by Daniel Blake
MIESES, KARL W. PROFESSOR OF PERSIAN STUDIES. ROOM F4. SECOND FLOOR.
Photograph next to it: a black man with silver hair and seventies eyeglasses.
Patrese took the stairs two at a time, gun drawn. Sirens behind and below him: units arriving in response to Dufresne’s call. Patrese barked Mieses’ name and room number into the radio and kept going. No time to wait for back-up.
Top of the stairs, turn right. F4 was third on the left. Door locked.
‘Professor Mieses?’ More shout than question. No answer.
Patrese shot the lock off and kicked open the door.
Mieses was there; well, what Patrese assumed had been Mieses, at any rate.
Cops barreling through the door behind him, stopping, careering into the back of each other. ‘Out!’ Patrese shouted. ‘Out, he’s dead, there’s nothing we can do, give me space. Seal off the building. Someone must have seen something. Find them.’
They left: some quickly, only too keen to get away, and some slowly, as though transfixed by the sight of a body with no head.
Blood everywhere, fresh and dripping with a high odor. Kwasi must have killed Mieses recently, as in a few minutes before Patrese’s arrival. So how come Kwasi wasn’t covered in blood when he walked out of here? And how had he got out in the first place?
Had he got out? Was he still here?
No, Patrese thought: he wouldn’t dare. Unless he’d thought they wouldn’t get the clue until it was too late, and had reckoned he had all the time in the world. Well, they’d soon find out. They were sealing off the building, and then they’d sweep every last inch of it.
He looked round the room. A professor’s sanctuary: every wall covered in bookshelves, every surface invisible under papers, and half hidden behind a skyscraper of periodicals, a computer so ancient it should have been in the Smithsonian.
Patrese looked down to the floor, for the tarot card he knew would be there. Another Knight: the Knight of Wands, this time. And next to it, something which looked like …
An arm.
Half an arm, more precisely: a bottom half, from the elbow downwards.
Patrese glanced at Mieses’ body again. His left arm was still intact, but his right had been severed at the shoulder. This stray portion of arm next to the tarot card had a hand at its end. Kwasi had only taken his upper arm this time, from shoulder to elbow.
Why?
He’d taken the head, as usual. He’d taken skin patches front and back, as usual. So why only half the arm? Not to save time, that was for sure: it must have actually cost him time, to saw the arm twice rather than once.
No, Patrese thought. The only reason Kwasi would have done this was to make the piece of arm easier to carry, and the only reason he’d have done that was because he didn’t have enough space for a whole arm in whichever bag he was using.
A little nag in Patrese’s brain: something he’d seen and couldn’t quite recall.
He looked round the room again. What – the obvious fact of a headless body aside – was out of place here?
There, pushed under an armchair. Something fluorescent, scrunched up. Patrese thought of the maintenance man he’d passed on the way in. He reached under the chair and pulled. There were two items, in fact: a waterproof jacket and waterproof trousers, both in bright orange with reflective white flashes, and both drenched in Mieses’ blood.
Patrese looked under the chair again. Another two items, these ones smaller. Shoe covers, velcroed where they fastened round the ankle. A logo on the side, just about visible through the blood spatters. Nalini.
Nalini makes cycling clothes.
Not the maintenance man coming in as Patrese had arrived, but the cycle courier coming out – helmet on, pollution mask covering his nose and mouth. He’d had one of those cycle courier bags over this shoulder. A head and half an arm would fit in there, but a whole arm wouldn’t. Kwasi must have had some sort of plastic lining inside the bag to keep the blood from dripping, of course; but that wasn’t exactly rocket science.
Kwasi had walked right past Patrese. Right past him, close enough to touch. And now he’d be long gone, lost and anonymous in a Manhattan rush hour.
Helpless pieces of the game, Patrese thought. Helpless pieces indeed.
The NYPD stopped every cycle courier they could find. None of them were Kwasi. Many of them, in fact, were working downtown, and even Lance Armstrong couldn’t have made it from Morningside Heights to Wall Street in the time available.
