White Death (10 page)

‘You’re
sure
you haven’t heard from him?’ he said.

Thomas Unzicker shook his head. He wore square-rimmed glasses and a
WHO THE FUCK ARE HARVARD
?
sweatshirt. He was twenty-four, and still got ID-checked in pretty much every bar from here to Cape Cod.

Nursultan clattered his spoon into the saucer. ‘We
have
to get hold of him.’

Unzicker stared at Nursultan a good ten seconds before replying. Nursultan didn’t break the gaze. Unzicker rarely spoke unless the subject was computers, when you couldn’t
shut him up; but otherwise, almost nothing. Nursultan didn’t
know whether Unzicker was just shy or whether it was something deeper, more pathological. He didn’t care, either way. He wanted Unzicker for his peculiar form of genius, not for his company.

‘His mom’s dead.’ Unzicker’s voice was little more than a whisper. Nursultan had to lean forward to hear it. It was always like this. If a door slammed or someone was talking outside, you had to ask Unzicker to repeat himself; that’s how quietly he spoke.

‘I want to talk with him. Much important on this, you know. He being difficult before his mother dead. He try to play me both way, yes? Be difficult with title match, get advantage on this project. Or maybe other way round. But I not have it. I not do business that way. So tell me: you need him for this?’

‘Yes.’

‘
Really
need him?’

‘Yes.’

‘You can’t do it on your own? Or get someone else in for him?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘This thing’s only going to work with the kind of chess Kwasi plays.’

‘There are other super-grandmasters.’

Unzicker shook his head again. ‘Too much to explain to someone new.’

‘If someone beats us to it …’ Unzicker shrugged; Nursultan kept talking. ‘You
sure
no one else know about this?’ Headshake. ‘What that mean? Yes, no one know, or no, you not sure?’

‘I haven’t told anyone.’

‘The police? They been round?’ Headshake. ‘They check up on things. They want to find out about his mother, they examine every bit of his life, then they find us.’

‘We’re not doing anything illegal.’

‘No. But what we do, it is secret.’ He rubbed his fingers together. ‘Valuable.’

Unzicker said nothing. In the corridor outside, a quartet of students in gym shorts padded past. A squeal of laughter from the day-care center echoed off the walls.

Nursultan looked out of the window, across a roofscape dotted with Technicolor huts. MIT, he thought, was supposed to be about reason, logic, engineering excellence. But this building was like one of those car-crash sculptures, like someone had just thrown it up. It didn’t even look finished. And that was the point. What Unzicker was doing here, what everyone was doing here, it was all nothing more than work in progress. Science was an open question. Every discovery made was merely a stepping stone to the next one.

Frank Gehry, who’d designed this place, had said the same about his buildings: they always looked more interesting under construction than when they were finished. That’s what he’d wanted here: that restless sense of something still happening. The floorplans looked like fractals. That was deliberate, to make sure the people inside didn’t think linearly. They were doing research that could change the world, they had to think in weird dimensions. If the building looked like it was leaping off the planet, so were the people inside. That was the theory, anyway.

Nursultan smiled and stood. ‘Moment you hear something, you tell me. Remember who pay you. Remember how much more I pay when we make this work.’

He patted Unzicker on the shoulder. It felt to Unzicker like the grasp of a bear’s claw.

Patrese had settled in to New Haven for the long haul, whether he liked it or not. The Bureau had booked him a room – special rates for government employees, naturally – in the downtown New Haven Hotel, conservatively named and conservatively decorated in various tones of corporate taupe.

He’d had the New Orleans field office FedEx him up a bunch of his suits, dress shirts and black leather Oxfords so he’d actually look like a Bureau agent. All he’d had packed when Kieseritsky had first called on Sunday morning was casual clothes for a weekend at the football.

He’d spent the past couple of days following up leads that had started without promise and had become even more hopeless. In the process, he’d gotten himself acquainted with the city’s geography and neighborhoods. Westville, East Rock and the East Shore were the ‘best’ – for which, read ‘richest’ – places to live. Fair Haven, the Hill and Dwight-Kensington were at the other end of the scale. As was so often the case, Patrese thought, the prettier the name, the bigger the shithole.

