The Forgotten Dead

by Tove Alsterdal

  I crossed my arms and pressed my hands into my armpits to warm them up.

  ‘We take fingerprints and blood samples. Then the bodies are sent to the morgue. I’ve never heard of any being identified.’

  I stared at him, but he just kept rambling on about his fucking immigrants. It was clear that rational arguments were not going to work, and I realized that Patrick could very well disappear all over again, into some sort of Kafkaesque bureaucracy that handled death. I fixed my eyes on the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus in her arms. An absurd thought occurred to me: if they’d had DNA testing back in those days, they could have proved who the father was.

  ‘Where is the nearest American consulate?’ I asked.

  ‘Seville.’

  I don’t want to see him, I thought. I don’t want to stand in some cold morgue as they lift up the sheet covering his face, and say: ‘That’s him’ and burst into tears. I don’t want everything to be so cold the last time I see him.

  ‘Could you send an email with the fingerprints and other information to the American consulate?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said the officer. ‘We don’t do things like that.’

  ‘Come on … where are your cojones!’ I pounded my fist on the desk and was close to calling him a ‘son of a bitch’, when the officer opened his mouth and smiled so I could see his gold teeth.

  ‘But we could certainly send a fax.’

  Outside the police building I called the number for the consulate in Seville.

  A man answered. Tom McNerney. His accent told me he was from the Midwest.

  ‘This has to do with something a little more important than a passport,’ I said.

  ‘OK. Tell me what it is and I’ll see what I can do.’

  I gave him a short version of the story, stating the facts as if they no longer had anything to do with me. As I talked, I stared at the solid walls of the police building. Someone had scrawled an anarchist symbol on the brick.

  ‘All right. I want you to stay calm,’ said McNerney when I had finished. ‘I’m going to call you back as soon as I get the fax from Tarifa, and then we’ll take it from there, one step at a time. OK?’

  ‘OK.’ I felt my heart lurch. Finally someone who cared.

  ‘By the way, in Tarifa I can recommend the Café Central in the old town. It’s a pleasant place to have a simple lunch. Historic setting and good prices.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll keep that in mind.’

  I rounded the corner, and the wind struck me full force. It felt like tiny needles as the sand whipped across my face. Before me was the beach and the sea, a vast horizon extending into infinity.

  Somewhere out there was where he’d been found.

  I sank down onto a block of cement, looking for the number among the most recent calls on my cell.

  She answered on the second ring.

  ‘This is Ally Cornwall again,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ said Terese. ‘You just disappeared the other day. Did you hang up or something?’

  I leaned forward, tugging my jacket up to protect me from the wind.

  ‘There’s just one more thing I need to know.’

  ‘Papa says I shouldn’t talk to journalists. They just distort what you say and slant everything the wrong way.’

  ‘I’m not a journalist.’

  ‘Then what’s this about?’

  ‘It’s a little hard to explain,’ I said, scraping my shoes on the fine-grained sand that had blown up onto the pavement. ‘I told you that I might know the man you found on the beach, and now I can tell you that I do. I’ve seen the photographs of him.’

  Terese gasped.

  ‘Really?’ she said, and then fell silent for a few seconds. ‘I hadn’t thought about him that way. That someone would know him, I mean.’

  ‘I need to know where he was lying,’ I cut her off. ‘The exact location.’

  ‘Why do you want to know that?’ asked Terese.

  ‘Please. Just tell me.’

  Several seconds of silence. Seagulls circled overhead.

  ‘I haven’t been able to talk to anyone about this,’ said Terese and then she burst into tears. She snuffled and sobbed. And as the words poured out of her — about how bad she had felt and how she’d gone to the beach that night with a man she’d met only hours earlier, a surfer guy named Alex from some small town in England who had apparently broken her heart — I started walking across the sand dunes. I managed to get a few facts out of the girl on the phone before she surrendered to uncontrolled sobbing.

  A dark stone jetty reached several metres out into the sea.

