I'm God

‘I got swept up in something I can’t explain. Envy, anger at Robert’s ability to capture the moment, ambition. Greed, maybe. I showed the photograph to the New York Times and told them I’d taken it. The rest you know. I won a Pulitzer Prize with that photograph. Unfortunately, the brother of the dead man had seen Robert taking it and told the newspapers. That’s how everyone found out the photograph wasn’t mine.’

He paused, before coming to a conclusion that had cost him ten years of his life.

‘And if I have to be honest, I’m not at all sure I was sorry.’

Vivien had instinctively placed a hand on Russell’s arm. When she realized, she pulled it away, hoping he hadn’t noticed.

‘What did you do after that?’

‘I survived by accepting any work I could find. Fashion articles, technical photographs, even weddings. Mostly I drew on my family’s money a few too many times.’

Vivien was searching for the right words to lift the burden of that confession from his shoulders, but just then her cellphone rang. She saw the name on the display: Bellew.

She took the call. ‘Hello, Alan.’

‘A real stroke of luck. I called the head of the 70th and asked him to run a check. When I asked him if he could put every man available on it, he thought I was crazy.’

‘I can imagine. Did they find anything?’

‘The woman’s name is Carmen Montesa. When she moved, she wisely went to the police and told them she was moving. We checked out the address. It’s in Queens, and we also have an active phone number registered to her.’

‘Alan, you’re quite a man.’

‘The first woman who told me that was the midwife who brought me into the world. Join the line. Keep up the good work, and stay in touch.’

Vivien stood up and Russell did the same. He had realized that the break was over and it was time to move.

‘Anything new?’

‘Let’s hope so. For now we have the woman. Let’s take it from there.’

She wiped her mouth, threw the paper napkin on the table and headed for the car. Russell cast a melancholy glance at the food he had barely touched. Then he followed Vivien, leaving behind him a story that, however hard he tried, he suspected would never end.

CHAPTER 22

Carmen Montesa loved numbers.

She had always loved them, since she was a little girl. At elementary school she was the best in her class. Working with numbers gave her a feeling of order, of peace. She liked putting them in little squares on the paper, each little graphic sign representing a quantity, placed side by side or in a column, all in her childish but precise handwriting. And, unlike many of her school friends, she found it a very creative subject. In her little girl’s mind, she had even assigned colours to numbers. Four was yellow and five was blue. Three was green and nine was brown. Zero was a clear, immaculate white.

Even now, sitting in her old leather armchair, she had a Sudoku magazine lying on her lap. Unfortunately not much had remained of those girlish fantasies. Numbers had become black marks on white paper in a periodical, nothing more. Over time, the colours had disappeared and she had discovered that, applied to the lives of people, zero wasn’t a nice shade.

She would have liked a different life. She would have liked to study, go to college, choose a subject connected with numbers that she could then make her career. Circumstances had decided otherwise.

In a movie she had seen once, one of the characters had said that life is very difficult in New York if you’re Mexican and poor. When she had heard that, she had agreed inside. Compared with most girls in her situation, she’d had one advantage: her beauty. And that had helped her a lot. She hadn’t had to compromise herself, although over the years she’d had to tolerate a few too many straying hands, a few too many bodies rubbing up against hers. There was just the one occasion when, to make sure of a place at nursing school, she had given the director a blow job. When she had seen her fellow students and noticed how many of them were pretty, she’d realized she hadn’t been the only one to take that particular entrance test.

Then Mitch had come on the scene.

She moved aside the magazine when she realized that a tear had fallen onto the Sudoku diagram. The number she had just written, the five, was now surrounded by a bluish halo, making it too round and too similar to zero.

It isn’t possible – after all these years I’m still crying …

Calling herself a fool, she put the magazine down on the low table beside her. But she let the tears come, and with them the memories. They were all she had left of a happy time, maybe the one true bright spot in her existence. From the moment she’d met him, Mitch had changed her life in every way.

There was before, and there was after.

With him she had found true love, discovered what love could be and do. He had given her the greatest gift in the world: he had made her feel loved and desired and a woman and a mother. All the things he had taken back from her when, from one day to the next, he had vanished into thin air, leaving her alone with a small son to raise. Carmen’s mother had always hated him. When it was clear that her son-in-law wouldn’t be coming back, she hadn’t made any overt comment, but the words Itold you so were written all over her face. Carmen had tolerated her veiled allusions because she needed her mother to look after the child when she was at work, but she had never agreed to go back to her parents’ home. She would spend her evenings in her – their – apartment with Nick, who was the spitting image of his father, reading stories and watching cartoons and leafing through biker magazines.

Then, one day, she had met Elias. He was a Chicano like her, an OK guy, who worked as a cook in a restaurant in the East Village. They had gone out together for a while, just as friends. Elias knew her situation – he was a gentle, respectful man, and it was obvious from a mile away that he was in love with her. But he had never asked her for anything, had never even tried to touch her.

She felt comfortable with him and they talked a lot. Nick liked him. She didn’t love him, but when he had suggested they live together, after much hesitation she had agreed. They had obtained a mortgage and bought a little house in a working-class area of Queens that Elias had insisted on putting in her name.

Carmen smiled through her tears at the memory of that tender, innocent man.

Poor Elias. They had made love for the first time in their house. He was gentle and shy and inexperienced, and she’d had to take him by the hand like a child and show him, step by step, how to please her. A month later she had discovered she was pregnant, and exactly nine months after their first night together Allison was born.

So then she had a family. A son, a daughter and a partner who loved her, all sitting together at the same table. She wasn’t with the man she secretly wished was still there, and this wasn’t the wildly happy life she’d known with Mitch. A quiet life was what it was, the kind that, when you had it and were content with it, made you realize you were starting to get old.

Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be her destiny to keep hold of a man.

Elias had gone, too, carried away by an acute form of leukaemia that had consumed him in a short time. She still remembered the grim expression on the face of Dr Myra Collins, an internist at the hospital where she was working then, who had taken her aside and explained what the results of the first tests meant. To Carmen’s ears, those clear, courteous words had already sounded like words of condolence.

And once again, she had been left alone. She had decided that was how she was going to