The opening of the window was a black hole into the dark basement. He lay down on his back, arms tight against his sides, then wriggled forward, legs first. Even a much smaller window would have provided space enough for a guy like him.
The basement was no more than a single room, about two-thirds the width of the house. Lime-washed walls and a fusty smell of damp and washing powder. A combined laundry, workshop, and storeroom for pickled cucumbers, obviously unused for some time. There was a carton of Tide on top of the washing machine. Marco upturned it, noting with satisfaction that the contents had long since congealed. He was certain now. No one came down here anymore.
His eyes passed quickly over tins of old paint and neglected tools as he stepped toward the door into the passage, unlocking it and opening it wide, his first emergency exit now secured.
Then he went up the stairs to the ground floor, found the patio door and opened it, too. Second exit secured. He paused and scanned the room for sensors, listening for the faintest hum, anything that might reveal the presence of a more sophisticated alarm system, a hook-up to a mobile phone or a neighbor’s landline.
Finding nothing, he set to work systematically. His eyes ate their way through room after room. During a normal burglary they would have routinely skipped anything that might make him think of those who lived there. Sympathy for the people from whom he stole was the worst of all evils, Zola always said. “Pretend all the possessions belong to you, and the people you see in the picture frames there are insignificant strangers. The toys you see belong to your own small brothers and sisters and have nothing to do with the children of the house. Remember this.”
The last part was especially hard to think about.
But Marco was a thief no longer. He wasn’t here to steal these people’s possessions but to take in their history, the tiny indications of who they might be and why.
So he started with the drawers and their contents of personal papers.
It was clear William Stark was a man who set store by order. Marco determined this immediately as he pored through cabinets and cupboards in the living room and dining room. Most people’s drawers were a mess: a Ronson lighter from days gone by, discarded mobiles, toothpicks in plastic containers, half-empty packets of tissues. Tablecloths here, birthday decorations there. Marco had rifled through the like at least a hundred times, but here it was different. William Stark didn’t keep such things. Even the walls and the shelves were devoid of anything reminiscent of times past. No photo of the young William standing between proud parents at his confirmation, a grinning face beneath a graduation cap; no Christmas cards saved in a box. Nothing in the way of nostalgia. Instead, Marco found handwritten tax reports and insurance documents in separate folders, a bowl of foreign coins in small plastic bags, receipts, boarding passes in bundles, travel brochures, and handwritten descriptions of hotels at various destinations, arranged in alphabetical order and held together by rotting elastic bands.
He nodded pensively. He had never met a man such as this in real life.
He found girls’ things in the adjoining rooms. The scent was different there. The objects that had been left in the daughter’s small, yellow-painted bedroom were most likely ones in which she had lost interest. The aquarium was dry, the birdcage empty, the drawing paraphernalia laid aside, the boy bands on the wall presumably superseded by new idols. By contrast, the mother’s room seemed more up-to-date, more representative of the person she had been and almost certainly still was. An array of books on shelves, a pile of handbags and summer hats stacked on top of the wardrobe. Boots of all kinds arranged neatly on the floor, and colorful scarves hanging from a hook next to the mirror.
Marco frowned and began to wonder. It almost seemed like the woman still lived here. But why the musty smell of absence? Why the congealed laundry detergent? Why the empty fridge, its door ajar?
And if the two of them really lived elsewhere, as was likely the case, why had the girl’s mother not taken her things with her? Didn’t she want them anymore? Or was she planning on moving in again? Marco had no idea, but then he had never been close to any female. Not even his mother.
Perhaps the woman believed William Stark was still alive and would show up someday. Perhaps all these things were just waiting to be put into use again. Perhaps life with Stark was simply on stand-by.
Marco stood quite still. It pained him to stand in that room knowing none of it would ever happen, that Stark was irrevocably dead. Maybe that was why he went back into the living room and began to study the few private photos there were. Right away he recognized the one the girl had used for her notice. Stark between the girl and her mother, smiling. She’d cropped it and blown it up, but it was the same image.
It was a family situation that would never be replicated.
Marco turned round, noticing for the first time the sharp incisions in the sofa and all its scatter cushions.
He stepped forward, sensing the desperate action to which the room had been witness. How else could he describe it? What did this act of vandalism indicate if not desperation? Was it Stark, who’d lost his mind? Was that why the woman’s boots and all her things were still in her room? Had she and her daughter simply taken to their heels? Was that it? Maybe they’d been really afraid of him. Marco knew the feeling.
He shook his head, unable to get a handle on the situation. Why would his stepdaughter then want Stark back? It didn’t make sense. There had to be some other explanation.
He began to poke at the slits in the cushions. They were dusty, suggesting it had been a while since it had happened. Clean, decisive incisions, probably made with a Stanley knife. Marco shook his head. He felt certain a man of Stark’s orderliness would never have done such a thing unless he’d simply lost his marbles.
Was it jealousy? Had the woman done something she oughtn’t? Had this man, whose life was arranged so neatly, gone berserk because his partner had been unfaithful? Had such a devastating event made him wrench away, from himself and those around him?