The first forty-eight hours after the murders had come and gone, and with them the hope that this thing might get solved quick and clean. The task force had followed up any known cases of criminal pairings, be they siblings, couples, friends, colleagues or any other imaginable permutation. Nothing doing.

And meantime, pressure was mounting from several directions at once. The press were clamoring for more information, which meant an arrest or another victim. Kwasi King wanted his mother’s body back so he could give her a proper burial, but the medical examiner wanted to keep hold of it a while longer, perhaps even till the crime was solved. Patrese had rung Kwasi to tell him. Kwasi had delivered himself of an unflattering opinion of medical examiners in general and the New Haven one in particular. Kwasi was well into the anger phase of grief, Patrese had thought.

Anna’s tarot reading had freaked Patrese more than he wanted to admit. The Fool had annoyed him; the Moon had unsettled him; and as for the Tower, men diving to earth while the building burned behind them … it reminded him of the pictures from New York on the day seared into America’s collective memory, when some of those trapped above the firelines in the Twin Towers had been pushed or jumped to their lonely, brutal deaths. An uncanny harbinger of that tragedy, no? If the Tarot was right about that, what else might it be right about?

Now Patrese was in the hotel bar, about to order dinner before turning in for the night. He couldn’t be bothered to go out, but equally he thought it defeatist to order room service. Hence the bar.

The waitress informed him that tonight’s special was apizza, a white clam pie pizza with a thin crust and no mozzarella. Apizza was New Haven’s main contribution to world cuisine, and boy did you know it when you were
here. If one more person in this town asked Patrese whether
he’d tried it, he might start committing murders himself rather than trying to solve them.

His cellphone rang. He held a finger up to the waitress: let me get this.

The display showed a 212 number. Manhattan code. Kwasi?

‘Patrese.’

‘Agent Patrese?’ A man’s voice, deep and rough: not Kwasi’s. ‘My name is Bobby Dufresne. I’m a detective with the NYPD, Twenty-Sixth Precinct.’

He didn’t need to tell Patrese why he was calling.

It’s seventy-five miles, give or take, between downtown New Haven and the campus of Columbia University in Upper Manhattan’s Morningside Heights district. Lights flashing and sirens blaring, Patrese managed the journey inside forty-five minutes.

He found his way to the murder site easily enough: it was lit up by the blues and reds lazily rotating on the roofs of the half-dozen police cruisers in attendance. At the main entrance to an austere-looking stone building, two uniforms stood guard behind crime-scene tape. A hundred or so students milled around, weeping on each other’s shoulders or talking dazedly into cellphones. A shrine seemed to be growing organically on a patch of grass nearby: candles, photographs, T-shirts, scarves.

HARTLEY,
proclaimed letters on the building’s front wall. Patrese turned sideways, edged through a gap between two students, and flipped his badge at the uniforms. One of them stepped forward and lifted up the tape for him to duck under.

‘Down the corridor, sir. It’s right at the end, in the corner.’

‘Thanks.’

Crime-scene officers flitted through bright pools of arc lights. Halfway along the corridor, Patrese stopped one of them and asked where he could find Detective Dufresne.

‘Right over there.’ A finger swathed tight in blooded latex pointed at a black man by the far wall. Dufresne had a sports jacket and a goatee beard trimmed to what looked like an accuracy of micrometers. He came across, hand extended.

‘Agent Patrese?’ A glance at his watch. ‘Where’s Mario?’

Patrese stiffened. An Italian insult right off the bat?

‘Mario?’ He kept his voice neutral.

‘Andretti. No other way you could have got here this fast.’

Patrese laughed. ‘Mario’s got the night off. Dale said he’d drive instead.’

Dufresne clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Glad you made it. Pleasure to meet you. Heard a lot about you, all that stuff down in New Orleans round about Katrina. Took an interest in the voodoo side, for obvious reasons.’

Patrese made a quick calculation: black skin, French name, voodoo, New York’s diaspora. ‘You’re Haitian?’

‘Came here when I was nine. Never going back. Anyhows, I can give you my life story sometime else.’ He gestured toward the corner room. ‘You wanna go on in?’

‘Sure.’ Patrese started to walk toward the room. ‘What happened?’

