The urgency in Melissa’s voice cut into me and I knew I had to get away before she appeared. I’d been going to tell her not to open the suitcase until I left. Now it would make no difference.
I backed down the steps.
‘I’ve got to go, Ally. It was nice meeting you.’
She furrowed her eyebrows again, altogether unsure about what was going on now. In a small voice, she said, ‘My mom’s just coming.’
Stepping backwards, I said, ‘Will you remember my name?’
In an even smaller voice, she said, ‘Eddie.’
I smiled.
I could have stared at her for hours, but I had to break away and turn around. I got back to the car and climbed in. I started the engine.
Out of the corner of my eye, as I was pulling away, I was aware of a sudden movement at the door of the house. When I got to the first junction, and was about to turn left, I glanced into my rearview mirror. Melissa and Ally were standing – holding hands – in the middle of the street.
I made my way over towards Newburgh and then got back on to Interstate 87, heading north. I decided I would keep going until I got to Albany and then take it from there.
It was early afternoon as I arrived in the outskirts of the city. I drove around for a bit and then parked in a side street off Central Avenue. I sat in the car for twenty minutes, staring at the wheel.
But take
I got out and started walking, briskly, and not in any particular direction. As I moved, I replayed the scene with Ally over and over in my mind. Her resemblance to Melissa was uncanny and the whole experience had left me stunned – blinking at infinity, shuddering in sudden, unexpected spasms of benevolence and hope.
But as I moved, too, I could feel Gennady’s silver pillbox lodged in the pocket of my jeans. I knew that in a few hours’ time I would be opening the box, taking out the two tablets that were left in it, and swallowing them — a simple, banal sequence of movements that was all too finite and bereft of anything even approaching benevolence or hope.
I wandered on, aimlessly.
After about half an hour, I decided there wasn’t much point in going any further. It looked like it was going to start raining soon, and in any case the unfamiliarity of these busy commercial streets was becoming a little disconcerting.
I stopped and turned around to go back towards the car. But as I did so I found myself staring into the window of an electrical goods store in which there were fifteen TV sets banked up in three rows of five. On each screen, staring directly out at me, was the face of Donatella Alvarez. It was a headshot. She was leaning forward slightly, her eyes big and deep, her long, brown hair casting one side of her face into shadow.
I stood frozen on the sidewalk, people passing behind and around me. Then I stepped a little closer to the window and watched as the news report continued with exterior shots of Actium and the Clifden Hotel. I moved along the window and stepped inside the door so I’d be able to hear the report as well as see it — but the sound was quite low and with the traffic passing behind me all I could hear were fragments. Over a shot of Forty-eighth Street, I thought I caught something about ‘ … a statement issued this afternoon by Carl Van Loon’. Then, ‘ … a re-appraisal of the deal in the light of negative publicity’. And then — I was really straining to hear now — something like ‘ … share prices adversely affected’.
I looked around in exasperation.
There was another display of TV sets tuned to the same channel in an alcove at the back. I quickly walked the length of the store, past VCRs and DVDs and stereos and ghetto-blasters, and just as I got to the other end, they were cutting to a piece of footage from the MCL – Abraxas press conference, the one with the camera gliding across the top of the room from left to right. I waited, my stomach jumping, and then after a couple of seconds …
I listened to the report, but was barely able to take it in. Someone at Actium that night — probably the bald art critic with the salt-and-pepper beard — had seen the footage on the news, and it had jogged his memory. He’d recognized me as Thomas Cole, the guy who’d been sitting opposite Donatella Alvarez at the restaurant, and who’d later been speaking to her at the reception.
