Scott moved as one kneels during prayer—smooth, elegant, with bent shoulders and with his eyes staring straight ahead, ignoring everything behind his back.
I tried to mimic his rhythm. I sat on the opposite end of the couch—the end where the green carpet ends—and looked at the blinking cursor in the password field of the stubborn flash drive that would not let me in. I told myself that the carpet, rolled up, is a simple carpet. I did not find relief there. Nothing demonstrates the true nature of a carpet better than the struggle to ignore it.
"Stop calculating the minutes," Scott said without turning around. "They will not pass any faster."
"Who is calculating?"
"You are. Your knee is tapping now for ten minutes." He typed something, deleted it, and typed it again. "Jax's team will be here before three. There is a chocolate bar in my bag. Have it."
"I am not hungry."
"I did not ask if you are hungry."
That was Scott. And that had always been Scott. In high school, he used to push food into John and me before every examination, like fuel into engines. I took the chocolate bar. It did not have any taste.
My phone vibrated in my pocket.
I took a quick glance at the screen and straightened a little. DIRECTOR. 1:52 AM.
The man has never, in all my time working for him, called me directly. It was preferable for him to come to the office and to shout your name at the top of his lungs so that everyone could hear it. This two o'clock call of his was as unusual as hearing a clock strike thirteen.
"Sir."
"Where are you?" No greetings, no excuses for the late hour.
"Working, sir. The Lin case. John and I are—"
"Good. Then you are awake." I could hear papers shuffling in his office. "I need you at the Night Bridge. In twenty minutes."
The chocolate in my mouth transformed into wax. "Night Bridge?"
"A dead man was found there by the patrol half an hour ago, seated on a bench as if he waited for the bus. It will be treated as suicide, and before breakfast, there will be reports of it in all the newspapers of the city, because the man was somebody. I won't say his name over the phone. Sergeant Hale will meet you. I can hear them laugh. Tonight, every night shift detective in the city will find something to distract himself from answering the phone. Wonder why?"
"Sir, John is—"
"John can take the next one. You have this one. Go."
The line went dead.
Scott stopped typing. When I looked at him, he stared at me, and the look lasted a little longer than the news I had just shared with him deserved.
"Night Bridge," I said. "A body."
"Then go."
"And leave you here with—" I pointed to the sofa and whatever was lying on it.
"I have been here with worse." He turned to the computer screen again. "Go, Marlon. A first case is a gift, and a second one at the same time is a test. Do not fail the test for the sake of courtesy."
The headlights flashed against the curtain before I could say anything.
A gray van pulled up in front of the gates, followed by a gray sedan. Two men dressed in gray coveralls got out of the van, and they did not bother to say hello or to ask questions or to stay on the carpet longer than needed. They simply lifted the carpet, as if it were furniture, and carried it outside into the snow.
I did not notice it was snowing.
The thin man driving the sedan offered me a set of keys. "From Mr. Jax. He said you would need a vehicle and not to scratch it."
I sent John a text from the driver's seat, my fingers barely steady. The director has assigned me a new body. Night Bridge. Where are you? Answer me.
No reply.
I told myself that it meant he was busy, not something else, and I started the car.
* * *
The snow fell on the town the same way the bad news falls—softly enough that you do not notice until it covers everything. Wipers were drawing white crescents on the windshield. On the radio, a sleepy voice was announcing more of it for the weekend, naming December third as the date, as if it were just another ordinary day.
Nine days, I thought. Nine days until I will stop myself. Nine days until the twelfth.
I switched the radio off.
Here is one thing that I have never told you about the Night Bridge. My mother has been telling me the story of how she met my father so many times when I was little that I learned it by heart: foggy evening, her scarf torn off by the wind, and a stranger in a dark coat who climbed over the rail in his polished shoes and hung there above the river on the hand trying to catch it. She always told it with her eyes on the window. And she always stopped at the same moment, at the point where the man returned her scarf and whispered something he never repeated. I begged for that part, and she smiled and said, That part is mine, my love.
