She was slight and very energetic, with dark skin, mixed-race, but she’d actually been raised by a pair of German immigrants after her mother—who was black (Afro American, in her words)—had given her up for adoption. She’d never seen her mother and had no way to contact her, because the woman had taken every legal precaution in order not to be identified. In the end, Elizabeth had hired a detective to find her, but, once the man tracked her down in Saint Louis, she couldn’t bring herself to go and see her. The woman had changed her name and was living downtown in the city, working at a fashion magazine. Elizabeth never met her mother, but she did become friends with the detective, and one afternoon she took me to visit him. His name was Ralph Parker, of the Ace Agency, and he lived in an apartment near Washington Square. Downstairs, in the building’s entryway, there was a control panel on the door, a metal detector, and surveillance cameras. Parker was waiting for us when we stepped out of the elevator. He must have been forty years old, with dark glasses and a face like a fox. He lived in an environment of high ceilings, an almost empty space with picture windows that looked out over the city. On a vast desk there were four computers arranged in a semicircle, always running, with open files and several active websites. It was the first time I’d seen a website running a special search engine, WebCrawler, that had just been released. The browser connected to the files related to Parker’s search, and the information arrived instantaneously. “We never set foot in the streets anymore, us private eyes,” he said. “You can find whatever you’re looking for on there.” One of the screens was linked to a warehouse on the docks, and by moving the cursor you could zoom into the building and see a group of men sitting around a table and listen in on what they were saying. Parker turned off the sound but left the image up, and it flowed along as in a dream. The men were laughing and drinking beer, and in one of the feeds I thought I could see a gun. “In a strict sense there are no private detectives anymore either,” he said then; “there’s no private person who investigates crimes. That works in the movies, on TV shows, but not in life. The real world is shadowy, psychotic, corporate, illogical. If you were on your own in the streets you’d only last two days,” Parker smiled. He smoked one joint after another and drank ginger ale. The Ace Agency was an organization with many affiliated but independent members. They worked with informants, with the police; they recruited drug addicts, prostitutes, soldiers; they were infiltrators, acting as a group. But none knew any of the other agents, they were all connected virtually. “Best not to know the people you’re working with personally, too many bad guys in this profession. Private shit.”
He was investigating the deaths of three black soldiers from a Gulf War infantry battalion in which most of the officers and noncommissioned officers were from Texas. A group of the family members of African American soldiers had hired him to investigate. He was certain that they’d been murdered. Pure racism. They’d killed them for sport. The agency had made contact with several soldiers who were still in Kuwait, and they would be the ones to expose the matter. “I only process the information,” he said. If he succeeded in proving it, they would go to court, and he would provide the evidence to the lawyers. He showed us a photo, a stretch of sand and three young black soldiers wearing combat uniforms in the Iraqi desert.
Then we went out to eat at a Chinese restaurant. Parker continued clueing me in on the realities of his profession. In 1846, the first detective agency opened, specializing in industrial espionage and the control of workers on strike. (“Following an individual at all times, wherever he went, in order to intimidate him, conducting undercover surveillance on the emerging union organizations, these figured among their typical activities.”) Parker cultivated a kind of romantic cynicism as if he were the only one to have discovered that the world was a hostile swamp. The only light in the midst of that darkness seemed to be Marion, his ex, who had left him overnight; he was trying unsuccessfully to win her back. The woman worked at a bookstore, and when Parker found out I was a writer (or used to be a writer), he insisted that we go to see her and called her on the phone, pacing from one end of the Chinese restaurant to the other as he told her that we’d be stopping by and that she had to meet me, couldn’t miss it, because I’d been a great friend of Borges. We went to the store, Labyrinth, on 110th Street in the neighborhood of Columbia University. The bookstore did indeed have a Borges quote about labyrinths printed on the front wall, but there weren’t any of his books on the shelves. The woman was very attractive, a tall and serene redhead who talked about Parker as if he wasn’t there. They’d lived together for a few months, but she left him because he exhausted her with his jealousy and his insults, and now Parker was having her tailed by one of his minions and had discovered
