The Girl on Paper (26 page)

When I get home, I switch on the TV and grab a bowl of cereal. Riots have broken out all over the place and I’m looking at the first of three days of images showing looting, arson and clashes with the police. The blocks around the intersection of Florence and Normandie are in total chaos. Guys are running off with crates of food stolen from shops. Others are pushing trolleys or rolling pallets to carry off furniture, sofas or electrical appliances. The authorities are calling for calm, but I can tell this isn’t going to stop. Which actually suits me pretty well…

I gather up all the savings I’ve stashed inside my radio, pick up my skateboard and skate over to Marcus Blink’s.

Marcus is a local thug, a ‘good guy’ who doesn’t belong to any gangs and just flogs the odd prescription, deals a bit of weed and sells on a few firearms. We were at elementary school together and I was on the right side of him, because I’d helped his mom fill in her welfare papers a couple of times.

The whole neighbourhood’s on edge. Everyone knows the gangs are going to make the most of the disorder to settle a few scores.

In return for my $200, Marcus fetches me a Glock 22; they’re all over the place these days, with heaps of crooked cops selling on their weapons after reporting them lost. For another $20, he throws in a round of fifteen cartridges. I go back home, feeling the cold metal heavy in my pocket.

I don’t get much sleep that night. I’m thinking about Carole. There’s only one thing I care about, and that’s making sure the abuse stops for good. Fiction is a powerful thing, but it has its limits. My stories allow her to escape to an imaginary place for a few hours, far from the physical and mental torture her tormentor is putting her through. But it’s not enough. Living in a made-up world isn’t a long-term solution, any more than getting high or getting drunk to forget your problems.

There’s no getting around it: sooner or later, real life always catches up with you.

The next day, the violence returns with a vengeance, and the area’s in a state of complete lawlessness. Helicopters chartered by TV stations hover over the city, broadcasting live footage of LA under siege: more looting, beatings, buildings on fire and gun battles between law-enforcement officers and rioters. Numerous reports reveal the disorganisation and inaction of the police, standing by while the stealing goes on.

With the death toll rising, the mayor goes in front of the cameras to declare a state of emergency and announce he intends to call on the National Guard to enforce a curfew from dusk to dawn. But it backfires: knowing the party’s nearly over, the looting only cranks up a gear.

In our neighbourhood, it’s mostly the Asian-run shops that are ransacked. Tensions between blacks and Koreans are running high, and on this second day of rioting most of the small businesses, mini-markets and liquor stores run by Koreans are pulled apart and looted, with the police nowhere to be seen.

It’s almost midday. For the last hour I’ve been balancing on my skateboard, staking out Carole’s stepfather’s grocery store. He’s opened up this morning in spite of the risks, hoping he’ll manage to avoid the looters. But now he’s feeling under threat too and I sense he’s about to bring down the shutters.

That’s when I choose to come out from my hiding place.

‘Need a hand, Mr Alvarez?’

He doesn’t bat an eyelid. He knows me and I seem like a reliable kind of kid.

‘OK, Tom! Help me bring these boards in.’

I take one under each arm and follow him inside. It’s a pretty lousy grocery store, of which there are dozens in the area. The kind of place that really only stocks the bare essentials, and which will soon be driven out of business by the arrival of a local Walmart.

Cruz Alvarez is medium height, quite stocky, with a big, square face; the right kind of build to play a bit-part as the pimp or night-club owner in a movie.

‘You know, I always said one day those fucking—’ he starts, before turning round to see the Glock 22 aimed at him.

The store’s empty and there’s no CCTV. All I have to do is pull the trigger. I don’t want to say anything, not even, ‘Drop dead, you piece of shit.’ I’m not here to dish out justice or apply the law, or to hear his excuses either. There’s no glory, no heroism, no courage in what I’m about to do. I just want Carole’s suffering to end and this is the only way I can find to do it.

A few months ago, without telling her, I gave an anonymous tip-off at a family planning centre, but nothing came of it. I sent a letter to the police which was never followed up. I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong. I don’t believe in God and I don’t believe in fate. All I believe is that this is where I should be, standing behind this pistol with my finger on the trigger.

‘Tom! What the hell’s got into—’

I move closer so I can fire from point-blank range. I don’t want to miss and I don’t want to use more than one bullet.

I shoot.

His head explodes spattering blood all over my clothes. I’m alone in the store, alone in the world. I can hardly stay upright. My arms are shaking.

Get out of here!

