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  A sign said MERIDIAN 120 MILES. The highway glistened.

  Meridian, as the thickness of the phone book had suggested, was a big city. He drove downtown and parked the car beneath the track of the Elevated Train. It was a perfect spot to leave the car: abandoned vehicles were strewn all around, many already stripped down to rusty frames as if picked clean by vultures. Walking away he looked into the back of a burnt-out station wagon and noticed the remains of a road atlas: a core of red highways, smoke-grimed, becoming charred, leading to ashes.

  He bought coffee and a street plan. Rampart Street was eight stops along the line but after so long in the car he preferred to walk. He followed the El, walking beneath the giant concrete legs that strode through the city. The sun streamed through the track, cross-hatching the ground with shadows. Patches of sky blazed through the angles of wood and metal. Every ten minutes a train thundered overhead, obliterating everything. In his childhood the future had been depicted in terms of white capsules zipping noiselessly along rails suspended over the efficient life of a gleaming city. What had actually resulted was graffiti-mottled trains rattling over a landscape of rusting vehicles that no one wanted.

  Rampart was a dilapidated street running parallel to the El, a couple of blocks to the south, number seventeen a faded one-storey place. A green-and-yellow FOR RENT sign added colour. He tried the bell and waited. A bird, bright as a goldfish, was perched on the phone line. Walker clambered over a fence and made his way round the back. Wooden steps led up to a door which opened when he tried it. He looked around and moved inside, shutting the door behind him, eyes adjusting. A tap dripping. He walked through the kitchen and into the hallway. Mail was piled up by the front door, junk mostly, a couple of letters and – he recognized the handwriting instantly – a card from Malory. Two lines: ‘Hope this reaches you before you move. Thanks for everything.’ Unsigned, postmarked Iberia, the date too smudged to read.

  There was nothing in any of the ground-floor rooms. Upstairs, the bathroom cabinet was empty except for a yellow beaker. His face in the mirror was pimpled with mould. There were two bedrooms, one with a bare double, the other with a single and an old desk. When he opened a closet metal hangers jangled briefly. A tingle of déjà vu. He shut the door and opened it again, hoping he could define the sensation more exactly but this time there was nothing.

  The desk drawers smelled of graphite. Paper-clips, a broken pencil, blank pages of paper. He sat on the bed, forearms resting on his legs, hands dangling between his knees, one foot tapping out the pulse of a thought. He lowered his head, ran his fingers through his hair. As he did so he noticed, behind his feet, almost under the bed, a micro-cassette case. There was a tape inside but, except for the manufacturer’s label, no indication as to what was on it. He pocketed the tape and peered beneath the bed on his hands and knees. The only thing there was a dusty magazine open at an article about the cathedral in Nemesis, a photo of a stained-glass window.

  He went through the house again, unable to form any idea of what Malory might have been doing here. Tightened the tap as hard as he could, stopping the drip. Then let himself out of the back door, locking it behind him.

  Out on the street a dog padded by. Its tail, balls and ears had all been clipped off, giving it the wicked, harmless look of a medieval gargoyle. From a pay-phone on the corner Walker called the number of the realtors on the sign. Thinking he was considering renting the place – ‘the property’ – they were very friendly until he asked if they had any information about the previous tenant. They lost interest immediately and Walker had to move quickly to hang up before they did.

  Near the El station he stood indecisively in the sunshine. Hitched his bag over his shoulder and said, quietly, to himself, ‘So . . . What shall I do?’

  Cars glinted past. What could he do?

  He bought a ticket and walked up to the platform as the El train pulled in. It rattled past crumbling verandas, painted stoops, the open windows of kitchens and bedrooms. Water towers were visible in the middle distance. On old walls, the faded ghosts of advertisements.

  The mainline train to Iberia didn’t leave for an hour. He walked a couple of blocks from the station and saw a massive crane looming over the city. In a cut-price electronics store he bought a micro-cassette recorder. Stepping outside he looked up and saw the crane arm swinging round – though it took him several seconds to express it in these terms for he experienced the movement of the crane as a sensation rather than a perception. In that burst of panic he felt the air reeling – centrifugal, sickening – as if the crane were stationary and the street spinning around it, like a fairground ride or a record on a turntable. Then the correct relationship of stability and motion re-established itself, with the crane arm sweeping above the street. He tried to re-evoke the earlier sensation but now reason was firmly entrenched again and would not be caught off balance by something it knew to be an illusion. The experience disconcerted him all the same. If things could be sent reeling so easily, if momentarily, it would take only a slightly more elaborate arrangement of effects to throw the world more radically out of kilter.

