The Forgotten Dead: A dark, twisted, unputdownable thriller

If I’m not answering my phone, I’m probably out on a job, so please leave a message after the beep.

It had been ten days since he’d called.

That was on a Friday.

I was in Boston with Benji, my assistant, to pick up a chair dating from the Czarist period in Russia. That piece of furniture was the last puzzle piece needed for the staging of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. It had belonged to an ageing hairdresser’s paternal grandmother, who had fled St Petersburg in 1917.

Patrick had phoned just after I finished the transaction. Benji and I had each taken hold of one side of the chair and were on our way down a narrow flight of stairs in a building that looked like it might collapse at any minute from sheer exhaustion.

‘I just wanted to say goodnight,’ said Patrick from across the Atlantic. ‘I miss you so much.’

‘This isn’t the best time,’ I said, propping the chair onto a step while Benji held on tightly so the precious object wouldn’t tumble down the stairs.

The hairdresser stood in the doorway above us, watching nervously. I really wanted to get out of there before he changed his mind. He’d told us that this chair, which he’d inherited from his grandmother, was the dearest thing he owned, but he wanted to see Mother Russia before he died. Otherwise he would never have even considered selling it. If he had enough money, he wanted to buy a burial plot near the Alexander Nevsky church in St Petersburg, where the great men of his native country had been laid to rest.

‘You won’t believe what a story this is going to be,’ Patrick went on. ‘If it doesn’t turn out to be the investigative story of the year, I don’t know what—’

‘Are you in a bar or something?’ I glanced at my watch. It was 5.45 in Boston. Midnight in Paris. It warmed my heart to hear his voice.

He was audibly slurring his words. ‘No, I’m back at the hotel,’ he said. There were sounds in the background, a car honking, voices nearby. ‘And you know what I’m looking at right now? The dome of the Panthéon, where Victor Hugo is buried. I can see straight into the garret windows of the Sorbonne too. Did you know people live up there under the eaves? But their lights are out now, and they’ve gone to bed. I wish you were here.’

‘Well, I’m standing in a stairwell in Boston,’ I said, as I heard the hairdresser start arguing with Benji. Apparently he was asking for more money.

‘I’ll be damned if human life is worth anything here,’ Patrick went on. ‘Nothing but objects that can be bought and sold.’

‘I really have to go, Patrick. Let’s talk tomorrow.’

I could hear him taking a swig of something.

‘I can’t talk about it over the phone,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to plaster this story all over the world. I’m not going to let them think they can silence me.’

‘Who could possibly do that?’ I replied with a sigh, grimacing at poor Benji, whose face was starting to turn an alarming shade of red. I had no idea how much it might cost to be buried next to Dostoevsky, but it had to be more than my budget could handle.

‘And afterwards I went out for a while, over to Harry’s New York Bar, just to find somebody to speak English with. Did you know that Hemingway went there whenever he was in Paris?’

‘You’re drunk.’

‘I needed to clear my head and think about something other than death and destruction. You have no idea what this journey is like, I’m headed straight into the darkness.’

‘Sweetheart, let’s talk more in the morning. OK?’ I was having a ridiculously hard time getting off the phone. A small part of me was afraid he’d disappear if I ended the call.

Then I heard a shrill ringtone somewhere near him.

‘Just a sec,’ said Patrick. ‘Somebody’s calling on the other phone.’

I heard him say his name with a French accent. It sounded funny, as if he were a stranger. Who would be phoning him in the middle of the night in a hotel room in Paris? Patrick raised his voice, shouting so loud that even the Russian standing above us must have heard him. He said something about a fire, and God.

‘Mais qu’est-ce qui est en feu? Quoi? Maintenant? Mais dis-moi ce qui se passe, nom de Dieu!’

Then he was back on the line.

‘I’ve got to run, sweetie. Shit.’ I heard a bang, as if he’d knocked something over, or maybe stumbled. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’

We both clicked off, and that was the last I’d heard from him.

I cut across 8th Avenue, heading for the Joyce Theatre. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a whirling blue light at the next block, but the sirens seemed to be coming from far away, from another universe, where none of this was happening. The silent phone in my hand. The tiny speck growing inside me. Patrick, who didn’t know he was going to be a father.

‘Ally!’

That was the girl at the reception desk — Brenda something or other — calling to me as I entered the theatre. ‘Your last name is Cornwall, right? Alena Cornwall? There’s a letter for you.’ She held up a fat envelope. ‘From Paris.’

My heart leaped as I took the envelope.

It was addressed to Alena Cornwall, c/o The Joyce Theatre, 8th Avenue, Chelsea, New York.

There was no doubt it was his handwriting. Neat letters evenly printed, revealing that Patrick had once been a real mama’s boy.

The envelope felt rough to the touch and seemed to contain more than just paper. According to the postmark, it had been sent from Paris a week earlier, on 16 September. Last Tuesday. The image on the stamp showed a woman wearing a liberty cap, her hair fluttering, in a cloud of stars. The symbol for France and liberty.

