At ease?
“Let me ask you again, Mr. Upend. Does the photograph indicate in any way that your daughter is at risk?”
But I knew the place, the exact place captured in the photograph, the street corner, the Métro station in the background, the newspaper stand.
“Is that a dangerous street corner in Paris? Is that a dangerous newspaper stand?” But she agreed that if I brought the picture into the station, she would put a copy on file. I hung up and ran the three blocks to the precinct house.
Officer Peña inspected the photograph, holding it for a moment at arm’s length, then, after unhurriedly perching a pair of spectacles on her nose, drawing it closer to her round face.
“This pretty girl?” she said, looking up at me. “She doesn’t look very endangered to me.”
It was true: in the photograph Clementine did not appear in any way at risk. In the picture she was looking beyond the frame toward someone I could not see, her expression one of mock exasperation, as though urging someone to quit fooling around and hurry up, why don’t you?
“You sure, Mr. Upend, she didn’t send this to you to let you know she’s okay?”
It wasn’t her handwriting on the envelope.
Now I was the recipient of Officer Peña’s scrutiny, as she fed her Selectric a fresh form. The typewriter flinched, chunk chunk, when Officer Peña jabbed with her finger.
“Name?…
“Clementine’s a nice name.
“Phone number?…
“Left her phone at home, did she?” Chunk jab flinch chunk. “No…known…number…
“You say you’d quarreled with your daughter, Mr. Upend?”
Chunk.
“And when, approximately, was that?”
Flinch chunk.
“Are you sure, Mr. Upend, you aren’t just feeling a little guilty?”
Now the typewriter merely whirred.
“About fighting with your daughter?”
Typing nothing, she nodded, squinting, lips pursed, as I asserted my conviction of urgency. When Officer Peña yanked on the form, the typewriter surrendered it with a squawk.
“That, Mr. Upend, is all I need to know….
“What is who going to do next? Your daughter and her friend?…
“That’s right, Mr. Upend, if something turns up, you can be sure we’ll let you know.”
—
Outside, I passed Esmé’s, the café where Clementine and I had spent so many after-school hours. Surely Officer Peña could have been right. Might it not be possible that I should feel relief? Hadn’t Clementine looked well, better than well, “that pretty girl,” more suntanned than when I had seen her last? I strove by sheer force of will to convince myself that my dread, however asphyxiating, was misguided, the stuff of delusion. Could it not be that what afflicted me was not an external threat but the shadow of my own past, hooding the sun but for me alone, the sun that elsewhere shone with such brilliance on Clementine, in Paris?
In the photograph of the kiosk, posters above the stacks of newspapers trumpeted the news. I calculated that the headlines could be no older than what, four days? five? So the photograph was recent. The films advertised on the sides of the kiosk had yet to be released. Perhaps my correspondent wanted nothing but to instruct me that it was I and I alone who would never be free. This could be true, I insisted to myself. Just because he had found me, just because he had found her—that alone did not mean that he would do what I most dreaded. He had never said that he would take her life as payment for my own.
SEVENTEEN
I do not know how I got home. I do not know what happened between leaving the precinct house and the moment back at the apartment when my telephone rang. I frisked myself to find it—found nothing—lurched from counter to armchair to desk—nowhere—and then it stopped midring. When I finally discovered my telephone in my briefcase, I punched through the list of recent numbers to see who had called. No one had called. No one had called for days. Then it rang again, once, twice, before I realized that it was Clementine’s telephone ringing, there, plugged into its charger on the vestibule table. I lunged for it, in the insane conviction that if Clementine’s telephone was ringing, then surely Clementine herself must be calling.
“Clem! Clementine, is that you? It’s me, it’s Dad—!” But there was nothing, only silence on the line.
“Hello?” I said, this time as one might test a vacant room for an echo. Nothing…nothing…except (was it?) the sound of breathing, a fluctuation in the background hiss of the line. I held my breath, and the breathing stopped. The silence shifted. Click. Pop. “Hello,” I said a final time, meaning goodbye. “Hello?” The hiss was now more insistent, now thickening to a low hubbub, as of a wide space busy with activity, telephones ringing, footfalls, scraping chairs, when abruptly a single voice cut in. Do you hear me? the voice said, strained, insistent. Do you hear me? it repeated, urgent now. Are you listening to what I am telling you?
A click and then the voice resumed: I am saying it was another letter, along with a photograph, a photograph of my daughter. Do you understand what I am saying to you?
It was my own voice, recorded, played back.
“I hear what you are saying.” This was a second voice in the exchange, a woman’s voice.
I am telling you, my voice continued, that someone—and I don’t know who—a stranger has mailed me a photograph of my daughter.
“That’s what you said the first time, when we took down the report. So where is your daughter now, Mr. Upend?” Just as I realized that the second speaker was Officer Peña, the line popped again with a sound something like a phonograph skipping, and her voice repeated, “So where is your daughter now, Mr. Upend?”
Click.
So where is your daughter now, Mr. Upend?
Click.
So where is your daughter now, Mr. Upend?
Click.
Then the gaping silence. Then a dead line.
—
What prevented me then, Father—having heard my own voice on the line, my own voice and Officer Peña’s, played back through my daughter’s cellphone—from raising
