slowly upstream, drawn by a tugboat. It was like an image of victory against adverse fate, an image it was difficult to share right now.
Hearing footsteps behind him, Russell turned. ‘Hi.’
‘Hi. Have you been here long?’
‘A while.’
Vivien pointed to the front door of her building. ‘You could have come up.’
‘I didn’t want to bother you.’
What he really meant, Vivien thought, was that he hadn’t wanted to be alone with her. But it made no difference.
‘I called you and your telephone was off. I thought you’d thrown in the towel.’
‘I couldn’t do that. For a whole lot of reasons.’
Vivien decided not to ask what they were.
‘Where are we going?’ he asked as she started the engine.
‘One-forty Broadway, Brooklyn. Where the Phantom of the Site lived.’
They turned onto West Street, heading south. Before too long they had left the entrance to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel behind them and were heading for F.D. Roosevelt Drive. As they proceeded, Vivien updated Russell on what Bellew had told her: that Wendell Johnson’s story was classified and that it wouldn’t be easy to get around that fact in a short time. He listened in silence, with his usual intent expression, as if pursuing an idea he didn’t see fit to express. In the meantime they had started across the Williamsburg Bridge and the water of the East River glittered beneath them, barely ruffled by a light wind. At the end of the bridge they turned right onto Broadway and soon found themselves in front of the building they were looking for.
It was an apartment block, with the same kind of down-at-heel look as the hundreds of anonymous hives that housed equally anonymous people in this city. It was in places like this that people lived for years without leaving any trace of their presence and sometimes died without anyone thinking to look for them for days.
Outside the front door, which had the number 140 on it, a patrol car was waiting. Vivien parked just opposite. Officer Salinas got out of the patrol car and came towards them.
He didn’t deign to look at Russell. By now, that appeared to have become the official attitude of the 13th Precinct to him. Even the friendly attitude Salinas had always shown him seemed to have vanished.
‘Hi, Vivien,’ he said, handing her a bunch of keys. ‘The captain told me to give you these.’
‘Perfect.’
‘It’s Apartment 418B. Do you want me to go up with you?’
‘No sweat. We can manage.’
The officer did not insist, pleased to get away from the place and the company. As they watched the patrol car drive off, she was surprised by Russell saying, ‘Thank you.’
‘For what?’
‘That officer asked if he could go up with you. It was obvious he meant only you. When you replied you said “we”, meaning me, too. I’m grateful to you.’
Vivien realized she had got so used to having him with her that she had answered like that unconsciously. But she was obliged to consider her own thoughtfulness. ‘For better or worse,’ she said, ‘we’re a team.’
Russell accepted the definition with a half-smile. ‘I don’t think it’s making you too many friends in the precinct.’
‘It’ll pass.’
They waited for the elevator in a lobby that smelled of men and cats. The elevator’s arrival was signalled by some incomprehensible squeaks and creaks. They went up to the fourth floor and immediately located the apartment, sealed by a couple of yellow ribbons.
Vivien removed them and turned the key in the lock.
No sooner had they opened the door than they were hit by that desolate feeling you get in places that have been uninhabited for a while. The door led straight into a room that doubled as kitchen and living room. It was obvious at a glance that this was the apartment of a man who had lived alone. Alone and without any interest in the world. To the right, there was a kitchen corner and a refrigerator next to a table with one chair. Opposite the oven, next to the window, an armchair and an old TV set on a shabby little table. Over everything, a thin layer of dust bearing traces of the police search the previous day.
They entered the apartment as if entering a temple of evil, holding their breaths. For years a man had lived within these walls.
Now that they had reached a point where they had an inkling of his story, they knew the true extent of the resentment that, day after day, had nourished his madness.
He had chosen to kill people under the illusion that in doing so he was destroying his own memories.
They took a quick look around the bare room, which was devoid of any object that was not strictly utilitarian. No paintings, no ornaments, no concessions to personal taste, unless that very absence could be considered a kind of personal taste. Next to the refrigerator was the only trace of normal life and humanity in the room. A shelf filled with aromatic essences, a sign that the man who had lived here had cooked for himself.
They concluded their visit of the tiny apartment in the adjoining room. Against the wall to the right of the door was a closet, and opposite it was a single bed pushed almost up against the wall. To the right of the bed, dividing it from the wall, a night table and a grim-looking lamp. To the left was a rack with two parallel shelves. The upper shelf was the height of a normal table, the lower one some twenty inches from the floor. In this room was only the second chair in the whole apartment, an old office armchair on wheels, which looked so shabby it might have been acquired from a junkyard rather than bought. The walls were bare, apart from a large map of the city hanging on the wall above the rack.
There were some objects on the lower shelf. Mostly books. A few magazines. A pack of cards that made them think of endless games of solitaire. And a big grey cardboard folder containing sheets of paper.
Vivien went closer.
If this was where he prepared his devices, then any tools or other things that could be analysed would already have been taken away by the team that had searched the apartment the previous day. But the captain had assured them that everything had been left intact, which made it likely that they hadn’t found anything.
She bent down and looked at some of the books. A Bible. A cookery book. A thriller by Jeffery Deaver. A tourist guide to New York.
She picked up the folder and placed it on the upper shelf. When she opened it, she found it full of drawings. Oddly, none of them were on normal paper. They had all been executed on stiff sheets of transparent plastic, as if the artist had wanted to express his originality, not only through his talent but also through the medium he had used.
She started looking at the drawings, one by one.
It soon became clear that the medium was the only original thing about them, because, even to an untrained eye, the drawings revealed no artistic talent at all. The composition was approximate, the line wavering, and the use of colour lacked both taste and technique. The person who had lived in this apartment seemed to have been obsessed with constellations. Each drawing was of a different constellation, but according to a map of the stars unknown to anyone but the artist.
A series of points joined by different-coloured lines. Sometimes stars, drawn in a childlike hand, sometimes circles, sometimes crosses, sometimes just tangled brush strokes. Russell, who had held back until now, came closer to see what Vivien was looking at.
He allowed himself a judgement she couldn’t help but share. ‘Horrible, aren’t they?’
