by Mark Lee
Kneeling on the bathroom floor, I pushed the paper into the developer and the photographs appeared. The pictures were small, the size of the film itself and I took one of my lenses and turned it over to magnify the images. I saw Daniel and Julia standing at the front door of the Canal House, Daniel working in the kitchen, the two of them together, sitting on the couch, his arm on her shoulder as they looked at my camera. I stared at Daniel’s face, looking for an answer. Had he known that he was going to die in East Timor? Was there a hint of sadness, a deeper knowledge, in his smile?
I HID IN MY ROOM for two days, then finally called the Riverside Bank. Some people think that power is revealed by the number of layers protecting you from the outside world. By that standard, Richard Seaton was a very powerful man. I had to talk to a series of receptionists, secretaries, and special assistants until Richard’s voice finally came on the line.
“Nicky! Glad you called. We lost track of you after you left Dili.”
“Where’s Julia?”
“In Bracciano.” Richard said. “Staying there just brings back a lot of bad memories. I’m flying to Italy this weekend in the jet. Maybe you could come along with me. We need to talk her into returning to England and resting. For a long time.”
“Maybe she doesn’t want to leave.”
“Yes. That’s why I need your help, Nicky. Where are you?”
“In London, at the Ruskin. Maybe we could meet later on this morning.”
“Of course. Right away. Let me send a car over.”
“It’s not necessary. I’d rather walk.”
“Whatever you want. Pick a time and I’ll be here.”
He gave me the address of his office and I said I’d drop by in two hours. Sitting on the edge of my unmade bed, I ate a candy bar and wondered what I was going to say. The only real decision I’d made was not to bring along my camera.
The Riverside Bank, Ltd., was in a large office building near the Strand. A security guard wearing a blue blazer was sitting in the central foyer. When I gave him my name, he picked up his phone and dialed a number. Another guard appeared and escorted me to the twenty-third floor where an older woman with a clipboard was waiting. Modern art decorated the office, geometric shapes on white canvas that were easy on the eyes. My guide escorted me past several determined-looking people staring at computer screens, pushed open a burnished steel door, and told me that Mr. Seaton was waiting.
The office was immense, four times bigger than the breakfast room at the Ruskin. It had glass walls on three sides and a spectacular view of the River Thames. Richard was sitting at a massive desk that looked like it had been molded out of concrete. He was looking at two different computer screens and typing on a keyboard. There was a phone on his desk with lots of buttons and a framed photograph of Julia standing on the tennis court at Westgate Castle.
“Nicky!” He jumped out of his chair and gave me a hug. I felt his hand pat me on the back a few times as if I was on his team and we had just lost a game.
“It’s wonderful to see you again. I still can’t believe all this happened. Daniel’s death is such a loss.”
“A big loss.” I said. My voice was all wrong, cracking a little, not confident.
“Please. Sit down,” he said and led me over to a conversation area. Framed photographs were on the wall: Richard talking to two American presidents, the prime minister of Britain, and the Dalai Lama.
“Can I get you anything? Coffee? Tea? Or maybe something a bit stronger? Anything you want.”
“That’s okay.” I sat down on a black leather couch. He took a heavily upholstered chair. Magazines were on the coffee table—some going back several years—but all of them had Richard’s face on the cover.
“What happened after Billy left East Timor?”
“We buried Daniel in a cemetery. A lot of people came to the funeral.”
“Is there a gravestone?”
“Just a wooden cross.”
A pad of paper lay on the coffee table. Richard picked up a silver fountain pen and scribbled a note. “I’ll get a memorial stone carved here in London and have it shipped to the cemetery. We can just put his name on it—or anything else you want.”
“That’s a wonderful thing to do for the man you killed.”
The words just came out of my mouth. I didn’t even think about them. I felt like a little kid who had just leaped into the deep end of the pool. Now I had to start kicking or I was going to drown.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I talked to Pak, that old man on the Seria. He said you paid him to fake an engine breakdown.”
Richard looked like a cyclist who had been rolling down a smooth boulevard when suddenly the pavement disappeared. “That’s insane,” he sputtered. “Completely untrue.”
“I know what happened.”
“Calm down, Nicky. Just calm down. Daniel was your closest friend. His death must have been an enormous shock.”
“I don’t know how you can justify killing another person, but I’m sure you have an explanation. Maybe you tell yourself that everything was crazy in Timor and now you’re back in London and everything’s normal again. People do that a lot, Richard. Blame it on the Third World. Blame it on the weather. There’s a million excuses and none of them are true. I think it was all about power. When Daniel ran off with Julia, he took something from you. And nobody does that to Richard Seaton.”
Richard pushed one of the buttons on the table phone. He stared at me, not saying a word, then the steel door popped open and Billy charged into the room. This was the London Billy, wearing an Armani suit and gray cashmere shirt.
“What’s the problem?” he asked, then recognized me and grinned. “Hey, Nicky! When did you get back in London?”
“This isn’t a social visit. Nicky is acting a bit strange.”
Billy shrugged and tried to make a joke. “Well, he’s never been completely normal. Isn’t that right, Nicky?”
