The Forgotten Dead

by Tove Alsterdal

  ‘Attractive?’

  ‘Dark, very short, big eyes.’

  Her eyes were the only thing I’d seen. And her physique. The desk clerk was as tall as Patrick. Compared to both of them, the woman was obviously quite petite.

  Olivier smiled a bit nervously. ‘I thought she looked like Juliette Binoche. I even told her so, but she didn’t seem impressed. She probably hears that all the time.’

  ‘Could you hear from her voice where she was from?’

  ‘She was definitely Parisian, and not exactly from the streets.’

  I took out my key and my cell, tapping in the number as I climbed the stairs. It was programmed into my phone under the name Josef K.

  I heard the phone ring once. Twice. I unlocked my room and went inside.

  On the fifth ring, the call was cut off.

  When I tapped in the number again, I was connected to voicemail, an automated message from the telephone company. When I heard the beep, I began speaking.

  ‘I want to talk to Patrick Cornwall,’ I said. ‘I know that he was supposed to interview Josef K.’

  I ended the call and sat down in front of my laptop. I sat there for a long time in the glow of the screen, staring at a picture of a French actress as the city fell quiet outside. So that was how she looked.

  Chapter 9

  Paris

  Sunday, 28 September

  ‘Hello?’

  It said ‘unknown caller’ on the display.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you to stay away?’

  It was her. The woman in the car. I sat bolt upright in bed. I’d know that voice among millions of others.

  ‘Who exactly are you?’ I said. ‘Where did Patrick Cornwall go when he left Paris?’

  ‘You should go home,’ she said.

  ‘He was supposed to meet Josef K. Isn’t that right? So where is he?’

  I heard her take a breath, followed by a second of silence. My heart was pounding hard, as if it wanted to leap out of my chest and land like a pulsing blob in my lap.

  ‘Yesterday you met a man named Salif,’ said the woman on the phone.

  ‘How do you know that?’ I wrapped the blanket around me. The ringing of my phone had awakened me. ‘What do you know about Salif?’

  ‘He’s dead,’ said the woman. ‘Shot once through the head. Are you satisfied now?’

  Then she was gone.

  The word was like a glaring headline in my mind.

  Dead.

  It wasn’t possible. That couldn’t be.

  And then: It was my fault. I was the one who’d led them straight to Salif. I got out of bed with the blanket around me and went over to the window to look down at the street. No one there.

  I turned to look at the digits on the clock radio. 9.15. Dazzling sun above the rooftops. Traffic noises.

  I’m a dead man, he’d said. Salif. How old was he? Twenty-three, twenty-four?

  I looked up the number for Arnaud Rachid. My hands were shaking. The phone rang. No one answered. Released from my paralysis, I got dressed. I grabbed my bag and jacket, ran downstairs to the breakfast room for a sandwich, quickly drank some juice and coffee, then hurried over to the river and across the bridges to the right bank. Three times I veered onto a side street and waited around the corner to see if anyone was following me, but I saw no one. I jogged the rest of the way through the Marais and stopped abruptly when I reached rue Charlot.

  The entrance was cordoned off. I quickly retreated to a doorway, breathing hard.

  There were two police vehicles and an ambulance parked on the street outside the building where Arnaud Rachid had his office. They had blocked the entire entrance to the courtyard. Bystanders had gathered outside the police tape. I caught sight of Sylvie, the activist girl, standing in another doorway with others wearing similar baggy clothing. I went over to her.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ I asked.

  ‘It was murder,’ said Sylvie, wide-eyed. ‘He was lying on the stairs outside the office this morning, shot in the head.’

  ‘They shot him here?’ I said dumbfounded. It didn’t make sense. Salif wasn’t supposed to leave the apartment in Bobigny.

  ‘Arnaud was the one who found him. He was terribly shocked, of course. It’s the man that Arnaud has been hiding. The one you were supposed to see yesterday. Because that’s where the two of you went, wasn’t it?’

  She gave me a searching look. I glared at her. She had some nerve thinking about her own jealous feelings when Salif was dead.

  ‘So where is Arnaud now?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. He panicked and ran off.’

