The Names of the Dead

by Wignall, Kevin

  He saw the clock on the dash even as she answered. “Seven hours.”

  “Wow. Have you stopped at all?”

  “Yes.” She said it as if it should have been obvious. “I booked hotel rooms, in Segovia. I want to visit the cathedral there, in the morning.”

  “Sure.”

  Freshly woken, he’d forgotten her strangeness, just as he’d woken many mornings over the past couple of weeks having forgotten that Rachel was dead and that he had a son somewhere out in the world. Those facts had become fully part of him now, and he guessed he’d get used to Mia in time, too.

  The hotel she’d booked was an old convent. They went to their rooms after checking in and then met in the restaurant at eight. Mia had changed into a black top of the identical style to the one she’d been wearing earlier.

  She offered a polite, slightly formal smile as she sat opposite him, then picked up the menu and studied it intently as if trying to solve a puzzle. He noticed, just inside the sleeve of her top, thin white scars—what looked like the ghosts of long-healed, self-inflicted wounds.

  Wes was starving and ordered accordingly. Mia ordered a salad to start and a chicken dish to follow. When the salad arrived she worked at it methodically, joylessly. The plate was almost empty when she put down her knife and fork.

  She looked at her wrist, as if suddenly aware that Wes might have seen her scars, and she pulled the sleeve down, almost over her hand.

  His instinct was to pretend he hadn’t noticed, because really this was nothing to do with him, but unexpectedly she said, “I used to cut myself. And I didn’t eat. I made a promise to my father, if he surrendered to the court in The Hague, I would change. Now he’s dead.”

  “But you’re still eating.”

  “Yes. It’s important to keep a promise. I wasn’t unhappy. I . . .”

  “You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”

  “Your name is James Wesley.”

  The lurch in the conversation threw him momentarily before he caught up. He’d had to give his full name when they were checking in, and he’d wondered whether she’d even noticed and why she hadn’t mentioned it. But she had noticed and had stored the fact away until now.

  “Yes.”

  “Why aren’t you called James?”

  “My family and my wife are the only people who ever called me that. Wes was a nickname from when I was a kid. Even my teachers called me Wes.” She looked completely lost somehow. He thought again of how there was something alien about her, like someone stranded in a world for which she wasn’t properly equipped. “You know, I appreciate you driving me, Mia, but you can leave any time you like. I can find my own way, if you decide you’ve had enough. I’d understand.”

  She stared at him for so long that he thought she might not answer, but it was more that she was decoding what he’d said, as though any ambiguous or implied meanings were slightly beyond her.

  Finally, she said, “But I like it. I like to drive. And I have nowhere else, except to scatter my father’s ashes.”

  “You really have no one else back in Croatia?”

  “My mother drowned when I was a baby. In the river, with stones in her pockets. I have some aunts and uncles and cousins, but we’re not close, not since . . . I have no husband. My father said I’m not the marrying kind, but he said that’s fine and I shouldn’t worry about it. I don’t like to be touched.”

  That begged a lot of questions, about when it had started or if she’d always been like that; about the reason she was no longer close to her extended family, or if she’d ever been close to them. But it was no business of his, and he guessed she’d tell him if she wanted to.

  “Your dad was right, you shouldn’t worry about it. We are what we are.”

  That seemed to please her, and after thinking on it, she said, “Did you know my father?”

  “Not really. Clearly my loss.”

  “He was a good man.”

  “I heard that.”

  She didn’t finish her main course and didn’t have dessert. And though she drank, it amounted to barely a glass of wine across the meal. Wes didn’t drink much more himself, finding the alcohol still going too readily to his head—he guessed that would take a while.

  Mia went to bed early and the hotel was quiet—so, by eleven, Wes too had gone back to his room. But there was no sleep coming on the back of the six or seven hours he’d had on the journey down.

  He turned on the TV and immediately turned it off again, finding the noise obtrusive. That made him think of Rachel—one of the many insignificant things they’d had in common was an aversion to TV in the bedroom.

  His thoughts skipped automatically from her to Ethan, even though he knew nothing about him, even though he was nothing more than a name. And because of that, questions rose up to fill the void, questions he couldn’t answer and didn’t want to think about.

  So he sat and read portions of Patrice’s bible instead, flicking through and picking pages at random rather than trying to read from the beginning as he had earlier, and drawn in particular to the many lines and passages Patrice had underscored in pencil. And after an hour or so, with tiredness finally creeping up on him, he found one of those lines and turned it over in his mind, moved by its simple invocation.

  Deliver me, O Lord, from the evil man: preserve me from the violent man.

  Some people—his country’s enemies—might have viewed him in those terms in the past, and even if his actions hadn’t been evil, they had certainly been violent. But now he was the one in need of preservation.

  He was probably safe enough for the time being. Mia had granted him an extra layer of cover by driving him, and as much as his former colleagues might expect him to turn up in Granada or Madrid, they wouldn’t know exactly where or when. So he was safe for now, but he’d need a greater deliverance than that if he were to have any hope of finding Ethan and filling in those blanks.

