The Search Page 12

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what is your interest in this man?’

  ‘That is hard to explain.’

  ‘Has he committed some crime?’

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘He is not wanted by the police?’

  ‘Possibly. No.’

  ‘And you are not with the police?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A finder?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tracker?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So what are you?’

  Walker shrugged.

  ‘And you have a photo of this man?’ Marek asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May I see it?’ Walker pulled the photo out of his wallet, unfolded it and passed it over.

  ‘Do you have any idea of what time he was at a particular place? Otherwise it is difficult to know where to start.’

  Walker shook his head.

  ‘It would be like looking for a needle in a haystack,’ said Marek.

  ‘Well, maybe not as simple as that,’ said Walker.

  They started their search that afternoon. Reasoning that Malory must almost certainly have passed through the Piazza de Repubblica, the main square, they went through that pile, one of the biggest, first. On the assumption that he hadn’t posed for any snaps they discounted the people featured in the photographs and concentrated on figures in the margins, people who had strayed unintentionally into the picture-frame.

  It was painstaking, frustrating work and by two in the morning their early enthusiasm had been overwhelmed by the drudgery of unrewarded labour. They still had two-thirds of the pile to go through but decided to call a halt and resume in the morning. Marek searched around the studio for a camp bed and then they sat by the desk drinking beer. They were bleary-eyed, half-stupid with looking, so addicted to the task that, even as they spoke, they continued to pick up odd snaps, glancing at them. Walker drained the final drops from his can, picked up one last snap – and there was Malory. The picture showed a Japanese girl smiling at the camera, a handbag over one shoulder. In the foreground the photographer’s shadow groped towards her. To her right a couple were sat on some steps, eating, and to her left, walking towards the camera, was Malory. Walker reached for the magnifier and immediately Malory’s face, blurred and grainy, loomed into view.

  ‘I’ve found him.’

  Marek came round the desk and looked over Walker’s shoulder. ‘You’re sure it’s him?’

  ‘Take a look.’ Marek looked from the magnifier to the original and back again.

  ‘We’re in business,’ he said and cracked open a bottle of vile-tasting spirits to celebrate. Grimacing, they took a shot each.

  Within ten minutes of waking they were back in the office, swallowing dark coffee, munching croissants.

  ‘OK. Now this is where the months of cross-referencing pay off,’ said Marek. ‘The first thing we do is find a copy of this photo in the sequential piles.’ Walker followed him out of the office and into the studio where trays of pictures were stacked up against the walls. Marek pulled out a couple of trays until he found a copy of the photo. ‘OK, so it was taken at about quarter to eleven. Good. Now we can try to guess where he’s going and look at the relevant stuff – but if he doesn’t crop up there we can resort to the sequential piles, look at every picture from eleven o’clock onwards.’

  Marek moved along the rows of photos and pulled out four bulging trays. ‘OK, he’s walking towards Via Pisano. Let’s assume he continues down there, so the next place to look for him is probably the Piazza Venezia.’

  Marek’s hunch was right. Within an hour they had found Malory again, blurred, recognizable only by his clothes, on the edge of a snap of a boy feeding pigeons. From there Marek reckoned he would have headed down towards Via Salavia. Finding no trace of him there they resorted to the sequentially arranged piles and found him, at 12.15, on the corner of two small streets.

  So it went on and by mid-afternoon they had built up a stack of photographs. Walker was amazed how often he had strayed accidentally into the camera’s gaze. The camera was a god, nothing escaped it.

  They continued to track Malory’s progress through the city. Marek pinned up a street map and marked out the route Malory had taken with approximate times. They came across him on the edge of a carefully composed shot of the Piazza San Pietro. After Repubblica this was the busiest and most intensely photographed spot in the city and two more photos followed his track from the north-west to the south-east of the piazza. Next he could be seen in the perfectly focused middle distance of a snap showing a hopelessly blurred young couple. This was followed by a sequence of video footage which, in the process of tracking across a piazza, showed him walking down an alley connecting Via Romana to Via Del Corso – where he was duly picked up in the margins of a shot of a statue of Garibaldi framed by a heavily polarized sky. In a photo of a girl in a white dress, stooping down to examine the sandals and belts being sold by patient Africans, Malory was seen walking towards the edge of the frame. In Via San Marco he was snapped inadvertently stepping between the photographer and his intended subject. For a moment he could be glimpsed in a sequence of Super 8, shot on the move as the cameraman walked through a crowd of people.

