think of that man.
Last night, after they got back from Hornell, he had come to the apartment with her, taken his things and left. He hadn’t asked to stay, and she knew that if she’d suggested it, he would have refused.
Standing in the doorway on his way out, he had turned to look at her with a mixture of sadness and determination in his dark eyes. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow morning.’
‘OK.’
She had stood there for a few moments looking at the closed door.
She poured coffee into a cup. However many sugars she added, she knew it would always be too bitter.
She told herself that what had happened was the kind of thing that happened many times in life. Too many times, maybe. It had been a night full of the only kind of love that time did not cover with frost, the kind that blazed into life at night only to fade with the sun the following morning. That was how he had taken it and that was how she had to take it, too.
‘Go fuck yourself, Russell Wade,’ she said out loud, and continued standing there, leaning on the counter, drinking coffee she didn’t really want. She forced herself to think of something else.
At Hornell Municipal Airport, just before the helicopter lifted off to take them back to New York, she had called the captain to update him on the bad news. After she had told him what had happened, a brief silence at the other end had told her that Bellew was trying to hold back a curse.
‘So we’re back to square one.’
Vivien had not admitted defeat. ‘There’s still one lead we can pursue.’
‘Go on.’ There was a slight hint of mistrust in the captain’s voice.
‘We have to go back to the period of the Vietnam war. We absolutely need to find out what happened to the real Wendell Johnson and this other kid nicknamed Little Boss. It’s the only angle we have.’
‘I’ll call the commissioner. At this hour I don’t think it’s possible to do anything, but I’ll start the ball rolling first thing tomorrow morning.’
‘OK.’
The reply had been drowned by the blades as they started to churn up the air. She and Russell had got into the helicopter, and for the whole journey there had been no sound strong enough to break their silence.
The telephone next to her rang. As if her thoughts had called him up, Bellew’s appeared on the display.
‘Vivien here.’
‘How are you feeling?’
‘I’m still alive. Any news?’
‘Yes. And it isn’t good.’
She waited in silence for the cold shower to hit her.
‘Willard contacted the army early this morning. The name Wendell Johnson is classified. There’s no way to access his files.’
Vivien felt anger clutch her stomach. ‘They’re crazy. In a case like this-’
‘I know,’ Bellew interrupted her. ‘But you’re forgetting two things. The first is that we can’t tell them what we’re working on. The second is that even if we could, it’s too flimsy a lead to break through that wall. The commissioner has asked the mayor to intervene. Maybe Gollemberg can approach the president. But there are procedures to go through that take time, even for the most important man in America. And if Russell is right, time is the very thing we don’t have.’
‘It’s crazy. All those people dead…’
She left the sentence unfinished, with a powerful implied reference to those who might still die.
‘I agree. But there’s nothing we can do for now.’
‘Anything else?’
‘One small thing you might be pleased to hear. The DNA test has proved that the man in the wall really is Mitch Sparrow. You were right.’
At any other moment, that would have been a great success. A victim identified and his killer already punished. Now it was only a source of pitiful pride and no consolation at all.
Vivien had tried to react against her sense of discouragement. There was one thing she could do, in the meantime. ‘I want to take a look at… that man’s apartment.’
She had been about to say Wendell Johnson’s apartment but had realized that the name no longer applied. He wasn’t Wendell Johnson any more – he was the Phantom of the Site.
‘I told them not to touch anything, because I knew you’d want to do that. I’ll send an officer to wait for you with the keys.’
‘Great. I’ll head out right now.’
‘There’s one strange thing. In the whole apartment there are almost no fingerprints. And the few there are certainly don’t match the prints of Wendell Johnson that Captain Caldwell sent me.’
‘Does that mean he wiped them?’
‘Maybe. Or it could mean our man didn’t have any prints. Probably wiped out when he got those burns.’
A phantom.
No name, no face, no prints.
A man who, even after death, didn’t accept an identity. Vivien wondered what kind of things the creature had experienced, what sufferings he had endured, to become what he had become. She wondered how long he had cursed the society around him, the society that had taken his life away from him and given him nothing in return. Exactly how he had cursed it they already knew. Dozens of deaths had demonstrated that.
‘OK. I’m heading out.’
‘Keep in touch.’
Vivien hung up and put the phone in the pocket of her bathrobe. She rinsed the cup in the sink and put it in the rack to dry. She went in the bathroom and turned on the shower. After a moment or two, enjoying the warm water on her naked body, she couldn’t help thinking that this case verged on the grotesque. Not because of how elusive the solution remained, but because of the way fate kept presenting absurd new escape routes, the way the truth kept finding unexpected hiding places for itself.
She got out of the shower, dried herself and put on clean clothes. As she put yesterday’s clothes in the laundry basket, she seemed to smell the scent of disappointment, which in her imagination was like the smell of dead flowers.
When she was ready, she picked up the telephone and called Russell.
An impersonal voice told her that his telephone was off, or unobtainable.
Strange.
It seemed impossible that he could be so negligent, given his eagerness to follow the case, the opportunity it was providing him, and the insight he had demonstrated during the investigation. Maybe he was still asleep. People accustomed to an easy life developed the ability to sleep on command, and for an excessive length of time, just as they managed to stay awake longer than most.
She would search the apartment on her own. That was how she usually worked, and in her opinion it was still the best way.
When she reached her car, she found Russell standing next to it.
He had his back to her. She saw that he, too, had changed: his clothes had the smell clothes get when they have been in a bag for too long. He was looking at the river, where a barge was moving
