He got back in the car and returned home. From the garage, he took the elevator direct to his floor. That would save the doorman the effort of remembering that he had gone out wearing a jacket and come back in his shirtsleeves.
He had just put his things on the table when the explosion happened.
He got up from the couch and went and switched the light back on, his eyes turned to the glare in the east but his mind on the fact that he couldn’t get away from what had happened in the afternoon. Now that he was thinking clearly, something occurred to him. Why had Ziggy used his last remaining strength, and the last moments of his life, to copy that sheet of paper and put it in his hands together with the photograph? What was so important about those things?
He went to the table, picked up the photograph, and stared at it for a few moments. He had no idea who that brown-haired young man with the black cat was, no idea what the photograph had meant to Ziggy. The sheet of paper, on the other hand, was a photocopy of a handwritten letter. The handwriting was clearly a man’s. He started to read, trying to decipher the rough, imprecise writing.
And as he read the words and grasped their meaning, he kept telling himself that it couldn’t be true. He had to read the paper three times to convince himself. Then, barely able to breathe, he put the letter and the photograph down on the table, with only Ziggy’s bloodstains to confirm that in fact it was all real, that it wasn’t a dream.
He looked back at the fire still burning in the distance.
His head was all mixed up. A thousand thoughts crossed his mind and he couldn’t get a fix on any of them. The anchorman on Channel One hadn’t mentioned the exact address of the building that had blown up. They were sure to report it on a subsequent news broadcast.
He absolutely had to know.
He went back to the couch and turned up the volume on the TV. He didn’t know if what he wanted most was a denial or a confirmation.
He sat there, wondering if the void into which he could feel himself falling was death. Wondering if his brother had felt the same every time he tackled a new story or got ready to take one of his photographs. He hid his face in his hands and in the darkness of his closed eyelids turned to the one person who had really mattered to him. As a last resort, he tried to imagine what Robert Wade would have done if he had found himself in this situation.
CHAPTER 13
Father Michael McKean was sitting in an armchair in front of an old TV set in his room at Joy, the community he had founded in Pelham Bay. It was a top-floor room, an attic with a partly sloping ceiling, white walls and a pine floor. In the air there still lingered the smell of the preservative with which the wood had been treated a week earlier. The cheap furniture that comprised the spartan decor had been collected wherever they could find it. All the books in the bookcase and on the desk and the night table had arrived here by the same route. Many were gifts from the parishioners, some made specifically to him. But Father McKean had always chosen the most worn and damaged things for himself. Partly that was his character, but mostly it was because, if it was possible to improve the everyday life of the community, he preferred the kids to be the ones to benefit. The walls were bare, apart from the crucifix over the bed and one splash of colour: a poster of the Van Gogh painting in which the artist had depicted, the poverty of his bedroom in the Yellow House in Aries. Although they were quite dissimilar, you had the impression, on entering, that those two rooms complemented each other, that there was some kind of communication between them, and that the poster on the white wall was an opening into a distant place and a different time.
Beyond the curtainless window you could glimpse the sea reflecting the blue, windswept late April sky. When he was a child, his mother would tell him on bright days like this that the sun turned the air the colour of the eyes of angels and that the wind didn’t let them cry.
But today there were bitter lines at the corners of his mouth and the expression on his face was grim. Those words of his mother, so full of imagination and colour, had stayed in his memory for ever. But the news on CNN today had other words and other images, scenes that from time immemorial had been associated exclusively with war.
And, like all epidemics, sooner or later war reached into every corner.
There, in close-up, was the face of Mark Lassiter, a reporter with a sharp, alert face, who looked as if he could hardly believe what he was seeing and saying, whose eyes and hair and shirt collar bore the marks of a sleepless night. Behind him lay the rubble of a shattered building, from which pathetic spirals of grey smoke still rose, the dying residue of the flames that for hours had illumined the darkness. The firefighters had fought all night to bring them under control and even now, on one side of the building, long jets of water indicated that the job wasn’t completely over.
‘What you can see behind me is the building that was partly destroyed by a powerful explosion last night. The experts are still at work trying to establish the cause. So far nobody has claimed responsibility, so we still don’t know if we’re dealing with a terrorist attack or a tragic accident. The only thing we know for sure is that the toll of the dead and missing is quite high. The rescuers are working around the clock to get the bodies of the dead out from under the rubble, although they haven’t given up hope of finding survivors. Here are the images taken from our helicopter, which show better than any words could the extent of this tragedy that’s shaken the city and the whole country and reminded us of other images and other victims that’ll never be forgotten.’
A series of aerial shots now followed, with Lassiter heard as a voice-over. Seen from above, the scene was even more harrowing. The building, a twenty-two-storey redbrick construction, had been cut in half straight down the middle. The right side had collapsed but, instead of the building imploding, it had slid to the side, leaving the other half still standing like a finger pointing to the sky. The fracture was so sharp that on the standing side you could still see the rooms without their outer walls, and in them the remains of furniture and other relics of everyday life.
On the top floor, a white sheet had got caught on a trellis and was flapping in the wind caused by the displacement of air from the blades of the helicopter, like a flag of surrender and mourning. Fortunately, the part of the building that had come away had fallen on a wooded area, a small park with a children’s playground, a basketball field and two tennis courts, missing other buildings. If it had hit them, the death toll would certainly have been greater. The explosion, occurring over toward the East River, had spared the buildings on the other side even though all the panes of glass within a significant radius had been knocked out by the blast. Around the shattered building and in among its debris was the highly coloured frenzy of rescue vehicles and men, bustling about full of energy and hope in a race against time.
The TV cut away from these images of desolation and death and back to a close-up of the reporter.