Sullivan rose from the chair and watched her as she left, even walked to the window and waited for her to appear in the street. She walked without hesitation, her manner purposeful and direct, and he found himself thanking this David Quinn for whatever he had done. Annie seemed so much more certain about what she wanted, and this – however things turned out with David – had to be a good thing.
Sullivan shook his head, sighed deeply, and walked back to the kitchen to find the envelope.
From the junction Annie took a cab, directing the driver towards St Nicholas and 129th. From the back seat she watched the world through the window, watched the people on the sidewalk, people entering and leaving the stores and malls and coffee shops. She watched their faces when the cab pulled to a halt at the lights, watched how they crossed the road, each of them seemingly lost within their own private world, each in some small way a reflection of herself. Here were the lost and confused, the haunted and broken, the loveless, the pained, the angry and exhausted. Here were the black and the white and every shade of grey between. The beginnings and the ends of humanity; the circle. Life was so often a lie, and yet sometimes so true it hurt, and each and every one of these people was perhaps looking for the same thing as herself. It possessed no name, no face, no voice and no identity. It just was. It was too heavy to carry, and yet too light to grasp. It could not be defined and yet we knew so well when we possessed it, and so bitterly when we didn’t.
The cab slowed against the curb. Annie paid the driver and let herself out. She walked three blocks before she reached a delicatessen on the corner, and turning left she felt sure she was headed in the right direction.
She tried three buildings before she recognized the frontage, the way the steps ran up through a small covered entranceway,
and walking up those steps she felt the tension, the unbearable tension of wanting David to be there at the same time as hoping that she had the wrong building, or that he was out. She hesitated in the lower hallway, looking up the stairwell towards the first floor, and just as she placed her foot on the first riser she turned, startled, as a door opened behind her.
‘I can help you?’
A man faced her, an old man, his skin sallow and dry like parchment, his hands bunches of knuckles twisted together.
‘Hello,’ Annie said. ‘I’m looking for someone.’
‘Someone who has a name?’ the old man asked.
‘Quinn, David Quinn.’
The old man shook his head. ‘No Quinn here miss. You have the wrong address perhaps?’
Annie frowned. ‘I’m sure this is the right building.’
‘No David Quinn here,’ the old man repeated. ‘Had someone here but he gone now … up there, first floor.’
Annie turned and looked up the stairs. An indescribable sensation invaded her chest.
‘You want to rent apartment?’ the old man asked. ‘You wanna see apartment … good apartment, nice light, big windows eh?’
Annie was nodding in the affirmative. She wanted to see, wanted to know that this was the wrong building, that somehow she’d lost her bearings and was two blocks east or west, or David’s building was on a street that ran parallel to this one. That had to be it. It
had
to be.
The old man went up first, painfully slow, one foot on the riser, the other joining it, and then the second riser, the third, the fourth, all the while Annie walking behind him like a funeral procession of two.
Reaching the first floor the old man turned right and started down the corridor. From his belt he took a large bunch of keys, and without asking, without even turning to check that Annie was behind him, he opened the door, threw it wide and stepped back.
‘See?’ he said, smiling wide. ‘Big windows, great light.’
Annie went through the doorway in slow-motion, the light from the room beating against her skin, the air thick, unbreathable almost, and after two or three steps, her eyes scanning the interior, she knew. She just
knew
.
‘When did he leave?’ she asked the old man.
The old man smiled, shrugged his shoulders. ‘I think two, three days maybe … I wasn’t here. My son you know, he takes care of everything. He went to the market, left me the keys. Good light huh?’
Annie nodded. ‘Good light, yes.’
Had there been any question in her mind it would have been swept clean away by the sight of the polythene bag lying on the bare hardwood floor beneath the window.
A bag with books inside. Three books. Thirteen dollars and keep the change.
Sixty lives will connect with what’s in this bag … makes you think huh?
She walked towards it, leaned down to look inside. There, wrapped in the same paper in which she’d given it to him, was
Breathing Space
. David hadn’t even bothered to look inside, hadn’t even bothered to open the wrapping.
