`That was Stevenson, up at the station house,’ he said. `We finally got a match on the first guy’s prints. Seems like we did the right thing to run them again. Stevenson’s faxing it through to us here in a minute, so tell us what you got, doc, and we’ll put it all together.’
The tired guy in the white coat shrugged and picked up a sheet of paper.
`The first guy?’ he said. `I haven’t got much at all. The body was in a hell of a mess. He was tall, he was fit, he had a shaved head. The main thing is the dental work. Looks like the guy got his teeth fixed all over the place. Some of it is American, some of it looks American, some of it is foreign.’
Next to my hip, the fax machine started beeping and whirring. A sheet of thin paper fed itself in. `So what do we make of that?’ Finlay said. `The
guy was foreign? Or an American who lived abroad or what?’
The thin sheet of paper fed itself out, covered in writing. Then the machine stopped and went quiet. I picked up the paper and glanced at it. Then I read it through twice. I went cold. I was gripped by an icy paralysis and I couldn’t move. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing on that piece of fax paper. The sky crashed in on me. I stared at the doctor and spoke.
`He grew up abroad,’ I said. `He had his teeth fixed wherever he was living. He broke his right arm when he was eight and had it set in Germany. He had his tonsils out in the hospital in Seoul.’
The doctor looked up at me.
`They can tell all that from his fingerprints?’ he said.
I shook my head.
`The guy was my brother,’ I said.
TEN
Once I saw a navy film about expeditions in the frozen Arctic. You could be walking over a solid glacier. Suddenly the ice would heave and shatter. Some kind of unimaginable stresses in the floes. A whole new geography would be forced up. Massive escarpments where it had been flat. Huge ravines behind you. A new lake in front of you. The world all changed in a second. That’s how I felt. I sat there rigid with shock on the counter between the fax machine and the computer terminal and felt like an Arctic guy whose whole world changes in a single step.
They walked me through to the cold store in back to make a formal identification of his body. His face had been blown away by the gunshots and all his bones were broken but I recognized the starshaped scar on his neck. He’d got it when we were messing with a broken bottle, twenty-nine years ago. Then they took me back up to the station house in Margrave. Finlay drove. Roscoe sat with me in the back of the car and held my hand all the
way. It was only a twenty-minute ride, but in that time I lived through two whole lifetimes. His and mine.
My brother Joe. Two years older than me. He was born on a base in the Far East right at the end of the Eisenhower era. Then I had been born on a base in Europe, right at the start of the Kennedy era. Then we’d grown up together all over the world inside that tight isolated transience that service families create for themselves. Life was all about moving on at random and unpredictable intervals. It got so that it felt weird to do more than a semester and a half in any one place. Several times we went years without seeing a winter. We’d get moved out of Europe at the start of the fall and go down to the Pacific somewhere and summer would begin all over again.
Our friends kept just disappearing. Some unit would get shipped out somewhere and a bunch of kids would be gone. Sometimes we saw them again months later in a different place. Plenty of them we never saw again. Nobody ever said hello or goodbye. You were just either there or not there.