The Drowned Man

by David Whellams

  Peter considered Montreal. Stephen wasn’t wrong. He had no official business left in Quebec.

  “Anything else?” Stephen said.

  This was the moment to disclose his fresh plans, Peter knew, but resentment now poisoned any residual goodwill, and he only said, “Get Nicola to refine her draft of the three letters and send me a copy as an email attachment. That’s it.”

  “Okay. I’ll get them to you. Otherwise, Malloway can handle everything. I don’t want you going to Montreal, Peter. We’ll have lunch when you get back.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Alida walked up to Independence Avenue and turned left towards the heart of Washington. The first glimmer of dawn brought the tidy, rich neighbourhoods east of Capitol Hill into sharp relief. She had by now painted her mind’s-eye picture of her new home in America and although these houses were beautiful, she knew that they would never provide her with asylum. She saw a sign off to her right for “Lincoln Park” and reflected that the sixteenth president popped up everywhere. Alida otherwise ignored the sign but she might have paused had she known that Pierre L’Enfant, the capital’s most important architect, originally intended that Americans should measure all distances in North America from that spot. She was at the centre of America.

  But Alida kept walking. Her destination was four hundred miles to the north, in Rochester, New York.

  It was ten minutes too early for the dog walkers and the joggers, but out of nowhere a taxi pulled up alongside and the passenger-side window descended.

  “Mumbai,” said the driver.

  It wasn’t exactly a gypsy cab but the driver, the brother of the owner, was unlicensed (which was why the police canvass of the taxi companies would fail to turn up Alida’s fare) and for ten dollars and no questions beyond her telling him she was from Bihar he drove her to Union Station. She had the Mumbai man take a loop around the Mall so that she could glimpse the Washington Monument and the Capitol Dome. She wished she had a Kodak but she did not ask the driver to stop. Glorious as these landmarks were, she had no intention of living in the shadow of these heavily policed tourist monuments.

  She remained calm. The trickle of passengers onto the vast communal floor of Union Station did not alarm her, nor did the security guards standing at posts around the perimeter. She had told the Mumbai man to leave her at the train station but her goal was the bus depot next door. Now she walked through the main building and across to the bus terminal.

  Her booking proved straightforward, an eight fifteen ticket all the way to the downtown Cumberland Street terminal in Rochester.

  The GPS was a problem. Walking up from the river, she had used it to plot the distance to upper New York State by road. The problem was the imprint left on the device. She could clear all records of previous trips but she suspected that the police had ways of recovering such data. She couldn’t flush it down the toilet or break it up into little pieces. She had noticed a post office in Union Station. With an hour and a half to spare before the bus departed for Baltimore and points north, Alida returned to the railway lounge and bought a cushioned mailing envelope. She addressed it to Jack Dawson, Beverly Hills, California, on a fictional street; she wrote 90210 for the zip code. She took the GPS screen off its stand, slipped it into the envelope and paid for the postage. Returning to the bus depot, she transferred her meagre possessions to a dirty canvas bag she found in a trash receptacle and deposited her pink rucksack, making sure that Leo and Kate were lodged at the bottom of the bin.

  The rhythm of bus travel soothed her. The Rand McNally sat on her lap as she alternately slept and gazed out the window. She could not get enough of the countryside of Pennsylvania as it rolled by. With the atlas as her guide to the wide-open future, she imagined, and compulsively recalculated, scenarios for her new life. The siren call of the blue interstates had marked her forever and she decided that she would buy a car as soon as she could. From her home base in Rochester — it sat at the very top of the country — she would explore everywhere to the west and the south. Alida was not the first young woman determined to visit all the states, but she believed she was.

  While waiting in the Harrisburg depot for her connector to New York State, she saw a poster for Gettysburg that extolled the preservation of the famous town and Civil War battle site. Abraham Lincoln had given his celebrated speech right there on the battlefield. Johnny had told her about Gettysburg (and now she thought, for the thousandth time, of the letters she carried). She added the battlefield park to her list of places to visit.