I pick up the cartridge case and put it in my pocket with the gun. Then I run home. I take a shower, burn my clothes, carefully clean the pistol and throw it into a trash can. I hold on to the cartridge so I can turn myself in one day, if an innocent man is accused of the crime. But would I really be brave enough to do it?

I’ll probably never know.

‘I’ve never told anybody what I did that morning. I’ve just had to live with it.’

‘So what happened afterwards?’ asked Billie.

We were lying on the couch. Billie lay behind me with her hand on my chest, while I held on to her hip as though clinging to a raft.

Talking about it had lifted a weight off me. I knew she understood without judging me, which was all I hoped for.

‘That evening, Bush senior made a speech to the nation, saying anarchy wouldn’t be tolerated. The next day, 4,000 members of the National Guard were patrolling the city, with the Marines close behind. After that, things began to calm down and the mayor eventually lifted the curfew.’

‘And did they investigate?’

‘Around fifty people were killed and several thousand injured. There were thousands of arrests in the weeks that followed, some of them fair, some of them pretty random, but no one was ever formally accused of Cruz Alvarez’s murder.’

Billie put her hand over my eyes and kissed my neck.

‘We should get some sleep now.’

‘Goodbye, Milo. Thanks for listening,’ said Carole, rising to her feet.

Still in shock, he stood up too, gently holding her back.

‘Wait. How do you know it was Tom if he never told you?’

‘Because I’m a cop, Milo. Two years ago, I was given access to some LAPD archives and I asked to see the file on my stepfather’s death. There wasn’t much in there: a couple of statements, a few photos from the crime scene and some botched fingerprints. No one really gave a damn who’d shot a small storekeeper in MacArthur Park. But in one of the pictures, you could make out pretty clearly a skateboard propped against the wall, with a stylised shooting star painted on it.’

‘And this skateboard…’

‘… was a present from me to Tom,’ she said, turning away.

The entire surgical team surrounded Professor Jean-Baptiste Clouseau.

The professor sawed through Billie’s breastbone, from the bottom right up to just below her chin.

Then he looked inside the pericardium, to examine the coronary arteries and begin the process of putting Billie on bypass. He injected a strong potassium solution to stop the heart from beating, before attaching a pump in place of the heart, along with artificial lungs.

Every time he carried out open-heart surgery, Jean-Baptiste Clouseau felt the same fascination with this magical organ that keeps us alive with 100,000 beats every day, 36 million a year and more than 3 billion in a lifetime. And all from a little blood-filled pump that appeared to be so delicate.

He opened the right auricle then the left and set about removing the two tumours, each time cutting out the base of the growth to prevent them coming back. The fibrous tumour really was an unusual shape.

Thank God we caught it in time!

As a precaution, he explored the heart cavities and ventricles, looking for more myxomas, but there were none.

When he had finished, he reconnected the heart to the aorta, filled the lungs with air, attached drains to remove the blood and closed up the breastbone with steel wire.

Job done!
he thought to himself, pulling off his gloves and leaving the theatre.

The sun was setting over Seoul. The Korean capital’s roads were gridlocked, as they were every evening at rush hour.

Iseul Park exited the subway and crossed over to the campus. Nestling right in the heart of the student quarter, Ewha had more than 20,000 students and was one of the most prestigious universities in the country.

Iseul walked down the long gently sloping stairway to what everyone called ‘the valley’: a space surrounded by glass, with two buildings facing one another across a concrete walkway. She went into the main entrance of the translucent ocean liner of a building, whose ground floor, filled with shops and cafés, felt like a state-of-the-art shopping mall. She took the lift up to the higher levels, which housed the lecture halls, a theatre, cinema, sports hall and a huge twenty-four-hour library. She stopped to buy a green tea from the vending machine, before finding a space at the back of the room. You knew you
were in the twenty-first century here: every workspace had a computer with instant access to all the books in the library in digital form.

Iseul rubbed her eyes. She could barely stay awake. She’d only got back from her study tour two days ago and was already swamped with work. She spent a good chunk of the evening writing out revision cards and going over her notes, constantly glancing at her phone, quivering every time it buzzed to signal the arrival of an email or text, but it was never the one she was hoping for.

She was cold, shivering, going crazy. Why had Jimbo suddenly gone AWOL? Had he taken her for a ride, the one time she’d really opened up to somebody?

It was almost midnight. People were gradually leaving the library, but a few students would be there until 3 or 4 a.m. It was that sort of place.