Or was it something else altogether?
Again, Marco studied the photo the girl had used. Here was William Stark wearing his African necklace—the one Marco himself now wore—beaming at the camera, the garden in the background in full bloom. So carefree they seemed, so happy. Even the girl, despite her sickly appearance, with dark shadows under her eyes and pale sunken cheeks.
No, Marco had never quite been able to grasp the fluctuations of ordinary people’s lives, and this instance was no exception. The slits in the sofa and the cushions, Stark’s disappearance, the woman’s clothes in her room. He didn’t get it.
Normally, he wouldn’t have cared, but this time was different. He needed to understand, it was why he was here. It was imperative for him to find out why Stark had to disappear, why his and Zola’s paths had crossed. Perhaps the answer lay somewhere here.
Looking around once more, it struck him that the cuts in the sofa could be Zola’s work. Had Stark possessed something Zola was looking for? Had he found it?
Marco turned to the largest of the chest of drawers, automatically doing what thieves do. Feeling all the surfaces, searching for anything that might be concealed, inserted in a secret place, affixed with tape somewhere inaccessible to view. Then he looked behind all the paintings, lifted the rugs and then the tattered mattresses on the beds. As though searching for wads of banknotes or precious jewelry, he worked his way systematically through the house, room by room, nook by nook, but found nothing.
He wondered about the open safe in the little office with the teakwood bookcases next to the front door. It was empty, but since all else had proved fruitless he got down on his knees and ran the nail of an index finger along all its joints. This too was without result, much as he had anticipated. It wasn’t the kind of safe with secret compartments and minute locking systems. It was the regular, old-fashioned sort, tall as a table, with one single interior
and a dial lock on the front.
And yet, to make sure, he stuck his head completely inside the safe, examining for cracks, turning his gaze this way and that. Nothing. Not a thing. Until he twisted onto his back and lay outstretched on the carpet in front of the safe. Only then did he see the sequence of black letters and figures written in felt-tip on the red metal wall above the upper frame of the door. They read: A4C4C6F67.
He repeated the sequence out loud four or five times until he felt sure he could remember. It had to be significant. Why else would a person write such a thing there? The question now was when it was written, why it was written, and more specifically: what did it mean?
He pulled himself out of the safe and got to his feet. He took one of the folders marked TAX from the desk drawer, flicking through its contents at random, searching for the numbers four and seven. They weren’t hard to find, for the pages were covered in them, sums done by hand, and Marco saw it immediately: the same curling fours, the same angular sevens as those in the safe. If William Stark had written these figures in his tax files, then his was the hand that had written them in the safe.
Marco sat down on a chair and buried his face in his hands. A4C4C6F67. What could it mean?
The sequence was progressive, figures and letters alike. No leaping back and forth. Only ACCF and 44667, mixed together. But why wasn’t there a letter between the last 6 and 7? Was it because the two last figures were actually one: 67? Or was the correct interpretation rather F6 and F7? What was the system?
The Internet abounded with tests and puzzles claiming to yield a person’s IQ. Marco found exercises like these easy to solve, but this was harder. It could be a system for archiving data. It could be a code that might be rearranged in numerous combinations and deal with countless subjects. It could be a computer password, or something to do with secret societies. In fact, it could be anything at all, and to compound the problem the sequence might even be incomplete, written in random order, or perhaps simply in reverse.
Marco’s most immediate and logical thought was that it was a password, or the combination of some other safe in some other location. The question was whether the series of letters and numbers were still relevant. It could, of course, be old and outdated.
He stood up, went over to an old Hewlett-Packard computer and switched it on. The hard drive whirred and groaned for a minute or so until a gray-green image appeared on the bulky screen. No password. Nothing but old games for kids. He turned it off again.
Finding no other computers in the house, he tried to put the thought from his mind, descending again into the basement in the hope of uncovering clues that might give him something to go on.
He was deeply absorbed, eyes once more scanning the room, when he heard voices outside in the garden.
He froze and held his breath.
It was two dark voices. Voices he knew all too well. A mix of English and Italian as only Pico and Romeo were capable of.
“Someone got here before us,” Pico whispered from outside. They had already noticed the broken window. This wasn’t good.
“Look at the glass, the way it’s all leaned up neat against the wall. And look, the door’s ajar, and the patio door’s wide-open.”
“Goddammit, you’re right, Pico.” It was Romeo now. How many times had the three of them done break-ins together? It made the next sentence inevitable:
“Marco’s been here.”
Marco retreated a single step up the stairs toward the ground floor. If they discovered he was still here, he would be trapped like a spider in its own web. Knowing Pico and Romeo, one of them would be slipping in through the basement door any second now, the other keeping watch by the patio door in the garden. And it seemed just as certain that a third clan member would be posted outside in the street. No doubt he was standing there now, leaning against a willow, pretending to look out over the marsh and lake. But he wasn’t positioned there to enjoy the scenery. The instant anything untoward occurred, a bird cry would go out, louder and shriller than the residents here were used to. And Pico and Romeo would be gone before anyone knew. They were fast, those two. Surely the only ones in the clan who could catch up with Marco. And in a moment, the hunt would be on.
