Giorgio Faletti: I'm God

‘Where is it?’

Bellew made a vague gesture with his head. ‘Two blocks from here, on 23rd and Third. The crime scene team should be there by now. The ME’s on his way, too. I already sent Bowman and Salinas to keep an eye on things until you get there.’

‘Isn’t this something for Cold Case?’

Cold Case was the squad that dealt with long-unsolved homicides. From what the captain had said, this sounded completely like their thing.

‘We’re handling it for now. Later, we can consider if it’s appropriate to transfer it to them.’

Vivien knew Captain Alan Bellew regarded the 13th Precinct as his personal territory and didn’t like anyone who didn’t work directly for him muscling in.

Vivien nodded. ‘Okay. I’ll get right on it.’

Just then, two men came through a door to the right of the desk. One was older, with grey hair and a tanned face.

Sailing, maybe, or golf.

Or maybe both, Vivien thought.

His dark suit, leather briefcase and serious demeanour were like a sign around his neck, marked Lawyer.

The other man was younger, about thirty-five. He was wearing dark glasses, and there was several days’ growth of beard on his drawn face. His clothes, distinctly more casual than his companion’s, bore traces of the night he had spent in a cell. That wasn’t the only thing he bore traces of: he had a cut on his lip and the left shoulder seam of his jacket was torn.

The two men went out without looking around. Vivien and Bellew watched them until they disappeared beyond the swaying of the glass-fronted door.

The captain gave a half smile. ‘We had a celebrity guest in the Plaza last night.’

Vivien knew what that meant. Upstairs in the squad room, along with the detectives’ desks, which were so close together they made the place look like an office furniture showroom, there was a cell. This was where the arrested were kept, sometimes for a whole night, waiting to be either freed on bail or transferred to the jail in Chinatown. With a sense of irony, given how uncomfortable the long wooden bunks fixed to the walls were, they had dubbed it the Plaza.

‘Who is that guy?’

‘Russell Wade.’

‘The Russell Wade? Who won the Pulitzer at the age of twenty-five? And had it taken away from him three months later?’

The captain nodded, the smile fading abruptly from his lips. ‘Yeah, that’s the guy.’

Vivien knew when there was a touch of bitterness in her chief’s voice. And few things made him more bitter than when people deliberately, almost complacently, destroyed themselves. For reasons of her own, it was a situation she was familiar with.

‘We picked him up last night in a raid on a gambling joint, blind drunk and resisting arrest. I think he caught a punch from Tyler.’

Bellew immediately filed that brief parenthesis away among the closed files and came back to the matter in hand.

‘No offence to the living, but I think you have a dead man to deal with. He’s been waiting a long time – best not to keep him waiting any longer.’

‘I think he has every right.’

Bellew left her. Vivien went outside again, into the mild air of that late spring afternoon. She descended the short flight of steps, and as she did so she had a fleeting vision of Russell Wade and his lawyer disappearing into a chauffeured limousine, over to her right. The car pulled away from the curb and glided past. The guest who had spent a night in the Plaza had now taken off his dark glasses, and their eyes met through the open window. For a moment, Vivien found herself looking into two intense dark eyes and was astonished by the immense sadness she saw in them. Then the car was past her and that face disappeared behind the screen of the electrically operated window.

The site where they had found the body was so close, it was easier to get there on foot. And in the meantime she was already processing the small amount of information she had in her possession. A construction site was often an ideal place to get rid of an unwanted person for ever. This wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last. A murder, a body buried in concrete, an old story of violence and madness.

Which wolf wins?

Those wolves had been battling it out since the dawn of time. Over the centuries, there had always been some who had fed the wrong wolf. Vivien walked on, feeling the unavoidable excitement she always felt on the verge of a new case. Along with the awareness that, whether she solved it or not, everyone would – as they always did – end up defeated.

To get to the construction site, she had walked up Third Avenue.

She had to emerge from that anonymity that had allowed her to merge into the humanity around her and assume a very specific role. The arrival of a detective on a crime scene was always a special moment, like a curtain rising on an actor. Nobody ever moved a finger before the person in charge of the investigation arrived. She knew the kind of things she was going to feel. And she knew that, as always, she’d have been happy to do without those feelings. The place where a murder had been committed, whether recently or some time in the past, had a certain grisly fascination. Some murder scenes even became tourist attractions. For her, a murder scene was a place where she had to put her emotions to one side and concentrate on her job. Whatever theories she might have constructed in her head during her brief walk were about to be put to the test.

Bowman and Salinas, the two officers sent by Bellew, were nowhere to be seen. They must be inside, putting yellow tape around the area where the body had been found.

The workers had gathered outside the door of one of the huts at one end of the site. Standing slightly apart from them were two other men, a large black man and a white man in a blue cotton work jacket. Everyone seemed extremely nervous. Vivien could understand how they felt. It isn’t every day you knock down a wall and find a corpse.

She approached the two men and flashed her shield. ‘Hi, I think you’re expecting me. I’m Detective Vivien Light.’

If they were surprised to see her arrive on foot, they didn’t show it. Their relief that she was here, that they finally had someone they could talk to, overcame any other consideration.

The white man spoke for both of them. ‘I’m Jeremy Cortese, the site supervisor. And this is my deputy, Ron Freeman.’

Vivien, sure that the two men couldn’t wait to get started, came straight to the point. ‘Who found the body?’

Cortese indicated the group of workers behind them. ‘Jeff Sefakias over there. He was knocking down a wall and-’

Vivien interrupted him. ‘OK. I’ll talk to him later. Right now I’d like to take a look at the scene.’

Cortese took a step towards the site entrance. ‘This way. I’ll take you.’

Freeman didn’t move. ‘If you don’t mind, I’d rather not see that… that thing again.’

Vivien made an effort to suppress a sympathetic smile. She was afraid that it might be misunderstood, that the man might think she was making fun of him. There was no reason to humiliate someone she instinctively sensed was a good person. Not for the first time, Vivien reflected on how difficult it was to guess a person’s character from his body. The man’s huge frame would have struck fear into anyone, and yet he was the one upset by the sight of the corpse.

Just then, a large dark sedan pulled up close to the barriers. The driver quickly got out and opened the door for the passenger in the back seat. A woman emerged from the car. She was tall and blond and must once have been beautiful. Now she was only an advertisement for the futile battle some women waged against the indifference of time. Even though her clothes were casual, they all had designer labels. She reeked of Saks Fifth Avenue, massage sessions at exclusive spas, French perfume, and snobbery. Without so much as a glance at Vivien, she addressed Cortese directly.