The Drowned Man

by David Whellams

  “She doesn’t own them now,” Alice said.

  “Then maybe we should find them a brand new owner,” he said, recognizing that they had entered new territory.

  “Private collector?” she immediately said.

  Lembridge held back for a minute. “First, tell me about Hilfgott’s source.”

  “A dealer in rare documents in Montreal. He told me he found two of the letters in an attic in Montreal. He wouldn’t say where he got the third one.”

  Alice could tell from the professor’s look that he believed that she had slept with Greenwell, too. She might have explained that Greenwell was gay but she said nothing. She looked him in the eye again. The story about the attic wasn’t remotely believable.

  “You want to know the value?” he said.

  She nodded and let the caftan slip to her waist. He proceeded. “There are rich men out there ready to purchase an assassin’s signature, even if they don’t get to put the letter on public display. The Booth letter should go for $80,000, as high as a hundred, maybe. But we need to find the right buyer.”

  Nearly a fortune. Added to the Canadian cash in her pink rucksack, she might have enough. This country is so big, she realized; I might just be able to disappear. She cuddled up to Lembridge once more. She was pleased. He had said “we.” They were partners. Co-conspirators.

  As she disrobed again, she murmured, “Can you find the right man?”

  “I have someone in mind.”

  Afterwards, she took another glass of Chardonnay and stood, starkers, by the big window. There wasn’t much to see in the darkness but the insects and bats. The smell of evergreens called up her earlier imaginings. She wondered if she could disappear and take up a new life here on the Chesapeake.

  “Is this a good place to live?” she said, staying by the window.

  Lembridge was subdued and fell back into his patronizing professor’s tone. “It’s a perfect spot to live. Maybe the most beautiful place in the country. But there are lots of other, different places. It’s a cornucopia, America. Have you travelled much since you’ve been stationed in Washington?”

  She would let him think she really was from the embassy. She turned to answer but saw that he had moved to the far end of the room and had booted up his computer. He hadn’t expected a response to his casual question, and he wasn’t interested in her credentials. Alice brought him his wine glass and watched over his shoulder. He was on the site of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. She knew few academics but she knew men, and understood that another display of male assertiveness was coming. She struggled to smile; she was uneasy. She yearned to lock in the deal.

  “I was just checking,” Lembridge said. “If we want to keep this thing hush-hush, we shouldn’t use the Archives Lab in West Virginia or the FBI labs at Quantico. But the University of Virginia in Charlottesville has what I need and they’ll leave me alone with the spectrometer.”

  He concentrated on the screen and when the dog ambled in to be patted he ignored it. Watching over his shoulder, she found nothing comprehensible on the website home page, only references to “electrostatic detection apparatus” and “digital image processing,” and the like.

  Finally, he said what she needed to hear. “I know a collector in Rochester, New York. Name of Ronald Crerar.”

  Alice let him play online and went to her crumpled clothes by the fireplace. She took John Carpenter’s phone out of her pocket and flipped it open. She hadn’t dared make calls with it but now she was glad that she had held on to it. It had a sophisticated camera function — she had made sure to delete the pictures Johnny had taken of her — and, in the dim light from the row of candles, she set the flash to maximum; she hoped there would be enough light.

  Lembridge exhaled dramatically and turned away from the terminal. He hummed to himself and called over the retriever. Alice came over and joined him in scratching the dog’s head and muttering to it. Of all the unpleasant things she had done that evening, sucking up to the dog may have been the hardest. Her twitch had come back, and she feigned a seductive gait as she fetched another bottle of wine, hoping her tremor didn’t show. Calmer now, she returned and, showing Lembridge the phone, she gestured for him to move aside. By the light of the computer monitor, she snapped two quick shots of the Labrador. She was merely testing the exposure, although she continued to coo to the animal. By the second click of the digital flash the dog had moved out of frame, but by then Alice had confirmed that she had enough light for the clear portrait she wanted.

  She pointed the mobile phone at Lembridge, who was still naked. No man likes his picture taken in the nude, unless he is a pervert, she thought, and Lembridge was, in her dismissive lexicon, nothing but a typical horny heterosexual male with a patronizing attitude. He cringed and waved her away with a laugh. But Alice knew what she was doing. Before he could fully react, she snapped a full frontal shot of the professor. He started forward to seize the phone but thought better of it. The son of a bitch is hoping for more sex, Alice thought.

  She knew where the professor lived and worked and the cell phone photo could reach his wife anytime Alice chose. She possessed a useful new weapon but was unsure of her next move. She was willing to leave the two letters with him, since they had to be conclusively authenticated before they could be sold, but she remained wary of him. She reiterated the arrangement, just to be clear. He would locate the buyer — the man in Rochester — and they would split fifty-fifty. Lembridge nodded his assent.

  Alice wanted to put her clothes back on but nakedness was a good way to keep him hooked for a few more minutes. Instead, she asked to use the computer. He watched her as she sat down in front of the blue-lit monitor. She quickly checked one of her email accounts, the one that only her mother’s nursing home knew about. She was paying a nurse attendant at the home to provide forthright reports at the end of every month on her mother’s condition. The August report contained nothing alarming, only that her mother had been asking when her eldest daughter would be visiting.

