Читать книгу The Forgotten Dead: A dark, twisted, unputdownable thriller - Tove Alsterdal - Страница 6

New York

Monday, 22 September

According to the charts, I was probably in my seventh week. I’d put off taking a pregnancy test for as long as possible, hoping in my heart that Patrick would come home. Then we could have done it together. Not the actual peeing on the test stick, of course. There had to be a limit. But the waiting for the stripe to appear.

My pulse quickened as I took my cell phone out of my jacket pocket. I might have missed a call because of all the traffic noise.

I hadn’t. The display was blank.

There had to be some perfectly natural explanation, I told myself. For Patrick, his work was everything, and it wouldn’t be the first time that he’d become so immersed in some ugly and complicated story that he forgot about everything else. He wouldn’t give up until he’d turned over every last stone. Once, three years ago, before we were married, I didn’t hear from him for a whole week, and I was sure that he’d got cold feet and left me. It turned out that he’d latched onto some small-time gangsters in DC and had ended up sitting in jail down there, wanting to do in-depth research from the inside. He’d come home with a broken rib and a report that was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

I tapped in his speed-dial number for the eleventh time this morning.

If you answer, I promise we’ll do whatever you want, I thought as the call went through. We’ll leave Manhattan and buy that house in Norwood, New Jersey. If it has already been sold, we’ll find one just like it. And then we’ll have babies and invite the neighbours over for barbecues, and I’ll quit the theatre and start sewing appliquéd baby hats. Whatever. If only you pick up.

I heard a click on the line signalling his voicemail. Hi, you’ve reached Patrick Cornwall …

The same message I’d heard when I woke up in the morning, all last week. It sounded emptier with each day that passed.

If I’m not answering my phone, I’m probably out on a job, so please leave a message after the beep.

It had been ten days since he’d called.

That was on a Friday.

I was in Boston with Benji, my assistant, to pick up a chair dating from the Czarist period in Russia. That piece of furniture was the last puzzle piece needed for the staging of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. It had belonged to an ageing hairdresser’s paternal grandmother, who had fled St Petersburg in 1917.

Patrick had phoned just after I finished the transaction. Benji and I had each taken hold of one side of the chair and were on our way down a narrow flight of stairs in a building that looked like it might collapse at any minute from sheer exhaustion.

‘I just wanted to say goodnight,’ said Patrick from across the Atlantic. ‘I miss you so much.’

‘This isn’t the best time,’ I said, propping the chair onto a step while Benji held on tightly so the precious object wouldn’t tumble down the stairs.

The hairdresser stood in the doorway above us, watching nervously. I really wanted to get out of there before he changed his mind. He’d told us that this chair, which he’d inherited from his grandmother, was the dearest thing he owned, but he wanted to see Mother Russia before he died. Otherwise he would never have even considered selling it. If he had enough money, he wanted to buy a burial plot near the Alexander Nevsky church in St Petersburg, where the great men of his native country had been laid to rest.

‘You won’t believe what a story this is going to be,’ Patrick went on. ‘If it doesn’t turn out to be the investigative story of the year, I don’t know what—’

‘Are you in a bar or something?’ I glanced at my watch. It was 5.45 in Boston. Midnight in Paris. It warmed my heart to hear his voice.

He was audibly slurring his words. ‘No, I’m back at the hotel,’ he said. There were sounds in the background, a car honking, voices nearby. ‘And you know what I’m looking at right now? The dome of the Panthéon, where Victor Hugo is buried. I can see straight into the garret windows of the Sorbonne too. Did you know people live up there under the eaves? But their lights are out now, and they’ve gone to bed. I wish you were here.’

‘Well, I’m standing in a stairwell in Boston,’ I said, as I heard the hairdresser start arguing with Benji. Apparently he was asking for more money.

‘I’ll be damned if human life is worth anything here,’ Patrick went on. ‘Nothing but objects that can be bought and sold.’

‘I really have to go, Patrick. Let’s talk tomorrow.’

I could hear him taking a swig of something.

‘I can’t talk about it over the phone,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to plaster this story all over the world. I’m not going to let them think they can silence me.’

‘Who could possibly do that?’ I replied with a sigh, grimacing at poor Benji, whose face was starting to turn an alarming shade of red. I had no idea how much it might cost to be buried next to Dostoevsky, but it had to be more than my budget could handle.

‘And afterwards I went out for a while, over to Harry’s New York Bar, just to find somebody to speak English with. Did you know that Hemingway went there whenever he was in Paris?’

‘You’re drunk.’

‘I needed to clear my head and think about something other than death and destruction. You have no idea what this journey is like, I’m headed straight into the darkness.’

‘Sweetheart, let’s talk more in the morning. OK?’ I was having a ridiculously hard time getting off the phone. A small part of me was afraid he’d disappear if I ended the call.

Then I heard a shrill ringtone somewhere near him.

‘Just a sec,’ said Patrick. ‘Somebody’s calling on the other phone.’

I heard him say his name with a French accent. It sounded funny, as if he were a stranger. Who would be phoning him in the middle of the night in a hotel room in Paris? Patrick raised his voice, shouting so loud that even the Russian standing above us must have heard him. He said something about a fire, and God.

‘Mais qu’est-ce qui est en feu? Quoi? Maintenant? Mais dis-moi ce qui se passe, nom de Dieu!’

Then he was back on the line.

‘I’ve got to run, sweetie. Shit.’ I heard a bang, as if he’d knocked something over, or maybe stumbled. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’

We both clicked off, and that was the last I’d heard from him.

I cut across 8th Avenue, heading for the Joyce Theatre. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a whirling blue light at the next block, but the sirens seemed to be coming from far away, from another universe, where none of this was happening. The silent phone in my hand. The tiny speck growing inside me. Patrick, who didn’t know he was going to be a father.

‘Ally!’

That was the girl at the reception desk — Brenda something or other — calling to me as I entered the theatre. ‘Your last name is Cornwall, right? Alena Cornwall? There’s a letter for you.’ She held up a fat envelope. ‘From Paris.’

My heart leaped as I took the envelope.

It was addressed to Alena Cornwall, c/o The Joyce Theatre, 8th Avenue, Chelsea, New York.

There was no doubt it was his handwriting. Neat letters evenly printed, revealing that Patrick had once been a real mama’s boy.

The envelope felt rough to the touch and seemed to contain more than just paper. According to the postmark, it had been sent from Paris a week earlier, on 16 September. Last Tuesday. The image on the stamp showed a woman wearing a liberty cap, her hair fluttering, in a cloud of stars. The symbol for France and liberty.

