Exchange Place (12 page)

The Infallible Scribe

I am free to return to my home. On the midday Radio Ulster news it was announced that at ten o’clock that morning the security forces carried out a controlled explosion on the white Volkswagen people-carrier parked on the forecourt of the Antrim Road Plaza. It was envisaged that residents of the evacuated zone would be able to return to their homes that afternoon, and on the three o’clock news it was announced that it was now indeed safe for them to do so. When I arrive at Elsinore Gardens the forecourt of the plaza is still cordoned off, but traffic is flowing freely on the Antrim Road. Near normality has been restored. The forecourt is strewn with wreckage, twisted bits of metal, exhaust pipe, windscreen wipers, shattered glass. The car doors are scattered at different angles and distances from the body of the Volkswagen, like alien shields dropped on a battlefield. Behind the white security tape a team of forensic operatives are examining the ground. I stand and watch them. They are dressed in white hooded coveralls, white face masks, white gloves and white boots. I think of a Second World War commando film set in the Alps. I count eleven of them walking nearly shoulder to shoulder like a line of infantry. Their progress is painstakingly slow, their eyes scanning, covering the ground inch by inch. Every so often one of them stops, stoops, and picks up something that to me is invisible.

Before abandoning my novel
X
+
Y
=
K
, I had done some desultory research into forensic science and remembered the phrase ‘every contact leaves a trace’, known as Locard’s Exchange Principle, after Edmond Locard, the pioneer of forensic science who set up the first police laboratory in an attic room in Lyons in 1910. Locard established that we leave traces of ourselves everywhere, from our bodies, our clothes, our shoes – fingerprints, hairs, fibres, paper, paint chips, soils, metals, botanical materials, gunshot residue. The microscopic debris that covers our clothing and bodies, said Locard, is the mute witness, sure and faithful, of all our movements and all our encounters. Locard became known as the Sherlock Holmes of France; indeed, Locard acknowledged that he had been influenced by the fictional detective. ‘Sherlock Holmes was the first to recognize the importance of dust,’ said Locard. ‘I merely copied his methods.’ Locard was also a passionate philatelist, the author of several books on stamps, including
Manuel du philatéliste
, in which he devoted a section to the identification of forgeries –
les falsifications
. Locard applied his microscope to stamps as he would to the traces of a human being; stamps were graphic cellular tissue, from which whole histories could be deduced. The world was a series of correspondences.

I turn the key in the lock and the door opens. I enter the hallway and again I feel the house haunted by my absence, for all that I am here. The atmosphere holds the ghost of my breathing, smoke of cannabis and American Spirit; every room contains residues of the skin and hair and fingerprints of John Kilfeather; everywhere are traces of my
DNA
, from which a future scientist might clone another me. I go into the parlour and pull up the blinds. A shaft of sunlight. The dust motes floating down through it are my remains. On the desk is my typescript of
X
+
Y
=
K
. I open it at random, and come across this passage:

‘Everything receives the light that falls upon it, and so registers an eternal imprint of the things around it’: this was the philosophy of William Denton, as articulated in his book
The Soul of Things
, published in Chicago in 1863. He was a keen student of the new science of photography pioneered by Louis Daguerre. ‘We visit a daguerrean room,’ says Denton, ‘and sit before the camera; while thus sitting our picture is formed on a prepared silver plate, and is distinctly visible upon it; it is taken out of the camera, and now, nothing whatever can be seen; a searching microscopic investigation discovers no line; but, on a suitable application, the image appears as if by magic. It is no more there, now that it is visible, than it was before; all that has been done is to make visible that which already existed on the plate, or no application could have revealed it. Some will object that if the silvered plate had not already been made sensitive, the image of the sitter would never have been retained; but experiment has shown that this is not so. Let a wafer be laid on a sheet of polished metal, which is then breathed upon. When the moisture of the breath has evaporated, and the wafer shaken off, we shall find that the whole polished surface is not as it was before, though our senses can detect no difference. For if we breathe upon it again, the surface will be moist everywhere, except on the spot previously sheltered by the wafer, which will now appear as a spectral image on the surface. Again and again we breathe, and the moisture evaporates, but still the spectral image appears. All bodies throw off emanations in greater or less size and with greater or less velocities; these particles enter more or less into the pores of solid or fluid bodies, sometimes resting upon their surface, and sometimes permeating them altogether. These emanations, when feeble, show themselves in images; when stronger, in chemical changes; when stronger still, in their action on the olfactory nerves; and when thrown off most copiously and rapidly, in heat affecting the nerves of touch; in photographic action, dissevering and recombining the elements of nature; and in phosphorescent and luminous emanations, exciting the retina and producing vision.’