Patrese gave an impromptu statement to the press from the steps of Columbia’s Butler Library, and inverted the usual wisdom about security services and terrorists. Yes, he said, he remained confident that they’d catch Kwasi King. Kwasi had to be lucky every time; they only had to be lucky once.
And Patrese knew, though he didn’t say, that chess is not a game of luck.
After a couple of hours, he left Dufresne in charge of the scene and headed back towards New Haven with Inessa. She was quiet until they were well clear of town, and then it all came gushing out. She blamed herself: if only she’d solved the puzzle sooner, Professor Mieses would still be alive.
No, Patrese said firmly: it was thanks to her alone that they’d gotten as close to saving Mieses as they had. Without her, they’d still have been floundering round Manhattan when Kwasi struck. She’d got them not just to Columbia but to the Iranian Center itself. There was only one person to blame for any of this, and that was Kwasi. He was the one doing the killing. He was the one playing games: the man-child, unable or unwilling to distinguish between murder and the puzzles page of a newspaper. It was nobody’s fault but his.
Inessa’s problem wasn’t guilt, Patrese knew: it was shock. Being up close to a murder – a real live murder, if that wasn’t a contradiction – was enough to throw most people off balance until they were used to it. All the TV shows and newspaper reports in the world couldn’t prepare you for the visceral impact of knowing that a life had been snuffed out in the time it took you to drink a can of soda. Inessa hadn’t seen Mieses’ body in the flesh, of course, but she’d been part of the race to save him, she’d been swept up in the vortex of police sirens and radio chatter.
Patrese’s instinctive reaction was a very male one: to solve Inessa’s problem for her, break it down into its constituent pieces, point out where she was looking at them wrong, and reassemble them in a way that absolved her of all blame. But he’d been around, and with, enough women to know that Inessa didn’t want him to solve her problem. She wanted him to listen. So that’s what he did. He let her talk, let her spill the words again and again as though she was trying to purge the toxins of her failure from within her.
He listened all the way back to New Haven, and then over dinner in the hotel restaurant, and then with the contents of the minibar in his room. And somewhere between the second and third locations, he knew that they’d sleep together that night. Not because he’d be taking advantage of her vulnerability, but because cops, doctors and undertakers know the slightly sordid truth that the rest of us prefer to keep hidden.
Sex and death are intertwined. Death makes us feel horny.
Not the actual sight of a dead body itself, of course – well, not usually, and there’s a word for people who broach this – but the presence of death, the imprint it has on those around it. Sex is the harbinger of life, and as such it’s the biggest, most literal fuck-you to death imaginable: assertion of life’s intense but temporary primacy, negation of death’s sting and the grave’s victory.
So when Inessa stood up from the sofa and took Patrese’s hand, he knew that this time she wouldn’t lead him on and then leave at the last minute. And afterwards, when she was sleeping contentedly on his chest – wasn’t it supposed to be the man who conked out first after sex? – he was staring at the ceiling, a single thought going round and round his head.
Kwasi had just killed, so now it was White’s turn.
50
Saturday, November 20th
New Haven, CT<
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Patrese was kissing his way down Inessa’s stomach in the half-light of a winter morning when his cellphone rang. ‘Leave it,’ she whispered, but he was already rolling away from her and reaching for the bedside table.
Casualties of the job, #219: an uninterrupted sex life.
ANDERSSEN, said the display.
‘Hey, Max.’
‘Gonna send you something. Caught on Unzicker’s e-mail this morning.’
‘OK. I’ll take a look and call you back.’
The message came through thirty seconds later. Unzicker – e-mail address [email protected] – was exchanging messages with an unnamed correspondent – [email protected]. The thread was entitled simply ‘The Game’.
[email protected]: Y’all ready to play?
[email protected]: Hell yeah. They won’t know what’s hit ’em.
[email protected]: Sure it can’t be traced?
[email protected]: Sure I’m sure.
[email protected]: Claim credit for it after?
[email protected]: We’ll see.
Patrese read it all through twice, and then rang Anderssen back. ‘Where’s he now?’
‘Still in his room.’