‘When did this get here?’ I asked, looking up at Brenda. ‘How long has it been lying around?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, wiping her fingers on a paper napkin. Under the desk she always kept a stash of sticky Mars bars, which she ate in secret. ‘Maybe on Friday. I wasn’t working that day. I guess they didn’t know where to put it.’

I went down the corridor, which led to the offices and dressing rooms. Why the hell couldn’t I even get my mail delivered on time? Certain people seemed to think I didn’t exist because I didn’t have a proper job contract or mailbox. But why on earth would Patrick send the envelope to the theatre and not to our apartment? That seemed incredibly impersonal. And he hadn’t even managed to write the whole address. No street number and no zip code. That had to be significant.

He must have been in a hurry. Something had happened. Maybe he’d met somebody new and didn’t dare come home to tell me. Maybe he was leaving me.

I stopped abruptly when a door crashed open, right in my face, and out rushed one of the dancers from the show.

‘But I nearly killed myself!’ Leia cried. ‘Don’t you get it? The wall practically reared up in front of me.’

I groaned loudly. Leia was a 22-year-old bundle of nerves who’d been singled out as the next big star on the New York dance scene, which had made her believe that the rest of the world revolved around her. She opened her eyes wide when she caught sight of me.

‘You need to do something about it,’ she said. ‘Or else I’m not setting foot on that stage ever again.’

‘I can’t rebuild the whole place,’ I told her. ‘Everybody knows how cramped the space is off-stage. You need to ask someone to stand there and catch you. That’s what they usually do.’ I turned my back on her and kept on walking. I had no intention of grovelling before a girl who was named after the princess in Star Wars.

‘You shouldn’t even be doing this job,’ she yelled after me. ‘Because you don’t care about other people.’

I turned around.

‘And you’re a spoiled little diva,’ I said.

Leia ran into her dressing room, slamming the door behind her.

The envelope I was holding was making my hand sweat.

I went into the small, windowless cubbyhole that was the production office for visiting ensembles and shut the door, but not all the way. Then I tore open the envelope.

A little black notebook tumbled out, along with a small memory stick and a postcard of the Eiffel Tower. I felt a burst of joy as I read the brief message.

Don’t worry, I’ll be home soon. There’s just one more thing I have to do. Love you always. P.

P.S. Keep this at the theatre until I get back.

I read the words over and over.

The air was getting stuffier in the cramped office. The walls were closing in on me, and I had to kick open the door to make the space seem bigger. I reminded myself what I’d memorized: Turning left, the corridor led to the loading dock on 19th Street. Turning right, I could reach the foyer, where the art deco stairs led up to street level. There were exits. It wouldn’t take me more than thirty seconds to run outside.

I sank back onto the desk chair and studied the famous steel structure on the front of the postcard.

There’s just one more thing I have to do, he’d written. The envelope had been postmarked a week ago. Shouldn’t he be done with whatever it was by now?

I leafed through the notebook. Scattered words and sentences, names and phone numbers. Why had he sent this to me? And why keep it at the theatre instead of taking it home? I saw darkness gaping beneath the illusory cheerfulness of the postcard.

Don’t worry meant that I had every reason to be nervous. I’d worked in the theatre long enough to know that people don’t say what they mean. The true meaning is hidden behind the words. I’ll be home soon and when I get back sounded like simple, practical information, but the words could just as well mean that he was trying to fool me. Or himself.

I stuck the memory stick in my laptop. While I waited for the pictures to upload, I slipped into an emotional limbo, a neutral position between plus and minus. It was something I did on opening nights or in disastrous situations. When Mama had suffered an embolism and I’d found her dead in her apartment, I’d wandered about in that state for several weeks afterwards. I’d finished up the set design for a music video at the same time as making arrangements for the cremation and funeral. My friends began telling me to see a psychologist. Instead, when it was all over, I slept for two weeks, and then I was ready to go back to work.

A picture appeared on the screen. It was blurry, showing a man partially turned away from the camera. In the next photo I saw two men standing outside a door. It seemed to be night time, and this picture was also blurry. I scrolled through more images, but couldn’t make any sense of them. Patrick was definitely not a great photographer. Words and language were his forte, but he was usually able to take decent pictures. These were awful. Nothing but hazy-looking men with disagreeable expressions. One of them appeared in several photos. A typical bureaucrat or banker, or maybe an advertising executive, with thin, rectangular glasses and light eyes, wearing an overcoat or suit. The pictures seemed to have been taken from some distance, in secret. The men could have been any anonymous strangers, in any city on earth. And they told me absolutely nothing about what sort of story Patrick was so immersed in over there.

I closed my eyes to think for a few minutes.

Then I opened the browser on my laptop and found the home page for The Reporter. I looked for the phone number of the editorial office.

‘I’d like to speak to Richard Evans,’ I said on the phone. He was the editor of the magazine that bought Patrick’s freelance stories, and a legend in the publishing world.

‘One moment, please.’

I was put on hold. An extended silence, while I waited to be put through. Then I heard that Richard Evans was not available. After half an hour of being rerouted to one person after another, I reached an editorial assistant, and I was able to trick her into telling me where he was. When I said that I had a story to deliver from Patrick, she told me that the editor would probably be back from the Press Café in an hour because he was due at a meeting. The assistant advised me to make an appointment. Instead, I slipped out of the theatre and took a cab to the corner of 8th Avenue and 57th Street. That was the location of the Universal Press Café, just across from the magazine offices.

Richard Evans was sitting next to the window, leaning over a table that was too low for his tall body. He was deeply immersed in a newspaper and gave me only a brief glance as I approached.

‘There are more tables over there,’ he said, motioning towards the other side of the café. Even though he was over sixty, his blond hair was thick and wavy.

‘I need to talk to you,’ I said. ‘My name is Ally Cornwall, and I’m married to Patrick Cornwall.’

Evans put down his paper. Though his gaze was piercing, his eyes were the faded blue of washed-out jeans.

‘Oh, right. Aren’t you from somewhere in Hungary? It seems to me Patrick mentioned that.’

‘I’m from the Lower East Side,’ I said and boldly sat down on the chair across from him. That was my standard reply whenever anyone wondered where I was really from. ‘We met once, at the celebration for the magazine’s fifteenth anniversary.’

‘Sure, of course.’ He managed a half-smile. ‘That’s also when Cornwall was nominated for the Pulitzer.’

‘But he didn’t get it,’ I said, waving to the waiter, who came rushing over to wipe off the table. I ordered a glass of orange juice.

