The Finder

by Will Ferguson

  “There was a student army as well,” said another. “Eight hundred strong. All volunteers pushing wheelbarrows and toting shovels, immediately began cleaning up. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” said Freebie, hoisting a fresh bottle. “Kiwis are fuckin’ amazing.”

  “Hear, hear.” More toasts: to courage and kindness, and to the quiet understated competence of New Zealanders, perched down here like bats, upside down on the other side of the globe.

  “I’m thinking of moving here after this is over. I really am.”

  “Me too!”

  Everyone is always thinking about moving to New Zealand. It’s one of the most hypothetical nations on earth, second only to Ireland.

  Andy the Englishman reappeared—Rafferty hadn’t noticed he was gone—bursting through the open door as though awaiting applause, and maybe he was. “Gentlemen! Like Eisenhower, I have returned!” This was met with a roar of indifference.

  “MacArthur,” said Rafferty. “It wasn’t Eisenhower, it was MacArthur.”

  “Is that Rafferty, I hear? Still a prick, I see. Gentlemen!” he shouted. “I bring a guest. I found him wandering, lonely as a cloud among the ruins of the city.” Behind Andy, a silhouette hesitated in the doorway. Andy misinterpreted this as nervousness. “Cautioned!” he exclaimed. “Not condemned, cautioned. Enter, enter! A soiree at the end of days! With the unerring instincts of the scribbler class, we have liberated a cache of hooch that had gone undamaged—until now! Such is the aleatory aspect of travel. One must always be prepared for Plan B, to say nothing of C through Z.” He pronounced it “zed,” in the British fashion. “Entrez, entrez.”

  But the shadow in the doorway didn’t move. Andy, theatrically: “Gentlemen, I give you… What did you say your name was? Doesn’t matter. We’ve been taking turns paying. Your round!” Andy said this with unalloyed chutzpah. Invite a fellow in and immediately get him to buy; it was the Englishman in Andy’s equation, shining forth.

  A voice, quietly. “I should be going.”

  “Don’t be silly. Hide awhile with us.”

  The small man looked over his shoulder. “Maybe just till the patrol has passed.”

  “Exactly,” Andy cried. “When the streets are clear, you can make your escape. Now—come, come. Join us! It’s your round. You can’t run off now. And here, I thought it was the Scots who were cheap!”

  Rafferty saw the silhouette stiffen at Andy’s comment. “Why do you say that?” the silhouette asked.

  “Well, that is Ireland I hear, yes? Just a trace, very faint, but there like an echo. Faith and begorra, you’ve held onto a bit of that haven’t you!” Whether it was a matter of congratulations or commiseration on retaining one’s Irish identity wasn’t clear. “I’m a student of dialect, you see. Ulster, am I right?”

  Another hesitation, more revealing than the last. “Not Ireland, no. New England, I’m afraid.”

  Someone at the table yelled, “As long as it’s not ruddy Old England! This table can’t handle another Limey fuck.”

  “Gentlemen!” Andy admonished. “I expect sobriety and propriety. We have a guest.” He turned to the silhouette. “Ruffians and reprobates, the lot of ’em. Pay no heed.”

  They waved Andy and his guest over, pulled up a chair for them. The small man in the trim suit sat directly across from Rafferty, perfectly outlined. Rafferty stared at him. I know you. From where? The man carried a stiff self-consciousness with him, like someone on the wrong end of a job interview. A bottle of something and a glass of the same were passed down the table.

  Before the small man could pour, Andy snatched it up, examined the label in the dim light. “Santa Rosa? Ah, yes, the plebian preferences of the great unwashed. It matters not! Rich or poor, gentry or prole, chambermaids and chamberlains alike, I am a man of the people! Gentlemen”—a belated nod to Tamsin—“and lady, drink up! The territorials are doing a sweep, evicting the last holdouts from the center of the city. They’re shutting Christchurch down, my friends. I met our guest here in mid-crouch, as it were, as we both hid from the same patrol behind a shard of stone.” Andy had gone out earlier in search of better wine, had come back empty-handed, but with a new member for their coven. He poured a glass for himself and one for the stranger. “To new friends!” he yelled. “The old ones can go to hell.”

  “Hear, hear!” someone else chimed in. Glasses were duly clinked.

