Tom McNerney inhaled sharply and clucked his tongue.
‘That’s a little trickier,’ he said. ‘That would mean getting involved in the internal affairs of the country in which we’re stationed and, as you know, I can’t do that.’
‘But what do the police say about it?’
‘From what I understand, they regard the death as an accidental drowning.’
‘But it wasn’t.’
I got up and paced the small room.
‘Patrick would never have gone into waves like that voluntarily,’ I said. ‘He won’t even take the ferry to Staten Island if he can avoid it.’
Wouldn’t, I thought. Wouldn’t, not won’t. Everything is past tense from now on.
‘It’s my guess that the Spanish police would like to see more solid evidence,’ said McNerney. ‘If there is any, I’m sure they will open an investigation. I have complete faith in the police of this country nowadays.’
I rubbed my forehead. Evidence?
‘They need to talk to the police in Lisbon,’ I said. ‘An Inspector Ferreira. He knows a lot of the story.’
‘As I said, I’m not the man to tell the police of this country what they should do. It would not be regarded kindly, as I’m sure you’ll understand.’
I lowered the phone. Solid evidence.
‘And I can’t—’
‘Get involved in their work. I know,’ I said, taking a deep breath.
‘I’m sorry,’ said McNerney.
‘Dr Robert Cornwall will be getting in touch with you soon,’ I said. ‘His lawyer will request that Patrick’s body be sent back home to the States.’
I went out onto the little balcony that faced the street at the back of the hotel. The sounds of another reality rose towards me. The noisy clattering of a moped. Two women loudly gossiping across the street.
An accidental drowning. Was it possible that Patrick’s death would be written off that easily?
Not a chance. He had sacrificed his life for this story. There was nothing normal about his death.
I went back into the room, sat down on the bed, and tapped in the phone number for the editorial offices of The Reporter in New York.
It took four minutes before I was connected to Richard Evans.
‘Ally Cornwall!’ the editor shouted on the phone. ‘What a coincidence. I’m sitting here with a thick envelope sent from Lisbon.’
Chapter 16
Tarifa
Saturday, 4 October
The first articles appeared in a special Internet edition of The Reporter, in the morning, Spanish time.
AMERICAN JOURNALIST MURDERED?
New York journalist Patrick Cornwall was found dead in southern Spain. Indications are that he was murdered.
Patrick Cornwall, 38, is known to readers of The Reporter as a fearless and knowledgeable journalist. Two years ago he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his exposé of racism within the police force.
For more than a month he has been researching present-day slavery in Paris, the heart of Europe and the cradle of the ideals of liberty. He found a dirty world in which human life is not highly valued.
‘Patrick was about to expose a criminal network that reaches even to the powerful elite,’ says Alena Cornwall, his widow, who has spent the past few weeks in Europe looking for her husband after he disappeared.
She finally found him, on a beach in Tarifa, a town on the Spanish coast. The local police thought it was a case of yet another refugee who had drowned while fleeing on a boat from Africa. His body was buried in an unmarked grave on Monday.
Now Alena Cornwall is demanding that the police investigate his murder.
‘Patrick Cornwall’s death is not just a crime against an individual,’ says Senator John Whiteford in a commentary.
‘It is also a crime against the freedom of expression.’
I rubbed my eyes, then I skimmed the rest of the article. I could hardly take in what it said. Black letters flickering on a greyish-white screen. As if it were just any newspaper text that had nothing to do with me. Yet I felt slightly elated, a euphoric sense at finding myself in the centre of the world. I was sitting at the computer behind the front desk in the hotel, clicking back and forth from one article to another. They had worked hard.
There were statistics about slavery in the world, comments from organizations working to abolish slavery, scores of examples of present-day slavery, an article about a hotel fire in which seventeen people had died, a map of immigration routes …
It was all there. And yet it wasn’t.
Patrick Cornwall was said to have been working on a theory about legitimate enterprises acting as a cover for extensive trading in slave labour for such markets as the construction industry, janitorial services, and agriculture in Western Europe.
A theory? Alain Thery’s name was not mentioned anywhere, but Richard Evans had assured me that this was only the beginning.
‘At this stage we can’t publish any names,’ he’d explained. ‘Those people could sue our asses off.’
‘Patrick is dead,’ I said. ‘I know that Thery is behind it.’
‘You might know that,’ said Richard. ‘But I’m the one who’d go to prison.’
He had personally stayed on the job and worked half the night, calling in extra staff and taking charge of the whole thing. He’d written the lead article himself.
‘I’ll be damned if Cornwall wasn’t right,’ he said when he called me to check on some details. ‘This is one hell of a story. A real prize-winning story. It’s a shame we won’t have his take on it. His eyewitness accounts giving the reader the sense that he dragged this poor immigrant’s story out of the blazing inferno.’
From the photo with the by-line of his editorial on the front page, Richard Evans’ fierce, pale blue eyes stared back at me.
‘The fact that immigrants are exploited as cheap or free labour is the dark side of the global economy,’ he wrote, drawing parallels with the slave trade of the past. ‘Back then a slave was an investment that was kept for generations. Now he is just one of many use-and-discard types of goods. Let’s not debate which is preferable. Instead, let’s finish what the abolitionists started almost two centuries ago: let’s eradicate slavery from the earth for good.’
