The Drowned Man (21 page)

“Not to her. Sorry, don't mean to be flippant. No, the sting is painful but not fatal to a healthy person. I was stung once. Treated it with baking soda and aspirin. Just more of her bad luck, I guess.”

Bad luck, Peter thought, or a fifth cause of death.

Peter Cammon and Henry Pastern spent an hour examining the Ford Focus, which the Bureau had left in a sequestered zone of the Quantico parking lot. The car was a disappointment. They found two small bloodstains on the headrest on the passenger side but the impoundment report had already noted these. Peter found a crack in the plastic bumper, a confirmation that the vehicle had hit Carpenter with great force. He took note of a round mark on the dashboard where a
GPS
device might have been secured.

Their visit to the banks of the Anacostia was equally pro forma. They found nothing useful in the yacht club parking lot. The two men stood on the grass fringe and looked out on the forlorn waterway. What hung in the air was the desperation of Alice Nahri, who had been willing to slaughter a woman, a stranger, in a storm of vicious assaults, just to win a few more days of freedom.

Peter had Henry drop him off near the Hoover Building. They pulled over on F Street and chatted. Henry was reluctant to let the chief inspector go.

“Henry, you'll need to call Inspector Deroche in Montreal. If you want I can telephone ahead and tell him to expect you, but you should be fine. Push him to take the girl seriously. She's the key to this. I wouldn't trust his opinion on the Booth letters but he's a good detective and he needs to know the details on the rental car and the latest forensics. The Sûreté has the lead on this, not Scotland Yard.”

Henry nodded vigorously and drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Are
you
staying on the case?”

The question was simple enough but it startled Peter. He thought for a moment. Later, he told himself that his reply was meant to encourage the novice detective, nothing more.

“To the end, Henry,” he said.

Peter strolled to Ford's Theatre, which happens to stand a block or so from
FBI
Headquarters. He joined a tour of the restored interior, which felt cool and hollow in its solemnity. Booth had chosen this killing ground to take out a president, firing a single derringer bullet into Lincoln's skull. While the National Park guide narrated the tale of Booth's attack, Peter hung back by the orchestra seats beneath the horseshoe of the balcony; here he gained a clear line of sight towards the presidential box and the stage below. The Lincolns had sat in the box on the right, which projected almost to the apron of the stage. There was the bunting on which Booth caught his spur. Peter applied his detective's eye to the scene. Booth's leap to the proscenium was foolhardy, and it was no surprise that he fractured his shin bone. Escaping through the rear of the stage never was a good plan, and bystanders almost stopped him. But then, melodrama was the young actor's stimulant, Peter knew. Renaud's book pointed out that Booth often confused stage drama with real life. In pain, the actor still managed to hit his mark stage front, and couldn't resist turning and declaiming “
Sic semper tyrannis!
” to the audience. Lincoln, slumping forward in his chair a few feet away, fell into a coma.

Peter took a minute to visit the small museum in the basement, where Lincoln's bloody coat and Booth's derringer and knife were displayed in glass cases. He took special interest in Booth's diary, the one he had jotted in during his ten days of desperate flight. The volume was more of a logbook, what would be considered a day-timer today, and Booth's frenzy and desperation, though not remorse, were evident in his scattered scrawl. Peter could see where pages had been torn out. He peered through the glass and looked for a Booth signature on the diary. The actor had not signed his final declaration of innocence.

Despite the searing heat, Peter enjoyed his walk back to the Willard Hotel, but as he lay down on the bed in his silent room, a wave of foreboding, of fatefulness, swept over him. The case was slipping beyond his influence. He had never been given a mandate and he had a slim chance of latching on to one. He was no closer to finding the girl or the letters, certainly not the killer. The pursuit of Alice Nahri, murderess, was entirely in the hands of the
FBI
, and it would never be Chief Inspector Cammon, retired, who would effect the arrest of the prime suspect, Leander Greenwell.

He was torn about where to head next. He was finished with D.C., but a return to England felt like a full-scale retreat. He was inclined to drop by Montreal on his way to London and visit Renaud for a few days. Deep instinct told him that Alice Nahri would also return to the City of Saints at some point.

And so Peter did what he often did to revive his spirits. He rang up one of the women in his life.

It was evening in England. Sarah picked up her mobile on the first ring.

“Dad! It's terrific to hear from you. Are you in Montreal?”

“No, I'm in Washington. On business.”

Sarah giggled. Peter was taken aback. His daughter's laugh was like tinkling crystal. She was twenty-eight years old now but he always envisioned her as a little girl, his youngest child; she was also the one who understood him best. He felt affection sweep over him, a yearning for home, for Joan and the family.