  Rafferty was studying the outline across from him. The empty space on a map. A man in want of a bowler. “New England, you say?”

  The silhouette pretended not to hear.

  “Where in New England, exactly? I used to have a cabin up in Maine, on the border with Vermont.” Not true, any of it. He was testing the water, intrigued by the man’s evasiveness. Maine and Vermont never touched. Anyone from New England would know that, and Rafferty wanted to see what the small man would say, but the small man never responded. Rafferty persisted. “The Maine-Vermont border. Ever been?”

  Again, no answer.

  “So tell me, Charlie,” one of the journalists asked, throwing the small man a conversational life preserver—they had decided, apropos of nothing, that the newcomer’s name was Charlie—“what brings you to Christchurch?”

  To this, the small man did reply. “I’m with a brokerage firm. We manage assets, have investments in different countries.”

  “Interesting work?”

  “It has its moments.”

  Rafferty cut in. “I feel like we’ve met somewhere,” he said.

  The silhouette turned. “I look like a lot of people. I have that type of face, I’m afraid. The curse of familiarity. Strangers on a train.”

  “Not a shadow of a doubt, Charlie,” someone shouted. “Not a shadow of a doubt.”

  The conversation at the rest of the table galloped off in newer, ill-defined directions, and the small man’s presence faded. He was still there, but strangely invisible—except to Rafferty. I know you.

  “What is that, one of those new digital DSLRs?” They were asking Tamsin about her camera.

  “It is.” None of this smartphone crap. Tamsin shot massive RAW files, digital negatives in effect, images to be color-balanced and adjusted later. She took her camera out of its battered case. “It’s the heavy-duty version. Has a real heft to it. You could bludgeon someone to death with my camera. Try that with an iPad.”

  It was a Canon, which immediately sparked a Canon versus Nikon debate, one as old—and implausibly impassioned—as Coke versus Pepsi, Stones versus Beatles. Nikon handles skin tones better, but Canon makes the backgrounds richer, sharpens the subjects. Tamsin didn’t care about any of these angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin-type debates. You don’t photograph subjects, you photograph light. Low in the sky or harshly rendered, twilit or in that magic-hour moment when the sun has set but its radiance has not, when the entire world seems to glow, transient light from no particular direction, a softness that leaves no shadows. Tamsin Greene was a master of the magic hour. With the halos that were always present in her peripheral vision, in many ways she lived in the magic hour. “You learn to read the light,” she liked to say. “The camera is just a tool. I can change a tragedy into a feel-good tale, and vice versa, with a simple change of filters.”

  “Saw your last photo-essay,” said one of the other journalists, a photographer like her. “In Harper’s, I think.” Like he didn’t remember. “Was pretty good.” Given how begrudgingly journalists admired each other’s work, this was the equivalent of a declaration of fealty. “I like what you did with the foreground. Good color saturation. Strong verticals. Yeah. It was nice.”

  “That’s what I was going for,” Tamsin said with a smile so lopsided it could almost be a sneer. “When Israeli forces were firing into the crowds, and civilians were fleeing: make sure it looks nice.” There was a reason the other journalists didn’t like Tamsin.

  With the camera cradled in her lap, Tamsin was changing the memory card the way a mother might ch
ange a bib. “There’s a Pulitzer in here somewhere,” she said. She popped the current memory card out, slid a new one into place. And then: “Smile, assholes.” She fired a practice flash—and that’s when it happened.

  In the flash of her camera, the room became a tableau vivant, frozen in midmotion. The small man’s face was lit up as though caught in a slash of lightning, less than the time it took for a heart to beat, but that was enough: gunfire and screams and flares trailing into the jungle air, tracer bullets and helicopters. Panic and pain and bare feet, running through the mud. Crowds surging forward, pushed back. Bodies, piled like soiled laundry. Rwanda, imploding. The Congo boiling over. He was there. In the camps. Rafferty felt his chest constrict, trapped in a freeze-frame moment of his own.

  Darkness returned.

  “An interesting piece of equipment,” said the silhouette. “May I?”

