Waiting For Columbus (5 page)

The man, his assignment, was declared officially suspicious and off the grid in April. Under the circumstances, it’s understandable that one missing person was shunted down the priority list. The likelihood that he is dead is high. The trail went cold. His file was basically forgotten. The report says he had been seen by several unreliable witnesses, and
then he was gone. A magic trick. A disappearing act. Spain is a vast country—forty million people. This was just one vanished man inside a chaos of people and landscapes.

Cold trails were Emile’s specialty. Hopeless cases were his forte. His ex-wife used to say it was because he could tap into the artistic side of his brain and make oblique connections.

Emile pushes his shoulders into the back of the chair and breathes deeply. The wooden chair was a gift from her. She’d found it in an antique shop with a cement Buddha head sitting on it. She was assured by the owner of the shop that the chair was well over a hundred years old and in excellent condition. She probably paid too much but she was in love, and the Buddha head had been there a long time. It had to be good karma to act as a platform for a Buddha, she said—to serve the Buddha in this way. This booga-booga side of his ex-wife was annoying as hell when they were together, but now Emile found he missed her booga-booga: the incense, the strings of tiny brass bells above the bed, soy milk in his Cheerios, the incessantly changing colors on the walls in their bedroom. She had taken most of this away when she left. Though she did leave a small, silver Buddha in the bathroom. And, of course, she’d left the chair.

Emile has the luxury of working out of his home, a penthouse in the heart of the Right Bank of Paris, the market district of rue Mont -orgueil. It’s a small flat but it’s rare to find an apartment with a private terrace and a view. From the roof, he can see Montmartre and Sacré-Coeur, and the Museum of Modern Art.

He was up for a glass of water, and on his way back to bed decided to check his e-mail. He was expecting the cases to begin arriving again and this mysterious person of interest was the first.

Somebody at headquarters in Lyon has attached a brief newspaper story about a baffled stranger in Valdepeñas, south of Madrid—a man asking for directions. Police were called but the man was not found. He’d disappeared. The thing is, he kept asking for directions to different
places: Sevilla, Granada, Tarifa, Marbella, and half a dozen other towns, cities, and villages. First he’d ask for food and then directions, always to someplace new. He was very courteous, always grateful. The good people of Valdepeñas were worried about him.

Emile makes a little whistling sound. Well, that’s a long shot, he thinks. But at least it’s a place to start. Two years of being away, two years of therapy, and now he’s thrown right back into the mix.

Emile scrolls to the top of the file.
Who the hell is this guy?

Sometimes the map will not do. The map will never be the territory. One must get out in the field in order to understand. While Emile can make telephone calls and send e-mails and look at maps from the comfort of his flat, it’s not the same as going out into the world and having a look-see. He’s never found anyone by just looking at a map. He’ll rent a car in Madrid, interview the people who may have seen this man, and follow any leads.

Soon he’ll be working the same hours he was logging before the incident. Admittedly, he was one of the busier agents. He was always trying to find someone. Even when he wasn’t on the job, he drifted easily to the missing people to whom he was assigned. He’d been away from work for a long time, and now the cases had already started arriving and his bosses in Lyon would be relying on his unique talents. Yes, he was going to get busy again.

“If I leave you clues, could you find me?” his wife had asked him before it went to pieces. “I want to be one of the people you find.”

Emile smiles. She does not.

Emile was baffled. What the hell did she want from me? he thinks.

She’d complained that he obsessed over his work. “These people you’re assigned to find—you make it so personal.”

“Focus. I focus,” Emile says to himself, trying to shake away the cobwebs of his past.