“Sorry, Dad, but I'm never sure where you're going to call from. But, yeah, good. You're working again,” she said.

For Sarah's part, her posture with her father had shifted about four years ago. She would never say so, but she used to fear him. She had grown up knowing that he had killed six men in his time with Scotland Yard. She had no grasp of what that was like. They had never discussed the shootings and as a result her doubts festered. He had been doing his duty, she knew, yet as the years passed she worried that her father had become inured to death. But four years ago, she had helped him on a murder case in Dorset. At dinner one night in the coastal town, he related the story of how he had discovered the body of a murdered girl in the Channel the day before. She listened with growing respect. The story was gruesome but was also permeated with her father's sadness. Luck had led him to the victim, he claimed, but Sarah noted that no one else had managed to bring the poor girl home.

“Dear, can you tell me something about jellyfish?” he asked Sarah.

Her laughter caused him to hold the hotel phone away from his ear.

“Sorry,” she said.

“What's so funny?” he said, not really taking offence.

“You always take me by surprise, Dad. But as a marine biologist I am
always
ready to talk jellyfish.”

“In particular, are there jellyfish in Chesapeake Bay?”

“Ah, well, the Chesapeake is one of the great ecological zones of the world. They have just about everything. Yes, there are jellyfish there. Why?”

“Would they be able to travel up the Potomac River, or a branch of it called the Anacostia?”

He could hear her moving about, presumably towards her computer. “Depends on tidal flow and water temperature. I'm going to go onto a database . . . Here it is.
Chrysaora quinquecirrha
. Sea nettles. They can be found all up the Atlantic Coast, the warmer the water the better. Classic-looking jellyfish, white or sometimes red, lampshade tops and long tentacles.”

“What will a sting do to you?”

“Well, this kind of sea nettle won't kill you with its toxins, unless you are prone to anaphylactic shock. It will leave a red mark where its stinging cells inject you, and it will hurt, but you'll recover.”

“Will they swarm a body, if that's the right word?”

“That's the perfect word. Multiple stings, the easier to bring down the prey.”

“What else can you tell me? Would they swim up the river?”

“More likely they would float up on the tides. They're a serious nuisance on a lot of public beaches. I don't know about the Anacostia but people lobby to have them culled or eradicated. I wouldn't go for a dip off Atlantic City, for example. Might meet a moon jelly.”

“Which is?”

“Guaranteed lethal if it stings you. But that's not your Chesapeake sea nettle.”

“Last thing, dear, would they attack a dead human body?”

Sarah seemed elated that her father had called her, pleased that her dad's professional interests meshed with hers. She took this question perfectly seriously. “Sure. The jellyfish has no way of telling what's alive or dead. But it wouldn't enjoy dead human flesh.”

“Thanks for all this.”

“Call Mum. There's no change in Uncle Nigel or Aunt Winnie, but I think she'd like to hear from you.”

“Right. Will do.”

“By the way, there are lion's mane jellyfish in the Chesapeake system.”

To this apparent non sequitur Peter could only say, “So?”

“I'm surprised at you, Dad. There's a Sherlock Holmes story, ‘The Adventure of the Lion's Mane.'”

Sarah was laughing as she hung up.

Peter's gloom might have qualified as a premonition, for Sir Stephen Bartleben called him a few minutes later.

“What's happening in D.C., Peter?”

Peter took fifteen minutes to describe his journeys around the capital. “The Bureau should track down the girl pretty fast.”

But both men knew all this was preliminary to the key question of next steps.

“Montreal,” the boss said.

“Yes.”

“I'm sending Malloway.”

Perhaps it was the distance from London or Cammon's pique with the callousness of Bartleben's approach that made him reply, “That figures.”

“What figures?”

“Malloway works for Counter. Frank would insist it be one of his own.”

Peter's snideness was offensive. The choice of a Yard representative was the former deputy commissioner's prerogative, even if Frank Counter had nominal authority. “I need a regular man to do it, Peter. That's why Malloway.”

Peter understood fully. There was a touch of sarcasm in the boss's retort. Bartleben was implying that Malloway could be relied upon to play his role conventionally, offending no one. Dunning Malloway would deal with Nicola Hilfgott with a degree of tact, unlike Cammon. Peter had met Malloway a few times. Peter recalled him as an ass-kisser who was not to be trusted.

“What does Malloway work on otherwise these days?” Peter said.

