A Cold Case
There are plenty of things I take for granted, but not being burglarized was never one of them. Whether I was in a good neighborhood or a crummy one, in a house or apartment or hotel room, every time I walked in and found my dresser drawers not emptied onto the floor, I would offer a silent, nondenominational prayer of thanks. I honestly believed that my gratitude would keep me safe, so imagine my surprise in late November 2011, when someone broke into a place I was renting with Hugh and my sister Gretchen and stole my computer bag.
I thought of my laptop—a year’s worth of work, gone!—but my real concern was my passport, which had been tucked into an interior pocket alongside my checkbook. Its loss was colossal because it was my only form of ID, and also because my Indefinite Leave to Remain sticker was in it.
This is the British equivalent of a green card, and getting it had not been easy. Before Indefinite Leave I’d had visas, and those had taken some effort as well. The rules have changed since I first applied, but in 2002 it was possible to qualify as a writer. All I had to do was fill out a great many forms and prove that I had published a book. Hugh, by extension, was granted a visa as the boyfriend of a writer. This meant that when crossing into England, I would be asked by the border agents if I wrote mysteries, and Hugh would be asked if his boyfriend wrote mysteries. No other genre was ever considered.
We had to renew our visas every few years. This involved going to the dismal town of Croydon and spending a day in what was always the longest and most desperate line I had ever imagined. It was also the most diverse. I thought I was good at identifying languages, but it turns out I know next to nothing. Surely they’re making that up, I’d think, listening in on the couple ahead of me. The woman, most often, would be dressed like the grim reaper. Her husband would wear a sweatshirt with a picture of a boat or a horse on it, and the two would be speaking something so unmelodious and dire-sounding I could not imagine it having the words for “birthday cake.” If Hugh and I were denied extensions of our visas, we would have returned to Paris or New York, while they’d have gone back to, what? Beheadings? *oridectomies? What they had at stake was life-and-death. What we had at stake was Yorkshire pudding.
The nuisance of visas and having them renewed was something I left to Hugh, who’s a whiz at that sort of thing. There was nothing the authorities demanded that he couldn’t locate: our original birth certificates, a hank of his grandmother’s hair, the shoes I wore when I was twelve. People think it’s easy to leave home and resettle in another country, but in fact it’s exhausting, and purposefully so. The government’s hope is to weed out the lazy, though all it really eliminates are those who can’t afford an immigration lawyer. Had we not been native English speakers, and had Hugh not loved the challenges, we’d have hired one as well. As it was, we renewed our visas the requisite three times and then applied for Indefinite Leave. Aside from the mountain of paperwork, this involved reading a manual called Life in the UK and taking a subsequent test.
Hugh sat for it on the same day I did, and we spent weeks in the summer of 2008 studying. During that time I learned the difference between the House of Lords and the House of Commons. I learned that in 1857 British women won the right to divorce their husbands. I learned that people below the age of sixteen cannot deliver milk in the U.K., but I don’t think I learned why. It was just one of those weird English injustices, like summer.
Before taking the real test, I took the fake ones provided at the back of the study manual. “What do people eat on Christmas?” was one of the questions. Another was “What do you do on Halloween when someone comes to the door?” It was multiple-choice, and possible answers included “call the police” and “run and hide.”
I laughed, but these weren’t jokes. If you were from Chad, you’d likely freak out when children with panty hose over their heads showed up at your house demanding that you give them candy. As for the Christmas-meal question, do I know what they eat in Nigeria for Eid-el-Kabir or in Beijing for Qingming?
Another of the test questions asked why great numbers of Jewish people immigrated to the U.K. in the early part of the twentieth century. I don’t recall all the possible answers, but A was “to escape racist attacks” and C was “to invade and seize land.”
Hugh and I took our tests along with a dozen other foreigners, and though they didn’t give us our grades, I’m pretty sure I had a perfect score. He missed a question about the cost of eye exams for people over sixty but otherwise got everything right. Our Indefinite Leave stickers were nothing much to look at—just our pictures surrounded by stamps and seals—but still we gazed at them for hours on end, the way you might at a picture of the baby you birthed upside down in a burning house after a difficult seven-year pregnancy. While juggling knives.
The next step is to get our British passports, though it’s not necessary. As it is, Hugh and I can live and work in the U.K. for the rest of our lives.
I had my Indefinite Leave for four years before my passport was stolen. The theft took place on Oahu. Telling people this erases the sympathy I get for being burglarized, so I’m always inclined to leave it out. Then too, there seems nothing specifically Hawaiian about it. There are only two places to get robbed: TV and the real world. On television you get your stuff back. In the real world, if you’re lucky, the policeman who responds to your call will wonder what kind of computer it was. Don’t let this get your hopes up. Chances are he’s asking only because he has a software question. The officer who responded to our call was prompt but not terribly reassuring. “Yeah”—she sighed, looking at the spot where my stolen property used to be—“we get a lot of burgs in this area.”
That’s how lazy she was—couldn’t even squeeze out the extra two syllables.
