The Search (2 page)

‘Have you heard of Alexander Malory?’

‘No. Should I have done?’

‘There have been a number of articles in the paper about him.’

‘I don’t read the papers.’

‘Well, he’s disappeared.’

‘A lot of people disappear. Or try to.’

‘Hence the need for trackers.’

‘What’s your interest in him?’

‘I am his wife.’ On cue she removed her sunglasses. As an expression of frankness it was so perfectly executed that Walker suspected it might not be genuine. ‘We’re
separated. That was years ago. He was very generous. Since then, however, certain irregularities in his dealings have come up. The police are interested in him. They don’t yet have a warrant
for him but they will have one soon. There are other people interested in him also. To speak plainly, they want to kill him. It’s possible he is trying to evade them but he moves around a lot
anyway. It’s equally possible he is just off travelling. Earlier I said he had disappeared – in a way he is in a state of constant disappearance.’

‘And?’

‘And I want to find him. For two reasons. If he is simply travelling, I would like to warn him – as I say, our parting was entirely amicable.’ Walker poured more orange into
her glass. ‘The second reason applies wherever or whatever he’s doing. My lawyers have found a loophole in our arrangements. I need him to sign and fingerprint a copy of one of our
contracts.’

‘Fingerprint?’

‘It’s a new legal requirement with certain documents. I don’t know why. But once he’s done that, whatever happens to him, everything comes to me. He has to sign this
before the police get to him. If he dies or is arrested before this document is signed, I lose everything.’

‘Everything you have or everything you have coming to you?’

‘Both.’

Walker had been studying her closely. Now, suddenly aware that she was scrutinizing him, he asked hurriedly, ‘So why me? There are trackers who –’

‘Too unreliable. It’s quite possible that trackers have already been employed to find him – by the people who want to kill him.’

‘But why me?’

‘As I said, you’ve had a more interesting life than you let on. You could do it. You’re not doing anything else. And you’re restless.’

‘How do you know I’m restless?’

‘I meant you’re totally content. Is that better?’

‘Yes, it doesn’t matter,’ Walker said, smiling.

‘I have no idea what it will involve,’ Rachel continued. ‘It’s possible you will find him in a few days. It is equally possible that he has genuinely disappeared and has
camouflaged his tracks – in which case finding him will be more difficult. Either way the important thing is that you find him before anyone else.’

‘So you want me to find him and get him to sign and fingerprint a piece of paper. That’s all?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what if he doesn’t want to sign this new will or contract or whatever?’

‘Then perhaps you mention that there are people who wish to see him dead and who would pay a lot to know his whereabouts. It won’t come to that. Like I said, Alex has always been
generous to me.’

‘And –’ Walker paused ‘– why is this of interest to me?’

‘First, I will pay you a great deal of money. Tell me, how much did you make from finding Orlando Brandon?’

‘Enough.’

‘Whatever you earned for finding Brandon, I will pay double. More than enough, you might say.’

Walker raised his eyebrows as if to say, ‘That’s a very generous offer.’

‘I think it is not the money that will interest you. It is the case itself. You will have very little to go on. It will be a challenge. For example, Alex hated – hates – being
photographed. There is no photograph of him as far as I can discover.’

‘Not even a passport?’

‘He has that with him.’

‘And are trackers already after him?’

‘Impossible to tell.’

‘How long since you heard from him?’

‘Six months.’

Walker was tugging at his right ear-lobe with thumb and forefinger. She pointed at his ear and said, ‘You’ll end up with one ear longer than the other.’

‘What?’

‘Pulling your ear like that.’

‘My father used to do it. It’s a gesture I’ve inherited.’

Their glasses were empty apart from melting ice.

‘Well?’

‘I’ll call you,’ he said, and this time she gave him her number.

