‘I married her. And I loved her. And then it went away.’
‘Went away?’
‘Gone, vanished, departed. I don’t know if it happened suddenly, but I knew it suddenly. One day I just looked at her and I didn’t love her.’
‘So then what did you do?’ I asked, rather uncomfortably. Maybe one day he would look at me, too, and not love me.
‘I tried to make the marriage work.’
‘But it didn’t?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘Because Miranda didn’t want it to. She wanted me to love her. Not just day-to-day love, but thunderbolt love.’
‘Did she love you like that?’
‘No. She never had.’
Too many cans of worms, I thought. Not now, I decided, and made an effort not to pull away from him. He patted me on the shoulder and re-settled himself, further away from me.
‘What you’re saying then is that you believe it happens, but it doesn’t last?’
‘I don’t see how it can. It’s infatuation more than love.’
‘So maybe I won’t be doing Jams a favour even if I find Jacob for her.’
‘But you’ll try to, anyway. Do I gather that he’s really gone missing?’
I told him what I’d done that morning.
‘And the Carl Nabokov chap hasn’t called back?’ he said when I’d finished.
‘Not yet. I’ll try him again tomorrow. If I go over early, maybe he’ll still be in. Unless students here keep different hours to English ones.’
Tuesday, 29 March
Chapter Six
Next morning, I woke at four-thirty, still partly running on London time, and spent an hour finishing my notes for Alan and sorting the location Polaroids. Then I went back to sleep again.
When the telephone rang at nine, it startled me. I didn’t recognize the ring. A single ring, like continental Europe. I fumbled it to my ear. ‘Hello?’
‘Alex Tanner?’
‘Yes.’
‘Carl Nabokov here. I got your note. Too late to call last night. What can I do for you?’
‘Wait a moment. I need to wake up.’
He gave a short, polite, ‘get on with it’ laugh.
‘It’s about Jacob Stone,’ I told him.
‘So your note said.’ His voice sounded tense and I wondered why. Impatience? Shyness? Guilt?
‘I’m looking for him. Do you know where he is?’
‘Sorry, no. I haven’t seen him since he went back to England last fall.’
‘When was that?’ I’d got my notebook now, and found the page.
‘Last September sometime. Right after he came back to the States after his mother’s funeral. When he moved out of International House.’
I scribbled. Jacob > Chicago 21st Sept, with Jams. Jacob > London, soon after.
On the flight he’d told Jams he might be in England, soon: it made sense. So why hadn’t he been in touch with her? ‘Do you have an address for him in England?’
‘A hotel. I was supposed to meet up with him – I was in England working at the British Library. But he didn’t show, and the hotel didn’t know where he was.’
‘Annoying for you,’ I said, because that was what he sounded. Retrospectively irritated. Not worried.
‘I guess,’ he said.
‘Could we meet? And talk?’
He hesitated. ‘I’m kind of busy. I’m leaving Chicago Thursday.’
Thursday. The day after tomorrow. He could spare me a few minutes, at least, so I could see him face to face – when I’d woken up enough to sort out my questions.
I left my request in the silence, and waited.
He cleared his throat. ‘What’s your interest in Jacob, exactly?’
‘You saw my card. I’m a private investigator. I’ve been hired to find him.’
‘I’ve told you all I know. I don’t see how I can help you.’
‘I’ll fit in with you,’ I said. ‘Any time today. Just for fifteen minutes. I’d be very grateful . . . what about lunch?’
‘Can’t make lunch.’
‘A drink, then. Or a cup of coffee . . . I’ll meet you anywhere you say.’
I had him. There was no way he couldn’t manage it.
‘Six o’clock, then,’ he said, not entirely ungraciously. ‘My place?’
‘Six o’clock, your place.’
I put the phone down, went to the bathroom and brushed my teeth while the bath was running. Then I lay in the British Airways-scented water watching my spider working away on the ceiling and I began to come to life.
Jacob was well on the way to being a real missing person. A London hotel as his last address, if Carl Nabokov was telling the truth, and why shouldn’t he be?