There was an oceanfront park a quarter of a mile up the road from our rental house, so after the police left I walked over with Gretchen, convinced that in one of the trash cans I would discover my computer bag. The laptop would be gone, I figured, but surely I would find my passport. It’s crazy how certain I was. Gretchen and I looked in one trash can after another, and just as I started searching the bushes, I realized how big the world is. You’d think I might have noticed this before, perhaps while on a twenty-three-hour flight from London to Sydney, but the size of a planet doesn’t really strike you until you start looking for something. It could have been anywhere, my old passport, but in my mind’s eye I saw it on a scratched-up, glass-topped coffee table, the surface of which was dusted with meth.
I suppose the people who steal from us could be decent and well intentioned. The things they take while we’re out working—our watches and cameras, the wedding rings passed down by our great-grandmothers—they’re all going to feed a sick child or to buy a new hip for a colorful and deserving old person. That, though, would make things too complicated. Much simpler to do like I did, and decide that these people are scum. Your stuff was sold off for a bag of dope, and while you lie awake, turning it over in your mind, your thief is getting high somewhere in front of a stolen TV. Remorse? His only regrets are that you weren’t away from home longer and that you didn’t have better things.
I have it on good authority that in the days before DNA testing, a great many burglars used to shit on their victims’ beds or carpets—this as an added insult before heading back out the window or whichever hole they’d crept in through. That they could defecate on command like that, and solely for spite, further illustrated their depravity in my book.
My computer was stolen at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning, and that night I had a reading in Honolulu. Several stars from the crime series Hawaii Five-O came backstage before the show and were infinitely more helpful than the real police officers I’d dealt with earlier in the day. “The first thing we need to do is set up a reward,” said the actor who played Detective Lieutenant Chin Ho Kelly. I’d never spoken to anyone so handsome, and said in response, obviously dazed, “You’ll be my what?”
Hugh, Gretchen, and I stayed on Oahu for another five days, and afterward, with me using my police report as ID, we flew to Los Angeles, where I secured a new passport. The picture in my stolen one wasn’t half bad, but in the new one I look like a penis with an old person’s face drawn on it. I could have had more photos taken, but it wouldn’t have made any difference. This was the new me, post-theft—all my youthful optimism gone, filched by some drug addict in Hawaii. Every time I looked at my horrible new passport, I thought of him and wondered what he was up to. The person I pictured was in his mid-to-late twenties, with a vibrant tattoo on his neck—something classy, perhaps a scorpion waving a joint. He was like a paper doll I would accessorize with whatever I found irritating that day: He texted during movies. He ate at Chick-fil-A. He put glitter in his thank-you letters, and when you opened them the damn stuff got all over everything.
I often wondered if my thief had ever been caught. If he’d spent time in jail, who had bailed him out? His mother? His girlfriend? I figured he was straight, since a gay person, or even a bisexual, would have also taken my rubberized canvas tote, which was right next to my computer bag and which prompts compliments like you would not believe.
In early December 2011 I flew back to London. Border agents in France don’t care who comes into their country, but in England it’s a different story. “What are you doing here?” they want to know. “What are you really doing here?” Indefinite Leave put an end to these questions, but now, without it, I was back to square one, treated like a lowly visitor.
“How long will you be in the U.K.?” asked my Heathrow border agent. “Where are you staying?”
I explained my situation, and after asking me to step to the side, the man carried my passport into an office and looked me up on the computer. It confirmed my Indefinite Leave, and I was free to go. No problem. Returning from South Korea a month later, I had the exact same experience. Then I took the train to Paris, and on my return I got a female border agent who really laid into me. “Why haven’t you gotten a new Indefinite Leave sticker?”
I reminded her that the process takes a great deal of time. It involves surrendering your passport—a problem, as I’d been traveling nonstop for work.
She crossed her arms. “What do you do for a living?”
I told her I was a writer, and she said very sternly that I could write at home.
“Well, not about South Korea,” I wanted to say, but it’s pointless to argue with people like her, so I just stood there, shaking.
“I don’t even have to let you in,” she hissed. “Do you realize that?”
I cleared my throat. “Yes.”
“What did you say?”
I felt the people behind me watching, and sensed them thinking, as I often do, What’s with the troublemaker? “Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
It seemed she wouldn’t be happy until I was crying. “Yes, I realize you don’t have to let me in.”
I don’t think I’ve ever felt more foolish than I did at that moment. Who was I to feel at home in another country, to believe that filling out forms and scoring high marks on a test guaranteed me the same sense of belonging I take for granted in the United States? Had a border agent there given me trouble, I might have gotten frustrated, but I doubt that my hands would have shaken, or that my voice, after climbing another three octaves, would have quivered and broken, leaving me to sound like Snow White with Parkinson’s. “But…,” I wanted to say, “but I thought you liked me.”
“Walk this way.” The woman lifted herself, muttering, from her chair, and as she left her booth, I glanced at her belt, expecting to find scalps swinging from it. Grabbing my bag, I followed her to an office, where one of her colleagues looked me up on the computer. My passport was stamped, and after ten minutes spent sitting on a bench and thinking about my thief, I was free to go. Hugh suggested I’d simply gotten the wrong border agent, but the experience was so unsettling that after returning to London I had him complete the paperwork for a new Indefinite Leave sticker. The forms were sent, along with my passport and a sizable check, to the British Home Office, and after a week I received a letter saying that they’d gotten my envelope and should hopefully get back to me within six months.