  “Sure.” Tamsin passed it across the table and the small man turned it over in his hands, admired the camera from every angle. “Remarkable,” he said. He then passed it to the journalist next to him, who performed a similar tea ceremony maneuver. “Not bad. This is Canon’s newest line, right? Not as good as Nikon, but still… Well made.” And so it was that Tamsin’s equipment moved slowly around the table, each person admiring it in turn. Some asked about specs, others about low-light conditions and tripod stability, autobracketing and whether it was as waterproof as the older versions. When the camera finally got back to her, Tamsin was about to tuck it into its case when she stopped, looked closer, then up at them. “Okay, which one of you assholes took out the memory card?”

  “What?”

  “The memory card. The one I just put in, where is it?”

  This was followed by accusations and alibis, charge and countercharge. “What are you accusing us of?” “We may be reprobates, but we are not common thieves, m’lady!” (That was Andy.) “Why the fuck would we want your memory? We’ve got plenty of our own.” “Quit dicking around, you jerks. Those cards cost fifty bucks a pop. Freebie?” “I didn’t take your fucking card.” “Well, who did?” “It sure as fuck wasn’t me.” “Ha ha. Joke’s over, assholes. Whoever has it, give it back.”

  Rafferty stared across the table, amazed at what he saw—or rather, what he didn’t. The small man was gone. He hadn’t left, exactly; it was more like he’d dissolved. As the acrimony grew and the allegations escalated, Rafferty got up, whispered to Tamsin, “I’ll be right back.”

  Outside, the night lay heavy on the city. Rafferty walked down the street, looking for the small man and Tamsin’s memory card. In the distance, an army patrol had fanned out, was moving toward the bar. Rafferty slipped away, even as he heard a muffled “Stop!” from the soldiers. He kept moving. When those soldiers reached the bar, they would have their hands full rounding up the reporters who were malingering inside. Rwanda. The Presidential Guard under attack. The Congo. A rapid exchange of gunfire. Bare feet fleeing through the mud. The wet smell of woodsmoke and open latrines, screams that would linger for hours, for days, for years, forever. Screams that echoed even now, as Rafferty crossed the tumbledown square with the fallen cross. I know who you are, you prick.

  But where was he? This man with the mercenaries. This man with the reptilian eyes.

  In the rubble-strewn square, the cathedral steeple was draped across the cobblestones like a downed dirigible. Empty windows everywhere. No sign of the small man. Rafferty turned around, disorientated. Felt lost, then realized why. The wall that had been thumbtacked in the middle of the ruins was missing. The slab of wall that had been standing upright was gone. He’d used that as a reference point, was confounded by its absence, stumbling across the wasteland, trying to figure out where he was in relation to where it should have been.

  He finally spotted it, toppled in the rubble, the wall having fallen, and as he drew closer, he saw, clawlike, a hand reaching out from underneath. A body was under the wall.

  From across the square, an army patrol was yelling at Rafferty. “Mate! No one’s allowed in here!”

  Rafferty crossed a loose scree of bricks, accidentally kicking up a metallic snake as he went. He stopped, and from the rain-slicked mud, retrieved a medallion. Saint Christopher, if he wasn’t mistaken. The chain had been snapped as though yanked from a neck. Patron saint of travelers, protector of the wayfaring soul. Rafferty knew Saint Christopher well. Had prayed to him, drunkenly, ironically, stupidly over the years, had yet to get a reply. Finding the medal there, amid the jumble, was surreal, like running into an old acquaintance at a rummage sale—an old acquaintance who never returns your calls, lying on the surface of the mud. It had to have come from the dead man. Rafferty shoved it into his pocket with vague thoughts that it might help identify the body later. As it turned out, this wasn’t Saint Christopher, and far from bringing Rafferty protection in his travels, the medallion would prove more a bane than a blessing.

  Rafferty tried to lift the fallen slab, but couldn’t. This section of wall had been standing when Rafferty left his room. The small man had slipped away, the wall had fallen, and the small man was now gone. It didn’t take a detective; Rafferty knew exactly who was under that slab. Hand, like a claw. Reaching out. Rafferty had half expected to spot Tamsin’s memory card clutched inside it. He could see where the wall had split on a cavity-pocked segment of mortar. One good shove would have brought it down; that could as easily have been Rafferty under that wall as the small man, and it hit him in a wave of nausea, the instability of it all: the wall, the city, the churches, all those cathedrals and certainties we build up only to watch fall.

