Deceptions by Anna Porter (fox in socks read aloud TXT) 📗

had to find out if anything was missing, and I told them that Mr. Berkowitz didn’t have much in the apartment. He was a tidy man. Didn’t need much. So they wanted me to tell them how I knew that, and I told them I used to pick up his mail and place it on that table by the door. And they asked me to go over there to show them where I had put it and to see if anything was missing. They thought it was strange that he would give a key to a neighbour.”

“Did you think something was missing?”

“No. The mail was still where I had left it. Even the package I had put on top, the one that had come from France. I told you about that. It was why I thought he was in France.”

“What else did they ask?”

Zsuzsa wrapped her arms around herself. “Is it cold in here?” she asked.

“Just the shock,” Helena said, “and lack of sleep.” She put her arm over Zsuzsa’s shoulder and steered her toward the kitchen. “I could make you some tea,” she suggested. “I don’t know whether Hungarians drink tea, but back where I come from people drink tea to calm their nerves.”

Zsuzsa gave a nervous little laugh. “Americans drink tea?”

“Sometimes,” Helena said. She just realized she had slipped into her own voice and forgotten to be American. “You have a kettle?”

Zsuzsa pulled the kettle and a jar of tea off the top shelf above the stove and asked Helena to plug it in. Her hands were shaking. “The police wanted me to look upstairs, too,” she said. “I told them I had never been up there, but they insisted.”

“Of course, you had never been up there.” Helena dropped teabags into a pot, poured in the hot water and waited. Of course, she would have been upstairs. Who could resist such a temptation? “We have to let the tea take its time,” she said.

“Did the police call you?”

“Not yet.”

“That’s odd, I did give them your number, and I told them you were a friend of Berkowitz’s. You know when the policeman in charge took the phone from my hand, when I was talking with you, he said he had asked you to come to the station.”

“Why don’t we sit somewhere,” Helena suggested after she poured the tea into a couple of translucent white mugs and took them to the table in the living room. “Your grandfather,” she said, looking at the posters and prints, “I wondered whether you had some idea of what he had collected.”

“I know he loved the old masters. My father remembered one drawing that could have been by Rembrandt. Of course, he didn’t know that at the time, but once he started going to the galleries, he was pretty sure it had been by Rembrandt. There was an exhibition of his drawings in Amsterdam we went to, and he said he knew then that what grandfather had on the wall in the bedroom had been a Rembrandt. And he thought there were some Van Goghs. Did I tell you we had gone once to the Kröller-Müller Museum in Holland? He pointed to one of the fields of flowers, and he said he thought it looked just like one of my grandfather’s.” She stopped suddenly, put her tea down. “Why do you ask?”

“Did he ever mention something by Artemisia Gentileschi?”

“I am not sure.”

Zsuzsa’s damp hair had fallen over her face as she picked up her cup again. She swept it back and stared at Helena as if she were looking at her for the first time. Her daughter’s voice had risen to shout at her brother, and the boy swept the figures off the game board and came to stand near his mother. There was no mistaking his angry face or the whiny voice he used to complain. Whatever she said, made him turn around and slouch back across the room and stomp up the stairs.

“Is that the real reason you came to see me?” Zsuzsa asked. “My grandfather’s paintings?”

Helena hesitated.

“Because I already told you I have none of them,” Zsuzsa continued.

“I know,” Helena said. “But I had hoped you would remember your father mentioning them.”

“You are not really a friend of Gyula Berkowitz’s,” Zsuzsa stated.

“Not really,” Helena ventured. “But I know something about him and something about the man who stole your grandfather’s paintings. The man you said had pushed him into the river.”

“Biro?”

“You knew . . .”

“We all knew. But there was nothing to be done then and nothing to be done now.”

“There may be something . . .”

“Biro is dead,” Zsuzsa said, cutting off whatever Helena was about to tell her.

They sat watching each other for a few minutes, then Zsuzsa asked, “What is it you actually do? Buy and sell art? You were hoping I had something of my grandfather’s to sell? I had a visit from another person like that before you. But at least he was honest about his reason for coming to see me. You were not.”

Helena had been trying to decide whether to tell Zsuzsa the truth. It was the kind of truth that could hurt both of them, in different ways. It was difficult to guess what the repercussions of Berkowitz’s murder would be, or even who benefited from his death. But at this stage, it may be more dangerous for Zsuzsa not to know what Helena knew. How do you protect yourself and, in Zsuzsa’s case, your family from something you have no idea about, only a vague suspicion that could do more harm than you realize?

Helena went to the window overlooking the porch where the yellow tape still surrounded Berkowitz’s part of the house. She thought she had heard a noise, but it may have been just a man walking his inquisitive dog. Or it may have been the police returning. “I came to see Berkowitz, as I told you last time,” she finally said. “But it wasn’t because he was a friend. He