The Ghost

And then she can do the prison visits.”
    I listened to the sound of her own door opening and closing, and shortly afterward the barely audible sound of a toilet flushing. I had almost finished packing. I folded the clothes she had lent me the previous evening and laid them on the chair, put my laptop into my shoulder bag, and then the only thing left was the manuscript. It sat in a thick pile on the table where she had left it, three sullen inches of it—my millstone, my albatross, my meal ticket. I couldn’t make any progress without it, yet I wasn’t supposed to take it from the house. It occurred to me that perhaps I could argue the war crimes investigation had changed the circumstances of Lang’s life so completely that the old rules no longer applied. At any rate, I could use that as an excuse. I certainly couldn’t face the embarrassment of staying here and running into Ruth every few hours. I put the manuscript into my suitcase, along with the package from the archive, zipped them up, and went out into the corridor.
    Barry was sitting with his Harry Potter novel in the chair by the front door. He raised his great slab of a face from the pages and gave me a look of weary disapproval, tinged with a sneer of amused contempt.
    “Morning, sir,” he said. “Finished for the night, have we?”
    I thought, he knows. And then I thought, of course he knows, you bloody fool; it’s his job to know. In a flash I saw his sniggering conversations with his colleagues, the log of his official observations passed to London, a discreet entry in a file somewhere, and I felt a thrust of fury and resentment. Perhaps I should have responded with a wink or a colluding quip—“Well, officer, you know what they say: there’s many a good tune played on an old fiddle,” or something of the sort—but instead I said, coldly, “Why don’t you just fuck off?”
    It wasn’t exactly Oscar Wilde, but it got me out of the house. I walked through the door and set off toward the track, only belatedly registering that, unfortunately, high moral dudgeon offers no protection against stinging squalls of sleet. I trudged on with an effort at dignity for a few more yards, then ducked for cover into the lee of the house. Rainwater was overflowing from the gutter and drilling into the sandy soil. I took off my jacket and held it over my head, and considered how I was going to reach Edgartown. That was when the idea of borrowing the tan-colored Ford Escape SUV popped helpfully into my mind.
    How different—how very different—the course of my life would have been if I hadn’t immediately gone running toward that garage, dodging the puddles, the tent of my jacket raised over me with one hand, the other dragging my little suitcase. I see myself now as if in a movie, or perhaps, more aptly, in one of those filmed reconstructions on a TV crime show: the victim skipping unknowingly toward his fate, as ominous chords underscore the portentousness of the scene. The door was still unlocked from the previous day and the keys of the Ford were in the ignition—after all, who worries about robbers when you live at the end of a two-mile track protected by six armed bodyguards? I heaved my case into the front passenger seat, put my jacket back on, and slid behind the steering wheel.
    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