I couldn’t help but laugh at myself for feeling like a fugitive — or maybe the more apt comparison was a Most Wanted radical. Yet I had to admit there was something electrifying about seeing that name again—Cordova—in the possibility that maybe, just maybe, it was time to start running for my life again.
2
Twenty minutes later, I let myself into my apartment at 30 Perry Street.
“I said I had to be out of here by nine,” a voice announced behind me as I closed the door. “It’s after one. What the hell?”
Her name was Jeannie, but no sane man would ever dream of her.
Two weekends a month when I had legal visitation with my five-year-old daughter, Samantha, my ex-wife, in an eighteen-year two-for-one promotion, decreed it compulsory I also take custody of Jeannie, the nanny. She was a twenty-four-year-old Yale graduate studying education at Columbia and clearly relished her powerful position as the designated bodyguard, the private escort, the Blackwater detail for Sam whenever she ventured into my dangerous custody. In this equation, I was the unstable Third World nation with a corrupt government, substandard infrastructure, rebel unrest, and an economy in free-fall.
“I’m sorry,” I said, throwing my jacket over the chair. “I lost track of time. Where’s Sam?”
“Asleep.”
“Did you find her cloud pajamas?”
“No. I was supposed to be at a study group four hours ago.”
“I’ll pay you double, so you can hire a tutor.” I took out my wallet, handed Jeannie about five hundred bucks, which she happily zipped into her backpack, and then I moved deliberately around her, heading down the hall.
“Oh, and Mr. McGrath? Cynthia wanted to know if she could switch weekends with you next weekend.”
I stopped outside the closed door at the end, turning back.
“Why?”
“She and Bruce are going to Santa Barbara.”
“No.”
“No?”
“I made plans. We’ll stick to the schedule.”
“But they already made the arrangements.”
“They can unmake them.”
Jeannie opened her mouth to protest, but clamped it shut — sensing, quite rightly, that the territory between two people who were once soul mates but were no longer was akin to wandering into Pakistan’s tribal region.
“She’s gonna call you about it,” she noted quietly.
“Good night, Jeannie.”
With a dubious sigh, she let herself out. I entered my office, switched on the desk lamp, and nudged the door closed behind me.
Santa Barbara, my ass.
3
My office was a small, neglected, green-walled room of filing cabinets, photographs, magazines, and piles of books.
There was a framed picture on my desk of Samantha, taken on the day she was born, her face ancient and elflike. Hanging on the wall was a movie poster of a debonair but exhausted-looking Alain Delon in Le Samouraï. The print had been a gift from my old editor at Insider. He’d told me that I reminded him of the main character — a lonely French existentialist hit man — which wasn’t a compliment. Across the room, left over from my Phi Psi frat-house days at the University of Michigan, was a sagging brown leather couch (on which I’d both lost my virginity and pounded out every one of my best stories). Hanging above that were framed covers of my books—MasterCard Nation, Hunting Captain Hook: Pirating on the Open Seas, Crud: Dirty Secrets of the Oil Industry, Cocaine Carnivals. They looked faded, the dust jacket designs very late-nineties. There were also a few copies of my more famous Esquire, Time, and Insider articles: “In Search of El Dorado.” “Black Snow Inferno.” “Surviving a Siberian Prison.” Two giant windows opposite the door overlooked Perry Street and a banged-up poplar tree, though it was too dark to see it now.
I walked to the bookshelf in the corner, beside the photograph of me in Manaus with my arm around a hecatao river trader, looking irritatingly happy and tan — snapshot from a past life—and poured myself a scotch.
I’d bought six cases of the Macallan Cask Strength during my 2007 three-week road trip through Scotland. The trip had been taken at the inspired suggestion of my shrink, Dr. Weaver, after Cynthia had informed me that she and my nine-month-old daughter were leaving me for Bruce — a venture capitalist with whom she’d been having an affair.
It was just months after Cordova slapped me with the slander lawsuit. You’d think out of mercy Cynthia would have rationed the bad news, told me first that I traveled too much, then that she’d been unfaithful, then that she was madly in love, and finally, that they were each divorcing their respective spouses to be together. Instead, it all came on the same day — like a quiet coastal town already hit by famine, further hit by a mudslide, a tsunami, a meteorite, and, to top it all off, a little alien invasion.
But then, maybe it was better that way: Rather early in the chain of disasters, there was nothing left standing to destroy.
The purpose of my trip to Scotland had been to start anew, turn the page — get in touch with my heritage and hence myself, by visiting the locale where four generations of McGraths had been born and flourished: a tiny town in Moray, Scotland, called Fogwatt. I should have known simply from the name it’d be no Brigadoon. Dr. Weaver’s suggestion turned out to be akin to learning my ancestors had arisen from the criminally insane ward at Bellevue. Fogwatt comprised a few crooked white buildings clinging to a gray hill like a couple of teeth left in an old mouth. Women trudged through town with the hardened faces of those who’d survived a plague. Silent red fat men blistered every bar in town. I thought things were looking up when I’d ended up in bed with an attractive bartender named Maisie — until it occurred to me she could feasibly be my distant cousin. Just when you think you’ve hit rock bottom, you realize you’re standing on another trapdoor.
I downed the scotch — instantly feeling a little more alive—poured another, and moved to the closet behind my desk.
It’d been at least a year since I’d ventured in there.
The door was jammed, and I had to force it open, kicking aside old sneakers and blueprints of the Amagansett beach house I’d considered buying Cynthia in an eleventh-hour attempt to “work things out.” The million-dollar marital Band-Aid, never a wise idea. I pried loose what was obstructing the door, a framed photo of Cynthia and me, taken when we were touring Brazil on a Ducati, searching for illegal gold mines, so in love, it was impossible to fathom a day it might not be the case. God, she was gorgeous. I chucked the picture aside, pushed back piles of National Geographics, and found what I was looking for — a cardboard box.
I pulled it out, hauled it over to my desk, and sat back in my chair, staring down at it.
The duct tape I’d sealed it with was unsticking.
Cordova.
The decision, five years ago, to take the man on as a subject had been accidental. I’d just come back from an exhausting six-week sojourn in Freetown, a Sierra Leone slum. At about three in the morning, wide awake, jet-lagged, I found myself clicking onto an article about Amy’s Light, the nonprofit dedicated to scouring the Internet for Cordova’s black tapes, buying them, and destroying them. A mother whose daughter had been brutally killed by a copycat murderer founded the organization. Like the central murder in Wait for Me Here, Hugh Thistleton had kidnapped her daughter, Amy, from a street corner, where she was waiting for her brother to return from a 7-Eleven, took her to an abandoned mill, and fed her through the machinery.