He takes his laptop to the roof terrace with a thermos of coffee. He places the computer on the small wooden table and pours coffee into his mug. He turns the knob on the little propane heater. It clicks to life with a small flicker, then slowly, as Emile turns it on high, the flame glows a bright hissing orange. He finds comfort in this sound. He does not open the computer. He drifts to the suspicious man in Madrid. Emile does not think he is dead. If he is as hot as the two alerts suggest, this man is likely holed up somewhere licking his wounds like a big cat or a bear. He’s found a cave. Maybe he’s damaged in some way and he needs to stay off the grid—he’s going to wait it out. Emile can relate to this—he understands this. He’s had experience with holing up. He worries, though, that this guy is just an innocent who needs help. Emile has read and reread the interviews with the witnesses, looking for that snippet of information that will point in the right direction. One of these witnesses says the man he saw was Chinese, or Japanese, or Korean. Another witness swears she saw him crying, sobbing uncontrollably. Another says he was Arabic-looking, he was holding some sort of bag under his arm, and he was most certainly not weeping. He’s gone over the file a dozen times. He knows everything there is to know. If there’s an oblique connection to be made, he’s not seeing it. There is one thing he knows about this man that was not written in the file: not one of the witnesses reacted out of fear. They all seemed to be concerned about his well-being. This man may be suspicious but he is not frightening.

Emile will begin in Madrid. Then he’ll go to Valdepeñas and talk to the people who fed and gave directions to the apparently lost man. The likelihood this is the same guy is remote but it’s all he’s got.

Emile closes his eyes to the gray city. The hazy sky. The diffused
lights. He can feel warmth from the heater on his cheeks. In two hours he’ll be on the train to Madrid.

“Oh, there’s land out there all right. I know there’s landfall out there in the Western Sea.” He’s pacing Dr. Fuentes’s office. Back and forth, frenetic energy barely contained.

Dr. Fuentes motions for him to come and sit. An open-handed gesture toward the offered seat, which is a low, flat-armed, dark-brown leather chair directly across from the chair-and-a-half monster in which the doctor sits. Columbus sits, interlaces his fingers, and looks up at the doctor.

“What happened to you?” the doctor says. “Do you know why you’re here? Do you have any idea, Bolivar?” He scribbles in his notebook. His therapy consists of long conversations and interactions in which he uses the patient’s first name, his real name. No assumed names, ever. He has never called Columbus by his assumed name.

“Bolivar?” Columbus is smiling, playing with the doctor.

“Yes. You are Bolivar.”

“How can I be this Bolivar when my name is Columbus?”

Fuentes’s voice becomes a silken rope. “I’ve told you this before, but repetition is fine. We think something happened to you and the defensive part of you has conceived this alternate persona.”

“You think this Bolivar is inside me?”

“Yes, that’s our theory.”

“A theory?”

“Yes, we don’t know for sure.”

“How long have I been here? And all you have is a theory? Should I look for a new doctor? Someone more competent?”

“Three other doctors have consulted on your case, Bolivar. All we have are theories right now.”

Columbus has his hands clasped tightly. Everything in him wants to punch Dr. Fuentes in the face. “And?”

“And they concur—”

“They
agree
. They don’t teach you how to talk like a human being at doctor school, do they?”

“They all
agree
that you have this disorder. Yes.”

“Nonsense. I am only me. Have been only me since I got here, and before this I was also me. For instance, I was Christopher Columbus in the spring of seventy-eight when we came across Vikings. You see, I, Cristóbal Colón, had the most extraordinary meeting with a Norseman. He was a big man and we had an amazing conversation … I found out a few things about the world that are not taught in the universities … Things that would astound even you, Fuentes, Mr. Smarty-pants.”

“The fact you seem annoyed—your anger—is an indication that there’s some truth in what I’m saying.”

“You’ll have to try your first-year psychology tricks on somebody else, Fuentes. I’m not buying it.”

“And the fact you are just now changing the subject is also indicative. I want to talk about your disorder and you change the subject to Vikings. You want to tell stories about Vikings. You’re avoiding the subject by telling made-up stories.”

“All stories are true, Fuentes.”

Columbus is sitting on the end of his bed, rocking, looking directly out the window into a narrow gathering of palm trees. “Fuentes is an idiot,” he says to Consuela as she gathers a pile of laundry and pushes it into a cloth sack. “Are you sure he’s a doctor?”