I Am God

by Giorgio Faletti

  CHAPTER 8

  Vivien Light parked her Volvo XC60, switched off the engine, and waited a moment for the world to catch up with her. All through the journey back from Cresskill, she had had the feeling of being out of sync, of moving in a parallel dimension of her own, where she was faster than everything else. As if leaving in her wake a trail composed of fragments of the past, rapid splinters of coloured time, as visible as the tail of a comet by the cars, houses and people that flashed on the screens of her car windows.

  The same thing happened every time she went up to see her sister.

  She always felt hope when she set out. There was no reason for it, which made it all the stronger – and made her disappointment all the stronger when she found her sister the same as ever. Still a beautiful woman, as if the months and years were absurdly compensating her by having no effect on her face, but with eyes like blue spots staring into an emptiness that grew more all-encompassing as her illness developed.

  That was why the journey back was a kind of leap into hyperspace, from which she emerged somewhere in the middle of reality.

  She turned the rear-view mirror so that she could see herself. It wasn’t vanity. She just wanted to recognize herself, to make sure she was normal again. She saw the face of a young woman some people had called beautiful and others had brushed past as if she didn’t exist. The approval, as always happens, was invariably in inverse proportion to her own interest in that person.

  She had short brown hair, rarely smiled, never folded her arms, and only allowed physical contact when she couldn’t avoid it. In her clear eyes there seemed to be a constant hint of sternness. And in the glove compartment of her car there was a Glock 23 pistol.

  If she had been a normal woman, her approach to life might have been different. So might her appearance. But her hair was short to prevent anyone from grabbing it during a fight, her stern expression told other people to keep their distance, folding her arms could denote insecurity, and touching someone helped to create a sense of safety and trust, useful if you wanted that person to come clean. And the reason she had a pistol was because she was Detective Vivien Light of the New York Police Department, working out of the 13th Precinct on 21st Street. The entrance to her place of work was just behind her, and she would only have to get out of the car and take those few steps to be transformed from a troubled woman into a police officer.

  She leaned forward to take the pistol from the glove compartment, slipped it into her jacket pocket and came back to earth.

  In the side mirror she saw two uniformed officers come out of the precinct house through the glass-fronted main door, descend the steps, get into a car and drive off at speed, lights flashing and siren wailing. They were answering a call, one of the many they received every day: an emergency, someone in need, a crime. Every day in this city, men, women and children walked in the midst of danger, unable to predict when it would strike, unable to fight it.

  That was what they were there for.

  Courtesy.

  Professionalism.

  Respect.

  That was written on the doors of the police cars. Unfortunately, courtesy, professionalism and respect weren’t always enough to protect all those people from the violence and madness of mankind. Sometimes, in order to fight it, police officers had to allow a little of that madness into themselves. The difficult part was that they had to be aware of it and keep it on a tight leash. That was the difference between them and the people whose violence they were sometimes obliged to meet with violence. And that was why she wore her hair short, rarely smiled, and had a shield in her pocket and a pistol on her belt.

  For no particular reason, she thought of an old Indian fable she had once told Sundance, about an old Cherokee sitting watching the sunset with his grandson.

  ‘Grandfather, why do men fight?’

  The old man, his eyes turned to the setting sun as the day lost its battle with night, spoke in a calm voice.

  ‘Every man, sooner or later, is called to do so. For every man there’s always a battle waiting to be fought, to win or lose. Because the fiercest clash is the one between the two wolves.’

  ‘What wolves, grandfather?’

  ‘The wolves every man carries inside himself.’

  The boy didn’t understand. He waited for his grandfather to break the silence he had let fall between them, maybe to arouse his curiosity. Finally, the old man, who had the wisdom of time inside him, resumed in his calm tone, ‘There are two wolves in each of us. One is bad and lives a life of hate, jealousy, envy, rancour, false pride, lies, and selfishness.’

  The old man paused again, this time to allow him to absorb what he had just said.

  ‘And the other?’

  ‘The other is the good wolf. He lives a life of peace, love, hope, generosity, compassion, humility and faith.’

  The child thought for a moment about what his grandfather had just told him. Then he expressed what was especially on his mind.

  ‘And which wolf wins?’

  The old Cherokee turned to look at him and replied, clear-eyed, ‘The one we feed more.’

  Vivien opened the door and got out of the car. As soon as she turned on her cellphone, it started ringing.

  She lifted it to her ear and instinctively replied as if she was sitting at her desk. ‘Detective Light.’

  ‘Bellew here. Where are you?’

  ‘Just outside. I’m coming in.’

  ‘I’ll go down. Let’s meet in the lobby.’

  Vivien climbed the steps, opened the glass-fronted door, and was inside the building.

  A black man with his hands cuffed behind his back stood in front of the desk, with a uniformed officer beside him holding him by one arm. One of the officers behind the desk was taking down the details of his arrest.

  As Vivien entered, she returned the officer’s wave. She turned right and found herself in a large room, painted a nondescript colour, with rows of chairs in the middle and a whiteboard on the wall facing them. Another whiteboard stood on an easel next to a raised desk. This was the room where the officers on duty gathered for roll call, to be given the rundown on the current operations and assigned their tasks for the day.

