The Forgotten Dead

by Tove Alsterdal

  On the way we stopped to buy a bottle of champagne and paused to kiss in a doorway, taking so long that some bitch started yelling for the police. When we reached Chinatown, the jewellers on Canal Street had all closed up for the day. ‘Why do I need a ring?’ I said. ‘Who decided that?’ And as night fell, we staggered deeper into the red glow of Chinatown’s knick-knack shops, tattoo parlours, and disreputable clubs. I had only a vague memory of how we made it back home that night.

  One year later, to the day, we were married, but it was the evening of our engagement that meant the most. Because it was only the two of us, I thought. After that his parents and all the traditions and the wedding magazines and the whole bridal package came into the picture.

  Patrick’s desk chair softly moulded to my body, faintly redolent of leather. Oddly enough, I’d never sat in his chair before. I ran my hand over the dark surface of his desk. In front of me lay a desk calendar bound in leather, a Christmas present from his father, who shared Patrick’s passion for intellectual luxuries.

  The page for 17 August held only a brief note.

  Newark 21.05. That was the departure time for his plane. No hotel name. We always used our cell phones to call each other, never the hotel phones. It hadn’t seemed important to know where he was staying.

  I took a deep breath before I pulled out the top drawer. I was reluctant to start rummaging through Patrick’s things.

  Everything was in meticulous order. There were stacks of receipts. Postage stamps, insurance policies.

  In the next two drawers he kept articles that he’d written, along with background material neatly sorted by topic. I quickly leafed through the piles of papers. Nothing about human trafficking. At the very bottom were the articles that had almost won him a Pulitzer Prize. He’d changed after that. Worked harder, become practically obsessed with whatever he was writing. I thought about a woman he’d interviewed for the series about the new economy. He’d found her under a bridge in Brooklyn. She talked about how she was going to get back her job as chief accountant very soon, and then she’d bring home her three kids and move back into an apartment in Park Slope. Under all the layers of clothing she carried a cell phone so the company would be able to reach her. It had neither a SIM card nor a battery. Patrick had spent three nights out there. When he came home he tossed and turned in bed, talking in his sleep. ‘You have to call Rose,’ he said. ‘You have to call Rose.’ I had pictured Rose as some secret cutie until I saw the article and realized she was the woman who lived under the bridges in Brooklyn. That was what he dreamed about at night.

  I shut the last drawer, and the desk resumed its closed, orderly guise.

  Hadn’t he ever mentioned the name of the hotel? Not even once?

  I fixed my gaze on the row of books above his desk.

  Hemingway.

  Patrick had said something about Hemingway the last time he called. About the bar where he’d gone. I hadn’t paid much attention because I didn’t give a shit about Hemingway. I would never have gone to that bar, even if he’d still been alive. But Patrick had also mentioned Victor Hugo.

  He was sitting at the window of the hotel and looking at … what? A grave? The place where Victor Hugo was buried.

  I kicked my feet to make the chair roll across the floor to my own work area, and pressed the keyboard of my laptop. The screen woke out of sleep mode.

  I’d seen Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, both the musical and the films, but I had no idea where the author was buried.

  I typed ‘Victor Hugo’ and ‘grave’ into Google and pressed search. From the first hit I recognized the name that Patrick had mentioned. The Panthéon. I clicked on Wikipedia. Panthéon was Greek for ‘all gods’. It was originally a church, but after the French Revolution it was turned into a mausoleum for national heroes. In 1851 Foucault had hung a pendulum from the dome to prove that the earth rotates. Victor Hugo was buried in crypt number twenty-four.

  Impatiently I scrolled down to the technical structural details.

  Patrick had said that he could see the dome from his window. The building was eighty-three metres tall. I pictured how it must rise above the rooftops. There could be hundreds of hotels that boasted of such a view.

  But Patrick could also see the university through the window. The Sorbonne. Did you know people live up there under the eaves? I typed ‘Sorbonne’ and ‘Panthéon’ and ‘hotel’ in the search box.