  Back at the station he tried the tape he had found earlier. He listened for a few minutes, turning the volume up and then fast-forwarded to a new section of the tape and listened again. Nothing. He fast-forwarded again, pressed Play and listened to the hiss of the tape moving. He fast-forwarded to the end, turned the tape over and listened again. The same. Blank, the tape was blank. Shit.

  Still with time to kill, he called Rachel. When she answered he could hear music playing in the background, a cello or double bass.

  ‘Walker! I’ve been hoping you would call,’ she shouted. ‘Hang on, let me turn the music down.’

  The music stopped and she came back a few moments later. ‘That’s better. Now I can hear you.’

  ‘What was it, the music?’

  ‘A Bach cello suite. You know it?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘It’s my favourite piece of music. I’ll play it for you when you come back.’

  ‘You can play the cello?’

  ‘I can play the record. We’ll listen to it together.’

  Her words triggered a memory that lay far in the future, when they were old and wood-smoke music drifted through the rooms of a home.

  ‘Meanwhile,’ said Rachel.

  ‘Meanwhile, any news?’

  ‘People have been asking for you.’

  ‘A guy called Carver?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever come across a man called Carver?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. Why? Should I have done?’

  ‘No, it’s – it doesn’t matter. What about the people who called round, did they give any names?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Any idea who they were? Trackers? Finders?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Did you tell them anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about Joanne Malory?’

  ‘Joanne? She’s Alex’s sister but he hadn’t seen her in ten years. He had no contact with his family. She could have been dead for all Alex knew. Why, have you found her?’

  ‘No, not really . . .’ Walker paused and heard Rachel say, ‘There is something though. A photo of Alex arrived in the post.’

  ‘In the post?’

  ‘Yes. This morning.’

  ‘Where from?’

  ‘It could be from anywhere. I mean it’s impossible to say. You know sometimes a letter arrives without being franked? There’s a stamp on it but no postmark.’

  ‘What about the photo?’

  ‘It’s strange. Blurred, very grainy. It looks like it’s been blown up from a larger photo.’

  ‘Any sign of where it was taken? Or when?’

  ‘None, I’m afraid, But you want to see it, yes?’

  ‘Yes but . . . I’ll have to call again. I’ll try and find a place you can cable i
t to. I’m going to –’ He stopped himself abruptly.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘Listen, I’ll call you again, yeah?’

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yes. Anyway, I’ve got to go.’

  ‘Be careful.’

  ‘You too.’

  They waited for each other to say goodbye and then hung up.

  It was a long, slow journey to Iberia. As the grimy landscape slipped past, Walker tried to take stock of what was happening. He was confused by Malory’s apparently random movements across the country. Unless he was fleeing from someone or searching for something they made no sense – and even then they made little. And the trail ahead was fainter than ever. At first he had had addresses, then a phone number, now only a postmark. What next? The rhythm of the train was making him sleepy. He nodded off and woke painfully twenty minutes later, his head lolling from the edge of the seat like a dog’s tongue. Across the aisle a woman had spread a blanket and a pack of Tarot cards over her lap. As far as Walker could work out she was playing a kind of patience. The nearest card to Walker, the one that caught his eye, showed a tower struck by yellow arrows of lightning. Men and masonry tumbling to the ground. Realizing that he was looking, the woman smiled at him and said, ‘It passes the time.’

