LITMIR.BIZ

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of Public Information.’ As if speaking to a dim-witted child who had forgotten his most rudimentary times tables.

      Will kicked himself for asking. He should have bluffed it out.

      The DCPI was on the other side of the corpse, talking to the TV guy. Will had to walk round until he was only a foot or two from the dead body of Howard Macrae. He stared hard into the blanket, hoping to guess at the face that lay beneath. Maybe the blanket would reveal an outline, like those clay masks used by sculptors. He kept looking but the dull, dark shroud yielded nothing.

      The DCPI was in mid-flow. ‘. . . our guess is that this was either score-settling by the SVS against the Wrecking Crew, or else an attempt by the Houston prostitution network to take over Macrae’s patch.’

      Only then did she seem to notice Will, her expression instantly changing to denote a lack of familiarity. The shutters had come down. Will got the message: the casual banter was for Carl McGivering only.

      ‘Could I just get the details?’

      ‘One African-American male, aged forty-three, approximately a hundred and eighty pounds, identified as Howard Macrae, found dead on Saratoga and St Marks Avenues at 9.27pm this evening. Police were alerted by a resident of the neighbourhood who dialled 911 after finding the body while walking to the 7-Eleven.’ She nodded to indicate the store: over there. ‘Cause of death appears to be severing of arteries, internal bleeding and heart failure due to vicious and repeated stabbing. The New York Police Department is treating this crime as homicide and will spare no resources in bringing the perpetrator to justice.’

      The blah-blah tone told Will this was a set formulation, one all DCPIs were required to repeat. No doubt it had been scripted by a team of outside consultants, who probably wrote a NYPD mission statement to go with it. Spare no resources.

      ‘Any questions?’

      ‘Yes. What was all that about prostitution?’

      ‘Are we on background now?’

      Will nodded, agreeing that anything the DCPI said could be used, so long as Will did not attribute it to her.

      ‘The guy was a pimp. Well-known as such to us and to everyone who lives here. Ran a brothel, on Atlantic Avenue near Pleasant Place. Kind of like an old-fashioned whorehouse, girls, rooms – all under one roof.’

      ‘Right. What about the fact that he was found in the middle of the street? Isn’t that a little strange, no attempt to hide the body?’

      ‘Gangland killing, that’s how they work. Like a drive-by shooting. It’s right out there in the open, in your face. No attempt to hide the body ’cause that’s part of the point. To send a message. You want everyone to know, “We did this, we don’t care who knows about it. And we’d do it to you.”’

      Will scribbled as fast as he could, thanked the DCPI and reached for his cell phone. He told Metro what he had: they told him to come in, there was still time to make the final edition. They would only need a few paragraphs. Will was not surprised. He had read the Times long enough to know this was not exactly hold-the-front-page material.

      He did not let on to the desk, to the DCPI or to any of the other reporters there that this was in fact the first murder he had ever covered. At the Bergen Record, homicides were rarer fare and not to be wasted on novices like him. It was a pity because there was one detail which had caught Will’s eye but which he had put out of his mind almost immediately. The other hacks were too jaded to have noticed it at all, but Will saw it. The trouble was, he assumed it was routine.

      He did not realize it at the time, but it was anything but.

THREE

       Saturday, 12.30am, Manhattan

      At the office, he hammered the ‘send’ key on the keyboard, pushed back his chair and stretched. It was half-past midnight. He looked around: most of the desks were empty, only the night layout area was still fully staffed – cutting and slicing, rewriting and crafting the finished product which would spread itself open on Manhattan breakfast tables in just a few hours’ time.

      He strode around the office, pumped by a minor version of the post-filing high – that surge of adrenalin and relief once a story is done. He wandered, stealing a glance at the desks of his colleagues, bathed only in the flickering light of CNN, on mute.

      The office was open plan, but a system of partitions organized the desks into pods, little clusters of four. As a newcomer, Will was in a far-off corner. His nearest window looked out onto a brick wall: the back of a Broadway theatre bearing a now-faded poster for one of the city’s longest-running musicals. Alongside him in the pod was Terry Walton, the former Delhi bureau chief who had returned to New York under some kind of cloud; Will had not yet discovered the exact nature of his misdemeanour. His desk consisted of a series of meticulous piles surrounding a single yellow legal pad. On it was handwriting so dense and tiny, it was unintelligible to all but the closest inspection: Will suspected this was a kind of security mechanism, devised by Walton to prevent any snoopers taking a peek at his work. He was yet to discover why a man whose demotion to Metro meant he was hardly working on stories sensitive to national security would take such a precaution.

      Next was Dan Schwarz, whose desk seemed to be on the point of collapse. He was an investigative reporter; there was barely room for his chair, all floor space consumed by cardboard boxes. Papers were falling out of other papers; even the screen on Schwarz’s computer was barely visible, bordered by a hundred Post-it notes stuck all around the edge.

      Amy Woodstein’s desk was neither anally neat like Walton’s nor a public health disaster like Schwarz’s. It was messy, as befitted the quarters of a woman who worked under her very own set of deadlines – always rushing back to relieve a nanny, let in a childminder or pick up from nursery. She had used the partition walls to pin up not yet more papers, like Schwarz, or elegant, if aged, postcards, like Walton, but pictures of her family. Her children had curly hair and wide, toothy smiles – and, as far as Will could see, were permanently covered in paint.

      He went back to his own desk. He had not found the courage to personalize it yet; the pin-board partition still bore the corporate notices that were there when he arrived. He saw the light on his phone blinking. A message.

       Hi babe. I know it’s late but I’m not sleepy yet. I’ve got a fun idea so call me when you’re done. It’s nearly one. Call soon.

      His spirits lifted instantly. He had banked on a tip-toed re-entry into the apartment, followed by a pre-bed bowl of Cheerios. What did Beth have in mind?

      He called. ‘How come you’re still awake?’

      ‘I dunno, my husband’s first murder perhaps? Maybe it’s just everything that’s going on. Anyway, I can’t sleep. Do you wanna meet for bagels?’

      ‘What, now?’

      ‘Yeah. At the Carnegie Deli.’

      ‘Now?’

      ‘I’ll get a cab.’

      Will liked the idea of the Carnegie Deli as much as, perhaps more than, the reality. The notion of a coffee shop that never slept, where old-time Broadway comedians and now-creaking chorus girls might meet for an after-show pastrami sandwich; the folks reading first editions of the morning papers, scanning the pages for notices of their latest hit or flop, their cups constantly refilled with steaming brown liquid – it was all so New York. He wanted the waitresses to look harried, he liked it when people butted in line – it all confirmed what he knew was a tourist’s fantasy of the big city. He suspected he should be over this by now: he had, after all, lived in America for more than five years. But he could not pretend to be a native.

      He got there first, bagging a table behind a noisy group of middle-aged couples. He caught snatches of conversation, enough to work out they were not Manhattanites, but in from Jersey. He guessed they had taken in a show, almost certainly a long-running

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