  The first hit was for the Hôtel de la Sorbonne. I felt a shiver race through my body. A feeling that Patrick was getting closer. I was pulling him towards me.

  A click from the door, his footsteps across the floor, and everything would return to normal again. Breakfast and work. Watching American Idol with half an eye in the evening. Days passing, nights when I was able to sleep. The sound of him breathing next to me.

  The hotel’s website appeared on the screen. ‘Near the Panthéon, the Sorbonne, and the Luxembourg Gardens’. The clock in the upper right corner of the screen told me it was approaching one a.m., which meant six in the morning in Paris. I tapped in the phone number, picturing in my mind the sun rising above ponderous stone buildings with gleaming cupolas.

  ‘Hôtel Sorbonne. Bonjour.’

  The voice on the phone sounded slightly groggy, half-asleep.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to get in touch with a guest who may be staying at your hotel.’

  A lengthy and rapid reply followed.

  ‘Do you speak English?’ I asked. ‘I’m looking for an American named Patrick Cornwall.’

  A long silence on the phone. I watched the clock change from 00.53 to 00.54. Tuesday, 23 September.

  ‘No Cornell.’

  ‘Cornwall,’ I said, enunciating carefully. ‘He’s an American journalist.’

  But I heard only a buzzing sound in my ear. I wondered how Patrick could stand it over there. But he spoke fluent French, of course, so he didn’t have to put up with being treated like something the cat had dragged in.

  On the website of the next hotel on the list, the Cluny Sorbonne, they boasted about speaking English. The description further said: in the heart of the Latin Quarter, within walking distance of Notre-Dame, the Panthéon, and the Louvre.

  ‘I’m looking for an American named Patrick Cornwall. I’m not really sure, but I think he’s staying at your hotel.’

  ‘No, he’s not.’

  I clicked back to the search list. Were there more Sorbonne hotels?

  ‘I’m afraid he has checked out.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘He has checked out.’

  I grabbed the armrest and held on tightly.

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘And who, may I ask, is calling?’

  I was just about to say ‘his wife’, but something stopped me. Shame. I felt my cheeks flush. I suddenly saw the situation from the other end of the phone line. France was a country in which even the president had secret lovers and got away with it. And I was the abandoned wife.

  ‘We’re colleagues at the magazine,’ I said. ‘And I’m sitting here with a travel invoice that I can’t quite decipher. That’s why I need to speak to him. So I can send him his money.’

  I sounded like a real bureaucrat.

  ‘Just a moment.’ An eternity passed as the clerk paged through the information in a ledger or a database or whatever they used in the Old World. I heard a clattering somewhere in the background. Maybe they were setting the tables for breakfast.

  ‘It was last Tuesday,’ he said finally. ‘September sixteenth.’

  A week ago. The same day the envelope was mailed. I took a deep breath.

  ‘Were you on duty when he left the hotel?’

  ‘Yes, of course. He was happy to be going home to New York. He said he missed his wife. I told him that he should bring her with him next time he comes to Paris. It’s the romance capital of the world, after all.’

  ‘Are you sure about that? That he was going home to New York?
’

  I gripped the phone even harder.

  ‘Yes. He said that quite clearly. We almost had a quarrel about the fact that he was so eager to leave us.’

  ‘Did he say anything else?’

  ‘Just that he would stay with us the next time he’s in Paris.’

  I ended the call. The silence pressed against my skull. At any second it would explode. Fragments of information would scatter across the floor. Checked out. Back home to New York. The baby money. The positive pregnancy test. We never pay advances.

  Restlessly I paced the apartment. Took some juice out of the fridge and drank from the bottle.

  Where had he gone? Why had he lied about where he was going? And if he was telling the truth, why hadn’t he come home?

  On the kitchen counter were the remains of the snacks I’d eaten over the past few days. Since the kitchen was just a corner of the bedroom, we always did the dishes before we went to bed so we wouldn’t have to look at leftovers when we got up in the morning. But now there was a small pyramid of empty yogurt containers. And I thought I noticed that they were starting to smell. The smell grew. Dirty glasses and cutlery, salad packaging and pizza boxes. All signs of his absence.

