Cortese provided her with answers before she had even asked the questions. ‘Sonora acquired two old buildings next door to each other. We’re demolishing them to build a condominium. As you can see, we’re nearly finished.’
Vivien pointed to the floor divided in two. ‘What was here before?’
‘On this side, an apartment block with a restaurant at street level. Italian, I think. We moved a whole lot of old equipment. On the other side, there was a small garage. I think it was put there after the building was built, because we found signs of renovation.’
‘Do you know who the owners were?’
‘No. But the company probably has all the papers.’
Cortese moved on, and Vivien followed him. They reached the corner to their right, where a concrete staircase, left over from the old buildings, led down to the lower level. There was a desolate feeling to the deserted site, with pneumatic hammers lying on the ground and a big yellow vehicle with a log drilling tool standing to one side. Everywhere was the grey gloom of destruction, without the colourful promise of rebirth.
As they went down the stairs, two of the crime scene technicians appeared, carrying their instruments. Vivien signalled to them, and they approached.
Vivien and Cortese got to the bottom of the stairs. The two officers were waiting for them there. Cortese stopped a couple of paces from the yellow tape. Officer Victor Salinas, a tall, brown-haired young man who had a crush on Vivien and whose eyes made no secret of the fact, waited for her to reach him then raised the tape to let her through.
‘What’s the score?’ she asked.
‘At first sight, I’d say normal and complicated at the same time. Come and see.’
At the far end was a kind of square cavity wall. Vivien turned her head and saw that on the opposite side there was another exactly the same. Most likely, one or more columns, now demolished, had formed a line between them.
In front of her, through a gap in the concrete, she saw a forearm covered in what remained of a cotton jacket. A skull with traces of shrivelled skin and hair could also be glimpsed inside, grinning like a figure from the Day of the Dead. But this was no allegory – this was very real evidence of violent death.
Vivien walked up to the wall. She looked carefully at the arm, the body, the material of the sleeve. She tried to peer inside, seeing what details she could make out. She knew how important first impressions could turn out to be.
She turned and saw that the crime scene officers and a man of about forty in a sportcoat and a pair of jeans were standing just beyond the tape, waiting for instructions. Vivien had never seen the man before but from his vaguely bored air she guessed he was the medical examiner. Vivien walked over to them. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Let’s try getting him out of there.’
Jeremy Cortese stepped forward and pointed to the worker who had been standing to one side. ‘If you like, there’s one of my men here who has no problems with dead bodies. In his spare time, he helps his brother-in-law who’s an undertaker.’
‘Call him over.’
Cortese signalled to the worker, who came towards them. He was in his early thirties, with a boyish face and vaguely oriental features. Shiny dark hair peeped out from under his hard hat. Vivien thought there must be something Asian about him.
Without a word he walked past them, went to the wall and bent down to pick up the pneumatic hammer from the ground.
Vivien went up to him. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Tom. Tom Dickson.’
‘All right, Tom, listen. We have a delicate situation here. This has to be done with extreme care. Everything inside that hole could be important. If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather you used a hammer and chisel, even if it takes longer.’
‘Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing. You’ll find everything the way you want it.’
Vivien placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘I trust you, Tom. Carry on.’
She had to admit the man knew his business. He widened the gap in such a way as to make the inside accessible, making the rubble fall outwards but without moving the position of the body.
Vivien asked Salinas for a torch and went closer to take a look inside the hole. There was still a lot of daylight, but the semi-darkness inside made it difficult to see. She shone the torch at the walls and the dead man. The narrowness of the space had stopped the body from sliding to the ground. The dead man was resting on his left side, his head tilted at an unnatural angle. It was this that had given the impression, when seen from the outside, that his head was resting on his shoulder. The enclosed environment and the lack of humidity had partially mummified him, which was why he was much more intact than would normally have been the case – and which also made it much more difficult to calculate how long he had been hidden here.
Who are you? Who killed you?
Vivien knew that for the families of missing persons, the worst thing was the anguish of not knowing. Someone
one night‚ one day
left home and never came back. And in the absence of a body, his loved ones spent their whole lives wondering what, where and why. Never giving up a hope that only time could gradually extinguish.
She pulled herself together and resumed her inspection.
When she aimed her torch at the ground she discovered, next to the feet of the corpse, an object covered in dust that looked at first glance like a kind of large wallet. She asked for a pair of latex gloves, slid into the opening, and bent to pick it up. Then she straightened up and signalled to the crime scene team and the medical examiner.
‘OK, gentleman, it’s your turn.’
As the team got to work, she examined the object she had in her hand.
She blew on it gently to remove the layer of dust. The material was imitation leather, and must once have been black or brown. She could see now that it wasn’t in fact a wallet, but a document holder. She opened it carefully. There were two hard plastic sheets inside, stuck together, which made a slight tearing noise as she pulled then apart.
Inside were two photographs.