‘Any more than this? Any clue as to when he might be planning to, er, play?’
‘I got what you got. Nothing more. Hold on.’ Patrese heard the trill of a cellphone at Anderssen’s end, and then Anderssen’s monosyllabic gruffness as he answered, listened, spoke, hung up, and returned to Patrese’s call. ‘That’s the watchers. He’s on the move.’
‘Where’s he going?’
‘Turned left along the riverbank. Heading upstream. On foot.’
Patrese looked at Inessa in his bed, rumpled and tousled and giving him a look so full of dirty promise that it would have seduced Truman Capote. The hell with the investigation, Patrese thought. Anderssen’s men were professionals. Patrese had seen their sort at work, and they were good. They’d be front, back and either side, forming an invisible and elastic box around Unzicker. The watchers would swap places as they moved, but the shape would remain largely the same, and Unzicker would always be in view. They’d tail him wherever he was going, and if he so much as looked like harming someone, they’d nail him. Patrese had been chasing his tail on this thing for three weeks now. He’d had enough. A weekend off would do him good. A weekend in bed with Inessa would do him even better.
‘I’m on my way,’ he said.
Anderssen kept Patrese in touch with Unzicker’s movements as Patrese hared up the freeway. Unzicker was still walking alongside the river: past the Hyatt, past Trader Joe’s, past the famous Shell sign from the thirties, past Riverside Press Park.
After a mile or so, he hung a left on the Western Street Bridge, crossing the Charles River into Allston. There were more people around now: students clad in crimson or blue, tens becoming hundreds becoming thousands as they headed like pilgrims for tailgate parties in the fields and the main event itself, the Harvard–Yale football match.
Or, as those two institutions like to style it with typical modesty, The Game.
Not ‘the game’, Patrese realized when Anderssen told him where Unzicker was: The Game. But was The Game part of the game? After all, if you were killing Ivy League students, where better to search for targets than at the most famous Ivy League match-up of all? There weren’t only a handful of potential targets here: there were thousands.
Allston, MA
Kick-off was midday, and there was still an hour or so to go when Patrese arrived. The watchers were clustered invisibly round Unzicker, tracking him as he walked between lines of tailgate parties in the field abutting the stadium. Anderssen was on top of an unmarked van in one corner of the field, watching Unzicker through binoculars. Someone found another pair for Patrese. They watched together in silence.
The tailgate parties are almost more of an event than the game itself. In the unremitting schedule of an Ivy League semester, this was one of the few days when students practically had a license to let their hair down and start drinking from the get-go. Many students hired U-Haul trucks to bring all the beer and barbecue equipment, and then leapt up on to the roofs of the trucks and started dancing. Twelve feet above ground, drunk and often in slippery conditions: it didn’t need, well, a Harvard degree to see that more people were going to end the day with broken bones than had started it. There was probably less chance of injury in the match itself than there was at the tailgate parties.
And through all the smoking grills and merriment and shrieking laughter and beer coolers and bawdy songs, Unzicker walked alone. Some people recognized him from the news coverage and whispered to their companions, but most of the tailgaters were so busy eating and drinking that they wouldn’t have noticed Elvis.
Patrese almost felt sorry for Unzicker, until he saw the look Unzicker was giving those past whom he walked like the angel of death. It wasn’t hatred that Patrese saw in Unzicker’s eyes, because hatred suggested a force, a power. What Patrese saw was an absence; a hollow where the spark of life should be. He shivered involuntarily.
With half an hour to go till kick-off, Unzicker went into the stadium. Half Greek arena and half Roman circus, Harvard Stadium is shaped like a horseshoe with a large crimson scoreboard at the open end and the Boston skyline beyond. The stands are numbered 1 through 37, with one to the scoreboard’s immediate left and thirty-seven opposite. Unzicker had a ticket for stand number three, and sat about halfway up the seating bank.
Patrese had once taken down a suicide bomber in Pittsburgh’s Heinz Field, which had been infinitely more demanding than this. Heinz Field seated twice as many people; Patrese hadn’t known for a long time where the bomber was sitting; and he’d been left with no option other than to take a shot knowing that if his aim was off, even by a fraction, the bomber would have detonated his vest and taken out everyone within a ten-yard radius.