  Twelve

  Wes was still eating breakfast when Mia came in.

  He said, “You want something to eat?”

  “I had it already.”

  “Okay. And you want to go to the cathedral this morning?”

  “That’s where I’ve been already.”

  Now that he looked at her, she had a contented and peaceful air about her that he hadn’t noticed before. He imagined that was what the visit to the church had done for her.

  “Great. Well, I’m just about finished. Let’s get out of here.”

  “We’re going to Granada.”

  “Yeah.” He looked down at the remains of his breakfast then back at Mia, who was still standing behind the chair opposite him. “You been there before?”

  “With my father. We visited the Alhambra.”

  He nodded, wondering if that was what Rachel had been doing there, and whether she’d managed to visit it before being caught up in the attack. She’d always been a bit of a geek for old buildings and historic sites.

  Mardin hadn’t been particularly notable, not when compared with some of the ancient cities in the region, but in the little under two years she’d spent there, her fascination for its old town had never dimmed. He’d even got to teasing her about it in a good-humored way, because he’d loved that about her, that endless low-key enthusiasm she’d had for the world.

  But he didn’t want to dwell on thoughts of Rachel, so he stood—with such speed that Mia took a step back—and within twenty minutes they were on their way. They headed south, across the plain around Madrid, through low hills pin-cushioned with neat rows of olive trees, through mountains with white villages tucked in clefts like unmelted snow.

  With the same quiet efficiency as the day before, Mia had booked rooms in advance in a palacio on the main street. He felt a slight unease when she told him it was the same hotel she’d stayed in with her father, fearing it might bring her grief to the surface, but when they arrived mid-afternoon she showed no signs of it having particular associations for her—it was just a place she’d stayed
in before and knew to be okay.

  As they were checking in, Wes said to the concierge, “I hope you can help. My ex-wife was one of the victims of the attack the other week, Rachel Richards.”

  She offered a suitably sympathetic look and said, “The American lady.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. . . .” She looked down. “Mr. Wesley.”

  “Thank you. I wanted to visit the hotel where she was staying. Would you be able to find out which one it was for me?”

  “There are lots of hotels in Granada, but of course, I heard from colleagues who had some of the victims as guests. Let me make a few telephone calls while you settle into your rooms.”

  “Thanks, I’ll be back in ten.”

  As they walked away into the hotel’s courtyard, Mia said, “Will I come?”

  He wasn’t sure what she meant exactly, whether she wanted to come or if she was asking if he expected her to. It felt like an insight, too, into the confusion she probably felt whenever someone made a joke or said something that lacked an explicit meaning.

  “You don’t have to come, no. But if you want to come, I don’t mind. I just need to find out if she had a child with her when she checked in. I’m pretty sure the answer is no, but I want to know if she originally booked for a child.”

  “So I’ll come?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “And then I’ll visit the cathedral. It’s just along the street.”

  “You like churches, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I wanted to be a nun when I was small. You can come too.”

  “No, I’ll leave that to you. My wife used to like visiting churches—in fact, any historic building.”

  “Your ex-wife.”

  “Yeah. Well, if we’re gonna be pedantic, my late ex-wife.”

  She stared at him, her eyes shining but still giving away nothing of what was going on within. And then she laughed. He wasn’t sure whether she was laughing at him or herself or some random thought, but he couldn’t help but laugh, too.

  Mia was already sitting in reception by the time he got back there. She stood and they approached the desk together.

  The concierge smiled and said, “Good news, Mr. Wesley.” She reached for a map and for the first time he noticed that she was pregnant. He had missed Rachel’s pregnancy—it occurred to him only now, and the realization came with a fleeting and intangible grief. He’d missed so much. All these things that would never be in his grasp again.

  The concierge opened the map out on the desk and marked a cross on it. “We’re here. You can see this is the Albayzín in front of us—the old town—then the Alhambra is across here, and your wife was staying in another nice hotel, the Palacio de Santa Cristina, which is just here.” She marked another cross, then drew a line linking them as she said, “It’s only a five- or ten-minute walk from here. I told them you might be coming, so they’re expecting you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “The map is ruined now.”

  Wes and the concierge both turned to look at Mia, but the concierge smiled and said, “It’s fine, it’s yours to keep. We have many.” She turned back to Wes. “I don’t know if you would like to visit the site of the attack, but if you do, it’s here in the Albayzín, the Plaza San Martín. I would recommend walking uphill along here, the most famous of the tourist streets, lots of small stores and restaurants, very Moroccan in feel, and then you can cut along the side of the hill to the plaza, or you could walk on to the Mirador de San Nicolás for the view over the Alhambra and come back down to Plaza San Martín.”

  Wes nodded, taking it all in, not sure if he was the only sane person left. The concierge’s odd tour-guide approach to visiting the site where his wife had been murdered a couple of weeks before was, if anything, even weirder than Mia’s admittedly flaky comment about the map.

  “Thanks, maybe that’s something we can look forward to doing in the morning.”

  His note of sarcasm was lost on the concierge.

  “Yes, it’s better in the morning, before the crowds and the heat. But you’ll visit the hotel now?”