I had stood beside Patrick on that evening, squeezed into a beautiful emerald-green sheath dress that I’d borrowed from a costume supplier. I had clutched his hand as the mingling stopped and everyone turned to look at the TV screens. In Patrick’s line of work there was no higher honour than the Pulitzer Prize. His series of articles about the Prince George police district in Maryland had aroused tremendous attention, and being nominated for the prize was the biggest thing that had ever happened to him. But in the end, his name was not the one announced. Instead, the prize for the best investigative reporting went to a couple of journalists from The New York Times, for uncovering insider trading on Wall Street. Patrick got good and drunk. The following year he’d spent four months, two of them without pay, reporting on who the losers were in the new economy. It was a blistering account that was given extensive coverage in The Reporter and had stirred vigorous debate. It was also cited by numerous politicians. But Patrick was not nominated again, and his self-esteem had suffered ever since.

‘I need to ask you about the assignment that Patrick’s on,’ I said. ‘About what he’s doing in Paris.’

‘Is he still over there? I thought he was supposed to deliver something soon.’

Evans frowned as he shovelled scrambled eggs onto his fork. It was clear that he would have preferred to eat his breakfast in peace.

‘I can’t get hold of him,’ I said. ‘He hasn’t answered his cell phone in over a week.’

‘It’s not always possible to call home when you’re out in the field,’ said Evans, peering at me over the rims of his glasses.

‘I know that,’ I said. ‘But we’re not exactly talking about the caves of Tora Bora. This is Paris. Europe. They have reception everywhere.’

Evans turned his fork to look at the piece of sausage he’d snared. It glistened with grease.

‘Well, at any rate it looks like a hell of a good story he’s working on over there. He was very insistent that I hold space for it in one of the October issues, front cover and all.’

‘What’s it about?’ I asked. ‘His article, I mean.’

Evans raised his eyebrows. I swallowed hard. It was embarrassing to admit how little I knew about my husband’s work.

‘Patrick is always careful to keep the magazine’s secrets,’ I added. ‘He never talks about his articles in advance.’

I had done my best to remember what he’d said. When he was drunk, on the phone, he’d talked about death and destruction, and about human lives not being worth anything. He’d mentioned cafés he’d been to in Paris, but not who he’d interviewed.

‘Selling human beings,’ said Richard Evans.

‘Selling human beings? You mean like trafficking? Prostitution?’

‘No, not exactly.’ He wiped his hands on a napkin. ‘He’s writing about immigrants who are exploited as labourers. Slave labour, pure and simple. And how the problem is growing as a result of globalization. Poor people who die inside containers when they’re being smuggled across borders, suffocating to death, or drowning in the seas between Africa and Europe, their bodies washing onto the beaches. A few years ago a whole group of Chinese immigrants drowned in England when they were forced to harvest cockles. They were farmers from somewhere, and no one had warned them about the tides. A shitty way to die, if you ask me.’

‘England? So what is Patrick doing in France?’

‘Exactly. There’s no clear angle.’ Having finished his breakfast Evans waved to the waiter behind the counter and then pointed at his plate. ‘When we buy foreign stories, there has to be a fresh perspective, a unique viewpoint. But that’s something Cornwall should know by now. He’s been working for us a long time. How many years is it? Five? Six?’

‘Patrick usually says that journalists who know exactly what they’re after are dangerous,’ I told him. ‘They merely confirm their own prejudices. They don’t see reality because they’ve already decided how they want it to look.’

Evans’s eyes gleamed as he smiled. Like glints of sunlight in ice-cold water.

‘I actually see something of myself in Patrick, back when I was his age. Equally stubborn and obsessed with work. The belief that you’ll always find the truth if you just dig deep enough. Not many people do that any more. These days journalists are running scared. Everybody’s scared. They all want a secure pension. They want to take care of their own.’

He ordered an espresso. I shook my head at the waiter. The smell of scrambled eggs and greasy sausage was already turning my stomach.

‘But why did he go to Europe?’ I asked. ‘All he had to do was go over to Queens to find that sort of thing going on.’

Evans shook his head and gave me a little lecture about why a story about the miseries in Queens wouldn’t sell as well as a report from Paris and Europe. He claimed that adversity is more appealing from a distance.

I felt sweat gathering in my armpits. The café was getting crowded. The lunch rush had started, and it was filling up with businessmen and media people.

‘And the whole point of hiring freelancers is that they’re willing to go places where no one else will go. That’s something all those marketing boys up there don’t understand.’ He pointed his finger at the top floors of the building across the street. ‘The minute I buy a story that’s the least bit controversial, they think I’m going to drag them back to 1968.’

I knew that The Reporter had been forced to shut down in ’68 because management couldn’t agree on how the Vietnam War should be depicted, but that wasn’t what I’d come here to discuss.

‘Are you saying he’s gone undercover?’ I asked.

‘If so, it would have been smart to talk to me about it first, but you never know. Maybe he’ll surprise us.’

Evans sighed heavily and ran his hand through his thick hair. According to Patrick, Evans would have been promoted to editor-in-chief, if only he’d been able to stay on budget. He understood the profession, unlike the marketing yokels who were in charge lately. They were people that Patrick despised as much as he worshipped old journalists like Bernstein, Woodward, and Evans.

‘In the past I could spend hours with the reporters,’ he said. ‘We’d go over the story in advance, try out specific analyses, and toss around various angles to take. But there’s no time for that any more.’

The tiny espresso cup had shrunk to the size of a doll’s cup in his big hand.

‘I was in Vietnam. I’ve seen Song My. I was in Phnom Penh right before the Khmer Rouge came in. Nowadays reporters come out of college thinking that journalism has to do with statistics. But if you really want to get into a story, you need to go out and smell reality.’

I glanced at my watch. It was 11.15 in New York. Almost dinnertime in Paris. I had to get back to the theatre.

‘So if I’m reading you right,’ I said, my voice chilly, ‘you’ve sent Patrick to Europe and paid him an advance, but you know almost nothing about the story he’s working on, and there’s no definite delivery date. Is that usual?’

‘No, no. We haven’t paid him any advance.’

My blood stopped. Time stood still. People passed by in slow motion outside the window, munching on sandwiches. I stared at Evans, but couldn’t think of anything to say.

‘We’re not allowed to pay out advances any more, not to freelancers. It’s a policy set in stone. I can remember when I was going to propose to my first wife, and I called up the editor to ask for an advance so I could buy her a ring. They’ve discontinued everything that once made this job fun.’

He shoved his newspaper in his briefcase and stood up.

‘I’m sure he’ll get in touch soon. Cornwall always delivers.’

I got up too. The whole place seemed to sway. Patrick had lied to me. He’d never done that before. Or had he?

