The Search

CHAPTER TWO

It was a three-day drive to Durban and Walker set off the next day. He crossed the Bay Bridge and headed up the coast. He had just passed Malory’s house when a white mist rolled in from the sea, enveloping the road. He slowed to a crawl, winding down the window and feeling the air clinging damp to his skin. The mist thinned and he looked out at a zinc sky, pale sea rolling calmly on to white sand, grey-white gulls dotting the beach. When the mist closed in again, all he could see was the lighthouse glow of cars heading towards him.

He turned inland ten miles later and the mist cleared, the landscape becoming gradually flatter. That night he slept for a few hours in the car before pressing on, stopping only for food and gas. At first he listened to music continuously, but soon the radio began to irritate him and he drove in silence.

By now the landscape was flat and featureless, almost an abstraction, existing only as distance. A hundred years ago there had been no road, only emptiness; now there was a four-lane freeway but the road altered nothing, not the sky yawning over it or the land stretching away to the horizon. It occurred to him that horizontal was derived from horizon. Where words came from, where they were going: horizon. If walking was a form of thinking, then driving was a form of meditation or self-hypnosis which, instead of concentrating the mind, encouraged it to float. The residue of concentration required to keep the car on the road lent these drifting thoughts a sense of urgentless purpose.

Often, glancing in the driving mirror, he expected to see Rachel’s face looking back at him.

He spent the second night in a motel and arrived in Durban late the following afternoon. The rental agency was on the edge of town. It felt strange, walking in after so long bent up in the car. There were no other customers and the man he spoke to had no objection to finding out about the car rented three months ago by Malory. He rifled through a filing cabinet, squinting through glasses that seemed to do his eyes no good at all, and came back with a sheaf of photocopied papers.

‘According to this,’ he said, ‘the car was checked in at a rental firm in Kingston — not one of our offices — a small firm we have an agreement with. Our cars can be left with them and they get ’em back to us.’

‘How long ago was that?’ said Walker. ‘When was it checked in?’

‘Couple a months ago,’ said the guy, unwrapping a stick of gum, feeding it between his teeth.

Kingston was another long haul, on the edge of the Southern Wetlands. Walker drove for two days, weather coming and going, birds. Power lines rising and dipping alongside him. Sometimes overtaking the same car three times in a day.

The last three hundred miles ran flat through the swamp. Trees were the same colour as the road, as the sky. Moss drifted from swamp maples. Here and there were splashes of dull red, either in the trees or in the road, the smear of hit animals. Rain spotted his windshield, hardly even rain.

The rental office was a run-down place near the railroad. A sign on the counter said: ‘If You Don’t Smoke I Won’t Fart’. The guy behind the counter was chewing on a sandwich. The reception area smelled of chicken; maybe a cigarette had recently been smoked there. Walker leant his elbows on the counter, waiting for the guy’s mouth to empty.

‘I’m trying to find out about a car that was checked in a couple of months ago.’

‘What car?’

‘A blue Mustang. Licence 703 6GH. It was dropped off here by a man named Malory.’

The guy wiped his fingers, screwed the serviette into a ball and chucked it away. ‘Let’s see. What was the date exactly?’

Walker told him and he hauled a wad of oil-smudged papers out of a drawer, sniffed, began thumbing through them.

‘Yeah, it was checked in here.’

‘Do you happen to know anything about the person who checked it in? Where he went or anything like that?’

‘Let’s see. I was working that day.’ Walker waited for him to go on but instead the guy scrutinized him and said, ‘You a cop?’

‘No.’

‘Tracker?’

‘No.’

‘Finder?’

‘No.’

‘Then what you want him for?’

‘He’s a friend.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what’s he supposed to have done, this friend of yours?’

‘Nothing. I just want to find him.’

With small variants Walker would have this same conversation many times in the months that followed. Strangely, the subsequent willingness to help of whoever he was talking to bore no relation to whether they believed him or not. The dialogue was an elaborate form of greeting, a formality. People couldn’t care less what answers he gave but no one wanted to forgo this little introductory exchange.

The guy nodded, satisfied: ‘Let’s see, only a few cars were checked in that day. If I remember right, if it’s the person I’m thinking of, he asked about a hotel.’

He paused, waited. This was another feature of the conversations of the next months: they all fancied themselves as Scheherazade, needed prompting before they would part with the next crumb of information.

‘And you recommended one to him?’

‘The Metropolitan.’

