In Search of Mr. Crow

Martin Wells spent Monday the way lawyers spend the days they intend to be ordinary: in motion. Three client calls, a filing, a lunch he did not taste. But the green folder sat in his locked drawer all day the way a tooth sits in a jaw that has decided to ache, and by four o'clock he had stopped pretending to work around it.

He took the will home and read it again at his kitchen table, and this time he did what he should have done eleven years ago: he read it as an adversary would.

The document was clean. That was the first unbearable fact. There was no ambiguity to litigate, no technical failure, no missing witness. He had drafted it himself, and he had drafted it well, and the clause was airtight. Death or continued absence for a period exceeding ninety days. All to Silas Crow. And the name Silas Crow appeared exactly twice in the whole instrument—once in the dispositive clause and once in the signature block—and in both places it had been written in Vale's own hand, inserted into the typed text with a pen, as though the typewriter had refused to say it and the man had been forced to.

Wells knew what people meant when they said a will was strange. Ninety days was a short absence clause. Executors were usually granted years to conclude that a vanished man was not coming back. Vale had wanted the door to open fast. Vale had built himself, or built someone, a ninety-day key. And the clause said nothing about proof, nothing about a hearing, nothing about a declaration of death—the machinery a normal will would have demanded. It said absence. A man is absent, the will seemed to say, whenever his lawyer cannot find him. The burden of the whole document had been arranged, quietly and legally, to fall on Martin Wells.

The second unbearable fact was smaller. In the file, clipped behind the will, was a memorandum of identity Wells required of every beneficiary—a formality, a paragraph of name, date of birth, address. The address for Silas Crow was a building on Eddy Street, in the Tenderloin, a single-room-occupancy hotel Wells had passed a hundred times without seeing it, the way you pass anything that is built not to be seen. No phone. No email. Date of birth left blank, and in the margin beside the blank, in that same pen, a single line: Not applicable.

He sat with that for a long time. Then he called Dr. Alan Reyes.

They had never been friends, Wells and Reyes. Reyes was the chemist, the first partner, the man whose name was on the earliest papers and on none of the buildings. Wells knew him from dinners and fundraisers, a heavyset man with careful hands and a way of listening that made you finish your sentences. Vale spoke of him less and less over the years, and then not at all, and Wells had learned, in the long friendship of a man like Adrian Vale, not to ask about the rooms that had been closed.

Reyes answered on the second ring. "Wells. It's been a while."

"It has. I'm sorry to call out of the blue. It's about Adrian."

The pause on the line was long enough to have furniture in it. "What about Adrian."

"You've heard nothing from him? No call, no letter?"

"Nothing in three years," Reyes said. "And before that, nothing worth reporting. Why are you asking me and not his office?"

"Because his office says he's traveling," Wells said. "And his doorman says the house is shut. And his lawyer is looking at a will that pays everything to a man nobody has ever met, if Adrian stays gone ninety days. I need to know if there's a version of Adrian Vale that would do that on purpose."

Reyes said nothing for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice had changed registers, dropped into something flat and clinical. "Come see me. Not on the phone."

They met the next afternoon in a laboratory south of the city that belonged to a university Wells had never attended. It was a working lab, unglamorous, all stainless steel and humming compressors, and Reyes poured coffee from a carafe that had seen decades, and they sat on stools by a bench like students, and for a while Reyes talked about nothing—the price of glassware, the weather, a grant lost. Wells let him. He had spent thirty years letting frightened people arrange the room before they spoke.

Then Reyes set down his cup and looked at his hands.

"I'll tell you what I can, and it isn't much, and you'll wish it were less. Adrian Vale is the most brilliant man I ever worked with, and I would not leave him alone in a room with my worst enemy, and I say that with love. Those two sentences used to be one sentence, in the beginning. Then they split." He smiled without any pleasure in it. "Everything splits, around Adrian."

"The will," Wells said. "Silas Crow."

"I know the name," Reyes said.

The lab hummed. Somewhere a centrifuge spun down with a dying note.

"I don't know who he is," Reyes went on, "and I want that on the record with your lawyer's ear listening: I do not know who he is. What I know is that three years ago Adrian started asking me questions that had no business being asked. Not research questions. Confession questions, dressed up as research. What could a compound do, he wanted to know, not to the body—to the person. He'd stopped caring about the body years before that, frankly. He used to say the body was just the packaging the person came in." Reyes turned his cup a quarter turn. "And then he wanted reagents. Old ones. Things I'd made once, in a different lifetime, for a program we buried. I said no. He laughed at me, kindly, the way he does, and he said, 'Alan, you were only ever the first draft of me,' and he left, and that was the last time I saw him in person. I've been waiting for this call for three years, Wells. I just thought it would come from the police."

"You think he's done something."

Reyes looked up, and his eyes, for the first time, were old. "I think science took a man who was already two men and gave him a permit. I think the estate and the will and the traveling story are the packaging. And I think you should stop reading that will and start watching that door you told me about. Because in my experience, lawyers find people through paper. And whatever Adrian Vale has become, he doesn't live on paper anymore."

Wells asked the question he had driven across town to ask. "If I can't find Vale in ninety days, the estate goes to this Crow. Is there anything in your science, Alan, anything at all, that could make a man want that? Make a man arrange his own disappearance in advance, with his college roommate holding the pen?"

Reyes was quiet for so long that the centrifuge finished its cycle and the room got louder in its place. "I can tell you what I'd want, if I were a man arranging his own disappearance," he said. "I'd want an executor who loved me. Love blinds better than any compound we ever made. I'd want him to have just enough doubt to keep looking, and just enough friendship to keep quiet. That's not chemistry, Wells. That's design."