I had loved that story all my life. And now a folder at the bottom of the box has put the bridge on a list, sandwiching it between a set of coordinates and a photograph of a dead man.
I parked my car behind the last police vehicle and sat for ten seconds with my hands on the steering wheel. Then I got out.
You could hear the Night Bridge before you could see it: the river, loud and black below, and the old iron singing in the wind. It has been built in the days when cities decorated their bridges with lights the way people tie ribbons to gifts. Twelve cast-iron lampposts, six on each side, each of which had a glass globe on top shaped like a closed flower. The legend went that on a clear evening, the lamps looked like a string of pearls spread over the water, and that was how it got its name.
Tonight, only eleven of them burned.
In the middle of the bridge, one lamp was burning alone, and beneath it was seated a man with snow on his shoulders.
"You are the kid the director sent."
The sergeant was a large man, his mustache covered in frost so heavily that it looked as if he shaved with the ice. His voice was careful and neutral, the voice of a man who decided to speak his mind no more.
"Detective Marlon, sir."
"Detective." He paused at the word. "Sergeant Hale. Walk on the left side of the bridge. We have kept the right side free, because there are prints there, and I'd like them to stay untouched until the sun rises."
We walked. The closer we approached, the more the bridge became a theater stage designed for a single actor, lit by one lamp while everything else was dark.
Walter Brandt, if you want the short version, was fifty-four, and he sat on that bench as if he was ordered to wait and chose to wait politely. Gray suit. Tied in a nice knot. Hands folded in his lap. His head tilted back just a little, as if somebody had been talking to him something worth listening to, and his eyes were closed. Someone had closed them nicely. Snow covered his hair and shoulders evenly, like sugar sprinkled on a cake.
"No coat," Hale said. "For such weather. The idea is that he walked out of his office, came here, drank whatever was in that bottle, and did not feel the cold." He nodded at a small brown bottle lying on the bench near the dead man's right hand. The label was scraped off, and what remained looked like the nail work. "Sleeping pills. Nearly empty. And his wife called us at ten to one because his phone sent her a message with two words: "I'm sorry." The uniform thinks it's a suicide even before the report is written."
"And you?"
"I said fine." Hale sniffed, and the snow on his mustache moved. "But I've been a policeman for twenty-six years, and in twenty-six years nobody has ever killed themselves on a bridge without a coat and then found it necessary to turn off all the lights."
I looked at him. "The lights?"
"Eleven lamps, Detective. If you ask the city, they'll say that the bulbs had burned out; they've been meaning to replace them. Maybe."
I moved to the nearest lamppost and asked the uniformed policeman standing near it to give me his flashlight. I pointed it upward to the glass flower. Empty. Not a broken bulb. Not a burnt-out filament. An empty socket with nothing screwed into it, and the latch on the glass globe open.
"Check the other ten," I said.
"Done already," Hale murmured behind me. "Same."
A lamp can burn out, but it can't unscrew itself, especially eleven times in a row. Somebody crossed this bridge at nighttime with a ladder, or a pole, and patience, and illuminated a single bench like an exhibit in a museum.
I returned to the lamp over the bench and examined it.
I like to think that this is the best part of the job that I do. The part of it that was once called by my Oxford professor, in front of my mother, my irritating attention. It is not magic. All you have to do is to look at something long enough for the pieces inside to contradict each other.
The snow on the dead man's shoulders was deep. The snow on the bench around his legs was deep. However, on the bench to his right, where the bottle was standing, there was a clearly outlined rectangular area of the snow, free of the snowflakes. The edges of it were soft with the new snowfall.
"The snow does not care whether you are living or dead," I said slowly. "It clings to anything that does not move. It clung to him because he was sitting here when it started. It did not cling to this area because somebody sat here, and he sat here while the snow fell, and he left only a little bit ago."