If he was, why the quick turnaround back to England? And after Jacob had accomplished whatever it was, had he meant to return to America? Jams believed he was going to continue with his Ph.D. But he may not have told her the truth.
One way of checking that would be to find out what, if anything, he’d told the university. He must have a tutor, or something. He must be paying tuition fees – or have stopped. And, perhaps even more usefully, he must have given a British address when he originally signed up.
But I had no contacts in the University of Chicago at all, and they’d probably be very tight on personal information.
Then I sat up with a splash of water that frightened the spider, who scuttled across the ceiling and away.
I had no contacts at the university, but I did have university contacts. In England. And the academic world was both international and small.
It was early afternoon in England. I had hours of English telephone-time left.
A woman’s voice answered on the second ring. ‘Grace Macarthy.’ Then she chuckled.
I’d only known Grace personally for a few days six months ago, when she was involved in one of my cases, but the chuckle brought her powerful, mischievous personality vividly into my hotel room, thousands of miles away as it was. I don’t like Grace much, partly because she’s an ex-lover of Barty’s, partly because my part-time assistant Nick has a crush on her and dragged her name into every conversation until I told her to can it.
But when it comes to useful information, I never let feelings get in the way. Grace is an Oxford English don, an efficient Ms Fixit, and very conceited. I didn’t think she could resist a challenge.
‘Grace, this is Alex Tanner. We met last year, remember?’
‘Of course I remember,’ she said. ‘Don’t be silly. As if Nick would let me forget. How are you? How’s Barty?’
My spirits lifted. It sounded as if Nick was making Grace suffer too. ‘We’re both fine. I’m calling from America.’ In other words, long-distance, don’t let’s chat.
‘Oh, where?’ she said conversationally, on purpose to tease me, I thought.
‘Chicago.’
‘I’ve never been to Chicago,’ she said. ‘Frank Lloyd Wright?’
‘And sky-scrapers, the heart of the Midwest, the Golden Mile, Al Capone, David Mamet, the 1968 Democratic Convention, voting the dead in Cook County, ER, The Fugitive, splitting the atom, the Windy City and a toddlin’ town,’ I said, hoping to shut her up.
‘Relax,’ she said, chuckling again. ‘That’s enough warm-up, you can move to the workout. I suppose you want something. What is it?’
‘Information. Which I don’t actually think you’ll be able to get, and which I need very quickly. By midnight tonight, your time.’
‘Bet you a fiver I can,’ she said.
‘Bet you a tenner you can’t,’ I said.
Now she was laughing. ‘And my father’s a policeman. OK, Alex, give me your questions.’
Barty wanted us to spend the rest of the day together. I wanted to spend the whole day alone, but I didn’t want to tell him why. It would have been altogether too intimate to say, ‘I want to think. About me, about you, about the rest of my life.’ It was enough, for the moment, that he was my lover I
didn’t want him inside my head too.
So we compromised. I’d have a two-hour lunch break from togetherness.
It wasn’t outside weather. Overcast, chilly, with lowering heavy clouds and rain carried on gusting winds from the lake. So in the morning we went to the Chicago Historical Society and talked about history.
We parted at noon. I’d been looking forward to it. But suddenly the two hours weighed heavy in my hands like obsolete coinage. I didn’t want to think about life. For reasons which I knew I was not up to exploring, just living it was hard enough.
I went back to my hotel room. It was empty. What did I expect?
I wasn’t hungry, but what do you do with a useless lunch break? You eat. You eat in the sort of place you eat by yourself, that you can go into wearing jeans and a sweat shirt and a leather jacket and Doc Marten boots. Not a Barty. ‘I’ve plenty of money or I’ve got a man who is and who’ll spend it on me’ sort of a place.
I walked north up Michigan Avenue. The lake wind was so cold I felt my scalp clamping round my skull. I walked three blocks and passed two universities. At least that’s what they said they were, but as they offered vocational training and classes in lunch hours and after work, they looked more like colleges of further education to me.
