“It’s not just about staying here,” she said. “I like you. I’ve been thinking about us, together.”
She seemed her prettiest then, looking up at me. She shook with a slight tremor — she was fighting hard. And the truth was, I liked her, too. But as I stood over her, the twelve years that usually disappeared when we were together returned. All I could see was her watching her old reality TV shows dubbed in German, Macy throwing a fit, and me, who liked a silent apartment filled with nothing but the noise that drifted from the street, trying to read behind a shut door.
I told her she was being ridiculous, this wasn’t what I’d wanted, and how could I trust her after today? For a moment her face remained still, but then she bolted up, hand jerked to hide her eyes, and rushed out. I stood there and watched her go.
NEARLY A MONTH LATER, the week after Christmas, I flew to London, summoned by Clara. Her sister lived in the Surrey suburbs, and Clara had flown over to visit. She asked me to come for a day, and there wasn’t a way for me to say no. I took a late flight and spent the night in a bland, business travelers’ hotel near Heathrow that Clara’s sister’s husband, still technically my brother-in-law, booked for me with his points.
In the morning I took a cab to Windsor Great Park, where I was to meet Clara beside Virginia Water. The cab driver dropped me off in a parking lot, and beyond the lot spread the park, or one corner of it. People were out, walking dogs they’d dressed in raincoats and plaid quilted capes. The trees were lifeless, their bare limbs seemingly all that kept the gray, pressing clouds from tumbling to earth.
Clara was up ahead, her back to me as she watched the swans floating in the lake. I called to her, and she turned. There was her auburn hair, spilling out of her parka’s hood, there was her dainty pointed nose, red with cold. Seeing her, I felt the last months erased, as if I’d just come up from a dream.
“Do you want anything?” I asked, nodding at the concession cart a hundred yards away.
“Tea,” she said.
I’d been nervous ever since Clara called to ask me over, and as I waited for the tea and my hot chocolate I studied the cart’s case of British snacks and tried to think through what I might do next. I had a suspicion of what was happening, but still my mind refused to work.
After I gave Clara her tea we took the path that went to the right, up the eastern branch of the lake. For a while we said nothing and watched the trotting dogs. Then, as I was testing my hot chocolate — still scalding — Clara said, “Do you plan to move back in with me next summer?”
That had been the plan once, the idea that Germany would be a cure.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been trying not to think about it.”
There was a pause. Then, with a changed, efficient tone I’d never heard from her before, she said, “Good. That’s all I needed to hear.”
I stopped, but she kept walking. I jogged to catch up with her. “What do you mean?”
“I’m going to file for divorce.”
As we walked she kept a few inches between us. I sipped my hot chocolate. It was cooler now.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll let you know what you need to do.”
In that moment I decided the last thing I wanted was to cause her more pain, so I told her I’d agree to whatever she asked.
We passed through a part of the path lined on both sides with chain-link fence. Behind the fence workmen had left tools and some kind of tractor.
“What have you been up to, anyway?” she said.
“Fucking a war widow,” I answered. I tried to smile, like it was some kind of joke, and only when I kept walking did I notice that this time she’d stopped. I turned and saw she’d started to cry. I went to her, but she batted me away. Dog walkers passed us, shifting their eyes.
“Really?” she said. “That’s what you’re going to say?”
I tried to put my arm around her, but she backed from me. “You don’t deserve anything,” she said, and the words cut like broken glass.
I FLEW BACK TO FRANKFURT. On the plane I tried an exercise whereby I emptied my mind bit by bit. It didn’t work.
From the airport I took the S-Bahn to Wiesbaden, and as we came to the Main I looked up, as I always do for rivers. I’d taken an early flight. The Main was still and narrow, and as the train turned to cross it the morning sun shot through the windows and the river suddenly glistened. Across from me two plump girls with spiked raven hair giggled over their cell phones, indifferent, their thick thighs stretching the weave of their matching leopard-print tights, their stout pimpled faces held close together. In the aisle a Turk or Romany, accordion folded shut and slung over his shoulder, shook his knitted change purse. I closed my eyes and listened as the bridge clacked beneath us. I felt Clara’s words, Amy’s silence, wounds beneath my skin. But the winter sun shone on my face and I said to myself: I am blameless. I said: I owe no one. I said: Surely something better has been promised me.
THE MOOR
The earliest record we have of the black detective Jackson Hieronymus Burke — the Moor — is an advertisement he ran in several Berlin newspapers in 1873, promising discretion and modest fees. Nothing is known of his cases from this period, but, tracing the address given in the advertisement to one of the city’s poorer quarters (Prenzlauer Berg), we believe they would have been limited to the lowest kind of work: finding stolen dogs, tracking suspected adulterers. After the advertisement, Burke drops from history until the fall of 1876, when he leaps onto the scene with a single feat of deduction.
All of Berlin had been baffled by the disappearance of the renowned theater critic Wolfgang Metzger. The police searched the sewers, dug up his mistresses’ back gardens. They questioned actors whose abilities he had maligned, impresarios whose shows he had damned. Neither the body nor evidence of foul play was found. Then, two weeks later, a letter appeared in the newspaper: Metzger had not disappeared, but had murdered his twin, a wealthy hay merchant, and replaced him. The letter, signed by Burke, described how he had uncovered the truth when he visited the twin’s villa to offer his services. He’d been directed to the stables and, finding the man there, noticed the horses shying from his touch. “With that I understood all,” he added with the confident flourish he would keep for the rest of his career. The twin’s servants might not have recognized a difference between Metzger and his brother, nor the twin’s wife, but the horses, with their keen animal sense, had betrayed the critic, who had hoped, by impersonating his brother, to avoid his debtors.
The city was shocked by this revelation and amazed by its deliverer. Everyone had the same question on their lips: who was this man, and where had he come from? Even now we can only speculate. Burke never spoke of his past, nor of how he came to detection. One rumor holds that he was born a slave on a Texas sugar plantation in the early 1840s, another that he was the son of a New Orleans freedman. References in certain archives suggest that a black detective — called, simply, El Negrito — practiced in Havana during the Civil War, but no proof connects him to Burke. We only know that Burke was American, that he was in his thirties when he arrived in Berlin, and that at the start of his career — in which he would solve over seven hundred cases and be memorialized in dozens of dime novels — he already possessed powers to rival the French masters Vidocq and Devergie.
Soon Burke’s photograph began appearing in shops, alongside etchings of the stable scene and a pamphlet, by a hack named Frisch, promising to teach its readers the detective’s secrets. He was invited to dinners, asked to salons — it was now, in the flush of his first triumph, that a columnist for the Zeitung, remarking on Burke’s color, gave him his nickname by declaring him their Othello, their Moor.