  I picked up the garbage can and with my arm swept the whole pile of trash off the counter and into the pail. Several forks and a glass fell in too. I closed the lid. Then I went back to my computer and logged into the Internet bank again. I transferred $6,282 from the savings account — the baby money, all that was left of it — to my own account. Then I typed words in the Google search box:

  New York. Paris. Flights.

  Chapter 3

  Tarifa

  Wednesday, 24 September

  ‘He wants to know what you were doing on the beach in the middle of the night.’

  Terese slid further down on the hard plastic chair they had provided for her. It felt as if they could read her mind, as if everything were clearly visible even though she had showered for hours and changed clothes and slept seventeen hours and then taken another shower after that.

  The policeman sitting at the desk leaned forward, twirling a pen between his fingers. His nails were stubby and ugly, grimy with dirt underneath.

  ‘Why does he want to know that?’ she whispered to her father, who was sitting next to her. ‘What difference does it make?’

  ‘You have to answer his questions,’ said Stefan Wallner. ‘I’m sure you realize that.’

  Terese rubbed her ear. He was talking to her as he had when she was a child. She regretted agreeing to have him act as her translator during the interrogation. ‘But we don’t need to call it an interrogation,’ he had said. ‘They just want to know what you saw on the beach.’ Maybe it would have been easier to be surrounded by strangers, she thought. People who wouldn’t be ashamed of her, or disappointed.

  ‘I just went for a walk,’ she said.

  ‘In the middle of the night? Before dawn?’ The policeman gave her a thin-lipped smile. It looked like a straight line below his moustache. She noticed an upper tooth was missing. His eyes were fixed on her breasts.

  ‘I was drunk,’ Terese said in Swedish. ‘I didn’t feel good. I may have got lost.’

  Stefan translated.

  ‘Was she alone on the beach?’ asked the officer.

  ‘Yes, I was.’ She swallowed hard. Her throat felt tight. ‘I already told you that.’

  ‘Alone on the beach, a young girl, in the middle of the night.’ He shook his head. On the wall behind him hung a picture of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus. Her father didn’t translate what he’d said, but she understood. She had studied Spanish for three years in high school, and she knew enough to order food in the restaurants. That was why her father had invited her along, so she could practise her Spanish. He wanted to show her the places he’d visited in his youth, when he was hitchhiking through Europe. She gave her father a sidelong look. His hair was blonder, so the grey was hardly visible, and his skin was suntanned. They’d been in Tarifa for a week when their holiday was disrupted.

  ‘Why isn’t he asking me anything about the body?’ said Terese. ‘Why is he only asking about me?’

  The officer leaned back in his chair, his legs wide apart. He was tapping the pen against his lips.

  ‘I know exactly what the likes of you get up to on the beach,’ he said. ‘You come here and hang about in the bars, ready to take off your clothes for anybody. My cousin has worked on the beaches. He had to pick up after people like you. You have no idea what he used to find on the sand in the morning.’

  He leaned towards Terese, and she gave a start when his eyes again fastened on her breasts. She wished she had put on a sweater. A cardigan over the camisole that was so tight it revealed half her tits.

  ‘That’s enough,’ said her father in Spanish, placing his hand, heavy and warm, on her bare shoulder. ‘My daughter has been through a terrible ordeal. You need to realize that she’s in shock.’ He glanced at Terese and then back at the police officer. ‘She told you that she was alone.’

  The officer smiled wryly, again exposing the gap in his teeth. Terese lowered her eyes.

  ‘Who was the dead man she found?’ Stefan went on. ‘Do you know anything more about what happened to him?’

  ‘An immigrant. From the sub-Sahara,’ said the officer, standing up. He went over to a map of Europe hanging on the wall. It also showed the northern part of Africa. Terese knew that boats went there from Tarifa. The crossing to Tangiers took thirty-five minutes and cost twenty-nine euros per person. Her father had picked up some brochures at the tourist office. Terese wasn’t particularly interested, but she hadn’t told him that. She didn’t want to upset him. When he’d suggested the trip to southern Spain, she’d pictured Marbella and sunny beaches and nightclubs. In Tarifa the wind never stopped blowing. She’d tried swimming on their first days here, but ended up feeling panicked when she was tossed about by the waves as the rip current dragged her away from shore.