It was five minutes away, one of those places that had always looked like it had seen better days. Walker took a room there and chatted to the clerk, a boy in his teens who let him look back through the register, happy to oblige. Sure enough, Malory had stayed there, just one night.

Walker was too tired to pursue things further. He trudged up to his room and called Rachel. The machine was on. He listened to the message and hung up. Then he redialled. He listened to her voice again, asked her to call him at the hotel.

He drank a beer and flicked through the channels on TV. He watched part of a programme about the lost city of Atlantis and the latest attempts to establish its historical authenticity. The noise of aqualungs was making him fall asleep. He flicked off the TV and dreamed he was still driving, driving through places he’d never been, places that didn’t exist, sunken cities whose streets were filled with waving reeds and darting fish.

In the morning he persuaded the clerk to dig out Malory’s bill. A waiter spilt a tray of tea nearby and Walker moved aside to study the bill while a cleaner wiped the floor. All the details of Malory’s stay were itemized: how much he’d spent on dinner and drinks; even an account of long-distance calls. Malory had made two calls, both to a number in Meridian. He tried calling from the reception phone but the number had been disconnected. He made a note of the number and thanked the clerk. As he made his way from the desk someone touched his elbow.

‘Walker?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d like to speak to you for a moment.’

They walked away from the desk, stood near a plant offering a version of shade.

‘You’re looking for Malory.’

‘I didn’t catch your name.’

‘Carver.’ There was no handshake. Walker had never met him before but felt certain he recognized him from somewhere. Glancing down he saw that Carver had left a trail of dark V-patterned footprints from the spilled tea.

‘Like I said, you’re looking for Malory.’ Knowing that some kind of response was called for, Walker did nothing, waited for him to continue. ‘I’ll put it differently. I know you’re looking for Malory.’ He waited but Walker waited longer. ‘Do you know where he is?’

‘If I knew where he was I wouldn’t be looking for him.’

‘But you are looking for him?’

‘I just wanted to clarify a point of logic.’ Carver looked at him patiently.

‘Do you know where he is?’ he asked at last.

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘You have any idea where he is?’

‘You haven’t answered my question.’

‘If you hear anything, call this number,’ he said, pulling a battered playing card from his pocket — a ten of spades. He scribbled on the card and handed it to Walker. Walker kept his hands in his pockets. Carver tucked the card into his breast pocket. Walker began to move away. Carver blocked his path.

‘I’m talking to you.’

‘No you’re not.’ Walker moved around him but Carver gripped his arm, hard. They were the same height.

‘Did you hear what I said?’

‘No.’ Walker tugged his arm free.

‘Let me give you a piece of advice, Lancelot. Everything she said to you was shit. Everything you hoped she was saying was shit. You think you have to go through all this shit just so you can fuck her?’

Walker concentrated on not moving, on letting nothing show.

‘You want to learn the hard way, don’t you?’ said Carver.

‘I don’t even want to learn.’

This time Carver let him walk away. He had only gone a couple of steps when Carver called out after him, ‘Hey, Lancelot!’

Walker kept moving and a second later something landed quietly in front of him. He looked down and saw a thin chain coiled up on the floor like a silver snake. He was able to check the urge to pick it up but, involuntarily, he reached up to his neck to check that his own chain was still there. Then walked towards the lift, the chain like grit beneath his foot.

Back in his room he crammed Carver’s words to the back of his mind, concentrated instead on the question of how he had known who and where he was. It was possible that he had just been followed here — but it was more likely that Rachel’s phone had been tapped. And the chain. . Abruptly he remembered why he had recognized Carver: the party, the guy he had bumped into. He picked up the phone to call Rachel and put it down again immediately. He could feel sweat trickling down his ribs, a nerve twitching in his jaw. All this shit just so he could fuck her. He hurled the phone across the room. Looked around for something else to smash but instead sat down abruptly. Forced himself to stay perfectly still, slowly emptying his mind of everything. He remained like that until he had lost any sense of time, began to lose any sense of being the agent of his thoughts. Then, in the ensuing vacancy, he allowed his thoughts to re-form, focusing purely on the practicalities of picking up Malory’s trail, on nothing else.

The lead was a flimsy one: the phone number from Malory’s hotel bill. He dialled again — amazingly the phone still worked — but, as before, got the high tone indicating it had been disconnected. His only option was to trawl through the phone book for Meridian until he found the address. He had nothing else to go on.

