So far, he had been looking away, but now he turned to her, with a new familiarity.
‘Do you remember the war in the Balkans?’
Vivien didn’t know that much about it. For a moment she felt embarrassed by her own ignorance. ‘More or less.’
‘At the end of the Nineties, Kosovo was an autonomous province of former Yugoslavia, with an Albanian Muslim majority, ruled with a rod of iron by a Serb minority that suppressed the separatists who wanted to join Albania.’
Vivien was fascinated by Russell’s voice, his ability to tell a story in such a way that he made the person listening part of it. It struck her that this might be his true talent. She was certain that, when this was all over, he would be able to tell a great story.
His great story.
‘It all started a long time ago. Hundreds of years ago, in fact. To the north of Pristina, the capital, there’s a place called Kosovo Polje. The name means ‘the plain of blackbirds’. At the end of the third century, there was a battle there between a Christian army composed of a Serbian and Bosnian coalition led by a man named Lazar Hrebeljanovic and an army of the Ottoman Empire. The Christians were wiped out. The Serbs in particular suffered enormous losses. After that defeat, a monument was built on the site that I think is unique in the world. It has a curse inscribed on it, wishing any Serb who doesn’t take up arms against the enemies of the Serbian people the loss of everything they possess, now and for ever. I’ve been there. Standing in front of that monument I realized one thing.’
He paused briefly, as if searching for the right words to sum up his idea.
‘Wars end. Hate lasts for ever.’
Vivien wondered if he was again thinking of the words of the letter and all they implied.
All my life, before and after the war, I worked in the construction industry …
‘Robert told me that in 1987 Slobodan Miloševic swore that no one would ever again lift a hand to a Serb. That declaration of intent turned him overnight into the leading light of the Serbian nationalist movement, and he became president. In 1989, exactly six hundred years after the battle of Kosovo Polje, he stood in front of that monument and made a warlike speech to more than five hundred thousand Serbs. That day, all the Albanians stayed home.’
Russell made a gesture, as if to hold time in his hand.
‘We arrived at the beginning of 1999 when the repression, and the fighting between the government and the Kosovo Liberation Army, had persuaded the international community to intervene. I saw things I’ll never forget. Things that Robert was so used to, he was quite impervious.’
Vivien wondered if Russell would ever be free of the ghost of Robert Wade.
‘One night, just before the NATO bombardment began, all the journalists and photographers were expelled. The reasons weren’t openly stated, but it was widely believed that they planned to carry out ethnic cleansing on a grand scale. The prefect of Pristina had summed it up by saying that he wished those who left a safe journey, but couldn’t guarantee anything to those who stayed. Some didn’t make that journey. And we were among them.’
Vivien ventured a question. ‘Are you sure Robert was really a brave man?’
‘I used to think so. Now I’m not so sure.’
Russell continued with his story, and there was both relief and strain in his voice.
‘Robert had a friend, Tahir Bajraktari, if I remember correctly, a schoolteacher who lived on the outskirts of Pristina with his wife Lindita. Robert gave him money and before leaving the city he hid us in his house, in a cellar that you reached through a trapdoor under a carpet, at the back of the building. We could hear the sounds of fighting outside. The Kosovo Liberation Army would attack, strike, and then vanish into thin air.’
Vivien had the impression that if she had looked deep in his eyes she would have seen the images he was reliving.
‘I was terrified. Robert did everything he could to calm me. He stayed with me for a while, but the call of what was happening outside was too strong to resist. A couple of days later, with machine-gun fire still echoing on the streets, he left our hiding place with his pockets full of rolls of film. That was the last time I saw him alive.’
Russell picked up the bottle of water and drank deeply from it.
‘When he didn’t come back I went out to look for him. Even now I don’t know how I summoned up the courage. I walked through the deserted streets. Pristina was a ghost town. The people had run away, leaving some of the houses with their doors open and the lights on. I reached the centre, and after a while found him. Robert was lying on the sidewalk, in a little tree-lined square, surrounded by other bodies. He had been hit in the chest by machine-gun fire, still clutching his camera in his hand. I grabbed the camera and ran back quickly to hide. I wept for Robert and I wept for myself, until I didn’t even have the strength to do that. Then the NATO bombardment began. I don’t know how long I hid there, listening to the bombs fall, without washing, rationing the food I had, until I realized that the voices coming from outside were speaking English. That was when I realized I was safe and came out.’
He drank again, greedily, as if the memory of his tears had dried every trace of liquid from his body.
‘When I managed to develop the photographs in Robert’s camera and took a look at them, I was struck by one shot in particular. I immediately realized that it was an exceptional photograph, the kind a photographer spends his whole life chasing after.’
Vivien remembered the image well. Everyone knew it. It had become one of the most famous photographs in the world.
It showed a man being hit by a bullet in the heart. He was wearing dark pants, but his chest and feet were bare. The impact of the bullets had made the blood spray out from him and at the same time had raised him off the ground. By some weird chance – the kind that could make a war reporter’s fortune – he had been caught by the camera with his arms outspread and one foot in front of the other, the body hanging in a position that recalled the figure of Christ on the cross. Even the man’s gaunt face, long hair and small beard fitted the traditional Christian iconography. The title of the photograph, The Second Passion, had come almost as a matter of course.
