I Am God

by Giorgio Faletti

  CHAPTER 29

  When the alarm went off, Vivien did not open her eyes immediately.

  She lay in bed, enjoying the touch of the sheets on her body, lethargic after a night of intermittent sleep and no rest. Shifting a little, she realized that she was lying diagonally across the bed, a sign that the restlessness that had made her change position a hundred times in her half-waking state had continued even after she had fallen asleep. She reached out a hand to switch off the alarm. It was nine o’clock. She stretched and took a deep breath. The pillow next to her still bore traces of Russell’s smell.

  She allowed herself a glance into the half-lit, familiar landscape of her bedroom. The next stage of the investigation was out of her hands for now, and Bellew had allowed her a night off. She had smiled at those words. As if taking time off was possible, with the cellphone on the night table next to her that could ring at any moment, bringing news that would make her hide her head under the blankets and wish she could wake up a thousand years and a thousand miles away.

  She got out of bed, put on a soft terrycloth bathrobe, picked up the phone and walked barefoot to the kitchen, where she started making coffee. This morning, contrary to habit, she was in no mood for breakfast. The very idea of food turned her stomach. And to think that the last time she’d eaten had been with Russell at the stand in Madison Square Park!

  Russell …

  As she put the filter in the machine, she felt a momentary anger. With all that she was going through, with a madman somewhere out there threatening to blow up half the city, with Greta lying on a bed in a clinic in a desperate condition, it didn’t seem either possible or fair that there could still be room in her brain to think of that man.

  Last night, after they got back from Hornell, he had come to the apartment with her, taken his things and left. He hadn’t asked to stay, and she knew that if she’d suggested it, he would have refused.

  Standing in the doorway on his way out, he had turned to look at her with a mixture of sadness and determination in his dark eyes. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow morning.’

  ‘OK.’

  She had stood there for a few moments looking at the closed door.

  She poured coffee into a cup. However many sugars she added, she knew it would always be too bitter.

  She told herself that what had happened was the kind of thing that happened many times in life. Too many times, maybe. It had been a night full of the only kind of love that time did not cover with frost, the kind that blazed into life at night only to fade with the sun the following morning. That was how he had taken it and that was how she had to take it, too.

  But if that’s the price I have to pay to have you, I gladly accept …

  ‘Go fuck yourself, Russell Wade,’ she said out loud, and continued standing there, leaning on the counter, drinking coffee she didn’t really want. She forced herself to think of something else.

  At Hornell Municipal Airport, just before the helicopter lifted off to take them back to New York, she had called the captain to update him on the bad news. After she had told him what had happened, a brief silence at the other end had told her that Bellew was trying to hold back a curse.

  ‘So we’re back to square one.’

  Vivien had not admitted defeat. ‘There’s still one lead we can pursue.’

  ‘Go on.’ There was a slight hint of mistrust in the captain’s voice.

  ‘We have to go back to the period of the Vietnam war. We absolutely need to find out what happened to the real Wendell Johnson and this other kid nicknamed Little Boss. It’s the only angle we have.’

  ‘I’ll call the commissioner. At this hour I don’t think it’s possible to do anything, but I’ll start the ball rolling first thing tomorrow morning.’

  ‘OK.’

  The reply had been drowned by the blades as they started to churn up the air. She and Russell had got into the helicopter, and for the whole journey there had been no sound strong enough to break their silence.

  The telephone next to her rang. As if her thoughts had called him up, Bellew’s appeared on the display.

  ‘Vivien here.’

  ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘I’m still alive. Any news?’

  ‘Yes. And it isn’t good.’

  She waited in silence for the cold shower to hit her.

  ‘Willard contacted the army early this morning. The name Wendell Johnson is classified. There’s no way to access his files.’

  Vivien felt anger clutch her stomach. ‘They’re crazy. In a case like this—’

  ‘I know,’ Bellew interrupted her. ‘But you’re forgetting two things. The first is that we can’t tell them what we’re working on. The second is that even if we could, it’s too flimsy a lead to break through that wall. The commissioner has asked the mayor to intervene. Maybe Gollemberg can approach the president. But there are procedures to go through that take time, even for the most important man in America. And if Russell is right, time is the very thing we don’t have.’

  ‘It’s crazy. All those people dead …’

  She left the sentence unfinished, with a powerful implied reference to those who might still die.

  ‘I agree. But there’s nothing we can do for now.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘One small thing you might be pleased to hear. The DNA test has proved that the man in the wall really is Mitch Sparrow. You were right.’

  At any other moment, that would have been a great success. A victim identified and his killer already punished. Now it was only a source of pitiful pride and no consolation at all.

  Vivien had tried to react against her sense of discouragement. There was one thing she could do, in the meantime. ‘I want to take a look at … that man’s apartment.’

  She had been about to say Wendell Johnson’s apartment but had realized that the name no longer applied. He wasn’t Wendell Johnson any more – he was the Phantom of the Site.

  ‘I told them not to touch anything, because I knew you’d want to do that. I’ll send an officer to wait for you with the keys.’

