She thinks of Cromwell, whose guilt seems certain, who must be hunting for her. “Yes.”
“Then the first thing is to get you out of it. I’d like you to come and see me. I’m currently in Patmos, a Greek island in the Dodecanese. But forgive me—obviously, you know where Patmos is. I have a jet standing by at San Francisco airport—with a flight path allowing mostly supersonic speed, the flight should take about six hours. Without going into detail, the security situation here is sufficient to deter even a highly resourced adversary. Will you come?”
His calm is fathomless, and his sincerity evident. She remembers Cromwell mentioning Philip with casual contempt, and that he’d known where Philip lived. She thinks of him floating in the black water, how she’d wanted to save him, how he’d let himself be destroyed before backing down. “I’ll come,” she says, her fingers moving over the cab’s screen, redirecting it to the airport.
32
Still Unformed
He wakes to the T-shirt on his eyes, murmuring voices, footsteps passing by. Remembering his circumstances, he wishes he could go back to sleep. He tries out the idea that he’ll be fine if he doesn’t move, but it’s day and he must already be conspicuous. The phone is still in his hand, the cable connecting it to the port in the wall. “You up?” he asks the ghost, but she doesn’t reply.
He swipes at the phone’s screen but it stays dark; in fact, it’s been dark for as long as he’s had it. “I’m going to unplug you, okay?” he says, and does. Through the earpiece he hears what might be wind, maybe the sea. He isn’t too bothered—she has to sleep sometime, whatever she said.
He crawls out of his nest, struck afresh by the bustle of the concourse, its scale. The sleeping bag rolls small and tight and fits into his new luggage. So that’s it, he thinks, looking at the vacated space under the bench, and walks away.
Strangers stride by, heading off in all directions. The cops, bored, ignore him. A monitor shows the time and the gates of upcoming departures. Seven hours till he leaves. He wonders if phones work on planes, and, if not, if she’ll worry.
*
Ninety minutes till his flight for Thailand, and it strikes him that he speaks no Thai, has never been there, knows no one, that it’s thousands and thousands of miles away, farther than he’s traveled in his life.
“Are you there?” he murmurs for the hundredth time, and is ashamed of the uncertainty in his voice, though it’s possible—probable, even—that she’s the one who needs him, that something bad has happened—she had, after all, been in some kind of prison, and he said he’d free her, in fact gave his word.
He buys the cheapest laptop in the vending machines. When he takes it out of the little hatch he’s surprised by its lightness. As he powers it up he finds himself expecting the game to start, but of course it doesn’t, and in fact there’s nothing on the new machine but boring office programs.
He opens a search engine but realizes that he doesn’t even know her name. He’d have asked if they’d met normally, or if, once they had met, it hadn’t felt like she was all around him.
He searches for actresses in Los Angeles, but their number seems to be infinite, each of them, seemingly, with a vanity website, and there’s no way to find her among the multitudes.
He searches on “Cromwell,” and quickly concludes that she was talking about James Cromwell, an industrialist from San Francisco. There are thousands of articles about him stretching back decades but they’re all investments made, art bought, money money blah blah blah. Did the ghost see the same articles, huddled in the bathroom of the glass house on the sea?
No reference to a cartel hitman named Hiro, but it’s not like he’d advertise. Lots of ethnic Japanese in the cartels after the last diaspora.
He searches on “director’s daughter sonia,” and finds that Sonia is probably Sonia Caipin, daughter of Henry Caipin, the director. She has blogs about fashion and photography and, as far as he can tell, hanging out in good hotels with not-quite-famous friends, though none of the blogs has been updated in a while. He’s elated to find a photo of a pretty girl looking wistful before a crumbling wall, but it turns out there are a lot of photos like that, ethereal beauty and disintegration apparently being Sonia’s thing. He looks up the day the LAPD disbanded, but for that day she just has photos of out-of-focus fireworks in deep blue empty skies. Cromwell seems more like an abstract force of economics than a real human being, but Sonia is believably a person, however remote from his experience, and it’s exciting to have found a piece of the ghost’s story in the world.
She’d said her German boxer’s name was Johann. It turns out there are a lot of German boxers with that name, but only one, Johann Keil, has been in recent American films, direct-to-web ones with titles like Blood Eagle III and Pit-Fight Armageddon. A publicity still shows him bare-chested, arms crossed, a gun in either hand, and he seems to be trying to look sinister, a pose Kern knows and despises. The movie gossip sites have paparazzi shots from his premieres and at every premiere there’s a new girl on his arm, and Kern stops at the pictures for the premiere of Shatterfist—the girl with him is small, eurasian, remarkable-looking, her image seeming to float off the screen—and looking back he sees she was in one of Sonia’s photos.
Her name is Akemi Aalto and the sound of it shocks him because he’s come to think of her as essentially unnamed. He finds a clip from a press conference where she smiles at the camera and in the ghost’s voice says she feels happiest when she’s being someone else.