  ‘That’s exactly where he was lying,’ sobbed Terese. ‘Can you believe that I actually stepped on him?’

  I climbed up onto the rocks and sat down. The waves raised and lowered the surface of the water, making it seem as if even the ground was pitching, and nothing solid or permanent existed. An orange kite flew over my head with a surfer wearing a wetsuit hanging onto a rope behind it. He bounced on his board and tumbled into the water. The air was salty and hot.

  ‘I don’t understand how he could treat me like that,’ moaned Terese.

  I stared at the phone in my hand. I’d almost forgotten I was holding it.

  ‘Who?’ I asked, bewildered.

  ‘Alex. I mean, we had …’

  The water splashed as a new wave broke against the rocks and then rolled further up the shore. Leaving foam in its wake. Somewhere near this jetty, wedged in among the rocks, was where he’d lain. I couldn’t make myself look down.

  ‘I suppose I shouldn’t have done it. Right?’

  ‘Done what?’

  ‘Had sex with him, of course.’

  ‘What does that have to do with anything?’

  My eyes were stinging from the sand and the glaring light. I squinted at the horizon to the west and couldn’t tell where the sea ended and the sky began.

  ‘If only I’d said no,’ Terese whimpered. ‘Maybe then he would have liked me.’

  ‘Now stop that,’ I said, my thoughts flying to that first night when I took Patrick to my place in the East Village, his hand in mine as I led him up the dark stairs where the light bulbs were never changed. ‘Sometimes you just have to take a chance.’

  I brushed the strands of hair out of my eyes, but the wind blew them right back.

  ‘He stole my passport,’ Terese said. ‘Can you believe he took it to sell? He just wanted the money. And I actually went back to the Blue Heaven Bar because I wanted to see him again.’

  ‘On which side of the jetty was he lying?’

  ‘I already told you that. On the right side, about halfway out.’

  I forced myself to turn my head and look down. Terese was not in the picture I saw. Only the thought of Patrick’s body. The chill of the water. A wave breaking in swirling foam, stirring up the sand from the bottom and leaving a few shells behind when the water receded. Then the next wave rushed in, erasing any trace of the one before.

  Chapter 15

  Tarifa

  Friday, 3 October

  ‘How’s the weather down on the coast?’

  Tom McNerney from the consulate was on the phone. It was just after ten in the morning.

  ‘I assume it’s windy,’ I said.

  I’d eaten a big breakfast and was now sitting at one of the computers behind the front desk. It was a simple pensión on a back street, built in the Arabic style, with a rectangular central courtyard and the rooms grouped around it. The walls were covered with blue and white tiles, painted with chubby little cherubs flitting about.

  ‘I’m sitting here with a fax of a set of fingerprints.’

  ‘OK.’ I quickly clicked out of the email I was writing to Benji and stood up. I could hear McNerney leafing through papers.

  ‘So now the question is how we should proceed,’ he went on. ‘First we need another set of fingerprints for comparison.’

  It took a few seconds before the meaning of what he’d said sank in.
Of course. I hadn’t thought that far.

  McNerney coughed. ‘The alternative is DNA testing, of course, but that’s a more complicated matter.’

  Not DNA, I thought, sinking down onto a wicker chair. I stared at a group of three life-size pink plastic flamingos that were part of the decor.

  Fingerprints were less … intimate.

  There were fingerprints back home in the apartment, of course. And on his things in Lisbon. I’d left his suitcase in the hotel storage room, giving the desk clerk a 20-euro tip and saying that I’d send for the suitcase later.

  ‘The easiest would be if his prints are already registered somewhere,’ McNerney went on.

  Registered? Were Patrick’s fingerprints in any police records?

  Yes, they were! And his father had given him hell for it. The fact that Patrick had ended up with a police record and, according to his father, had ruined his future for the sake of the story he was chasing.

  ‘He was once arrested a couple of years ago,’ I said. ‘In Maryland.’