  ‘When they come this way, they’re mostly fleeing from the countries south of the Sahara,’ said the officer. He pointed at the map that hung on the wall of painted brick. ‘Mali, Nigeria, Sierra Leone. Several years ago we were bringing in overloaded boats every single day.’ He moved his hand over the sea, out into the blue of the Atlantic. ‘Later more people started taking this route, via Senegal to the Canary Islands, then through Libya, of course, it’s a total chaos there, and then the Turkey route … The smugglers know we have coastguard boats patrolling the straits, with cameras and radar. But that still doesn’t stop some people from trying.’

  Stefan Wallner translated for Terese, who relaxed a bit. She was already familiar with some of these facts. When she was lying in bed yesterday, wanting only to fall asleep and die, her father had gone out to talk to the police and the Red Cross. He came into her room every couple of hours to ask whether she wanted anything to eat. He sat on the edge of her bed and stroked her hair and told her about all the unhappy people who were fleeing poverty and possibly war as well. The head of the Red Cross in Tarifa had shown him pictures of people who had died in the sound during the past few years. He’d had an entire binder full of photographs. Whenever Terese closed her eyes, she saw the body of the black man and thought to herself that she was looking at death. And then she’d felt the old sorrows well up, from her teenage years in high school when she’d realized how meaningless everything was, and that it didn’t matter what she did because she was nobody. Could anyone love a nobody? No one would notice if a nobody died. ‘There’s nothing I want to do, Papa,’ she’d said. ‘I don’t know if I even want to go on living.’

  The policeman went over to one of the windows and used his whole hand to point outside. Terese shivered when she saw the barbed wire and seagulls. She looked at the island out there, the surging waves and the lighthouse. She never wanted to go down to the sea again.

  ‘If we catch them, they end up on Isla de las Palomas,’ he said. ‘A few years ago the place was packed, but thes
e days we keep them only twenty-four hours, at most. Then they’re sent to the detention camps in Algeciras. If we can’t get them to tell us where they came from, they’re released out onto the streets after sixty days. After that, they’ll be picking tomatoes.’

  The officer came around his desk and picked up a document. A flimsy piece of paper.

  ‘But I’m talking about the ones who make it here alive, of course.’

  He sat down, again spreading his legs wide, and gave a sharp slap to the paper in his hand.

  ‘This arrived by fax from Cádiz early this morning. They’ve found two more. A man and a woman. Pregnant.’ He picked up another piece of paper and held it up. ‘The Moroccan authorities have reports of a rubber dinghy that set off in the early hours of Sunday morning. It managed to slip past. Maybe somebody was bribed. Who knows? These smugglers will try anything.’ He used two fingers to smooth his old-fashioned moustache, which turned up slightly at the ends. ‘They tell the passengers to jump into the sea when they get close to land so the smugglers can turn the boat around before we catch them.’

  ‘Have you identified them?’ asked Stefan Wallner. His hand was still on Terese’s shoulder, occasionally giving her a light pat. Protecting her. She was ashamed that she’d lied. She was ashamed that she’d been abandoned on the beach. It was horrible that people were dying in the sea.

  The police officer grinned. ‘How would we do that? So far we haven’t found anyone alive.’

  ‘But I told you he had a tattoo,’ Terese said.

  ‘They already know that,’ said her father. Terese bit her lip. Reprimanded, just like a child. Yet she was twenty years old.

  ‘If they’re Moroccan, we contact the Moroccan authorities directly,’ said the officer. ‘And they’re here within twenty-four hours. But if we’re talking about sub-Saharans, there’s not much we can do. They have no identity papers, and even if they were alive, we couldn’t get them to tell us where they’re from.’ He shrugged. ‘We take blood samples and fingerprints, of course. And keep them on file.’