Trouble Read online

  He opened his wallet and took out a corner torn from one of Belzer’s folders; on it, Jonah had copied Iniguez’s home number while the lawyer used the bathroom.

  The phone rang three times and was answered by a woman with a DJ’s voice. Jonah asked for Simón.

  “Who is this?”

  “A friend of his brother’s.”

  Kiddo what the hell do you think you’re doing we’re not trying to make friends

  A second extension clicked on; saxophone and drums softly in the background.

  “Yes?”

  “Mr. Iniguez?”

  “Yeah, who’s this.”

  “My name is Jonah Stem.” He paused. “I’m the—”

  “I know who you are.”

  “I’m sorry to, to disturb you, I—Chip—my lawyer, he wouldn’t want me to say this, but I wanted to, to apologize for what happened to your brother. You may not believe me but I didn’t mean for him to get hurt. I swear. This is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and I feel like shit for it. It probably won’t mean much to you, but, but I wanted you to know.”

  Iniguez hung up.

  UNABLE TO CONCENTRATE, Jonah spent the evening in front of his laptop. He had Googled Eve a zillion times before, always turning up the same paltry results. Find-a-person sites couldn’t locate Gones, Eve; Gones, E.; last name Gones, instead offering to put him in touch with old classmates, a proposition he found pathetic to the point of heartbreak. His attempt to close the browser met with a barrage of popups (Spycams, You are the 1,000,000th visitor!!, Vaporize the bunny and win a FREE MP3 PLAYER) that multiplied faster than he could pick them off. He was glad when Windows crashed.

  He didn’t have a phone book. Nobody under thirty-five did.

  Verizon had no listing under the name Eve Gones or Eve Jones. Not in Hoboken, not in New York, not in the entire metro area.

  He called his sister.

  “Jonah-face, it’s good to hear your voice.”

  “You, too.”

  “Can you get me some drugs? I want to sell them at work. Everyone I work with takes sedatives. Except me.”

  “You sleep?”

  “No. But sometimes I black out for hours at a time, regaining consciousness in a motel room off I-95, with my purse and underwear gone. What’s shaking?”

  “I wondered if you could look someone up for me in the Yale alum database.”

  He heard the meaty slam of her Sub-Zero, followed the snap of a can and a lusty slurp. “The best part of pregnancy is that I’m not allowed to drink diet,” she said. “You forget how good real corn syrup tastes.”

  “You’re not supposed to drink caffeine, either.”

  “It’s Sprite,” she said. “Mind your own beeswax. Who went to Yale?”

  “I met someone in your class and wanted to do some research on her.”

  “Ooooh, Jonah-face has a girlfriend.”

  “She’s a friend.” He sounded about six. Leave it to a sibling.

  “Jonah and some girl, sitting in a tree, she wants him for his M.D.”

  He waited.

  “All right, Jeeeez. Let’s go check it out…Oh boy. My office is such a mess. Can you come clean it up for me, please?”

  “No.”

  “Thanks, my darling brother, I love you, too.” Channeling Mom again. He pictured Kate in the stately downstairs library she’d converted for personal use: bookshelves soaring up to kiss crown moldings at an altitude of eighteen feet. When she and Erich first bought the house—with equity coming out of their ears, they’d snatched it up during a lull—she told Jonah that they planned to call one of those dealers that sold archaic, unreadable hardcovers by the yard.

  Jonah had never confessed how much he disliked the place. It was drafty, with big Camelot stones and stained glass that tried much too hard. The decorator, a schoolmate of Erich’s from Berlin, had gone ornate retro-neo-bobo. Divans, settees, ottomans. Lots of spots to sit with nary a backside to fill them: their owners worked too much. Spending the night there, drowning in pillows and down, made Jonah feel like a monarch, one due for a beheading come morning.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Eve Gones.”

  “I don’t remember anybody like that.”

  “Think about how many people you had in your class.”

  “A lot, but I’m surprised I don’t have any…What college?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Huh. Well, let’s look.” He heard her clicking keys. “Eve Jones…Oh you know what? Gretchen drew you a picture.”

  He smiled. “Yeah?”

  “I told her you were a doctor. So she drew a picture of a doctor. It’s a masterpiece. Pollockesque. She employed a lot of white crayon. I never understood why they made white crayons, paper is white, how pointless is that. Okay, Eve Jones. Nope. Sorry. Nothing.”

  “She said she knew you. She remembered you.”

  “She knew me?”

  “Not that she was a friend,” he said. “But she definitely implied familiarity.”

  “That’s weird.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It is.”

  Then he thought Of course.

  “Katie? I made a mistake. Can you look up a different name?”

  “You don’t know the name of your own girlfriend?”

  “She’s not my girlfriend. Her name is spelled with a G.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s Jones but with a G.”

  Kate snickered. “Like G-J-O-N-E-S?”

  “There’s no J.”

  “Gones?”

  “It’s pronounced Jones,” he said, which made her laugh harder.

  “Jonah-face, that’s not a name.”

  “That’s how she spells it.”

  “They don’t let illiterate people into Yale.”

