The blue panel truck stayed half a block behind.
I don't know precisely what route Francine took to get from D'Agostino's to the imported-foods store on Atlantic Avenue . She could have stayed on Fourth Avenue all the way to Atlantic, could have taken the Gowanus Expressway into South Brooklyn . There's no way to know, and it doesn't much matter.
One way or another she drove the Camry to the corner of Atlantic Avenue and Clinton Street . There is a Syrian restaurant called Aleppo on the southwest corner, and next to it, on Atlantic , is a food market, a large delicatessen, really, called The Arabian Gourmet. (Francine never called it that. Like most of the people who shopped there, she called the store Ayoub's after the former owner who had sold out and moved toSan Diego ten years ago.)
Francine parked at a metered spot on the north side of Atlantic , almost directly across the street from The Arabian Gourmet. She walked to the corner, waited for the light to turn, then crossed the street. By the time she entered the food store, the blue panel truck was parked in a loading zone in front of the Aleppo restaurant, and just next door to The Arabian Gourmet.
She was not in the store long. She only bought a few things, and she didn't need any help carrying them.
She left the store at approximately 12:20. She was wearing a camel-hair car coat over charcoal-gray slacks and two sweaters, a beige cable-knit cardigan over a chocolate turtleneck. She had her purse over her shoulder, and was carrying a plastic shopping bag in one hand and her car keys in the other.
The back doors of the panel truck were open, and the two men who had gotten out of it earlier were on the sidewalk once again. When Francine emerged from the store, they moved up on either side of her. At the same time, a third man, the driver of the truck, started his engine.
One of the men said, 'Mrs. Khoury?' She turned, and he flipped his wallet open and shut, giving her a quick peek at a badge, or at nothing at all. The second man said, 'You'll have to come with us.'
'Who are you?' she said. 'What's this about, what do you want?'
They each took hold of an arm. Before she could have known what was happening they had hurried her across the sidewalk and up into the open back of the truck. Within seconds they were inside the truck with her and the doors were shut and the truck was pulling away from the curb and into the stream of traffic.
Although it was the middle of the day, and although the abduction took place on a busy commercial street, hardly anyone was in a position to see what happened, and the few people who did witness it had no clear idea what they were seeing. Everything must have happened very quickly.
If Francine had stepped back and cried out at their first approach…
But she didn't. Before she could do anything she was in the truck with the doors shut. She may have screamed then, or struggled, or tried to. But by then it was too late.
I KNOW exactly where I was when they snatched her. I went to the noon meeting of the Fireside group, which runs from 12:30 to 1:30
weekdays at the Y on West Sixty-third Street . I got there early, so I was almost certainly sitting with a cup of coffee when the two of them hustled Francine across the sidewalk and into the back of the panel truck.
I don't remember any of the details of the meeting. For several years now I've been going to AA meetings on a surprisingly regular basis. I don't go to quite so many as I did when I first got sober, but I still must average somewhere around five a week. This meeting would have followed the group's usual format, with a speaker telling his or her own story for fifteen or twenty minutes and the rest of the hour given over to general discussion. I don't think I spoke up during the discussion period. I'd be likely to remember it if I had. I'm sure there were interesting things said, and funny things. There always are, but I can't remember anything specific.
After the meeting I had lunch somewhere, and after lunch I called Elaine. Her answering machine picked up, which meant either that she was out or that she had company. Elaine is a call girl, and having company is what she does for a living.
I met Elaine a couple of lives ago, when I was a hard-drinking cop with a new gold shield in my pocket and a wife and two sons out on Long Island . For a couple of years we had a relationship that served us both very well. I was her friend on the job, there to steer her through hassles, and once called upon to pilot a dead client from her bed to an alley down in the financial district. And she was the dream mistress, beautiful, bright, funny, professionally adept, and throughout it all as agreeable and undemanding as only a whore can be. Who could have asked for anything more?
After I left my home and my family and my job, Elaine and I pretty much lost touch with one another.
Then a monster from out of our shared past turned up to threaten us both, and we were thrown together by circumstance. And, remarkably, we stayed together.
She had her apartment and I had my hotel room. Two or three or four nights a week we would see each other. Generally those nights would end at her apartment, and more often than not I would stay over.
Occasionally we left the city together for a week or a weekend. On the days when we didn't see each other, we almost always spoke on the phone, sometimes more than once.
Although we hadn't said anything about forsaking all others, we had essentially done so. I wasn't seeing anybody else, and neither was she— with the singular exception of clients. Periodically she would trot off to a hotel room, or have someone up to her apartment. This had never bothered me in the early days of our relationship— it had probably been, truth to tell, part of the attraction— so I didn't see why it should bother me now.
If it did bother me, I could always ask her to stop. She had earned good money over the years and had saved most of it, putting the bulk of it in income-producing real estate. She could quit the life without having to change her lifestyle.
Something kept me from asking her. I suppose I was reluctant to admit to either of us that it bothered me. And I was at least as reluctant to do anything that would change any of the elements of our relationship. It wasn't broke, and I didn't want to fix it.
Things change, though. They can't do otherwise. If nothing else, they are altered by the sheer fact of their not changing.
We avoided using the L-word, although love is surely what I felt for her, and she for me. We avoided discussing the possibility of getting married, or living together, although I know I thought about it and had no doubt that she did. But we didn't talk about it. It was the thing we didn't talk about, except when we were not talking about love,
