The Disappearance of Stephanie Mailer: A gripping new thriller with a killer twist Joël Dicker (booksvooks TXT) 📖

“You’re out of the club!” the old man from Bratislava fired back.

“Is this a boxing club or a butcher’s shop?” another of the officers said, scratching his head uncomprehendingly.

“A bit of both,” the old man said.

“The room isn’t even refrigerated,” one of the inspectors said in a shocked tone as he took notes.

“It’s cold outside and we keep the windows open.”

The police had informed my mother. But being stuck at work, she had called my grandparents’ neighbor Ephraim, who came as quickly as he could and took me back to the house.

“I’m staying with you until your mother gets back,” he said.

“What kind of policeman are you?” I asked him.

“I work in homicide.”

“Are you important?”

“Yes, I’m a captain.”

I was very impressed. I told him what worried me.

“I hope Grandpa won’t be in trouble with the police.”

“With the police, no,” he said, with a reassuring smile. “But with your mother . . .”

As Ephraim had predicted, my mother spent days on end screaming at Grandpa over the telephone. “Daddy, have you gone crazy?” She told him I could have hurt myself, or gotten punch-drunk, or I don’t know what. But I was enchanted: Grandpa, of blessed memory, had taken me on the road of life. And he wasn’t going to stop there, since, after initiating me into boxing, it was he who, like a magician, brought Natasha into my life.

That happened a few years later, when I had just turned seventeen. I had recently transformed the big room in my grandparents’ basement into a gym where I had my weights and my punching bag. I trained there every day. One day, in the middle of the summer vacation, Grandma announced: “Clear your shitty basement. We need the room.” When I asked the reason for my eviction, she explained that they were generously welcoming a distant female cousin from Canada. Generously, my ass! I was sure they were asking her for rent. By way of compensation, they suggested I move to the garage, where I could continue my exercises amid the smells of motor oil and dust. During the days that followed, I cursed this fat, old, stinking cousin who was stealing my space. I could already picture her with her hairy chin, thick eyebrows, yellowing teeth, and foul breath, dressed in clothes from the Soviet era. Worse still, the day she arrived, I had to fetch her from the station in Jamaica, Queens, where she was arriving by train from Toronto.

Grandpa forced me to take along a placard with her name on it in Cyrillic.

“I’m not her driver!” I said angrily. “Want me to put on a cap while you’re at it?”

“Without the sign, you’ll never find her.”

I left, furious, carrying the sign despite my protests, but swearing I wouldn’t use it.

When I got to the concourse of the station in Jamaica, I wandered through the crowd of travelers, quite lost, and after approaching a few panicked old women who said they were not the disgusting cousin, I was obliged to resort to my ridiculous piece of cardboard.

I remember the moment I saw her. That girl in her twenties, with the laughing eyes, the fine, gorgeous curls, and the sparkling teeth, who came and stood in front of me and read my sign.

“You’re holding your sign upside down,” she said.

I shrugged. “What the hell business is it of yours? What are you, the sign police?”

“Don’t you speak Russian?”

“No,” I said, turning the sign the right way up.

“Krasavchik,” the girl said, laughing.

“Who are you anyhow?” I asked irritably.

“I’m Natasha,” she said with a smile. “That’s my name on your sign.”

Natasha had entered my life.

*

From the day Natasha arrived at my grandparents’, all our lives were turned upside down. The cousin I had imagined to be old and horrible turned out to be a wonderful, fascinating young woman who had come to New York to study cookery.

She upset our habits. She took over the sitting room, where nobody ever went, settling there after her classes to read or go over her lessons. She would curl up on the couch with a cup of tea after lighting scented candles which gave the room a delightful smell. Previously so gloomy, it became the room where everybody wanted to be. When I got back from school, I would find Natasha there, her nose in her papers, and, settled in armchairs facing her, Grandma and Grandpa drinking tea and gazing at her in admiration.

Whenever she wasn’t in the sitting room, she’d be cooking. At all hours of the day or night. The house filled up with smells I had never known. Dishes were constantly being prepared, the fridge was always full. And when Natasha cooked, my grandparents, sitting at their little table, would watch her with fascination and relish the dishes she set in front of them.

The basement room that became her bedroom she turned into a comfortable little palace, papered in warm colors, where incense was permanently burning. She would spend her weekends there, devouring piles of books. I often went down as far as her door, intrigued by what was going on inside the room, but without ever daring to knock. In the end Grandma, seeing me hanging around the house, prodded me into action. “Don’t just stand there doing nothing,” she would say, giving me a tray loaded with a steaming samovar and freshly baked cookies. “Take that and be welcoming to our guest, will you?”

I would hasten down with my precious load and Grandma would watch me, smiling, touched. The first time I didn’t even notice that she had put two cups on the tray.

I would knock at the door of Natasha’s room, and, when I heard her tell me to come in, my heart would beat twice as fast.

“Grandma has made you some tea,” I would say shyly, half opening her door.

“Thank you, Krasavchik,” she would say with a smile.

She was most often on her bed, eating up books. After meekly placing