“Are you good at your job?”
“I was dedicated, and interested—”
“You’re underselling yourself,” says Waverly. “I already know how good you are. I’ve talked with Mr. Kucenic and he tells me you were one of the best researchers he’s ever had, if not the best. Intuitive, efficient. He said your skills are far above your pay grade, but your personal difficulties hold you back from assuming greater responsibilities. He wonders if you have a fear of success—”
Waverly takes a drag on his cigarette and lets the smoke rise from his mouth. He’s reading something in his Adware while we talk—I watch his eyes twitch as they scan text. Why has this man bothered Kucenic? I don’t want him talking to Kucenic about me, I haven’t agreed to anything.
“Different priorities,” I tell him. “I don’t have a fear of success—”
“After talking with Kucenic, I realize your work must have been nerve shattering,” he says. “Watching people die, studying how they died, determining if their deaths are legitimate or somehow fraudulent, and all the paperwork. You must feel like you’re tracking ghosts sometimes—”
I’ve watched hundreds of people burn alive, but the woman buried in the river mud hangs over me like a burden of conscience. They haven’t left me—no one I’ve researched has ever left me.
“They are like ghosts,” I tell him.
“I want you to track a ghost for me,” says Waverly.
The usual nervous churning of butterflies when new opportunities present themselves—or at least distaste for stirring from my comfort zones. A fear of distraction from the things I care most about, maybe. I finish off my cappuccino. “You don’t need to waste your money on me, Mr. Waverly,” I tell him. “Accessing the Archive is free, if you sign up through the Library of Congress. There are plenty of actual librarians who are looking for research opportunities. Real professionals—”
“My daughter,” says Waverly.
A manila folder—an 8 × 10 of a woman that dissipates the Adware. Crimson hair the color of blood, languid eyes like emeralds. The photograph must have been for a fashion ad: the woman’s posed in a stylized hunch, her black gown exposing bone-white shoulders.
“This is your daughter?”
“I thought you’d be interested once you saw her picture,” he says. “Her name is Albion—it means the ‘white cliffs.’ Albion O’Hara Waverly. I’ve mourned her for ten years—just out of college when that picture was taken. Long after the end, I clung foolishly to the hope that she might have somehow escaped—but I’m sober now.”
“I’m sorry for your loss—”
Waverly dips a biscuit into his cappuccino. Illy pitches espresso in the Adware—I consent and soon our waiter brings a fresh cup and biscotti on Waverly’s tab.
“I schedule regular times to visit my memories of Kitty in the Archive,” he says. “Kitty was my wife of thirty-nine years. Katherine. There are certain memories I have—taking her to Mellon Park on Sundays for brunch, pastries and strawberries and champagne, and to the Frick in the afternoons for high tea. I commissioned designers to sculpt these moments so they would be more real for me than even my own memories of her. My daughter used to be there with us, but recently I haven’t been able to visit Albion—”
“You can’t bring yourself to it?”
“No, no, it’s not that,” he says. “She’s somehow vanishing from the City. Deleted. Someone’s deleting all her files—the public files and even my own private files. The job’s been thorough. The librarians—I’ve tried the librarians at the Library of Congress, and they’ve been sympathetic but haven’t been very helpful. They have too much work to do, building the City, maintaining it. I’ve filed police reports—but the police don’t have the resources. Besides, they don’t prioritize this as a missing persons case or anything of the sort but rather a data mismanagement claim or at worst cybervandalism or a hacking charge. Digital graffiti, that sort of thing, if they even want to entertain the notion that something like this is in their jurisdiction. I’ve searched on my own, but she’s vanishing. I have photographs—I know she exists. Existed—”
“Have you tried the Kucenic Group or one of the other research firms? They’re set up for work like this—”
“I trust Timothy about you,” he says. “When I talked with Kucenic, he wanted to transfer me to a sales rep, someone who handles accounts. He rattled off the names of awards and bragged about his U.S. News & World Report ranking, but when I asked if the person assigned to my case would be as skilled as you, he told me that he has a capable staff that can handle any query. He went on to tell me that your drug habit ruins you as a worker—”
“I’m clean,” I tell him.
“Good—”
“But it’s not difficult work. This is the type of research grad students are doing all over the country, that librarians are doing—”
“The cream rises to the top, Dominic. I don’t want ‘capable staff.’ I don’t want salesmen, I don’t want account representatives, and I certainly don’t want graduate students. I want someone with your skills, someone working for me. Someone with discretion—”
I scan the photograph of Albion, save the image to my Adware. Maybe the caffeine’s strafing my nerves but I feel sick and want to run from here, to hole up in my apartment and powder myself into oblivion, but something Timothy said snags my thoughts—you don’t want to die.
“You want me to find your daughter? Recover the files?”
“I want you to restore her to the Archive,” he says. “I want you to track down who is doing this to me, to my family, so that I can prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law, or at least protect us from similar future threats. I want you to find out who has deleted her so that I can have my daughter back. Please. I’ve already lost her once—”
“I’ll help you—”
Qualia Coffee on my way home. Checking e-maiclass="underline" Gavril’s written several times—all marked “high importance,” of course. Attachments of photos from fashion houses he wants me to caption—Anthropologie, House of Fetherston, Tom Ford—and his friends’ artist statements to translate into colloquial English, the usual odd jobs he lets me do. I mark them all as unread.
I ping Kucenic and when he doesn’t answer, I text him: Met with Waverly. Hard sell. What’s this all about?
A new message from Waverly’s secretary pops up as I’m pouring creamer into my coffee—he’s set up a per diem for direct deposit and negotiated with Kucenic so I can retain access to my archival security codes. I respond with my checking account number and PIN and within seconds the first deposit’s made—a rate substantially higher than Kucenic ever offered. Another file hits my in-box—a brief dossier about Albion.
Kucenic texts back: I’m sorry, Dominic. Please don’t contact me—
The heat’s off in my apartment again. Kucenic’s reply stings, but I try to understand—all the trouble I’ve caused him. Getting colder, so I wrap up in my comforter and watch a doc called A Round of Fiddles about Objectivist poetry but my mind wanders. Waverly’s daughter, Albion. By evening, another storm front’s dusting DC with snow and I shut off my lights and watch the encroaching winter—the weather here’s an odd mix of extremes, like Pittsburgh once. Warm enough in the afternoon to walk without a jacket yet snowing by nightfall. What would Gavril make of that photograph of Albion? What would he make of the clothes she wore—would he have recognized the gown? Maybe the whole production was something local to Pittsburgh, something amateurish. Scanning the dossier: Albion was twenty-four when she died, just shy of graduating from the fashion design program at the Art Institute. Images of her designs: tweeds and plaids, a prep fantasia. Other images of her: I’ve never seen a woman in real life who looks like these photographs, and I wonder how much of this imagery is false—camera tricks to make her seem tall, postproduction effects on her green eyes, coloring to make her hair that particular shade of blood red?