  ‘OK,’ said McNerney. I noticed a slight shift in his tone of voice. ‘Then it’s just a matter of contacting the home front …’

  ‘He’s not a criminal,’ I quickly added. ‘He was doing research in Prince George police district, working undercover. Pretending to be a felon, you might say. For a story on racism among the police, how they treat blacks worse than whites. There were rumours of systematic abuse and coerced confessions.’

  ‘That sounds familiar for some reason,’ said McNerney.

  ‘He almost got a Pulitzer Prize for the story,’ I said. ‘Plus a broken rib.’

  ‘So, Maryland, you said?’ I heard him tapping on a keyboard, and I imagined Patrick’s fingerprints being compared, all the lines matching up perfectly.

  ‘There’s something else I was told,’ said McNerney.

  ‘What?’

  ‘They have certain routines in cases like this.’ His voice sounded scratchy. He cleared his throat and wheezed a bit. ‘Well, that is … when the first impression is that they’re dealing with an immigrant from south of the Sahara.’

  He was choosing his words carefully, not wanting to say the wrong thing.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, the thing is, they’ve buried him.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Your husband, Patrick Cornwall, was buried a few days ago. On Monday, to be precise.’

  My hand holding the phone dropped towards the floor. I closed my eyes and thought about packed-down dirt and the darkness underneath. Layer upon layer of dirt.

  ‘Hello? Are you there?’ I heard Tom McNerney saying.

  I raised the phone back to my ear.

  ‘They can’t do that,’ I said. ‘They didn’t even know who he was.’

  ‘From what I understand, there wasn’t enough room,’ said McNerney. ‘They’ve had more people over the past few weeks. People who have died, I mean. Some are immigrants, but there are also … er … ordinary citizens. They die too. Old folks. And it’s a small town.

  ‘He was murdered.’

  Silence on the phone. Again he cleared his throat.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘He’s an American citizen,’ I said. The words caught in my throat.

  ‘As his next of kin, you can of course request that his remains be sent home as soon as the bureaucratic procedures are taken care of. We’ll help you with the paperwork.’

  ‘That’s not what this is about,’ I said, standing up. ‘They killed him. I don’t know exactly who did it, but I know who’s responsible. A Frenchman who—’

  ‘Calm down. Let’s take one thing at a time.’

  I paced back and forth in the lobby, listening to Tom McNerney’s broad Midwest accent in my ear. Some of what he said sank in.

  First, he would see to the identification. He’d learned that no autopsy had been done on Patrick’s body. That should be the next step, but it would have to be handled entirely by the Spanish police.

  ‘We don’t do anything unless they request our help,’ he explained. ‘I need to abide by the rules of diplomacy.’

  ‘Can’t you just ask them if they’d like your help?’

  ‘That would mean getting involved in the police work in the country where I’m stationed. And we don’t want to do that.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, rubbing my forehead. I pictured having to pay a return visit to the Guardia Civil and make a big scene in that cold office of theirs. Or would one of the other branches of the police take over now? Maybe the Policía Nacional? I sank down on another chair next to the big pots of plastic flowers, feeling weighted down with fatigue.

  ‘But if we just take one step at a time, it’ll all work out. You’ll see.’

  ‘Where?’ I said then.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Where is he buried?’

  The Catholic cemetery was in a vast field behind a German discount store. Outside the cemetery walls three horses were grazing among the withered grass.

  The wind stopped as I entered. Inside the walls the vegetation was lush. It was a leafy oasis in the midst of the arid terrain, as if the very concentration of death had given the earth life. And, as a matter of fact, that was probably the case … ashes to ashes, dust to dust …

  A cemetery worker was putting his gardening tools away in a shed.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said in my most polite Spanish. ‘I’m looking for a new grave. A man who was buried here on Monday.’

  The man shrugged and shook his head.

  ‘They think he was an illegal immigrant,’ I added, and the workman set down his spade. His face was creased, and he was missing most of his teeth. He pointed towards the southern section of the cemetery.