She parted the plastic and gently slipped her fingers in to extract them without ruining them. She examined them by the light of the torch. In the first, a young man in a helmet and combat uniform was leaning on a tank and looking gravely at the camera. Around him there was vegetation that suggested a tropical country. She turned the photograph over. There was something written on it, faded by time, with some of the letters almost erased, but not enough to make them illegible.
Cu Chi District 1971
The second photograph, which was much better preserved, surprised her. The subject was the same young man who had been looking thoughtfully at the camera in the previous photograph. Here, he was in civilian clothes, a psychedelic T-shirt and work pants. In this image he had long hair and was smiling and holding a big black cat out to the camera. She studied the man and the animal closely. At first she thought it was a deformation caused by the angle, but then she realized that her first impression had been correct.
The cat had only three legs.
There was nothing written on the back of this photograph.
She asked the other officer, Bowman, for two plastic bags, and slipped the document holder and the photographs inside them. She went up to Frank Ritter, the head of the crime-scene team and handed them over to him.
‘I’d like you to analyse this material. Look for fingerprints, if there are any. Examine the victim’s clothes. Plus, I’d like these photographs to be enlarged.’
‘We’ll see what we can do. But if I were you I wouldn’t hold out too much hope. Everything looks pretty old to me.’
The ME walked around the stretcher and came and joined Vivien. They limited the introductions to the absolute minimum.
‘Jack Borman.’
‘Vivien Light.’
They both knew who they were, where they were and what they were doing. Right now, any other consideration faded into the background.
‘Any idea yet of the cau
se of death?’
‘In layman’s terms, I’d hazard a guess, from the position of the head, that someone broke his collar bone. With what I don’t know. I’ll know more after the post mortem.’
‘How long do you think he’s been here?’
‘From the body’s state of preservation, I’d say around fifteen years. But the state of the hiding place also has to be taken into account. An analysis of the fibres should get us there. And I think forensic tests on the material of the clothes will come in useful, too.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
As the medical examiner walked away, Vivien realized that everything that could be done had been done. She gave the order to remove the body, said goodbye to the men, and left them to their tasks. At this point, she considered it pointless to talk to the worker who had found the body. She had given Bowman the job of taking down the details of all the people who might be useful to their investigation. She would talk to them later, including Mr Charles Brokens, who woke up every morning with that woman in his bed.
In a case of homicide like this, the most important leads usually came from the technical data rather than from witness statements. They’d have to wait for the test results before deciding on a plan of action.
She went back the way she had come, until she reached the site entrance. The workers watched her with a mixture of admiration and awe. She set off for the precinct house to pick up her car. She needed to think.
Bellew hadn’t assigned her to an easy case. He presumably considered her capable of solving it, but what he was asking her to do was equivalent to pulling chestnuts from the fire. And from the facts that had emerged so far, these chestnuts had been in the fire for at least fifteen years and had been burned to a cinder.
She passed a bar and instinctively looked through the window. Sitting at a table, talking to a girl with long blond hair, was Richard. The way they were looking at each other suggested they were more than just friends. She felt like a voyeur, and hurried away before he could see her, although he seemed to have eyes only for his companion. She was not surprised to find him there. He lived nearby and they’d been there together several times.
Maybe a few more times would have been better.
She’d had a relationship with Richard that had lasted a year, full of laughter, food and wine, and tender, gentle sex. A relationship that had been one step away from being love.
But, what with her work and the situation of Sundance and her sister, she had found it more and more difficult to devote herself to the two of them. In the end, the affair had ended.
As she walked, she realized that she had the same problem as all the people moving on that street and in that city. They all assumed they would live and knew they would die.
CHAPTER 10
Ziggy Stardust was good at camouflage.
He was capable of being a perfect nobody among the millions of New York nobodies. He was a perfect example of neither-nor: neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, neither handsome nor ugly. He was the kind of person you didn’t notice, didn’t remember, didn’t love.
The king of nobodies.
But he had turned being a nobody into an art. In his own way he considered himself an artist. In the same way as he called himself a traveller. On average he rode more miles on the subway every day than most passengers in a week. In Ziggy’s opinion, the subway was a place for suckers. Which made it the ideal place for one of his many activities: bag snatching. Another of his activities, more of a fringe activity but no less important, was being the dealer of choice for those who loved white powder but didn’t like risks or problems.
With Ziggy, they never had any problems.
He wasn’t a big time dealer, but the income, though small, was regular. All these grand ladies and gentlemen had to do was call a safe number and they’d get a home delivery of whatever they needed for their parties or be given an address to go to for fun and games. They had the money – he had what they were willing to pay for. This meshing of supply and demand was so natural, it wiped out any possible scruples – not that Ziggy had ever had any.
Occasionally, when he was able to, he also sold information to anyone who needed it. Sometimes even to the police, who in return for a few useful tip-offs – strictly confidential, of course – turned a blind eye to Ziggy’s frequent subway trips.
