Vanished in the Dunes (7 page)

“There was a message for you on the tape,” Sara says. This is his second day back on this visit and it is a rare recent incident of direct interaction. She speaks as she sits at a small desk in the living room opening her order from the Vietnamese take-out. Amos sits across the room on a couch that faces the muted sounds from a flickering television. This arrangement is typical of their recent physical separation whenever they are both in the apartment.

Posner has spent the day at the Neue Galerie on Fifth Avenue staring at the erotic drawings of an Austrian artist named Egon Schiele who only lived until he was twenty-eight. There was boldness in the artist's renderings. Women subjects unflinchingly part their legs to reveal crimson labia, and all of it makes Posner uncomfortable as he imagines some connection between these provocative poses and Heidi.

“A Detective Wisdom from the East Hampton Police asked you to call him back. What's that all about?”

Her sudden interest is a change from the recent past and catches him off guard. He raises a glass of wine to buy time. He sips the burgundy liquid and leans back. He must tell the smallest part of the story now, and he isn't sure how to do it. The words finally come out as if he were another person speaking.

“Oh, there was this person on the Hampton Jitney that went missing some time ago. A woman. She was on the same bus I took, so the town police wanted to know if I could help them.”

“Did you already speak to them?'

“Yeah. About a week or two ago. The detective I spoke to said he'd probably have a few more questions. No sweat.”

Sara doesn't comment. She just turns away from him with apparent disinterest and digs her chopsticks into a container of spicy chicken with cashew nuts.

Wisdom answers on the first ring.

“This is Amos Posner. You left a message for me to call.”

“Thanks for getting back so fast. Not everyone's so good about responding.”

Posner pictures Wisdom sitting at a battered metal desk in a dingy room filled with smoke, and then catches himself in mid-thought. There is a brand new police department building in East Hampton. The desks are likely all new and smoking has surely been banned.

This is not some old film or television image.

“How can I help you?”

“I have a few more questions you might help us out with. Can I ask when you plan to be back in Amagansett?”

“I'm really not sure,” answers Posner. “Give me a second.”

He realizes that a hundred miles cannot separate him from this matter. Nor a thousand. Seconds of dead air follow. He sighs, but is sure Wisdom doesn't hear him.

“The day after next,” he says.

“Can I come over about ten in the morning?” asks Wisdom. It is a formality, which Posner readily agrees to. There is no other option. He must play out his story to the end. He tells Sara he is going back to Amagansett the next day.

“Whatever,” is all she says, but her shrug reveals indifference. Still, he feels that even her verbalized apathy seems to be an improvement.

“Did you notice if the woman had a cell phone?” asks Wisdom.

The detective is dressed in similar clothes to those he wore on his first visit. Posner absently wonders if the man has multiple similar
outfits, or whether he never changes his clothes. He opts for the former, but the idea brings a smile to his lips, which he cannot disguise.

“Something funny about the question?” asks Wisdom.

“Sorry,” answers Posner. “Something unrelated. I apologize.”

Wisdom grunts and pulls a pad from his coat pocket.

“What about it? Did you see her with a cell phone?”

“I'm pretty sure I didn't,” says Posner. “We only spoke for a few seconds. You're not supposed to use a cell phone on the Jitney.”

Wisdom nods. Something in his manner makes Posner definitely realizes the man is a long way from some bumbling cop. He is more like that shrewd, yet modest, television detective he watched years ago. That's it. Colombo. Except that Wisdom has neither a cigar nor a raincoat.

“It seems she made a call to her boyfriend. Another doctor. A guy named Henry Stern sometime that afternoon. The day she disappeared. Said she was calling from some nice house in the area with ocean views.”

Wisdom puts his notepad down and his eyes rise to see through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

“Lots of houses out here have ocean views,” is all Posner thinks of saying, but it is the right comment.

“You're right about that,” says Wisdom and returns his gaze to his notebook.

