father, maybe a gypsy from Romania, and that she’d kept it hidden, maybe sewn inside a coat. She never looked at it, but took great comfort in thinking of its flame, that passionate blood red. It reminded her of love. I imagined that somewhere she was pleased to know the ruby was out in the light, on the hand of a woman her son loved and married. I kept these fantasies to myself. He didn’t like to talk about the past, grew stiff and cold. I used to think it was because it caused him too much pain, but more likely it was because it was too much effort to keep all the lies straight.
“What are you thinking about?” Jack walked on my left, the park yawning to the right.
“My ring. It’s gone. Someone took it.”
“I’m sorry. I noticed. I thought maybe you took it off.” There were running footfalls behind us and both of us startled, turned only to be passed quickly by a rail-thin young woman wearing headphones and breathing too hard. We started walking again.
“How could this have happened?” I asked.
He didn’t answer, just gave a slow shake of his head. We were moving fast, both of us nervous, unsure what we were heading into, or why, or what we were going to do when we got there.
“You didn’t like him. Neither did Linda. Okay. But this? Did you imagine this?”
“Linda didn’t like him?” He seemed pleased.
“Jack,” I snapped. “Answer me.”
“No. Not this. Of course not. Who could imagine this?” He took a few long strides so that he was in front of me, then turned around, stopping me. The Children’s Gate was just two blocks away now. He held out a hand.
“Give me the gun,” he said, sounding practical, assured. He was the man, he should be holding the gun. That simple.
“No,” I said, pushing past him. He grabbed my arm and didn’t let go even when I struggled.
“Jack,” I said, feeling anger, too much anger, rise in my chest, a kind of free fall in my belly. “Let go of me.”
I tried to wrest my arm from him, but he held fast.
“I mean it,” I said. “Let go.”
“Calm down, Isabel,” he said gently. “Look. It’s me.”
I looked at his face and my anger burned out. Just the eye contact calmed me, and I was aware of how rigid my body was, stiff at the shoulders, arm muscles tensed.
“We need a plan, a course of action.”
“Impossible.”
“Why?”
“We have no frame of reference. Nothing like this has ever happened to either one of us.”
We were moving again, Jack still holding tight to my arm as though he thought I might try to bolt. “We need to decide what to say at least,” he said reasonably.
And then it was too late. We both saw him, standing against the low stone wall. Just the look of him, furtive, anxious, told me that he was the one waiting for Camilla Novak. I was sure of it.
Jack and I separated. He kept so close behind me, I could feel him at my back. I look back at this moment now and think how foolish we were. New Yorkers think we own the world, that our proximity to reported crime-even if we are as pampered and sheltered as children in a nursery-makes us savvy and street smart. We believe our own international reputation as tough, rude, no-nonsense. We think we can grab a gun and confront some nameless thug on the street.
I walked right up to the stranger, who raised his eyes from the concrete to look at me. He was short, balding. His face was pockmarked and ruddy from the cold. His eyes had a kind of lazy menance, a dim nastiness.
“Camilla Novak is dead,” I said simply. My hand was on the gun in my pocket. “Now I have what you want.”
He looked at me blankly, pushed himself off the wall. His eyes darted toward Jack, back at the bulge in my pocket. He was making a threat assessment.
“I have some questions,” I went on arrogantly. “If you answer them, I’ll give you the files.”
Clumsy? Yes. Short-sighted? Sure. Of all the scenarios that had played out in my mind-a struggle, some kind of slick conversation in which I got what I wanted, even though I had no idea what that was, my actually firing the weapon, him cowering in fear, him attacking me-what happened next was a surprise. There was a beat, a pause between us where I felt Jack stiffen, start to pull me back.
“Who is Kristof Ragan?” I said, even though my heart was pumping fast now, adrenaline racing through me, causing a shaking in the hand gripping the gun. “Where can I find him?”
He released a little laugh. “You make mistake. No English.”
I had a moment of self-doubt when I felt very, very silly. But no. It was the same voice I’d heard on the phone, the same gruffness, the same thick accent.
“Really?” I said. I pulled Camilla’s phone out of my pocket and found the number on the call log, hit send. The ringing coming from his pants-some indecipherable pop tune-seemed to startle him; he glanced annoyed at his own pocket. Then he pushed past us like a linebacker, snatching the bag from my shoulder, knocking me to the hard concrete and body-checking Jack against the wall. He broke into an impossibly fast sprint into the park. Jack and I exchanged a shocked look. I scrambled to my feet and gave chase.
“Are you crazy?” he yelled after me.
“He’s got the bag!” I called, as if this justified risking my life. And in the moment it seemed to.
I broke away and ran down the concrete trail past the ornate lampposts and benches, but by the time I reached a fork in the trail, he was nowhere to be seen. Jack came up behind me. In his hands were the pieces of Camilla’s cell phone, which I must have dropped when I fell to the ground. The despair that swept over me might have brought me to my knees if my attention wasn’t diverted by two sharp reports cracking the night. Then Jack was on me, pulling me behind a large rock formation off the paved trail. Two more shots rang out, and a car alarm answered, filling the air with its mournful, incessant wail.
We huddled speechless until we saw the stranger stumble into view. He took a few staggering steps and then fell hard onto his belly with a low, terrible moan. Stupidly, I left the cover of the rock and kneeled beside him, touched his shoulder. He was talking, mumbling in a language I recognized but didn’t understand. I leaned in close to him, barely aware of Jack behind me, pulling at my arm. He was saying something like, “Isabel, there’s someone coming. Someone shot this guy; they’re coming after us.”
But I didn’t hear him then, because I was listening to the whispering of a dying man.
“Who is Kristof Ragan?” I asked him. “Where is he? Please.”
There was no reason for me to think he might know the answer to this question. And it was blindly selfish, some might even call it depraved indifference, to make demands of this person who lay bleeding on the cold concrete of Central Park. But every ounce of my drive lived in this question. And this stranger was the only one I had to ask. In all his final mutterings, which ceased in a horrifying gurgle, I only heard one word I thought I understood. Whether it was the answer to my question or not, I wouldn’t know until later.
He said, “Praha.”
Prague.
That magical city with its bloodred rooftops and towering castle, its muscular bone buildings and dark hidden squares. It captured me the first time I walked its cobblestone streets and marveled at its magnificent architecture. How I dreamed of Franz Kafka in the cafes he haunted. How I reveled in the predawn hush, the only quiet moment on Charles Bridge, that cascade of stone with its towering, tortured saints moaning through the ages. How I loved it even more the second time with my husband-to-be. I felt it became mine somehow when I married Marcus, someplace that would become a part of our lives, of the history of the children I hoped to bring into the world. The next time I visited Prague its secrets would try to swallow me, devour me whole. But I didn’t know that yet.
It made sense to me then. He would return home, of course. How long had it been since I’d seen him in Camilla’s apartment? Two, maybe three hours. He could be on a plane already, couldn’t he? There’d be a stop in London, maybe Paris. But then he’d go back to the place that made him.
When I looked up again from the man whose name I never knew, I saw her standing about a hundred feet away-the woman I knew only as S. She wore a strange expression as she stared directly at me. I heard Detective Breslow’s words again.