  Rochester, New York, turned out to be the first city that Alida learned to trust. As the Trailways bus passed the “City Limits” sign she mouthed the words “Welcome to Rochester, Kodak City, Pop. 214,231.” This made her smile: Kodak was the universal term in Bihar for a tourist’s camera. Simultaneously she saw from the elevated expressway the skyline of the city and the grey-blue of Lake Ontario in the distance. If I had a Kodak, she thought, amusing herself, I could take a picture and pin it on my wall.

  At the bus station she disembarked and walked out to East Street, where she saw the top half of a tall black building in the distance, a modest skyscraper that nonetheless anchored the centre of the city. It welcomed her as a beacon to a new, exotic life. In the opposite direction she noted a sign and an arrow: “East Street Mansions” and below, “Eastman House.” The pieces of her reverie began to slot into place with remarkable swiftness.

  Her first task was to find cheap accommodations — with a landlord who lacked prying eyes. She understood that bus stations were often built in the downscale parts of town and she knew that rooming houses along the nearby streets would have adverts posted. She ambled down the street facing the main doors of the depot and in minutes spied a frowzy hotel that was nothing more than a brownstone walk-up with segmented by-the-day-or-week flats. It would suffice.

  She walked past the rooming house, cut up to the right until she found a main street, and soon discovered a store that sold luggage. With her new navy blue gym bag Alida became the image of a graduate student. At least, that was how the pockmarked and warty landlady sized her up when she arrived at the rooming house. A cash payment got her a shabby rental on the second floor. Alida let herself into her room but left again to deposit the Booth letters and the remaining Canadian bills in a locker at the bus station. She bought a city map at the candy counter, returned to the brownstone, and spread out the map on the chenille bedspread. Within a few minutes she had located the visitor centre as well as the most direct route to Irondequoit Bay and the harbour. She plotted a rambling walk past the four tallest buildings in Rochester, which were helpfully identified by icons on the map. She concluded that the Xerox Tower, the tallest at thirty storeys, was the black skyscraper she had glimpsed on her arrival in town.

  The Xerox Tower turned out to be grey, not black, an illusion of the early afternoon sun. She circled the lobby as if checking out the architecture but didn’t bother going up the elevators; nor did she disturb the lone security guard at the information booth. She did note that there was only one exit door.

  She walked on to the next skyscraper. The Times Square Building immediately caught her fancy. Although it was not all that big, at fourteen storeys, it was surmounted by four sculpted wings that, according to a brochure, had served as a beacon for new arrivals since the building went up in 1930; a plaque in the lobby asserted that each wing weighed twelve thousand pounds and together they were known as the Wings of Progress. She took an elevator to the fourteenth floor. There was no observation deck but she was able to spy Lake Ontario from one of the topmost windows. The building delighted her, like the rest of Rochester.

  She traversed a park area labelled Washington Square, in the centre of which stood the Soldiers and Sailors Monument. At its apex perched a benign Abraham Lincoln. He was everywhere in America, it seemed, and she reminded herself to read the Booth letters again. She smelled the moisture in the air before she turne
d a last corner and saw the lake. Ontario was the smallest of the Great Lakes, the brochure stated, but it seemed immense. The view, as Johnny might have said, sealed the deal for Alida. The water stretched out like the floodplain of Bihar after a monsoon but for her the lake was “American” in every way, a vista to infinity and endless with potential, a highway for big ships, and a presence crouching like a beast by the edge of the city. Alida also liked the scale of Rochester, sprawling yet defined by its neighbourhoods and its waterfront. She walked the long way back to East Street and took in the façades of the preserved mansions, and had a very American thought: someday I could own one of those.

