Майкл Смит - The Lonely Dead

I shook my head. I didn't know. I didn't care, either, but Mrs Dupree was evidently viewing me as a welcome five-minute break from people who would shout at her.

'Way, way back they would take the orphaned children out of the cities on the coasts, put them on trains. They'd take them out into the country and stop at the itty-bitty stations and the kids would literally be 'put up' onto the platforms in the hope that some farmer with a bit of room — and a need for some more labour — would take one or two in. Here's the kid. Feed it. That's that. Everything prior is dead and gone. Things weren't quite like that in the sixties, but in some ways they kind of were. Half the time the kids wouldn't get told they were adopted ever. Most of the rest, the parents would wait until they thought the children were old enough, which meant probably they'd been voting for a few years and were spaced out to all hell to find out mom and dad could have been hundreds of miles away at the moment they were born. It was not a good system and we know that now, but at the time it was thought to be for the best — and a whole lot of those children grew up to have happy and productive lives. Honey, you okay?'

'Yeah,' I said, looking back up at her from my hands, which I had been inspecting while wondering if I would ever have a happy and productive life myself. 'I didn't expect to get so stopped, so soon. And… this is very important.'

'I know it is. I understand.'

I shook my head, wanting to be somewhere else. 'You don't, I'm afraid, but thank you for your time.'

I got up and headed towards the door. My hand was on the handle when she asked: 'You sick?'

I looked back at her, confused and caught unawares. For a moment I thought she was suggesting something in particular.

'What do you mean?'

She raised an eyebrow. 'I mean is this about you having discovered that you have a medical condition which someone else needs to know about, because they might have it too?'

I looked her in the eyes and considered lying.

'No,' I said. 'There's nothing wrong with me. But there's something very wrong with him.'

I left her sitting behind her desk, and walked the long corridor back towards the outside world, where I could smoke, and breathe first-hand air, and where my problems were only part of what I was.

— «» — «» — «»—

'So what now, Bobby?'

Silence. He was AWOL again. Off somewhere in the spirit world with a beer and a grin, freaking out the other ghosts.

It was late afternoon and I had a beer of my own and was sitting at a table outside L'Espresso, a cafe-bar just on the corner up from the hotel. My feet felt aggrieved and full of bones. San Francisco is a pleasant enough place but frankly, it has too many hills.

In the face of the complete bust of the morning, I'd done the only other thing I could think of. Maybe, I thought, just maybe Paul hadn't even gotten into the system. Perhaps he'd been picked up by someone off the street, taken in by some kindly storekeeper's wife. I knew this was a fantasy born of Mrs Dupree's tale of baby trains in the Midwest, but I really didn't see any other avenue open to me and I had to do something to find him. I had drifted for too long. This was my job. No one else's.

In the absence of any useful visual reference, I tried another approach. I knew my parents weren't the people to just throw a child to the wolves. It was likely that they would have left the child somewhere they believed not to be openly dangerous, and where there would have been a decent flow of pedestrians. They were on foot. There is a limit to how far you want to walk with two-year-olds. Thus it was likely, or at least possible, that I was looking for a busy area within very easy walking distance of Union Square. Worst case, it would be somewhere that also matched that description, but on a tram line.

So I bought a map, and I walked areas like that, trying to find somewhere that matched my pictures. I found nothing, which meant I had nowhere else to go. I had tried, a couple of months back, responding to an email Paul had sent. The message was bounced back to me within the hour, his address unknown, unheard of, impossible to find. His messages were statements to me, not attempts at communication. There was no trail there either.

I finished my beer and walked the few yards back to the hotel. As I headed through the reception I heard someone call my name. I turned, slowly.

The fresh-faced young guy at the desk was holding up a piece of paper. 'There's a message for you.'

That sounded unlikely. Nobody knew where I was. The few people whose contact I might have welcomed would have called me on the cell phone. I walked over to the desk, feeling as if I had a target on my back.

I took the piece of paper, thanked him, and turned away. When I opened it I saw the following message:

'This lady might be able to help you. If she wants to.'

There was a phone number for this unnamed woman, and the name of the person who'd left me the message. Muriel Dupree.

— «» — «» — «»—

A phone call, a visit to the web and a fast shower and then I went back downstairs and hailed a cab from outside the hotel. It took a while to find someone who was prepared to take me as far as I needed to go, which was over the Bay and then some, and then, it turned out, a good way more. The one I wound up with was intent on exacting a bonus through my providing an audience for a long series of diatribes. Luckily he was too wrapped up in his own dialectic for me to have to play a speaking role. I grunted and said 'Right,' and watched out of the window as city and then suburbs passed me by.

The phone call I'd made had been to social services, hoping to speak to Mrs Dupree. This turned out to be as vain a hope as it sounds. I'd have been better off trying to go back in time. The web had told me the telephone number belonged to a Mrs Campbell, and also where she lived. It's one of the things I know how to do. I didn't know who this person was, or what Muriel thought she might have to say to me, but experience told me you get closest to the truth by not giving it advance warning that you're coming. I do know what I'm talking about. Bobby and I met while working for the CIA.

Eventually the guy in front stopped talking and started glancing at a map. We pulled further and further from through routes and eventually hit some straggled blocks of residential streets. The neighbourhood was white semi rundown, no realtor's dream. We went back and forth through it for a little bit before I took hold of the map and guided us in. We stopped halfway up a street of small wooden houses each on their own very little plot.

I got out and paid. There was no one around.

'If you're looking to party, you've come to the wrong place,' the driver said, and then took off up the street.

I waited until he was out of sight, and then walked fifty yards back the way we'd come, having deliberately told him not quite the right address. Two turnings away was the road I actually wanted, and three minutes along it was the house I had come to visit.

I walked up a short path and two steps onto a porch area. It had been well painted in white, a few years before. It would soon need doing again. I looked for a bell and found none, so rapped on the door instead. I had no real doubt that the woman would be home.

After a few minutes I heard a sound behind the door, and then it was opened. In the shadows beyond was a small figure.

'Mrs Campbell?' I asked.

She said nothing, but slowly reached to the screen door and pushed it slightly ajar. Through the gap I saw a woman in her seventies, with hair that was still looked after, but a face that was grey and pouched; and also seemed to be in shock. She looked me in the eyes, then up and down, and then in the eyes again.