I said to Hugh, “Six months?”
“That’s at the latest,” he told me. “For all you know, it could come next week.”
I sent off my passport at the beginning of June, and when, by mid-July, it had still not been returned, I had to cancel a reading in Italy. When it did not come by the end of July, I had to forfeit a nonrefundable Eurostar ticket to France. Nobody likes having a problem, but having a convoluted, bureaucratic one is even more galling. When I explained it to people face-to-face, I would see their eyes glazing over, and when I explained it over the phone, I could feel them turning on their computers and checking their retirement accounts.
Without my passport, I was stuck in the country I had immigrated to. And all because of some drug addict in Hawaii. While he got high on the beach, I endured one of the wettest, coldest summers on record. Growing up in North Carolina, I got my fill of hot, sticky weather. Ninety-degree heat does nothing for me—I hate it. A little warmth wouldn’t have hurt, though, a couple of days when I didn’t have to wear both a sweater and a long undershirt, these beneath a hideous plastic poncho. I honestly hadn’t known it was possible to rain that much. It was so bad in West Sussex that baby birds were drowning in their nests. Even frogs were dying. Frogs! Our Italy trip was to be a reading with a few days of vacation tacked on. But instead of driving through the Piedmont with Hugh and our friend Eduardo, I walked the roads surrounding our house, wearing knee-high Wellingtons and watching as bloated slugs floated by.
Everyone but me seemed to be going places.
Once a week, in an attempt to break the monotony, Hugh and I would grab our jumbo golf umbrellas and slog down the road to the pub, where we’d catch up on the local news. One of our few neighbors who had not yet flown to Spain had her house broken into while she was upstairs asleep. The thief stole her purse and, after discovering that her car keys were in it, took her Audi as well. In response, the local police suggested that, as a precautionary measure, we all start sleeping with our keys.
Had they responded this way in France or America, it wouldn’t have surprised me, but wasn’t everyone in England supposed to be a detective? Wasn’t every crime, no matter how complex, solved in a timely fashion by either a professional or a hobbyist? That’s the impression you get from British books and TV shows. Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Hetty Wainthropp, Inspector George Gently: they come from every class and corner of the country. There’s even Edith Pargeter’s Brother Cadfael, a Benedictine monk who solved crimes in twelfth-century Shrewsbury. No surveillance cameras, no fingerprints, not even a telephone, and still he cracked every case that came his way. But now, almost nine hundred years later, the solution is to sleep with our keys? “How’s that for progress?” I said to Hugh as we waded home. “I mean, why not just tell us to sleep in our cars?”
In mid-October I was scheduled to fly to the U.S., and then on to thirty cities as part of a lecture tour. Canceling it was out of the question, so in early September I called the Home Office and demanded that they send my passport back. This meant canceling my application and losing the five hundred dollars that accompanied it, but what choice did I have? The person I spoke to on the phone explained that the return process could take up to twenty working days. She also said that if I left for the States, there was no guarantee the British government would let me back into the U.K.
I hung up thinking there were worse things than being deported from England. What’s with a country that takes six months to replace a sticker in somebody’s passport, this when it’s all right there on the computer? Then I thought of other things I don’t like about the place: the littering, the public drunkenness, the way they say “Jan” instead of January. There are problems everywhere, of course. It’s just that without my passport I can’t adequately appreciate them.
A few days into my tour of the U.S., someone on Oahu came upon a computer bag with a checkbook and a passport in it. He or she then took them to the nearest post office, along with a note reading, “Aloha. These were found abandoned. Very important documents. I hope they can find their way back to the owner.” There was no name at the bottom, just the word “Thanks.”
The postal supervisor used my checkbook to track down my banker, and three days later I had my old passport back. After opening it up and kissing my Indefinite Leave to Remain sticker, I called the Hawaiian postal supervisor, who told me that my things had been found in the vicinity of the house I’d rented, not far from the area I’d scoured with Gretchen. That was all he could tell me. Neither the passport nor the checkbook smelled of mildew, so maybe they were only recently tossed out. By whom? I no longer care. Instead of thinking about my burglar, I’m turning my imagination toward the unidentified person who so thoughtfully ended my nightmare with the British Home Office. I think of good instead of evil. I believe in luck again. It would have been nice to get my computer back, but I can live with its loss. My only regret is that my case was so anticlimactic. What began as a mystery ended as an even bigger one. Who are you, Good Samaritan? I wonder. What are you doing right this minute? Donating bone marrow? Reading to the blind? Teaching crippled children to dance?
On returning to England in early December, I handed two passports to my Heathrow border agent. He looked at the old one containing my Indefinite Leave sticker, and then at the new one, which he stamped and handed back. He may have said, “Welcome home,” or it might have been simply “Next.” In the way of people who have better things on their minds, I didn’t quite bother to listen.