  Then he disappeared for almost an hour. When they picked up his trail again he was in a wide-angle shot of the cathedral steps.

  ‘What time was it taken?’ asked Walker.

  ‘Early evening. Look at the shadows. It’s one of the last photographs before the light went. Soon after it got dark there was an incredible thunderstorm.’

  This was the last photo of Malory they found. Looking through the remaining photos took little time: only specialist or exceptionally careless photographers continued snapping into the fading light of evening. By nine o’clock there were only a few photos showing the cathedral illuminated by green spotlights or streets filled with the volcanic ghosts of red and yellow car lights.

  Walker took copies of the photos and map. Back in his hotel he spread them out on the floor. He levered open a beer, took a swig from the bottle and poured it into a glass. He sat on the bed, drinking, staring at the pictures on the floor. Always his attention was drawn to the photo of Malory on the cathedral steps. Marek had blown up the portion showing Malory walking into a full-length 8 x 10. The fact that it was the last photo of Malory lent it an automatic fascination but there was something elusively familiar about it too. Walker glanced back at the other photos, rummaged through them until he came to the first picture of Malory he had seen, the one cabled through to him at Kingston. It showed just his head, looking off to the right. Placed next to each other the two pictures were strikingly similar. Blocking off everything but the head and shoulders of the cathedral snap, he saw that it was a mirror image of the original photo. Successive enlargements had rendered details as coloured smears in one and grey smudges in the other, but these background blurs coincided. Both pictures had been printed – one the right way, the other the wrong way – from the same negative.

  Walker stared at the images, not attempting to fathom the consequences or meaning of this discovery. He picked up the dictaphone and tossed it on to the pillow. Poured another beer and drank it carefully, noticing the taste of each sip, the way the cold glass felt in his hand, the beads of moisture on the bottle.

  It had started raining. The blinds rattled in the breeze. On the writing desk was a phone that looked like it had never rung. He lay back on the bed and pressed the Record button of the dictaphone, heard its slow whirring. The faint murmur of traffic outside. The cathedral bells chiming damply through the rain. He tried not to think of anything, only the details of the room: bedspread, wallpaper, wire hangers in the empty wardrobe, sachets of coffee and sugar on the dresser.

  He went into the bathroom where blue towels hung on a rail. He stood under the shower and got out only when the water began running cold. He dried himself and climbed between the cold, starched sheets. On the bedside table was a clock showing the
time in thin green numbers, a lamp which he flicked off and on and off.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  He left the hotel early and, with the aid of the map, began to duplicate Malory’s route through the city, trying to pass through each place at the same time that Malory had done. As he did so he was conscious as never before of the number of people with cameras. In the course of the day he would be caught dozens of times in a tourist’s photo.

  He saw the things Malory had seen: a cloud idling through the sky, ice-cream sellers, children, couples in T-shirts and slacks, people reading. He saw a pair of sunglasses lying crushed in the road, the darting shadows of birds, cigarette butts in the grass around the ancient walls. He noticed everything and everything he saw was like a memory. Nothing surprised him. What he saw dissolved instantly into memory as if some intermediate stage in the process of cognition had been skipped. He kept thinking of ways to articulate and understand what was happening but knew from experience that it was better just to let it happen, to let everything fall into place as it had to, without his understanding.

  The day moved on, morning led to afternoon. He saw the sun congregate in piazzas, grit lying between cobbles; he saw the cool darkness of rooms where lives were going on. He drank a coffee in a bar whose walls were lined with photos of local football heroes. He stared at the brown flecks of foam in his cup. Crystals of spilt sugar. A rind of lemon in a glass. The twisted butts of cigarettes in an ashtray. A crumpled serviette. On the table next to him was an empty cup with a print of lipstick on the rim. Was it possible, he wondered, to reconstruct the identity of the woman who had been drinking from just that smudge of pink? Her life, the way she spent her days, the things she had seen, the men she had loved?

