Full Stop (6 page)

Loretta said doubtfully: ‘How long would it take?'

‘We're talking four, maybe five minutes.'

Loretta remembered Michael's voice and said nothing.

‘Ms Lawson?'

‘I'm here.' She massaged the back of her neck with her free hand. ‘I can't say I'm enthusiastic'

‘I understand totally but can I ask you another question? Am I correct in thinking you're a stranger in town? I checked with NYNEX before I called you and they list the subscriber to this number as Antonia Annetta Stramiello.'

‘You did?' Loretta was impressed that he'd done his homework so early on a Saturday morning. ‘Toni's a friend, actually, I've borrowed her flat for the weekend. I go back to England on Sunday.'

‘I don't want to pressure you, Ms Lawson, but I'm delighted to hear you say that.'

‘You are? I don't understand.'

‘First point, if he hasn't called again by Sunday, you're out of it. Second point, say you agree and we get him — he gets bail, you're not even in the country. You don't have to worry.'

Little shivers ran down Loretta's spine. ‘What about Toni?
She'll
be here.'

‘She had any of these calls?'

‘Not as far as I know. I mean, I haven't spoken to her since it happened. I was going to ring her this morning but it says in the phone book you shouldn't tell anyone. Not even a friend.'

‘That's good advice. Ms Stramiello needn't know anything about it. You're the complainant and you'll be back home in – where did you say you come from?'

‘I didn't. Oxford.'

‘Oxford's a long, long way from New York. Will you help us, Ms Lawson?'

‘I suppose,' she said reluctantly. She looked round for her notebook, spotted it on the coffee table and returned to the bed.

‘You'd better give me your name and number,' she said, pen poised. ‘Donelly, did you say?'

‘That's it. Let me give you my direct line. This is a busy office so you may have to try a few times.'

After she put the phone down Loretta thought for a moment, her arms folded and one hand nervously stroking her left elbow. She didn't like the idea of not telling Toni what was going on but presumably Donelly knew what he was talking about; she was about to ring him back, go over the point again, when it occurred to her to speak to Dolores, who was so far away that she couldn't possibly have any connection with Michael or prejudice the inquiry. Loretta rapidly dialled the San Francisco number, remembering the time difference only as Dolores's answering-machine cut in and informed her — luckily, since it was only five-thirty in the morning — that Dolores had gone to Los Angeles for the weekend. Loretta cut the connection, thinking there was no point in leaving a message; she tried Donelly, muttered something when his prediction proved correct and she got the engaged tone, and went into the kitchen. On the fridge door, secured by a magnet, was a list of essential numbers Toni had left behind, starting with the emergency vet. Loretta found Jay's parents' number in Sag Harbor and dialled it, hearing the phone ring only twice before an answering-machine cut in and an unctuous female voice — Jay's mother, Loretta assumed — announced that the Minister wasn't able to come to the phone right now.

‘You may leave messages and requests for prayers after the tone,' it went on. ‘Please specify the full name of the friend or relative who needs the Minister's intervention, and a
brief
-heavily stressed — ‘outline of their affliction. Please also leave your own name and telephone number so we can follow up with you. Donations to church funds may be made by credit card, please remember to give the name of the cardholder, number and expiry date and the amount of your donation. God bless you.'

‘Blimey,' said Loretta. Resisting the temptation to invent an aunt at death's door and trying not to betray her amusement was Jay's father listed in yellow pages under Dial-a-Prayer, she wondered? Prayers-to-go? — she spoke quickly into the receiver, asking Toni to ring her back in the next half hour or in the early evening. She put the phone down and went into the bathroom, reflecting that the Christian Right probably took a tough line on obscene phone calls but she preferred to put her faith in more worldly forms of intervention. Loretta turned on the taps, splashed some lily-scented oil into the bath and distractedly prepared to wash.

In the other room, the phone sounded again. Loretta approached it warily, realising she had not asked Lieutenant Donelly how long it would be before the tap was in place.

‘Hello,' she said, steeling herself to deal with Michael.