  ‘Do the police know what happened? Do they know who the dead man is?’

  Sylvie looked at me with an expression that showed what an idiot I was.

  ‘Of course not. He didn’t have any papers on him. That’s the whole problem. And Arnaud isn’t about to run around saying that he was hiding the man. Then the police would be after him, and everything would go to hell.’

  The medics slammed shut the back doors of the ambulance. They seemed about to leave. I considered going over to ask if I could see the dead man, but I decided not to. Instead I headed in the opposite direction. At the next street corner I paused to tap in Arnaud’s phone number and left a message telling him he had to call me.

  I’d gone only ten metres when my cell rang.

  ‘Were you the one who leaked where he was hiding?’ Arnaud said.

  I denied it, and he seemed to believe me.

  ‘How were they able to find him?’ I asked. ‘Do you think they followed us?’

  I heard Arnaud moan.

  ‘He was lying there when I arrived this morning, with a hole in his head. Do you understand? They shot him. What did he ever do to anyone?’

  I managed to get Arnaud to tell me that he was outside the city, in la banlieue. ‘Where we were yesterday,’ he said.

  ‘I’m coming over there.’

  The door was ajar. Sitting on the bed where Salif had sat yesterday, Arnaud Rachid was staring at the wall. The bedclothes were in disarray.

  ‘I wonder if they shot him here,’ said Arnaud. ‘Or if they dragged him down to rue Charlot first.’ He buried his face in his hands. He was shaking.

  ‘All he wanted was a good life, for God’s sake.’

  I sat down on the edge of the bed. The room was as dimly lit as it had been before. As if time had stood still. Except that Salif had been taken away.

  But his smell still lingered in the air. The smell of sweat and fear and confinement.

  ‘It was like he was staring up at me, but his eyes were completely blank, and then there was that hole in his forehead.’ Arnaud slammed his fist against his own forehead. ‘Then I noticed that the cast on his leg had been crushed, and the bandages on his hands had been torn off, and his body was twisted in such a strange way, as if … as if …’

  ‘As if?’ I said, though I didn’t want to know.

  ‘As if they’d broken both of his arms.’

  Arnaud began to sob. A deep, keening sound that prevented me from thinking.

  ‘Is it wise for you to be here?’ I asked. ‘They might come back.’

  ‘The door was open. He must have opened it to let them in. Even though I told him not to open the door for anyone.’

  Arnaud kept sobbing.

  Stop crying, I thought. If you cry, you have no chance. They’ll get you. And I realized it was my mother’s voice speaking inside my head.

  ‘How did they find him?’ I asked, putting my hand on his shoulder.

  ‘I’ve been trying to talk to some of the neighbours,’ said Arnaud, fidgeting with the TV remote control, which he held in his hand.

  ‘Isn’t that the job of the police?’ I said.

  ‘The police don’t know he was living here.’

  I looked at him.

  ‘You have to tell them. We’re talking about murder now. Not a risk of being deported.’

  Arnaud got up and went over to the window. He w
iped his face with a corner of his scarf and then turned to look at me.

  ‘The police aren’t going to be investigating this case,’ he said. ‘Haven’t you realized that yet?’

  I went with Arnaud to speak to the rest of the neighbours. Salif’s fate was somehow linked to Patrick’s. I was certain about that.

  The first doorbell we tried was broken. Arnaud knocked on the door. It opened a crack and a tiny woman wearing a headscarf peeked out at us.

  Arnaud spoke Arabic to her. After a moment she opened the door another few centimetres. She eyed me suspiciously.

  ‘The police were here yesterday,’ Arnaud told me after the woman had shut the door and gone back inside. ‘They were looking for an illegal immigrant.’

  ‘But it couldn’t have been the police who shot him, for God’s sake.’

  Arnaud strode over to the next apartment. No one opened the door. The same at the next place. I thought I could hear sounds coming from inside.

  ‘People are scared,’ said Arnaud. ‘They know it’s bad news whenever the police show up.’

  The next neighbour who came to the door was a man wearing long underwear. He spoke French and undressed me with his eyes as he talked to Arnaud.