‘What if he doesn’t?’ I said, and then cleared my throat. ‘I mean, hypothetically speaking. What would the magazine do then?’

‘He’s not on any specific assignment, so the magazine has no official responsibility, if that’s what you mean. As a freelancer, he’s in charge of getting his own insurance coverage.’

I felt someone shove me in the back as two students took over the table where we’d been sitting. Talking loudly, they put down their books and latte cups.

‘That’s all part of being freelance. Right?’ said Evans. ‘If you want to be free, with nobody telling you when to get up in the morning or send you out on routine jobs. I really miss those days.’

He smiled as he wrapped his shiny woollen scarf one more time around his neck.

‘When you hear from him, tell him hello and that I still have space in late November.’

I gritted my teeth. In his eyes I was merely a nervous wife in need of reassurance, so the boys could be kept out in the field. Phnom Penh? Kiss my ass.

Evans was busy putting his wallet away in his inside pocket, but then he stopped.

‘There’s a stringer in Paris that we sometimes use,’ he said, shuffling through a bunch of business cards. ‘If they decide to set fire to some suburb again, we give her a call.’ He dropped a few cards, and I watched them sail to the floor. Pick them up yourself, I thought.

‘She’s a political journalist.’ He bent down to gather up the scattered business cards. ‘I think I gave Patrick her name too. Damn. I can’t find it, but I’ve got it on my computer.’ He handed me his own card. ‘Send me an email if you want the info.’

‘Sure.’ I didn’t bother with any final courtesies and left the café, walking ahead of him and turning right on 8th Avenue. It was thirty-eight blocks to the theatre in Chelsea, and I walked the whole way. At that moment I needed air more than anything else.

‘There stands an oak on the shore, with golden chains around its trunk.’ The dancer on stage made the words float, her voice as delicate as a spirit or a dream.

The others joined in, repeating the words in a rhythmic chorus as Masha danced her longing. On the stage stood three substantial chairs from Russia’s Czarist period. I’d leased two of them from a private museum in Little Odessa, and then I’d spent weeks searching half the East Coast until I found the third chair in Boston.

I sank silently onto the seat next to Benji in the auditorium, noting that it had been worth all the effort. I watched the bodies in motion around the solid chairs, which were a constant, something on which to rest and yearn to flee. They were also practical obstacles that stood in the way, preventing the dancers from moving freely, forcing detours and pauses in the choreography. Chekhov’s play was about three sisters who spend the entire drama longing for Moscow without ever getting there, as the world around them changes. At first I’d imagined an empty stage, with the starry sky and space overhead, but then I realized that something solid was needed on stage, something that held the sisters there. Why didn’t they just leave? Take the next train?

I touched Benji’s arm to let him know I was back. His real name was Benedict, but I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone.

‘What is it?’ he whispered. ‘Where have you been?’

I shook my head. ‘Not now.’

I hadn’t told even Benji how worried I was. I’d gone about my job as usual, while thoughts of Patrick whirled through my mind.

‘They’re doing Masha now,’ he whispered in my ear.

The light changed from yellow to blue, then switched off before coming on again. The light technician hadn’t yet worked out all the cues.

‘They were supposed to rehearse Irina, but Leia has locked herself in her dressing room. She swears she’s never going to dance in this theatre again. She says there’s evil in the air, and she can’t express her innermost emotions.’

He gave me a sidelong glance and smiled sardonically.

‘And she says it’s all your fault.’

‘Oh my God. What the hell …’

I got up, groaning loud enough to be heard in the whole auditorium. He was talking about that girl I’d called a spoiled diva a few hours ago. Duncan, the choreographer, glared at me from the edge of the stage, motioning with his hand for me to leave. Out. Go fix the situation. OK, OK. I understood the signal.

‘I’ll go talk to her,’ I whispered to Benji. ‘Or do you think that would make her commit suicide?’

The whites of his eyes gleamed blue in the wrongly placed light.

‘I hear she actually tried that once, in all seriousness. It was Duncan who found her. Did you know they used to be an item?’

‘Be right back,’ I whispered.

A small group of people had gathered outside Leia’s dressing room.

‘She won’t come out,’ said Helen, who played the third sister, Olga. ‘She says we should find someone else for the part of Irina. But she knows full well that’s impossible.’

‘Take it easy,’ said Eliza, who was the theatre’s marketing manager. She’d witnessed all sorts of neurotic behaviour. ‘She’ll come out when she starts to wonder if we miss her.’

I knocked on the door.

‘Come on, Leia,’ I called. ‘I shouldn’t have said that to you. This show can’t manage without you. You are Irina. Nobody else can play her the way you do.’

The silence lasted thirteen seconds. I counted. Then the lock clicked. I opened the door and slipped inside the dressing room, shutting the door behind me. The dancer’s face was streaked with make-up. She was still sniffling.

‘I don’t understand what I ever did to you,’ she said. ‘Why are you so mean?’

‘I don’t know what got into me. I guess I’m just stressed out because of the opening night,’ I replied.

‘You don’t care how I feel,’ said Leia. ‘You only think about yourself. Everybody in this fucking business only thinks about themselves.’

‘Everyone’s nervous,’ I said. ‘It’s an important show.’

Leia looked at me from behind her smeared mask. A mask of despair, I thought. Maybe that’s what I should use. Streaked make-up, a person who’s on the verge of falling apart. First the make-up runs, then the whole face gives way, and underneath is an entirely different face. Neither is who she seems to be. There’s yet another face behind the mask, just as real or phony as the outer one.

‘What are you nervous about?’ asked Leia, who had now stopped crying. She cast a glance at herself in the mirror and reached for some cleansing cream. ‘You don’t have to stand on stage in front of an audience that might hate you.’

‘I’m not nervous,’ I tell her.

‘Then why do you keep yelling at me? Why do you call me names if you don’t mean it?’

‘They don’t hate you. They love you.’ I picked up a dress that had been tossed on the floor and brushed it off. What a stupid girl. She couldn’t even take care of her costumes. ‘It just slipped out. I must be tired. That’s all.’

‘Are you having your period or something?’

‘No, I’m not.’ I put a bit too much emphasis on those words, but it was too late to change what I’d said. I saw Leia’s eyes studying me in the mirror. Those sharp blue eyes of hers.

‘So are you pregnant or what?’

The words hovered in the air. I couldn’t think of a thing to say as I stared at the girl in the mirror. A small, insecure girl who barely weighed a hundred pounds. And then I saw a spark appear in her eyes. I’d been silent a second too long.

‘My God, you’re pregnant!’ said Leia triumphantly.

I turned away from her annoying, make-up-smeared face.

