So they lay together in her bed, JJ helping her to prop pillows, making her comfortable, and he lay on his side with one arm draped over her and they talked to each other sparingly in the darkness, the words becoming fewer and fewer, the pauses longer.
When Jools fell asleep he eased onto his back, staring up at the ghost of the ceiling, thinking of nothing, then sinking unawares into the Bostridge hit, a stepped remembrance, descending into it till it was more real than the dark room around him. There was Bostridge slumped in blood, the girl captivating him, and that package, and that gaze as he stood in the elevator.
He was flicking through the wallet then, looking at the picture of Bostridge’s family, trying to focus on them but seeing only blanked-out faces, and then he snapped out of it and was focused back on the room and Jools sleeping next to him. Thinking he’d slept too, he lifted his head and looked at her clock, reckoning from the time that only a few minutes had passed.
He’d lie there with her for another hour or so, get up and dress then, probably waking her a little. He’d kiss her goodbye in the darkness, not even rousing her completely, and by the next night it would seem dreamlike to her that he’d even been there.
And heading in the other direction, he’d be draping reality over the bones of dreams, filling in those faces in Bostridge’s wallet, finding out if somewhere in the shamanlike memory of that hit was the thing that had become his death warrant.
Perhaps he’d see the reality too, whether he wanted to or not, of the butterfly effect that resulted each time he pulled the trigger, the lives that spiraled away from those simple actions. It was a rare thing for someone in his position to see what death was, not in the instant but in the aftermath, where all its energies were absorbed. He didn’t know whether he wanted to see it, but at the same time, somewhere hidden away inside him, it was there, pulling at him, scrambling his bearings.
9
By eleven he’d dealt with the mechanics of arriving in New York, picked up a few things, and still managed to get to the drab basement of Penn Station with over half an hour to spare. As always though, it had left him feeling like one of the walking wounded, and it wasn’t even as if he could crash for the afternoon at his hotel, half the journey still ahead of him.
Instead he spent the afternoon and early evening on the train, winding in and out of the New England states, quite a few tourists among the other passengers, English accents audible here and there. He fit in with them too, dressed in casual clothes, his gun in a small rucksack.
It wasn’t the private dead space of a hotel room but it wasn’t too bad either, the relaxed rhythm of the train, its gentle murmurs. After lunch he catnapped on and off throughout the afternoon, ignorant of the aspiring autumn beyond the windows, hearing it though in the commentaries of other passengers.
He came around sharp just before six and looked out at the rural landscape, familiar, almost European, drenched in early-dusk light and shadow. It was a comfortable environment to be cocooned in, instantly recognizable but alien enough in the detail to feel like another world.
He’d bought a newspaper at the station and picked it up for the first time now, scanning through it like an Edwardian traveler looking for news from home. He scanned every headline, deciphering the runes, looking for some hidden hint in the news stories of what was going on. But there was nothing, no reports of car bombs, gas explosions, no snippets of unexplained murders.
Then he came across the one story he hadn’t expected to find there, a short Associated Press piece with the barest facts on Dylan McGill, a twenty-year-old from Illinois, shot dead in Paris in a suspected street robbery. He’d been touring Europe before continuing his education. And that was all, AP leaving it to others to eulogize about American youth and turn over the ground for Pulitzers.
But there he was, the kid JJ had taken out, the only abstract indication to the outside world that something serious was happening in the shadows. He’d still have made the papers if JJ had left him there too, as the student from Illinois charged with the brutal sex murder of an antiques dealer, and how differently they’d have painted him then.
It couldn’t have been down to chance that he’d been set up like that; he had to have upset somebody. And maybe he hadn’t even been aware of it, just as somehow JJ had managed to cross Berg without knowing it, stumbling out of bad fortune only in that unplanned visit to Viner’s, the same place where Dylan McGill had stumbled into it.