It was as cold as a morgue, that Ford, and as dusty as an old attic. I ran my hands over the unfamiliar controls and my fingertips came away gray. I don’t own a car—I’ve never found much need, living alone in London—and on the rare occasions I hire one, it always seems that another layer of gadgets has been added, so that the instrument panel of the average family sedan now looks to me like the cockpit of a jumbo. There was a mystifying screen to the right of the wheel, which came alive when I switched on the engine. Pulsing green arcs were shown radiating upward from Earth to an orbiting space station. As I watched, the pulse switched direction and the arcs beamed down from the heavens. An instant later, the screen showed a large red arrow, a yellow path, and a great patch of blue.
An American woman’s voice, soft but commanding, said, from somewhere behind me:Join the road as soon as possible.
I would have turned her off, but I couldn’t see how, and I was conscious that the noise of the engine might soon bring Barry lumbering out of the house to investigate. The thought of his lubricious gaze was enough to get me moving. I quickly put the Ford into reverse and backed out of the garage. Then I adjusted the mirrors, switched on the headlights and the windscreen wipers, engaged drive, and headed for the gate. As I passed the guard post, the scene on the little satellite navigation monitor swung pleasingly, as if I were playing on an arcade game, and then the red arrow settled over the center of the yellow path. I was away.
There was something oddly soothing about driving along and seeing all the little paths and streams, neatly labeled, appear at the top of the screen and then scroll down before disappearing off the bottom. It made me feel as if the world were a safe and tamed place, its every feature tagged and measured and stored in some celestial control room, where softly spoken angels kept a benign vigil on the travelers below.
In two hundred yards,instructed the woman,turn right.
In fifty yards, turn right.
And then,Turn right.
The solitary demonstrator was huddled in his hut, reading a newspaper. He stood as he saw me at the junction and came out into the sleet. I noticed he had a car parked nearby, a big old Volkswagen camper van, and I wondered why he didn’t shelter in that. As I swung right, I got a good look at his gaunt gray face. He was immobile and expressionless, taking no more notice of the drenching rain than if he had been a carved wooden figure outside a drugstore. I pressed my foot on the accelerator and headed toward Edgartown, enjoying the slight sense of adventure that always comes from driving in a foreign country. My disembodied guide was silent for the next four miles or so, and I had forgotten all about her until, as I reached the outskirts of the town, she started up again.
In two hundred yards, turn left.Her voice made me jump.
In fifty yards, turn left.
Turn left,she repeated, when we reached the junction.
Now she was beginning to get on my nerves.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered and took a right toward Main Street.
Turn around when possible.
“This is getting ridiculous,” I said out loud and pulled over. I pressed various buttons on the navigator’s console, with the aim of shutting it down. The screen changed and offered me a menu. I can’t remember all the options. one wasENTER A NEW DESTINATION . I think another wasRETURN TO HOME ADDRESS . And a third—the one highlighted—wasREMEMBER PREVIOUS DESTINATION .
I stared at it for a while, as the potential implications slowly filtered into my brain. Cautiously, I pressedSELECT .
The screen went blank. The device was obviously malfunctioning.
I turned off the engine and hunted around for the instructions. I even braved the sleet and opened up the back of the Ford to see if they’d been left there. I returned empty-handed and turned on the ignition. Once again the navigation system lit up. As it went through its start-up routine, communicating with its mother ship, I put the car into gear and headed down the hill.
Turn around when possible.
I tapped the steering wheel with my forefingers. For the first time in my life I was confronted with the true meaning of the word “predestination.” I had just passed the Victorian whaling church. Before me the hill dipped toward the harbor. A few white masts were faintly visible through the dirty lace curtain of rain. I was not far from my old hotel—from the girl in the white mobcap, and the sailing prints, and old Captain John Coffin staring sternly from the wall. It was eight o’clock. There was no traffic on the road. The sidewalks were deserted. I carried on down the slope, past all the empty shops with their cheery closed-for-the-winter-see-you-next-year!! notices.
Turn around when possible.