  “I think so.”

  “Good. I told them to expect you.”

  He thanked her and they left, crossing the busy street outside before cutting through side streets on the way to the last place she’d slept, in the town where she’d died. It hadn’t felt real so far, something of a fable clinging to it, or a jarring dream from which he knew he would wake, but there was no doubting he was walking toward reality now.

  Thirteen

  The Palacio de Santa Cristina, like their own hotel, was an old building formed around a Moorish courtyard. It was smaller but quietly luxurious, the kind of place he could immediately picture Rachel loving.

  As soon as he walked into the reception, a young male concierge stepped forward questioningly. “Mr. Wesley?”

  “That’s me.”

  “I’m very sorry for your loss, Mr. Wesley. The manager would like to see you. Perhaps if you would like to take a seat in the courtyard, I’ll let her know you’re here. Would you like something to drink, some coffee or a cold drink?”

  “Coffee would be great, thanks.”

  The concierge turned to Mia, who responded with alarm, as if she feared he might be about to embrace her. “Madam?”

  “Please, some peppermint tea.”

  The concierge nodded, but now that he’d looked at her he seemed transfixed by her face. Wes had already become used to the otherworldly nature of her appearance, to the extent that it amused him to see other people respond to her as if to a ghostly apparition.

  The concierge snapped out of it and said, “I’ll be back in a moment. Please, go through and take a seat.”

  “Before you go.” He’d already spun around on his heel but he stopped and faced Wes again, expectant. “Was my wife alone when she was here?”

  The concierge offered a sympathetic look and said, “We saw the same stories, but your wife did not have her son with her. He was included in the booking, but she’d left him with friends.” The sympathy edged into something else then. “You don’t have . . . access?”

  Wes knew the whole question of the boy’s whereabouts had been hushed up by the authorities, even if he didn’t know the reason. The hotel staff and everyone else probably assumed he’d been found and was safe with relatives, or with his father, and there was only one way Wes could answer without arousing suspicion.

  “He wasn’t my son.”

  “Ah. I see.” The concierge gestured toward the courtyard. “Please, take a seat, and the manager will be with you shortly.”

  They walked through and, once they were sitting, Mia said, “What’s his name?”

  “Who?”

  “The boy who’s missing.”

  It was the first time she’d expressed any real interest in Wes’s reasons for being here.

  “Oh, Ethan. Ethan Richards.”

  “Not Wesley.”

  “No.”

  “Because he’s not your son.”

  “No, I just said that to the concierge. I’m pretty sure he’s mine. That’s why I’m here—I need to find out where he is, make sure he’s okay.”

  “That’s what fathers do.”

  “I guess so,” he said, even as he knew he’d never be much more of a father than that unless the Agency had a change of heart. And he didn’t want to think that far ahead anyway—one problem at a time.

  They sat in the small ornately tiled courtyard with water playing gently in the fountain at its center. He could easily imagine Rachel emerging from one of the doors, crossing the courtyard but getting sidetracked, looking up mesmerized by the galleried landings above. He thought he’d successfully put away all his memories and feelings for her, but it was painful to think of her now, to think of never seeing her again in that private little reverie of hers.

  Someone did emerge from a door across the way, but it was a waitress, bringing their drinks. Then a few minutes later a smar
tly dressed middle-aged woman came out of the same door on the other side of the courtyard. She was carrying a large padded envelope and smiling as she approached.

  “Mr. Wesley, I’m pleased to meet you, but sorry it’s in such terrible circumstances.” Wes stood and she said, “Please, don’t get up. I’m Beatriz Fuentes, the hotel manager.”

  They shook hands, the manager glancing down at his bandages, and then Wes said, “This is Mia.”

  Wes was relieved when, instead of leaning over the table to shake her hand, the manager simply nodded with a smile and said, “Pleased to meet you, Mia.”

  “Hello.”

  Beatriz sat, placing the envelope on the seat next to her.

  “I understand you and Miss Richards were divorced?”

  “That’s correct.”

  She looked at him with what appeared to be understanding, but her expression also suggested she knew more about him than his marital status—a couple of the recent news reports had mentioned him by name, or rather had described Rachel as “the former wife of the disgraced CIA officer James Wesley.”

  “I was part of a US operation that went wrong, and my negligence resulted in people dying. I was sent to prison—we both felt it would be better for Rachel if, well, you know . . .”

  It was a lie expertly interwoven with strands of the truth, and Rachel would have laughed to see him construct it, but Beatriz looked touched in response.

  “A sad situation.” She looked at Mia, maybe wondering how she fitted into the equation, but when Mia openly stared back at her, Beatriz seemed unnerved and turned quickly to Wes. “Some people came for your wife’s things, people from the US embassy in Madrid. They told us that the next of kin is the brother, and that they would send the things to him.”

  “Technically that’s true.”

  She appeared not to hear him, her mind on another track. “This was an oversight. If they had asked for the contents of the room safe, of course, we would have looked, but we didn’t think to check until after they’d left. It was an upsetting time, for all of us, for everyone in the city.”