by Sam Bourne
‘Police sources are telling us there was a history of antagonism between Black Lives Matter activists and Professor Aikman.’ It was the female reporter, her hair so blonde and rigid that Maggie glanced around, looking for the camera.
‘I know that. I know what the police are saying. They’re saying it to you, they’re saying it to us. To our face. All this, “Russell Aikman was your enemy.” That’s bullshit. You hear me?’
‘Isn’t it true he was on the other side of the statue debate?’
The leader smiled. ‘Lot of people in this town on the other side of that debate. Lot of people in this country. You think we’re going to start killing them all?’
‘And the access to the building?’
‘Plenty of people got access to that too. Not only black folks who got that code.’ Without breaking his stride, he handed a flier to a woman who passed by, talking into her phone.
Maggie saw her moment. She held out her phone, reporter-style, as if to record his answers.
‘Until yesterday, what did you know of Russell Aikman?’
‘That’s just it. I hardly heard of him. No disrespect to the guy, but he just wasn’t one of the big players in the whole statue thing. He wasn’t shooting his mouth off on CNN, you know what I’m saying?’
‘Not on your enemies list?’
‘We don’t have an enemies list. Nothing like it.’
‘But if you did?’
‘He wouldn’t be on it. The guy was not on our radar.’
In unison, the two reporters offered hurried thanks and turned around. Maggie wondered if it was something he – or perhaps she – had said. But then she spotted the Chief of Police coming out of the building opposite. They wanted to buttonhole him.
Maggie turned back to the leader and spoke more quietly now. ‘Mr . . .’
‘Mike Jewel. Call me Mike.’
‘Mike, who do you think killed Russell Aikman?’
‘I don’t have a name for you. I ain’t a detective. Mind you, they don’t have a name either.’ He nodded towards the police chief. ‘But it’s obvious. White supremacists killed that guy.’
‘Why’s that obvious?’
‘You seen Aikman’s work? You taken a look at what that guy was writing?’
Maggie shook her head.
Jewel pulled out his phone and went straight to a tab he’d kept open, apparently for this purpose. ‘Look at that.’
He was holding up the screen at an angle that made it hard for Maggie to read. It appeared to be an article in an academic journal, reviewing a book by Aikman. The title of the book: The Role of Bonded and Indentured Labor in the Virginian Economy, 1680 to 1820.
‘I’m not sure what I’m looking—’
Jewel withdrew the screen. ‘Look, this professor went through the archives, line by line. He calculated the exact number of slaves kept at every major property and plantation in this state, including Monticello and Mount Vernon.’ Still holding Maggie’s gaze, he peeled off another flier and handed it to a teenage boy.
‘I see.’
‘He didn’t just work out how many slaves Thomas Jefferson and George Washington kept. He worked out how many died on their watch. Aikman did the work, you know what I’m saying?’
‘Right.’
‘But he didn’t stop with the big names. He went through the records – the wills, the auction ledgers, ships’ manifests – the whole nine yards. I mean, he was relentless. He kept going till he had the exact number of slaves kept by every big family in Virginia. He had it down. Chapter and verse.’
‘And those families—’
‘They’re still here. That’s the whole point. They’re still here. It’s not that long ago, my friend. Those big plantation fortunes, those names – they never went away.’
‘And you think one of them might have wanted to silence Russell Aikman.’
‘Now you’re putting words in my mouth. I never said that. Maybe those guys are too rich to care what some professor’s saying in a book no one’s gonna read. But the rest of them? The movement. White supremacy is real, my friend. It lives. And they’d have had no doubt who Russell Aikman was. What he was. To them, it would have been obvious. Finding out what he found out, writing what he wrote? That made him a traitor. A traitor to the white race.’
Maggie could see Jewel himself was now distracted, glancing across the street to the police department, where Ed Grimes was addressing a larger group of reporters. The key change seemed to be the arrival of not one but two cameras, their appearance acting as the cue for more journalists to gather. Maggie had seen that dynamic in action before. For all the chin-stroking essays you could read about ‘the changing media landscape’, it was still TV that mattered.
It was then she caught a glimpse that she processed not in her brain but in her gut. Her stomach seemed to flip while her mind struggled to keep up. She had to squint into the gloom to check what her eyes thought they’d seen.
There, by the second tripod, setting up. Could it be? She hadn’t seen him in so long. His hair was a little shorter now, the loose curls tamed, but it was still thick and dark, just as she remembered it. In his boots and faded jeans, peering now into the lens, he could have passed for an American TV news cameraman, though there was that familiar reticence in his posture, a suggestion he was holding back somehow, that she recognized in an instant.
Now he looked up and met her eye. He showed no hint of surprise. On the contrary, he seemed to have been waiting for this moment, as if they’d arranged it. Without saying anything, they both moved towards each other. He broke into a small jog to cross Market Street, until their faces were just a few inches apart.
‘Uri, I don’t believe it.’
‘Of all the race riots in all the towns in all the world, you walk into mine.’
She laughed, smiling wider than the joke merited. ‘It’s good to see you. You look great.’
‘So do you. You always did.’
