Jim Crace - All That Follows

“What is this, Leonard? Is this you?” Francine has whitened again.

“The same male also talks with Lucy herself, according to her mother. More about the bike, she thinks. Friday, nine-oh-two a.m., that’s only yesterday: Lucy Emmerson calls this same number, Mr. Lessing, from her own handset. That conversation lasts, let’s see, for thirteen minutes. There’s more.” He smiles again. Rollins is warming to his task. “Five thirty-six p.m., last evening. Somebody, could be anyone who has access to your handset, Mr. Lessing, reaches this young woman’s answer service but, in spite of being invited to ‘do what you have to do,’ chooses not to leave a message. Two minutes later, five thirty-eight p.m., a man using your cell again, Mr. Lessing, speaks to Miss Emmerson’s grandfather at the family home. And that conversation lasts for just four seconds. Though long enough for us to make a note of it—”

“Bravo,” says Leonard.

“Now, let me show another face to you.” He does not even hold it up for Francine but hands it immediately to Leonard. It’s Maxim Lermontov, a recent formal photograph with a police detention tag attached to it and a committal number. “Ring any bells with you?”

“It’s the guy who’s taken hostages.”

“Know him personally?”

“Used to. Once. Long time ago.”

“Seen him recently?”

“Haven’t seen him since, oh, 2006.”

“Been in touch in any other ways?”

“No. Not at all.”

“Final warning. What do those words mean to you?”

“They mean what they mean in plain English.”

“But otherwise?”

“A protest group. A violent protest group.”

“How would you know that, Mr. Lessing?”

“From the television. On the news. Yesterday. I watch the news. I keep myself informed.”

The NADA agent shakes his head. “This makes no sense to me,” he says, and chins a smile at Francine as if to ask if this makes any sense to her. He shows he’s happy when she shakes her head. “Your wife is mystified.”

“Explain,” she says. Either one of you, she means.

“What do we have?” Rollins continues, turning now to Francine as he might to a baffled colleague for help. “We have a girl your husband says he’s never met or spoken to, and yet some male has used his phone to contact her or someone in her family — what?” He turns to his folder, quickly counts the log. “Five times at least. Five times that we know of. We have a hostage situation thanks to a guy armed to the teeth, a guy who’s been a friend of your husband, a guy we’ve been informed by Lucy’s mother was someone Mr. Lessing here was involved with”—he checks his paper once again—“in Austin, Texas. Snipers Without Bullets.” He turns to Leonard again. “Is that you?”

“It was. For about two days. Eighteen years ago. This is very tenuous.”

“Possibly.”

“Then wouldn’t you be better off arresting burglars?”

The young man nods and closes his folder. He’s looking less amused. “Better watch the old blood pressure, Mr. Lessing. Deep breaths are called for, don’t you think? Might well be sensible. Let’s leave it there for the moment, shall we? Unless there is something helpful you can contribute.”

Leonard takes a calculated risk. “I haven’t wanted to mention it to anyone, but it’s true, Lucy Emmerson and I have been in touch. Once in a while. Over the years,” he says. “I’m like her kind of unofficial godfather. So obviously I tried to talk to her by phone when all this stuff blew up with Maxie. That’s all there is to it.”

“Mr. Lessing, let’s be straight with each other before I go and before it’s too late. You understand the penalties, I’m sure, for withholding information in security matters, for wasting police time.”

“You’re wasting our time, that’s the truth of it.”

“Mr. Lessing, people’s lives are in danger here, not just the girl’s. This is serious. This is perilous. This is what we need to know. Your final chance. Can you throw any light, any light at all, on the whereabouts of Lucy Katerina Emmerson? Or who it is that’s taken her?”

It’s true, it’s mostly true, what Leonard says. “I haven’t got the foggiest.”

THE HOUSE WILL HAVE TO WAIT, Francine says, when her “fathomless” husband starts slamming drawers and fretting about the disarray — open cupboards, piles of clothes and bedding — that the officers, like teenagers, have left in their home. “Leave it, leave it, leave it,” she insists, making him sit on the futon in front of a muted telescreen — pushing him, even — while she remains standing, her arms crossed, being heavily patient as if she is dealing with a bulky infant. Leave it, she means, until her anger has subsided. Leave it until she knows how big this problem is. “Now talk. No bullshit either, Birthday Boy.”

He tells her almost everything: his failure on Wednesday evening to pass on information to the authorities, his surreptitious Thursday visit to the hostage house, the talk, the drink, the cigarettes with Lucy Emmerson, her genius idea, his loss of nerve, his Friday decoy visit to the woods, the log of phone calls that of course have been so simple for the police to trace. “Such amateurs,” Francine says, still standing. She doesn’t mean the police. “You know what maddens me the most, Leonard?” He shakes his head. He doesn’t want to know. “It’s not the lies. It’s not your secrecy. God knows I’m used to that. You think I care anymore? It’s that you never even offered me the chance.”

“I was protecting you,” he says, not really knowing what he means by it.

“Protecting me from what? Another one of your backdowns? Protecting me from offering an opinion, from saying, ‘Yes, let’s have her here, your little hush-hush goddaughter. Let’s help this poor girl reach her father in some way, let’s all do what we can to put an end to this monstrous nonsense with the hostages in Cedarbeech—’”

“Alderbeech.”

“Protecting me from making you do something ill-advised for once, not rational, not sensible? You weren’t protecting me. You were protecting you!”

“You wouldn’t have wanted me to go ahead with it. Would you?”

“I would have wanted you either to call the police and tell them what you knew or to … to … arghh.” Here she tightens her fists, knuckles up, and shakes them at Leonard. “I would have loved you for it, actually.”

“If I’d brought Lucy here?”

“Of course, of course, of course. What do you take me for?” She brings a fist down on her open palm. It always quiets the class. “Right now I’d really like to beat you up.”

The worst is over. No one’s hurt. Francine and Leonard are sitting side by side on the futon — not touching, though, and for the moment preferring to listen to the television newscaster rather than face each other anymore. The news blackout has been relaxed, it seems. Whereas yesterday live coverage from Alderbeech was rationed and controlled, today the wraps are off. The UK station that they settle on provides a menu for the hostage scene: Background, Security Briefing, Mother’s Plea, Latest Developments. They open the last of these. It is “the standoff’s fourth tense day” already. A routine has been established. Here are St. John Ambulance Brigade officers, stripped of shoes and coats, delivering yet more pizzas for the hostages and the uncooked food and unopened tins and bottles that the hostage-takers have required. Here are helicopters “standing by” for reasons that are not specified. Here again are photographs of the three suspects, not just Maxie now. An international brigade.

The female that Leonard once suspected could be an undiminished Nadia Emmerson has been identified as a mixed-race Filipina called Dorothy Paredes, known as Donut. In one photograph, she is still a pretty student with faculty colleagues at a Chinese restaurant. Christmas 2013. She’s smiling, just a little tipsy, with her arms around the shoulders of two pixelated men, one of whom is tugging at her ponytail of sleek black hair. A later photograph, released this morning by Interpol, shows a thinner woman with cuts and bruising to her lips and cheeks. Her jaw is swollen and her hair is cropped. The second man, an older, grizzled-looking Nicaraguan thought to be Donut’s lover, is Tony Ramirez, also known as Rafaelo Matamoros and, less convincingly, Pancho Mancha. Both are “wanted on four continents” and both are “unpredictable.”