Annie snatched the book from the polythene bag and stuffed it into her purse. From the moment she’d stood at the door of her apartment that morning and given it to David, except for a fleeting moment in the hospital, she hadn’t thought about it. The most important thing her father had left for her and she’d forgotten about it. Despite its importance, finding it seemed now her consolation prize.
She turned abruptly, stared for a moment at the old man, and then she opened her mouth. ‘Your son? Where is he?’
‘At the market.’
‘The man who was here … did he say where he was going?’
‘Aaach, he’s a crazy man. Left like he was headed for a fire. Supposed to give a month’s notice or he lose a thousand dollars … well, he lost his thousand dollars. Stayed here two,
maybe three weeks and he lost a thousand dollars. Crazy people in this world eh?’
‘Two or three weeks?’ Annie asked. ‘He was here two or three weeks?’
The old man nodded, grinned, showed Annie the spaces between his small, child-size teeth. ‘So you want this apartment with the good light?’
Annie heard the question but it didn’t register. She was across the room and out the door before the old man had a chance to say another word. He raised his hand as if to catch her attention, but Annie was running down the stairs two steps at a time, her heart going faster than she could, and when she reached the front door and burst out into the street she felt as if something dreadful had been chasing her.
‘Aaach, crazy people in this world,’ the old man called after her, but his voice was like something from someone else’s life.
Sullivan slowly turned the last page over.
He sat quietly at the kitchen table for some time.
‘Something,’ he said to himself. ‘Something …’
He rose slowly from the chair, put the pages into a neat pile, slipped them back into the envelope, and then he left the kitchen and walked across Annie’s front room.
He paused at the door, looked around the room he was so familiar with, a room where he’d shared a thousand days and nights with this woman, a woman who had reached him more deeply than anyone he’d ever known. He closed his eyes for a moment. There was something about those pages, sitting innocuously inside their brown envelope on the kitchen counter.
He shook his head slowly, opened his eyes, and crossed the landing to his own apartment.
He wanted a drink. God, how he wanted a drink. But he’d made a deal, and Annie was even now fighting to keep her half of the bargain.
If this David Quinn hurt her …
Sullivan stood for a moment, his right hand rubbing his left forearm, and then he walked across the room and switched on his computer.
‘Gone,’ Annie said as she came through Sullivan’s apartment door.
Sullivan turned from where he was staring intently at the computer screen. ‘What has?’
‘David,’ she said. ‘The apartment is empty. Left behind nothing but the books I sold him the first day we met. And a book I lent him … Christ, I can’t bear to think how I would have felt if he’d taken that. And there was an old man there, said David had been gone two or three days …’
‘But he did say David was there?’ Sullivan asked.
Annie crossed the room to where Sullivan sat. She balanced herself on the arm of the couch. ‘Said someone was there, but the name David Quinn meant nothing to him, and whoever the hell it was he was there for a couple of weeks, that was all, and he left in a hurry and lost a thousand dollars deposit.’
‘Private or agency?’ Sullivan asked.
‘What?’
‘The building where he had the apartment?’
‘The old man said his son took care of things … why?’
‘Means it was more than likely private. With private accommodation there aren’t references and credit checks, there’s just money. Have enough money you can be the Son of Sam and move into a penthouse suite on Broadway.’
‘And what’s this?’ Annie said, indicating the computer screen.
‘The last of the insurance companies that hold offices here and in Boston. I’ve gone through Mutual Consolidated, Trans-Oceanic, Atlantic Cargo Insurance, Providence Shipping
Lines … God knows how many. Pulled up their employee listings and there’s only one David Quinn amongst the lot of them.’
‘And?’ Annie said, shifting closer towards Sullivan.
‘And that David Quinn is a major shareholder in Trans-Oceanic, fifty-three years old, lives in Baltimore.’
‘Which means?’
Sullivan shook his head. ‘There must be hundreds of insurance companies Annie, but as far as those who run offices out of New York and Boston your man is not employed in any of them.’
Annie frowned, anxiety entering her myriad other thoughts. ‘So who the hell is he?’
‘More to the point, who the hell is Robert Franklin Forrester?’
‘Forrester … what the hell has this got to do with Forrester?’