Wearily, I surrendered to fate. I flicked the indicator and turned into a little street of houses—Summer Street, I think it was called, inappropriately enough—and braked. The rain pounded on the roof of the Ford; the windscreen wiper thudded back and forth. A small black-and-white terrier was defecating in the gutter, with an expression of intense concentration on its ancient wise face. Its owner, too thickly swaddled against the wet and cold for me to tell either age or sex, turned clumsily to look at me, like a spaceman maneuvering himself on a lunar walk. In one hand was a pooperscooper, in the other a white plastic scrotum of dog’s crap. I quickly reversed back out into Main Street, swinging the wheel so hard I briefly mounted the curb. With a thrilling screech of tire, I set off back up the hill. The arrow swung wildly, before settling contentedly over the yellow route.
Exactly what I thought I was doing I still don’t really know. I couldn’t even be sure that McAra had been the last driver to enter an address. It might have been some other guest of Rhinehart’s; it might have been Dep or Duc; it could even have been the police. Whatever the truth, it was certainly in the back of my mind that if things started to get remotely alarming, I could stop at any point, and I suppose that gave me a false sense of reassurance.
Once I was out of Edgartown and onto Vineyard Haven Road, I heard nothing more from my heavenly guide for several minutes. I passed dark patches of woodland and small white houses. The few approaching cars had their headlights on and were traveling slowly, swishing over the water-slicked road. I sat well forward, peering into the grimy morning. I passed a high school, just starting to get busy for the day, and beside it the island’s set of traffic lights (they were marked on the map, like a tourist attraction: something to go and look at in the winter). The road bent sharply, the trees seemed to close in; the screen showed a fresh set of evocative names: Deer Hunter’s Way, Skiff Avenue. In two hundred yards, turn right. In fifty yards, turn right. Turn right.
I steered down the hill into Vineyard Haven, passing a school bus toiling up it. I had a brief impression of a deserted shopping street away to my left, and then I was into the flat, shabby area around the port. I turned a corner, passed a café, and pulled up in a big car park. About a hundred yards away, across the puddled, rain-swept tarmac, a queue of vehicles was driving up the ramp of a ferry. The red arrow pointed me toward it.
In the warmth of the Ford, as shown on the navigation screen, the proposed route was inviting, like a child’s painting of a summer holiday—a yellow jetty extending into the bright blue of Vineyard Haven Harbor. But the reality through the windscreen was distinctly uninviting: the sagging black mouth of the ferry, smeared at the corners with rust, and, beyond it, the heaving gray swell and the flailing hawsers of sleet.
Someone tapped on the glass beside me and I fumbled for the switch to lower the window. He was wearing dark blue oilskins with the hood pulled up, and he had to keep one hand pressed firmly on top of it to prevent it flying off his head. His spectacles were dripping with rain. A badge announced that he worked for the Steamship Authority.
“You’ll have to hurry,” he shouted, turning his back into the wind. “She leaves at eight-fifteen. The weather’s getting bad. There might not be another for a while.” He opened the door for me and almost pushed me toward the ticket office. “You go pay. I’ll tell them you’ll be right there.”
I left the engine running and went into the little building. Even as I stood at the counter, I remained of two minds. Through the window I could see the last of the cars boarding the ferry, and the car park attendant standing by the Ford, stamping his feet to ward off the cold. He saw me staring at him and beckoned at me urgently to get a move on.
The elderly woman behind the desk looked as though she, too, could think of better places to be at a quarter past eight on a Friday morning.
“You going or what?” she demanded.
I sighed, took out my wallet, and slapped down seven ten-dollar bills.
ONCE I’D DRIVEN UPthe clanking metal gangway into the dark, oily belly of the ship, another man in waterproofs directed me to a parking space, and I inched forward until he held up his hand for me to stop. All around me, drivers were leaving their vehicles and squeezing through the narrow gaps toward the stairwells. I stayed where I was and carried on trying to figure out how the navigation system worked. But after about a minute the crewman tapped on my window and indicated by a mime that I had to switch off the ignition. As I did so, the screen died again. Behind me, the ferry’s rear doors closed. The ship’s engines started to throb, the hull lurched, and with a discouraging scrape of steel we began to move.
I felt trapped all of a sudden, sitting in the chilly twilight of that hold, with its stink of diesel and exhaust fumes, and it was more than just the claustrophobia of being belowdecks. It was McAra. I could sense his presence next to me. His dogged, leaden obsessions now seemed to have become mine. He was like some heavy, half-witted stranger one makes the mistake of talking to on a journey and who then refuses to leave one alone. I got out of the car and locked it, and went in search of a cup of coffee. At the bar on the upper deck I queued behind a man readingUSA Today , and over his shoulder I saw a picture of Lang with the secretary of state. “Lang to face war crimes trial” was the headline. “Washington shows support.” The camera had caught him grinning.