Denton knew from his own experience that the image impressed on a photographic plate could be extraordinarily persistent and difficult to efface; for, after polishing a plate once used, the figure of a former sitter would sometimes reappear, as if breathed into being, reminding one of the bloom that lies at the back of old mirrors, or a body seen through mist. He envisaged molecules streaming radiantly from the sitter to be received permanently into the depths of the plate. It followed that in the world around us, ‘radiant forces were passing from all objects to all objects in their vicinity, and during every moment of the day and night were daguerreotyping the appearances of each upon the other; the images thus made, not merely resting upon the surface, but sinking into the interior of them; there to be held with astonishing tenacity, and only waiting for a suitable application to reveal themselves to the inquiring gaze. You cannot, then, enter a room by night or by day, but you leave on your going out your portrait behind you. You cannot lift your hand, or wink your eye, or the wind stir a hair of your head, but each moment is indelibly registered for coming ages. The pane of glass in the window, the brick in the wall, the paving-stone in the street, catch the pictures of all passers-by, and faithfully preserve them. Not a leaf waves, not an insect crawls, not a ripple moves, but each motion is recorded by a thousand infallible scribes; and this is just as true of all past time, from the first dawn of light upon this infant globe.’ Nothing, according to Denton, is ever lost.

The Third Man

A black limousine glided up out of the fog, its fog lights on. It drew to a halt. A man emerged, attired in a midnight blue chauffeur’s uniform. He opened the rear passenger door and stood to attention. Monsieur Odilon will see us there, said Gordon. Courtesy of the Embassy. Dear Old Ireland, as they say. They boarded the vehicle. The interior smelled of leather and tobacco. Kilpatrick sat to one side of Gordon on the long deep seat. We are twin passengers, he thought, two men who otherwise might have passed each other by, were it not for happenstance. In retrospect it had been preordained that they should meet, as if his thinking of Bourne had brought Bourne closer to him. He thought again of tomorrow evening’s assignation in Rue du Sentier, and what it might imply. The Street of the Path. Or of the Track. The black limousine glided silently through the fogbound streets of Paris. Kilpatrick had no idea where he was and the idea came to him that he was floating down a dark river in the cabin of a motorboat. Mind if I light up? said Gordon. He pressed a button on his armrest and a panel opened to reveal a chromium ashtray. He took out a leather cigar case from an inside pocket. Vintage Dunhill, Kilpatrick noted. Smoke yourself? said Gordon. Well, I used to, said Kilpatrick, and you know, why not. Celebrate the occasion. Let me not be the cause of your downfall, said Gordon. On the other hand … and he extended the case towards Kilpatrick. From our Ireland–Cuba connections, he said. Sancho Panza, maybe not top dollar, but pretty good. Bite or cut? he said. Oh, whatever you’re having yourself, said Kilpatrick. With a magician’s gesture Gordon produced an instrument and neatly snipped the ends of two cigars. He held up the cutter, snapped his fingers, and a lighter appeared in his hand instead. Vintage Dunhill again, nice art deco enamelled chevrons. Well, here’s to us, said Gordon, and he grinned. They lit up.