If I’d been born in Chicago, would it have been different? Would I have got on, further, learning after work? Would I have survived at all? Amid these tall overwhelming inhuman skyscrapers, built for people with position and money, would I have shrivelled and died? Would my mother have lived in one of the bleak, violent housing projects the police had shown me, and would I have gone to a high school where the canteen only provided plastic cutlery to cut down on the stabbing deaths? Would I have been a stabber, or a stabbee?
Suddenly, powerfully, I was homesick.
I’d always assumed everywhere in the world was open to me. It was just a matter of getting there, on expenses. But if, abroad, I was going to whimper like a baby for Mum England, then that closed lots of doors.
I hate the sound of doors closing.
I needed something reassuring. One of my public homes.
So I went in to a Burger King.
I’d thought it would be familiar. Hamburger chains are the same all over the world. That’s the point of them. Nobody’d go there for the food, not even me.
It wasn’t familiar. It had a different system of ordering.
In England, you go up to the counter, and you order, and you pay, and you take it and perch yourself at a table on one of the chairs which are designed only to let you perch, because Burger King and McDonalds have worked out long ago what I was just beginning to click to, which is that the kind of loser who eats at a burger place has nowhere to go and will stay inside in the warm for as long as they can for the price of a cheap burger or even for the price of a cup of coffee – unless you provide chairs that put your back into spasm after ten minutes.
I thought I knew what to expect, though I didn’t expect not to want it so powerfully. But when I reached the counter I gave my order and paid, but was then told to wait and pick up my order from a different assistant further along.
I didn’t like it. But I did it, because I’d paid.
I waited for my number to be called. I took the bag. I perched myself on the familiar chair at the familiar table, and took out my food.
I’d ordered a cheeseburger and a large orange juice. I also had something else: an enormous flying-saucer of a hamburger, oozing mayonnaise. I investigated it. Tomato and onion-rings and burger and two cheese slices and pickle and, as I already knew, mayonnaise.
I looked at the receipt. There’d been a mistake. I had two receipts, printed out together. My order, which I’d paid for, taken by Antoinette. The oozing flying-saucer was a ‘Whopper Cheese Com’, and someone else had paid Latonya for it, and was presumably complaining at the counter as I read.
I ate my order. I packed up the Whopper Cheese Com in the bag and took it with me back to my room. It was disgusting, but it was free.
Then, with an hour to spare, I lay on the bed and waited for Barty.
I hate waiting. I try never to do it because so much of my childhood was wasted like that. Not waiting for something good to happen: waiting for anything to happen, all of it in someone else’s control. But now I had none of my usual props. I couldn’t clean my flat or file or type or get out there and hustle. I couldn’t even read, because I hadn’t brought any books. The television – all ten channels – was so dire I’d given up on it the day before.
When I heard Barty’s knock on the door, I wasn’t relieved, I was angry. With myself for being such an empty person, and with him for showing me.
He breezed in, pleased to see me. He went straight up to the Burger King bag on the dressing-table, looked inside, said ‘It’s freezing cold. What is it, the carryout hamburger Captain Oates went to fetch?’
I took a deep breath. It wasn’t his fault, none of it was. It was partly circumstances and partly mine, and since circumstances weren’t likely to surge forward and shoulder the burden of responsibility, that left me.
‘I’m glad to see you,’ I said.
Then we went to the Frank Lloyd Wright house and talked about architecture, and I began to feel better. Better enough for Barty to get on my nerves, again. He knew more about architecture than I did, as he had about Chicago’s history in the morning, and was so informative and unassuming with it that my fingers itched for complimentary slippers to stuff down his throat – or, better still, a complimentary sledgehammer.
By five o’clock I’d had more than enough, and we parted for the night. I’d said I was tired and that after my meeting with Carl Nabokov I’d go back to my hotel, eat Captain Oates’s hamburger, and go to bed. Barty wasn’t pleased but he knew better than to make it obvious, and we arranged to meet for breakfast the next morning.