  Walker smiled back. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat, looked through his reflection at the nothing-happening landscape.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In Iberia he booked in at the hotel recommended by a taxidriver. He called Rachel, gave her the hotel’s cable number and half an hour later held a copy of the photo in his hands. It was grainy, blurred and in transmission the image had deteriorated still further. As she had said, it was obviously an enlarged segment of a larger picture and from the few background blurs it was impossible to gain any clue as to when or where it was taken. It showed Malory in three-quarter profile: fortyish, short hair, the down-curving mouth of a man who had to make an effort to smile. Although more or less as Rachel had described him, Walker’s initial reaction was one of surprise: he had not pictured Malory like this, this was not the impression he had built up. Almost immediately, though, his impressions began rearranging themselves in accordance with the image in his hand and the harder he tried to focus on this discrepancy between what he had been led to believe – or what he had come to expect – and what the photo showed, the more difficult it became to disentangle what he had imagined from what was revealed.

  Even with the photo he was no better off than before in terms of what to do next. Malory could be anywhere for all he knew – another city, another country. He had nothing to go on. Hunting out the woman with the Tarot cards to see if she could give him a few leads seemed as good an idea as any. Or flip through the phone book for a spiritualist who could offer guidance from beyond the grave.

  Absurd though they were, these thoughts marked a turning-point – the beginning of a turning-point – in his search for Malory. From then on the nature of the search began subtly to change and he came to rely less on external clues than on his intuitive grasp of what Malory might have done in similar circumstances. He only understood this later. At the time he simply remembered the taxi-driver saying, ‘All tourists stay there,’ when recommending the hotel. Probably this meant the taxi company had a deal with the place and received a percentage on everyone sent there. There was only one train a day from Meridian; no buses. So if Malory had taken the train he would have arrived at the same time of day as Walker and may have been referred to the same hotel. He went down to reception but they had no record of past guests and too many people passed by for them to recognize Malory’s picture. Walker returned to his room and thought about what Malory would have done if he had been here. Probably he would have lain around like Walker was doing now, turning the TV on and off, getting hungry. Gone out to get a bite to eat, found a bar.

  Walker looked out of the window. Dark, beginning to rain. He pulled on his jacket, folded the photo of Malory into his pocket and went out in search of a bar. Outside the hotel it was deserted. Across the way was another street which, from the quantity of neon shimmering through the rain, looked more hopeful. The neon, it turned out, was in the window of a shoe repairer’s, a pharmacy and a travel agency. Walker continued to the end and turned into a street crowded with people and cars. Two blocks along was a subway station and a man selling umbrellas. Feeling rain drip down his neck, Walker splashed across the road and bought one, asked if there was a bar nearby – a place where he could get a drink, something to eat. The umbrella-seller directed him to Finelli’s, a couple of blocks away.

  Walker took a seat at the bar and ordered a beer, catching glimpses of himself in the mirror behind tiers of spirits. After another beer he ordered a burger and by the time that arrived he was ready for more beer. A sport he had never seen before was on TV. Mainly it involved fouling members of the opposite team and trudging off to the dugouts at the edge of the arena. As far as he could make out the game was divided not into halves or even quarters but into sixteenths and the score – unless he had misunderstood – was 540 to 665.

  Walker turned to the guy next to him and asked about the game. He was thick-set, missing a couple of teeth and wearing a check work shirt, happy to converse in the peculiar idiom of booze – telling and never asking. This was fine by Walker, especially when it turned out that he came to this bar every night after work, regular as clockwork. Hour of overtime and in here by eight o’clock five nights a week.

  ‘What about the other nights?’

  ‘Those nights I get here a little earlier,’ he laughed, coughing. They shook hands; the guy told him his name was Branch.

  ‘Ever been tempted to trace your roots?’ asked Walker. His new drinking companion didn’t bother laughing. Walker bought Branch a beer, still sniggering quietly at his joke. Branch showed no sign of buying him one back so Walker ordered a couple more and asked if he happened to remember speaking to a friend of his who’d come here a couple of months back when he was in town. The friend, as a matter of fact, who’d recommended this bar to him, he said, and went on to describe Malory.

  Branch stopped chewing and siphoned off half his beer. Bar conversations were like this: sometimes it was difficult to tell if the person you were talking to was deep in thought or sinking into a stupor.

  ‘Yeah. Maybe I do recall him.’

  ‘Actually, I might even have a picture of him. Yeah, here you go. I’ve been carrying this picture around for months and never quite threw it away.’

  Branch held the paper like he was gripping a fellow by the lapels.

  ‘About two months ago, was it?’

  ‘Exactly. To the day practically.’

