‘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.