  “I’m not kidding.”

  “—not many.”

  “Would you please look in the database please.”

  “Guh-Jones…From now on can I call you Guh-Jonah?”

  “Kate.”

  “Calm down, I’m looking…” She paused. “Nope. Maybe she’s not registered. Did she change her name? Get married?”

  “I don’t think so. Can you—do you have a yearbook around or something?”

  Kate sighed. Then he heard her drag something across the parquet.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I need the stepladder, it’s all the way on the top shelf.”

  “Why don’t you have Erich get it?”

  “He’s at the office.”

  “It’s nine o’clock.”

  “The life of a moneymaker.” She grunted. “Crap. It’s about two inches…let me get the ladder from the kitchen.”

  “Kate—”

  “Keep your frickin shirt on.”

  “You don’t have to get it right this second. I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”

  “Jonah-face,” she drawled, “I’m pregnant, not a cripple.”

  He timed her. Three minutes, during which he pictured her on tiptoes, her taut belly brushing up against The Natural History of Nova Scotia Vol. VII. Once he’d thought of pregnancy as a delicate, motionless phase of life. His sister had disabused him.

  “Whoo.” Kate belched. “Excuse me. Okay. Got it. This’ll be fun, I haven’t looked at this in a while…Okay. Jones or Guh-Jones, is that right, Gonah-face?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Wow, look at that.”

  He stopped pacing. “You found her.”

  “No, I found a picture of my friend Robbie building the Beer Can Eiffel Tower. He worked on it for six months before his roommate came home wasted and—”

  “Kate.”

  “Jeeeeez. Yessir. I am on the job. I am at your service. Um…Goldstein. Gomez. Graves. There’s no Gones, here, Gonah-face.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I know how to use an index. There’s an Elizabeth Marion Jones, a Jennifer Jones, and a Samantha Erin Jones. No Eve Jay-jones or Eve Gay-gones. Sorry.”
<
br />   “Can you flip through it?”

  “There’s thirteen hundred people in my class.”

  He sat down on his bed, flicking his big toe and breathing heavily. He zoned out long enough that when he came back he thought they’d been disconnected. “Hello?”

  “I’m here. I’m looking at—oh, gosh, there’s me. That’s so sad, I was so skinny.”

  He said, “What the hell.”

  “Maybe she made it up to impress you. It happens all the time. My junior year there was a woman who got into the graduate program in microbiology by faking her entire application. It turned out she was a total psycho. They arrested her. True story.”

  “I don’t understand,” Jonah said.

  “What’s not to understand? People lie, they do it all the time. They lie on their job applications. When I recruited for Lehman, I couldn’t believe what people would put on their CVs. Where does she work? Call them, they’ll have her info.”

  He slapped himself in the forehead. “That’s a good idea.”

  “Glad to help. Should I tell Mom you have a new girlfriend?”

  “No, please, no—”

  “I’m kidding. Love you.”

  The man who answered at the Beacon Transitional Housing Facility didn’t sound altogether official; he seemed confused when Jonah said he was looking for a way to get in contact with Eve Gones.

  “This is a men’s-only residence.”

  “She works there once a week,” Jonah said.

  “Nobody by that name works here.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  Jonah pursed his lips. “Can I ask who I’m speaking to?”

  “I’m the head night-shift nurse.”

  “You’ve never heard of Eve Gones?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know if you’ve heard of her, or—”

  “Can I ask who I’m speaking to? Are you press?”

  “I’m a friend of hers,” Jonah said. “I’m trying to track her down.”

  “Look, I can’t help you. I can’t speak to you. I have to go.”

  The man hung up. Annoyed, Jonah dialed again. It rang eighteen times.

  • 13 •

  LATELY HE’D GROWN accustomed to spending his days in a dysthymic funk, but the following morning he was so nonplussed by his conversations with his sister and the man at the Beacon that he failed to notice that the usual cause of said funk wasn’t around. At lunchtime he asked one of the interns what had happened to Benderking, and received a noncommittal shrug.

  He wasn’t about to question this gift. Not until afternoon rounds, when Benderking showed up in a beastly mood—sans tie, wearing an ill-fitting shirt and a large gauze eyepatch—did Jonah care to ask a notoriously gossipy nurse.

  “Somebody threw a cup of coffee in his face.”

  “What happened?”

  “She comes in, yelling at him, ‘You piece of this, you piece of that.’ Whhooosh.” The nurse made a flinging motion. “Right in his eye.”

  “It was a she?”

  “You know what I think, he was playing around on her.”

  Disturbed, Jonah asked what had happened to the attacker.

  “Ran off. You undercover? What you want to know for?”

  He said, “I wanted to know.”

  HE EXPECTED HER that night, and sure enough, she was under her elm, its foliage slaughtered by the oncoming fall.

  “Hello my love,” she said.

  They went upstairs. He dropped his bag and stood with his arms crossed while she made herself a cup of tea.

  “I need to apologize,” she said, reaching for the box of chamomile. “I’ve been frightfully out of touch.”

  He said nothing.