‘Do you know who the father is?’

‘Of course I do,’ I said, my voice barely audible even to me. It was a mere exhalation, a toneless whisper.

‘Congratulations,’ said Leia. ‘Poor you.’

‘Nobody else knows about this,’ I said quietly. ‘If you tell anyone, I’ll kill you. No, sorry. I didn’t mean that. But I don’t want anybody to know. It’s way too early. It hardly exists at all.’

‘But it does exist,’ said Leia. ‘Of course it exists.’

I sank down on the chair next to her, meeting her eyes in the mirror above the make-up table. My face pale, with dark circles under my eyes. We’d worked until two in the morning, and afterwards I couldn’t sleep. I’d lain in bed, sweating, as I thought about how Patrick was about to leave me, and my child would be born without seeing his father. I realized I was more exhausted than I’d thought.

‘I was once pregnant too,’ said Leia.

I fixed my gaze on the table. She was the last person I wanted as a confidante.

‘I had an abortion,’ she went on. ‘I didn’t want to ruin my career. It wasn’t the right time to have a child. And the guy was a real jerk. He never would have helped out with the baby. But you’re married, right?’

I nodded.

‘He was too,’ said Leia.

I slowly turned to look at her. The cleansing cream had spread the make-up into big splotches. Right now I really needed to see about getting her on stage, or else Duncan would never trust me again as the set designer.

‘Do you ever regret what you did?’ I asked.

‘You mean that I’m not sitting in some suburb as a single mother? I never could have taken this job.’

She spun her chair around so she was facing me.

‘So, does he want it?’ she said. ‘The father?’

I nodded. ‘There’s nothing he wants more. He’d like to have a whole baseball team.’ My voice quavered. I could hear Patrick speaking so clearly, as if he were standing right next to me, whispering in my ear. ‘A mixed team, both boys and girls.’ Speaking in that gentle voice of his.

‘Well, at least you don’t have to go on stage,’ said Leia. ‘You only have to build things. It’s OK for you to have a big belly. So what’s the problem?’

I took a tissue from the box on the make-up table and blew my nose. I’d also had an abortion, when I was twenty, after a one-night stand. Back then it had seemed such a simple and matter-of-fact decision. This was something else altogether.

‘It would have been born by now,’ said Leia, tugging at the elastic band holding back her hair. ‘I know I shouldn’t think about that, but sometimes I do. Even though I didn’t want it.’

I grabbed a towel from a hook and tossed it to her.

‘Wash your face,’ I said. ‘Then go out there and dance. That’s what matters.’

Leia put the towel under the tap to get it wet, then washed her face. Her smile became a grotesque grimace in the midst of the splotchy make-up.

‘Good Lord, why must I be a human being?’ she said as she rubbed her face hard and stood up. ‘Rather an ox or an ordinary horse, as long as one is allowed to work.’

Irina’s lines from her monologue in the first act. Leia was back on track, and I should have sighed with relief, but my body was as tense as hers as she assumed the pose. She was all sinews and muscles and nearly transparent skin.

‘Oh! I long to work the way one occasionally longs for a drink of water when it’s very hot. If I don’t start getting up early in the morning to work, you’ll have to end your acquaintance with me, Ivan Romanovich!’

‘Hurry up now,’ I told her, and then went straight to the production office, shutting the door almost all the way, and burying my face in my hands.

Don’t cry, don’t show any sign of weakness. That was such a deep part of my psyche that I hardly knew how other people did it. Those people who cried.

‘Have you heard anything from Patrick?’

Benji had opened the door. Now he stood there, giving me a searching look.

‘I need to go through all this stuff,’ I said, looking down at the desk. I picked up a pile of receipts that needed to be entered in the books. Props and nails and fabric.

‘Are you starting to worry?’ Benji persisted. ‘Haven’t you got hold of him yet?’

I slammed the stapler with my hand as I fastened the receipts to pieces of paper. Benji caught sight of the postcard and snatched it up.

‘Aha! Tour d’Eiffel,’ he said. ‘If he was my husband, I would never have let him go off to Paris.’

‘You don’t have a husband,’ I said.

‘It says here you don’t need to worry.’ He waved the Eiffel Tower and smiled. ‘He probably just wants you to miss him. That’s why he hasn’t called.’

I shook my head. ‘That’s not what this is about.’

‘Isn’t that what it’s always about?’ said Benji. ‘About who does the calling and who does the waiting? And the person who doesn’t call always has the upper hand. That’s what’s so unfair.’

Benji’s perfect pronunciation of Tour d’Eiffel rang in my head.

‘Do you speak French?’ I asked him.

‘Oui, bien sur,’ he replied, smiling. ‘I spent a year in Lyon as an exchange student. I love that country.’

‘France is a shitty country,’ I said, and I meant it. It occurred to me that I’d been feeling annoyed ever since Patrick had announced that he was going there. Maybe my antipathy had been all too evident. Maybe that was why he’d told me so little. And why I hadn’t asked any questions. I had once lived in France, in a hovel out in the country, during several dark years of my childhood. I remembered almost nothing of the language.

‘Listen to this.’ I concentrated hard on recalling what Patrick had shouted on the phone while I was standing in that stairwell in Boston.

‘Mais qu’est-ce qui est en feu?’ I said the words slowly so as not to leave out a single syllable. The words meant nothing to me. ‘Quoi? Maintenant? Mais dis-moi ce qui se passe, nom de Dieu!’

‘Who said that?’

‘Do you know what it means?’

Benji ran his hand through his hair, black and styled in a blunt cut that made him look slightly Asian, which he was not. But he’d explained it was the current fad in the club world now that we were entering the Asian era. He asked me to repeat what I’d said.

‘But what’s burning?’ he translated haltingly. ‘What do you mean? Now? But tell me what’s going on, in God’s name!’

He scratched his hand, which was chapped from all the washing of delicate fabrics.

‘Although actually we might say “for God’s sake”, or “what the hell is going on”. What’s this all about?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘This has something to do with Patrick. Am I right?’ Benji squatted down so he was looking me right in the eye as I sat at the desk. He put his hand on my knee. ‘Has something happened? You can tell me. Come on, Ally. It’s me. Benji.’

‘Benedict,’ I said, getting up.

Benji made a face.

‘If he was my husband and I hadn’t heard from him, I’d go find him in Paris,’ he said. ‘I’d walk through the streets and put up signs on the lamp posts all over town, searching for him.’

I pushed past him and went out into the hall.

‘I know, I know,’ said Benji. ‘I don’t have a husband.’

Gramercy was a bland district on the east side of Manhattan.

