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By Root 549 0

or injustice she has the ability to generate anger sufficient to wither fig trees. After she had wormed the whole tale out of me, in horrible little snips mixed with futile lies, I got the full blast of it, such that the resources of even her perfectly fluent English for insulting my intelligence were exhausted and she had to switch over to German: saudumm, schwachsinnig, verblödet, verkorkst, vertrottelt, voll abgedreht, and dumm wie die Nacht finster sein, to recall just a few. German is rich in such expletives, and they often filled the air of my childhood home. “Stupid as the night is dark” was in fact one of Mutti’s favorites. Finally: du kotzt mich an, which is quite vulgar and means roughly, “you make me puke.” With that, I was out on the street. I had received the reaming in near silence, conscious of a perverse pleasure in having at last violated the holy patience of my spouse. I called Rashid, he arrived in minutes, he stepped out to open the door for me (something that Omar has been told not to bother with), and I noticed he was looking upward and I did too as Paphiopedilum hanoiensis came flying from the top floor of Amalie’s house, just missing my car and smashing its new pot on the street. I had made her both angry and violent—a good night’s work and another down payment on my condo in Hell.

That, as it turned out, was the best part of the evening. After Rashid dropped me off and I stuck my key in the street door I noticed that it swung open before I’d had a chance to turn the lock. Someone had jammed the latch with a bit of duct tape. Heart in mouth I raced up the flights. The door to my loft hung open. Inside, in the narrow hallway that leads to the bedrooms, I found Omar. He was on his hands and knees groaning and seemingly examining a bright red oval on the polished oak floor, for blood was dripping down either side of his face from a wound in the back of his shaved skull. I lifted him up and into an armchair and obtained a clean dishcloth, a basin of water, and a bag of ice from the kitchen. When I had the wound washed and the bleeding under control, I asked him what had happened. I recall feeling an unnatural calm as I sat there listening to his groggy mumbles—in Arabic to begin with—a calm that recalled my army days as a medic, when the wounded were unloaded in large numbers from the dust-off helicopters after a firefight: the first moment you wanted to run away screaming and then came the unnatural calm that enabled you to work on mangled boys. I wanted to run screaming now through my loft to see what had happened to Miranda, but I made myself sit and ask and listen. There was not much to tell. He had heard a woman’s shout and a heavy thump and come running in from the living room where he had been watching cable news. That’s all he remembered. He didn’t see anyone. Miranda, of course, was gone, as was the original of the Bracegirdle manuscript.

I found Detective Murray’s card in my wallet and called him and left an urgent message and then dialed 911. After this we had the sort of confused interaction of many strangers, of the sort that’s always cut away in television dramas about crime and emergency, but which in real life absorbs many frustrating hours. Paramedics removed Omar, although he insisted upon walking down the stairs under his own power, and I entertained the police, first a pair of uniformed officers and then a pair of detectives, Simoni and Harris. They examined the front door of my loft and declared that the lock showed signs of picking, which made the affair more serious, not so much a domestic thing, which is what I imagined they thought when they arrived—a bleeding man, a missing woman, rich people, unholy liaisons…still, they couldn’t keep the snarkiness out of their voices. I imagined they were searching for some witty remark, of the sort that the scriptwriters used to put in the mouth of Jerry Orbach on the old Law & Order. They wanted to know who Omar was and where he came from and what was his relationship with the missing woman; and there was Omar’s pistol to explain, and my