Marek moved along the rows of photos and pulled out four bulging trays. ‘OK, he’s walking towards Via Pisano. Let’s assume he continues down there, so the next place to look for him is probably the Piazza Venezia.’
Marek’s hunch was right. Within an hour they had found Malory again, blurred, recognizable only by his clothes, on the edge of a snap of a boy feeding pigeons. From there Marek reckoned he would have headed down towards Via Salavia. Finding no trace of him there they resorted to the sequentially arranged piles and found him, at 12.15, on the corner of two small streets.
So it went on and by mid-afternoon they had built up a stack of photographs. Walker was amazed how often he had strayed accidentally into the camera’s gaze. The camera was a god, nothing escaped it.
They continued to track Malory’s progress through the city. Marek pinned up a street map and marked out the route Malory had taken with approximate times. They came across him on the edge of a carefully composed shot of the Piazza San Pietro. After Repubblica this was the busiest and most intensely photographed spot in the city and two more photos followed his track from the north-west to the south-east of the piazza. Next he could be seen in the perfectly focused middle distance of a snap showing a hopelessly blurred young couple. This was followed by a sequence of video footage which, in the process of tracking across a piazza, showed him walking down an alley connecting Via Romana to Via Del Corso — where he was duly picked up in the margins of a shot of a statue of Garibaldi framed by a heavily polarized sky. In a photo of a girl in a white dress, stooping down to examine the sandals and belts being sold by patient Africans, Malory was seen walking towards the edge of the frame. In Via San Marco he was snapped inadvertently stepping between the photographer and his intended subject. For a moment he could be glimpsed in a sequence of Super 8, shot on the move as the cameraman walked through a crowd of people.
Then he disappeared for almost an hour. When they picked up his trail again he was in a wide-angle shot of the cathedral steps.
‘What time was it taken?’ asked Walker.
‘Early evening. Look at the shadows. It’s one of the last photographs before the light went. Soon after it got dark there was an incredible thunderstorm.’
This was the last photo of Malory they found. Looking through the remaining photos took little time: only specialist or exceptionally careless photographers continued snapping into the fading light of evening. By nine o’clock there were only a few photos showing the cathedral illuminated by green spotlights or streets filled with the volcanic ghosts of red and yellow car lights.
Walker took copies of the photos and map. Back in his hotel he spread them out on the floor. He levered open a beer, took a swig from the bottle and poured it into a glass. He sat on the bed, drinking, staring at the pictures on the floor. Always his attention was drawn to the photo of Malory on the cathedral steps. Marek had blown up the portion showing Malory walking into a full-length 8 x 10. The fact that it was the last photo of Malory lent it an automatic fascination but there was something elusively familiar about it too. Walker glanced back at the other photos, rummaged through them until he came to the first picture of Malory he had seen, the one cabled through to him at Kingston. It showed just his head, looking off to the right. Placed next to each other the two pictures were strikingly similar. Blocking off everything but the head and shoulders of the cathedral snap, he saw that it was a mirror image of the original photo. Successive enlargements had rendered details as coloured smears in one and grey smudges in the other, but these background blurs coincided. Both pictures had been printed — one the right way, the other the wrong way — from the same negative.
Walker stared at the images, not attempting to fathom the consequences or meaning of this discovery. He picked up the dictaphone and tossed it on to the pillow. Poured another beer and drank it carefully, noticing the taste of each sip, the way the cold glass felt in his hand, the beads of moisture on the bottle.
It had started raining. The blinds rattled in the breeze. On the writing desk was a phone that looked like it had never rung. He lay back on the bed and pressed the Record button of the dictaphone, heard its slow whirring. The faint murmur of traffic outside. The cathedral bells chiming damply through the rain. He tried not to think of anything, only the details of the room: bedspread, wallpaper, wire hangers in the empty wardrobe, sachets of coffee and sugar on the dresser.
He went into the bathroom where blue towels hung on a rail. He stood under the shower and got out only when the water began running cold. He dried himself and climbed between the cold, starched sheets. On the bedside table was a clock showing the time in thin green numbers, a lamp which he flicked off and on and off.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
He left the hotel early and, with the aid of the map, began to duplicate Malory’s route through the city, trying to pass through each place at the same time that Malory had done. As he did so he was conscious as never before of the number of people with cameras. In the course of the day he would be caught dozens of times in a tourist’s photo.
He saw the things Malory had seen: a cloud idling through the sky, ice-cream sellers, children, couples in T-shirts and slacks, people reading. He saw a pair of sunglasses lying crushed in the road, the darting shadows of birds, cigarette butts in the grass around the ancient walls. He noticed everything and everything he saw was like a memory. Nothing surprised him. What he saw dissolved instantly into memory as if some intermediate stage in the process of cognition had been skipped. He kept thinking of ways to articulate and understand what was happening but knew from experience that it was better just to let it happen, to let everything fall into place as it had to, without his understanding.
The day moved on, morning led to afternoon. He saw the sun congregate in piazzas, grit lying between cobbles; he saw the cool darkness of rooms where lives were going on. He drank a coffee in a bar whose walls were lined with photos of local football heroes. He stared at the brown flecks of foam in his cup. Crystals of spilt sugar. A rind of lemon in a glass. The twisted butts of cigarettes in an ashtray. A crumpled serviette. On the table next to him was an empty cup with a print of lipstick on the rim. Was it possible, he wondered, to reconstruct the identity of the woman who had been drinking from just that smudge of pink? Her life, the way she spent her days, the things she had seen, the men she had loved?
When he came out of the bar the light was turning lemon, preparing to fade. He continued following Malory’s route around the city, passing through a maze of narrow streets until he found himself in front of the cathedral. Clustered round the square, squat homes jostled for space, their needs dwarfed by the vastness of the cathedral’s spatial claim. Walker looked up at the twin towers rearing above him, his eyes dragged skyward. The cathedral leapt upwards, every part of it straining to be higher than every other part. Graceful, full of grace.
The sun slipped behind the other buildings of the town, leaving only the twin towers of the cathedral in sunlight. Walker pushed open the wooden door and walked in. The cathedral was empty, no people and no pews. Walker made his way up the nave, his footsteps disturbing a silence distilled over five hundred years, accentuated by the clamour of vaulting overhead. The air smelt stagnant and fresh, reminding him of the chapel in the country. Flowers blowing by the old walls, brown earth. Purple and yellow petals, moving in the wind.