  But the Xerox Tower remained her main focus. She knew that the rich man spent ten-hour days in his office and watched over the city and the lake from his windows on the twenty-eighth floor of the building. Sometimes he slept in his office. Alida prepared herself. She was in the mood to spend some cash.

  The next morning she strolled around until she found a women’s store downtown. She bought a white blouse, black slacks, and a black velvet jacket. She sprang for stylish earrings and a pair of Foster Grants at a department store on the same street. On the way back she went into a thrift shop and found a pair of knock-off Blahniks — no use squandering money. On impulse, she bought a briefcase to complete the picture of a modern businesswoman. It showed just the right amount of wear to prove her bona fides as a hardworking executive. She took it to a hole-in-the-wall shoemaker’s and had the Pakistani owner polish it up to a high gleam. In her room, she changed into her complete outfit, except for the heels, and examined herself in the bathroom mirror. Coming downstairs to see how she looked in the natural light she encountered the landlady, who smiled with wonderment at this alien creature.

  “How do I look?” Alida said, using her best British-schoolgirl inflection.

  “I never, ever get to see one of my tenants dressed to the nines. Where are you about to head off to, young woman?” the plump lady said.

  Alida smiled but instinctively drew back a step. She was grateful for the old woman’s chatter but the more Alida befriended her — she had decided she might need to stay two weeks — the better witness the woman would make if the police interviewed her. She began to twitch as she stood posing in the hall. She regained control. She had decided on the long bus journey to put her ingrained paranoia behind her. A new life meant a new philosophy. She smiled now, smoothed her skirt, and kissed the landlady on the cheek.

  “I have a part-time-job interview,” she said. She had told the woman that she was a university student.

  The landlady smiled back. “Don’t forget your shoes, dear.”

  Alida went back to her room to fetch the Blahniks and when she came down, the woman told her she looked gorgeous. Alida thanked her.

  She timed her return by taxi to the Xerox Tower for eleven thirty, hoping to spot her target leaving for lunch. She searched out a Kinko’s down the block and copied the pages of the Booth letters. Returning, she passed the indifferent security guard and took the elevator to the twenty-eighth floor. Two businesses occupied half the floor space each. Lembridge had given her the man’s name, Crerar, first name Ronald, describing the businessman as short and swarthy, and “not to be underestimated.” One of the firms on the twenty-eighth was an insurance company and the other, so said the etched letters on the glass door, was Intrepid Regional Investments. She entered this office, marched directly to the receptionist and asked if Mr. Crerar had left for lunch yet.

  “I’m sorry,” the honey-haired receptionist said with a smile, “he’s just finishing an appointment. Do you want to wait?”

  Everything in America felt new to Alida. She reflected on the fact that this was her first encounter with an American woman her age. Alida was eager to please, to gain the feeling of sisterhood, even though she would never see the woman again. She grinned back.

  “Thank you. I’ll see Mr. Crerar at the restaurant.”

  Alida entered the insurance office and pretended to be interested in the promotional material. Five minutes later, a man who had to be Ronald Crerar came out of Intrepid Investments and pushed the button for the elevator. He was short, his hair thinning, but he wasn’t swarthy or disagreeable. On the contrary, his expensive clothes and his self-confident way of moving compensated for his lack of height and hair. When she talked to him, she would reassess his charms.

  She strolled into the elevator area and stood close to him. He smiled at her.

  “These elevators take forever,” he said.

  “We call them lifts,” Alida said. “And they do take forever.”

  “We’re going to have lunch, did you know that?” Crerar said.

  His intention was to startle her but Alice knew how to project cool. “All right,” she said matter-of-factly. She introduced herself as Teresa Smith.

  They settled into a secluded banquette in an upscale restaurant two streets away. As Alida anticipated, the maître d’ was all artificial smiles in Ronald Crerar’s presence. She had already surmised that Crerar always got what he wanted and the restaurant was clearly a staging area for his seductions, commercial and otherwise. She reminded herself not to underestimate her target. After all, he had instantly figured out that she was the woman who had mentioned the non-existent lunch date to his receptionist. He had acted to make their date a reality and that gave him an advantage. Besides, Alida was in mild shock at finding herself in such luxury after two days in grubby clothes on an intercity bus. She was nervous, although not so much that her twitch kicked in.