“He's on one of Frank's special squads. Worked on the phone-hacking scandal for a while. Showed good stuff dealing with the Palace on the alleged tapping of Prince Harry's account. Lately he's worked on the cricket-fixing incident with the Pakistanis.”

“Just like Carpenter. That's just great,” Peter said.

Sir Stephen ignored the taunt. “Also did counter-terrorism work a little in the Subcontinent office. I need a regular man, full time, with an international brief.”

The deeper implication was that Peter was no longer authorized to deal with the Americans or the Canadians. Malloway would handle everything going forward. Peter barely held back.

“Stephen, Malloway should work closely with the Bureau here. A special agent named Henry Pastern. And he has to reach Deroche as soon as possible. I haven't told Deroche about the woman in the river and the
ME
's analysis, though Henry may have already called him. We need to square the circle.”

“Peter, crikey, that's why mutual legal assistance protocols were invented. Malloway can handle Montreal
and
Washington.”

Peter's rage grew. He tried one more time. “This isn't really an international problem. It's going to be an American manhunt. That's how we'll get the woman and, with any luck, retrieve Nicola's precious documents.”

Prognostication was the wrong way for Peter to go. Sir Stephen paused, the silence implying that Peter had always been the wrong choice to handle Nicola's ego. “Complete your business in D.C., Peter, then head home. Skip Montreal.”

Peter considered Montreal. Stephen wasn't wrong. He had no official business left in Quebec.

“Anything else?” Stephen said.

This was the moment to disclose his fresh plans, Peter knew, but resentment now poisoned any residual goodwill, and he only said, “Get Nicola to refine her draft of the three letters and send me a copy as an email attachment. That's it.”

“Okay. I'll get them to you. Otherwise, Malloway can handle everything. I don't want you going to Montreal, Peter. We'll have lunch when you get back.”

Alida walked up to Independence Avenue and turned left towards the heart of Washington. The first glimmer of dawn brought the tidy, rich neighbourhoods east of Capitol Hill into sharp relief. She had by now painted her mind's-eye picture of her new home in America and although these houses were beautiful, she knew that they would never provide her with asylum. She saw a sign off to her right for “Lincoln Park” and reflected that the sixteenth president popped up everywhere. Alida otherwise ignored the sign but she might have paused had she known that Pierre L'Enfant, the capital's most important architect, originally intended that Americans should measure all distances in North America from that spot. She was at the centre of America.

But Alida kept walking. Her destination was four hundred miles to the north, in Rochester, New York.

It was ten minutes too early for the dog walkers and the joggers, but out of nowhere a taxi pulled up alongside and the passenger-side window descended.

“Mumbai,” said the driver.

It wasn't exactly a gypsy cab but the driver, the brother of the owner, was unlicensed (which was why the police canvass of the taxi companies would fail to turn up Alida's fare) and for ten dollars and no questions beyond her telling him she was from Bihar he drove her to Union Station. She had the Mumbai man take a loop around the Mall so that she could glimpse the Washington Monument and the Capitol Dome. She wished she had a Kodak but she did not ask the driver to stop. Glorious as these landmarks were, she had no intention of living in the shadow of these heavily policed tourist monuments.

She remained calm. The trickle of passengers onto the vast communal floor of Union Station did not alarm her, nor did the security guards standing at posts around the perimeter. She had told the Mumbai man to leave her at the train station but her goal was the bus depot next door. Now she walked through the main building and across to the bus terminal.

Her booking proved straightforward, an eight fifteen ticket all the way to the downtown Cumberland Street terminal in Rochester.

The
GPS
was a problem. Walking up from the river, she had used it to plot the distance to upper New York State by road. The problem was the imprint left on the device. She could clear all records of previous trips but she suspected that the police had ways of recovering such data. She couldn't flush it down the toilet or break it up into little pieces. She had noticed a post office in Union Station. With an hour and a half to spare before the bus departed for Baltimore and points north, Alida returned to the railway lounge and bought a cushioned mailing envelope. She addressed it to Jack Dawson, Beverly Hills, California, on a fictional street; she wrote 90210 for the zip code. She took the
GPS
screen off its stand, slipped it into the envelope and paid for the postage. Returning to the bus depot, she transferred her meagre possessions to a dirty canvas bag she found in a trash receptacle and deposited her pink rucksack, making sure that Leo and Kate were lodged at the bottom of the bin.