‘Too many coincidences,’ Sullivan said, ‘and it wasn’t until I read the last chapter you have in there that I started to think about it.’
‘Think about what?’
‘This Harry Rose and his friend Johnnie Redbird.’
Annie shook her head. ‘I’m not getting it.’
‘Maybe there’s nothing to get,’ Sullivan said. ‘Maybe I’m reading something into this that isn’t there, but there’s too many things that seem too close –’
‘What the hell are you talking about Jack? Too close to what?’
Sullivan looked away towards the window. He shook his head. ‘I don’t –’
‘Too close to what Jack?’
Sullivan turned and looked directly at Annie O’Neill. ‘I don’t know Annie …’
‘For Christ’s sake Jack, stop saying you don’t know. What are you getting at?’
‘The way it all fits together, or at least
could
fit together if you look at it from a different viewpoint.’
Annie opened her mouth to say something, then turned and sat on the couch. ‘Say what you mean to say Jack Sullivan.’
Sullivan smiled, a kind of embarrassment in his expression. ‘Forget it Annie … just forget it. It’s just that I read this stuff and it really got me thinking.’
‘Well you can stop thinking about that and start thinking about how the hell we’re gonna find David.’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’ Annie echoed. ‘Well, maybe it doesn’t matter a fuck to you Jack Sullivan, but it happens to matter a great deal to me. He’s more than likely taken an apartment under an assumed name, has swept through here like Hurricane Asshole, taken me for a complete schmuck, and now has the sheer fucking nerve to walk out on me and thinks I’m gonna forget about it. I want to find him just to slap him upside the head Jack, that much at least.’
‘Good enough. So where d’ you suggest we start?’
‘What’s with the
we
white man?’ Annie said. ‘You’re the goddamned journalist, the investigative reporter … you shouldn’t have to even ask where we start.’
‘The apartment block … I’ll go there, speak to the old guy’s son, see if he has any idea where he came from, where he might have gone when he left. I’ll pick up the books he bought as well –’
Annie frowned. ‘The books? What the hell d’you need those for?’
Sullivan held up his hand. ‘He’ll have touched them, and there’ll be prints.’
Annie shook her head. ‘Along with about three thousand others don’tcha think?’
Sullivan frowned, shook his head. ‘You’re right, screw the books. Besides I don’t know anyone who could fingerprint them and check them against records anyway.’
‘Christ Jack, you’re a fucking amateur at this aren’t you?’
‘Thank you very much Miss O’Neill. You have a better idea?’
Annie cast her mind back to all the times she’d been with David. She thought of the trip to Boston, how everything had been paid for in cash, that they’d registered under
Mr and Mrs Quinn
, that he’d never given her a telephone number where he could be reached …
And considering it from that point of view it was unnerving, as if he’d intended to leave no traces, nothing that could ever be used to find him if he decided to vanish. Perhaps he was nothing more than a serial lover. She smiled at the thought, smiled with her lips, but in her heart there was only emptiness and loss.
She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I have no better ideas. You’re okay to go to the apartment and check this out?’
Sullivan nodded. ‘Sure I am Annie, no problem. You have the address?’
Annie looked at him blankly. She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Not a clue, but I’d have no difficulty finding it again.’
Sullivan rose from his chair. ‘Seems we’re out for a little adventure together then, eh?’
‘Seems so.’
They left a few minutes later, took a cab across to the other side of Morningside Park, and all the while – with every revolution of the wheels beneath her, with every passing street and block and junction – Annie believed that perhaps she was following a ghost.
Annie waited in the street while Jack went in and spoke with the old man and his son. For some reason she didn’t want to go inside. She could not have answered the question had she been asked why. There was just something about it, almost as if within this building someone had made a fool of her and she had no wish to be reminded of that fact.
It was cold, and after a few minutes she went up the short flight of stone steps and stood inside the entranceway. Every once in a while she looked through the glass window in the front door. Waiting was not her forte, and each minute seemed
to stretch on forever. She glanced at her watch – her father’s watch – and after looking at it for the fourth or fifth time she couldn’t stand the suspense any more. She went down the steps and walked to the end of the street, turned back and walked past the building a good fifty yards.