  Next, Alice scanned the websites of the British papers for any significant news on Bihar, or — the subject she dreaded — cricket. Nothing new about India emerged, but the cricket matches had started at Lord’s among British, Pakistani, and Indian teams and she checked out the scores in the sport sections of the Times and the Guardian. She was looking for something special and ignored the match results, which held no interest. With deepening trepidation, she called up the News of the World site. “Cricket Scandal!” was blazoned across multiple shots of a party in a hotel room. The News had busted three star players. The feature ran four full pages of the tabloid. In the photos, three Pakistani players and a girl were identifiable in the foreground.

  The girl was Alice.

  Alice had a prepaid subscription to the News of the World and she inputted her account code and password so that she could read the full text of the day’s news and call up past editions. She found other, smaller photos of the party room, supplemented with candid shots of the accused Pakistani cricketers in old matches, along with their Cricket Council identity portraits. Alice wasn’t named anywhere in the body of the feature. The hotel, a posh place in Mayfair where she had stayed that one night, wasn’t named either. The article was brutal. The scandal had progressed much further than she had expected. The three cricket stars were accused of throwing a match at a test back in April. The day the News released the scorching story, the Asian Cricket Council suspended the three players. A Scotland Yard spokesman stated that his office would be investigating. Alice’s sense of dread increased. It would not take long for the police and the editors to determine her identity.

  The betting syndicate had been suckered by the News sting and now they must be panicking. They would never trust Alice to keep quiet, even though she would never give evidence to the police. Alice’s boss, her master the Sword, must be in a fury. In its overall impact as a news story the feat
ure was diffuse but heavy with implications for her safety. Whatever the public scandal, which likely would result in life suspensions for the Pakistani players, the danger to Alice was disproportionately greater.

  The Sword would try everything to get rid of her.

  Lembridge had wandered to the kitchen to make coffee — she could smell it — and now he approached her from behind, coffee mugs exuding steam. Like her, he was still nude, and now it all seemed filthy, inappropriate to Alice, a wretched mistake. Her clothes lay across the room by the hearth. She was tempted to whirl and knock the coffee into his crotch. Killing the internet browser with a keystroke, she got up slowly, feeling completely exposed, and shook her head to the proffered mug.

  He saw the change in her and he managed to restrain his ego and his erection. He watched her cross the room and knew this tryst was over. She seemed almost deadly in her coldness.

  She dressed in two minutes flat and made for the Booth letters on the dining room table.

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going with those?” he said.

  “I have to leave.” She put the papers in their folders and then said, “The deal is off.”

  She sized up Lembridge. He wasn’t stupid. It had been about money from the start. He had liked her because she was reckless and wanton, and he craved some excitement in his life. He wanted the cash as well, and she bet it wasn’t the first time he had steered Lincoln memorabilia the way of a rich collector rather than to a public archive. He let her go out through the sliding door to the deck. She seemed glacial, asexual now.

  Alice avoided looking at him as she rushed down the steps from the balcony. She ran to the car, aware that he was following. Realizing that she was actually leaving, he reached out to grab her. She twisted around and spat at him, “Don’t. And don’t tell anyone about any of this. Or your wife gets the pose with your dick at attention. Thanks for the wine.”

  That was her last moment of bravado. She began to sob as soon as she got into the Ford. The crickets and birds had fallen silent; the night now held only terrors. How could she have deluded herself with this fantasy of disappearing into postcard America? She had drawn a mental painting of her sanctuary, somewhere in a house on the edge of a forest but with the smell of the sea to remind her of her twisted journey to find peace.

  She had imagined Rose at the end of the movie, when the RMS Carpathia rescued her and brought her home to the United States. Rose might have settled in a place like this: rode horses on the beach, learned to sail, started a new life. Alice possessed three passports. As Alice Nahri, British citizen, she had journeyed to Montreal. As Alice Nahri, citizen of India, she could return to Bihar, though she knew it was too late.

  In her mind’s sketch she had given no name to the woman on the edge of the forest. But now, as Alida Nahvi, the girl in the third passport, her reinvention of herself in America would be her final transformation.

  CHAPTER 18

  Alice sped north on the twisty two-lanes, homing in on Annapolis. She ignored the quaint “Welcome” plaques on the edge of each village and the billboards trying to sell her seaside bliss. Drying her tears on her sleeve she fixed her gaze and her fevered mind on the vacant highway ahead. Self-preservation conjured up a plan that arrived almost fully formed. Oh, she had always organized her calculations around a vanishing act of some kind but now it would be a Plan B disappearance, not quite the first happy ending she had envisioned. She would extinguish her British self. Alice, named for Orwell’s mother but also Lewis Carroll’s little girl, would die in the rabbit hole. It all made her sad; she had been running so long. But if there was a positive glimmer on the horizon, it was the chance she still had of merging with anonymity into the heartland of the America she imagined. She knew where she would go.