‘Loretta,' cried Toni's voice, sounding a long way off. She was shouting above background noise, what sounded like the insistent bleeping of a car alarm. ‘Loretta, can you hear me?'

‘You're
very
faint. Where are you?'

‘At a payphone. It's on the main street, that's why there's so much — thank God, someone's finally turned off that alarm. How's Honey doing?'

‘She's fine.' Loretta glanced at the dog, puzzling over why Toni was using a payphone.

‘Can you do me a favour?'

‘Of course. Actually, I've just left a message for you with Jay's parents. On their answering-machine. What's all this stuff about requests for prayers?'

Toni said impatiently: ‘He freelances.'

‘What?'

‘He
freelances,
' Toni yelled, as though Loretta hadn't heard her the first time. ‘People call him from all over the States. Loretta, I need most of these quarters to call my gyno — I left my address book behind and I need you to look up her number for me.'

‘Your what?'

‘My
gynaecologist.
It should be in my desk drawer, the second one down. A little red book. Don't be too long or my money'11 run out.'

‘Give me the number you're on and I'll call you back.'

‘Excuse me? Sorry, Loretta, I don't think this phone takes incoming calls. Can you go get it?'

She found the book easily and returned to the phone.

‘What's her name?'

‘Rosenstein. Dr Hester Rosenstein.'

Loretta read out the number. ‘Toni, before you go.' She hesitated, not sure what to say, and in the end asked baldly: ‘Do you know anyone called Michael?'

‘Michael? Sure. Why? Did someone leave a message?'

‘Ye-es.'

‘Didn't he give his last name? It's most likely Michael Koganovich, we've been developing a new course together, he said he'd call before he went off to Rome for the summer. Have you read his work on Derrida? He has a very interesting perspective on — shit, I don't have many of these things left and I have to call Dr Rosenstein.'

Loretta realised this was not the time to discuss obscene phone calls. ‘Ring me later,' she said, ‘I'm going to be out all day but you can get me between five and seven. Toni?
Toni?

The line went dead, presumably because Toni had cut the connection in her eagerness to ring Dr Rosenstein. Loretta wondered idly what it was all about, having got used to the way Americans routinely hooked up with an array of specialists, approaching them direct instead of waiting months for referrals
as happened under the NHS. The system was faster than the British one, much more expensive, and Loretta had a suspicion that it resulted in unnecessary medical treatment, particularly operations. The bath was almost full and she turned off the taps, removed Toni's robe and stepped into the water. Perhaps she was having tests, Loretta speculated as she added more cold, trying to recall exactly what Toni had said the previous afternoon — something about how difficult it was to conceive at her age. It would explain why she had sounded so distracted a few moments ago.

The bathroom door, which Loretta hadn't fully closed, swung eerily open as if propelled by an invisible hand. Getting more used to the set-up in the flat, Loretta postponed her panic about intruders and waited for Honey to appear. Sure enough, she was rewarded by a series of peremptory barks; the dog, it seemed, was reluctant to cross the threshold into the bathroom, perhaps because she associated it with doggy shampoo and other unwelcome grooming procedures.

‘Five minutes, dog,' Loretta sang out, and slid deeper into the perfumed water.

Central Park was hillier than Loretta remembered, and teeming with people. Half of New York seemed to have been lured out by the prospect of brilliant sunshine when the mist cleared, and she was continually overtaken by joggers, roller skaters and even the occasional pony and trap. Loretta turned to watch one of them clip-clop smartly into the distance, surprised by the realisation that at the turn of the century this would have been an everyday form of transport even in New York. Her impression of the city as a twentieth-century creation, with entrepreneurs competing with each other to build higher and better, was so vivid that she hardly connected it with the city she knew from the novels of Edith Wharton and Henry James. Smiling to herself, and wondering if she'd have time over the weekend to visit Washington Square, Loretta resumed her walk across the park. There was a relaxed, almost carnival atmosphere in spite of the
heat, and the fact that virtually everyone except Loretta was wearing some variation on sports gear — tubular cycling shorts, track suit bottoms, vests in acid purples and greens — fostered the illusion that she was on the periphery of some major sporting event. It was certainly more pleasant than the narrow, scrubby strip of land sandwiched between Riverside Drive and the fast-moving traffic on Henry Hudson Parkway where she had walked Honey earlier that morning.

