Everything always happens too late …
With his tongue, he pursued the fragments of salad that got stuck between his teeth and washed them away with sips of the beer.
His thoughts returned to the morning’s meeting with Val Courier, a famous architect of somewhat dubious sexuality, and Fred Wyring, an engineer with equally dubious calculations, who had been joined by the wife of the owner of the company. Mrs Elisabeth Brokens, who looked like a brochure for Botox, having tired of going from one analyst to another, had decided that the best cure for her neuroses would be work. Having no aptitude, no training, and no ideas, she had been forced to turn to her husband. Maybe she had freed herself from her neuroses, but only by passing them on to all the people she came in contact with.
Jeremy Cortese didn’t have any qualifications, but had graduated on the job. Day after day, working hard and learning from those who knew more than him. He found arguing with incompetents a waste of time, which he’d eventually have to account for to someone, in this case Mr Brokens in person. Mr Brokens knew his work well but evidently didn’t know his wife quite as well, if he let her stick her nose in things like that.
Every time he saw her show up, he was tempted to set the stopwatch, so that he could demonstrate to his boss how much a visit from his wife to the site had cost him. Maybe it would have been better for him to keep paying the analysts’ fees.
He was so absorbed in his thoughts that he didn’t see Ronald Freeman come in. It wasn’t until he was standing right in front of him that he became aware of his presence and looked up from his salad.
‘We have a problem.’
Ron paused, then put his hands down on the table and looked him straight in the eyes. The expression on Ron’s face was one he’d never seen there before. If such a thing was possible, Jeremy would have said he was pale.
‘A big problem.’
That started ringing alarm bells in Jeremy’s head. ‘What’s up?’
Ron made a gesture with his head towards the door. ‘It might be better if you came and saw for yourself.’
Without waiting for a reply, he turned and headed for the exit. Jeremy followed him, feeling a mixture of surprise and anxiety. It was quite rare to see his deputy fazed by an emergency of any kind.
They walked along the street side by side. As they approached the site, they saw that the men had left the fenced-off area, a homogenous mass of work jackets and hard hats.
Without realizing it, he had started walking faster.
When they reached the entrance, the workers silently stood aside for them. It was like a scene from an old movie, the kind where the camera tracks along a row of despairing faces standing at the top of a mine shaft where a sudden collapse has trapped some of the miners inside.
What the hell’s going on?
They lost no time in putting on their hard hats. Ronald turned right, and Jeremy followed. They walked along the fence, next to what was still standing of a wall, then found themselves descending a staircase that led to the old basement, which was now almost completely open to the sky. As soon as they were at the bottom, Ronald led him towards the opposite side of the excavation. The only wall still partially standing here was the solid one between the two buildings, which was currently being demolished.
They reached the left-hand corner, the furthest from the staircase. Ronald stopped and with an almost choreographed effect, as if raising a curtain, moved aside and left the way free.
Jeremy shuddered, and felt like retching. He was glad he’d only eaten salad.
The demolition work had exposed a cavity wall. Through a gap in it, made by a pneumatic hammer, an arm was visible, dirty with time and dust. Above it, a head, reduced almost to a skull, was resting on what remained of a shoulder and seemed to be looking towards the outside world with all the bitterness of someone who has waited too long to see light and air again.
CHAPTER 8
Vivien Light parked her Volvo XC60, switched off the engine, and waited a moment for the world to catch up with her. All through the journey back from Cresskill, she had had the feeling of being out of sync, of moving in a parallel dimension of her own, where she was faster than everything else. As if leaving in her wake a trail composed of fragments of the past, rapid splinters of coloured time, as visible as the tail of a comet by the cars, houses and people that flashed on the screens of her car windows.
The same thing happened every time she went up to see her sister.
She always felt hope when she set out. There was no reason for it, which made it all the stronger – and made her disappointment all the stronger when she found her sister the same as ever. Still a beautiful woman, as if the months and years were absurdly compensating her by having no effect on her face, but with eyes like blue spots staring into an emptiness that grew more all-encompassing as her illness developed.
That was why the journey back was a kind of leap into hyperspace, from which she emerged somewhere in the middle of reality.
She turned the rear-view mirror so that she could see herself. It wasn’t vanity. She just wanted to recognize herself, to make sure she was normal again. She saw the face of a young woman some people had called beautiful and others had brushed past as if she didn’t exist. The approval, as always happens, was invariably in inverse proportion to her own interest in that person.
She had short brown hair, rarely smiled, never folded her arms, and only allowed physical contact when she couldn’t avoid it. In her clear eyes there seemed to be a constant hint of sternness. And in the glove compartment of her car there was a Glock 23 pistol.
If she had been a normal woman, her approach to life might have been different. So might her appearance. But her hair was short to prevent anyone from grabbing it during a fight, her stern expression told other people to keep their distance, folding her arms could denote insecurity, and touching someone helped to create a sense of safety and trust, useful if you wanted that person to come clean. And the reason she had a pistol was because she was Detective Vivien Light of the New York Police Department, working out of the 13th Precinct on 21st Street. The entrance to her place of work was just behind her, and she would only have to get out of the car and take those few steps to be transformed from a troubled woman into a police officer.
She leaned forward to take the pistol from the glove compartment, slipped it into her jacket pocket and came back to earth.
In the side mirror she saw two uniformed officers come out of the precinct house through the glass-fronted main door, descend the steps, get into a car and drive off at speed, lights flashing and siren wailing. They were answering a call, one of the many they received every day: an emergency, someone in need, a crime. Every day in this city, men, women and children walked in the midst of danger, unable to predict when it would strike, unable to fight it.