Triskellion 3: The Gathering (10 page)

“Sit down, Crow.”

The man tugged at the creases in his trousers and sat down opposite the director. He rubbed a hand over his blond buzz-cut and cleared his throat.

“How do you explain this?” The director waved the piece of paper at Crow and read the bullet points aloud: the body of a Hope operative had been found in a burnt-out house in Western Australia. He had been shot before being burned.

“I don’t know, sir, is the truth. We picked up the message from the Australian police yesterday.”

“Let me get this right, Crow,” the director said; “we’re one of the world’s most secretive and powerful intelligence services and now we’re letting hick Australian policemen from Woola-Woola do our investigating for us?”

“No, sir,” Crow protested. “I thought our agent had it under control. He’d found the house and had it watched by the local operative there.”

The director stared at the map of Australia on his desk, then he took a pen and drew a line through the circle around Perth up to the area where the dead man had been found.

“Our agent assured me it would be easy once they’d found the house,” Crow continued. “He didn’t expect any resistance; it was just two women and two kids.”

“Are you out of your mind, Crow? Have you forgotten what the Hope Project is about? Have you forgotten where these kids are from and what they are capable of?”

Crow looked at the desk and ground his teeth. “No, sir.”

“At best you are irresponsible, letting our agent go there alone. At worst, you are incompetent.”

Crow went to speak; the director held up his hand to silence him. “I don’t want to hear any more. It was you who persuaded me that Van der Zee’s idea to let those kids loose in the first place was the right thing to do. If I’d taken my own advice, we’d have them sliced up and bottled in specimen jars – where they belong – by now. And Van der Zee would still be alive, and so would one of our best agents.
And
we might have some conclusive research results!”

“I think the agent wanted the glory of bringing them in alone,” Crow said, attempting to defend himself.

“This isn’t about glory. He was your responsibility, Crow.”

As the director tidied the papers on his desk, Crow felt that his dressing-down was coming to an end. “I’m going to recommend you for a transfer,” the director said, looking up at Crow, who appeared to be holding his breath. “To Alamogordo.”

Crow was horrified. There were some postings that might have suited him, but being sent to the most secretive Hope Project centre of all, in the middle of the New Mexico desert, was like a death sentence. Once you went to Alamogordo, you never came back from the wilderness. Crow couldn’t speak. He rose from his chair.

“With immediate effect, Crow,” the director added. “Clear your desk.”

Crow slunk out of the office, his head hung low.

“Hey, Crow,” the director called after him. Crow turned back, a look on his face that said he expected his boss to reveal it was all a big joke and that he still had his job in New York.

“Yes, sir?” he said.

“Alamogordo’s not so bad.” The director smiled. “I sort of grew up there. So long…”

Rachel was not satisfied. She could not believe that the apartment was no longer theirs. “I’m going in,” she said.

“You sure?” Adam asked. But Rachel was already rapping on the door.

The young woman opened it again, looking exasperated. “What?” she said. “I told you I couldn’t help you.”

Rachel held the door open and fixed the woman with her eyes, holding her gaze, waiting until she had control. “I know. I’m really sorry,” she said, “but I’m sure you wouldn’t mind if we just looked around.”

The expression on the woman’s face softened and she began to smile. “Sure,” she said, as if they were old friends. “Come in.” She opened the door wider and the three of them walked in.

“I’m Rachel, and this is Adam … and Gabriel,” Rachel said.

“I’m Holly,” the woman said, shaking hands. “And this is Ben.” She pointed to a toddler, who was sitting on the floor, surrounded by toys and building bricks, watching
Sesame Street
– just as Rachel and Adam had in this room ten years or so before.

“Hi, Ben,” Rachel said.

“Say hello, Ben,” his mother said. “Sorry, he doesn’t really speak much yet. He’s only just turned two.”

Ben looked at them, but said nothing.

Holly led them through the living room and into the kitchen. Rachel’s eyes flicked around, taking in the differ-ences and the similarities. They were certainly the same rooms, but now they were filled with someone else’s taste and furniture. Everything looked so different. The kitchen was the only thing that had remained the same; the industrial cooker and the steel worktops on which they had last eaten their breakfast more than two years before had not changed.

“Love your kitchen,” Rachel said.

“Thanks,” Holly said, wiping the surface with her hand. “We left it just as it was when we moved in. We decorated everywhere else.”

“You don’t have any old letters or bills and stuff from the previous owners, do you?” Adam asked.

“I don’t think so,” Holly said. “I’ll have a look, though.”

She went to a cupboard and pulled out a few letters and handed them to Adam. He flicked through the pile; it was mostly free offers for people whose names meant nothing to him.

“Thanks,” he said, handing them back.

“Can I get you guys a drink?” Holly asked.

Although she would have loved one, Rachel felt it was time to go. The apartment was no longer theirs.

The twins followed Holly back into the sitting room, where they had left Gabriel watching TV and playing with Ben. In the middle of the floor was a building of astonishing complexity made of Lego bricks, drinking straws, cocktail sticks and anything else that had been to hand.

Holly gasped at the spires, the swooping walkways, the buttresses and the windows made of marbles and ice cubes that were beginning to melt, all lit from inside by a lava lamp and torch.

“Oh my God,” she said. “That’s so beautiful.”

Ben looked up at his mother and smiled. “Gabriel showed me how.”

Holly’s jaw dropped even further. Not only had her two-year-old son built an amazing construction from scratch, but he had also just put his first sentence together.

“I just helped him along a little,” Gabriel said, grinning.

Looking at him, Rachel realized suddenly how much she had missed that smile. Seeing Gabriel standing there in her old home, seeing the beauty of what he had accomplished and the joy he had brought to the child and his mother, she felt a rush of warmth towards him. But she also sensed that given their circumstances, such moments as these would be rare and brief. “We need to go,” she said. “Great to meet you.”

