I Am God (28 page)

‘I need to speak to Lester Johnson. Is he home?’

The boy ran away, allowing the door to swing open. ‘Grandpa, the police want you.’

Straight ahead of them was a corridor ending in a staircase that led to the upper floor. To the right was a small lobby, and to the left a door, through which the boy disappeared. Before long, a man came out. He was an energetic-looking man in his sixties, wearing a blue shirt and a pair of faded jeans. He still had a thick head of hair and alert eyes that looked them rapidly up and down. It struck Vivien that this was the way prison inmates sometimes behaved.

She let Captain Caldwell take the initiative. It was his territory and Vivien owed that to him. She hoped that when the time came he would be shrewd enough to step aside.

‘Mr Lester Johnson?’

‘Yes, that’s me. What do you want?’

That phrase seemed to be part of the family’s linguistic heritage: the boy had used it, too.

‘I’m Captain Caldwell. I—’

‘Yes, I know who you are. Who are these people?’

Vivien decided that this was the moment to step forward. ‘I’m Detective Vivien Light, from the NYPD. I need to speak with you.’

Lester Johnson gave her a quick, self-satisfied appraisal, which above all took in her physical appearance. ‘OK. Come on in.’

He led them to the door through which he had emerged and the boy had disappeared. They found themselves in a large
living room, with couches and armchairs. On one of these Billy was sitting watching cartoons on a flat screen TV. However rundown the exterior of the house might have looked, the interior was neat and tidy, with an excellent choice of fabrics and wallpaper, all in natural colours. Vivien saw a woman’s hand in the matching shades.

‘Billy, it’s time for bed,’ Lester Johnson said to his grandson in an authoritative tone.

‘But grandpa …’ the boy protested weakly.

‘I said it’s time for bed. Go to your room and don’t make a fuss.’

His voice made it clear he would accept no compromise. The boy switched off the TV and walked sulkily past them, and without saying goodnight to anyone disappeared around the corner. A few moments later they heard the sound of his bare feet on the stairs grow weaker until it faded completely.

‘My son and sister-in-law are out for the evening. And I’m a bit more lenient with the boy than his parents.’

After that brief insight into his family life, he indicated the couch and the armchairs. ‘Take a seat.’

Vivien and Caldwell sat down on the couch and Lester Johnson on the armchair facing it. Russell chose the one that was further away.

Vivien decided to get straight to the point. ‘Mr Johnson, are you related to a man named Wendell Johnson?’

‘He was my brother.’

‘Why do you say
was
?’

Lester Johnson gave a vague shrug. ‘Because early in 1971 he left for Vietnam and that’s the last we heard of him. He was never declared either dead or missing in action. Which must mean he got out 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
you,
Mr Johnson. Say goodnight to Billy for us. He’s a great kid.’

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.

Wars
end.
Hate
lasts
for
ever.

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.

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!

Russell
…

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 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.

But
if
that’s
the
price
I
have
to
pay
to
have
you,
I
gladly
accept
…

‘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.

Well,
it’s
his
loss
…

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 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.