A post office near the hotel had directories from all over the country. The directory for Meridian was one of the thickest in the rack. The only way to go about it was systematically. He found an empty table and got started. It was mind-numbing work, requiring an appalling amount of concentration, more boring than anything he had ever done. After two hours he got to G. The law of averages meant that he should find the number before M. Most likely he would get to it at W. His eyes felt like a microscope. If his thoughts wandered off he went back a couple of columns and resumed his trudge through the book, forcing himself to think of nothing.

He found the number under M, under the name of Malory: Joanne Malory. He cursed himself for his stupidity in not looking there first. Checked three times, unable to believe that he had found it, then jotted down the address. Back at the hotel he lay on the bed and shut his eyes, columns of numbers marching through his head. He dozed and dreamed of numbers.

The telephone woke him — the manager of the hotel wanting to know if he was staying another night. It was six o’clock, way after check-out. Walker stared at the digits on the telephone, adding them up across and down. Apologized, said he was leaving immediately.

It started raining sixty miles out of town. An hour later the rain was falling so heavily that it was impossible to see the road ahead. One wiper had given up and twitched helplessly in the downpour. Walker bent forward, peering through the windshield at a truck swimming towards him. The windshield was ablaze with light and then, as the truck passed, there was a blind drench of spray. He braked and felt the car slither, the wiper clearing a segment of visibility.

He must have missed a sign or taken a wrong turning: either way he was lost. He clutched the wheel with one hand and skimmed through the radio, hoping for some kind of confirmation of where he was. An old song came and went in a sea-spray of static. He twisted the dial a fraction and a chubby voice said storms were ravaging the region. Storms and gale-force winds. Police advised people to stay home unless absolutely necessary, to drive with extreme caution. Several rivers had broken their banks, many minor roads in the region were flooded, the something bridge was down. The main roads between Belford and Oakham, Queenstown and Nelson, Darlington and Sable were closed.

These towns meant nothing to Walker. No mention was made of Meridian or Kingston. The way the announcer talked of ‘the region’ without specifying which region, made him feel more lost than ever, as if he were nowhere, not even in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of nowhere, stranded between nowhere towns. The voice announced that we would now return to ‘Melody through Midnight’ and Walker snapped the radio off.

Lightning jarred the darkness. There was a long silence, so long it seemed like the silence itself was waiting, and then thunder crashed all around. Easing through a curve he felt both right-side wheels bump off the road and begin dragging the car into whatever lay beyond. He hauled the car back on to the road but minutes later the same thing happened again — with the right wiper gone he could see nothing of what was happening over that side. It was dangerous to keep going and even more dangerous to stop: the first car to come by would plough straight into him.

He glanced down at the fuel gauge. Depending on the gradient the needle swung between the red strip indicating things were getting bad and the E indicating they couldn’t get any worse. The rain eased off and then came pounding back, harder than ever. Here and there the road was flooded and the car plunged through the waiting lakes. He moved his face closer to the windshield as the road curved left. Immediately beyond the bend a tree was lying half across the road. He veered round the trunk and crashed through flailing branches. Lightning jagged down towards a church or tower in the distance.

Later, long after he had given up hoping for such a thing, he drove past a turn-off and signpost. He slid to a halt and backed up. The rain was so heavy he had to wind down the window to make out the sign, startled by the noise of the storm hammering on the roof, hissing. Seventy miles ahead was the town of Flagstaff; ten miles off to the right was a town called Monroe. He cranked up the window, turned right. Even ten miles seemed optimistic: for the last twenty minutes the needle had been stretched out horizontally, only momentarily twitching from E. The engine was sounding worse and worse. By the outskirts of Monroe it was like the last drops of coke being sucked through a straw.

He drove into town along the main drag, past the water-logged forecourt of a darkened gas station. Black ponds had formed around every drain, sometimes stretching from one side of the street to the next. A faulty light in a shop blinked off and on. He parked opposite the only place that was open, the Monroe Diner. Killed the engine and listened to the rain, the wind creaking through signs. He pulled a coat from the back seat and cracked open the door. The rain sounded like fat frying in a pan. He plunged his foot into a puddle and levered himself out of the car. Waded across the street.

Every face turned on him as he entered, the glare that passes for welcome in bars all over the world. He felt like a traveller who stops at a tavern in Transylvania and asks if anyone knows the way to Castle Dracula. Shook his hair and rubbed his feet on the crew-cut mat. Behind the bar a woman was pouring beer into an angled glass.

