Peter May - Freeze Frames

Reading through it, nothing immediately struck him as significant. Located near the foot of the Atlas mountains, where the Souss River flows into the Atlantic ocean, Agadir was, he read, still regarded as the first sardine port in the world. It was also an important commercial port and tourist town, with its long strip of sandy beach. It wasn’t until he reached the section on the city’s history that he found his interest suddenly piqued. The entry read:

At 15 minutes to midnight on February 29, 1960, Agadir was almost totally destroyed by an earthquake that lasted 15 seconds, burying the city and killing thousands. The death toll is estimated at 15,000. The earthquake destroyed the ancient Kasbah.

Of course, Enzo realised, the entry in the Everyman encyclopedia had predated the earthquake by three years. If Killian had possessed a more recent edition, might he have marked out the section on the earthquake? Fifteen thousand had been killed by it. And Killian had written on the Post-it, HE DID NOT DIE. Had someone thought to have died in the quake actually survived it?

He spent some time then browsing through accounts of the earthquake. Some gave the death toll at over 16,000, others gave the time of the quake at anything between fifteen and twenty minutes before midnight. What was clear was that most people had been indoors, and that buildings with structures hopelessly inadequate to withstand even a minor earthquake had simply collapsed killing almost everyone inside. In fact, a third of the population of the city had perished in that brief fifteen seconds.

There were entire sites dedicated to photographs of the disaster. Graphic images of a city reduced to rubble. Twisted and mangled buildings whose roofs hung in suspended animation just inches from the ground. An aerial shot of the original walled kasbah, utterly devastated, only a handful of buildings in the old, medieval hilltop city left standing. Bodies buried beneath tons of masonry had never been recovered, and the kasbah had never been rebuilt. It was almost inconceivable to Enzo that so much damage could have been done in such a short space of time, so many lives taken without warning.

In the end, he was overtaken by fatigue. He closed down his computer and trudged wearily upstairs to the bedroom. And as he lay between the icy sheets, aware as never before of the emptiness of his bed, he knew that somehow, in some way, he had just made a breakthrough. But Killian’s voice was still too far away. Enzo was simply unable to hear the words with sufficient clarity to make any sense of them.

It was sometime after four in the morning that he woke, sitting bolt upright, feeling cold air on hot skin. He was sweating, wide awake and staring into the darkness. Five hours of shallow sleep seemed like no more than five seconds. And yet his mind had never stopped, taking him on a restless journey through the shattered remains of Agadir, the elusive shadow of Adam Killian always just out of reach, his voice a distant call, words lost in the crashing of falling masonry and the death cries of fifteen thousand other voices.

And Enzo had only one thought in his mind. He had not checked the row of encyclopedias to see if any of the other volumes were out of place. He cursed himself out loud, and heard the dying echo of his voice swallowed by the night. He had been too tired, insufficiently focused. But, still, it should have occurred to him before now.

He swung his legs out of the bed, slid his feet into his slippers, and slipped on his silk robe. He turned on the bedside light, screwing his eyes up against its sudden brightness, and started back downstairs to the study.

The room seemed to be waiting for him. Its stillness, in this darkest hour of the night, was so dense Enzo felt he could almost touch it. He had the strangest sense of premonition, of something just beyond his grasp that would soon be his. He was uncertain whether it was that, or the cold, that made all the hairs stand up on the back of his neck. The bloodstain on the floor seemed darker, somehow, the bullet holes in the wall freshly made, the dust of shattered plaster hanging in the air, along with the smell of cordite.

He was, he knew, letting his imagination run away with itself, and yet he could have sworn that he was not alone in the room. Killian himself was there, somewhere in the stillness, willing him to listen, to hear his voice.

Enzo rounded the desk and ran his index finger along the line of dark green Everyman encyclopaedias.

“Damn!” His voice shattered the stillness of the night. Two further volumes had been transposed. NYA to RAG and SPI to ZYM. If he had only taken the trouble to look last night, he would have seen them immediately. He lifted them down, and as before placed them on the desk in front of him as he sat in Killian’s chair.

From somewhere out in the garden he heard the deep-throated yowling of a cat. It came chillingly out of the night, penetrating the dark and the quiet. Enzo stood up and crossed to the window, opening it and pushing out the shutters. Light from the room washed across the lawn. In the shadow of the trees at the far side, he saw the black cat pacing restlessly in silhouette, howling at the night. For a moment it stood still, to turn luminous green eyes in his direction.

For several seconds it seemed to Enzo as if he were trapped, a rabbit caught in the headlights of a car, before he closed the window. Ruffled, he remembered Charlotte’s playful allusion to the cat as being perhaps Killian’s ghost. Absurd, of course, but still he could not shake off the sense of another presence in the room, of eyes watching his every move, of a voice whispering silent encouragement that he couldn’t hear.

He went back and stood at the desk to open the volume NYA to RAG with trembling fingers. He drew his thumb across the open pages of the book and let them flick past it, until his eye caught the flash of yellow he had been hoping for. He flipped back until he found it. Once more, the Post-it was blank. But on the opposite page, the entry for Paris had been marked with the same yellow pen. The entry was five pages long, and Enzo flipped slowly through them all looking for a highlighted passage, something that would guide him to more specific information. But there was nothing. All that had been singled out was the word Paris right at the head of the entry. So perhaps, he thought, Paris itself was the clue. The city. The place. But why?

He set the open book on the desk and lifted the volume SPI to ZYM. This time he found the Post-it among the W entries, and highlighted on the opposite page was the name Simon Wiesenthal. Enzo stood staring at it, his skin prickling all over his skull. He looked up and saw his reflection in the window. The black robe with the red dragons, the tangle of dark hair tumbling wildly over his shoulders, the silver streak running back from his forehead. A sudden movement startled him. He refocused, and saw the black cat on the outside window ledge, staring in at him.

He turned his eyes down again to the page. Wiesenthal, he knew, was the most famous of the post-war Nazi hunters, responsible for tracking down dozens of fugitives so that they could be brought to justice for crimes against humanity. Although this 1957 entry was long out of date, Enzo read it anyway.

Wiesenthal was an Austrian-Jewish architectural engineer and holocaust victim who had survived four and a half years in the German concentration camps of Janowska, Plaszow, and Mauthausen. After the war he had begun working for the US army, gathering documentation for the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremburg. Then, in 1947, he and thirty other volunteers had founded the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Linz, Austria, to gather information for future trials.

In the same way that Enzo had made the assumption that the entries on Ronald Ross and Agadir were somehow linked, he felt there had to be some connection between Wiesenthal and Paris. But what? There was nothing in this old entry that gave any clue as to what it might be.