“He says we paid Pak to sabotage the ship’s engine.”
Richard and Billy glanced at each other. They didn’t play leader and follower at that moment; it was something much more complex. At that moment I wasn’t sure if killing Daniel was Billy’s idea or if Richard had actually given the order. Perhaps Richard only provided the desire, the need, and Billy made it real.
“What are you talking about, Nicky? You saw the explosion yourself.”
“You probably came up with the idea when you were negotiating with Vanderhouten. You paid him off and Pak threw a gasoline bomb.”
Richard stood up and looked down at me. “You think you understand the world because you’ve photographed a few starving babies and bribed your way around some roadblocks, but you’re an innocent, Nicky. You don’t know anything.”
“I know that you killed Daniel. That’s enough.”
“You can’t prove that. I don’t care what that old man told you. It’s not true and no one’s going to believe him.”
“That doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to me. All I have to do is spend some time here in London, buying drinks for journalists, and telling them what happened. Then I’ll fly over to New York and do the same thing. The story would leak out. It always does, these days.”
Billy stepped forward and jabbed his finger in my direction. “Doing something like that would cause some very negative consequences.”
“Tell Billy to shut up. I didn’t come here to talk to another murderer.”
“Watch your mouth!” Billy shouted.
“I want him to be quiet because I’m about to explain the only way you can get out of this.”
Everything changed the instant I said that. Billy glanced at Richard. His fists became hands again and he returned to the door. Richard smiled slightly, then decided that it didn’t look dignified. He went over to the concrete desk, sat down, and flipped open a thin leather binder that contained rows of blank checks. “I’ll pay you one hundred thousand pounds, Nicky. Take it or leave it. I won’t negotiate.”
He looked startled. Over at the door, Billy shifted his weight around like a boxer getting ready to attack.
“What I’m telling you is this—you will never see Julia again. You will never talk to her. You will never inquire about her. You will stay out of her life forever.”
Richard stopped writing the check and sat there with a pen in his hand. “You can’t order me around.”
“You’re wrong about that. That’s exactly what I’m doing.” I stood up and headed for the door. “You’re not going to talk to Julia and you’re not going to talk to me. I’ve already written out a statement and left it in a safe place. Keep away from me or the world is going to learn that you killed Daniel.”
“Stay here,” Richard said. “We’re not finished with this conversation.”
“Everything you say about me is true. I’m not rich or successful, I don’t have a home or a family, and now I’ve lost my best friend. But that’s an advantage in this situation. I’m like one of those suicide bombers with nothing to lose.”
Feeling tense and sweaty, I passed through the outer office and stood in front of the elevators. I expected the phone to ring downstairs in the lobby and waited for the security guard in the blazer to give me that “Step this way, sir” routine. When I made it out to the sidewalk, I started breathing again.
I bought a pad of paper and a manila envelope at a stationery store and sat in a pub. I wrote down exactly what had happened on the Seria and described the confrontation with Richard. When that was done, I signed the statement and placed it in the envelope with a roll of film that included Pak’s photograph.
It had rained that morning, but patches of sky were starting to appear when I took a cab over to the Newsweek offices. Ann and Carter were checking the color levels of some photographs on a computer when I walked in. They both looked surprised to see me.
“Nicky! When did you get back?” Carter said.
“Yesterday.”
“It was just terrible what happened to Daniel McFarland,” Ann said. “It’s been in all the papers. The magazine ran a half-page, boxed, with his picture.”
“I haven’t read any of it.”
“Have you seen this?” She handed me a copy of Newsweek from a few weeks ago while I was in Dili. My shot of the mother with her dying child was on the cover. Inside were four pages of my photographs with the headline AGONY IN EAST TIMOR. I had even gotten a reporter’s byline for what I explained over the phone.
“New York loves you,” Carter said. “They’re going to nominate you for the Pulitzer Prize.”
A few months ago I would have dragged them down to a pub and bought drinks for everyone. Now I didn’t care. “It’s stuffy in this office,” I told Carter. “Let’s get out of here and take a walk.”
We used the pedestrian passageway to Hyde Park. The statue of the falling lovers was still there, but the cherubs had been wrapped in plastic sheeting. Carter and I headed down Lovers’ Walk, trying to avoid the patches of mud. A cold wind tugged at the flap of his trench coat.
I handed him the sealed envelope. “Take this and keep it in a safe place. If I get killed in some idiotic accident, it’s probably not an accident. Open it and show the statement to everyone you know.”
“Okay.” Carter stared at me. “You all right, Nicky? How you feeling?”
“Tired.”
“Listen, I could authorize payment for fifteen sessions with a psychologist here in London. Sometimes people need to talk to a therapist after they’ve been through a difficult experience.”
“That’s not what I want to do right now.”
Carter stopped walking and we stood between two beech trees. A few dead leaves still clung to the branches. “If you want another assignment, that’s easy enough. New York just called me about your availability.”
“Where do they want to send me?”
“Three blind people, including the son of Senator Bob Rawlings, will attempt to climb Mount Everest this January. You wouldn’t have to go all the way to the summit, just to one of the base camps.”
“The whole thing sounds completely pointless.”