The young mother was still staring at the cathedral her child had built as they let themselves out of the apartment.

R
achel was disappointed. She had expected the apartment to yield at least some small intimation of their former life. Some clue as to their father’s whereabouts. Only the kitchen remained as proof that the place had ever been their home – all other evidence of their existence had long since been wiped away. They walked down the staircase in silence, past all the other anonymous apartment doors that concealed other people’s lives.

Back in the entrance hall they could hear hammering. The noise was coming from an open service door. Inside, a bulkhead light lit up a flight of stairs leading down to the basement.

Adam paused a moment and looked down.

Rachel read his thoughts: “Mr Hoffman?”

Adam nodded. The janitor of the block might still be the same one who had been here since they were small.

Adam and Rachel ventured downstairs towards the source of the banging, while Gabriel waited in the hall. The basement was concrete and brick: warm and dusty with thick pipes that provided the block with heat. In the corner, a man in a brown duster coat was attacking a heating pipe with a wrench.

“Mr Hoffman?” Rachel called.

The man could not hear her above the clanging. Rachel went over and touched him on the shoulder. He jumped and let out an involuntary cry. “What the…?”

As he turned, Rachel saw that it
was
Mr Hoffman, a little greyer and a touch heavier, but still the same man who had looked after the building for as long as they could remember.

“You tryin’ to gimme a heart attack? Whadda you want?” He gripped the wrench in his hand as if he might be about to fend them off with it. He looked from one twin to the other, not recognizing either of them.

“Sorry, Mr Hoffman we didn’t mean to alarm you. We’re Rachel and Adam Newman.”

“Congratulations,” Mr Hoffman said in a gruff voice. “Now if that’s all you came to tell me, can you leave me to get on with fixing this pipe?”

Rachel persevered. “Sorry, no. I mean we’re Rachel and Adam Newman who used to live in apartment three zero one.”

Mr Hoffman looked a little closer. “Lotta people come and gone recently. I can’t remember them all.”

“Our mother was …
is
Kate Newman. The English woman?”

“Sure. I remember Kate Newman. She was always polite to me. Good manners. Her husband was a schmuck, though. How could he leave a good woman like that and throw her out of house and home?”

“That was our mom and dad,” Adam said.

“Kate Newman had young kids,” Hoffman said. “Twins.”

Rachel pointed to herself and Adam. “That’s us,” she said. “We’ve grown a bit. It’s been two years, at least.”

Mr Hoffman looked at them closely again, a glimmer of recognition creeping across his face, followed by a smile. “You were the kid who fell off the fire escape?” He prodded Adam gently in the chest.

Adam nodded. He remembered the incident well. He had fallen from the first floor, nearly breaking his neck, but escaping miraculously with only cuts and bruises.

“You gave me quite a scare,” Mr Hoffman said, rubbing his chin. “Why, I knew you two when you were just babies. Cute little twins in pink and blue.”

Adam chuckled, embarrassed.

“You taking a trip down memory lane?”

“I suppose we are, in a way,” Rachel said. “We were just looking for any stuff of ours that might have been left here. You know, letters or anything like that. You see we can’t find our dad.”

Mr Hoffman gave them a look that said as far as he was concerned finding him would be no good thing, but aloud he told them to “Come into the office.”

They went into a small bleak room on the other side of the basement. Mr Hoffman had furnished it with a cushioned office chair. Padding exploded from the splits in its worn plastic upholstery and a scrawny-looking black and white cat lay curled up in one corner.

“That’s Bilko,” Hoffman said. “Meanest cat you ever saw.”

The cat opened its one eye, studied the children for a few seconds, then went back to sleep.

Besides the cat and chair, there were a kettle, some stained coffee mugs and an electric fire that was not needed in the stuffy underground air. On one wall, Mr Hoffman’s tools were arranged on a board, their shapes outlined in marker pen – where a tool had been lost or misplaced, its ghost remained, silhouetted by the outline. On the other side of the room was a battered filing cabinet and a desk, stacked up with papers, pens, half-smoked cigars, bits of junk in various shapes and sizes.

Mr Hoffman made a cursory attempt to tidy the surface of the desk, muttering all the while: “Newman … Newman. Apartment…”

“Three zero one,” Rachel prompted.

He looked in pigeon holes above the desk that were stuffed with papers and receipts and the odd fast-food carton.

“Newman. Newman…”

He climbed up on his chair and looked at wads of envelopes, held together by rubber bands and piled up on top of the pigeon holes.

“Newman. Newman…”

He climbed down again and looked in the drawer of the desk. It revealed cigar boxes, tins of cough sweets, tubs of oil and a variety of nuts, bolts and tubes of glue. Mr Hoffman stopped momentarily and scratched his head. He turned to see Rachel and Adam looking expectantly at him, watching his every move.

“What was that number again?”

“Three zero one,” Adam said.

Mr Hoffman opened the top drawer of the grey steel filing cabinet and flicked through the files suspended in the drawer. “Just give me a second…”

He slammed the top drawer shut and opened the middle one. He ran thick fingers, clearly not designed for administrative work, across the files. Then his fingers stopped. “Newman. Got it!”

He lifted a file from the cabinet and placed it on top of the other papers on his desk. He opened the folder and Rachel could see there were several letters inside. Mr Hoffman looked at the twins and tapped his head with his forefinger. “Knew there was something somewhere for Newman.”

Rachel’s stomach fluttered with excitement as she rifled through the letters. One stood out from the statements and utility bills. It was a thick white package with an English stamp showing the head of the Queen. It was addressed to
RACHEL AND ADAM NEWMAN
in a spidery handwriting that she recognized.