  ‘They showed ID,’ he said. ‘They asked about an illegal refugee they were looking for.’

  ‘Did they say his name?’ asked Arnaud.

  ‘Yes, but I don’t remember what it was,’ said the man, scratching his crotch.

  ‘Salif?’ I said.

  His face lit up. ‘Yes, that was it. And then some long surname. I said this whole place is crawling with them. Impossible to keep track of them all.’

  Back in the apartment, I pulled up the blinds, which instantly rolled back down halfway, but still let in a wide swathe of sunlight. Then I went over to the kitchenette, filled a cracked cup with water, and drank it down as I waited for Arnaud to come out of the bathroom.

  ‘How did they know he’d be here?’ I said when he reappeared. ‘Do you think they’re following me? Or you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He leaned against the counter, tugging at his hair.

  ‘I can’t understand why he opened the door. He wasn’t supposed to let the police in. Or anybody else.’

  ‘Do you think someone paid them off?’

  ‘Or maybe they bought the police ID they were carrying. No one could have known his name except the people he’d run away from. I haven’t told his surname to anybody.’

  Arnaud fidgeted with a cell he was holding.

  ‘I found this here,’ he said. ‘It was in the bathroom.’

  ‘Is it Salif’s?’

  He nodded and said, ‘There’s something you’ll want to know.’

  He took a step closer and held up the cell. On the display I saw a name.

  Patrick C.

  A shiver raced through my body.

  ‘Of course he would have Patrick’s number,’ I said, grabbing the phone and staring at the name. ‘Salif called him before.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Arnaud. ‘But this was the last number I got when I checked his incoming calls.’

  I clutched the phone in my hand, and the world closed in around me. I had the feeling that I was now all alone with this small object.

  ‘According to the phone, Patrick called Salif at ten o’clock last night,’ Arnaud went on. ‘That was an hour and a half before the so-called police began knocking on doors here.’

  Gently I pressed the ‘call’ button.

  And held my breath.

  I heard the ringtone. It seemed to be echoing through the whole apartment. Four, five, six times. No voicemail. No one saying: You’ve reached Patrick Cornwall. Then a voice spoke. A man’s voice. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Patrick,’ I whispered. ‘Is that you, Patrick?’

  ‘Who is this?’ said the voice on the phone, and it wasn’t Patrick.

  ‘Where is he?’ I said. ‘What have you done with him?’

  Nothing but silence. I lowered the phone and looked at Arnaud.

  ‘What does this mean?’ I asked him. ‘Where is Patrick?’

  He touched my hand, which was still holding the phone, and I felt my body starting to shake. The tremors were billowing up from deep inside me.

  Arnaud looked at me in surprise. ‘Are you in love with him, or something?’

  Quickly I turned away. Don’t lose control, I thought, pinching myself hard on the arm.

  Don’t be a fucking cry-baby.

  ‘I just want to know what’s happened to him,’ I said, still holding Salif’s cell.

  Someone had used Patrick’s phone to make the call. They must have stolen it.

  And at the same moment I realized what could have happened. They’d used Patrick’s cell to locate Salif. If they’d been able to get police IDs, they could also have had access to the cell network to trace the call. That would also explain why Salif had opened the door. He thought it was Patrick coming to see him. Or someone who was friends with Patrick. Maybe they’d promised to take Salif to the States.

  I took a tissue out of my pocket and blew my nose.

  Then I explained my theory to Arnaud. He stared impassively out of the window where the grey suburbs extended on and on, as far as the eye could see.

  ‘I can’t make any sense of all this,’ I said. ‘These past few days … If only I knew what he was thinking.’

  Arnaud slowly turned to look at me.

  ‘Josef K had defected,’ he said. ‘He was ready to tell everything about how these businesses are run, and who’s in charge. He was prepared to name names. Patrick was supposed to interview him.’

  The words sank in and settled into place.

  ‘Where?’ I asked. ‘Where were they supposed to meet?’