Iseul took the Tom Boyd book she’d found in the tea room in Italy out of her bag. She flicked through it until she reached the photo of Luca Bartoletti and his girlfriend, Stella, on a scooter in Rome, aged nineteen.

‘Don’t ever stop loving me,’ the young Italian woman had written, which was exactly what she wanted to say to Jimbo.

She took a pair of scissors and a tube of glue out of her pencil case. Now it was her turn to fill up more of the blank pages, sticking in the best photos from the four happy weeks she’d spent with Jimbo. Her contribution to the selection of mementos consisted of tickets from the shows and exhibitions they’d enjoyed together, like the Tim Burton retrospective at MoMA and Chicago at the Ambassador Theater, as well as the films he’d introduced her to at the cinematheque at NYU, including
Donnie Darko, Requiem for a Dream
and
Brazil
.

She carried on all night, putting her heart and soul into it. Early in the morning, red-eyed and muddle-headed, she
dropped by the post office in the administrative building to buy a padded envelope before slipping the midnight-blue leather book inside and sending it to the United States.

Billie was slowly coming around. She was still on a ventilator and couldn’t speak because of the tube in her throat.

‘We’ll take that out in a few hours,’ Clouseau promised.

He checked the little electrodes he’d placed on her chest to stimulate the heart in case it slowed down.

‘No problems there,’ he said.

I smiled at Billie and she winked back at me. Everything was going to be fine.

‘Oh God, I’m late!’ the girl complained as she put her clothes back on. ‘You said you’d set your alarm!’

She smoothed her skirt, slipped on her pumps and buttoned up her shirt.

The young man lay watching her from the bed, smiling in amusement.

‘If you want to call me, you’ve got my number,’ she said, opening the bedroom door.

‘OK then, Christy.’

‘It’s Carry, jackass.’

James Limbo – who went by the name of Jimbo – grinned. He stood up and stretched, without bothering to apologise or trying to get his one-night stand to stay. He went to make himself some breakfast.

‘Shit, we’re out of coffee,’ he moaned, opening the kitchen cupboard.

He looked out of the window of the brownstone apartment to see Carry whoever she was heading up the road towards Houston Street.

Pretty good lay. Well, not bad. Six out of ten
. He frowned. Not good enough to give it another shot, anyway.

The door to the apartment opened and Jonathan, his flatmate, came in holding two cups of coffee from the coffee shop on the corner.

‘I ran into the UPS delivery guy downstairs,’ he said, pointing with his chin to the package under his arm.

‘Thanks,’ said Jimbo, grabbing the envelope and his double-shot caramel latte.

‘You owe me $3.75,’ announced Jonathan. ‘Plus the 650 I lent you for the rent two weeks ago.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ replied Jimbo evasively, studying the address on the back of the envelope.

‘It’s from Iseul Park, isn’t it?’

‘What’s it to you?’ he shot back, opening the package containing the Tom Boyd book.

Weird
, he thought to himself, leafing through the book to find the photos stuck in by its various owners.

‘I know you don’t give a shit what I think,’ Jonathan continued, ‘but I have to tell you, you’re really screwing Iseul around.’

‘You’re right, I don’t give a shit what you think,’ agreed Jimbo, taking a sip of coffee.

‘She keeps on leaving voicemails. She’s worried about you.
If you want to break it off with her, you could at least have the decency to tell her. Why do you have to act this way with women? What exactly is your problem?’

‘My problem is that life is short and we’re all gonna die. That a good enough explanation for you?’

‘No, I don’t see what that has to do with anything.’

‘Look, I want to be a director some day. Movies are my life, period. You know what Truffaut said? He said cinema is more important than life. Well, it’s the same for me. I don’t want to be tied down, married with kids. Anyone can be a good husband or father, but there’s only one Quentin Tarantino or Martin Scorsese.’

‘Dude, I don’t think you’re that good!’

‘Well, if you don’t get it, that’s your problem. Just drop it,’ replied Jimbo, retreating to the bathroom.

He took a shower and threw some clothes on.

‘Right, I’m off,’ he called, throwing his bag over his shoulder. ‘I’ve a class at noon.’

‘OK, cool, don’t forget the re—’

Too late, he’d already slammed the door behind him.

Jimbo was hungry. He bought a falafel wrap from Mamoun’s, which he wolfed down on his way to the film school. He was still a bit early, so he stopped at the café next to the school building to grab a Coke. While he was standing at the counter, he had another look at the book Iseul had sent him. There was no denying the girl was sexy and smart, and they’d had fun together, but now she was getting clingy, sending these soppy photographs.