The rhythm of bus travel soothed her. The Rand McNally sat on her lap as she alternately slept and gazed out the window. She could not get enough of the countryside of Pennsylvania as it rolled by. With the atlas as her guide to the wide-open future, she imagined, and compulsively recalculated, scenarios for her new life. The siren call of the blue interstates had marked her forever and she decided that she would buy a car as soon as she could. From her home base in Rochester — it sat at the very top of the country — she would explore everywhere to the west and the south. Alida was not the first young woman determined to visit all the states, but she believed she was.

While waiting in the Harrisburg depot for her connector to New York State, she saw a poster for Gettysburg that extolled the preservation of the famous town and Civil War battle site. Abraham Lincoln had given his celebrated speech right there on the battlefield. Johnny had told her about Gettysburg (and now she thought, for the thousandth time, of the letters she carried). She added the battlefield park to her list of places to visit.

Rochester, New York, turned out to be the first city that Alida learned to trust. As the Trailways bus passed the “City Limits” sign she mouthed the words “Welcome to Rochester, Kodak City, Pop. 214,231.” This made her smile: Kodak was the universal term in Bihar for a tourist's camera. Simultaneously she saw from the elevated expressway the skyline of the city and the grey-blue of Lake Ontario in the distance.
If I had a Kodak,
she thought, amusing herself,
I could take a picture and pin it on my wall.

At the bus station she disembarked and walked out to East Street, where she saw the top half of a tall black building in the distance, a modest skyscraper that nonetheless anchored the centre of the city. It welcomed her as a beacon to a new, exotic life. In the opposite direction she noted a sign and an arrow: “East Street Mansions” and below, “Eastman House.” The pieces of her reverie began to slot into place with remarkable swiftness.

Her first task was to find cheap accommodations — with a landlord who lacked prying eyes. She understood that bus stations were often built in the downscale parts of town and she knew that rooming houses along the nearby streets would have adverts posted. She ambled down the street facing the main doors of the depot and in minutes spied a frowzy hotel that was nothing more than a brownstone walk-up with segmented by-the-day-or-week flats. It would suffice.

She walked past the rooming house, cut up to the right until she found a main street, and soon discovered a store that sold luggage. With her new navy blue gym bag Alida became the image of a graduate student. At least, that was how the pockmarked and warty landlady sized her up when she arrived at the rooming house. A cash payment got her a shabby rental on the second floor. Alida let herself into her room but left again to deposit the Booth letters and the remaining Canadian bills in a locker at the bus station. She bought a city map at the candy counter, returned to the brownstone, and spread out the map on the chenille bedspread. Within a few minutes she had located the visitor centre as well as the most direct route to Irondequoit Bay and the harbour. She plotted a rambling walk past the four tallest buildings in Rochester, which were helpfully identified by icons on the map. She concluded that the Xerox Tower, the tallest at thirty storeys, was the black skyscraper she had glimpsed on her arrival in town.

The Xerox Tower turned out to be grey, not black, an illusion of the early afternoon sun. She circled the lobby as if checking out the architecture but didn't bother going up the elevators; nor did she disturb the lone security guard at the information booth. She did note that there was only one exit door.

She walked on to the next skyscraper. The Times Square Building immediately caught her fancy. Although it was not all that big, at fourteen storeys, it was surmounted by four sculpted wings that, according to a brochure, had served as a beacon for new arrivals since the building went up in 1930; a plaque in the lobby asserted that each wing weighed twelve thousand pounds and together they were known as the Wings of Progress. She took an elevator to the fourteenth floor. There was no observation deck but she was able to spy Lake Ontario from one of the topmost windows. The building delighted her, like the rest of Rochester.

She traversed a park area labelled Washington Square, in the centre of which stood the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. At its apex perched a benign Abraham Lincoln. He was everywhere in America, it seemed, and she reminded herself to read the Booth letters again. She smelled the moisture in the air before she turned a last corner and saw the lake. Ontario was the smallest of the Great Lakes, the brochure stated, but it seemed immense. The view, as Johnny might have said, sealed the deal for Alida. The water stretched out like the floodplain of Bihar after a monsoon but for her the lake was “American” in every way, a vista to infinity and endless with potential, a highway for big ships, and a presence crouching like a beast by the edge of the city. Alida also liked the scale of Rochester, sprawling yet defined by its neighbourhoods and its waterfront. She walked the long way back to East Street and took in the façades of the preserved mansions, and had a very American thought:
someday I could own one of those.

But the Xerox Tower remained her main focus. She knew that the rich man spent ten-hour days in his office and watched over the city and the lake from his windows on the twenty-eighth floor of the building. Sometimes he slept in his office. Alida prepared herself. She was in the mood to spend some cash.