‘I got swept up in something I can’t explain. Envy, anger at Robert’s ability to capture the moment, ambition. Greed, maybe. I showed the photograph to the New York Times and told them I’d taken it. The rest you know. I won a Pulitzer Prize with that photograph. Unfortunately, the brother of the dead man had seen Robert taking it and told the newspapers. That’s how everyone found out the photograph wasn’t mine.’
He paused, before coming to a conclusion that had cost him ten years of his life.
‘And if I have to be honest, I’m not at all sure I was sorry.’
Vivien had instinctively placed a hand on Russell’s arm. When she realized, she pulled it away, hoping he hadn’t noticed.
‘What did you do after that?’
‘I survived by accepting any work I could find. Fashion articles, technical photographs, even weddings. Mostly I drew on my family’s money a few too many times.’
Vivien was searching for the right words to lift the burden of that confession from his shoulders, but just then her cellphone rang. She saw the name on the display: Bellew.
She took the call. ‘Hello, Alan.’
‘A real stroke of luck. I called the head of the 70th and asked him to run a check. When I asked him if he could put every man available on it, he thought I was crazy.’
‘I can imagine. Did they find anything?’
‘The woman’s name is Carmen Montesa. When she moved, she wisely went to the police and told them she was moving. We checked out the address. It’s in Queens, and we also have an active phone number registered to her.’
‘Alan, you’re quite a man.’
‘The first woman who told me that was the midwife who brought me into the world. Join the line. Keep up the good work, and stay in touch.’
Vivien stood up and Russell did th
e same. He had realized that the break was over and it was time to move.
‘Anything new?’
‘Let’s hope so. For now we have the woman. Let’s take it from there.’
She wiped her mouth, threw the paper napkin on the table and headed for the car. Russell cast a melancholy glance at the food he had barely touched. Then he followed Vivien, leaving behind him a story that, however hard he tried, he suspected would never end.
CHAPTER 22
Carmen Montesa loved numbers.
She had always loved them, since she was a little girl. At elementary school she was the best in her class. Working with numbers gave her a feeling of order, of peace. She liked putting them in little squares on the paper, each little graphic sign representing a quantity, placed side by side or in a column, all in her childish but precise handwriting. And, unlike many of her school friends, she found it a very creative subject. In her little girl’s mind, she had even assigned colours to numbers. Four was yellow and five was blue. Three was green and nine was brown. Zero was a clear, immaculate white.
Even now, sitting in her old leather armchair, she had a Sudoku magazine lying on her lap. Unfortunately not much had remained of those girlish fantasies. Numbers had become black marks on white paper in a periodical, nothing more. Over time, the colours had disappeared and she had discovered that, applied to the lives of people, zero wasn’t a nice shade.
She would have liked a different life. She would have liked to study, go to college, choose a subject connected with numbers that she could then make her career. Circumstances had decided otherwise.
In a movie she had seen once, one of the characters had said that life is very difficult in New York if you’re Mexican and poor. When she had heard that, she had agreed inside. Compared with most girls in her situation, she’d had one advantage: her beauty. And that had helped her a lot. She hadn’t had to compromise herself, although over the years she’d had to tolerate a few too many straying hands, a few too many bodies rubbing up against hers. There was just the one occasion when, to make sure of a place at nursing school, she had given the director a blow job. When she had seen her fellow students and noticed how many of them were pretty, she’d realized she hadn’t been the only one to take that particular entrance test.
Then Mitch had come on the scene.
She moved aside the magazine when she realized that a tear had fallen onto the Sudoku diagram. The number she had just written, the five, was now surrounded by a bluish halo, making it too round and too similar to zero.
It isn’t possible – after all these years I’m still crying …
Calling herself a fool, she put the magazine down on the low table beside her. But she let the tears come, and with them the memories. They were all she had left of a happy time, maybe the one true bright spot in her existence. From the moment she’d met him, Mitch had changed her life in every way.
There was before, and there was after.
With him she had found true love, discovered what love could be and do. He had given her the greatest gift in the world: he had made her feel loved and desired and a woman and a mother. All the things he had taken back from her when, from one day to the next, he had vanished into thin air, leaving her alone with a small son to raise. Carmen’s mother had always hated him. When it was clear that her son-in-law wouldn’t be coming back, she hadn’t made any overt comment, but the words I told you so were written all over her face. Carmen had tolerated her veiled allusions because she needed her mother to look after the child when she was at work, but she had never agreed to go back to her parents’ home. She would spend her evenings in her – their – apartment with Nick, who was the spitting image of his father, reading stories and watching cartoons and leafing through biker magazines.
Then, one day, she had met Elias. He was a Chicano like her, an OK guy, who worked as a cook in a restaurant in the East Village. They had gone out together for a while, just as friends. Elias knew her situation – he was a gentle, respectful man, and it was obvious from a mile away that he was in love with her. But he had never asked her for anything, had never even tried to touch her.
