"Lewiston, Maine."
"Yes. Go ahead."
I pulled out the Hertz form, spelled Travin's name, and gave his address. After a moment, she said, "We have no Travin listed there, sir."
"Could it be a new listing, operator?"
"No, sir. We have no listing at all."
I hung up… but then had another idea. I called down to the desk.
"I'd like to check out, if I could. Mr. Travin in 909. I'm in quite a hurry. Could you have someone bring up the bill."
"One moment, sir… Yes, will that be on your Visa card?"
"Please. I think you already have it."
"Yes, Mr. Travin. I'll just check it through and then someone will bring it up to your room."
Ten minutes later, careful to hide my face, I stuck a dollar around the door and received Travin's bill in return. But it wasn't very informative: same address, same phone number, same Visa number as on the Hertz form. He'd had breakfast in his room every morning, two other meals in one of the hotel restaurants, and drinks in the bar. All in all, he'd been staying here for six days; unfortunately, he'd made no long-distance phone calls. So…the men who'd searched this room hadn't slipped up, after all. The name Travin, his driver's license, the credit card, his hotel bill — they added up to a dead end. In a few days, Hertz would sound the alarm. The police would come up with the car but then go no further. Even if they found the body and concluded it was Travin, it wouldn't do them much good. Michael Travin, whoever he was, had effectively vanished from the face of the earth.
I took a long breath, walked over to the window, and looked out at the night. The lights of an ore carrier twinkled out on the river and made me think of Halifax. I'd been there yesterday: it seemed centuries ago. Brightman's death was a chasm, a great void… and what did it have to do with all this? / can tell you everything, Mr. Thorne. How it was done. What has happened to Brightman. Everything. Had Travin been killed because he knew? And was that why they hadn't worried about me — because as long as I didn't get to talk to him, I wouldn't 7 know? But questions like that were beyond me, and I had more immediate problems. Where was I in this? What should I do now? I sensed that I'd reached a turning point — emotionally, in terms of my own commitment, but in other ways as well. There were some practical questions. I am not a professional adventurer. As a writer, my time is my own, but there was the small matter of money and the more subtle one of energy. Did I really want to make the investment? Then there were legal considerations. Right now, my legal position was fine, not even iffy. I hadn't actually seen a crime committed, and you're under no obligation to report the dead bodies you find lying around. The car was nothing. As long as I paid Hertz for the window, no cop on earth would think of pressing a charge. Theft? I hadn't taken anything of value. Obstruction of justice? No one knew the rental form had been in the glove compartment except me; besides, the police could get the original from the Hertz office. No doubt I'd violated some local Hotel- and Innkeepers Act by getting into this room, but even that might be hard to prove since I hadn't had a criminal purpose. What had I taken? Destroyed? No, if I picked up the phone right now and called the police, I'd get nothing more than a lecture on good citizenship. If…
But just then there was a knock at the door.
I froze.
The knock, a little heavier, came again.
I took a deep breath. "Yes?"
"Mr. Travin, sir? Valet service, sir. They called up from the desk, sir, and said you was checking out. Don't want to be forgetting your suit."
"Just a minute."
I was even more careful than I'd been with the bellhop and made absolutely certain that the woman didn't get a look at my face: Travin was dead — I didn't want to become him. Yet now, in an odd way, I was being visited by his shade. Pulling off the plastic wrapping, I spread the suit out on the bed, and it lay there in grisly imitation of its owner: sans head, hands, and feet. Other than this, however, it was perfectly ordinary: gray, one pair of trousers, no vest. Sears, The Men's Store, said the label. But then I saw there was a little brown envelope twist-tied to the hanger. We Found This in Your Pockets … I tore it open, spilled it out on the pillow.
One book of matches, from something called the Mikado Room.
Seventy-seven cents in change, including one Canadian quarter.
And a claim check from a photo store…
I picked up this last item. It was the usual thing: the strip of envelope they give back to you when you take in a film. It was gray, overprinted with the number 2009 and the store's name and address: Jack's Photo Supplies, Berlin, N.H.
Well, well. Maybe they'd screwed up after all.
And right then, I made up my mind. I wasn't entirely sure why. I'd been joining the dots in one of those puzzles they used to put in the paper, and here was another. That was part of it; and so was Russia, and all I felt about that country, and May Brightman was still in it too. But there was something else; and it was "something personal," just as Travin had said — a feeling, present from the very beginning, that all these events, however impossible it seemed, led back to me.
But maybe the reasons don't make any difference. A rose is a rose: you do what you do. With Travin's suit bundled under my arm, I took the elevator down to the lobby, and forty minutes later, behind the wheel of Brightman's enormous white boat, I entered the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel and crossed back over the Canadian border.
9
Windsor to Toronto, Toronto to Montreal, then south to the border again: Route 26 through New Hampshire, back roads to Interstate 91, then east on 84 through Pennsylvania… Twenty-four hours after leaving Detroit, I was sitting in a restaurant in Washington, D.C., but on that trip you'd have to say I took the long way around. I was exhausted by the end of it, though I made plenty of stops — mainly for gas, which Brightman's mammoth machine guzzled insatiably. But I also detoured to pick up my bags at Toronto International Airport, where I'd left them when I came in from Halifax, and for a few hours I flaked out in a motel near Kingston, Ontario. And most important of all, I jogged through Berlin, New Hampshire, to pick up Travin's photographs.
As the miles rolled by, I thought and drove, and drove and thought, until my mind was humming along with the tires. On the highway, I made pretty good time, but mentally my progress wasn't so even: I kept swinging back and forth between confidence and doubt. What if I found nothing? What if the whole thing was meaningless? My conscience prickled, I felt halfway a fugitive, and the further Detroit receded behind me, the more unbelievable my speculations seemed to become. Brightman had killed himself: I had no reason to suspect, let alone contradict, that conclusion. And I had no certain knowledge that anyone, let alone the KGB, had searched the hotel room. But then, just as I grew convinced that I was making a fool of myself, my mind headed off in another direction. Travin was dead. Someone had killed him. And even if Brightman hadn't been murdered, you can hardly call suicide normal. No: something very peculiar was happening… I suppose, even before I picked up those photographs, that I was convinced: my mind just needed time to get used to it.
Berlin, when I got there, turned out to be a pulp and paper town whose smokestacks trailed a livid, sulphurous haze across the New England hills. I would have put its population at something like fifteen thousand, big enough to boast a Wool-worth's, a newspaper (the Berlin Reporter), and a municipal building with a fine old clock tower. Pleasant; a little ramshackle; even pretty if you looked away from the smokestacks, for the Androscoggin River flowed through it. It was the sort of place that perfectly expressed small-town America before the Midwest was discovered. Despite the name, I didn't see much sign of a German influence and was more aware of a French-Canadian element — Canucks, as they say in New England. There was a grocer called Mercier, a Club des Raquettes, and a red-brick Ste. Anne's on your way in. Of course, that first trip, I noticed this only in passing: my mind was entirely concentrated on the photo shop, where I laid down $65.48 and received two oversized gray envelopes in return.