When we took our first walks together, Patrick had tried to make it seem more interesting than it was. He pointed out where Uma Thurman lived, in a corner building by Gramercy Park. He’d once run into her ex, Ethan Hawke, and the guy had actually said hello to him. Humphrey Bogart had been married in the nearby hotel, and Paulina Porizkova lived somewhere in the neighbourhood, but that was all. There was nothing more to brag about, no matter how much he wanted to impress me. Gramercy was mostly the home of office workers, doctors, and employees of the hospitals that were scattered about. It was an anonymous district without soul, and I thought of it as a blank slate.

The doorman was dozing as I came in, just past eleven p.m. The rehearsals had gone on late at the theatre.

‘That husband of yours isn’t home yet?’ he said inquisitively, leaning over the counter so he could watch me walk past.

‘Not yet,’ I replied.

‘Still in Europe?’

Patrick always talked with the doormen. He was on a first-name basis with all of the nine men who took turns working the shifts in the building. After three years of living there, I still wasn’t used to the fact that somebody always noticed when I came and went.

‘Goodnight,’ I said, and slipped inside the elevator.

I didn’t breathe easy until it passed the twelfth floor and then stopped at the fourteenth. There was no thirteenth floor. I was glad the builders were superstitious, because it meant one less floor, and the ride in the enclosed space was a few seconds shorter.

I unlocked the door and stepped into silence. In my fourteenth-floor apartment, there was no time and no reality. It was a void floating high above 23rd Street. Through the window I looked down at the cars racing past like bright little toys far below. To the north I could glimpse the top of the Chrysler Building lit up in white.

There were no windows facing south. Otherwise, I would have been able to see the Lower East Side, or Lo-i-saida, as the Puerto Rican kids had called it when I was growing up. It was only ten blocks away, but it was another world. That was where Mama and I had lived when I was nine years old, in our first rented one-room apartment in Alphabet City, where all the streets were letters instead of numbers. I learned to fight and to swear in Spanish before I could even speak English properly. Seven years later Mama thought she had realized the American dream when she was able to move across the street into a tiny, rundown, two-room place on First Avenue. Over there the baker was Polish and she had neighbours with whom she could speak Czech. By then I’d forgotten the language, or maybe I just didn’t want to speak it. I don’t know. When she died I took over the apartment and stayed there until I met Patrick.

My email was flashing when I sat down at my desk.

Eleven messages in the inbox. None of them from Patrick.

Instead I logged onto the website of our Internet bank. Richard Evans’s words had been echoing in my head all night.

We haven’t paid him any advance.

We had two joint accounts. That was Patrick’s idea, in order to keep track of our finances. Personally I was used to living hand-to-mouth. I’d never shared a bank account with any man before. It almost seemed more intimate than sharing a bed.

There was a total of $240 in the account we used for daily expenses. Neither of us had deposited any money yet for the next month’s bills. Everything was as it should be.

Then I looked at our joint savings account.

The baby money.

He was the one who had dubbed it that. I called it our savings capital. We regularly deposited funds, and Patrick’s parents contributed at Christmas and on birthdays. At the moment we were up to just over $16,000. We hadn’t touched the money, not even last autumn when Patrick had posted a negative income from the story he’d written about the new losers in the current economy.

I stared at the numbers that were dancing in the grey glow on the screen.

The total in the savings account was $6,282. On 17 August, a withdrawal of $10,000 had been posted. Transferred to Patrick’s personal account.

I dropped the mouse and grabbed the armrest of my chair, rolling backward to create a distance of two metres between me and the screen. An air pocket. As if the deception wouldn’t be able to reach me there.

I thought back to the day when he had packed for his trip. Six weeks ago, in the middle of the summer’s worst heatwave, when the air was motionless and scorching, and the asphalt was melting outside. I had been lying on the sofa, wearing only a long, thin tank-top. ‘It might take a little longer,’ he’d said after closing up his laptop. ‘We want to run the article as the cover story in October, so I need to be done in mid-September, or at least no later than the end of the month.’ He gave me a light kiss on the cheek as he slipped past to go into the bedroom.

‘Do you have money for the bills next month?’ I’d called after him. I wish I’d said something more loving, but I knew he was having a hard time making ends meet financially. He’d had so few assignments, and the pay was worse than before. Paris sounded like an expensive expedition. I was annoyed that he was so enthusiastic about leaving me behind.

‘It’s fine,’ he said. ‘I got an advance from the magazine so I have enough for the next two months.’ Another kiss. ‘This story is going to turn everything around. I promise.’

I spun in my chair and looked at Patrick’s corner of the workroom. His desk was dark and neat. Against the wall was the external keyboard, looking lonely and neglected with the cord dangling idly in the air.

What else had he lied about? Was he even in Paris at all?

He could just as well have gone to Palm Beach with a lover. I pictured our savings being frittered away on champagne. But I quickly dismissed such a stupid idea.

He had in fact sent me an envelope postmarked Paris. And he had written that he loved me.

I placed my hand on my stomach, thinking I could feel it growing inside. Only a tiny sausage, a worm, a growth. So far.

Of course he was in Paris.

The next second I pictured another woman, pretty and chic and elegant, like the girl who played Amélie from Montmartre, or some other big-eyed, dark-haired, petite and secretive Frenchwoman.

I got up and walked through the apartment, pausing in the kitchen to drink a big glass of iced water. From there I looked at his side of the bed, which was neatly made. Mine was chaos, with the covers sagging partway onto the floor.

When I closed my eyes I could almost hear his footsteps as he came into the kitchen and opened the cupboard where we kept the coffee, and then the plop when the vacuum seal released its hold.

We had torn down the walls between the rooms when I moved in, opening up the place to make it into an airy and bright loft space for our life together. At first I was bothered by his presence whenever we sat and worked. The clattering of his keyboard behind me, the faint creaking of rubber against wood as he rolled back his chair, and his footsteps as he paced around the room, trying to come up with the right wording. Later I’d learned to block him out, to focus on my computer screen and not think about sex as soon as he came close enough for me to feel the eddying air when he moved, and the smell of him: wool, olive soap, and a light aftershave. I suppose that’s what people call daily life.

The biggest problem had been to merge our record collections. He arranged everything alphabetically, while I put the most important ones first. In the end we bought two identical bookcases from IKEA in Newark, and I was allowed to keep my Doors albums in peace. ‘Strange people, strange lyrics, strange drugs’ was all he had to say about them.

Behind the bed a glass door opened onto a small balcony. Out there, from a certain angle, I was able to see the Empire State Building. I could also see that our three potted plants had withered. Patrick was the one who usually remembered to water them.