He opened his arms and Maggie stepped forward into the hug, not sure what to do with her hands, one of which was still holding her phone. She reached for his shoulder, but clashed with his arm as it attempted to make the same move. She realized that when they knew each other they never hugged this way, like two guys in a bar.
‘I thought you were in London.’
‘I was for a while. Then back to Israel for a bit. My mother’s getting old.’ He shrugged: you know how it is. ‘And now here.’
‘You live in Charlottesville?’
Now it was his turn to give a disproportionate laugh. ‘New York. I’ve been making a film about the whole statues thing. When it kicked off, I came down.’
‘That’s . . . amazing. What are the chances?’
‘Actually, I knew you’d be here.’
Maggie turned her eyebrows into a question mark.
‘I have a friend in the governor’s office.’
‘Ah.’
‘I guessed you’d come straight here. I wanted to see you.’
‘I’m glad. It’s good to see you too.’ She held his gaze, looking deep into those green eyes she remembered. She felt a familiar stirring, the sensation simultaneously warm and unsettling.
‘I mean, I needed to see you. About all this.’ He gestured towards the police chief and the candlelit vigil for Russell Aikman. ‘There’s something you need to know.’
Chapter Seven
Charlottesville, Virginia, 6.40pm
They were in the lobby of his hotel in Charlottesville, a pair of townhouses in the historic district converted into a boutique ‘inn’. Only now, after Uri had suggested they take the three-minute walk from the vigil outside the police department, did Maggie have a chance to take in properly the sight of this man whose bed she had shared for . . . how long had they been together? Longer than with any other man she had known, before or since.
Physically, he had barely changed, though shorter hair made him look more serious. The difference was rather in the way he carried himself and the way he loo
ked at her. Back when they had known each other – during those first intense days in Jerusalem and then shuttling between New York and DC – there was something boyish and open about his face, a sweet eagerness that she had been unable to resist. Now he seemed warier and perhaps wiser, as if life had sat him down and instructed him in some of its harder lessons. She wondered if she looked the same way to him. Given all that had happened, she probably did.
He ordered tea for them both, then pulled out a laptop which he placed on the low table between them. He moved his chair close to hers, so that they were side by side, facing the screen. As he leaned in to the keyboard, typing in a series of passwords, she caught the scent of him – a parcel of neural information that seemed to travel straight through her skin.
‘OK, so these are rushes of an interview I did about two weeks ago. Do you know this guy?’ He pressed play, unspooling footage of a man she did not recognize. The man wasn’t saying anything, just occasionally clearing his throat or flicking dust off his jacket. He seemed to be waiting for the interview to start, as the lighting was adjusted around him. That figured: Uri could be a pain-in-the-arse perfectionist when it came to framing and lighting a shot. But she still had no clue who this man was. He was no model or actor, even if Uri was giving him the Hollywood treatment.
‘Who is it?’
Uri pulled away from the machine and sat back in his chair, prompting Maggie to shift too so that they could face each other. It seemed so strange to be in the same room again, talking together, as if the last few years of absence had just fallen away. A memory resurfaced that was once so fresh it stung.
They’d been in a bar in Washington, The Dubliner, a faux-Irish pub she couldn’t stand, packed with the usual crowd of lobbyists and legislative assistants and reporters, all jostling and jockeying, forever trying to grab hold of a better place on the DC monkey bars, even if that meant edging someone else off. To her, they looked as strained and sweaty as marines on an assault course.
He kept her waiting, she remembered that. Long enough that she’d had two whiskies by the time he arrived. Maybe three.
And then he appeared, looking dark and handsome and with eyes so lost, you wanted to lose yourself in them. And he told her that he’d wanted to make it work, he really had, but he had seen what she was like, how she couldn’t sit still. He reminded her how she’d been when they’d taken a holiday together – in a perfect corner of Santorini – just a few weeks earlier, how she’d been unable to lie on a beach for more than half an hour. ‘I’m Irish, I burn,’ she’d said. But he knew better. He saw the way she would reach for her phone, the way she needed to be where things were happening, or as he put it, ‘at the dead centre of the shitstorm’. He called her ‘an adrenalin junkie with a Messiah complex’. (Though on that occasion he’d been quoting Liz.)
She hadn’t waited for him to say the words. She’d gathered her things, kissed him hard on the lips and said goodbye before he had the chance. She had never seen him again after that. And she never again set foot in The fucking Dubliner.
Sitting now in the lobby of this hotel, the trees flanking the entrance visible through the windows, their fairy lights twinkling, Maggie wanted to ask if he’d found with someone else what he’d been looking for with her. Did he now have a wife? Did they have children? Did he have a gorgeous little son or a beautiful baby daughter? Had he made a home?
But he did not answer any of those questions. Instead he answered the question that she had actually asked.
‘His name is Mitchell Boult. He teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania.’
‘OK.’
‘Or rather he did.’
‘What do you mean, “did”?’
‘Maggie, I was following this guy for my film. About the statues campaign. He was one of the first people who got involved. He served on a state commission to advise on the future of memorials in Pennsylvania. His specialism was the civil war. He was the real deal.’
‘Right.’
‘Are you tired or something?’
‘No, why? What do you mean?’