  Captain Alan Bellew, her immediate superior, came in through another door facing the entrance. Seeing her, he came towards her with that rapid walk of his that gave an impression of physical vigour. He was a tall, highly capable man who loved his work and was good at it.

  He knew all about Vivien’s difficult love life. In spite of that, and her youth, her unquestionable qualities in the job had led him to hold her in high regard. A relationship of mutual respect had sprung up between them, and whenever they had worked together they’d always achieved excellent results. One of Vivien’s colleagues had once called her ‘the captain’s pet’, but when Bellew had found out about it he had taken the officer aside and given him a little talk. Nobody knew what he had said, but from that moment on all comments had ceased.

  Coming level with her, he did what he always did: he came straight to the point.

  ‘A call just came in. We have a homicide. The body’s apparently years old. They found it on a construction site during demolition. It was inside a wall between two basements.’ He paused, just long enough to give her time to focus on the situation. ‘I’d like you to handle it.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  Bellew made a vague gesture with his head. ‘Two blocks from here, on 23rd and Third. The crime scene team should be there by now. The ME’s on his way, too. I already sent Bowman and Salinas to keep an eye on things until you get there.’

  ‘Isn’t this something for Cold Case?’

  Cold Case was the squad that dealt with long-unsolved homicides. From what the captain had said, this sounded completely like their thing.

  ‘We’re handling it for now. Later, we can consider if it’s appropriate to transfer it to them.’

  Vivien knew Captain Alan Bellew regarded the 13th Precinct as his personal territory and
didn’t like anyone who didn’t work directly for him muscling in.

  Vivien nodded. ‘Okay. I’ll get right on it.’

  Just then, two men came through a door to the right of the desk. One was older, with grey hair and a tanned face.

  Sailing, maybe, or golf.

  Or maybe both, Vivien thought.

  His dark suit, leather briefcase and serious demeanour were like a sign around his neck, marked Lawyer.

  The other man was younger, about thirty-five. He was wearing dark glasses, and there was several days’ growth of beard on his drawn face. His clothes, distinctly more casual than his companion’s, bore traces of the night he had spent in a cell. That wasn’t the only thing he bore traces of: he had a cut on his lip and the left shoulder seam of his jacket was torn.

  The two men went out without looking around. Vivien and Bellew watched them until they disappeared beyond the swaying of the glass-fronted door.

  The captain gave a half smile. ‘We had a celebrity guest in the Plaza last night.’

  Vivien knew what that meant. Upstairs in the squad room, along with the detectives’ desks, which were so close together they made the place look like an office furniture showroom, there was a cell. This was where the arrested were kept, sometimes for a whole night, waiting to be either freed on bail or transferred to the jail in Chinatown. With a sense of irony, given how uncomfortable the long wooden bunks fixed to the walls were, they had dubbed it the Plaza.

  ‘Who is that guy?’

  ‘Russell Wade.’

  ‘The Russell Wade? Who won the Pulitzer at the age of twenty-five? And had it taken away from him three months later?’

  The captain nodded, the smile fading abruptly from his lips. ‘Yeah, that’s the guy.’

  Vivien knew when there was a touch of bitterness in her chief’s voice. And few things made him more bitter than when people deliberately, almost complacently, destroyed themselves. For reasons of her own, it was a situation she was familiar with.

  ‘We picked him up last night in a raid on a gambling joint, blind drunk and resisting arrest. I think he caught a punch from Tyler.’

  Bellew immediately filed that brief parenthesis away among the closed files and came back to the matter in hand.

  ‘No offence to the living, but I think you have a dead man to deal with. He’s been waiting a long time – best not to keep him waiting any longer.’

  ‘I think he has every right.’

  Bellew left her. Vivien went outside again, into the mild air of that late spring afternoon. She descended the short flight of steps, and as she did so she had a fleeting vision of Russell Wade and his lawyer disappearing into a chauffeured limousine, over to her right. The car pulled away from the curb and glided past. The guest who had spent a night in the Plaza had now taken off his dark glasses, and their eyes met through the open window. For a moment, Vivien found herself looking into two intense dark eyes and was astonished by the immense sadness she saw in them. Then the car was past her and that face disappeared behind the screen of the electrically operated window.

  The site where they had found the body was so close, it was easier to get there on foot. And in the meantime she was already processing the small amount of information she had in her possession. A construction site was often an ideal place to get rid of an unwanted person for ever. This wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last. A murder, a body buried in concrete, an old story of violence and madness.

  Which wolf wins?

  Those wolves had been battling it out since the dawn of time. Over the centuries, there had always been some who had fed the wrong wolf. Vivien walked on, feeling the unavoidable excitement she always felt on the verge of a new case. Along with the awareness that, whether she solved it or not, everyone would – as they always did – end up defeated.

  CHAPTER 9

  To get to the construction site, she had walked up Third Avenue.