  When he came out of the bar the light was turning lemon, preparing to fade. He continued following Malory’s route around the city, passing through a maze of narrow streets until he found himself in front of the cathedral. Clustered round the square, squat homes jostled for space, their needs dwarfed by the vastness of the cathedral’s spatial claim. Walker looked up at the twin towers rearing above him, his eyes dragged skyward. The cathedral leapt upwards, every part of it straining to be higher than every other part. Graceful, full of grace.

  The sun slipped behind the other buildings of the town, leaving only the twin towers of the cathedral in sunlight. Walker pushed open the wooden door and walked in. The cathedral was empty, no people and no pews. Walker made his way up the nave, his footsteps disturbing a silence distilled over five hundred years, accentuated by the clamour of vaulting overhead. The air smelt stagnant and fresh, reminding him of the chapel in the country. Flowers blowing by the old walls, brown earth. Purple and yellow petals, moving in the wind.

  He looked up at the stained-glass windows where imploring figures blazed with colour: a knight in blue-white armour, a woman clutching a golden cup in both hands as if simultaneously praying and offering it to him. He walked past waving candle flames, the tombs of dead knights.

  In front of the altar was a lectern and a heavy Bible. He opened the Bible at the page indicated by a dark ribbon and found an envelope there, crushed flat by the weight of pages, his name written in ink. The sound of ripping paper reverberated around the cathedral as he tugged open the envelope. Inside, folded in three, were the documents Rachel had given to him, signed and fingerprinted. He flicked through the papers and looked inside the packet again, searching for a note of explanation. Nothing.

  The whine of hinges made him turn around. Three figures, Carver in the middle, were silhouetted as sunlight squeaked in through the open door. Walker moved into the shadows of the choir. The door swung shut. The three figures made their way towards him.

  Walker knew nothing about the layout of a cathedral: if there were other doors he had no idea where they might be. Instead of a door he found himself by the steps leading up to one of the cathedral’s twin towers. Glancing back at the figures moving methodically through the nave, he began climbing up the cold wide steps. The spiral of the stairs gradually tightened. He heard footsteps coming up behind him; he was being forced upwards, his options narrowing the higher he got.

  As the footsteps drew closer he waited at a sharp twist in the stairs, his hand grasping the spine from which the stairs spiralled out. A man’s head – Walker recognized him from the roof at Ascension – bobbed into sight. A second later his peering eyes looked up as Walker’s foot smashed into his throat. He tumbled down the steps and Walker charged after him, catching him again full in the face as he scrambled to his knees. He grabbed Walker’s ankle and they both crashed down more steps. He had ended up on top of Walker. His knees were pressing down on his chest, fingers digging into his throat. Shifting his weight, Walker succeeded in toppling him over and down the steps. Walker scrambled to his feet, clutched the rope hand-rail and kicked at him again. The man covered his head and rolled further down the stairs so that it seemed they would go on and on like this with Walker dribbling him back to the floor of the cathedral. He lashed out at him again and this time he became wedged in the curve of the stairs and lay still.

  He could hear more footsteps below. He stood for a moment, breathing heavily, unsure what to do, and then moved on up again. Blurs of purple and orange flashed before his eyes. He came to a small recess and a door which was locked shut by age. He kicked at it and the door tore loose from one of its hinges, the late sun blazing red through the gap. He kicked at the door again and it came completely free, a bird’s nest smashing apart as it crashed open, two eggs dropping through the air and smashing on the narrow ledge. He stooped through the door, surrounded by red-tinged sky, his feet slithering in shattered egg. He was on a narrow ledge that ran around the tower. A bird squawked and lunged at his head: the flap of filthy wings, the eye-jabbing beak. He swiped the bird away, thought of trying to move out around the ledge but realized it was pointless – they would guess exactly where he was. He moved back in and ran up a few more steps before crouching silently in the twist of the stairs.

