Sara Paretsky: Blacklist

Book 11 in the V.I. Warshawski series, 2003

Dr. Sarah Neely provided valuable medical advice. Jill Koniecsko made it possible for me to navigate Lexis-Nexis. Judi Phillips knew exactly how a robber baron would have constructed an ornamental pond in 1903. Jesus Mata helped VI. with her neighborhood Mexican restaurant. Sandy Weiss was a demon on technology topics and Jolynn Parker’s Fact Factory as always turned up amazing results. Eva Kuhn advised me on Catherine Bayard’s music tastes. The senior C-Dog did his usual witty riff on chapter titles; chapter titles, as always, are provided in loving memory of Don Sandstrom, who cherished them.

Michael Flug, archivist at the Vivian Harsh Collection, was immensely helpful in directing me to documents about the Federal Negro Theater Project. Margaret Kinsman introduced me to this great resource in my backyard.

The great forensic pathologist Dr. Robert Kirschner died in the summer of 2002. His presence in prisons and at mass graves from Nigeria to Bosnia, from El Salvador to Chicago’s South Side, brought a measure of justice to victims of torture and mass murder, and his loss is a grievous one. Despite the nature and importance of his work, Dr. Kirschner also took pleasure in VI’s adventures. For the last sixteen years, he found time to advise me on the ways and means her adversaries used to murder. During his final illness, we talked about the unpleasant ends the characters in Blacklist were meeting. I miss him as an adviser, a friend, and a great humanitarian.

This is a work of fiction. I do mention historical events, such as the Federal Theater Project, the Dies Committee, HUAC, and some figures active in the arts in the nineteen-thirties, like Shirley Graham, as part of the background of the novel, All characters who actually play a role in the story, as well as events like the destruction of the Fourth Amendment, are solely the fabrication of a brain made frenzied by chronic insomnia. Any resemblance to any real person, institution, government or legislation is purely coincidental.

The clouds across the face of the moon made it hard for me to find my way. I’d been over the grounds yesterday morning, but in the dark everything is different. I kept stumbling on tree roots and chunks o? brick from the crumbling walks.

I was trying not to make any noise, on the chance that someone really was lurking about, but I was more concerned about my safety: I didn’t want to sprain an ankle and have to crawl all the way back to the road. At one point I tripped on a loose brick and landed smack on my tailbone. My eyes teared with pain; I sucked in air to keep from crying out. As I rubbed the sore spot, I wondered whether Geraldine Graham had seen me fall. Her eyes weren’t that good, but her binoculars held both image stabilizers and nightvision enablers.

Fatigue was making it hard for me to concentrate. It was midnight, usually not late on my clock, but I was sleeping badly these days-I was anxious, and feeling alone.

Right after the Trade Center, I’d been as numbed and fearful as everyone else in America. After a while, when we’d driven the Taliban into hiding and the anthrax looked like the work of some homegrown maniac, most people seemed to wrap themselves in red-white-and-blue and return to normal. I couldn’t, though, while Morrell remained in Afghanistan-even

though he seemed ecstatic to be sleeping in caves as he trailed after warlordsturned-diplomats-turned-warlords.

When the medical group Humane Medicine went to Kabul in the summer of 2001, Morrell tagged along with a contract for a book about daily life under the Taliban. I’ve survived so much worse, he would say when I worried that he might run afoul of the Taliban’s notorious Bureau for the Prevention of Vice.

That was before September 11. Afterward, Morrell disappeared for ten days. I stopped sleeping then, although someone with Humane Medicine called me from Peshawar to say Morrell was simply in an area without access to phone hookups. Most of the team had fled to Pakistan immediately after the Trade Center attack, but Morrell had wangled a ride with an old friend heading to Uzbekistan so he could cover the refugees fleeing north. A chance of a lifetime, my caller told me Morrell had said-the same thing he’d said about Kosovo. Perhaps that had been the chance of a different lifetime.

When we started bombing in October, Morrell first stayed on in Afghanistan to cover the war up close and personal, and then to follow the new coalition government. Margent, Online, the Web version of the old Philadelphia monthly Margent, was paying him for field reports, which he was scrambling to turn into a book. The Guardian newspaper also occasionally bought his stories. I’d even watched him on CNN a few times. Strange to see your lover’s face beamed from twelve thousand miles away, strange to know that a hundred million people are listening to the voice that whispers endearments into your hair. That used to whisper endearments.

When he resurfaced in Kandahar, I first sobbed in relief, then shrieked at him across the satellites. “But, darling,” he protested, “I’m in a war zone, I’m in a place without electricity or cell phone towers. Didn’t Rudy call you from Peshawar?”

In the following months, he kept on the move, so I never really knew where he was. At least he stayed in better touch, mostly when he needed help: (VI., can you check on why Ahmed Hazziz was put in isolation out at Coolis prison? VI., can you find out whether the FBI told Hazziz’s

family where they’d sent him? I’m running now-hot interview with local chief’s third wife’s oldest son. Fill you in later.)

I was a little miffed at being treated like a free research station. I’d never thought of Morrell as an adrenaline junkie-one of those journalists who lives on the high of being in the middle of disaster-but I sent him a snappish e-mail asking him what he was trying to prove.

“Over a dozen Western journalists have been murdered since the war began,” I wrote at one point. “Every time I turn on the television, I brace myself for the worst.”

His e-response zipped back within minutes: “Victoria, my beloved detective, if I come home tomorrow, will you faithfully promise to withdraw from every investigation where I worry about your safety?”

A message which made me angrier because I knew he was right-I was being manipulative, not playing fair. I needed to see him, though, touch him, hear him-live, not in cyberspace.

I took to wearing myself out running. I certainly wore out the two dogs I share with my downstairs neighbor: they started retreating to Mr. Contreras’s bedroom when they saw me arrive in my sweats.

Despite my long runs-I’d go ten miles most days, instead of my usual five or six-I couldn’t wear myself out enough to sleep. I lost ten pounds in the six months after the Trade Center, which worried my downstairs neighbor: Mr. Contreras took to frying up French toast and bacon when I came in from my runs, and finally bullied me into going to Lotty Herschel for a complete physical. Lotty said I was fine physically, just suffering as so many were from exhaustion of the spirit.

Whatever name you gave it, I only had half a mind for my work these days. I specialize in financial and industrial crime. It used to be that I spent a lot of time on foot, going to government buildings to look at records, doing physical surveillance and so on. But in the days of the Internet, you traipse from website to website. You need to be able to concentrate in front of a computer for long hours, and concentration wasn’t something I was good at right now.