I opened the door, letting in air, the faint sounds of the city below, and a chilly streak of reality that passed through me.

Why the hell was I thinking of doubting his love? I’d made him a promise, back when I’d suffered one of my first attacks of jealousy, convinced that he was going to leave me. I was not the sort of person who could hold onto anyone. They always left me.

‘But I love you,’ he’d said. ‘I’m the one who can’t understand why you want to stay with me.’

I took in a deep breath. Crisp and fresh September air. The skies had cleared during the evening, the stars had faded and vanished in the lights of the city.

I couldn’t believe my ears when he proposed to me. I stared at him while all sounds stopped abruptly and a chasm opened up beneath the floor of Little Veselka.

Little Veselka isn’t exactly what most people would call a romantic setting. A smoky, noisy deli in the East Village that has stood on 9th Street since the 1950s. It has an open kitchen, so you can hear the Ukrainian cooks screaming at each other as they grill their steaks in full view of all the customers.

It was there we met for the first time.

I was with a bunch of people from La MaMa, one of the little theatres down on 4th Street, off-off-off-Broadway, where I was working at the time. My whole life took place in that neighbourhood. I ate take-out from the Indian restaurants on 6th Street, and I lived in my mother’s old apartment on the corner of 4th. Rumour had it that the building was due to be torn down soon, to be replaced by twenty storeys of luxury apartments, but those sorts of rumours about old buildings were always rampant in the East Village.

I noticed him as soon as he came in. He was with Arthur Nersesian, an Irish-Armenian writer who knew everybody. They sat down and he introduced Patrick as a freelance journalist who was writing a story about the last Bohemian in the East Village, meaning Arthur. All the others had been driven away by the rising cost of housing. They now lived in Brooklyn.

If Bohemians even existed at all. A heated discussion ensued at the section of the table where I’d ended up with Patrick, and a director who was practically horizontal, his arm around an eighteen-year-old student actress. Wasn’t there a better name for people who loafed about and did no work? Who were incapable of pulling their life together and feared responsibility? Or were the so-called Bohemians the vanguard of the future, the first truly free human beings?

From a purely statistical standpoint, Patrick said, it was possible to ascertain that in the Bohemian belt, which extended straight across Manhattan and eastward into Brooklyn, there were more of those types of people than anywhere else in the world. People who worked freelance and had no permanent jobs, who had chosen to live that particular lifestyle.

He explained that he was actually a reporter of social issues, and he believed that words could change the world. ‘Words are more powerful than most people think,’ he said, and looked me in the eye after we’d finished off the seventh or eighth or God knows how many bottles of wine at the table, while the director was in the process of drowning between the breasts of the student actress.

‘Plenty of people have no idea what a responsibility it is to be a writer. They think it’s all about winning fame and respect, but for me it’s about taking full responsibility for the world we live in.’

I was fascinated by his serious demeanour. He wasn’t trying to show off; he actually believed what he was saying. There was also something so extraordinary about the way he was dressed. He wore chinos and a shirt and a blazer — which was extremely unusual in that district, where everyone worked so hard to present a unique style.

When he walked me home and took my hand, he did that too with the greatest seriousness. ‘Never would I allow you to walk home alone in the middle of the night.’

‘But I’ve walked this same route thousands of times and survived.’

‘I wasn’t here then.’

Outside the shabby entrance on First Avenue he kissed me gently, and after that I simply had to take him upstairs with me and roll around with him in the bedroom that was so small it held nothing but a bed within the four walls. I wanted to penetrate deeper into that alluring seriousness, all the way to its core to find out if it ever ended.

The next morning I didn’t want to get out of bed. I couldn’t remember that ever happening before. On similar mornings with other men, I’d made a point of fleeing as soon as possible. I didn’t want them to start groping for my soul.

But lying next to Patrick, I stayed in bed. I ran my finger over his cheek. ‘Are you always like this?’ I asked.

‘Like what?’

‘So serious. Genuinely serious. Are you like that all the way through, or is that just your way of picking up girls?’

That made him laugh. ‘I had no idea it would work so well.’

A year later he proposed. At Little Veselka.

He must be teasing me, I thought at first. Then: I’m not the sort of person anyone marries. Then: Help. This is really happening. What do people do when this happens?

I said yes. Then I said yes two more times. He leaned across the table and kissed me. ‘Hell,’ he swore as his lips touched mine. He jolted back in his chair.

‘What’s wrong? It’s OK to change your mind, if you want.’

Patrick covered his face with his hand and groaned.

‘The ring! I forgot about the ring. What an idiot I am.’

He’d been so preoccupied with mustering his courage that he’d forgotten that little, classic detail. Could I forgive him? Could I give him another chance to do it over, according to the rulebook?

I took his face in my hands. I ran my finger gently along his jaw line. I said that I didn’t want any other proposal. This was the best one I could have imagined. If he was so nervous that he’d forgotten the ring, that meant something. It was something I could believe. It was far more important than any bit of metal that existed on earth.

‘But if you insist,’ I went on, ‘the shops are still open on Canal Street.’

On the way we stopped to buy a bottle of champagne and paused to kiss in a doorway, taking so long that some bitch started yelling for the police. When we reached Chinatown, the jewellers on Canal Street had all closed up for the day. ‘Why do I need a ring?’ I said. ‘Who decided that?’ And as night fell, we staggered deeper into the red glow of Chinatown’s knick-knack shops, tattoo parlours, and disreputable clubs. I had only a vague memory of how we made it back home that night.

One year later, to the day, we were married, but it was the evening of our engagement that meant the most. Because it was only the two of us, I thought. After that his parents and all the traditions and the wedding magazines and the whole bridal package came into the picture.

Patrick’s desk chair softly moulded to my body, faintly redolent of leather. Oddly enough, I’d never sat in his chair before. I ran my hand over the dark surface of his desk. In front of me lay a desk calendar bound in leather, a Christmas present from his father, who shared Patrick’s passion for intellectual luxuries.

The page for 17 August held only a brief note.

Newark 21.05. That was the departure time for his plane. No hotel name. We always used our cell phones to call each other, never the hotel phones. It hadn’t seemed important to know where he was staying.

I took a deep breath before I pulled out the top drawer. I was reluctant to start rummaging through Patrick’s things.

Everything was in meticulous order. There were stacks of receipts. Postage stamps, insurance policies.