  Her mistake was to assume that Annapolis was bigger than it was. She reasoned that a state capital positioned at the top of something labelled the Intercoastal Waterway would be a sailors’ town, and sailors usually meant prostitutes. She planned to scan for streetwalkers down by the docks. She wasn’t using the GPS for now but the green road signs all pointed to the city core, and she hoped to use the masts of ships to guide herself to the harbour. But it turned out that Annapolis wasn’t that kind of port; perhaps farther up or down the coast, but not here. She cruised slowly down the quiet access streets to the waterfront and found only restaurants, T-shirt shops, and hotels, all closed down for the night. She saw no one at all. She felt stupid for fantasizing images of a whaling port out of Melville.

  She pulled back from the water and stopped at the next fast-food parking lot. Even the all-night pizza joint was shuttered. Until now, she had kept the GPS turned off. She had used it intermittently to reach Lembridge’s house but she knew that the device contained a complete record of her travels. Police and immigration officials would find it interesting. Employing it now, with her lethal plan forming, was sketchy but she had no choice. The solution would be to take the whole unit with her when she ditched the car; let the cops puzzle over why it hadn’t been left in the vehicle.

  She programmed it in now and set the centre of Washington as her destination.

  Still, she had no idea where to look for a prostitute in D.C. Even more challenging was finding a girl with the requisite skin colour and body type. The capital was only an hour away on Route 50; already, signs presented alternative routes to the downtown. New panic churned in her stomach. There were few cars on the road. She had to make a decision in the next ten minutes. She pulled into a rest stop and examined the atlas; a helpful insert map of Washington showed Route 50 intersecting with something called the Anacostia Freeway at the north end of the city. With no one neighbourhood appearing more promising than any other, she reprogrammed the GPS. It offered several choices for “Anacostia” and she plugged in the “River” setting.

  Her entry into urban Washington began bizarrely. The navigation program channelled her onto a six-lane “parkway” but gave no hint of the size or feel of this route. It turned out that elegant trees flanked the road and a wall constructed of yellow stones lined the edge of her southbound lane. It was all very pastoral and not what she anticipated. Worse, she couldn’t see any houses or urban avenues from the sheltered parkway. When she caught sight of an overhead sign for “Anacostia Park” she took the first exit, ignoring the complaints from the GPS voice. This was better. She took the next turn into a dense grid of streets and immediately saw that this was a poor, predominantly black area. The houses were shabby, though not totally run down, and the gritty streets held a threatening quality. She saw a pair of men exchanging packets of drugs in a side lot. A string of two-storey warehouses held promise for what she needed but she cruised the row without spying any hookers. A couple of solitary men walking fast along the pavement eyed her dusty car. She wondered if they knew rental plates from owner plates and what they would conclude if they did. She had yet to see any women at all.

  She noticed the orange glow of lights at the distant end of one of the wider thoroughfares and veered in that direction. She slowed the Ford to fifteen miles per hour. The Anacostia River remained her favoured destination but she had no idea where to find it. As she wandered the undifferentiated streets, increasing her exposure with every minute, she began to understand that the neighbourhood was a self-contained square, framed by several large bridges that she glimpsed from time to time. She headed towards the bright lights, reasoning that they marked a major bridge crossing. She had to try. There would be streetwalkers there or there wouldn’t.

  Alice found what she wanted before she met up with the bridge. The neighbourhood had not quite degenerated to the point where there were burned-out houses or congregations of men smoking ganja on street corners, but Alice remained hopeful of finding a working girl. Turning up and around the right-angle grid in a hairpin pattern in the hope of locating the orange lights, she finally discovered a dark avenue that ran close by the river. A grassy berm blocked an
y view of the water but she could sense it off to the right, while ahead the street appeared to run right under the lit-up bridge. It looked promising. A streetlight four hundred yards dead ahead provided enough illumination that any hookers would be noticed by cruising johns, without it all being too blatant.

  Alice stopped the Ford in the shadows, invisible. She turned off the engine, got out and opened the back. She took out the tire iron. Then she opened the rear door to verify that a snoop looking through a window wouldn’t see anything memorable in the back seat. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet smiled at her from the pink rucksack. She would have to ditch the bag soon; for now she thought, what the hell, and left it where it was. She got back in the car, started it up again, and drove towards the pool of light.

  She made out the two mannequin shapes ahead and rolled slowly up the avenue — she wanted the girls, on her first pass, to dismiss her as a prospective client. The closest girl, who stood just out of the streetlight’s circle, seemed promising to Alice — Alida, now — a typical prostitute, suspicious of eye and anxious for business. Alice watched her reaction. She checked off Alice as a stupid, lost girl, dumb enough maybe to stop and ask for directions. Alice glanced at her without slowing and moved past the second girl, who scowled from the grass fringe. This one was all wrong, chubby and dressed in a short skirt, with glazed, middle-distance eyes, indicating heavy drug use. Alice frowned. Neither woman qualified as apsara, the celestial consorts of Hindu myth. The apsara were shape-shifting beings who were associated with water and were the patronesses of gamblers. It was too much to hope for.

  As she passed under the street lamp and made a sharp left turn, Alice pondered whether the first girl would do. She was darker than Alice, and wore her hair longer, but she was roughly the same height and weight. Alice sensed the night hours ebbing away.