“Mrs. Singer? I’m Clines.”
She let him into the poorly lit shop. He appeared even taller when he stepped inside, and without being conscious of it she placed herself between him and the door. He had long pale hands and long legs, which ended in narrow, boatlike black shoes. He looked around the rectangular room of the shop, and she wondered if he was calculating the odds of her ability to pay him for his services. So far she’d only sent him a check for five hundred dollars as a retainer, and it was quite clear the sum value of what was left in the near-empty shop wasn’t close to that figure: there was the oak desk chair with its rusty wheels and a chipped glass coffee table topped with prescription bottles that served as a nightstand for the twin-sized mattress and box spring placed on the floor next to it. There was a floor lamp on the other side of the bed and beside that a warped drop-leaf table with an electric hot plate on which the kettle was wheezing ever so softly as the heat of the coils died down. Her clothes were folded and simply stacked in two opened suitcases against the wall, which was unadorned except for the few picture hangers that had been left up and the more numerous holes made by former ones. She could have been a squatter in the store for all he knew, an unstable, destitute woman who had stolen in and invented a dire family scenario.
She offered him the desk chair. June herself sat down on the low bed. “I want you to know, Mr. Clines, that I live here because it’s simplest for me, at this moment. This was my place of business.”
“I’m not worried,” he said, setting down his briefcase. He didn’t remove his light overcoat. “I know you’re more than solvent. I know that you’ve been liquidating your inventory. That you sold your apartment. I have to look into these things.”
“I understand.”
He nodded. “Now to why I’m here.”
“Yes. Please.”
“Before we start, I have to ask you whether you’re set on wanting to find this person.”
“He’s my son,” she replied, disliking his use of “this person.”
“But are you sure you want to find him?” he said again. “I have to ask. Sometimes people think they want something when in fact they don’t. We can stop now and all you’ll be responsible to me for is a few hours.”
“That’s all right.”
“You’re certain?”
“Yes.”
But June had in fact wondered, when she first contacted Clines, if she was indeed sure. It had been so long. The last time she had seen Nicholas in person was eight years ago, on the day of his high school graduation. He left that very night, for his own self-styled “grand tour.” June was naturally under the impression that he was going to call her regularly from wherever he was. As he stuffed the last clothes and books into his backpack that evening, Nicholas couldn’t tell her his itinerary because he said he didn’t know it himself. He would fly the red-eye to London, as that was the cheapest flight, but then cross the Channel as soon as he could and roam through Europe on his way to Italy, where he would stay, he told her, until his money ran out. What she never imagined was that his tour would be continuous, that it would turn out to be a perpetual series of departures that would never quite lead him back home. For the first year he sent monthly postcards, addressed, oddly, not to the apartment but to the shop, the briefest scrawls about what he was seeing, a job he’d just taken, sometimes the only indication of place being the postmark. He never left an address where she could write him back. The monthlies became bimonthlies, and then seasonal, and by the time they appeared twice a year she had somehow quelled most of the confusion and hurt and rage their arrival brought on in her heart.
Eventually, at least during the waking hours, she rarely thought of him, and it was only in her dreams that she encountered him. He would appear to her as gaunt, even skinnier than he always was, wearing the same faded Led Zeppelin concert T-shirt and blue jeans he’d departed in, walking through the anonymous gray terminal of a train station or airport with nothing on his back. He wasn’t hungry or lonely or lost, and for a brief, calming moment before she awoke, June could rest easy in how self-sufficient he appeared, how perfectly needless (if not perfectly contented), which she knew, even inside her dream, was a mirror of her own difficult character.
“Please show me what you have, Mr. Clines.”
He opened his briefcase and removed a thick manila folder and handed it to her. Inside were faxes, copies of bureaucratic-looking documents with official seals on the letterheads, and then other handwritten or typed pages. Clines described what they were as she went through them; most of them were lists made out for local police, each page in a different language: Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian. The only one in English was from a prominent antiquities dealer in London, whose firm was well known to the New York trade; here again was a list of stolen items, a few small oil paintings, silverware, coins, jewelry, various objets d’art.
As he spoke she scanned the pages for mention of her son, but the name Nicholas Han (Han was her family surname) did not appear. The names on the pages rang familiar to her, like people she’d never known but might have read about, or had heard of through others, names varied on themes and notations that she alone could collate and make sense of. There were Stephan Lombardia, Leo Stevens, Leo De Nicole, among others, aliases that clearly came from things she’d once said to him. To know the derivations was almost heartbreaking; Leo had been his pet guinea pig who’d died a week after they brought him home; Stephan was what she’d blurted when Nicholas was old enough to ask about his father, having just noticed the name in the paper that morning. Naturally, he had asked other questions about his father, where he was from, what he had looked like, how he had died, and to all these she’d answer with whatever vague, half-true description or reason she could come up with, careful that they could never lead to an actual man.
“How can you be sure it’s my son who’s been doing this?” she said to Clines anyway, wishing none of it were true. There were no images on the faxes, including the cover from an Interpol office in Madrid, where a case agent, according to Clines, had just a few weeks earlier begun collecting and cross-referencing the materials. It was this file that he had received through a contact in Europe.
“One of the pages there indicates that the box number you gave me in Rome was rented by Stephan DiNicola.”
“Who?”
“Stephan DiNicola. The person you last wired money to.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “I’m sorry. That’s probably right.” She’d been increasingly forgetful of late, at least of the recent past. She had indeed wired money, having received a typed letter from Nicholas, admittedly brief but marked by a renewed warmth, a casual intimacy that seemed to suggest he would soon be coming home. At the end, in a postscript, he asked if she could wire a thousand dollars to an S. DiNicola, a friend who would hold the funds for him until he reached Rome. It was the most he had ever asked for. Yet she had practically run to the nearest Western Union office, sending two thousand instead. She expected a quick reply, or even a phone call, but for a month now there had been nothing. Nothing at all.