As Wisdom studies his notes, Posner's memory fixates on the cell phone. The incessant ringing on the front seat of his car, until the last chimes die away, and his ultimate race the next morning to a local beach where he finds a stone and pummels the amalgam of plastic and metal into tiny bits; and then the drive to the town recycling center later that day to scatter the remnants, then little more than powder, amidst the piles of nonrecycling garbage; the chicken bones, orange peels, and assorted household waste that have become man's footprint.

But the cell phone only rang sometime after seven that evening, he remembers. She must have called Henry earlier. From his house. It had to be from his house. When she was in the bathroom, but she used her cell phone, not his house phone. That's good. Very good. So there is no further basis to connect him with Heidi except that his house has an ocean view, but as he explains to Wisdom, such a vista is far from unusual in the area.

Wisdom rises to leave. Thanks him again for his time and help. There is no hint of nausea this time when Wisdom moves across the tile floor toward the door. Posner begins to believe he is getting past all of this, and that he is not only in the clear, yet beyond any evidence to remotely connect him to Heidi. He breathes deeply and goes upstairs. He pours a glass of wine. That night he sleeps deeply and late into the next morning. He has two weeks of such mindless solitude.

And then he gets a visit from Dr. Henry Stern.

Dr. Henry Stern is a tall man, over six feet, with straight brown hair and green eyes. He is thirty-two when he first meets Heidi at a hospital Christmas party a year before.

“Do you celebrate Christmas?” she asks her voice throaty and European accented, as she sips a glass of eggnog.

They stand with two other staff members in white coats and a well-dressed man who announces he is in administration. Stern shakes his head slightly.

“No. I'm Jewish. By the way that's not spiked, you know,” he says pointing to her glass as she looks up at him, her dark eyes wide as globes.

“Spiked?”

“I mean there's no booze in it. No liquor at all. Can't have the hospital pushing alcohol during business hours.”

The others all laugh, and he did mean it as a joke, since business hours equaled a twenty-four-hour day, but her eyes seize his and stop his own laughter. That's when he turns away, as he feels a flush creep across his face. He drifts across the room and joins two other radiologists, but for a change he doesn't feel like discussing shadows on x-rays; the indications of something ranging from either benign to inoperable. He has learned to control his emotions when he speaks with patients and their primary physicians. He has built up a wall of false bravado during such conversations, always faking the positive,
which will give them a tortured future of discomfort and occasional pain as well as hope.

He doesn't know her name, but steals looks across the room for the next half hour until he sees her standing alone near the door. He summons some hidden reserve of courage and approaches.

“Leaving so soon?” he asks and feels the flush return to his face. When she looks at him again with those black eyes, he begins to sense he is lost. Utterly lost or bewitched, it doesn't matter.

They go to a neighborhood bar a few blocks away. Tiny Santa dolls share space on the shelves alongside gin and Scotch bottles. All-too-familiar Christmas songs are piped through a pair of speakers at the front of the room. A tiny tree at the end of the bar winks red-and-green lights. They laugh at the juxtaposition of Santa and the alcohol, and she wonders how he can safely drive a sled with a drinker's red nose. They laugh some more and keep walking until they reach an empty booth in the back. He asks for a beer, and she takes a glass of red wine. They both order burgers.

“I thought Muslims don't eat meat?” he asks referring to her cultural disclosure during their walk.

She cuts the air with a wave of her hand.

“That's a Hindu thing, but I do many things Muslim women don't do.” She stares intently at him, and then goes on.

“Beef should be all right for Muslims if the slaughter is ritual and clean. We are also not supposed to eat pork. The same as Jews, part of halal or Muslim dietary rules. It's the high level of uric acid in the pig that is of concern. But I confess I do like wine. Alcohol is discouraged, but one can't be perfect.”

She sips her wine before she adds, “Adultery is also forbidden, except that I'm not married.”

Then she laughs and her cackle overrides the dim Christmas music that floats from the front of the room. She describes how she is a blend of three cultures; her parents' Iranian background, her
years growing up in a rather strict Austrian world, and the much more laissez-faire American world, especially in New York.