Nice trick, said Kilpatrick. Oh, something I picked up in Istanbul, said Gordon, they’re very into prestidigitation there. Like most magic, it’s very simple if you know how. You’d be disappointed if I told you how it’s done, so I won’t. Some things should remain a mystery, don’t you think? Some things, said Kilpatrick. And that’s only speaking about the things we know about, said Gordon, what about the things we don’t even know exist, that’s an even greater mystery. Well, I’d like to know about Bourne, said Kilpatrick, the man you took me for. I used to know a John Bourne. You did? said Gordon. Yes, I met him back in the seventies in Belfast. He was a painter too. I met him in the Crown Bar. You remember the Crown? Sunlight falling through the stained glass windows of an afternoon, and you’d hold a glass of beer up to it and watch the bubbles floating upwards through the sunlight. And this afternoon I was sitting at the bar counter, Bourne was two stools away from me. Of course I didn’t know he was Bourne then, but I couldn’t help but notice his gear. Oatmeal Donegal tweed three-button jacket with the middle button done, navy-blue cord trousers, dark tan Oxford brogues. The light glinted on his sky blue silk tie. Nice jacket, said Bourne. He must have caught my eye out of the corner of his eye. I must have been wearing the chocolate brown cord jacket I’d bought a few days ago in the Friday Market. It was a nice jacket, vintage bespoke, made for a Dr T.E. Livingstone according to the label, I wonder what kind of a man he might have been, fitted me almost to a T, as it were. Of course I only say all this in hindsight. I don’t think I appreciated clothes that much back then. I might well not have noticed the things I notice now. And I think it was Bourne who showed me what clothes could be, what they could do for one. And for all I know my memory of what Bourne was wearing has been skewed by what I saw him wear since. A notional ensemble culled from several ensembles. Anyway, I said, Nice jacket yourself, and we began to talk, we talked from afternoon till evening, said Kilpatrick.

By now the fug within the cabin of the limousine was thicker than the fog without, the faces of the two men briefly and intermittently illuminated by a dim red glow as one or other of them drew on his cigar. Insulated from the outside world, gently undulating with the dips of the road, the vehicle seemed to make no forward progress, as if moored between the banks of a dark river. Yes, said Gordon, what clothes can do for us.
Le style, c’est l’homme
. Though I believe the phrase originally referred to literary style, as if we clothe ourselves in language, which I guess we do after a fashion. Or disguise ourselves, for that matter. He drew on his cigar. Yes, he said, the old Crown Bar. I used to know the owner’s son, back in the sixties, told me that under the brown paint of the ceiling it was all gold-leaf scrollwork, said Gordon. Is that right? said Kilpatrick, I didn’t know that. I know they renovated it a couple of years ago, reinstalled the original gas lighting, but I don’t remember anything about a gold-leaf ceiling. But it reminds me that that afternoon with Bourne I learned another thing I didn’t know about the Crown Bar, you know the film
Odd Man Out
? said Kilpatrick. Do you know, I’ve never seen it, one of those things you mean to, but never do, said Gordon. Great film, I believe.

Well, said Kilpatrick, it’s by Carol Reed, directed
The Third Man
too, James Mason is an
IRA
man on the run in Belfast, or a city we take to be Belfast, the character he plays is Johnny McQueen, ambiguous name or what, seeing he’s against the forces of the Crown, Crown as in British, that is. I say he’s on the run, hobble is more like, seeing he’s been wounded in a botched payroll heist. At one stage he staggers into one of the boxes of the Crown Bar, and when I saw it, I took it for the Crown Bar, but Bourne tells me it was a stage set. An exact replica, every detail just so, down to the griffins on the doorposts, the brass match-strikers in the boxes, engraved
MATCHES
, the ornate mirrors. And you wonder why Reed went to those lengths, he could have had James Mason in some other less elaborate bar, he could have still called it the Crown Bar if it was the verbal association he wanted. Come to think of it, I can’t remember if it’s identified as the Crown in the film, said Kilpatrick. Maybe he just wanted to do it to show he could, said Gordon, an exercise in style. A piece of magic. Isn’t that what films are about, making things appear to be what they are not? A forgery perhaps, but then forgery’s one of those crimes we secretly admire, we all feel a kind of glee when the experts are fooled. We’ve arrived, by the way, said Gordon.

Kilpatrick had not been aware of the vehicle’s stopping. The passenger door opened seemingly by itself. Odilon the chauffeur was poised at its side when they disembarked. As they did so Kilpatrick saw one of those massive oak-doored portals you come across in certain streets in Paris. Odilon retired to the limousine. Gordon went up to the portal and pressed a button on the intercom. It gave off a noise as if of short-wave radio. Gordon spoke into the speaker.