“You mean he might have been an intelligence contact? You should know, Liz, that those kinds of machinations—a certain cab collecting a certain woman at a major train station—only happen in the movies, not in the life of actual espionage agents. It’s actually much more likely, unfortunately, that a certain woman would become the victim of a random psychopath encountered when she gets into the wrong cab.”
“What did she tell you about that cab ride?”
“Not a lot, Liz. We were so focused on meeting one another for the first time. She did tell me she surprised the driver by thanking him in his own language. When she did so, she said, the color drained from his face. That’s not an expression I’ve heard before, and it was very memorable. But it was even more memorable because Ellen seemed so—how do you say it?—shook by the encounter.”
“Could she have overheard anything significant in his radio conversation?”
“From what she said, it sounds to me like the driver was talking about her or another woman in sexual terms. You mentioned he used the word teena several times. As I told you, that is the word for fig, but it also refers to a woman as a sort of tasty dish.”
Suddenly, a sharp, shrill chirp pierced the air. Liz sat up and turned on the bedside light.
“Is there a bird in here?”
Nadia burst out laughing. “No, no! It’s just a lizard.”
“What do you mean ‘just a lizard’?” Liz said, hopping out of bed and shaking out her sheets.
“Take a look at the ceiling.”
Liz looked up and saw that part of the pattern painted there seemed to move. It was a lizard scurrying directly above her head. Then she saw another one, closer to the peak of the ceiling.
“Will they drop down on us?” Liz asked.
“I hope not. If they do, I believe they are harmless.”
“Startling, though,” Liz said, returning to her bed.
“Certainly. Think about it, Liz. A lizard in the night would make great fodder for a postcard message.”
“Let’s write one for Ellen.”
“If we post it, Erik will know we’ve been together.”
“That’s true. And, before we met, you told me you had something to say about him. I had the impression that the ‘something’ might have been a reason for Ellen to leave him.”
“She wrote that Erik had a problem with outflow at work. There was dirty business, money laundering. There was no doubt she loved her husband, but I thought she might separate herself from him to retain power over her own resources.”
“She wrote this? Did you discuss it further in New York?”
“Yes, she told me in a letter. And I asked her about it in New York. She said he’d found a way to recirculate the flow, so the outgo problem was not so serious. I felt she rather brushed off my concern, which, of course, was magnified once again when she went missing.”
“Oh Nadia! I think you’ve misunderstood. I’ve been to Erik’s workplace. He was working on designing an environmentally friendly washing machine. The costs of refining it were running high, largely due to his water bills, so he found a way to use recirculated runoff from his parking area to test the machine.”
“No wonder Ellen seemed unconcerned in New York! All these years I have prided myself on my English comprehension, but most certainly I read that letter all wrong!”
“You can’t blame yourself. The best linguists can get stumped on slang and jargon about machines.”
“But now you’ve come all this way, and my information is worth less than nothing.”
“Is that what you were writing about when you advised Ellen to be careful about leaving the family circle?”
Nadia seemed to weigh her reply.
“It’s little wonder you sought me out,” she finally said “Yes, I did advise Ellen to think carefully about shattering the family circle. I did not think it was worth doing for financial reasons. And, as I mentioned, I worried that the hypnotist she considered consulting would lead her to think a family member was the figure in her flashbacks.”
“I, too, would have questioned her involving a hypnotist. But we’re still left with the fact that Ellen was overcome by the flashbacks. If she could not prevent them happening, she may have felt she was not in control of herself. And if she had an impulse to abuse, it would account for her leaving Veronica. By leaving her, she would be protecting her. The flashbacks you tell me about indicate a woman who felt out of control, overwhelmed.”
“Well, yes, the flashbacks seemed to overtake her. But when she spoke of them in New York, she was more worried than frantic. Even if they did make her feel as though she was losing control, it was not regarding handling herself with her child. She did not have it in her to abuse. I’m certain of it. No, Liz, I must say, it struck me that she wanted to face the flashbacks head-on and eliminate the source from which they sprang.”
“But didn’t you tell me she was reluctant to discover who the figure in the shadows was?”
Nadia did not reply. The two women stared up at the ceiling in silence. Liz wondered, could we have found a reasonable motive for suicide? Or, for the murder of the figure in the shadows?
“Ayeeeeeee!” Nadia shrieked, jumping from her bed and shaking a lizard from her sheets. Liz jumped up, too. Laughing, Nadia said, “Do you happen to have an extra postcard?”
“Eleven September 2001,” Nadia said aloud as she wrote the date on the postcard. “Someday, we hope, we will all sit down together and we will tell you how we came this far to find you,” she added and handed the card to Liz.
“The occasion for this postcard is easier to sum up,” Liz wrote. “Just call it ‘The Curious Incident of the Lizard in the Nighttime.’”
After signing their names on the postcard, the two women got into their beds and, pulling their sheets completely over their heads to shield themselves from falling wildlife, attempted to drop off to sleep.
September 12 dawned pink as the inside of a seashell. Liz looked at it, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep, through the lens of her camera. She had not slept well with the lizards chirping above her through the night. While she headed down the beach to photograph the Fijian sunrise, Nadia had gone in search of coffee at the island’s tiny shop and outdoor dining complex. Liz was zooming in on the “Cast Away” island when Nadia signaled her from the front of their grass hut.
“Come here right now,” she ordered.
There’s a side of Nadia I’ve never seen! Liz thought, impressed with the woman’s bossiness. Liz raised a finger to indicate, “Just a minute.” She wanted to catch in a photo the sun’s arc rising over the horizon, like the edge of a fabulous doubloon.
Nadia strode down the beach with a purposeful air that only made her look comical, dressed as she was in a sarong and flip-flops. “It’s very bad in the States,” she declared. “You must come immediately.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Manhattan is under attack.”
Liz stood stock-still.
Nadia repeated the news. “Manhattan is under attack.”
“By what? By whom? And Boston?”
“Not Boston. My contacts tell me Boston is not yet hit.”
“Not yet?”
“I hope it will not be. But it’s not just New York. The Pentagon has been hit.”
There was just one television in reach and it was not quite on the island. Nadia outlined the unbelievable as the two made their way to it. Housed on a luxurious yacht anchored offshore, the television was only accessible via boat. Unfortunately, all of the island’s kayaks were already tethered to the yacht. Stripping to reveal bikinis, Liz and Nadia grabbed Styrofoam boards fitted with plastic windows, designed to be used by leisurely swimmers to look at life on the coral reef below.