I'm God

an image of himself approaching him and Ziggy’s bonyhand reaching out and clutching his arm

Ziggy supporting himself on the edge of the table and reaching out his hand towards the printer

himself not understanding

Ziggypressing a button with his finger and leaving a red mark on it

himself listening without hearing as the printed sheetrustled onto the tray

Ziggywith a photograph in his hand

himself terrified

and finally Ziggy convulsing and drawing his last breath and blood spurting from his open mouth. He fell to the floor with a dull thud and Russell found himself standing in the middle of the room, holding a black and white photograph and a printed sheet of paper, both stained red.

And in his eyes the image of his brother lying in the dustcovered in blood.

Moving like a puppet, hardly aware of what he was doing, he stuffed the sheet of paper and the photograph into his pocket. Then, with the logic and instinct of an animal, he fled, leaving reason behind him, in that place that smelled of boiled cabbage and damp. He reached his car without seeing anybody. He set off, forcing himself not to drive too quickly in order not to attract attention. He drove as if in a trance until his breathing and heartbeat returned to normal. At that point he stopped the car in a side street and started thinking. He told himself that, in running away, he had clearly made an instinctive choice, but at the same time he was certain it was the wrong choice. He should have called the police. But that would have meant having to explain why he was there and how he happened to know Ziggy. And God alone knew what kind of trouble Ziggy had got himself into. In addition, it was quite possible that the man in the green jacket was the person who had knifed the poor bastard. The thought that he might, for whatever reason, decide to come back was pretty scary. Russell had no desire to join Ziggy lying dead on the floor.

No. Better to pretend that nothing had happened. Nobody had seen him, he hadn’t left any traces, and the neighbourhood was full of people who minded their own business and certainly weren’t crazy about talking to the police.

As he was thinking and trying to decide what line to follow, he realized that the right sleeve of his jacket was stained with blood. He emptied his pockets onto the passenger seat, checked that nobody was about, then got out of the car and threw the garment in a dumpster. With a touch of self-deprecation that surprised him, given the situation, he told himself that, at the rate of two jackets thrown away per day, he would soon have serious problems with his wardrobe.

He got back in the car and returned home. From the garage, he took the elevator direct to his floor. That would save the doorman the effort of remembering that he had gone out wearing a jacket and come back in his shirtsleeves.

He had just put his things on the table when the explosion happened.

He got up from the couch and went and switched the light back on, his eyes turned to the glare in the east but his mind on the fact that he couldn’t get away from what had happened in the afternoon. Now that he was thinking clearly, something occurred to him. Why had Ziggy used his last remaining strength, and the last moments of his life, to copy that sheet of paper and put it in his hands together with the photograph? What was so important about those things?

He went to the table, picked up the photograph, and stared at it for a few moments. He had no idea who that brown-haired young man with the black cat was, no idea what the photograph had meant to Ziggy. The sheet of paper, on the other hand, was a photocopy of a handwritten letter. The handwriting was clearly a man’s. He started to read, trying to decipher the rough, imprecise writing.

And as he read the words and grasped their meaning, he kept telling himself that it couldn’t be true. He had to read the paper three times to convince himself. Then, barely able to breathe, he put the letter and the photograph down on the table, with only Ziggy’s bloodstains to confirm that in fact it was all real, that it wasn’t a dream.

He looked back at the fire still burning in the distance.

His head was all mixed up. A thousand thoughts crossed his mind and he couldn’t get a fix on any of them. The anchorman on Channel One hadn’t mentioned the exact address of the building that had blown up. They were sure to report it on a subsequent news broadcast.

He absolutely had to know.

He went back to the couch and turned up the volume on the TV. He didn’t know if what he wanted most was a denial or a confirmation.

He sat there, wondering if the void into which he could feel himself falling was death. Wondering if his brother had felt the same every time he tackled a new story or got ready to take one of his photographs. He hid his face in his hands and in the darkness of his closed eyelids turned to the one person who had really mattered to him. As a last resort, he tried to imagine what Robert Wade would have done if he had found himself in this situation.

CHAPTER 13

Father Michael McKean was sitting in an armchair in front of an old TV set in his room at Joy, the community he had founded in Pelham Bay. It was a top-floor room, an attic with a partly sloping ceiling, white walls and a pine floor. In the air there still lingered the smell of the preservative with which the wood had been treated a week earlier. The cheap furniture that comprised the spartan decor had been collected wherever they could find it. All the books in the bookcase and on the desk and the night table had arrived here by the same route. Many were gifts from the parishioners, some made specifically to him. But Father McKean had always chosen the most worn and damaged things for himself. Partly that was his character, but mostly it was because, if it was possible to improve the everyday life of the community, he preferred the kids to be the ones to benefit. The walls were bare, apart from the crucifix over the bed and one splash of colour: a poster of the Van Gogh painting in which the artist had depicted, the poverty of his bedroom in the Yellow House in Aries. Although they were quite dissimilar, you had the impression, on entering, that those two rooms complemented each other, that there was some kind of communication between them, and that the poster on the white wall was an opening into a distant place and a different time.

Beyond the curtainless window you could glimpse the sea reflecting the blue, windswept late April sky. When he was a child, his mother would tell him on bright days like this that the sun turned the air the colour of the eyes of angels and that the wind didn’t let them cry.

But today there were bitter lines at the corners of his mouth and the expression on his face was grim. Those words of his mother, so full of imagination and colour, had stayed in his memory for ever. But the news on CNN today had other words and other images, scenes that from time immemorial had been associated exclusively with war.

And, like all epidemics, sooner or later war reached into every corner.

There, in close-up, was the face of Mark Lassiter, a reporter with a sharp, alert face, who looked as if he could hardly believe what he was seeing and saying, whose eyes and hair and shirt collar bore the marks of a sleepless night. Behind him lay the rubble of a shattered building, from which pathetic spirals of grey smoke still rose, the dying residue of the flames that for hours had illumined the darkness. The firefighters had fought all night to bring them under control and even now, on one side of the building, long jets of water indicated that the job wasn’t completely over.

‘What you can see behind me is the building that was partly destroyed by a powerful explosion last night. The experts are still at work trying to establish the cause. So far nobody has claimed