can send someone else. And anyway, an Israeli is a case for Immigration.
The commissioner insists: We’re just following orders from above. We’ve annexed you to the Secret Service. They have all the materials on Israel. And if you crack this case . . .
Then what? Israel will give me a medal? Thanks, but no thanks. Who needs honors from a foreign country?
Forced to accept the commissioner’s decision, Simon T. Lenox is swiftly vacated from his office and resettled in another office on the eighty-fourth floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center—stuck in a place where he doesn’t belong, struggling to tamp down his anger. He has better conditions here, ample space—an office designed to win him over, furnished with an executive leather chair and a state-of-the-art laptop. But all these props serve only to underscore how foreign he is in this new domain. Where are the incoming and outgoing mail trays? Where is the picture on the wall commemorating the much-publicized arrest of a suspect who was caught only because Lenox recognized her perfume? And what about the framed letters of appreciation, and his target-practice outfit, and his tailored suit on a hanger for when he is unexpectedly summoned to testify in court?
Who wants an obscure case and someone watching over your shoulder?
Simon T. Lenox stares at the partitions. Outside, the windows are drizzling: 43,600 tearful glass eyes. Inside, the phones are ringing. Crimes and misdemeanors occur constantly. In recent years he has lost something of the hunger, the joy of the hunt. Even when he solves a case, he does not feel the elation anymore. Back in the day, he used to finish off two bottles of Jack Daniels to celebrate a closed case.
At his age. In his position. He’s seen it all and heard it all. Nothing can surprise him. Not even foreigners who go missing in a country that isn’t theirs.
Without a trace. A phrase meticulously designed to mask the grief. As it should.
The place may be foreign, but the notepad is familiar. Simon T. Lenox pulls himself together and starts to write:
To: Brig. Gen. Yoav Rosen-Vardi, Israel Police Attaché to the United States, Washington, DC
I was requested by my supervisors to investigate, on behalf of the State of Israel, the disappearance of Mr. Liam Emanuel, and have happily accepted the assignment.
Incidentally, does the subject not have a middle name, as is usually the custom with us?
I hope to be able to locate the subject. I am honored to serve a true friend of the United States.
Yours sincerely,
Simon T. Lenox, Chief Inspector
Senior Investigator, Missing Persons
Annexed to the Secret Service
PS Kindly forward the affidavits you collected in Israel, as well as any relevant materials I may require during my investigation.
THE LAST person who saw him was the flight attendant on the red-eye from Tel-Aviv to JFK. She remembered the subject only because he shut himself in the bathroom for an unreasonably long time. She was about to break in, but then he suddenly emerged, seeming calm, and asked her whether she knew Yuri Gagarin. The flight attendant assumed he was suffering from some kind of mental disturbance. She’d once caught a couple going at it in the bathroom, and another time there was a man who had a stroke on a flight.
Transatlantic sex. Simon T. Lenox leans back in his executive leather chair and holds his notepad to his chest. This case might turn out to be more interesting than he’d expected.
Opening scene in a play: A man bursts out of a tiny cabin and fishes out from some hidden level of consciousness the name of the first man who broke through the gravity barrier. Did the Russian cosmonaut suffer from space sickness? That is what the missing man asked the flight attendant. Or was he troubled, during that single orbit around Earth, by his bladder? He was finally free, the son of a bitch—Columbus of the cosmos. That was what he said to her.
She was convinced he had lost his mind. Would you like a valium? she asked, and picked up the internal phone to the cockpit.
The passenger said: What a shit job, babysitting three hundred people on a jumbo jet who’ll do anything to hide their terror of death.
Ever since that day, every time she demonstrates the emergency procedures before takeoff, the flight attendant remembers that passenger. She straps on the inflatable life jacket, pulls down the oxygen mask with the dangling tubes, and his defiant face jumps up at her. Unshaven. Fresh stubble. She remembers the stubble clearly.
Did the passenger appear frightened? Might he have gone into the bathroom to cry?
No. Flight attendants are adept at spotting tears. There are people who lose their equilibrium when the rug of solid ground is pulled out from under them, she told the investigator in Israel. Simon T. Lenox presumes something of that shock, the shock of the earth falling away, afflicted her as well.
The subject pointed at the darkness swaddling the plane and asked: How do pilots learn how to control their bladder?
The flight attendant thought he was joking.
What made her ask if he was going on a secret mission?
The subject kept on about Yuri Gagarin. What had the Russian cosmonaut taken with him on Vostok 1? he wanted to know. He had the placid voice of a curious boy holding back his teacher after class. The choice of objects, he continued, must have been made with the clear knowledge that if he never came back, neither would they.
The flight attendant lost her patience and instructed the passenger to return to his seat immediately and fasten his seatbelt.
Yuri Gagarin? Who the hell is that, anyway? Lenox has trouble deciphering whether she had spat out that question at the bothersome passenger, or at the investigator. He sighs, suddenly aware of his age, albeit not of his position.
In the end he crashed. Three years after the daring spaceflight, the cosmonaut met his death in a foolish jet accident. This fact was not recorded in the affidavit from Israel, but Lenox scribbles it in his notepad as a footnote.
A possible destination for the subject: Houston, Texas: the NASA Space Center.
Only then does he allow himself to relax into the soft leather chair.
THE NYPD website lists dozens of missing people. Simon T. Lenox knows each of them by name, as well as their families, acquaintances, and enemies.
If he himself were to suddenly disappear, who would notify the authorities?
Such contemplations are best quashed early on. Self-pity is a luxury, and personal involvement only sabotages an investigation. He will do what is required, no more. He doesn’t owe the Israelis anything. He doesn’t even know any Israelis, except the ones he sees on television. CNN. Breaking news! They occupied us! We occupied them! They killed us, they’re killing us, they’ll kill us! He has no interest in the endless Middle Eastern blood cycle. Troubling the whole world with their problems for over a century already. Whenever Israel’s name comes up, he quickly flicks over to the nature channel. A river beaver building a dam. The white-tailed deer’s mating habits. Those are the only scenes that can lull him to sleep.
Yet here he is, with a missing Israeli.
Israelis are a type of Jews, aren’t they? What kind of Jews are they?
The FBI’s central computing system aggregates data about missing people from all law-enforcement authorities. Innocent and less-innocent people who walked out one fine day from their homes and never returned. Lenox, unwillingly, has become an expert—a dubious title, since he has failed to get most of his subjects home in time, or in one piece.
Since the last time he logged into the site, three bodies have been found, among them that of a six-year-old girl who was murdered with her mother by the mother’s boyfriend, in a motel near Albany. He killed them both with an axe. A particularly horrific case, if there is even any reasonable way to rank such horrors. Lenox remembers being notified about the disappearance of the woman and her child, who’d