The article concluded with a challenge to the politicians. ‘Democracies,’ he wrote, ‘must be able to find better solutions than building walls to keep out the rest of the world.’ And then he expressed sorrow at the passing of Patrick Cornwall, and wrote that he was one of the magazine’s most valued freelance reporters. His death would leave a real void.
As the hours passed, I watched the news spread over the Internet.
It was mentioned on CNN, and then on one TV channel after another. As the morning progressed in Europe, the story appeared in more and more newspapers in Spain, France, and Great Britain.
Patrick’s by-line photo from The Reporter was mass-produced in online publications all over the world. Some even ran a photograph of me, taken from the Joyce Theatre home page.
A well-groomed woman wearing light make-up smiled at me from the photo. A woman from another life.
I stopped reading and studied the picture of Patrick. It had been taken about two years ago. His expression was solemn and formal. He looked like a stranger. Frozen in a moment that had swiftly raced past.
Now we just needed to wait.
Richard Evans had promised me that the story would start to take on a life of its own. The demands for a murder investigation would grow until the police would be forced to act. And in the end justice would rise victorious, as he expressed it, out of all the shit.
Chapter 17
Tarifa
Monday, 6 October
On Monday they came to exhume his body.
I watched everything from a distance. It was now out of my hands. The small backhoe turned and manoeuvred until it was next to the grave. The cameras whirred as the first shovelful of dirt was removed. The murmur of voices rose.
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I was crouched down between several Catholic graves, my hood pulled up so I wouldn’t be recognized.
This section of the cemetery, which had been so desolate before, was now crowded with people. Reporters and TV crews and ordinary spectators. In two days, Patrick’s death had become a story capturing worldwide attention. Journalists and TV producers had quickly got hold of my number, and on Saturday the calls had started coming in. I declined all interviews and referred everyone to Richard Evans. I had said everything I was going to say to The Reporter. Some had ferreted out my email address. They wanted to know more about our life together, about what Patrick was like as a husband and a human being. They wanted to rip from me every memory that I had left.
I’d walked for miles on the beach. For long stretches I’d taken off my shoes and walked barefoot at the edge of the water with my jeans rolled up. It was too cold to swim, but the sea tempted and tugged at me, and I wished I could have gone in for a swim. To swim the way I used to do long ago, when I was in school. Back then, as I glided through the water, everything around me had disappeared.
On the other side of town, in the east, there were deserted beaches, rocky and inaccessible. There was also a ruin of a fortress filled with broken bottles and used condoms. When the wind got to be too much, I would head up to the old part of town, hidden within medieval ramparts, which had the same meandering Arabic network of lanes as Alfama in Lisbon. I had passed the place called the Blue Heaven Bar, where Terese had met the dirt-bag who had stolen her things. In the restaurant that Tom McNerney had mentioned, the Café Central, I’d eaten a Moroccan salad with tuna and mint for both lunch and dinner.
I’d then slept soundly all night, a slumber without colour or dreams, until I awoke to McNerney’s phone call and he told me that the Spanish police had decided to exhume Patrick’s body.
The pressure from American and European news agencies had cut through the bureaucratic red tape.
An autopsy was going to be performed. The murder investigation had begun.
Photographs from the exhuming of the grave were quickly posted on the Internet.
I was sitting at my usual computer behind the front desk, dropping in three euros to pay for an hour of Internet time. It seemed more real and concrete to read about Patrick’s death than to experience it myself. The significance hadn’t yet settled in the depths of my soul.
Never again.
Retribution, I thought instead. Justice. That’s what was important right now. The exhumation order was the first victory, and soon those bastards would be caught, with the whole world watching.
I skimmed through a couple of Spanish newspapers, but it wasn’t easy. Spanish was a spoken language for me. So I switched to the New York papers.
The Reporter described the opening of Patrick’s grave as a victory for justice. There were several articles about cases of slavery discovered around the world, but nothing new about the fire in Paris, about the death of Mikail Yechenko, or about Alain Thery. His name still hadn’t been mentioned. Nor was any of the information from Yechenko’s documents reported.
On the other hand, there was a flood of praise for Patrick’s work.
You could have bought his articles while he was alive, I thought as I clicked out of the news reports and leaned back. I was starting to think about leaving this godforsaken town. There were buses to Málaga, and from there I could catch a plane.
Home, I thought. Was that possible? To go back, as if nothing had happened? Put on my old clothes, step back into my old life?
I skipped all the emails from journalists, and opened the last two that Benji had sent.
In the first he wrote that he was so terribly, terribly sorry.
That the world was a horrible place in which love never had a chance.
He’d pasted in a poem by W H Auden, the one quoted in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and I couldn’t avoid the lines about the stars that were put out when a beloved one had died.
He’d also sent three sketches for a stage design for Cherry Lane Theatre. Just some scattered ideas, he wrote, so he’d have something to show them at the next meeting. I couldn’t even get myself to look at them. Benji would have to string the clients along until I got home.