‘When did this get here?’ I asked, looking up at Brenda. ‘How long has it been lying around?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said, wiping her fingers on a paper napkin. Under the desk she always kept a stash of sticky Mars bars, which she ate in secret. ‘Maybe on Friday. I wasn’t working that day. I guess they didn’t know where to put it.’

I went down the corridor, which led to the offices and dressing rooms. Why the hell couldn’t I even get my mail delivered on time? Certain people seemed to think I didn’t exist because I didn’t have a proper job contract or mailbox. But why on earth would Patrick send the envelope to the theatre and not to our apartment? That seemed incredibly impersonal. And he hadn’t even managed to write the whole address. No street number and no zip code. That had to be significant.

He must have been in a hurry. Something had happened. Maybe he’d met somebody new and didn’t dare come home to tell me. Maybe he was leaving me.

I stopped abruptly when a door crashed open, right in my face, and out rushed one of the dancers from the show.

‘But I nearly killed myself!’ Leia cried. ‘Don’t you get it? The wall practically reared up in front of me.’

I groaned loudly. Leia was a 22-year-old bundle of nerves who’d been singled out as the next big star on the New York dance scene, which had made her believe that the rest of the world revolved around her. She opened her eyes wide when she caught sight of me.

‘You need to do something about it,’ she said. ‘Or else I’m not setting foot on that stage ever again.’

‘I can’t rebuild the whole place,’ I told her. ‘Everybody knows how cramped the space is off-stage. You need to ask someone to stand there and catch you. That’s what they usually do.’ I turned my back on her and kept on walking. I had no intention of grovelling before a girl who was named after the princess in Star Wars.

‘You shouldn’t even be doing this job,’ she yelled after me. ‘Because you don’t care about other people.’

I turned around.

‘And you’re a spoiled little diva,’ I said.

Leia ran into her dressing room, slamming the door behind her.

The envelope I was holding was making my hand sweat.

I went into the small, windowless cubbyhole that was the production office for visiting ensembles and shut the door, but not all the way. Then I tore open the envelope.

A little black notebook tumbled out, along with a small memory stick and a postcard of the Eiffel Tower. I felt a burst of joy as I read the brief message.

Don’t worry, I’ll be home soon. There’s just one more thing I have to do. Love you always. P.

P.S. Keep this at the theatre until I get back.

I read the words over and over.

The air was getting stuffier in the cramped office. The walls were closing in on me, and I had to kick open the door to make the space seem bigger. I reminded myself what I’d memorized: Turning left, the corridor led to the loading dock on 19th Street. Turning right, I could reach the foyer, where the art deco stairs led up to street level. There were exits. It wouldn’t take me more than thirty seconds to run outside.

I sank back onto the desk chair and studied the famous steel structure on the front of the postcard.

There’s just one more thing I have to do, he’d written. The envelope had been postmarked a week ago. Shouldn’t he be done with whatever it was by now?

I leafed through the notebook. Scattered words and sentences, 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 the seas between Africa and Europe, their bodies washing onto the beaches. A few years ago a whole group of Chinese immigrants drowned in England when they were forced to harvest cockles. They were farmers from somewhere, and no one had warned them about the tides. A shitty way to die, if you ask me.’

‘England? So what is Patrick doing in France?’

‘Exactly. There’s no clear angle.’ Having finished his breakfast Evans waved to the waiter behind the counter and then pointed at his plate. ‘When we buy foreign stories, there has to be a fresh perspective, a unique viewpoint. But that’s something Cornwall should know by now. He’s been working for us a long time. How many years is it? Five? Six?’

‘Patrick usually says that journalists who know exactly what they’re after are dangerous,’ I told him. ‘They merely confirm their own prejudices. They don’t see reality because they’ve already decided how they want it to look.’

Evans’s eyes gleamed as he smiled. Like glints of sunlight in ice-cold water.

‘I actually see something of myself in Patrick, back when I was his age. Equally stubborn and obsessed with work. The belief that you’ll always find the truth if you just dig deep enough. Not many people do that any more. These days journalists are running scared. Everybody’s scared. They all want a secure pension. They want to take care of their own.’

He ordered an espresso. I shook my head at the waiter. The smell of scrambled eggs and greasy sausage was already turning my stomach.

‘But why did he go to Europe?’ I asked. ‘All he had to do was go over to Queens to find that sort of thing going on.’

Evans shook his head and gave me a little lecture about why a story about the miseries in Queens wouldn’t sell as well as a report from Paris and Europe. He claimed that adversity is more appealing from a distance.

I felt sweat gathering in my armpits. The café was getting crowded. The lunch rush had started, and it was filling up with businessmen and media people.

‘And the whole point of hiring freelancers is that they’re willing to go places where no one else will go. That’s something all those marketing boys up there don’t understand.’ He pointed his finger at the top floors of the building across the street. ‘The minute I buy a story that’s the least bit controversial, they think I’m going to drag them back to 1968.’