She smiled ‘Hi’ as he perched himself on a stool by the bar. ‘What would you like?’

‘Hi. Coffee, please.’ Even before he asked for it, coffee was implicit in the idea of shelter offered by the diner.

Once he was sat at the bar no one took any notice of him. His hair dripped on the counter and into his coffee. 34 He ordered food, looked around. A dozen people, mostly alone or in pairs. Every now and again the window bleached white by lightning. The barwoman brought his food, asked where he was heading.

‘I’m on my way to Nelson,’ he lied reflexively. ‘I got lost in the rain some way back.’

‘That’s what it’s like this time of year. Never rains but it pours. Never pours but it floods. And it always rains.’

‘And you have rooms here?’ Walker was scooping up his food American-style, using just the fork, talking and chewing.

‘For one? For one night?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s no problem. Matter of fact, it wouldn’t be a problem if you wanted rooms for eight people for a week.’

Walker paid for everything and took a beer upstairs. The room was on the top floor. He spent twenty minutes standing under a shower that was not quite hot enough, then sat on the edge of the bed, drinking beer and thinking about tomorrow, wrapped in a towel. Clothes drying over a fan-heater.

He finished the beer and walked over to the window, the town hunkered down under the rain. A car eased along the main street, slowed, pulled into the parking lot beside the diner. Walker flicked off the light and went back to the window. The car had disappeared from sight but he could see puddles stained red by the tail lights. Then the lights were switched off and there was the slam of doors opening and closing. He pulled on his clothes, warm from the heater, damp. He tossed a few things from the bathroom into his hold-all and moved out into the corridor, locking the door behind him. A sign said emergency exit. It had not been used in a long time and he had to wrench it noisily open. The fire escape was behind the neon welcoming you to the Monroe Diner. He pulled the emergency door shut and zig-zagged down the rusted steps. Rain purpled and greened around him. Hanging from the lowest rung he dropped to the wet tarmac. He moved round the parking lot to the car he had seen from his window. By now they would be on their way up to his room. All the doors were locked. He scanned the ground, found a large stone. Lightning flashed lazily. When the thunder came he hurled the stone through the driver’s window. As he opened the door the interior light flashed on for a moment, a dim echo of lightning. He swept glass from the seat, pulled the ignition wires from the steering column. As soon as he touched them together the engine sparked into life.

He edged round the diner and out on to the rain-slick street. Two hundred yards down the road he flicked on the headlights. In a film now, he thought to himself, someone hidden in the back seat would put a gun to his head and whisper, ‘Freeze.’ Suddenly nervous, he looked over his shoulder, almost disappointed to find no one there.

Wind and rain howled through the broken window. He was chilled from his damp clothes. Twenty miles out of town he pulled over and clambered awkwardly into a sweater and jeans. He stretched the wet shirt over the broken window. It bulged and sagged and made no difference, but with dry clothes and the heater blowing he felt better.

As soon as he was warm he became sleepy. When he felt himself nodding off he slapped his face and turned off the heater until he was cold and alert, miserable again. Alternating between shivers and yawns. There was no question of stopping — he had to put as much distance as possible between himself and Carver before morning. Assuming it was Carver. He went over the scene back in Monroe and realized that for all he knew the occupants of the car were simply travellers who had decided to rest up for the night instead of pressing on through the storm. Rather than being a stroke of luck that he had been at the window as the car drove in, it could equally have been whatever was the opposite of a stroke of luck — he was too tired to think of the word, maybe there wasn’t one — that they came along when they did and set off his paranoia like an alarm. Shit! He pounded the steering wheel and accidentally sounded the horn. He reassured himself by playing the scene over again, this time focusing on his reactions — on how it hadn’t occurred to him even for a moment that the car hadn’t come for him. Even if they didn’t convince, the double negatives at least obscured the issue. Anyway, there was no going back. There was no going back but either way, he thought, going back over the same question again, he should get rid of the car as soon as he could — but wherever he left it it would still point in his direction. As soon as they found the car, any lead he had built up effectively counted for nothing — but he couldn’t abandon the car in an unfindable place without marooning himself. The relentless orbit of thoughts tired him but at least, he reasoned, setting off the whole process again, at least it kept him from falling asleep.

The rain showed no sign of letting up. When he could barely keep his eyes open he pulled off the road and squelched up a narrow lane. He turned off the engine, climbed over the seat and curled up in the back.

Rain hammered on the roof of his dreams.