‘Go with your first impulse,’ I wrote. ‘Trust your intuition to come up with the right approach.’
I was just about to close the email programme when I discovered an email from Caroline Kearny among the ones that I’d skipped. Her purple-clothed figure appeared in my mind, as if from a different era. Paris seemed so infinitely long ago.
‘Oh, my darling, oh, my dear,’ she wrote. Several more lines expressing sorrow and then a P.S.:
‘Meeting Guy de Barreau tomorrow. Have tried to contact Alain Thery, but he’s left the city. Rumour has it that he’s on one of his yachts, in Saint-Tropez or Puerto Banus.’
I clicked the reply button, but couldn’t think of a thing to say, so I switched off the computer. The poem still lingered in my head as the screen went all dark, like a sky without its stars, nor a moon or a sun.
I awoke to a Spanish talk show on the TV. Outside it was still light, with horns blaring. I had stretched out on the bed, zapping through the TV channels. Then I must have fallen asleep. I couldn’t remember ever feeling so exhausted.
The remote had fallen to the floor. I picked it up and began searching for a news show.
First a piece on domestic politics in Spain, and then the spotlight shifted to Tarifa. The camera panned over fishing boats and moved on to the statue of the saint that stood at the very end of a pier to bless the shipping lanes. I turned up the volume. A Spanish news anchor was saying: ‘It was here in Tarifa that the body of an American journalist …’ Patrick’s face appeared, the photo from his by-line. ‘… now suspect that he was murdered …’
A picture of the beach, and then a young black man appeared on screen.
‘I didn’t know him personally,’ said the man, speaking English with a strange accent. In the subtitles, he was identified only as James, an immigrant.
‘Patrick Cornwall was on the boat that night. He said he wanted to write about the crossing from Africa for an American magazine.’
All sounds from the street disappeared. What the fuck? A boat? What was the man talking about? Africa?
‘It was a terrible trip across the straits,’ said the immigrant named James. ‘It was stormy, and the boat rocked and took on water and people fell into the sea. I think almost all of them died.’
‘But you survived,’ said the reporter, whose English was worse than James’s.
‘I thank my God that I’m alive,’ said James, glancing up at the sky. It was Creole English he was speaking, from some former British colony. The interview was subtitled in Spanish.
‘You’ve chosen to step forward, even though you risk being sent back to your homeland,’ said the reporter. ‘Why do you want to speak out about this?’
‘I owe it to God because he rescued me from the sea,’ said James.
‘And you are quite certain that Patrick Cornwall, the American journalist, was on that same boat?’
‘He said he wanted to write about us,’ said James. ‘I asked if he could help me get to America. He was a good man.’
Then the immigrant disappeared, and the camera panned across the beach and over to the fortress ruins, where the reporter stood, holding a microphone.
‘The death of the American journalist Patrick Cornwall has prompted huge headlines all over the world, turning everyone’s eyes to the southern coast of Spain.’ He had to shout to be heard over the roaring of the waves. ‘Every death is a tragedy, of course, but in this case there doesn’t appear to be anything criminal involved, other than the illegal smuggling of people, which still happens here, on our shores.’
A soccer game started up. I had to get up from the bed and go out onto the balcony, letting the lashing of the wind bring me to my senses again.
It wasn’t possible. I tried to picture Patrick in a rubber
boat on a stormy sea. Wearing chinos and a sport coat, clinging to the gunwale. Could I have been so wrong?
Had he really gone crazy and made his way over the border to commit even bigger stupidities in order to land his story? I’m headed straight into the darkness.
In the room behind me my cell was ringing. It was Richard Evans.
‘What the hell is this?’ he shouted into the phone. ‘I’m sitting here with a wire from the AP. Did Patrick go out trying to do some sort of travel report?’
‘It can’t be true,’ I said, closing the balcony doors. ‘He would never have gone out on a boat like that.’
‘Why not?’
‘Patrick wouldn’t even take the ferry to—’
Evans interrupted me.
‘I’ll agree that it sounds like a fantastic story, an amazing eyewitness account, with the waves and the people struggling to get across a merciless sea. But that’s not what we wrote in The Reporter yesterday. What am I missing? All the lawyers are calling me like crazy.’
I sank down onto the bed. My mind was whirling.
‘That man named James must be mistaken,’ I said. ‘Maybe he’s just somebody who wanted to be on TV.’
‘They claim he’s trustworthy. It’s been confirmed that a boat capsized in the Mediterranean that night. Evidently they’ve found more dead bodies.’ Evans put his hand over the phone and murmured something to someone else. I heard a TV on in the background, and other voices. ‘We’re checking on this, of course, but for the time being we’re going to have to pull the story off the web.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The other publications have already changed their versions. We can’t stand alone against the world and claim that Patrick Cornwall was murdered by a criminal gang. That would completely destroy our credibility. We have to safeguard our integrity, especially since he worked for us.’
‘But it’s the truth,’ I said faintly, not sure whether I believed it myself.
‘It’s not so much a matter of what’s true,’ said Evans, ‘as what we’re able to substantiate.’
The Forgotten Dead Page 28