I knew that The Reporter had been forced to shut down in ’68 because management couldn’t agree on how the Vietnam War should be depicted, but that wasn’t what I’d come here to discuss.

‘Are you saying he’s gone undercover?’ I asked.

‘If so, it would have been smart to talk to me about it first, but you never know. Maybe he’ll surprise us.’

Evans sighed heavily and ran his hand through his thick hair. According to Patrick, Evans would have been promoted to editor-in-chief, if only he’d been able to stay on budget. He understood the profession, unlike the marketing yokels who were in charge lately. They were people that Patrick despised as much as he worshipped old journalists like Bernstein, Woodward, and Evans.

‘In the past I could spend hours with the reporters,’ he said. ‘We’d go over the story in advance, try out specific analyses, and toss around various angles to take. But there’s no time for that any more.’

The tiny espresso cup had shrunk to the size of a doll’s cup in his big hand.

‘I was in Vietnam. I’ve seen Song My. I was in Phnom Penh right before the Khmer Rouge came in. Nowadays reporters come out of college thinking that journalism has to do with statistics. But if you really want to get into a story, you need to go out and smell reality.’

I glanced at my watch. It was 11.15 in New York. Almost dinnertime in Paris. I had to get back to the theatre.

‘So if I’m reading you right,’ I said, my voice chilly, ‘you’ve sent Patrick to Europe and paid him an advance, but you know almost nothing about the story he’s working on, and there’s no definite delivery date. Is that usual?’

‘No, no. We haven’t paid him any advance.’

My blood stopped. Time stood still. People passed by in slow motion outside the window, munching on sandwiches. I stared at Evans, but couldn’t think of anything to say.

‘We’re not allowed to pay out advances any more, not to freelancers. It’s a policy set in stone. I can remember when I was going to propose to my first wife, and I called up the editor to ask for an advance so I could buy her a ring. They’ve discontinued everything that once made this job fun.’

He shoved his newspaper in his briefcase and stood up.

‘I’m sure he’ll get in touch soon. Cornwall always delivers.’

I got up too. The whole place seemed to sway. Patrick had lied to me. He’d never done that before. Or had he?

‘What if he doesn’t?’ I said, and then cleared my throat. ‘I mean, hypothetically speaking. What would the magazine do then?’

‘He’s not on any specific assignment, so the magazine has no official responsibility, if that’s what you mean. As a freelancer, he’s in charge of getting his own insurance coverage.’

I felt someone shove me in the back as two students took over the table where we’d been sitting. Talking loudly, they put down their books and latte cups.

‘That’s all part of being freelance. Right?’ said Evans. ‘If you want to be free, with nobody telling you when to get up in the morning or send you out on routine jobs. I really miss those days.’

He smiled as he wrapped his shiny woollen scarf one more time around his neck.

‘When you hear from him, tell him hello and that I still have space in late November.’

I gritted my teeth. In his eyes I was merely a nervous wife in need of reassurance, so the boys could be kept out in the field. Phnom Penh? Kiss my ass.

Evans was busy putting his wallet away in his inside pocket, but then he stopped.

‘There’s a stringer in Paris that we sometimes use,’ he said, shuffling through a bunch of business cards. ‘If they decide to set fire to some suburb again, we give her a call.’ He dropped a few cards, and I watched them sail to the floor. Pick them up yourself, I thought.

‘She’s a political journalist.’ He bent down to gather up the scattered business cards. ‘I think I gave Patrick her name too. Damn. I can’t find it, but I’ve got it on my computer.’ He handed me his own card. ‘Send me an email if you want the info.’

‘Sure.’ I didn’t bother with any final courtesies and left the café, walking ahead of him and turning right on 8th Avenue. It was thirty-eight blocks to the theatre in Chelsea, and I walked the whole way. At that moment I needed air more than anything else.

‘There stands an oak on the shore, with golden chains around its trunk.’ The dancer on stage made the words float, her voice as delicate as a spirit or a dream.

The others joined in, repeating the words in a rhythmic chorus as Masha danced her longing. On the stage stood three substantial chairs from Russia’s Czarist period. I’d leased two of them from a private museum in Little Odessa, and then I’d spent weeks searching half the East Coast until I found the third chair in Boston.

I sank silently onto the seat next to Benji in the auditorium, noting that it had been worth all the effort. I watched the bodies in motion around the solid chairs, which were a constant, something on which to rest and yearn to flee. They were also practical obstacles that stood in the way, preventing the dancers from moving freely, forcing detours and pauses in the choreography. Chekhov’s play was about three sisters who spend the entire drama longing for Moscow without ever getting there, as the world around them changes. At first I’d imagined an empty stage, with the starry sky and space overhead, but then I realized that something solid was needed on stage, something that held the sisters there. Why didn’t they just leave? Take the next train?