She felt comfortable with him and they talked a lot. Nick liked him. She didn’t love him, but when he had suggested they live together, after much hesitation she had agreed. They had obtained a mortgage and bought a little house in a working-class area of Queens that Elias had insisted on putting in her name.
Carmen smiled through her tears at the memory of that tender, innocent man.
Poor Elias. They had made love for the first time in their house. He was gentle and shy and inexperienced, and she’d had to take him by the hand like a child and show him, step by step, how to please her. A month later she had discovered she was pregnant, and exactly nine months after their first night together Allison was born.
So then she had a family. A son, a daughter and a partner who loved her, all sitting together at the same table. She wasn’t with the man she secretly wished was still there, and this wasn’t the wildly happy life she’d known with Mitch. A quiet life was what it was, the kind that, when you had it and were content with it, made you realize you were starting to get old.
Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be her destiny to keep hold of a man.
Elias had gone, too, carried away by an acute form of leukaemia that had consumed him in a short time. She still remembered the grim expression on the face of Dr Myra Collins, an internist at the hospital where she was working then, who had taken her aside and explained what the results of the first tests meant. To Carmen’s ears, those clear, courteous words had already sounded like words of condolence.
And once again, she had been left alone. She had decided that was how she was going to live her life from now on. Alone with her children, just the three of them. Nick was a gentle, lovable boy and Allison a girl with a very strong character. Then one day Nick had confessed to her that he was gay. Carmen had already guessed that, but had been waiting for him to bring up the subject. As far as she was concerned, it changed nothing. Nick was and would always be her son. She considered herself a fairly intelligent woman and too much of a loving mother to allow a sexual preference to jeopardize the respect she had for him as a person. He had spent one whole afternoon talking about the humiliations he had suffered and the torments he had gone through before coming to terms with what he was, in a community where machismo was a way of life for most young men. Then he had told her that he and his companion would be going to live in the West Village.
Carmen stood up, went to the kitchen, took a sheet of paper from the roll on the worktop, and wiped her eyes. Now that she came to think of it, the full line spoken by the boy in that movie was that it isn’t easy to live in New York if you’re poor, Mexican, and gay.
She opened the refrigerator and poured herself a glass of apple juice.
Enough crying, she told herself.
She had shed sufficient tears in her life. Although Nick’s life hadn’t been easy at first, he was an assistant in a boutique in SoHo now, he was in love and he was happy. She, too, had a good job, she didn’t have too many money worries and for years she’d had a discreet relationship – no strings attached – with her boss, Dr Bronson. It could have been thought an acceptable life. True, Allison had turned from a lively child into a difficult teenager. Every now and again, without warning, she would stay out all night. Carmen knew she was with her boyfriend when he had his parents’ house to himself. Still, she would have preferred to be told when that happened. She was sure that, once they’d got past the inevitable generational conflicts, their relationship would get better with time. Over the years, Carmen had learned to understand people but, like everyone, she’d never really learned to understand herself or those she was emotionally involved with. Sometimes, she suspected that all her certainties about Allison were just self-delusion.
She was about to go back to her armchair and her Sudoku when the doorbell rang. She wondered who it could be. Her few friends rarely visited he
r without phoning first. And anyway, at this hour of the day they were all at work. She left the kitchen and walked down the corridor to the front door.
Framed in the glass-fronted door, visible through the blind, were the silhouettes of two people.
When she opened the door she found herself facing a determined-looking young woman, the kind who are always too busy to remember they’re also beautiful, and a tall man of about thirty-five, with dark hair, intense black eyes and two days’ growth of beard that gave him an engagingly bohemian look. If she were still young, Carmen thought, she’d have found the girl attractive enough to be considered a rival and the man sexy enough to be considered a quarry. But these were the foolish illusions of memory, a game she played with herself every time she met new people, whether young or old, but would never follow through on. At her age, she had no desire to play the game, because life had taught her how it was going to end in most cases. All things considered, it boiled down to numbers, yet again.
‘Mrs Carmen Montesa?’
‘Yes.’
The young woman held up her shield. ‘My name’s Vivien Light. I’m a detective with the 13th Precinct in Manhattan.’ She gave her time to check her photograph, then indicated the man beside her. ‘This is Russell Wade, my partner.’
Carmen felt a pang of anxiety. Her heart started beating faster, as always happened to her when she felt emotional. ‘What’s the matter? Is it Allison? Has something happened to my daughter?’
‘No, don’t worry. I just need to have a word with you.’
The relief was like balm to the soul. She was too excitable, she knew. She couldn’t help it – it was her nature. At work she was admirably cool and efficient, but when she went back to being a woman and mother she became vulnerable again.
‘All right,’ she said, relaxed now.
The young woman smiled and pointed inside the house. ‘I’m afraid this is going to take a while. Can we come in?’
Carmen stood aside, an apologetic expression on her face. ‘I’m sorry. I was so relieved, I forgot my manners. Of course you can come in.’