alive, but never got in touch with us. Well, that’s his business. He stopped being my brother a long time ago.’
Hearing a relationship between brothers dismissed like that, Vivien instinctively turned to look at Russell. His eyes had hardened for a moment, but immediately afterwards he resumed the stance he had decided to adopt, one of attentive silence.
‘Before he left for Vietnam, did Wendell work in the construction industry?’
‘No.’
That monosyllable rang in Vivien’s ears like a bad omen. She sought refuge in illusion. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Miss, I’m old enough to be a little soft in the head. But not so soft that I can’t remember what my brother did when he was still here. He wanted to be a musician. He played the guitar. He would never have done any job where he risked damaging his hands.’
From the inside pocket of her jacket, she took the photographs that had brought her to Hornell. She held them out to Lester Johnson. ‘Is this Wendell?’
Lester did not take them from her, but leaned forward to look at them. After what seemed an eternity, he said, ‘No. I’ve never seen this guy before in my life.’ He leaned back in his chair.
Russell, who had been silent until now, surprised everyone by speaking at this point. ‘Mr Johnson, if that isn’t your brother, it might be someone he knew in the army. Usually, guys who went to Vietnam sent home photographs of themselves in uniform. Sometimes alone, but often with a group of friends. Did he happen to do the same?’
Lester Johnson looked at him sharply, as if the question had put paid to any hope he might have had that these intruders would leave his house soon. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘I’ll be right back.’
He got up from the couch and left the room. When he returned, he was holding a cardboard box. He handed it to Vivien and sat down again.
‘These are all the pictures I still have of Wendell. There should be some from Vietnam among them.’
Vivien opened the box. It was full of photographs, some in colour, some in black and white. She looked through them quickly. The subject was always the same: a pleasant-looking, fair-haired boy, alone or with friends. At the wheel of a car, as a child on a pony, with his brother, with his parents, with long hair held in a band while he hugged a guitar. She had already gone through most of them when she found it. It was in black and white and showed two soldiers in front of a tank. One was the smiling boy she had seen many times in the previous photographs; the other was the young man who had been holding up a three-legged cat in the photographs they had in their possession.
Vivien turned it over and saw on the back in faded letters
written in irregular handwriting that had one major characteristic: it was completely different from the handwriting in the letter that had started this whole madness.
She handed the photograph to Russell, so that he could see the result of his intuition. When she got it back, she passed it to Lester Johnson. ‘What do these words on the back mean?’
The man took the photograph and looked first at the front and then at the back. ‘The King was what Wendell called himself as a joke. I assume Little Boss was the other boy’s nickname.’
He handed the rectangle back to Vivien.
‘I’m sorry if I told you I’d never seen him. I don’t think I’ve looked at these photos for thirty years.’
He leaned back in the armchair again and Vivien was surprised to see tears welling in his eyes. Maybe his cynical attitude was only a kind of self-defence – maybe the fact that he’d never heard from his brother again had hurt him more than he wanted to admit. Her arrival must have reopened an old wound.
‘And you really have no idea who that person with Wendell could be?’
The man shook his head, without saying anything. His silence was worth more than a thousand words. It meant that tonight he had lost his brother for a second time. It also meant that they had lost the one real lead they had.
‘Can we keep this photograph? I promise you’ll get it back.’
‘All right.’
Vivien had stood up. The others realized that they had no reason to stay here any longer. All the energy seemed to have drained out of Lester Johnson. He walked them to the door in silence, maybe thinking to himself how little it takes to dredge up old memories and how much they hurt.
As Vivien was about to leave, he held her back. ‘Can I ask you a question, Miss?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Why are you looking for him?’
‘I can’t tell you that. But there’s one thing I can say for certain.’ She paused, as if to isolate what she was about to say. ‘The reason your brother never got in touch with you isn’t because he didn’t want to. Your brother died in Vietnam, just like so many others.’
She saw the man take a deep breath. ‘Thank you. Goodnight.’
‘Thank
When the door closed behind them, she was pleased that she had resolved his uncertainties. For them, on the other hand, she thought as they walked to the car, certainty was still a distant target. She had arrived in Hornell convinced she had reached the finishing post, instead of which she had come up against a new and very uncertain point of departure.
That phrase of Russell’s came back to her as she opened the car door. Hate kept alive for years had led a man to plant bombs all over a city. Hate had led another man to detonate them. The illusion that she might return to New York in a different mood had faded. She knew that the return journey she would be thinking of the consequences of war and the power it had, after many years, to still claim victims.
CHAPTER 29
When the alarm went off, Vivien did not open her eyes immediately.
She lay in bed, enjoying the touch of the sheets on her body, lethargic after a night of intermittent sleep and no rest. Shifting a little, she realized that she was lying diagonally across the bed, a sign that the restlessness that had made her change position a hundred times in her half-waking state had continued even after she had fallen asleep. She reached out a hand to switch off the alarm. It was nine o’clock. She stretched and took a deep breath. The pillow next to her still bore traces of Russell’s smell.
She allowed herself a glance into the half-lit, familiar landscape of her bedroom. The next stage of the investigation was out of her hands for now, and Bellew had allowed her a night off. She had smiled at those words. As if taking time off was possible, with the cellphone on the night table next to her that could ring at any moment, bringing news that would make her hide her head under the blankets and wish she could wake up a thousand years and a thousand miles away.
She got out of bed, put on a soft terrycloth bathrobe, picked up the phone and walked barefoot to the kitchen, where she started making coffee. This morning, contrary to habit, she was in no mood for breakfast. The very idea of food turned her stomach. And to think that the last time she’d eaten had been with Russell at the stand in Madison Square Park!
As she put the filter in the machine, she felt a momentary anger. With all that she was going through, with a madman somewhere out there threatening to blow up half the city, with Greta lying on a bed in a clinic in a desperate condition, it didn’t seem either possible or fair that there could still be room in her brain to