  Rafferty reeled, shouted, voice thick, as the soldiers moved toward him. “There’s someone under here!”

  The image remained, though, of a face. Unremarkable. But not the eyes. And it might have been an illusion, might have been the flash bouncing off the retinas, reddish pink and pinkish red, those strange feline dots that appear in the eyeballs of poorly taken snapshots, but even in that single freeze-frame moment, Rafferty had recognized a certain rage, a rage that was buried now beneath that slab of wall.

  “There’s someone under here!” he cried. “Hurry!”

  On the other side of the world, on a small island on the edge of a very large sea, Police Inspector Shimada, senior officer, Hateruma Substation, was waking up from a troubling dream about a man whose face had been erased.

  PART FOUR THE DESERVING POOR

  THE CITY WAS SMOLDERING, SHE could see it from here: the columns of smoke, the angel hair of haze, the constant chuttering of helicopters.

  A girl in her awkward years—thirteen, maybe more, it was hard to say—was making her way homeward along a narrow path high above the plains. A loose assortment of elbows and knees and poorly cut bangs (she did those herself in the mirror). A girl in her awkward years, dressed in the drab tartan of Saint Michael’s, hugging textbooks to her chest, the winds tugging at her from all sides—and honestly, who thought brown and mustard made for a flattering school uniform? A girl in her awkward years, caught between landscapes: tumbledown seascapes on one side, the broad Canterbury Plains on the other, spreading out like coarse canvas and creased cotton, the hedgerows and fallow fields, and in the middle, like so much broken masonry: Christchurch in ruins. The rains had lifted, but the city still smoldered. She could see it from here.

  “There won’t be any school, not after that,” she said, pleading her case. But it was no use. Fayther, as she had dubbed him, insisted.

  “All the more reason to go down, gather your schoolwork. Educational pursuits do not wait on natural discourse. Off you go, Catherine. And take care for any falling rocks.”

  How exactly?

  When the earthquake hit, the cliffs above Saint Michael’s had given way, sending large boulders tumbling down to within striking distance of the school. The playing field was now pocked with rubble, and the students had fled, but Catherine had been sent back anyway, to collect her homework.

  “Won’t be any homework.” But Fayther was Fa
yther and once a notion had taken hold of him, he was impervious to pleas. The vats of water. The numerological calculations. The infiltration of bolder sheep. Visions only he was privy to.

  So she’d trudged across the fields and down the steep and twisty trail to the schoolyard at the edge of the village, where the rocks had stopped just short of freeing her from the ongoing ordeal that was Saint Mike’s. In the silence of the school, she’d gathered her chem and biology textbooks, was now making the windy walk homeward. On the checkerboard plains below: the faint bleat of sirens, still. I warned them. Would they listen? Fayther, awake in the Land of Nod. Entire city, sleepwalking towards catastrophe. I tried to warn them. Would they listen? Letters to the editor and town hall dustups, and still the city had fallen.

  The path climbed through ferny grasses, ran along a high tumbled edge. Directly below was a cove, a scooped-out hollow that dropped directly, dramatically, into the sea. The swell of waves below was like the slow rise and fall of a bullwhip, lifting up—hanging in place a moment—then crashing down, onto a pebbled shore. Beyond the cove lay an endless immensity of ocean. The boat was gone.

  It had been there for two days, a nondescript vessel anchored offshore, waiting—for what? Catherine had spotted it earlier, but it was no longer present. Had she imagined it? Ships never came into the cove; the currents were too unstable, with no pier to land on. Perhaps it had been a rescue ship sent in to spirit survivors to safety, and with no more survivors being pulled from the wreckage of the city, the ship had simply departed for other coves, other crises. Tragedies were so easily forgotten. It was like the weather, how clouds sweeping in from the Atlantic would pummel their home, sending their sheep into a near-narcoleptic fear, but as soon as it lifted, all you could remember were blue skies and summer winds.

  A separate path ran down, precariously, to water’s edge, zigzagging its way to the very bottom of the cove. Catherine pushed on, over tussocks of grass, past wind-stunted bracken, to the last house on the last hill, the only house on the hill: a farm on the edge of the sea, a bungalow balancing act high above the plains, master of all it surveyed, and not a single tree to slow the wind. You never got used to the wind, not really.