  Seconds later he heard someone go into the recess from which he had just emerged. He tried to imagine the man’s movements, pictured him looking at the sun-filled doorway, guessing that Walker had moved out on to the ledge but hesitating for one, two, three seconds before stepping out after him.

  Walker, too, hesitated for crucial seconds and then stepped quietly down and back into the recess. There was no one there: he had moved out on to the ledge. Immediately, the figure appeared back in the doorway, black against the red sun. They saw each other at the same moment. Walker ran towards him. Crouching awkwardly, the silhouette braced himself and kicked out. A foot caught Walker on the side of the head but he shoved through the flailing arms and feet until they were both on the far side of the shattered door. He continued shoving at the figure who was pounding at him with one hand and grabbing on to the rusted hinge, trying to anchor himself, with the other. Walker wrenched a hand free and shoved him back towards the edge. He had lost his balance but was grabbing at Walker’s lapels, dragging him as he stumbled out on to the ledge. They were both about to go over. Walker pushed once more, shrugged his shoulders and pulled back so that his jacket came over his shoulders and off. His assailant stumbled back, one step, two, clutching the jacket as if a flapping bird were attacking him. The next second there was nothing there except the sun’s vacant redness.

  Walker moved up again. His legs burned with the strain of running, air scorched his throat. The steps led eventually to a locked door that he couldn’t budge. He moved back down until he came to a narrow paneless window. Leaning out he saw a ledge, just wide enough to enable him to move along to a decorative stone tendril running up to the roof of the tower.

  Hearing footsteps below he squeezed through the vaulted window and on to the ledge. From here the whole city appeared to have congregated around the cathedral. In the distance the foil flatness of the river glinted orange-pink. Gazing down, the sky seemed to have been stitched into the fabric of the building, into the narro
w windows and flying buttresses. Everything was vertical except the distant curve of the horizon. It was not just the fact of his being pursued: something inherent in the cathedral itself drove him upwards.

  The ledge was barely wide enough for his feet but there were sufficient handholds above his head to enable him to steady himself and move along slowly. He felt the wind plucking his clothes. A storm was blowing in over the city. He shuffled further and felt the ledge crumbling beneath his foot. Taking as much of his weight as possible on his hands he tentatively moved his foot, but the ledge was too worn to support him. It was impossible to go any further. He began to move back the way he had come.

  Still three feet from the window, he saw Carver. He had climbed halfway through the window. One arm was curled round the central pillar of the window, in the other he held a rusted crowbar. There was nothing Walker could do: in one direction Carver was barring his retreat, in the other the ledge was unable to support his weight.

  Carver was speaking but the wind snatched away his words. Then Walker heard him say, ‘So this is it. The choice is yours. Either you hand over the envelope – or I pick it out of whatever’s left of you when you hit the floor.’

  The sky was growing dark. Oil-spill clouds rolled over the city.

  ‘So which is it to be?’

  Every moment was like every other. Walker said nothing.

  ‘I almost forgot,’ Carver said. ‘I’ve got something for you. You left it in the hotel.’ He put down the crowbar and reached into his pocket. Tossed a silver chain towards Walker. It landed on the ledge, close to his feet, slithered out of sight.

  When he looked up again Carver had picked up the crowbar. He leaned out further from the window and swiped at Walker, catching him on the elbow. Sparks of pain shot up his arm. He inched his way along the ledge, digging his fingers into the old stones. He stretched his right foot a few inches further and felt the ledge start to flake away. This was it: he could not go even an inch further. Carver swiped at him again, smashing the knuckles of his left hand. His fingers slid from the wall, numbed by the blow. Still anchored by his right hand, he swung out in a short arc, left foot slipping clear of the ledge. Now he was facing out from the wall, scrabbling to find a purchase for his left heel, waiting for the life to return to his hand. He glimpsed the remains of the egg, smeared over the toe of his shoe like a smashed body seen from high above.