The strangeness of her story bothered Walker less than the way it challenged his gathering sense of inertia. He had been drifting for months, uncertain what to do, forming vague plans but
lacking the resolution to see anything through. He was waiting for a decisive moment – a moment that would impel him to make a decision – but no such moment came. Every morning he had
breakfast at the Café Madrid and walked down to the ocean. Every other day he lifted weights. Afternoons he went running along the beach. Evenings he drank. His growing addiction to this
regime of fitness – and the drinking it served to offset – was one of a number of small details that made him postpone any commitment to change. He had so little to do that even minor
chores like going to the bank became major events in his day. The more he pondered things the more restless he became, floundering in a sea of impulses. He had no responsibilities, no obligations,
and so found himself paralysed by choice, waiting to see what came his way. Now something had come his way – a challenge, she had said – and he balked at the prospect, longed instead
for his current life to continue indefinitely and without interruption.

Tracking: he turned the word over in his mind, taking the measure of his feelings. After Brandon’s death he’d sworn – not sworn, to swear not to do something always seemed like
an incitement to do it – he’d resolved not to get involved in anything like that again, especially now, now that it was illegal, dangerous.

Six years previously tracking had been an industry virtually. It started as a response to rewards being offered for information regarding the whereabouts of prominent figures who had gone
missing. One case attracted a lot of publicity when the man claiming the reward called himself a professional tracker. The term caught on and the numbers of people disappearing, it seemed to
Walker, increased in order to keep pace with the growing numbers of people calling themselves trackers. It got to the point where, like lights left on in an empty house, a pile of clothes left on a
beach was taken as a sign not of accidental drowning but of an inadequate attempt to disguise a disappearance. Whenever anyone disappeared there was always somebody who had a vested interest in
finding him or her again. Anyone with a taste for adventure was lured into the idea of tracking; the classified pages of small-town papers always included a few ads from trackers offering their
services. Even the government department responsible for missing persons – Finders to themselves and everyone else – was getting in on the act. A number of officers were alleged to have
located a missing person and then sold the information to a private concern. Finders keepers, it was commonly joked, was the motto of the Missing Persons’ Department. Lured by the prospect of
big money, anyone in the department with ambition and initiative went solo after a few years. The government moved quickly: missing persons, it ruled, had to be investigated by the government
department only. Tracking was illegal without a licence – and a licence became impossible to obtain. The move backfired: putting trackers beyond the law meant that a lot of people living
outside the law got in on tracking. Many trackers had been less than reliable or scrupulous in their methods, but now that they were firmly outside the law their methods became increasingly
ruthless. Like trafficking, tracking became one of the standard activities of the underworld. And this was the world Walker was being lured back into.

The day after Rachel’s visit he walked along the beach, hearing the freeway roar of the ocean, feeling the fling and reach of spray. He picked a curve of brown glass from the sand.
Sea-lions were clowning in the breaking waves. A dog scampered after a chewed husk of ball. Clumps of kelp, driftwood.

Later, when the light was turning hazy, he called her from a telephone on the boardwalk. He had not known what he was going to say when he dialled her number but hearing her voice he decided on
impulse. Yes, he said, he’d do it.

They spent a day together, sitting outside in the first warm sun of the year. Rachel was wearing a pale dress and a cardigan, one button missing. Walker asked her to tell him
everything about Malory, the people he knew, his business contacts, his habits. Whenever he asked for more details she paused and answered his questions patiently. Walker made notes, so intent on
watching her speak that at times he did not hear what she was saying. He drifted, thinking of the happiness that might lie in wait for them. Then he was jolted back to the present. Rachel was
telling him of the allegations of corruption that had come in the wake of Malory’s winning a huge bridge-building contract.

‘You didn’t hear about it?’

‘No. Sorry. Like I said, I never read papers.’

‘Television?’ ‘Only sport.’ ‘Not films even?’ ‘Not really.’ ‘Alex –’ ‘If I find him,’ Walker interrupted, ‘you
just want me to get those documents signed?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t want me to bring him back?’

‘I think you’re not being quite honest again, Mr Walker.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think you do watch films. Old ones. And no, all I want are the documents.’

‘Did he have affairs?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You mean if he did you don’t know?’

‘I don’t see the distinction.’

‘What about you?’

‘What about me?’

‘Did you? Have affairs?’

‘No.’ Then, business-like again, she said, ‘Shall I go on?’ Walker crossed his legs, preparing to resume his note-taking.