  ‘Yeah, I remember him.’ He handed back the photo. ‘We spoke a while.’

  ‘What about – I mean, do you happen to remember what you spoke of?’

  ‘Pretty much what everybody talks about.’

  ‘Did he – I don’t suppose he mentioned where he was heading to, did he?’

  ‘Matter of fact he did – if it’s the fellow I’m thinking of. Or leastways he asked if I knew when the bus to Usfret left.’

  ‘And you told him?’

  ‘I told him there was only one every three days and he’d missed that. Told him the best thing he could do was take the bus to Friendship and get a bus from there.’

  ‘Usfret, right. He must have been on the way to see Joanne, his sister.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about that.’

  ‘Did he say he was going to get the bus like you said?’

  ‘Didn’t say but he certainly seemed grateful for the information.’ ‘

  And did he say how long he was going to stay for or where he might go after that?’ Walker was conscious that he was overplaying his hand, pushing too hard.

  ‘How come you’re so interested in him?’

  ‘Oh, I just wanted to catch up with him.’

  ‘Folks say that, it generally means he owes them money. Either that or they want to kill hi
m.’

  Walker laughed unconvincingly. ‘Not me.’

  ‘You a cop?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tracker, huh?’

  ‘No, I’m just a friend. A friend on his way to Friendship,’ said Walker: his second joke of the evening.

  ‘Shit,’ said Branch, not in anger or derision, just to bring this phase of the conversation to an end. Walker glanced up at the television: the score was up into four figures now. He bought Branch a final beer and hurried back to his hotel.

  The desk clerk looked patiently through the bus timetables while Walker breathed beer fumes over him. Unlike Malory, Walker was lucky with the buses – one left straight for Usfret the next morning. He could even book a ticket right there, at the hotel. Walker said yes straightaway, then, when the ticket was half-written, told the clerk to hold on for a while, he had just remembered a couple of things he might have to do.

  ‘No problem,’ said the desk clerk, tearing the ticket wearily in two.

  Back in his room Walker tried drunkenly to organize his thoughts, lurching from one possibility to the next. Getting the express meant that he would gain some time on Malory since obviously, assuming the guy in the bar was right, he had simply gone to Friendship to get the bus to Usfret. Looked at like that there was no point in going to Friendship. But . . . But if from now on there were going to be fewer and fewer external clues to go on, then he was going to have to rely more on thinking himself into Malory’s shoes. In that case the more exactly he managed to repeat Malory’s moves the easier it would be to duplicate the choices he had made. Tracking Malory was not going to be like a game of snakes and ladders where he could leap forward five places. He could do that but something he came across in those five missed spaces might prove more important than the one he landed on.

  He phoned down to reception, told them to book him a ticket to Friendship. As he was getting ready for bed, sorting through his bag for his toothbrush, he came across the dictaphone and tossed it on to the bed. Lying there a few minutes later, he switched on the tape. Nothing. He flipped the tape over and fast-forwarded, almost to the end, in case there was a brief message tucked into the last minute of the tape. He turned down the volume so that the hiss was less pronounced and let it play noiselessly. Or not quite noiselessly . . . He switched off the machine, ejected the tape and inserted the blank cassette that had come with the machine. Pressed Play. He listened for a few moments, ejected that tape and played the other one. Yes, there was nothing to hear but there was a distinct difference in the quality of the silence. It was not a blank tape but a recording in which there was nothing to hear, a recording of silence. He listened intensely and realized that the tape was not as devoid of noise as he had first thought. Certain noises were conspicuous by their absence: it had not been made in the countryside – there was no sound of birds, no hedgerow rustle. Fiddling with the bass and treble controls to minimize hiss but retain clarity of sound, he strained his ears to penetrate the ambient silence and hunt out the faintest hint of other sounds. It was strange and difficult, sitting there, trying to shut out the silence of the room in order to decipher the silence of the tape. Doubly difficult since straining his ears like this made him aware of the obtrusive sounds that composed the silence around him. The machine had come with a small set of headphones and with these he was able to cocoon himself inside the silence of the tape. He could hear a faint rattle, like blinds shifting in a breeze, a bell chiming in the distance, the swish and murmur of traffic, the gurgle of pipes, maybe rain.