Obviously, that wasn’t his real name. Nobody remembered what his real name was. Even he forgot it sometimes. The nickname had been given him, when someone had remarked on his resemblance to David Bowie at the time the record Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars had come out. He couldn’t remember who it had been, but the name had remained.
It was the only thing that removed him a little from the anonymity in which he had always tried to live. He never walked in the middle of the sidewalk, but always hugged the walls and kept to the most shadowy areas. If he could choose, he preferred to be forgotten, rather than remembered. In the evenings he went back to his hole in Brooklyn, watched TV, surfed the internet and only went out to make phone calls. All calls related to work he made from a public phone booth. At home, on a cabinet, he always kept a roll of quarters, for every eventuality. There were a lot of people who hadn’t realized there was a good reason cellphones were called cellphones. They were telephones but they were also what landed you in jail. And those who ended up in jail because their calls had been intercepted got what they deserved. Not because they were criminals, but because they were stupid.
Even now, as he descended the stairs to Bleecker Street station, he couldn’t help feeling justified in his conviction. Better to make everyone believe you were a nobody than have someone sooner or later decide that they’d prove it to you.
He reached the platform and got on the green express line going uptown. The opening and closing of the sliding doors, the constant getting on and off of weary passengers who wanted only to be somewhere else, meant a lot of pushing and shoving, the contact of bodies, the smell of sweat. But it also meant wallets and distraction, the two basic elements of his work. There was always a purse slightly open, a pocket not well closed, a bag next to someone immersed in a book so engrossing they forgot everything else.
Of course the good old days were long over. Credit cards were everywhere now, and there was less and less cash in circulation. That was why he had decided to branch out – to diversify his activities.
The door is closing, came the voice of the loudspeaker.
He moved towards the rear of the carriage, where it was more crowded, making his way between hanging elbows and whiffs of garlic. Sitting next to the door was a guy in a green military jacket. He found it hard to judge his age. From where he was standing, he couldn’t see him well because the blue hood of a coverall came up from under the jacket to partly hide his face. His head was slightly tilted to the side, and it looked as if the swaying of the carriage had made him doze off. Next to his feet was a dark canvas bag.
Ziggy felt a slight sense of pins and needles in his fingertips. There was part of him that displayed something close to extrasensory perception when he singled out a victim. It was a knack, a gift, which had sometimes given him the idea that he had been born to do this work. Of course, the clothes the man was wearing didn’t suggest there might be something of value in that bag. But the hands resting in his lap weren’t the hands of a man who did heavy work, and his watch looked like a good one.
In his opinion, there was something here that went beyond the guy’s appearance. His instinct had rarely let him down, and over time he had learned to trust it.
He had once removed a wallet from a guy in a jacket and tie only because, in brushing against him, he had felt, by touch alone, a cashmere overcoat that must have been worth more than four thousand dollars. Trusting to nothing but the texture of the material, he had made his move. A few minutes later, going through the guy’s wallet, he had found seven dollars, a fake credit card and a subway season ticket.
Cheapskate!
/>
He went closer to the man in the green jacket, although staying on the other side of the door. He waited a couple of stops. The number of passengers was increasing. He moved into the middle and then, as if shifting to leave the door clear, he moved next to him.
The canvas bag was on the floor. It was on his left, close to his feet, the handle in the perfect position to be
grabbed at the right stop
getting out while the other passengers got on. He checked that the man still had his head in the same position. He hadn’t moved. Many people dozed off on the trains, especially those who had a long way to go. Ziggy was convinced that this guy belonged to that category of person. He waited until they got to Grand Central, where the number of people getting on and off was usually greater. As soon as the doors opened he grabbed the bag in an extremely rapid but natural movement, and got off. He immediately hid it with his body.
Out of the corner of his eye, as he was trying to melt into the crowd, he thought he saw a green jacket getting out of the carriage a moment before the train left.
Shit.
Grand Central was always full of cops and if that guy had sussed him, there was the possibility there would be quite a scene. And maybe a few days in the cooler. He passed a couple of police officers, an older man and a black girl, who were chatting just outside the station. Nothing happened. Nobody came running, crying ‘Stop thief!’ to attract the attention of the two officers. He preferred not to turn around. Better to let the guy who was following him think he hadn’t noticed anything.
He came out onto 42nd and immediately turned right and then right again, onto Vanderbilt. There was a stretch where there wasn’t much traffic and that was the right place to check if the guy in the military jacket really was following him or not. He went back into the terminal through the side entrance, taking advantage of the opportunity to throw a casual glance to his right. He didn’t see anybody come around the corner who looked anything like him. But that still didn’t mean anything. If the guy was clever, he knew how to follow someone without being spotted. Just as he himself knew the best way to throw someone who was tailing him. He wondered again how come the guy hadn’t told the two cops. If he’d noticed the theft and had followed him to get the bag back personally, that could mean two things.