number. We’re friends.”

  “I could be your new boyfriend.”

  “It’s a bit sudden.”

  “How about a shy and gentle suitor?”

  “They probably won’t ask that many questions.”

  “It’s settled, then. I’ll call you tonight.”

  I went home and began waiting for him to call. I tried to read but couldn’t concentrate. I kept seeing my brother’s sad little face. Whenever the phone rang I raced to it. If my mother got there first I was quick to inquire whether it was for me.

  When she noticed my interest in the telephone she asked, “What are you expecting? Is it Pavel? Is it about Pavel?”

  “I’m not expecting anything.”

  She gave me a look that said she didn’t believe me.

  “Well,” I added, “not exactly expecting, and it hasn’t anything to do with Pavel.”

  “Is it about work?” she asked. “Is it a boy?”

  “It’s nothing, really.”

  It was lucky we had gone through this because when Bernard finally called it was my mother who took the call. Fortunately she misunderstood my eagerness to talk to him and was later even a little distracted by it.

  Bernard told me there was nothing to suggest Pavel was either in trouble with or known by the police, nor had he been admitted to hospital. He said that he had checked them all. Over the phone he did not seem so much like a bear. I was relieved that he had heard nothing.

  We met the next morning before I was due at work. When I arrived at Bernard’s office he was waiting for me in the hallway outside the door. His roommate was in conference with a client so again we went across the street for a coffee.

  “Bernard, do you have to leave the office every time he has a client there?”

  “No, no, of course not. It wouldn’t really be my office, then, would it? No, I knew you were coming any minute so I thought, you know, save time and everything if I—”

  “Waited for me in the hallway.”

  “I think it probably did save a little time but, anyway, I’ve had an idea.”

  “Yes?”

  “I know you said that you’d already been to your brother’s unit, but I think I should go there and have a look around myself.”

  “That’s your idea, Bernard?”

  “Yes. I’ll call up the agent pretending to be interested and see if I can get them to take me through it this morning. I’ll look for clues. He might have left something behind.”

  “He didn’t. I’ve looked.”

  “You looked through the windows but you haven’t been inside. I’ll get inside to see what I can find.”

  He could see that I wasn’t impressed with his idea. “Rose, you never know. You can go to work and I’ll call you when I’ve been through the place. Have you had breakfast?”

  I hadn’t had breakfast and I didn’t have a better idea. I didn’t have any other idea except perhaps the nagging one of calling another private investigator, so I found myself going along with him.

  My father was spared any anxiety over Pavel’s disappearance. His relationship with Pavel had so deteriorated that he was unaware Pavel was missing. He was getting up later and later each day. It had become too much for him to watch my mother leave for work at Kuznetsov’s shoe repair business. At the end of the day, when I came home from work, I would often find him in his old-world gray pleated trousers and his freshly ironed shirt, mopping the kitchen floor or scrubbing the bath.

  “The place gets dirty,” he told me once when he caught me looking at him.

  Bernard called me at work and told me he would meet me during my morning tea break to show me what he had found.

  “Do you get a morning tea break?” he asked over the phone.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. I’ll meet you in the alley out the back.”

  “Bernard, what did you find?”

  “Can’t talk now, Rose. I’ve only got two days. Meet you in the alley.”

  Why couldn’t he talk? I was his only client.

  When we met out the back it was in his car. He had brought along two cups of coffee, one of which he gave me when I got in next to him.

  “Bernard, what happened? Did you find anything?”

  “Rose, do you know if this is a loading zone?”

  “I don’t know. Bernard, did you find anything?”

  “Yes, I’ll show you in a second. How much time do you get?”

  “Fifteen minutes. Why?”

  “I thought so. That’s enough time. I’ll show you what I found and then we’ll have the coffee. It needs to cool. I got the agent to let me have a look around and then, while she was occupied, I put all the stuff I could find in my travel bag.”

  “How was she occupied?”

  “She had a very distracting call come in on her mobile phone.”

  “What if she hadn’t had that call?”

  “I made sure she did. I called my roommate and gave him the agent’s mobile number. It was printed on her business card. Then I had him call her and threaten her with legal action.”

  “Legal action? Over what?”

  “Everything. Under the general complaint that her firm had misrepresented the state of various properties, he complained about the plumbing, the presence of vermin, leaking toilets, cat urine on the carpet, that sort of thing. He just made it all up but it gave me all the time I needed. Now, come and see what I’ve got.”

  We got out of the car and he led me to the boot. He looked around, as if to see whether someone was watching, and then opened the boot to reveal his green travel bag. He unzi
pped the bag and pulled out the rags I had seen days earlier through the window of Pavel’s flat.

  “That’s it? That’s all you’ve got?” I asked him.

  “And this,” he said, pulling out a long piece of metal pipe.

  “Jesus, Bernard. This stuff is useless.”

  “What about the pipe?”

  “The pipe’s not his. Pavel doesn’t know anything about plumbing.”

  “I think he used it for something else. I’ve seen kids around, at the station, in car parks at the back of supermarkets; I’ve seen them with bits of pipe. They’re using them to smoke crack.”

  “Pavel doesn’t smoke crack.”

  “Rose, I think we’re starting to make some progress here, but you’re not necessarily going to like what we find.”

  “Bernard, what the hell are you talking about? I know my own brother.”

  “Rose, even if I’m right, it’s not the end of the world. I really think your brother was doing crack. Look here,” he said, directing me to the bend of the pipe with his finger. “That’s not tobacco ash or dust, Rose. It’s crack.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m pretty sure. Now, get in the car, drink your coffee and we’ll talk about this in the time we have left.”

  He held on to the pipe and we went back to sit next to each other in the car.

  “Look, the first time you find out someone in your family is using drugs, it’s always a shock. Your first impulse is to deny it.”

  “Bernard, you don’t know that this is crack residue.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “How do you know? When have you ever seen crack before?”

  “Rose, I’ve seen it. Believe me.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “No, you mean you don’t trust my judgment. You do believe me.”

  “Okay, then I don’t trust your judgment.”

  “Trust me,” he said, drowning in coffee a capsule he had placed on his tongue. “This is a pipe with crack residue which I found in the unit your brother was living in before he disappeared. Think about it. Somebody was using crack at his place. You said he was buying new clothes in the period before he disappeared.”