  She had to emerge from that anonymity that had allowed her to merge into the humanity around her and assume a very specific role. The arrival of a detective on a crime scene was always a special moment, like a curtain rising on an actor. Nobody ever moved a finger before the person in charge of the investigation arrived. She knew the kind of things she was going to feel. And she knew that, as always, she’d have been happy to do without those feelings. The place where a murder had been committed, whether recently or some time in the past, had a certain grisly fascination. Some murder scenes even became tourist attractions. For her, a murder scene was a place where she had to put her emotions to one side and concentrate on her job. Whatever theories she might have constructed in her head during her brief walk were about to be put to the test.

  Bowman and Salinas, the two officers sent by Bellew, were nowhere to be seen. They must be inside, putting yellow tape around the area where the body had been found.

  The workers had gathered outside the door of one of the huts at one end of the site. Standing slightly apart from them were two other men, a large black man and a white man in a blue cotton work jacket. Everyone seemed extremely nervous. Vivien could understand how they felt. It isn’t every day you knock down a wall and find a corpse.

  She approached the two men and flashed her shield. ‘Hi, I think you’re expecting me. I’m Detective Vivien Light.’

  If they were surprised to see her arrive on foot, they didn’t show it. Their relief that she was here, that they finally had someone they could talk to, overcame any other consideration.

  The white man spoke for both of them. ‘I’m Jeremy Cortese, the site supervisor. And this is my deputy, Ron Freeman.’

  Vivien, sure that the two men couldn’t wait to get started, came straight to the point. ‘Who found the body?’

  Cortese indicated the group of workers behind them. ‘Jeff Sefakias over there. He was knocking down a wall and—’

  Vivien interrupted him. ‘OK. I’ll talk to him later. Right now I’d like to take a look at the scene.’

  Cortese took a step towards the site entrance. ‘This way. I’ll take you.’

  Freeman didn’t move. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather not see that … that thing again.’

  Vivien made an effort to suppress a sympathetic smile. She was afraid that it might be misunderstood, that the man might think she was making fun of him. There was no reason to humiliate someone she instinctively sensed was a good person. Not for the first time, Vivien reflected on how difficult it was to guess a person’s character from his body. The man’s huge frame would have struck fear into anyone, and yet he was the one upset by the sight of the corpse.

  Just then, a large dark sedan pulled up close to the barriers. The driver quickly got out and opened the door for the passenger in the back seat. A woman emerged from the car. She was tall and blond and must once have been beautiful. Now she was only an advertisement for the futile battle some women waged against the indifference of time. Even though her clothes were casual, they all had designer labels. She reeked of Saks Fifth Avenue, massage sessions at exclusive spas, French perfume, and snobbery. Without so much as a glance at Vivien, she addressed Cortese directly.

  ‘Jeremy, what’s going on here?’

  ‘As I told you on the phone, we found a man’s body while we were digging.’

  ‘Well, I understand that, but we can’t stop work because of it. Do you have any idea how much this site is costing the company per day?’

  Cortese shrugged and made an instinctive gesture with his hands in Vivien’s direction. ‘We were waiting for the police to get here.’

  It was only then that the woman seemed to notice her presence. She looked her up and down, with an expression Vivien decided wasn’t worth the effort of deciphering. Whatever test she was subjecting her to – clothes, looks or age – she knew she hadn’t passed it.

  ‘Officer, I hope we can resolve this regrettable incident as soon as possible.’

  Vivien tilted her head slightly to one side and smiled. ‘And who do I have the pleasur
e of …?’

  ‘Elisabeth Brokens,’ the woman said in a self-important tone. ‘My husband is Charles Brokens, the owner of the company.’

  ‘Well, Mrs Brokens, what I might define as a regrettable incident is the nose your plastic surgeon stuck on your face, for instance. What happened here is something the rest of the world insists on calling homicide. And as I’m sure you know, that’s something that tends to be of great interest to the law. Which, if you don’t mind my saying so, has priority over your company’s balance sheet.’ She stopped smiling and abruptly changed her tone. ‘And if you don’t get out of my way I’ll have you arrested for obstructing an investigation by the New York Police Department.’

  ‘How dare you? My husband is a personal friend of the commissioner and—’

  ‘Then I suggest you complain to him, Mrs Brokens. And let me get on with my job.’

  She turned her back on the woman, and left her standing there like a block of marble, plotting some retaliation or other. She headed for the opening that she assumed to be the site entrance.

  Jeremy Cortese fell into step beside her. There was an incredulous but blissful look on his face. ‘Lady, if you ever have a site that needs supervising, I’d be happy to offer my services for free. Mrs Brokens’ face after your little speech is going to be one of the happiest memories of my life.’

  But Vivien barely heard him, her mind already elsewhere. As they crossed the threshold, she took in the situation at a single glance. Just beyond where they were now, marked out by a protection fence, was a hole in the ground that covered about three quarters of the area of the whole site and was as deep as a cellar. The bottom of the hole was the floor of the two different buildings, divided down the middle by a line. On the other side, part of the street level floor still had to be demolished, but most of the work had been done. At the bottom, the two officers were just finishing cordoning off an area in the left-hand corner. A worker was leaning against a wall behind them, waiting.