"Your foster parents are still alive at this point? The couple you've mentioned? Who lived near the prison?" she adds with a trace of irony.
"No. But I still was able to live there for a while. It was not expensive and I had work, odd jobs. I come home and I can tell someone has been inside. It was strange. Nothing was missing except the covers on my bed. I think, well, that's not so bad. At least whoever it was took only that. Then it happened again several more times. I realize now it was them. They wanted my hair. That's why they took my bedcovers. Because I lose a lot of hair, you see?" He touches tangles of hair on top of his head. "It is always falling out if I don't shave. It gets caught on things when it's so long." He holds out an arm to show her, and long hair wafts weightlessly on the air.
"Then you're saying you didn't have long hair when you met Susan? Not even on your back?"
"Not at all. If you found long hairs on her body, then they were put there, you see what I am saying? All the same, I accept that her murder is my fault."
Chapter 15
WHY IS IT YOUR FAULT?" BERGER ASKS CHAN-donne. "Why would you say that Susan's murder is your fault?"
"Because they followed me," he answers her. "They must have come in just after I left, and then they did that to her."
"And did they follow you to Richmond, too, sir? Why did you come here?"
"I came because of my brother."
"Explain that to me," Berger replies.
"I heard about the body at the port, and I was convinced it was my brother, Thomas."
"What did your brother do for a living?"
"He was in the shipping business with my father. He was a few years older. Thomas was good to me. I didn't see him much, but he would give me his clothes when he no longer wanted them, and other things, as I've told you. And money. I know the last time I saw him, maybe two months ago in Paris, he was frightened something bad was going to happen to him."
"Where in Paris was this meeting with Thomas?"
"Faubourg Saint Antoine. He loved to go where the young artists and nightclubs are, and we met in a stone alleyway. Cour des Trois Freres, where the artisans are, you know, not too far from Sans Sanz and the Balanjo and, of course, the Bar Americain, where girls can be paid to keep you company. He gave me money and said he was going to Belgium, to Antwerp, and then on to this country. I never heard from him again, and next the news came out about the body."
"And where did you hear this news?"
"I told you I get many newspapers. I pick up what people throw away. And many tourists who don't speak French read the international version of USA Today. There was a small story in it about the body found here, and I knew right away it was my brother. I was sure. For this reason, I came to Richmond. I had to know."
"How did you get here?"
Chandonne sighs. He looks fatigued again. He touches the inflamed, raw skin around his nose. "I don't want to say," he replies.
"Why don't you want to say?"
"I'm afraid you'll use it against me."
"Sir, I need you to be truthful with me."
"I'm a pickpocket. I took a wallet from a man who had his coat draped over a monument in Pere-Lachaise, the most famous cemetery in Paris, where some of my family is buried. A concession a perpetuite" he says proudly. "Stupid man. An American. It was a big wallet, the sort people keep passports and plane tickets in. I've done this many times, I regret to tell you. It's part of living on the street, and I've lived on the street more and more since they started after me."
"These same people again. Federal agents."
"Yes, yes. Agents, magistrates, everyone. I immediately took the plane because I didn't want to give the man time to report his wallet missing and then have someone stop me at the gate in the airport. It was a return ticket, coach, to New York."
"You flew out of what airport and when?"
"De Gaulle. That would have been last Thursday."
"December sixteenth?"
"Yes. I got in early that morning and took a train to Richmond. I had seven hundred dollars because of what I took from the man."
"Do you still have the wallet and passport?"
"No, never. That would be stupid. I threw them in the trash."
"Where in the trash?"
"At the train station in New York. I can't tell you exactly where. I got on the train…"
"And during your travels, nobody looked at you? You weren't shaven, sir? No one stared at you or reacted to you?"
"I had my hair in a net under a hat. I wore long sleeves and a high collar." He hesitates. "I have another thing I do when I look like this, when I have not cleaned off the hair. I wear a mask. The type of mask people put over their nose and mouth if they have severe allergies. And I wear black cotton gloves and large tinted glasses."
'This is what you wore on the plane and the train?"
"Yes. It works very well. People move away from me and I, in this instance, had an entire row of seats to myself. So I slept."
"Do you still have the mask, hat, gloves and glasses?"
He stops to think before answering. She has thrown him a curveball and he is uncertain. "I can possibly find them," he hedges.
"What did you do when you got to Richmond?" Berger asks him.
"I got off the train."
She questions him about this for several minutes. Where is the train station? Did he take a taxi next? How did he get around? Just what did he think he would do about his brother? His answers are lucid. Everything he describes makes it seem plausible that he might have been where he claims to have been, such as the Amtrak station on Staples Mill Road and in a blue taxicab that let him off at a dump of a motel on Cham-berlayne Avenue, where he paid twenty dollars for a room, again using an assumed name and paying cash. From here, he states that he called my office to get information about the unidentified body he says is his brother. "I asked to speak to the doctor but no one would help me," he is telling Berger.
"Who did you talk to?" she asks him.
"It was a woman. Maybe a clerk."
"Did this clerk tell you who the doctor is?"
"Yes. A Dr. Scarpetta. So then I asked to speak to him, and the clerk tells me Dr. Scarpetta is a woman. So I say, okay. May I speak to her! And she is busy. I don't leave my name and number, of course, because I must continue to be careful. Maybe I'm followed again. How do I know? And then I get a newspaper and read about a murder here, a lady in a store killed a week earlier, and I'm shocked_frightened. They are here."
"These same people? The ones you say are after you?"
"They are here, don't you see? They killed my brother and knew I would come to find him."
"They certainly are amazing, aren't they, sir? How amazing they are to know you would come all the way to Richmond, Virginia, because you just happen to read a discarded USA Today and learn that a body has turned up here, and that you would assume it's Thomas, and that you would steal a passport and wallet and off you'd go."
"They would know I would come. I love my brother. My brother is all I have in life. He is the only one ever good to me. And I need to find out for Papa. Poor Papa."
"What about your mother? She wouldn't be upset to find out Thomas is dead?"
"She is drunk so much."
"Your mother's an alcoholic?"
"She's always drinking."
"Every day?"
"Every day, all day. And then she gets angry or cries a lot."
"You don't live with her, yet you know she drinks every day and all day long?"
"Thomas would tell me. It's been her life ever since I can remember. I've always been told she is drunk. The few times I would go to the house, she was drunk. It was mentioned to me once that my condition might have happened because she was drunk when she was pregnant with me."