‘Deceased’s name is Dennis Barbero. President of Columbia’s BSO, the Black Students Organization. Not as minority as you might think, this being Ivy League and all. Columbia’s got more black students than most, and the, er, head guy, the president of the university, he’s a big fan of affirmative action.’

‘You got an ID so fast?’

‘Excuse me? Oh, you mean ’cos he’s got no head and shit? Yeah, yeah, definitely him. Definitely Dennis Barbero. Public Enemy T-shirt he always wore, that’s on the, er, body, and also, he’s one of the few who had a key to open this room up.’

They reached the door. Dufresne gestured: After you.

‘G-body meeting of the BSO, every …’

‘G-body?’

‘General body. General meeting. Every Thursday, nine till eleven, right in here, but it’s locked when not in use. Dennis had to open it up.’

There was a sign on the door.
MALCOLM X LOUNGE, 106 HARTLEY HALL
.

Patrese stepped inside.

Blood everywhere, all over the walls and floor, as though a herd of pigs had been slaughtered in here rather than one man. Dennis’ body was sprawled between a table and two chairs. Unlike Regina King and Darrell Showalter, he was clothed. Like them, he was missing a head and one of his arms.

The Public Enemy T-shirt had the band’s famous logo: the silhouette of a black man’s head with a beret, as seen through rifle sights. The shirt had ridden up to reveal the missing patch of skin. The left arm of his shirt had been severed, along with the arm itself. There was a tarot card near the body, but it was too far away for Patrese to make out exactly what it was.

He looked round the room. On the near wall, a painting – Sherman Edwards’
My Child, My Child
, according to a card alongside – from which a staggeringly beautiful black woman, dressed in a purple shawl and clutching a naked baby tight to her chest, stared at Patrese in silent, reproachful challenge. Directly opposite was a poster-sized photo of Malcolm X himself, lips pursed, right index finger raised, old-fashioned radio microphone in front of him, and beneath it a quotation:

‘We declare our right on this Earth to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being.’

And to be killed like an animal, Patrese thought bitterly.

He went closer, careful not to step in any of the outlying islands of blood. He peered at the tarot card. A young man in armor astride a charging horse, sword held high in his right hand. The Knight of Swords.

Since Anna had told his fortune, Patrese had pondered and studied the major arcana with a fervor some might have thought obsessional. He knew this card wasn’t among them. The knight of swords was minor arcana, the lesser secrets. He’d have to go back to Anna tomorrow and pick her brains all over again.

No tarot reading, though; not after last time. That was for damn sure.

He turned to Dufresne. ‘Give me the timescale. What do we know?’

‘I’ll walk you through it; it’s easier. Let’s get out of here.’

The Columbia campus stretches over six city blocks, but in
the last few hours of his life, Dennis had moved within only one of them. Hartley Hall was located at the eastern side of this block, on 114th and Amsterdam: Dufresne took Patrese over to Alfred Lerner Hall on the western side, 114th and Broadway. Patrese glanced at the 114th Street sign.

‘Across 110th Street, huh?’ he said.

Dufresne laughed. ‘Oh, you’re not in Harlem yet. 110th Street’s the marker only over to the Upper East. Round this side of the park, us niggers don’t start in earnest till north of 125th. Matter of fact, this precinct’s one of the safest in the city. Till tonight.’

There was another uniform at the entrance to Lerner Hall. He snapped to attention as Dufresne approached.

‘Easy, son,’ Dufresne said. ‘This ain’t
Crimson Tide
.’

Dufresne and Patrese rode the elevator to the sixth floor, where Dufresne led the way through two sets of fire doors to a sign:
WKCR, 89.9 FM
. Columbia University Student Radio Station.

‘Dennis was here, seven thirty till eight thirty. Did it every week: Dennis Barbero’s Black Music Hour. Played whatever he wanted to play, long as it was black. Could be Martha Reeves or Kool Herc, could be Gladys Knight or Grandmaster Flash. One of the most popular shows they have.’ He made a face. ‘Had.’

Patrese smiled: it was the most natural mistake in the world.

‘Anyhows,’ Dufresne continued, ‘show finishes eight thirty. Dennis hands over to the guy doing the news headlines – on the half-hour, short ones only – says adios to the producer, and leaves.’ He took Patrese back through the fire doors, down again in the elevator, and through the main foyer. ‘A couple of people see him here, leaving the building.’