In the next two drawers he kept articles that he’d written, along with background material neatly sorted by topic. I quickly leafed through the piles of papers. Nothing about human trafficking. At the very bottom were the articles that had almost won him a Pulitzer Prize. He’d changed after that. Worked harder, become practically obsessed with whatever he was writing. I thought about a woman he’d interviewed for the series about the new economy. He’d found her under a bridge in Brooklyn. She talked about how she was going to get back her job as chief accountant very soon, and then she’d bring home her three kids and move back into an apartment in Park Slope. Under all the layers of clothing she carried a cell phone so the company would be able to reach her. It had neither a SIM card nor a battery. Patrick had spent three nights out there. When he came home he tossed and turned in bed, talking in his sleep. ‘You have to call Rose,’ he said. ‘You have to call Rose.’ I had pictured Rose as some secret cutie until I saw the article and realized she was the woman who lived under the bridges in Brooklyn. That was what he dreamed about at night.

I shut the last drawer, and the desk resumed its closed, orderly guise.

Hadn’t he ever mentioned the name of the hotel? Not even once?

I fixed my gaze on the row of books above his desk.

Hemingway.

Patrick had said something about Hemingway the last time he called. About the bar where he’d gone. I hadn’t paid much attention because I didn’t give a shit about Hemingway. I would never have gone to that bar, even if he’d still been alive. But Patrick had also mentioned Victor Hugo.

He was sitting at the window of the hotel and looking at … what? A grave? The place where Victor Hugo was buried.

I kicked my feet to make the chair roll across the floor to my own work area, and pressed the keyboard of my laptop. The screen woke out of sleep mode.

I’d seen Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, both the musical and the films, but I had no idea where the author was buried.

I typed ‘Victor Hugo’ and ‘grave’ into Google and pressed search. From the first hit I recognized the name that Patrick had mentioned. The Panthéon. I clicked on Wikipedia. Panthéon was Greek for ‘all gods’. It was originally a church, but after the French Revolution it was turned into a mausoleum for national heroes. In 1851 Foucault had hung a pendulum from the dome to prove that the earth rotates. Victor Hugo was buried in crypt number twenty-four.

Impatiently I scrolled down to the technical structural details.

Patrick had said that he could see the dome from his window. The building was eighty-three metres tall. I pictured how it must rise above the rooftops. There could be hundreds of hotels that boasted of such a view.

But Patrick could also see the university through the window. The Sorbonne. Did you know people live up there under the eaves? I typed ‘Sorbonne’ and ‘Panthéon’ and ‘hotel’ in the search box.

The first hit was for the Hôtel de la Sorbonne. I felt a shiver race through my body. A feeling that Patrick was getting closer. I was pulling him towards me.

A click from the door, his footsteps across the floor, and everything would return to normal again. Breakfast and work. Watching American Idol with half an eye in the evening. Days passing, nights when I was able to sleep. The sound of him breathing next to me.

The hotel’s website appeared on the screen. ‘Near the Panthéon, the Sorbonne, and the Luxembourg Gardens’. The clock in the upper right corner of the screen told me it was approaching one a.m., which meant six in the morning in Paris. I tapped in the phone number, picturing in my mind the sun rising above ponderous stone buildings with gleaming cupolas.

‘Hôtel Sorbonne. Bonjour.’

The voice on the phone sounded slightly groggy, half-asleep.

‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to get in touch with a guest who may be staying at your hotel.’

A lengthy and rapid reply followed.

‘Do you speak English?’ I asked. ‘I’m looking for an American named Patrick Cornwall.’

A long silence on the phone. I watched the clock change from 00.53 to 00.54. Tuesday, 23 September.

‘No Cornell.’

‘Cornwall,’ I said, enunciating carefully. ‘He’s an American journalist.’

But I heard only a buzzing sound in my ear. I wondered how Patrick could stand it over there. But he spoke fluent French, of course, so he didn’t have to put up with being treated like something the cat had dragged in.

On the website of the next hotel on the list, the Cluny Sorbonne, they boasted about speaking English. The description further said: in the heart of the Latin Quarter, within walking distance of Notre-Dame, the Panthéon, and the Louvre.

‘I’m looking for an American named Patrick Cornwall. I’m not really sure, but I think he’s staying at your hotel.’

‘No, he’s not.’

I clicked back to the search list. Were there more Sorbonne hotels?

‘I’m afraid he has checked out.’

‘What did you say?’

‘He has checked out.’

I grabbed the armrest and held on tightly.

‘When was that?’

‘And who, may I ask, is calling?’

I was just about to say ‘his wife’, but something stopped me. Shame. I felt my cheeks flush. I suddenly saw the situation from the other end of the phone line. France was a country in which even the president had secret lovers and got away with it. And I was the abandoned wife.

‘We’re colleagues at the magazine,’ I said. ‘And I’m sitting here with a travel invoice that I can’t quite decipher. That’s why I need to speak to him. So I can send him his money.’

I sounded like a real bureaucrat.

‘Just a moment.’ An eternity passed as the clerk paged through the information in a ledger or a database or whatever they used in the Old World. I heard a clattering somewhere in the background. Maybe they were setting the tables for breakfast.

‘It was last Tuesday,’ he said finally. ‘September sixteenth.’

A week ago. The same day the envelope was mailed. I took a deep breath.

‘Were you on duty when he left the hotel?’

‘Yes, of course. He was happy to be going home to New York. He said he missed his wife. I told him that he should bring her with him next time he comes to Paris. It’s the romance capital of the world, after all.’

‘Are you sure about that? That he was going home to New York?’

I gripped the phone even harder.

‘Yes. He said that quite clearly. We almost had a quarrel about the fact that he was so eager to leave us.’

‘Did he say anything else?’

‘Just that he would stay with us the next time he’s in Paris.’

I ended the call. The silence pressed against my skull. At any second it would explode. Fragments of information would scatter across the floor. Checked out. Back home to New York. The baby money. The positive pregnancy test. We never pay advances.

Restlessly I paced the apartment. Took some juice out of the fridge and drank from the bottle.

Where had he gone? Why had he lied about where he was going? And if he was telling the truth, why hadn’t he come home?

On the kitchen counter were the remains of the snacks I’d eaten over the past few days. Since the kitchen was just a corner of the bedroom, we always did the dishes before we went to bed so we wouldn’t have to look at leftovers when we got up in the morning. But now there was a small pyramid of empty yogurt containers. And I thought I noticed that they were starting to smell. The smell grew. Dirty glasses and cutlery, salad packaging and pizza boxes. All signs of his absence.

I picked up the garbage can and with my arm swept the whole pile of trash off the counter and into the pail. Several forks and a glass fell in too. I closed the lid. Then I went back to my computer and logged into the Internet bank again. I transferred $6,282 from the savings account — the baby money, all that was left of it — to my own account. Then I typed words in the Google search box:

New York. Paris. Flights.