names and phone numbers. Why had he sent this to me? And why keep it at the theatre instead of taking it home? I saw darkness gaping beneath the illusory cheerfulness of the postcard.
Don’t worry meant that I had every reason to be nervous. I’d worked in the theatre long enough to know that people don’t say what they mean. The true meaning is hidden behind the words. I’ll be home soon and when I get back sounded like simple, practical information, but the words could just as well mean that he was trying to fool me. Or himself.
I stuck the memory stick in my laptop. While I waited for the pictures to upload, I slipped into an emotional limbo, a neutral position between plus and minus. It was something I did on opening nights or in disastrous situations. When Mama had suffered an embolism and I’d found her dead in her apartment, I’d wandered about in that state for several weeks afterwards. I’d finished up the set design for a music video at the same time as making arrangements for the cremation and funeral. My friends began telling me to see a psychologist. Instead, when it was all over, I slept for two weeks, and then I was ready to go back to work.
A picture appeared on the screen. It was blurry, showing a man partially turned away from the camera. In the next photo I saw two men standing outside a door. It seemed to be night time, and this picture was also blurry. I scrolled through more images, but couldn’t make any sense of them. Patrick was definitely not a great photographer. Words and language were his forte, but he was usually able to take decent pictures. These were awful. Nothing but hazy-looking men with disagreeable expressions. One of them appeared in several photos. A typical bureaucrat or banker, or maybe an advertising executive, with thin, rectangular glasses and light eyes, wearing an overcoat or suit. The pictures seemed to have been taken from some distance, in secret. The men could have been any anonymous strangers, in any city on earth. And they told me absolutely nothing about what sort of story Patrick was so immersed in over there.
I closed my eyes to think for a few minutes.
Then I opened the browser on my laptop and found the home page for The Reporter. I looked for the phone number of the editorial office.
‘I’d like to speak to Richard Evans,’ I said on the phone. He was the editor of the magazine that bought Patrick’s freelance stories, and a legend in the publishing world.
‘One moment, please.’
I was put on hold. An extended silence, while I waited to be put through. Then I heard that Richard Evans was not available. After half an hour of being rerouted to one person after another, I reached an editorial assistant, and I was able to trick her into telling me where he was. When I said that I had a story to deliver from Patrick, she told me that the editor would probably be back from the Press Café in an hour because he was due at a meeting. The assistant advised me to make an appointment. Instead, I slipped out of the theatre and took a cab to the corner of 8th Avenue and 57th Street. That was the location of the Universal Press Café, just across from the magazine offices.
Richard Evans was sitting next to the window, leaning over a table that was too low for his tall body. He was deeply immersed in a newspaper and gave me only a brief glance as I approached.
‘There are more tables over there,’ he said, motioning towards the other side of the café. Even though he was over sixty, his blond hair was thick and wavy.
‘I need to talk to you,’ I said. ‘My name is Ally Cornwall, and I’m married to Patrick Cornwall.’
Evans put down his paper. Though his gaze was piercing, his eyes were the faded blue of washed-out jeans.
‘Oh, right. Aren’t you from somewhere in Hungary? It seems to me Patrick mentioned that.’
‘I’m from the Lower East Side,’ I said and boldly sat down on the chair across from him. That was my standard reply whenever anyone wondered where I was really from. ‘We met once, at the celebration for the magazine’s fifteenth anniversary.’
‘Sure, of course.’ He managed a half-smile. ‘That’s also when Cornwall was nominated for the Pulitzer.’
‘But he didn’t get it,’ I said, waving to the waiter, who came rushing over to wipe off the table. I ordered a glass of orange juice.
I had stood beside Patrick on that evening, squeezed into a beautiful emerald-green sheath dress that I’d borrowed from a costume supplier. I had clutched his hand as the mingling stopped and everyone turned to look at the TV screens. In Patrick’s line of work there was no higher honour than the Pulitzer Prize. His series of articles about the Prince George police district in Maryland had aroused tremendous attention, and being nominated for the prize was the biggest thing that had ever happened to him. But in the end, his name was not the one announced. Instead, the prize for the best investigative reporting went to a couple of journalists from The New York Times, for uncovering insider trading on Wall Street. Patrick got good and drunk. The following year he’d spent four months, two of them without pay, reporting on who the losers were in the new economy. It was a blistering account that was given extensive coverage in The Reporter and had stirred vigorous debate. It was also cited by numerous politicians. But Patrick was not nominated again, and his self-esteem had suffered ever since.
‘I need to ask you about the assignment that Patrick’s on,’ I said. ‘About what he’s doing in Paris.’
‘Is he still over there? I thought he was supposed to deliver something soon.’
Evans frowned as he shovelled scrambled eggs onto his fork. It was clear that he would have preferred to eat his breakfast in peace.
‘I can’t get hold of him,’ I said. ‘He hasn’t answered his cell phone in over a week.’
‘It’s not always possible to call home when you’re out in the field,’ said Evans, peering at me over the rims of his glasses.
‘I know that,’ I said. ‘But we’re not exactly talking about the caves of Tora Bora. This is Paris. Europe. They have reception everywhere.’
Evans turned his fork to look at the piece of sausage he’d snared. It glistened with grease.
‘Well, at any rate it looks like a hell of a good story he’s working on over there. He was very insistent that I hold space for it in one of the October issues, front cover and all.’
‘What’s it about?’ I asked. ‘His article, I mean.’
Evans raised his eyebrows. I swallowed hard. It was embarrassing to admit how little I knew about my husband’s work.
‘Patrick is always careful to keep the magazine’s secrets,’ I added. ‘He never talks about his articles in advance.’
I had done my best to remember what he’d said. When he was drunk, on the phone, he’d talked about death and destruction, and about human lives not being worth anything. He’d mentioned cafés he’d been to in Paris, but not who he’d interviewed.
‘Selling human beings,’ said Richard Evans.
‘Selling human beings? You mean like trafficking? Prostitution?’
‘No, not exactly.’ He wiped his hands on a napkin. ‘He’s writing about immigrants who are exploited as labourers. Slave labour, pure and simple. And how the problem is growing as a result of globalization. Poor people who die inside containers when they’re being smuggled across borders, suffocating to death, or drowning in