‘It’s just, it seems like you’re a bit away, you know. Like maybe you weren’t listening.’
‘No, no, I’m listening. I mean, I suppose what I’m thinking is: it’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it?’
‘About Boult? That’s just it, he—’
‘No. I mean about us.’ She instantly regretted that ‘us’. ‘I mean, you. Being here. And me. At the same time. Guessing I would come here, and then: there I am!’ In trying to sound light, she sounded heavy.
‘I don’t understand. You don’t want me to be here?’
‘No, of course not. It’s great to see you, Uri. Really. It’s just, you know, what a coincidence!’ The voice straining for lightness again. If she could hear it in herself, so could he.
As she insisted he go on, that he tell her all about Mitchell Boult, she scolded herself – for ruining it, for being suspicious, for being paranoid, for letting her past infect her present.
‘So you were saying about Boult: brilliant professor.’
‘And really good guy.’
‘Sure.’
‘Well, last week they found him dead. They thought it was a heart attack.’
‘But it wasn’t?’
‘I don’t know, Maggie. Boult’s wife was suspicious. She kept telling everyone how fit he was. He’d had a medical a couple of months ago and he was fine. All clear. Still the doctors insisted: “Look, these things can happen.” ’
‘But?’
‘But then I heard about Aikman. You know, both historians. Both experts on the same period.’
‘OK. But that really might just be a coincidence.’
Maggie heard her own voice, separate from her, listening to it as it talked to Uri about these men neither of them really knew. She struggled to make sense of it. Once she and Uri had conversed in intimate whispers, their heads propped up on pillows. They had touched each other, skin on skin. And now here they were, their two voices talking in regular sentences, like strangers, in a hotel lobby in Charlottesville.
‘That’s what I thought too. Until I saw this.’
He angled the computer for her. It was displaying the cover page of a PDF document. Perspectives on Public Commemoration and the Sacralization of Memory: November 21 to November 22.
‘This is what Boult was working on when he died.’
‘Organizing this conference?’
‘Yes. Though they called it, how do you pronounce it, a collock-you-um ?’
Maggie nodded, remembering how she liked his rare mispronunciations, how she never wanted to correct them.
He gestured at the screen. ‘Click on it.’
She opened the first page. Standard conference format, detailing registration at 09.00, introductory remarks at 09.45 to be delivered by Prof Mitchell Boult, here described as the co-convenor of the ‘colloquium’, then various breakout sessions, including one that caught her eye: The William Keane trial: a roundtable.
‘Keep going.’
She scrolled through, unsure what she was looking for. Finally she reached the last page of the document, scanning it until she had reached the closing session of the final day.
Scheduled for 16.00 were concluding remarks from Prof Russell Aikman, University of Virginia. But that wasn’t what had troubled Uri. That wasn’t what had made him drive several hundred miles to meet Maggie again after all these years.
‘See how he’s described,’ Uri said, touching the screen with his finger.
It was the word that appeared after Aikman’s name, the same bit of academese that had described Boult. Co-convenor.
Maggie murmured it almost to herself. ‘They organized this thing together.’
‘Exactly,’ said Uri, with an excitement that sounded more like relief. ‘Now what are the chances that two men working on a conference both—’
‘—end up dead—’
‘—within a week of each other?’
She looked at him and he looked at her, their gaze unbroken. She felt that familiar longing again, a hunger that was very specific to this man. She pushed the feeling back down below the surface and listened as he spoke again.
‘I know you, Maggie Costello. And I know you know that this is no coincidence.’
Chapter Eight
Court 73, Richmond, Virginia, 2.45pm
‘Your honour, our next witness needs some assistance.’
Exactly as Keane had planned, everyone in court – press, public and the defence team around Susan Liston and her publishers – turned the same way at the same moment, all eyes shifting to the double-door entrance. There a tall African-American man in something akin to a nurse’s uniform appeared, moving slowly. He was pushing a wheelchair, which eventually was revealed to be ferrying an ancient black woman, almost fetally curled into the seat. Both of her hands gripped the top of a cane, their fingers gnarled and claw-like. The hair on her head was flecked with silver and iron.
The judge – white, female, middle-aged and usually keen to make a great show of her impatience with verbose lawyers and long-winded experts – was now conspicuously generous, allowing both the witness and her carer to take their time.
‘No hurry at all, Ms Henderson,’ she soothed, as the wheelchair completed its long trek across the courtroom. Then the judge, and everyone else, watched the elaborate process required to help the witness out of the chair and onto the stand. Finally she was seated, her hands still clasping the cane, her nurse standing close by, like a bodyguard for a president.
She took the oath, identifying herself as Vivian Henderson, of Jonesboro, Arkansas. Her voice seemed to take the judge and everyone else by surprise. It was clear and unexpectedly loud.
William Keane rose to his feet. ‘Miss Henderson, it’s an honour to meet with you like this.’
‘Not Miss. Mrs.’ A high-pitched noise pierced the air. The carer stepped forward, fiddled with a device close to the woman’s ear, and stepped back again.
‘Oh, I beg your pardon. I was just—’
‘My husband may have passed thirty-seven years ago, but that don’t mean he’s not my husband.’