  “Oh my, don’t we look rather vexed.”

  “Why did you do that.”

  “Do what.”

  “You can’t do that,” he said. “You can’t. That’s not—I mean, I can’t believe you did that. And please don’t try and tell me that you didn’t, because—”

  “Jonah Stem.” She set her tea down. “Kindly allow me to get a word in.” She cracked her knuckles, cleared her throat. “First I must explain where I’ve been. I’ve had a number of things on my mind, and a number of obligations to attend to. First and foremost, you must be aware that the difference between success and failure is most often a matter of planning. With likely only one chance to have my say with this fiend who’s been venting his wrath upon you, I took it upon myself to—”

  “You did do it,” he said.

  “You’re interrupting me.”

  “You’re not going to, I don’t know, pretend?”

  “Why should I pretend? I was going to tell you, I wanted it to be a surprise.”

  “Oh it was.”

  “Then good. Don’t act so oddly. I was explaining to you that doing the job properly entailed a fair amount of thought on my part, not to mention effort, in determining when and where the best time to strike would be, the most appropriate means of reprisal. I thought coffee worked well—”

  “Oh my God.”

  “—symbolically.”

  “Jesus. Eve.” He walked around the room, beating his fists together.

  “You don’t agree?”

  “Agree with what.”

  “The symbolic value of—”

  “What are you talking about.”

  “Coffee,” she said patiently.

  “What about it.”

  “After what he did to you? Making you glue his mug together? I suppose I could have hit him with a mug itself, but this was so much more—well, cinematic. I wish you’d been there to witness it firsthand…” She traced the path of the imaginary coffee through the air. “A direct hit.”

  He stared at her until she frowned.

  “I’m getting a bad feeling from you, Jonah Stem.”

  “No shit.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Of course there is, you assaulted my resident.”

  She shook her head as if to say And so…?

  “Why did you do that.”

  “He deserved it.” She looked surprised. “Are you going to tell me he didn’t?”

  “I—”

  “All you’ve been saying for a month is how much you’d like to sauté his innards.”

  “That was—”

  “Frankly,” she said, “I was expecting a little more gratitude.”

  “Gratitude?”

  “Why yes.” She was wide-eyed. “I did it for you, you know.”

  “Don’t even say that.”

  “I did.”

  “Don’t even try and say that.”

  “Well I did, you can’t get around it. Just because the results aren’t what I anticipated—and I’ll be frank again, I think you’re getting a tad histrionic here, Jonah Stem—doesn’t mean my heart wasn’t in the right place. You said—”

  “I said I didn’t like the man, I didn’t—”

  “You said—”

  “I didn’t say I wanted him injured.”

  “You told me to,” she said.

  “I never said any such thing.”

  “You most certainly did.”

  “When.”

  “You said, ‘Go for it.’”

  “When did I say that.”

  “We talked about it. You told me you wished he’d learned some manners, and—”

  Now he remembered. “I never said that, you said that.”

  “And you acceded to the point.”

  “I—”

  “And I offered to teach him some manners, and you told me to go for it.”

  “Figuratively.”

  “Well,” she said, “that wasn’t very clear.”

  “It should be.” He leaned against the wall. “I mean for God’s sake if I’d said to kill him would you’ve done that?”

  She didn’t answer.

  He turned around to look at her.

  She said, “You did it for me.”

  A
silence.

  He said, “I need to—excuse me.”

  He locked himself in the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub. Benderking had suffered a corneal burn. He’d recover, but it would be painful and could take weeks.

  He replayed that conversation, trying to remember if there had been anything in his tone, his phrasing, his facial expression—anything at all…Go for it. That wasn’t a command. Was it? Could he be held accountable? What it would look like, having this woman who he had ostensibly saved testifying that he’d put her up to an act of violence.

  Nobody died he thought. That was the main thing.

  But somebody could have.

  But nobody did.

  From down the hall he heard something break.

  He went back to the kitchenette and found Eve at the counter, her hands in the sink. Her face was pale.

  “Eve?”

  “I—I dropped it.”

  The teacup lay in fragments near the drain. Blood ran from Eve’s palm, spotting the watery stainless steel, mixing and swirling with dishwater and dishsoap.

  “Let me see,” he said.

  “It’s nothing, it’s—I’m sorry about the cup.”

  The cut was shallow but long. He didn’t think it would require anything more than a tight bandage and some antiseptic. He tore a length of paper towel off, bunched it together, and told her to apply pressure.

  “Jonah—”

  He went to the bathroom and scrounged stuff to patch her up. When he returned with a handful of Band-Aids and a tube of Neosporin, she had begun to lay the shards on the counter.

  “I can fix it,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Give me your—op—hold it open.”

  “Please don’t be mad.”

  “I’m not mad.”

  “I’m sorry I—I’m sorry.”

  “Hold still, Eve.”

  “I love you.”

  “Hold your hand open.”

  “I do, I love you.”

  “Eve—” He looked at her, and what he saw startled him: an immense chasm of despair, dividing her top to bottom, a book with its pages torn out.