The dog had dragged her on a zigzag course, sniffing the ground and setting off on trails which petered out in dusty earth until Loretta decided she had had enough and turned for home. Honey promptly initiated a noisy quarrel with an oversized poodle which Loretta recognised as a
bichon frise
even as the lead slipped through her fingers and she realised she was contravening at least one and probably several of the city's by-laws.
‘Don't
let her off the lead' Toni had warned, relating an incident in which a friend had been fined by the parks police. She hadn't mentioned Honey's hysterical dislike of dogs larger than herself and Loretta lunged forward, panting as she seized Honey's collar and extricated her from the snarling mass of fur.

‘Is he always so aggressive?' the poodle's owner inquired in a tone of detached interest when the dogs were eyeing each other from a safe distance. ‘You thought of taking him to a shrink?'

Loretta didn't waste time explaining Honey was a girl. She apologised curtly, hurried back to the flat and discovered that the dog had spent part of the hot, suffocating night chewing the handles of her weekend case. Thoroughly disgruntled and muttering under her breath, she scooped up all her belongings and put them out of Honey's reach — shoes perched incongruously on bookshelves, her passport and spare cash on top of the fridge. So far the the dog had shown an interest only in leather but Loretta did not want to risk coming home and finding her air ticket punctured with teethmarks and sodden with canine saliva. Honey reacted as though it was a game, rearing up on her hind legs and barking noisily every time Loretta thought of a new hiding place. Either Toni's neighbours were a tolerant lot or the
walls of the flat were thicker than she imagined, for no one banged on the front door to complain about the racket. She eventually escaped from the apartment block a few minutes before eleven, quite a lot later than she intended.

Nodding to the lift attendant, who recognised her from her earlier outing with Honey, she waited for the lift to descend and compared Toni's cramped flat, with its fearsome list of rules and regulations about everything from having visitors to stay to separating different types of rubbish for recycling, with her own house in Oxford. Loretta's study, and her bedroom, were at the back of the house, overlooking the garden and the canal; on sunny mornings she had breakfast outside on a small terrace, watching boats go by and smiling as her grey cat stalked bees and butterflies. He was a companionable animal and his vocal range was in an altogether more subtle register than the fusillade of growls and barks which Honey seemed to let loose on the slightest pretext. Loretta got out of the lift, reminding herself that the dog was only a puppy, and probably bewildered by the unexpected absence of her owner.

Before setting off for the Metropolitan Museum Loretta had left a message for her American agent, Kelly Sibon. She also recorded a new outgoing message on Toni's answering-machine, punctuated by strange chomping sounds as Honey worried a rubber bone, in case Kelly or John Tracey tried to contact her before she returned. Loretta frowned as she thought of Tracey, and as she emerged from the park on to Museum Mile she worried about what he would do if he had to leave the
Sunday Herald.
He freely admitted he had neither the desire nor the confidence to go freelance; when Loretta was offered a part-time lectureship at Oxford, enabling her to give up a job she hated in London, he had been both admiring and envious. Their situations were not dissimilar in that Loretta's unhappiness had been brought about by what her former boss, the Professor of English at Fitzroy College, insisted on referring to as ‘new working practices'. He enthusiastically welcomed the idea of working more closely with industry, so much so that Loretta once lost her
temper at a staff meeting and snapped that she didn't want to spend her working life turning out literate food department managers for Marks & Spencer.

Unlike Loretta, John Tracey usually described himself as apolitical but from the little he'd said in phone calls to San Francisco he seemed to be finding the brash new regime at the
Sunday Herald
hard to take. He was pessimistic about his chances of finding a staff job on another newspaper, even though he had recently won two awards for his reporting of events in Eastern Europe. Just before she left England Loretta had rather diffidently suggested that he should write a book about the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, whereupon he rolled his eyes upwards and said: ‘You write the books, Loretta. I'm a fifteen-hundred-words man.'