Hale looked at the area carefully, then he looked at me. "Somebody sat here."
"For a while. Next to him. Company, if you like to call it that."
"And those?" Hale pointed with the flashlight to the right side of the bridge.
I stooped and looked. They started from the bench and formed a row of footprints going towards the northern, darker end of the bridge. Small soles. Small heel. Short steps, the steps of somebody who does not hurry and is not afraid of being chased. Whoever made them left a dead man at the pace of somebody who leaves a church.
The footprints looked like the prints of a small foot – a woman's, or a slim man's, or a boy's. I told myself that in that specific order and refused to obsess over the first option.
"They end at the far edge," Hale said. "There is a clean patch of snow where something warm stood waiting. The exhaust melted it. Then there are tire tracks, and then the tracks are filled with the fresh snow before I have anybody to cast them."
"His wallet?"
Everything was there, untouched. Cards, money, even a small photo of his wife. Nobody had robbed him. Hale pulled out an evidence bag from his pocket. "Walter Brandt. Fifty-four. That's the name the wife gave us, and the license says the same."
I took the bag. For a split second, I had taken it in such a loose grip that I nearly dropped it.
Inside the license, hidden in a plastic case, was a business card – thick cream paper, black ink. Walter Brandt. Regional Director, Everlight Life Insurance. Life insurance.
And at the bottom, a direct line. Seven digits I had never seen on that card before, but they burned in my memory from another sheet of paper that I had found in that folder on the night of my twenty-first birthday. I am not boasting. My mother used to say that I could memorize a telephone book if I was bored enough, and a folder that I couldn't let go was a perfect source of such boredom.
The number ended in 4-0-7-1. The phone numbers belonged to my father and his manager at the life insurance company where he worked.
It's strange how the body gets the news faster than the mind does. My fingers turned cold first. Then my stomach. Then the sound of the river seemed to come to me from far away, like something heard through a wall.
A bridge. A bottle of sleeping pills. A phone number.
Three things on that old paper – the paper that I played with as a child – stood before me under a single lamp on the snow, and each of them could be a coincidence on its own. But together they made a sentence that I did not want to read completely.
"Detective?" Hale said. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
"It's cold," I said.
"It's cold," he said too, watching me a second longer than was needed. "Now pull yourself together, because I have the phone of the dead man here. The wife has forwarded me the picture that he sent to her before we picked her up. I don't like it. Maybe you'll see what I can't. Tell me what I am missing."
He showed me the screen.
It was the photograph of the bench. The man in it sat there in the same position as he sat now, with his eyes closed and hands folded. However, there was only a few flakes of snow on his shoulders, and a lamp above him illuminated the scene with a golden glow. His eyes were closed. His hands were folded. The picture has been taken from above, and very close to the man – from exactly the place where the rectangle of clean snow was.
Across his lap, stretched long, thin, and sharply outlined was a shadow.
That shadow belonged to whoever had taken the picture. The lamp stood behind her and above her, projecting her shadow across the knees of the dead man: the curve of a head, with hair tied back in a ponytail, an arm raised and bent, holding up the phone. At the bottom of the shadow, the hem of a long coat fluttered, with a small crooked kink in it, as if the one side of the coat was caught on something.
I held my breath.
I recognized that shadow. I had been looking at its twin for twelve days, in a photograph that I kept to myself, in a picture of a man lying in the snow with his white shirt ripped open. The same angle from behind a lamp. The same patient shadow stretched across a body. The same crooked hem.
It wasn't a coincidence. Anybody who took care to unfasten eleven bulbs and weather a snowstorm in the presence of a dying man was not going to be careless about her own shadow.
Her shadow she wanted in the picture.
"Women," Hale said quietly, "from the looks of her, long coat and hair tied back. That's all I know. Do you know anything more?"
I did not answer.
I just kept looking at the uneven edge of the coat, imagining the wind blowing the scarf, and always coming to the same ending of the story.