The Third Column

"There are two ways to learn a person: by what they confess, and by what they correct."

By Monday morning the room at the Rego Park Motor Inn had stopped looking like a room.

Ethan had taken down the print of the sailboat. He had pulled the bed away from the wall, and moved the desk, and stripped the cheap floral curtains from their rod, and he had covered the entire back wall, from the baseboard to the ceiling, with butcher paper from a restaurant-supply store on Queens Boulevard, taped at the corners with blue painter's tape. It was the sort of paper he had once used in his kitchen to wrap fish. On it, in black marker, in his small clear block capitals, he had drawn three vertical lines.

PARIS, said the first column.

THE BOOK, said the second.

SULLIVAN COUNTY, said the third.

Lauren stood in the door with two cups of coffee, looking at it. She was wearing the gray sweater she had slept in. She had not been to Boston. She had gone as far as Penn Station on Friday afternoon, and stood in front of the departures board for twenty minutes among the crowds with her suitcase in her hand, and had then turned round and walked back out into the rain and taken a cab to Queens. She had not mentioned it. Neither had he.

"You didn't sleep," she said.

"I slept for two hours on the floor. I had the best dream of my life. I was in a kitchen, and nothing was on fire." He took one of the cups. "The dossier came at four. Anaïs sent it by courier from the consulate. It's the original, Laurie. All of it. Two hundred and twelve pages in French, with the fourteen that went missing."

"And?"

"And I've read it four times," said Ethan. "I'd like you to read it once, and then tell me I'm wrong."

…

Anaïs Delorme looked tired on the little screen of his laptop.

She was a thin dark woman of about forty, with short hair and a wedding ring she turned constantly with her thumb, and she sat in an office in the Palais de Justice with a stack of files at her elbow and the window behind her showing a slice of rooftops under a gray Paris sky. They had met nine years ago at a conference in Lyon, over a very long dinner in which he had cooked an omelette for twelve in a borrowed kitchen, and she had been, ever since, the only French magistrate he trusted.

"I should not have done this," she said, in her careful English. "If you tell anyone, I will say that you are a charming man who broke into my office."

"I'll say you were abducted by a chef."

"It is not funny." But the corner of her mouth moved. "Ethan. I read the fourteen pages last night. I did not wish to. Twelve years in this building, I have read worse. But I sat in my kitchen with the light off for an hour after."

"What is in them?"

"The part that the family did not want an American court to see." She turned the ring. "The pages describe the scene in the apartment when the police entered. Not the girl. I will not talk about the girl. They describe the room. The furniture, the light. The way things had been put. You must understand that when the police broke the door, they expected a madman's lair. A disorder. Blood on the walls. It was not." Her voice dropped. "It was a very ordinary student room. Very clean. And he was sitting in it, at the desk, in the light of a lamp, with his shoes lined up neatly at the door, drinking tea."

"A lamp."

"A desk lamp, yes. On a cord. The clerk who took the inventory noted the model."

Ethan was writing. He kept his eyes on the paper, and his hand moved steadily across the sheet, and he said, "No candle."

"No candle. No candle was found, and none was noted. There was a radio on the shelf. It was tuned to the news. There was nothing of music." She looked at him through the screen with her tired, intelligent eyes. "I have read the American book, you know. A colleague gave it to me. It is a very beautiful book. I read the chapter about the night, and I thought, This is not the room. I thought, Whoever wrote this was never in that room. But I told myself, it is a book. It is a memoir, it is polished, one is allowed to polish." She stopped. "Then you telephoned. And I thought: No. Not polish. Invention."

"Thank you, Anaïs."

"There is one more thing. In the pages." She turned a sheet toward the camera, a typed list, ruled in black. "A habit. The police psychologist wrote that the suspect, on arrest, asked three times that the officers take off their shoes at the door. And that when he cleaned the room, he did it in a particular order, every surface, by a cloth with the smell of lemon. He was left-handed. He lined the shoes in pairs, by the door, side by side, the girl's and his own, with the toes to the wall."

Ethan lowered his pen.

"Shoes," he said.

"It is something about him. A rite." She spread her hands. "I do not understand the people who do this. I only record."

…

When the screen went dark, he stood in front of the paper for a long time.

He did not hurry. He took the pages, one at a time, and tore from the roll small squares of tape, and began to put the facts on the wall, each in its column, level with its fellow in the others, so that they ran across the paper in rows. He worked in silence. Lauren leaned against the door frame with her coffee going cold and watched his hands, and the blue squares of tape went up, one after another, like a row of small bright windows.

In the first column, PARIS:

Desk lamp, on cord. No candle.

No white cloth. Body left where it fell.

Radio on, news. No music.

Shoes in pairs by door, toes to wall. Left-handed. Lemon cloth. Cleaned in a fixed order.

In the second column, THE BOOK:

Candle, small white dish, center of the table. (Ch. 9, p. 181.)

Wrapped in unbleached muslin, "as one does a cheese." (p. 183.)

The parts laid in sequence, "like courses." (p. 187.)

Satie, the first Gymnopédie, twice through. (p. 184.)

