Epilogue
Rue Mouffetard
By the end of June, the world had decided it was over.
It was the biggest financial scandal in Europe in a generation. For eleven days the front pages carried the same photograph: a white-haired old man in an overcoat being led down the steps of a Geneva court, looking about him with mild, puzzled interest. THE SWISS TABLE. SIX ARRESTED. FOUR BILLION FROZEN. THE BOOK OF THE ANCHOR. Dr. Anneliese Roth told reporters she had no comment, then made one, in a single unrepeatable sentence about Swiss banking.
Within a month the first cheques went out. They went to an old man in Birkenhead, a widow in Wallasey, a retired deckhand in Barry, each in a plain envelope from a court-appointed trustee. A woman of eighty-one rang the number on her letter and asked in a thin cracked voice whether it was a joke. When they said it wasn't, she was quiet a long time. Then she asked if it was true the accountant, Hale, had been a good man. They told her that, according to the court, he had been the best they ever knew.
Gideon Strake pleaded guilty to everything, on the first morning, to the surprise of his lawyer. In his cell, in the evenings, he read a great deal, and wore a plain steel watch with a cracked glass that nobody had had the heart to take away. In the third week he asked whether there had been news of a man in a hat. He was told there had not.
Marcus Lindqvist was sentenced to four years. He wrote Idris one letter from a prison near Annecy, four close pages in his large sloping hand. Idris read it at the kitchen table, put it in a drawer, did not answer, and did not throw it away.
The case was closed in a small grey room in Lyon, on a Thursday, with a plate of hard little biscuits. Operation Blank Card: concluded. Principal subject, MORGAN, D., believed deceased in Lake Geneva. Remains not recovered. Principal evidence secured. Idris accepted a certificate of commendation with an unreadable face and put it in his cardigan pocket and forgot it.
"You don't look pleased," said the Director, a clever woman. "One would almost think you were sorry he was dead."
"I am," said Idris. "Very."
He went home early by the funicular and found his daughter on the balcony in her school uniform, cross-legged in the thin sun, with a flowerpot, a trowel, a packet of sweet-pea seeds, and a one-euro coin balanced on the back of her hand. She had the expression of a surgeon.
"Baba. Watch."
She closed her fingers slowly, all the way, her small dark brows drawn together, as though she held something precious she feared to crush. She turned her other hand in the air toward the street. She opened it. Empty.
"Where is it?"
"I don't know."
"It's in my sleeve!" She shook out her cuff, and the coin rolled across the tiles and fell spinning at his feet. She was flushed and dreadful with triumph. "I believed it. And you look at the other one, Baba, not the one that has it. You look where you want them to look."
"Who told you that?"
"A man at the market. He was very old, with a stick and a cap. He said to tell you, sincerity." She considered. "And that it was a pleasure."
The envelope came to the little bookshop in Lisbon on the first Thursday of July. Senhor Pessoa handed a Baedeker with a cracked red spine across the counter to a huge soft-spoken man in a linen jacket, who asked after the cat.
On a terrace in the Alfama, over grilled sardines, in a hot white wind off the river, Nell held a button of green wax cracked in two. "It's not a dossier. It's much too thin. It's a photograph."
It was black-and-white and a little blurred: a narrow cobbled street with a market stall at one end and a church at the other. On the left stood a tall old house with a bookbinder's shop at its foot, a green door and three storeys of windows. In the third, behind a pot of geraniums, a small green lamp burned. On the back, in tight upright hand in blue-black ink, someone had written an address. Beneath it, in type from an old machine, was one more line.
Rue Mouffetard, 41. The third floor. For the one who was counted first.
Nobody spoke. Down the street a tram clanged. Camille, on the parapet with her chin on her knees, didn't take her eyes off the card. At the far end of the table, in a plain white shirt, with a glass of green wine and his long brown hands loosely folded, sat the man who had been dead nine weeks. He was thinner. He had a short dark beard with silver in it and dark glasses pushed up in his hair. He might have been a man waiting for a bus.
"The typing's different," said Nell. "The e is level. Not the same machine. So who typed it? And who wrote the address?"
"I do," said David.
He turned the photograph over and held the small blue-black words in the sun. A bee came out of the vine, circled his head and went away. He had seen that hand a hundred times that spring. It crossed every seven. It had been taught by a nun in a Cardiff convent school, and it had written da iawn, bach in the margin of a book of crimes for a quarter of a century, to someone it hoped would read.
"It's my father's," said David Morgan.
"But Conrad said—" Ravi stopped. "He said he lived there."
"He said he lived there. He didn't say he still did."
The wind moved the awning over the empty glasses and the little heap of fishbones. Camille slid down and rested her hand on his shoulder. Anselm folded his enormous arms and looked at the sky like a man told the road is long who has decided to enjoy the scenery.
"Paris," said Nell. "I've never been. I shall hate it. I'm told the telephones are dreadful." She picked up her real cards, a worn red pack, and began calmly to shuffle. "When do we go?"
"Tuesday."
"And the arrangements?"
"We'll need a hat," said David.
He took the dark glasses from his hair and put them in his pocket. From inside his shirt he took a plain white card and held it between his hands in the hot July sun, as one holds a small bird. He didn't need to look at it. He had known what it said since a hospital corridor in Cardiff twenty-two years ago, and a hand on his face, and a small voice saying, Are you still the one who sits up?
Yes, he thought. Always.
He turned it over.
It was warm.
And under his thumb, slowly, in the sun, line by line, in a small tight upright hand he had known all his life, a row of faint brown figures was coming up out of the blankness: a street, a number, a date, and a name.
THE END OF BOOK ONE