“Of course it’s pointless, but you could get some good photographs.”
“Who knows? I might get lucky. Someone might die.”
Carter’s voice was calm and sympathetic. “You really should go see that therapist, Nicky. I’ve used her myself to deal with a few issues.”
“I need to take some time off.”
“Of course. No problem. You’ve earned it.”
We stood there for a few minutes with our hands in our pockets. A gust of wind made the dead leaves shiver.
“I guess Daniel was your friend,” Carter said.
“Does that surprise you?”
“People work together for years, but you never really know what their relationship is until …” Carter looked embarrassed. “Until something happens.”
• • •
I FELT AS EMPTY and fragile as a paper cup, too tired to sleep or eat or do anything but wander around London. If I had been left on my own, I probably would have returned to the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum. Sitting on one of the benches, I could have spent the rest of my life watching thousands of strangers stroll in and view the sculptures, make the circuit around the room, stop and examine the angry centaurs, then walk out the doorway.
But I couldn’t stay in London. I had to see Julia. A plane flight seemed too immediate so I took a train to Paris, then booked a ticket on the express going down to Rome. I sat alone in a first-class compartment with a fold-down bed, table, and a little steel sink. Everything was clean and in the right place. The young porter smiled and told me that the dining car was open for supper. Chrysanthemums trembled in a fluted vase as we rolled past cornfields and clattered over bridges. Later that night we stopped at a train station near the Italian border. I lay in the lower bunk and peered through the half-opened curtain. Fluorescent light. An empty train platform. And it seemed so lonely, like a way station to a shadowy, awful place. Wheels squeaked, the train shuddered as another car was added, and then we were moving forward.
The little nun at the convent recognized me from the time I visited Daniel. I told her that I wanted to see the mother superior and she led me up a stone staircase to an office that overlooked the garden.
The mother superior was a large woman with a broad face. She looked like someone who owned an Italian corsetry shop. She listened intently as I described what had happened in East Timor. When I told her that Daniel was dead, she looked startled and sat back in her chair.
“We prayed for Mr. McFarland’s safe return.”
“I guess it didn’t work.”
“Excuse me. I must tell the others.”
The mother superior stood up suddenly and left me alone in her office. I sat there for a few minutes and listened to footsteps moving up and down the hallway. Staring at a faded photograph of a dead pope, I had a vision of an enormous prayer machine hidden down in the convent basement. It had pedals and lights and looked like a cross between a slot machine and an old-fashioned concert organ. Now they were removing Daniel’s soul from the device, the little tag that listed his name.
When the mother superior returned she was very brisk and efficient. She questioned me about Daniel’s funeral and seemed relieved that he had been buried in a Christian cemetery. I took Daniel’s improvised will out of my shirt pocket and placed it on her desk. The nun unfolded the crunched-up sheet of notepaper and studied it as if it was a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
“He wanted you to have his car,” she said.
“Yes. Is it still here at the convent? Will the engine start or do I need to get a mechanic?”
“A mechanic is not necessary. When Mr. McFarland left Rome, he gave me the key and asked me to check the car occasionally. This became a source of tension among us until I decided that we would all take turns, oldest to youngest. Every night, after dinner, one of the sist
ers got to sit in the car and run the engine for a few minutes to keep the battery alive.”
“Thank you.”
“We would have done anything to help Mr. McFarland. Everyone here respected him. He was a very generous man.”
“That didn’t help him either.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying, Mr. Bettencourt.”
“The fact that you prayed for him and the fact that he was a good person didn’t stop this from happening.”
The nun folded up the will and handed it back to me. “I’m sorry you lost your friend,” she said. “It must be very painful.”
THE CAR STARTED the first time and I drove north to Bracciano. The autumn rains hadn’t arrived and the days were still warm. A herd of goats scrambled through the road ditch. Farmers were burning the stubble off their fields and there was a smoky odor in the air.
I opened the gate near the cottage, then drove slowly down the dirt driveway. La Signora was digging up onions in the vegetable garden. When she saw me, she thrust her shovel into the dirt and walked down the terraces to the patch of gravel where Daniel had always parked the car.
“Buon giorno, Signor Nicky.”
“Buon giorno, signora.”
The old lady touched the red hood of Daniel’s car, then started crying. She said a few things in Italian that I didn’t understand.
“Dov’è Signora Julia?” I asked, and my question transformed the old lady. She stopped crying. If Billy Monroe or any other threat had dropped out of the sky, she would have chased them away with her shovel.
La Signora pointed down the slope to the ravine, and when I hesitated she gave me a little push forward. As I crossed the field to the dirt pathway, I inspected the cherry trees I had planted last year. All of them had lost their summer leaves, but their trunks were straight and their branches reached toward the sky. The Monterey pines Daniel had planted still looked like saplings, but the eucalyptus had taken root and were peeling off strips of bark like a snake shedding its skin.
Julia sat on a boulder, facing the ruins of the Roman bridge. She wore a long cotton skirt and a wide-brimmed straw hat to protect her from the sun. When I came closer through the grass I saw that she had walked down the hill to pick blackberries, but the basket was only half full.