That evening he cooked dinner for them both. They ate outside, drank wine. He lent Rachel a sweater, which she draped around her shoulders. Earlier in the day he had seen her
handwriting for the first time. Now, for the first time, he was watching her eat. Seeing things for the first time. Relationships last for as long as there are still things to see for the first
time. Walker thought of the future when they would look back to the moment they first saw each other. She was eating lettuce with her fingers. A drop of dressing glistened on her lips. She dabbed
her mouth with a napkin, blue. Her mouth.

They took the plates inside. Walker made coffee. Rachel had her back against the wall. She had discarded his sweater. He moved over to her, leant one hand against the wall, level with her
shoulder. She took a dark gulp of wine, aware of his arm like the low branch of a tree she would have to duck under. Sleeves rolled above his elbows, veins in his forearm.

‘That’s a lovely dress,’ he said.

‘You like it?’

‘Yes.’ He moved his other arm so that it too was pressed against the wall on the other side of her shoulders and she was enclosed by the cage of his body, the hoop of his arms. The
movement brought his face lower, a few inches closer to hers. Their lips were almost touching.

‘You know what kind of dress that is?’

‘The kind you can buy anywhere.’

‘It’s the kind of dress I want to put my hand up.’

She pressed back against the wall. Their hearts were beating faster.

‘You know what kind of line that is?’

‘No.’

‘I think you do.’

‘And that’s not all,’ said Walker. ‘There’s something else.’

‘What?’ The air felt heavy around them.

‘It’s the kind of dress . . .’ Walker said, freeing the words from the coarseness in his throat, ‘the kind of dress I want to pull up over your hips. the kind of dress
where you raise your arms and I pull it over your head.’

‘To do that the zip would have to be undone.’ Walker moved one hand from the wall to her legs, below the hem of her dress.

‘After the zip was undone, then I would pull it over your head. Then –’

‘And then I would undo the buttons of your shirt, your belt.’

Walker moved his hand up between her thighs, feeling her skin become softer and softer until it attained that softness that can never be remembered because it is impossible to imagine anything
so soft, because there is nothing to compare it with, to store it alongside. Their lips touched for a moment. Then Walker felt her hand on his wrist, pushing it away from between her legs.

‘No,’ she said, ducking beneath his other arm, smoothing down her dress. In prison he had heard stories like this many times, stories that ended in rape and hate. Walker took up the
position Rachel had occupied, leaning back against the wall, his hands hanging by his side. She came towards him, kissed him on the lips.

‘You understand?’ she said.

‘No, yes. No.’

‘But you understand?’

‘No,’ he said.

Malory lived – ‘as far as he lives anywhere’ – in a beach house a couple of hundred miles up the coast. Rachel gave Walker a set of keys and he drove
there the next day. A storm was building, the sun flinching in and out of clouds. The house was sparse and expensive, built mainly out of windows. Rugs on wood floors, white walls.

Despite everything Rachel had told him it was difficult to form an impression of Malory from the evidence of his home. There was furniture, a few records, books – not enough of either to
suggest any passion for music or reading. There were a few pictures on the walls, none of which he paid much attention to – except for a framed Victorian photograph. It was of a man sitting
in a chair, wearing a heavy sepia suit, eyeglasses. Walker wondered who it was and moved closer to read the small caption in the right-hand corner: ‘Unknown Self-portrait’. Walker
stepped back and gazed at the face of this strange ghost, captivated by the closed logic of the picture. Who was he? A man who looked like this . . . But who was he?

Walker moved away from the sad old photograph and went round the rest of the house. It was a place dominated by the absence of everything except light and places to sit or move around. In the
study he went through Malory’s files and desk. Rachel had said that if he was away his secretary came in once a week to take care of all his personal affairs, and in a desk drawer he found
credit card statements and bills. From these he was able to trace his movements up until three months ago; since then there was nothing. The last payment was to a car rental firm in Durban. Walker
made a note of the company’s name and went round the house once more. No flowers or ornaments, only the vista windows looking out over the ocean heaving silently.