Here, it was hard to see at first glance exactly what damage Unzicker could do. It was broad daylight, and he was surrounded by thousands of people. There was no way he could find a victim and spirit him or her away without being seen. Maybe he was here simply to scope out a likely target: see who was too drunk to resist, keep tabs on them till after the game, and then strike when the crowds had dispersed and darkness was falling. If that was the case, the watchers would get him long before he could manage any of that.
They won’t know what’s hit ’em, Unzicker had e-mailed this morning. Patrese reminded himself not to take chances on this one. They weren’t to take their eyes off Unzicker, not for a second.
Unzicker wouldn’t know who the watchers were, but he sure as hell knew who Patrese and Anderssen were. They couldn’t run the risk of him seeing them, but neither did they want to let him out of their sight, watchers or no watchers. Harvard Stadium was famous for its excellent sightlines, but for Patrese right now that was a drawback. Everywhere he could see Unzicker, Unzicker could see him.
Except one place, Patrese realized: from behind the scoreboard itself.
The scoreboard was mounted on the roof of the Murr Center, the building that housed Harvard’s squash and tennis courts. Patrese and Anderssen flashed their badges at the facilities manager and got him to open the door leading on to the roof.
There was a maintenance gantry at the back of the scoreboard, though nowhere for the operators to sit and no protection from the elements: the board must have been controlled from elsewhere in the stadium. Patrese and Anderssen climbed on to the gantry. If they went to the right-hand side of the scoreboard, away from where Unzicker was sitting, they could watch him without being seen themselves.
The field stretched out ahead of them, end zone to end zone. The stands were filling up: Harvard crimson to their right, Yale blue to their left. This was emphatically not a day for neutrals, Patrese thought: except for one.
He trained his binoculars on Unzicker again. Unzicker was fiddling with what looked like a smartphone, or some other handheld electronic devi
ce. Patrese had brief fancies of mind-control rays and mass hallucinations: Unzicker as some sci-fi villain turning the crowd into zombies. Fans crowded to his left and right, front and back, and yet Unzicker managed to maintain around himself a small but definite exclusion zone, as though his weirdness and aloofness had combined to create a forcefield.
A long-forgotten movie scene came to Patrese’ mind: spectators at a tennis match, their heads going back and forth with the ball, and in the middle of them all one man looking straight and unwavering at the man he was later going to kill. Hitchcock, Patrese thought, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember the name of the movie itself.
When the teams came running on to the pitch, Unzicker looked only mildly animated while everyone else around him cheered and whooped. The color guard, the national anthem, all the pre-match rigmarole: Unzicker barely noted any of it, preferring instead to fiddle with his phone. Patrese kept watching, but for the moment his mind was elsewhere, back in his own glory days of college football at Pitt: the razzmatazz, the feeling that he was one of the big men on campus, the human tunnel through which the team would run on to the field while the band played ‘March to Victory’, and then the game itself, the handoffs from the quarterback, the heart-pounding rush into the tunnel of bodies in midfield, ducking, weaving, muscles working faster than thought itself as he jinked toward the glimmering chinks through the darkness, run to daylight, run to daylight, as though the noise from the crowd was physically prising open the gaps in front of him, and then out into the open prairie and the long run for home, defenders floundering in his slipstream as the crowd rose and stamped and his teammates thrust their arms skywards, go Franco, go, go, go.
Nothing else in his life had ever come close.
Patrese forced his mind back to the present. The captains were shaking hands, the umpires were taking up their positions. The game was about to start.
A ripple in the crowd: surprise, laughter. Patrese saw faces turned toward him, fingers pointing. Instinctively, he ducked backwards, fully behind the gantry, and looked at Anderssen: What the fuck? Anderssen shrugged; he had no idea either. The laughter became louder, interspersed with cheers and boos; pantomime stuff, it seemed to Patrese, as though the game itself had been forgotten.