I took my coffee over to a corner seat and considered where my curiosity had led me. For a start, I was technically guilty of stealing a car. I ought at least to call the house and let them know I’d taken it. But that would probably entail talking to Ruth, who would demand to know where I was, and I didn’t want to tell her. Then there was the question of whether or not what I was doing was wise. If thiswas McAra’s original route I was following, I had to face the fact that he hadn’t returned from the trip alive. How was I to know what lay at the end of the journey? Perhaps I should tell someone what I was contemplating, or better still, take a companion along as a witness? Or perhaps I should simply disembark at Woods Hole, wait in one of the bars, catch the next ferry back to the island, and plan the whole thing properly, rather than launch myself into the unknown so unprepared?
Oddly enough, I didn’t feel any particular sense of danger—I suppose because it was all so ordinary. I glanced around at the faces of my fellow passengers: working people mostly, to judge by their denims and boots—weary guys who had just made an early-morning delivery to the island, or people going over to America to pick up supplies. A big wave hit the side of the ship and we all swayed as one, like rippling weed on the seabed. Through the brine-streaked porthole, the low gray line of coast and the restless, freezing sea appeared completely anonymous. We could have been in the Baltic or the Solent or the White Sea—any dreary stretch of flattened shoreline where people have to find a means of turning a living at the very edge of the land.
Someone went out on deck for a cigarette, letting in a gust of cold, wet air. I didn’t attempt to follow him. I had another coffee and relaxed in the safety of the warm, damp, yellowish atmosphere of the bar, until, about half an hour later, we passed Nobska Point Lighthouse and a loudspeaker instructed us to return to our vehicles. The deck pitched badly in the swell, hitting the side of the dock with a clang that rang down the length of the hull. I was knocked against the metal doorframe at the foot of the stairs. A couple of car alarms started howling and my feeling of security vanished, replaced by panic that the Ford was being broken into. But as I swayed closer, it looked untouched, and when I opened my case to check, Lang’s memoirs were still there.
I switched on the engine, and by the time I emerged into the gray rain and wind of Woods Hole, the satellite screen was offering me its familiar golden path. It would have been a simple matter to have pulled over and gone into one of the nearby bars for breakfast, but instead I stayed in the convoy of traffic and let it carry me on—on into the filthy New England winter, up Woods Hole Road to Locust Street and Main Street, and beyond. I had half a tank of fuel and the whole day stretched ahead of me.
In two hundred yards, at the circle, take the second exit.
I took it, and for the next forty-five minutes I headed north on a couple of big freeways, more or less retracing my route back to Boston. That appeared to answer one question, at any rate: whatever else McAra had been up to just before he died, he hadn’t been driving to New York to see Rycart. I wondered what could have tempted him to Boston. The airport, perhaps? I let my mind fill with images of him meeting someone off a plane—from England, maybe—his solemn face turned expectantly toward the sky, a hurried greeting in the arrivals hall, and then off to some clandestine rendezvous. Or perhaps he had planned to fly somewhere by himself? But just as that scenario was taking firm shape in my imagination, I was directed west toward Interstate-95, and even with my feeble grasp of Massachusetts geography I knew I must be heading away from Logan Airport and downtown Boston.
I drove as slowly as I could along the wide road for perhaps fifteen miles. The rain had eased, but it was still dark. The thermometer showed an outside temperature of twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit. I remember great swathes of woodland, interspersed with lakes and office blocks and high-tech factories gleaming brightly amid landscaped grounds, as delicately positioned as country clubs, or cemeteries. Just as I was beginning to think that perhaps McAra had been making a run for the Canadian border, the voice told me to take the next exit from the interstate, and I came down onto another big six-lane freeway which, according to the screen, was the Concord Turnpike.
I could make out very little through the screen of trees, even though their branches were bare. My slow speed was infuriating the drivers behind me. A succession of big trucks came lumbering up behind me and blazed their headlights and blared their horns, before pulling out to overtake in a fountain of dirty spray.