  ‘Great. I’ll head out right now.’

  ‘There’s one strange thing. In the whole apartment there are almost no fingerprints. And the few there are certainly don’t match the prints of Wendell Johnson that Captain Caldwell sent me.’

  ‘Does that mean he wiped them?’

  ‘Maybe. Or it could mean our man didn’t have any prints. Probably wiped out when he got those burns.’

  A phantom.

  No name, no face, no prints.

  A man who, even after death, didn’t accept an identity. Vivien wondered what kind of things the creature had experienced, what sufferings he had endured, to become what he had become. She wondered how long he had cursed the society around him, the society that had taken his life away from him and given him nothing in return. Exactly how he had cursed it they already knew. Dozens of deaths had demonstrated that.

  ‘OK. I’m heading out.’

  ‘Keep in touch.’

  Vivien hung up and put the phone in the pocket of her bathrobe. She rinsed the cup in the sink and put it in the rack to dry. She went in the bathroom and turned on the shower. After a moment or two, enjoying the warm water on her naked body, she couldn’t help thinking that this case verged on the grotesque. Not because of how elusive the solution remained, but because of the way fate kept presenting absurd new escape routes, the way the truth kept finding unexpected hiding places for itself.

  She got out of the shower, dried herself and put on clean clothes. As she put yesterday’s clothes in the laundry basket, she seemed to smell the scent of disappointment, which in her imagination was like the smell of dead flowers.

  When she was ready, she picked up the telephone and called Russell.

  An impersonal voice told her that his telephone was off, or unobtainable.

  Strange.

  It seemed impossible that he could be so negligent, given his eagerness to follow the case, the op
portunity it was providing him, and the insight he had demonstrated during the investigation. Maybe he was still asleep. People accustomed to an easy life developed the ability to sleep on command, and for an excessive length of time, just as they managed to stay awake longer than most.

  Well, it’s his loss …

  She would search the apartment on her own. That was how she usually worked, and in her opinion it was still the best way.

  When she reached her car, she found Russell standing next to it.

  He had his back to her. She saw that he, too, had changed: his clothes had the smell clothes get when they have been in a bag for too long. He was looking at the river, where a barge was moving slowly upstream, drawn by a tugboat. It was like an image of victory against adverse fate, an image it was difficult to share right now.

  Hearing footsteps behind him, Russell turned. ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi. Have you been here long?’

  ‘A while.’

  Vivien pointed to the front door of her building. ‘You could have come up.’

  ‘I didn’t want to bother you.’

  What he really meant, Vivien thought, was that he hadn’t wanted to be alone with her. But it made no difference.

  ‘I called you and your telephone was off. I thought you’d thrown in the towel.’

  ‘I couldn’t do that. For a whole lot of reasons.’

  Vivien decided not to ask what they were.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he asked as she started the engine.

  ‘One-forty Broadway, Brooklyn. Where the Phantom of the Site lived.’

  They turned onto West Street, heading south. Before too long they had left the entrance to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel behind them and were heading for F.D. Roosevelt Drive. As they proceeded, Vivien updated Russell on what Bellew had told her: that Wendell Johnson’s story was classified and that it wouldn’t be easy to get around that fact in a short time. He listened in silence, with his usual intent expression, as if pursuing an idea he didn’t see fit to express. In the meantime they had started across the Williamsburg Bridge and the water of the East River glittered beneath them, barely ruffled by a light wind. At the end of the bridge they turned right onto Broadway and soon found themselves in front of the building they were looking for.

  It was an apartment block, with the same kind of down-at-heel look as the hundreds of anonymous hives that housed equally anonymous people in this city. It was in places like this that people lived for years without leaving any trace of their presence and sometimes died without anyone thinking to look for them for days.

  Outside the front door, which had the number 140 on it, a patrol car was waiting. Vivien parked just opposite. Officer Salinas got out of the patrol car and came towards them.

  He didn’t deign to look at Russell. By now, that appeared to have become the official attitude of the 13th Precinct to him. Even the friendly attitude Salinas had always shown him seemed to have vanished.

  ‘Hi, Vivien,’ he said, handing her a bunch of keys. ‘The captain told me to give you these.’

  ‘Perfect.’

  ‘It’s Apartment 418B. Do you want me to go up with you?’

  ‘No sweat. We can manage.’

  The officer did not insist, pleased to get away from the place and the company. As they watched the patrol car drive off, she was surprised by Russell saying, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘That officer asked if he could go up with you. It was obvious he meant only you. When you replied you said “we”, meaning me, too. I’m grateful to you.’

  Vivien realized she had got so used to having him with her that she had answered like that unconsciously. But she was obliged to consider her own thoughtfulness. ‘For better or worse,’ she said, ‘we’re a team.’

  Russell accepted the definition with a half-smile. ‘I don’t think it’s making you too many friends in the precinct.’

  ‘It’ll pass.’