Back in my hotel room the red light on the telephone was flashing. A message. I rang the desk. ‘Grace Macarthy called,’ they said.
Good. I dialled. Ring ring ring. ‘Grace Macarthy.’
‘Alex here.’
‘You owe me a tenner. Have you got a pencil?’
‘Fire ahead.’
‘I’ll give you the Oxford stuff first, OK? Stone’s home address – 5 Ormskirk Drive, Armthorpe, Doncaster, South Yorkshire. No telephone number. As an undergraduate he was brilliant but peculiar. Few friends. Went home every weekend. Very religious. Fundamentalist. Belonged to a Northern sect.’
‘Hang on,’ I said, still scribbling. ‘Right. Thanks.’ ‘The Chicago stuff wasn’t easy. Here’s what I got: he’s known as conscientious, a hard worker, well informed, well organized, not much of a mixer, a bit formal, rather arrogant. He paid the fees for the autumn term – they call it a quarter – last September, earlier than he could have got away with. He didn’t register for any course in the autumn term, though. He should have done that in late September. They’ve heard nothing of him since.’
‘So he didn’t arrange for leave of absence?’
‘No. So either he meant to come back, or he meant to drop out. And if he meant to drop out, why did he pay the fees?’
Thanks, Grace, I can work it out for myself, I thought. ‘How good is your Chicago information?’ I said.
‘Reliable. From a friend of a friend. Didn’t I do well?’
‘Very well,’ I said grudgingly.
‘But I always do,’ she said. ‘Why does it irritate you?’
‘Because I think you’re smug,’ I said, goaded. Which she’d meant me to be.
She chuckled. ‘So are you,’ she said sweetly, and rang off.
Chapter Seven
I don’t know what I’d expected Carl Nabokov to look like. His voice on the telephone was a pleasant light baritone, nothing special. It hadn’t prepared me for the breathtaking man who answered the door on my first ring.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘You must be Alex. I’m Carl.’
I should have said Hi and offered my hand, but what I did was s
tand and gape like an idiot. He was about five-ten or five-eleven, slender but muscular, with very dark, straight hair, grey-green eyes and extraordinary, beautiful skin. It was obvious he was of mixed race, but it wasn’t at all clear how many races had gone into the melting-pot. A little black in the dusky bloom, a little Slav in the arched nose and high cheek-bones, perhaps some native American in the narrow, tilted eyes.
He was dressed like many of the graduate students I’d seen – red and blue plaid flannel shirt, no tie, brown corduroy trousers, cheap tweed jacket, cheap not-leather shoes – but the clothes didn’t matter. He was easily the most physically attractive man I’d ever met. He was even the most attractive man I’d ever seen; better then the young Robert Mitchum, who he rather resembled and who was my acme of fanciability to date.
‘Hi,’ I managed. I wasn’t going to risk a handshake.
He was staring back at me, probably because he thought I was half-witted.
‘Sorry I’m early,’ I said.
‘That’s fine. Come on in,’ he said, and led me into the front room of his apartment, which was ready for me. No trace of the lived-in disorder I’d seen through the window the previous day. Now the books were on shelves, the CDs on racks, the papers in files stacked neatly on his desk.
He offered me a Coke. I accepted, and he went through a narrow corridor to a small, half-visible kitchen area. I could see a sink, a drainer and an old bulky fridge, which was humming to itself and hiccuped loudly in protest when he opened its door.
I sat on an upright chair with my back to the window, looked around the room, breathed evenly, and waited. I could hear him opening cans and decanting the drink into glasses.
He brought them back on a tray. ‘Caffeine-free, sugar-free,’ he said reassuringly. Yuk. I smiled, took a glass and sipped. He sat down on the sofa, put the tray and his glass on a low coffee-table, and clasped his hands on his knees.
Then I began to relax, because he was as nervous as I was. He was sweating lightly, looking at me intently and then looking away again when he met my eyes.
Mutual lust at first sight, perhaps. This could be fun. I thought. ‘Thanks for seeing me,’ I said.
The Loop Page 4