  ‘I don’t know. I only know that Patrick left Paris on Tuesday two weeks ago.’ He fixed his eyes on the floor. ‘I wasn’t supposed to say anything. If word had got out that he was going to meet Josef K …’

  ‘Did Patrick tell you that? That you weren’t supposed to say anything?’

  Arnaud didn’t answer. He turned around and began rinsing off the plates stacked on the counter, doing a clumsy job of it.

  ‘Salif is dead,’ I said. ‘So what the hell is so important now? There’s nobody left for you to protect.’

  ‘I wasn’t the one hiding him.’

  ‘Then who was? I don’t see anyone else here.’

  ‘I’m not talking about Salif. I mean Josef K. He’d gone underground. I didn’t even know where he was. I wasn’t involved in that.’

  I sank down onto a rickety kitchen chair. It’s like a hall of mirrors, I thought. Someone is always hiding behind the others, and there’s no way to figure out where the exit is. I hated the hall of mirrors at the amusement park when I was a kid. Not knowing where everyone was positioned, or which version was real. And all those distorted faces.

  ‘So you have no idea where Patrick went?’ I asked.

  ‘Afraid not,’ said Arnaud.

  Then both of us fell silent. A fly danced beneath the fan. The walls turned yellow.

  ‘We need to leave,’ he said at last.

  ‘I think I know what she looks like,’ I said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘One of the people behind all this.’

  And I told him about the woman who’d picked me up in the car. How she’d threatened me if I didn’t go back home to New York. I said I was almost positive she was the same woman who had come to get Patrick the day before he disappeared. And it had something to do with Josef K.

  ‘She was the one who phoned me this morning and told me that Salif was dead,’ I said. ‘She has to be involved. Otherwise how would she know who he was?’

  I met Arnaud’s eye. The next second he looked away.

  ‘Maybe she was right,’ he said. ‘Maybe you should have gone back home to New York. Maybe then Salif would still be alive.’

  ‘Don’t put the blame on me,’ I shouted. ‘You were the one who was supposed to be protect
ing him.’

  ‘I know that,’ yelled Arnaud. ‘You don’t have to tell me that, damn it.’

  Then neither of us said another word. Maybe he was thinking the same thing I was.

  That it no longer made any difference.

  It was late afternoon by the time I got back to the hotel.

  ‘You have a visitor,’ said René, the desk clerk. He nodded towards the easychairs in the lobby.

  For a nano-second my heart stood still. In the time it took for me to turn halfway around, I thought Patrick would be coming towards me with a smile. Instead, Sarah Rachid got up from where she was sitting.

  ‘Who are you really?’ she snapped as I approached. ‘There’s no Alena Sarkanova working for The Reporter in New York. Or staying here at the hotel either. So the question is: who are you?’

  I sank like a stone onto the sofa. There was nothing to say. I retreated into a haze of fatigue, hearing her continue to talk in the distance.

  Arnaud had phoned her after I’d gone to see him the first time. He had shouted and carried on, wanting to find out if Sarah knew what I was really after.

  ‘So I called New York, the magazine where you claim to work. They’ve never heard of you.’

  ‘Those switchboard operators are hopeless,’ I said faintly.

  From Arnaud she’d learned that I was staying at the same hotel where Patrick had stayed.

  ‘So I come here. I ask for Madame Sarkanova, but they’ve never heard of her. When I repeat the name, and say Alena, he reacts. The clerk over there.’ Sarah points at René, who is pretending to be preoccupied. “‘Oh, Alena Cornwall,” he says. “Is that who you’re looking for?” As you can imagine, I was very surprised, but I introduced myself and told him I’m a lawyer, and then he said I could wait for you here in the lobby.’ She raised her chin aggressively. ‘Why did you lie?’

  ‘Sarkanova is my maiden name.’

  ‘And you’re married to Patrick Cornwall?’ Sarah sat down on the armchair across from me and shook her head. ‘But you’re going around telling everyone you’re a reporter. That’s sick.’

  ‘I needed to ask questions,’ I said. ‘Your brother must have told you that Patrick has disappeared.’

  ‘What?’ said Sarah. ‘Has something happened to him?’

  I studied her face. Her surprise was genuine. Her expression changed to concern and she lowered her eyes.