Alex Scarrow
City of Shadows
Prologue
13 September 2001, New York
Roald Waldstein stared at the Manhattan skyline. The pallid sky above the south end of the city was still smudged with a faint pall of dust. The thin twist of smoke, coming from where the Twin Towers had stood just two days ago, looked like the careless rubbing out of a pencil drawing, a ghost of the towers that had once been there.
‘God,’ he said. ‘And it’s still burning.’
‘My dad said it might carry on burning for weeks.’
Roald turned to look at Chanice Williams. ‘Really?’
‘Uh-huh.’ She nodded confidently, working gum in her mouth almost mechanically. ‘Said so on Fox News too.’
Like everyone else at Clinton Hill Elementary School, Chanice had become something of a news-station junkie, tuning in before and after school, the cartoon channels completely forgotten for now.
‘You think anyone’s alive in there still?’ asked Roald.
‘Dunno. I heard they lookin’ just in case, tho’.’
He watched the puffs of dark smoke rising lazily. ‘I hope there’s no one trapped in that… alive. That would be horrible.’
‘Come on. We should get on to school,’ said Chanice. ‘We’ll be late.’
Roald nodded at her to head back up the alleyway without him. ‘I’ll come in a bit.’
‘Shizzy.’ She clucked her tongue. ‘You gonna get youself another demerit. You want that, Waldo?’
The kids all called him Waldo. As in Where’s Waldo? It took the first five minutes of the first day of school to get lumped with that stroke-of-genius nickname. The thick-framed glasses and untameable hair had played their part too.
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘OK, your funeral, Mr Professor.’
He watched her turn and go, weaving her way up the alleyway, stepping round a dustbin that had spilled rubbish across the cobbles.
‘I’ll be along in a bit,’ he called after her.
‘Your funeral!’ She shrugged again. ‘Jus’ don’t miss registration,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘Or Miss Chudasama gonna get medieval on yo’.’
He turned back to watch the skyline. A train rumbled noisily overhead across the Williamsburg Bridge, heading into Manhattan. They were saying the trains and subway into Manhattan were still pretty deserted — easy seats. Everyone figured something else bad was bound to happen again at any moment: another plane, a bomb perhaps.
His mother said that too. Just like Chanice, like every New Yorker, like every American, dull-eyed from watching too much TV. ‘ They’ll be back. They’ll be back to finish us all off. Just you see.’
It was just him and his mother and the TV set in their one-bedroom apartment. She had three different part-time jobs and what time was left after that was spent microwaving TV dinners or pop-tart breakfasts. Outside work, her life was Montel Williams, Judge Judy or Oprah Winfrey so she didn’t really ever have much to say that wasn’t already a newspaper headline. To be honest, she rarely had much to say that was original or vaguely interesting. But she had this morning. Something that had lodged firmly in his mind.
She’d turned away from her small black-and-white TV in the kitchen to look at him, mug of coffee in one hand, cigarette in the other. ‘Roald, don’t you just wish you could go back to Tuesday morning and tell those poor souls not to come in to work? Or just… just… go in there and scream fire or something?’
He nodded now. Such a small step in time that would be. Just two days to save three thousand lives.
He turned away from the East River. Beyond the railing the low-tide shingle was covered with rubbish: nappies, shopping trolleys and plastic bags and seagulls picking for titbits among it.
Just two days.
He started to make his way back up the alleyway, passing a boarded-up archway to his right. Chipboard panels nailed over old rust-red brickwork, covered with lurid-coloured spray-paint gang tags. One of the panels had been pulled away, revealing a corrugated metal shutter that was halfway up. He squatted down to look inside. Curious. His mother was always cautioning him how curiosity killed the cat. That or got into very big trouble with the local police department if it didn’t mind its own gosh-darn business.
The muted light of day pushed the darkness within far enough back that he could see the place had been used by drug addicts or vagrants. Broken glass, discarded needles, a dirty mattress. A forgotten part of Brooklyn. He wondered when this place last had a proper use, a purpose, other than being some dark hole for an addict to crawl into, or merely a dark empty space beneath an old bridge.
‘ WAL-DO! ’
He looked up the alleyway. Chanice, bless her, was tapping her toe, waiting for him, acting like she was his big sister or something. She cupped her mouth. ‘You re-e-eally don’t wanna be late again. Ya mom’ll kill you! Come on! ’
‘Coming!’ He got up and turned round one last time to catch a glimpse of the smudge in the sky over Manhattan.
10 September 2001, New York
‘Mr Waldstein? S-sir?’
Roald Waldstein turned to see Dr Joseph Olivera approaching. The man joined him beside the railing and together they looked out at the sedate East River.
‘My apologies, Joseph,’ said Waldstein. ‘I was a million miles away there.’
‘Uh… that’s OK, sir.’
Waldstein smiled. He liked Olivera. The technician reminded him of himself at that age: hungry for knowledge, to show the world what his agile mind contained. Hungry to show the world an incredible theoretical possibility: that it was possible to step backwards through the membrane of space-time. As easy as it was to step through the tattered rip in a bedsheet.
‘You know, Joseph, I came across this place when I was just a boy. When I was eleven.’
‘S-sorry?’
‘This place,’ Waldstein said, turning to look back at the alley. ‘The archway. No one comes down here. It’s a backwater.’
‘You… you lived round here?’
‘In Brooklyn?’ He nodded. ‘Moved to Chicago after my mother died. I lived with my aunt after.’
Olivera nodded. He knew that much of this legendary man’s life — Chicago onwards. Waldstein’s early life — the first years alone with his mother — Waldstein had always preferred to keep utterly private. A media-stream interviewer had once called him a biographer’s nightmare.
‘Perfect location this,’ Waldstein said. ‘I never ever forgot about it. This time and this place. You know, Joseph, tomorrow every New Yorker will have their eyes up on the sky. We could walk in and out of this alleyway dressed as clowns all day long and no one would remember that.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Perfect location,’ Waldstein muttered. He smiled wistfully.
They listened to the distant hiss of morning traffic, the cry of a dozen gulls strutting among the shingle and rubbish below, fighting for scraps.
‘Mr Waldstein? Can I ask you a question?’
The old man smiled, pushed a shock of his wild, wiry grey hair away from his eyes. ‘You can ask, Joseph. I can’t promise you an answer, though.’
Olivera sucked in a breath. Nervous. Waldstein suspected he knew what the man was going to ask. At some point or another, every person he’d ever worked with long enough eventually mustered their courage and got round to asking the exact same question. He let Olivera continue with it all the same. Better to get this out of the way.
‘Mr Waldstein, when you went back… that first time, you know, in 2044? The Chicago demonstration?’
Here it comes. He half smiled. Yup… that question, all right.
‘Did you… did you ever get to s-see — ’
‘My wife? My child?’
Olivera nodded. Wide-eyed and very nervous. Waldstein suspected the man must have worked himself up for this moment. Must have spent the last few months at the institute, and the last few weeks here, waiting for that perfect moment to pop the question. And here it was supposedly — what this young man judged to be the perfect moment.