Marco held his arms tight to his chest, breathing deeply to calm his pulse.
His only way out was through the front door, and he would have to run like the wind.
Silently, he backed up the stairs, conscious that they would know Marco’s preferred escape route was always a door that opened onto a garden, and therefore Pico would come from below while Romeo would be waiting at the door to the veranda. Had there been a second floor he would have sought refuge there immediately. A roof had on occasion likewise proved to be a good solution for a thief disturbed during a break-in, but there was no second floor and the roof was as flat as a pancake with no place to hide.
Maybe he could cry for help? Fling open the window facing the neighbor’s house and scream at the top of his lungs, as heartrendingly as he was able while clinging to the window frame, in the hope someone would appear and frighten the hell out of Pico, Romeo, and their man in the road.
He rocked on his heels for a moment, his brain churning in search of a solution.
It wouldn’t work. They would be inside any minute and find something hard to hit him on the head with. Pico wasn’t afraid to use violence, and if they knocked him unconscious he would never wake up again, or else wake up without legs.
What do they want here? he asked himself. The image of the slashed sofa and the tattered mattresses suddenly made more sense. They had been here before. They were the ones responsible, and now they were back. But why? What were they looking for?
They couldn’t have known beforehand that he was here now because they’d sounded surprised when they found the glass splinters. All they knew was that he had been here at some point. Which meant they had to be here for some other reason.
What could it be?
Come on, Marco, think! he urged himself.
He looked around him. The basement offered no hiding place, he knew that, and the ground floor contained no built-in wardrobe or cubbyhole. Just some shelves in the bedroom with a curtain in front.
If they had been here before, as he felt certain they had, then they had come for something they had failed to find last time, or else something they now needed on account of the situation Marco had imposed upon them.
A creaking noise came from the basement. Marco held his breath and listened. Someone was already inside. It was difficult to hear what was going on because the sounds were drowned out by Romeo’s voice from the back garden ordering the man in front of the house to keep a good eye on the main door.
Another exit strategy foiled.
Mind Romeo doesn’t see you through the window, Marco admonished himself, scuttling to the wall underneath the windows of the living room. There was nowhere to conceal himself here, no place they would fail to look. The dining room was the same. Only the bedrooms remained. Marco darted into the hall and stared into the small rooms one by one. It was hopeless. Beds and shelves, that was it. Nothing in which to vanish.
And then his eyes fixed on the safe in the little office, its door ajar.
It was his only chance, because if Zola’s crew were sure of anything, it was that the safe was empty, having undoubtedly checked it the first time they were here.
They’ll look everywhere but there, he tried to convince himself, crawling inside and pulling the door closer.
His eyes narrowed as he assessed the situation and its three possible outcomes. They might find him and beat the daylights out of him, or he might remain undiscovered and get away. But there was a third terrifying possibility: that they would find him and lock him inside the safe.
He noticed he’d begun breathing more deeply. If they shut the door on him he would suffocate and never be found until the house was again in
habited.
Marco pressed his lips together. And when that time came they would find him because of the smell. His smell.
They would find a dead boy no one knew. Suffocated and decomposed. A boy with no distinguishing marks and no identity papers.
His heart was beating so fast that his breathing could hardly keep up in his upright fetal position and he began to sweat. Even his fingers perspired, and the tenuous hold they kept on the thin edge of the safe door became increasingly hard to maintain.
Now came the sound of Romeo’s voice from the patio door by the living room, and the man at the front door responded. Only Pico was silent. Marco knew he was checking the basement.
The floorboards creaked as Pico climbed the stairs from the basement to the living room, and Marco felt the house to be alive, an organism whose rooms were thick bundles of nerve endings. A foot placed randomly on a floor sent electric impulses shooting into all corners of the house and into the safe where Marco strained to remain silent, though everything inside him screamed for help. The pounding of his heart, the explosive activity of his brain, the clothes on his skin, the tangle of his limbs, his fear, the enclosed space, all combined to thrust up his body temperature, his pores opening accordingly. And as Pico made the whole house tremble even by the very lightness of his step, sweat poured from Marco’s skin. Most perceptibly from his wrist to the index finger that kept hold on the door. And it was through this little digit, slippery with moisture, that he registered how close Pico was to finding him.
I’m not here, he repeated over and over in his mind, willing the words into Pico’s sensory apparatus. Marco’s not here, he left a while ago. Do whatever it is you’re here for, Pico, but do it quickly. The neighbors will soon suspect something’s wrong when they see your man at the front door. He squeezed his eyes tight shut as cupboards slammed and furniture was shoved aside.
Pico was nothing if not thorough. Which was why Marco was so petrified.
The Marco Effect: A Department Q Novel Page 19