  They waited for the elevator in a lobby that smelled of men and cats. The elevator’s arrival was signalled by some incomprehensible squeaks and creaks. They went up to the fourth floor and immediately located the apartment, sealed by a couple of yellow ribbons.

  Vivien removed them and turned the key in the lock.

  No sooner had they opened the door than they were hit by that desolate feeling you get in places that have been uninhabited for a while. The door led straight into a room that doubled as kitchen and living room. It was obvious at a glance that this was the apartment of a man who had lived alone. Alone and without any interest in the world. To the right, there was a kitchen corner and a refrigerator next to a table with one chair. Opposite the oven, next to the window, an armchair and an old TV set on a shabby little table. Over everything, a thin layer of dust bearing traces of the police search the previous day.

  They entered the apartment as if entering a temple of evil, holding their breaths. For years a man had lived within these walls.

  Now that they had reached a point where they had an inkling of his story, they knew the true extent of the resentment that, day after day, had nourished his madness.

  He had chosen to kill people under the illusion that in doing so he was destroying his own memories.

  They took a quick look around the bare room, which was devoid of any object that was not strictly utilitarian. No paintings, no ornaments, no concessions to personal taste, unless that very absence could be considered a kind of personal taste. Next to the refrigerator was the only trace of normal life and humanity in the room. A shelf filled with aromatic essences, a sign that the man who had lived here had cooked for himself.

  They concluded their visit of the tiny apartment in the adjoining room. Against the wall to the right of the door was a closet, and opposite it was a single bed pushed almost up against the wall. To the right of the bed, dividing it from the wall, a night table and a grim-looking lamp. To the left was a rack with two parallel shelves. The upper shelf was the height of a normal table, the lower one some twenty inches from the floor. In this room was only the second chair in the whole apartment, an old office armchair on wheels, which looked so shabby it might have been acquired from a junkyard rather than bought. The walls were bare, apart from a large map of the city hanging on the wall above the rack.

  There were some objects on the lower shelf. Mostly books. A few magazines. A pack of cards that made them think of endless games of solitaire. And a big grey cardboard folder containing sheets of paper.

  Vivien went closer.

  If this was where he prepared his devices, then any tools or other things that could be analysed would already have been taken away by the team that had searched the apartment the previous day. But the captain had assured them that everything had been left intact, which made it likely that they hadn’t found anything.

  She bent down and looked at some of the books. A Bible. A cookery book. A thriller by Jeffery Deaver. A tourist guide to New York.

  She picked up the folder and placed it on the upper shelf. When she opened it, she found it full of drawings. Oddly, none of them were on normal paper. They had all been executed on stiff sheets of transparent plastic, as if the artist had wanted to express his originality, not only through his talent but also through the medium he had used.

  She started looking at the drawings, one by one.

  It soon became clear that the medium was the only original thing about them, because, even to an untrained eye, the drawings revealed no artistic talent at all. The composition was approximate, the line wavering, and the use of colour lacked both taste and technique. The person who had lived in this apartment seemed to have been obsessed with constellations. Each drawing was of a different constellation, but according to a map of the stars unknown to anyone but the artist.

  Constellation of Beauty, Constellation of Karen, Constellation of the End, Constellation of Wrath …

  A series of points joined by different-coloured lines. Sometimes stars, drawn in a childlike hand, sometimes circles,
sometimes crosses, sometimes just tangled brush strokes. Russell, who had held back until now, came closer to see what Vivien was looking at.

  He allowed himself a judgement she couldn’t help but share. ‘Horrible, aren’t they?’

  She was just about to agree when her cellphone started ringing. She put a hand in her pocket, planning to turn it off without even looking to see who was calling her. But then she took it out reluctantly and looked at it, afraid that she would see the number of the Mariposa clinic on the display.

  Instead, it showed the name of Father McKean.

  ‘Hello.’

  She heard his voice, familiar but oddly different. It sounded tense, almost frightened, without any trace of the energy it usually conveyed. ‘Vivien, it’s Michael.’

  ‘Hi. What is it?’

  ‘I need to see you, Vivien. As soon as possible, and alone.’

  ‘Michael, I’m tremendously busy right now, I can’t—’

  ‘It’s a matter of life and death, Vivien,’ he said as if he had rehearsed these words to himself many times. ‘Not mine but that of many people.’

  A moment’s hesitation. A moment that, to judge by his next words, must have seemed endless to him. ‘It’s to do with those explosions, may God forgive me.’

  ‘The explosions? What’s your connection with the explosions?’

  ‘Come quickly, I beg you.’

  Father McKean hung up. Vivien stood there in the middle of the room, in the square of sunlight cast on the floor from the window. She realized that while she had been on the telephone, as often happened when she was engrossed, she had moved, so that she was now back in the living room.

  Russell had followed her and had stopped in the doorway to the bedroom.

  She looked at him. She wasn’t sure what to say. Michael had asked to speak with her alone. Taking Russell with her might mean annoying Michael and perhaps inhibiting him from saying what he had to say. At the same time, it meant confessing that her niece was in a community for drug addicts, and that was something she couldn’t deal with right now.