  I murmured my thanks and started walking, noting the hierarchy among the dead. First came the rows of neat Catholic nichos, crypts with arched roofs, decorated with flowers, and names etched into the stone four feet high, with small statues of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Then came the ordinary headstones that became plainer the closer I got to the perimeter of the cemetery. The flowers were fewer, and finally even the names disappeared. Several anonymous graves marked with bricks, grass growing up through the cracks. None of them had been dug in the past few weeks.

  Finally I came to a small commemorative marker. A simple piece of metal with an inscription and a small bouquet of pink flowers. En memoria de los inmigrantes caidos en aguas del ’estrecho. In memory of the immigrants who perished in the waters of the straits — the straits between the African continent and Europe.

  The sun was hot on the back of my neck. I turned around. Behind me the field stopped at a wall. A tree cast a wide shadow over the far corner. A rusty wrought-iron fence surrounding an old grave had toppled over. In front of it was a mound of earth, about the size of a coffin. Slowly I approached, bent down, and picked up a fistful of the brown dirt. It was damp, smelling of humus and autumn. I sank to my knees. Placed my hand on the grave.

  Emptiness. That’s what I felt. A profound, aching silence. Where no sounds could reach. I had never had any god to talk to, neither the Catholic god nor any other. For the first time in my life I felt the lack of something greater, yearning for a solace that I had no clue how to find.

  I bowed forward, brushing the earth with my cheek, and whispered: ‘Patrick. I’m here, and I just wanted to tell you …’ My throat closed up and I couldn’t say the words.

  You’re going to be a father.

  The shadow from the tree moved slowly across the white wall. Time passed.

  When I finally got up, I had a hard time straightening out my legs. I turned one last time to look at the nameless part of the cemetery. And I realized there was a conversation I could not put off any longer.

  ‘It’s not true!’ she screamed into the phone. I held it away from my ear. Then Patrick’s father took over. I could hear Eleanor Cornwall in the background saying: ‘My son is not dead. He’s not dead!’

  Formal and businesslike,
Robert Cornwall demanded that I tell him exactly what had happened.

  ‘A Catholic cemetery?’ he managed to say, after I’d told him most of the story. ‘But you know we’re Protestants.’

  ‘It’s a Catholic country,’ I said. ‘And they didn’t know who he was.’

  Silence. Did I really have to defend this country? As if I were the one who had decided he should be buried here. I sat down on the bed in my hotel room and stared out of the open door to the balcony.

  Patrick’s parents had never accepted his decision to marry me. Not when there were so many nice girls from black families among their circle of friends.

  ‘He has to be laid to rest in our cemetery,’ said Robert, choking on his words. ‘Mother needs a grave she can visit. Our family lawyer will handle all the details.’

  And the line went dead. My father-in-law had ended the call. I lay down and stared up at the ceiling, seeing two damp patches that seemed to grow, merging into one another. I hadn’t told Patrick’s parents that I was expecting his child.

  That evening the confirmation came.

  I was still lying on the bed and must have fallen asleep, when the phone woke me. My body felt cold and numb.

  ‘I’ve received word from Maryland,’ said Tom McNerney. ‘We have a positive ID.’

  ‘I see,’ I said.

  It felt like nothing could touch me any more. The formalities relating to Patrick’s death were something abstract that had nothing to do with the death itself. Bureaucratic procedures, like a school exercise that had to be completed.

  ‘You were right,’ said McNerney. ‘He was listed in the police records, and the fingerprints match those of the dead man in Tarifa.’

  I slid back into a sitting position.

  ‘What happens now?’

  ‘Please accept my sincere apologies. I realize I haven’t even offered you my condolences.’

  I saw the curtains flutter as a gust of wind came through the window. Outside the light was a matte blue. It would soon be dark.

  ‘The first thing we need to do is arrange for a formal death certificate. We can help you with the paperwork and with contacting the Spanish authorities.’

  ‘And the murder investigation?’ I said. ‘What about that?’