In the third, SULLIVAN COUNTY:

Candle ring, paraffin, in a circular deposit.

Unbleached muslin, cotton twine.

Remains arranged in anatomical order.

A single sheet of printed music, folded in four. (Gymnopédie No. 1, Peters edition.)

No shoes. No evidence of left-handedness. No lemon. Not wiped.

He stepped back.

The paper stood in front of them, three columns, three tidy rows. The first and the third matched in nothing. The second and the third matched in everything. And down the middle of the paper, ruled with the black marker, a thick line ran between the first column and the other two, like a river between two countries.

"Four details," said Lauren.

"Four. All four are in the book. None is in the Paris file." He did not turn. "And not one of the things Hale actually did, the things that were him, the shoes, the lemon cloth, the hand he used, is in the culvert. Whoever left Yingying in that pipe knew the book by heart. And knew nothing about the man."

"That's what a copyist would do."

"Yes. A copyist would work from the book. It's the only text anyone has." He pushed a hand through his hair. "But Laurie. Think who wrote the chapter. Not Hale. Hale told her what happened, and she put it in order. She added the candle, because a candle is better than a desk lamp. She added the cloth, because a cloth is a cleaner image. She added the music, because a scene wants music. She made it beautiful."

"And someone read her version."

"Someone read her version and thought, That's how it should have been." He turned at last. "I heard it on Sunday, in that dining room, and I did not understand it. He said, She improved the candle. He said it with a kind of dazed pride. He's begun to remember her version as the truth."

Lauren put down her cup.

She said slowly, "Hale told us she cut the dull parts."

"Yes."

"He told us she edited him."

"Yes."

"Ethan." She was very white. "The way you said that. Whoever left her in that pipe. You've been avoiding the pronoun for ten minutes."

"I know."

"Say it."

He took the book from the bed. It was the paperback he had read on the ship, spine cracked, the pages soft, and it fell open in his hand to a place near the middle, where a yellow sticky note was stuck to the margin. It was not his. He had found it two days earlier, in the dead girl's own copy, which he had taken, with Mrs. Jiang's blessing, from the nightstand in the room in Jackson Heights. It was written in Yingying's small, careful hand.

ch. 9 — compare w/ tape 17!! The candle?? He never says candle on tape.

"She noticed," he said. "She had the original interviews. She had every tape. She sat in an office for six weeks, typing them up, line by line, and one day she turned to chapter nine and found a candle in the text that was not on the tape. She wrote the candle, and two question marks. She was twenty-four, and it was not her business, and she could not let it go."

He put his thumb on the yellow paper.

"The man who killed her did not copy Desmond Hale, Laurie. The man who killed her edited a human being as if it were a manuscript. The thing in that pipe is not a murder with a literary flavor. It is a revision. It is a second draft of a page that someone else had already improved."

"And there is only one person in the world who knows what the first draft looked like."

"And what the second looked like." He closed the book. "And what the reader would make of it."

Neither of them spoke.

The window rattled in a gust of wind. Out on the boulevard, a bus went by, and the light from its windows slid across the three tall columns of paper, and the blue squares of tape, and the thick black line. Lauren stood with her hand pressed flat against her sternum, like a woman trying to feel for a heartbeat. He knew what she was doing. She was running it back. The elevator, the lavender, the white room, the green eyes. The long, clean, scrubbed floor. The mirror. The wooden floor that had been done on someone's knees.

"She told us she cooked," she said. "She told us in her kitchen, and again at her office. I've been cooking a lot. And you told me she was not lying."

"I told you it was the truest thing she said."

"We have been in that room." Her voice shook. "We drank her tea."

"Yes."

"My nose told us in the first ten minutes, and we've spent two weeks looking at Westport. We had it from the beginning. We had it."

"We had it," said Ethan quietly, "and we did not want it. That's all. I've done it myself, for six years of my life. You don't look at the thing you can't bear." He put his hand on her shoulder. "Don't punish yourself. It was two weeks. It isn't very long, for a woman who has been right in front of us."

…

His phone buzzed on the desk.

It was a small flat sound. He crossed the room to it, and glanced at the screen, and for a moment he did not move.

Unknown number. New message.

He opened it.

Mr. Vance, I have been thinking about our conversation, and I am afraid that I did not give you a full answer. I should like to correct that. My study is open to you. Come alone, or with your sister, whichever you prefer. The kettle is on. S.

Beneath it, as if added by a different hand, a second line:

P.S. You asked who I was cooking for. I find that I would like to tell you.

He read it twice. In the mirror above the desk he could see his own face, and it was calm. It was the calm that came to him, he had learned, on a certain kind of night, like the stillness in the eye of a storm.

"Who is it?" said Lauren, behind him.

He thought of the dock at Port Canaveral. He thought of a hand, cold, taking his. He thought of how many times in his life she had stood at the edge of something and let him go ahead.

"Spam," said Ethan.

It was the first lie he had told her since he was nine years old. It went down very smoothly. He put the phone in his pocket, and turned, and smiled, and felt, under his ribs, the small bright click of a door that has just swung shut.

"Spam," he said again, lightly. "I'm going to get us some real coffee."