“And which do you prefer?” he asks.

His earlier disorientation, for that's what it was, has gone. He is now the consummate successful New York male his ego has constructed. And she knows nothing about him, with or without his private medicinal blanket, a condition he isn't about to tell her. He wants to gain this woman's serious interest. He hesitates to speak to avoid making dumb comments, yet when she reaches out and touches his hand, his voice all but disappears.

“I think I prefer it here,” she says, her accent deeper than before.

He stares at the generous hint of brown cleavage that rises above her scooped sweater neck, and calls for another round to mask the sound of blood rushing through his body. He wonders if she can hear the pumping. All his training tells him she can't, yet she must see his fingers shake slightly as they grasp the new beer glass. She must see the white foam spill over the rim as he raises his glass.

“Prosit,” she says. “That's how we toast each other in Vienna.”

Later he trembles when she takes his hand and leads him into her studio apartment only a block from the hospital. A bed, a small sofa, a table wedged against the wall. She says it's enough space.

“What do you like to do?” she asks, as the sweater rises above her head and flies away.

When he doesn't answer, and just stares at her, she says, “Then let me show you what I like.”

Later they speak long into the night about the Middle East. She abhors the mullahs that govern modern Iran, and he detects that part of her enmity was based on how her family had been treated. She dislikes the Israelis, not, she protests, because they were Jews, but because of the way they abuse the Palestinians. She had read Tolstoy and Shakespeare, and they laughed together when he remembered
the bard's quote about first killing all the lawyers, as a reason for their both becoming doctors.

“After all,” she said more than once when she rolled on top of him, “Doctors have to stick together.”

Henry waits for her at a table against the far back wall of Luca's on First Avenue. That's where they always meet for dinner. He watches as diners come in, most of them locals like him, there for the fish stew, or the tagliatelle with duck ragout, which is his own favorite.

Heidi has agreed to meet him at eight, but it is already past nine. He's already finished two glasses of the house Chianti. He wonders if she's standing him up on purpose. When they last met, two nights before, the evening had become a disaster. When she was ready for sex he just couldn't perform. At first she was angry and threw curses at him in German. Then she softened somewhat.

“It happens sometimes,” she said, but still steered him to the door.

Yet he knew why the problem arose. A week before he had seen her emerge from a private office looking disheveled, her lipstick slightly smeared and her hair in disarray. A tall young intern followed her. He could have killed her at that moment, but all he wanted to do was lose himself within her body. He realized that he needed to calm down, but when the next opportunity came, he couldn't do it.

There is a state of hopelessness when obsessive love becomes uncontrollable. People in love generally share some aspects of life; culture, music, books, art, even political discussion, or debate, but she would have none of that. She wanted to fuck away their time together, and he became a slave to that excess. Yes. That's what he had become, a toy, a plaything. She was a psychiatrist, and had pushed his buttons for her own gratification, as well as her sense of control. There was even more to it. One night, about a month before, Heidi had more than her usual quota of wine.

On reflection, he wasn't all that surprised when she said, “I like Jewish men. They're both very intelligent and oral. All my life I've heard how Jews outperformed the general population in academics, business, law, and, particularly, medicine. Especially here in New York. It's a challenge for me to outperform them.”

So Heidi is a user and a manipulator whose social goal seems to be to sexually dominate men, particularly Jewish men. But it didn't matter. All he cared about was the few times each week he could bury his face in her flesh. He knew she saw other men; she collected them like stamps, or coins, one-time stands of sex, but always Jewish men from what he came to observe, yet she stayed with him for the most part, and in some recess of his brain he somehow hoped she would stay there forever.

They were both off on the day when she said she wanted to take the bus to East Hampton, and she'd pointedly avoided inviting him to spend time with her until the evening. He was pissed and took it out on the Avis rental agent when he picked up the Chevy at mid-morning. A sudden impulse made him anxious to drive back upstate to where he grew up even though there were no relatives or friends still there. He just needed a break.