The next morning she strolled around until she found a women's store downtown. She bought a white blouse, black slacks, and a black velvet jacket. She sprang for stylish earrings and a pair of Foster Grants at a department store on the same street. On the way back she went into a thrift shop and found a pair of knock-off Blahniks — no use squandering money. On impulse, she bought a briefcase to complete the picture of a modern businesswoman. It showed just the right amount of wear to prove her bona fides as a hardworking executive. She took it to a hole-in-the-wall shoemaker's and had the Pakistani owner polish it up to a high gleam. In her room, she changed into her complete outfit, except for the heels, and examined herself in the bathroom mirror. Coming downstairs to see how she looked in the natural light she encountered the landlady, who smiled with wonderment at this alien creature.

“How do I look?” Alida said, using her best British-schoolgirl inflection.

“I never, ever get to see one of my tenants dressed to the nines. Where are you about to head off to, young woman?” the plump lady said.

Alida smiled but instinctively drew back a step. She was grateful for the old woman's chatter but the more Alida befriended her — she had decided she might need to stay two weeks — the better witness the woman would make if the police interviewed her. She began to twitch as she stood posing in the hall. She regained control. She had decided on the long bus journey to put her ingrained paranoia behind her. A new life meant a new philosophy. She smiled now, smoothed her skirt, and kissed the landlady on the cheek.

“I have a part-time-job interview,” she said. She had told the woman that she was a university student.

The landlady smiled back. “Don't forget your shoes, dear.”

Alida went back to her room to fetch the Blahniks and when she came down, the woman told her she looked gorgeous. Alida thanked her.

She timed her return by taxi to the Xerox Tower for eleven thirty, hoping to spot her target leaving for lunch. She searched out a Kinko's down the block and copied the pages of the Booth letters. Returning, she passed the indifferent security guard and took the elevator to the twenty-eighth floor. Two businesses occupied half the floor space each. Lembridge had given her the man's name, Crerar, first name Ronald, describing the businessman as short and swarthy, and “not to be underestimated.” One of the firms on the twenty-eighth was an insurance company and the other, so said the etched letters on the glass door, was Intrepid Regional Investments. She entered this office, marched directly to the receptionist and asked if Mr. Crerar had left for lunch yet.

“I'm sorry,” the honey-haired receptionist said with a smile, “he's just finishing an appointment. Do you want to wait?”

Everything in America felt new to Alida. She reflected on the fact that this was her first encounter with an American woman her age. Alida was eager to please, to gain the feeling of sisterhood, even though she would never see the woman again. She grinned back.

“Thank you. I'll see Mr. Crerar at the restaurant.”

Alida entered the insurance office and pretended to be interested in the promotional material. Five minutes later, a man who had to be Ronald Crerar came out of Intrepid Investments and pushed the button for the elevator. He was short, his hair thinning, but he wasn't swarthy or disagreeable. On the contrary, his expensive clothes and his self-confident way of moving compensated for his lack of height and hair. When she talked to him, she would reassess his charms.

She strolled into the elevator area and stood close to him. He smiled at her.

“These elevators take forever,” he said.

“We call them lifts,” Alida said. “And they do take forever.”

“We're going to have lunch, did you know that?” Crerar said.

His intention was to startle her but Alice knew how to project cool. “All right,” she said matter-of-factly. She introduced herself as Teresa Smith.

They settled into a secluded banquette in an upscale restaurant two streets away. As Alida anticipated, the maître d' was all artificial smiles in Ronald Crerar's presence. She had already surmised that Crerar always got what he wanted and the restaurant was clearly a staging area for his seductions, commercial and otherwise. She reminded herself not to underestimate her target. After all, he had instantly figured out that she was the woman who had mentioned the non-existent lunch date to his receptionist. He had acted to make their date a reality and that gave him an advantage. Besides, Alida was in mild shock at finding herself in such luxury after two days in grubby clothes on an intercity bus. She was nervous, although not so much that her twitch kicked in.

For his part, Crerar was anything but subtle. He turned every conversation back to his business enterprises, which, nonetheless, remained nebulous. At one point, just to force him to take a breath, Alida made up a potted biography about being raised in England and attending business school in Manchester.

Crerar at once burst out: “I went to
LSE
for a year!” She wanted to tell him that the sons of half the dictators in the Middle East and Asia had degrees from the London School of Economics.

The whole interaction stayed coy. “You're in insurance, then?” Crerar ventured. She understood that he was drawing an assumption from her materialization across the hall on the twenty-eighth floor. When he ordered wine, she consented to one small glass (and only that so that he did not think she was a Muslim) and prepared to redirect the conversation.