  For his part, Crerar was anything but subtle. He turned every conversation back to his business enterprises, which, nonetheless, remained nebulous. At one point, just to force him to take a breath, Alida made up a potted biography about being raised in England and attending business school in Manchester.

  Crerar at once burst out: “I went to LSE for a year!” She wanted to tell him that the sons of half the dictators in the Middle East and Asia had degrees from the London School of Economics.

  The whole interaction stayed coy. “You’re in insurance, then?” Crerar ventured. She understood that he was drawing an assumption from her materialization across the hall on the twenty-eighth floor. When he ordered wine, she consented to one small glass (and only that so that he did not think she was a Muslim) and prepared to redirect the conversation.

  When the sommelier left, Alice said, “No. You might say that I am in the non-insured business.”

  “Okay. What kind of business are we talking about? And why were you on my floor?” His voice had quickly turned hard.

  “I’m in a cash business. I know you can appreciate that.”

  Lembridge had implied that Crerar was avaricious, a man with too much discretionary cash (unlike the academic himself), and Alida, during the long hours on the bus, had tried to guess how brutal and grasping the businessman would turn out to be. If anything, he was both shrewder and more lustful than expected. She decided to be forthright, in order to find common ground in their mutual greed, all the while dangling the chance of sex.

  “I have something you’ll want to purchase,” she said.

  “First, tell me what business you’re in.”

  “Rare documents, artifacts that have come onto the market,” Alida said.

  “Or haven’t come onto the market, young woman. From what sources do you get hold of these items?”

  “Let’s leave that for a moment. There’s a proper order to do these things,” she said.

  “I need to know who referred you to me,” he insisted, although the possibility of sex muted his tone.

  “Put it this way. We will need an authenticator who is acceptable to both of us. Once we agree on that expert, you will know who gave me your name.”

  “I have to assess the risk. The trail of ownership must be validated,” he said, leaning close to her. “I can’t risk buying an item on the Stolen Art list
.”

  Alida respected Crerar’s spine. He outmatched Johnny and Lembridge both. She shifted tactics again.

  “Nonsense,” she said, mustering an edgier tone. “The risk-reward is based on your needing to own this item, even if you only visit it once a year in the safety deposit chamber of your bank. With that in mind, previous ownership is moot. The bonus, Mr. Crerar, is that no one knew this document existed until three months ago, so that listing problem is solved. The only issue is authentication.”

  “Call me Ron, Miss Smith, please.”

  For the balance of their lunch, she managed to control the negotiation. She refused more wine. She let drop that the two documents were Civil War–era treasures and then she linked them to the assassination. Within ten more minutes, she had him begging to know how John Wilkes Booth might be connected to them. She feared for a second that he had heard about the Booth letters already, but it was a natural question. When she informed him that she had photocopies of two letters in her briefcase, one signed by the assassin, he gave her a broad smile of admiration. If only he knew that the originals were slotted in her portfolio, too, right next to the copies. Ten minutes later, the duplicates, set out on the linen tablecloth, effectively closed the deal. She sensed his testosterone rising as the greed took hold.

  They worked through the arrangements over the next hour. Alida ordered three desserts, but only because she was hungry. He seemed charmed, as if gluttony equated with self-assurance. The price came down from $85,000 to $50,000, subject to verification by the document expert. She said she had someone in mind. They discussed a mutually convenient venue outside Rochester. Summing up, Alida promised to call him within a week to confirm the expert’s name and the locale for the exchange. It was all so reasonable. They would close the deal ten days hence in a safe spot a few miles back down the I-90. She refused his dinner invitation, saying she was far too full.