The book itself was more interesting though. The
Angel Trilogy
? He was sure he’d heard of it somewhere. He thought about it and remembered reading in
Variety
that the rights had been sold to make it into a Hollywood movie. But how had this copy wound up full of photos? He got off his stool and
sat down at one of the computers provided for customers. He typed in a few keywords about Tom Boyd and came up with thousands of results. But when he restricted his search to the last seven days, he found that someone had been flooding message boards trying to get their hands on a particular copy, half of whose pages were blank. Exactly the one he had in his bag!

He went out onto the sidewalk, mulling over what he’d just read. An idea was forming.

Kerouac & Co. was a small bookstore on Greene Street, specialising in buying and selling second-hand and antiquarian books.

Kenneth Andrews, dressed as always in suit and tie, went over to the window display to add a signed copy of William Faulkner’s
Go Down, Moses
, newly acquired from the feuding heirs of an aged collector. He placed it with an F. Scott Fitzgerald first edition, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s framed autograph, an exhibition poster signed by Andy Warhol, and a Bob Dylan song scribbled on the back of a restaurant bill.

Kenneth Andrews had run the store for nearly fifty years. He’d been around in the bohemian glory days of the 1950s, when the Village was home to the Beat Generation, poets and folk singers. But rising rents had long ago driven the avant-garde artists out to other areas, and the inhabitants of Greenwich were now a well-to-do bunch, paying top dollar for his relics in order to get a flavour of an era they hadn’t lived through.

The bell tinkled and a young man appeared in the doorway.

‘Hi,’ said Jimbo as he walked in.

He’d been in a few times before and found the place quaint. With its soft lighting, musty smell and antique prints, it reminded him of old movie sets and made him feel as though he were entering a parallel universe, far from the hustle and bustle of the city.

‘Hi there,’ replied Andrews. ‘What can I do for you?’

Jimbo set the Tom Boyd book down on the counter.

‘What do you think of this?’

The old man put on his glasses and inspected the book with disdain: imitation leather, mass-market fiction, faulty printing, not to mention all the photos making it even more of a mess. As far as he was concerned, this book was trash.

He was just about to say as much when he remembered reading a short item in
American Bookseller
, saying every copy of the special edition of this bestseller had had to be pulped because of a printing error. Could it be…

‘I’ll give you $90 for it,’ he offered, following his hunch.

‘You must be kidding,’ Jimbo said huffily. ‘This is a very special copy. I could get three times that on the internet.’

‘Go ahead then. I can go up to $150, tops. Take it or leave it.’

Jimbo thought about it for a minute. ‘It’s a deal.’

Kenneth Andrews waited until the young man had left the store before digging out the magazine article.

Bad news for Doubleday: following a fault in the printing process, all 100,000 copies of the special edition of the second volume of the Angel Trilogy, by bestselling author Tom Boyd, have had to be pulped.

Hmm, interesting
, pondered the bookseller. With a bit of luck, he might just have got hold of the one surviving copy…

Wearing a white apron, Milo was serving arancini and pizza slices at a Sicilian restaurant in Via degli Scipioni. After Carole left, he’d decided to stay on in Rome for a few days, and this job earned him enough to pay for his tiny hotel room, plus free meals.

Milo exchanged emails with Tom every day. Over the moon to hear he’d started writing again, he’d got back in touch with Doubleday and various overseas publishers to let them know they’d been too quick to write his friend off. A new Tom Boyd book would be in the stores in no time.

‘It’s my birthday today,’ said one of the regulars, an attractive brunette who worked in a luxury shoe store in Via Condotti.

‘That’s great.’

She bit into the ball of rice, leaving a lipstick mark on the outside.

‘I’m having a party with some friends at my apartment. If you wanted to drop by…’

‘Thanks, but I don’t think so.’

A week ago, he wouldn’t have needed asking twice. But after hearing what Carole had told him, things had changed. His friend’s story had knocked him for six, revealing a hidden side to the two people he was closest to. He was plunged into a whirl of contradictory emotions: enormous sympathy
for Carole, feeling more strongly about her than ever; respect and pride for what Tom had done. But he was also annoyed at being left out of their circle of trust for so long, and sorry it hadn’t been him who’d done the dirty work.

‘I just can’t say no to a slice of
cassata
,’ drawled the curvaceous Italian, pointing to the cake covered in candied peel.

Milo was about to cut her a piece when his phone buzzed in his jeans pocket.