Wells drove back across the city in the last light with Reyes's sentences arranging and rearranging themselves in his head, and he understood that the phrase two men had not frightened him as much as the tone in which it had been said—which was not the tone of a metaphor. That night he did not sleep well, and at one in the morning he was standing in his hallway with his coat on, unable to explain to himself why, and by two he had stopped trying to explain it. He drove into the city.

The fog was in again, thicker than the January night Colin had described, a fog with actual weight to it, that ate sound. Folsom Street was empty and lit, the glass front of the Vale Biolabs lobby glowing its proud blue, and Wells turned the corner and walked into Harriet Alley, and the world became six feet of visibility and brick.

The steel door was exactly as Colin had described it: no handle, no sign, no number, set into the brick as if the brick had grown around it. In the fog, under the one working lamp at the alley's far end, it looked less like a door than like a fact the building had been keeping. Wells found a doorway opposite—an old loading alcove, deep enough to hold a man and his breath—and he stood in it and prepared to be a lawyer about the whole thing: an observation, a record, a fact, filed.

He was good at waiting. He had deposed hostile witnesses across decade-long feuds. He stood in the alcove while the fog moved through the alley in slow ropes, while a rat crossed without hurrying, while two men came down the alley talking in a language he didn't know and passed within arm's reach of the door without giving it a glance. That, he noted, was its own evidence. The men who knew the door did not look at it.

He thought about Colin, somewhere across town coming off a night shift, and about the girl with the dog, whose name he had deliberately not asked for, because a name would have made her a client and this was not yet a case. He thought about all the Sundays of the eleven-year walk, and how a habit is a kind of loyalty, and how loyalty is the exact instrument a careful man would choose if he wanted to be looked for by someone who would not talk. The thought did not go anywhere. It just sat with him in the alcove, keeping vigil, the way the dead keep vigil in this city: politely, in the fog, asking nothing.

At twenty past three, the lock turned.

There was no buzzer he could hear, no voice, no light from any camera. The door simply opened inward, a slice of darkness detaching from the wall, and the man who came out of it came out the way Colin had said: silently, smoothly, arriving without lifting. He was thin—thinner than a man should be, thin under his dark coat in a way that suggested the coat had been bought for a different body. He was stooped, so that his head seemed to start lower than a head should. And the fog closed behind him as he came, so that for a moment he seemed not to have emerged from the door but to have condensed out of the weather itself.

Wells watched him walk the length of the alley. At the mouth of it, the man stopped. He did not turn around. He stood facing the street, and he said, into the fog, in a voice that was soft and dry and perfectly, horribly unhurried:

"You should come out, Mr. Wells. You've been breathing like a witness for three hours."

The cold that went through Wells then was not the fog's. He came out of the alcove because his legs decided it before he did, and he walked to where the man stood, and he looked at him under the far lamp.

The face was wrong. Not scarred, not deformed, not disguised—wrong, in the aggregate, in a way no single feature could account for. The skin was pale in a way that suggested a room with no windows. Something in the eyes, Wells thought—something shrunken and redrawn, as if a portrait had been copied by a hand that despised the original. He was looking at a stranger. He was certain, in some sealed chamber of himself that he would not open for a long time yet, that he was looking at somebody he had known for thirty years.

"Mr. Crow," Wells said.

The man smiled. It was not a good smile; it was a performance of one, and the performance was somehow worse. "You have the advantage of me," he said. "Though no—that's not true. I have read your firm's name on excellent stationery. Executor, is it? Or has the ninety days run?" The voice stayed soft. It did not raise. It made the alley quieter around it.

"I'm here about the girl," Wells said. "January. Harriet Alley. A young woman was knocked down outside this door, and a man stepped over her and came back out with a check."

"And you've come to collect for her." Crow said it with mild interest, as if confirming a delivery. "No. You've come for the will. The girl is Colin Grange's errand; the will is yours. Two men, one alley. I find the symmetry tasteful." He tilted his head, and the stoop made the gesture serpentine. "Ask what you drove here at three in the morning to ask, Mr. Wells. You've been rehearsing in that alcove. I could hear the rehearsal."

He had not spoken his cousin's name to a living soul since January — not to Reyes, not to the police, not to the air of his own office. The cold of that arrived late, the way cold comes off stone, and he filed it with the rest of the fog.

Wells found that his voice, when it came, was steady, and he was grateful to it. "Does Adrian Vale know what you do at this door?"

It was the right question and he knew it the moment it left him, because it was the question of a lawyer serving two masters, and the thing in front of him understood it instantly, and delighted in it.

"Know," Crow repeated. He seemed to taste the word. "Mr. Vale and I have an arrangement of very long standing, and I will tell you this much for nothing, because you came out in the fog like a gentleman and because it will keep you awake, and I have found that I enjoy that. Whatever you believe about that house on Broadway, that lobby on Folsom Street, that signature on the checks—whatever arrangement of the facts lets you sleep—understand that I keep the books now. He had his ninety days the day that door was hung. Everything since is my administration." He stepped closer, and up close there was a smell off him, faint and chemical, bitter, like a pharmacy behind a locked room, and his pale eyes had the flat patience of something that had already read the ending. "You want to search for Mr. Vale. Search. But do the arithmetic first, counselor. Every day he is absent, I am present. It's in the paperwork. You wrote the paperwork."

Then he went, down the alley and out into the street, without a sound on the wet pavement, and Wells stood alone in Harriet Alley with the fog coming down like a verdict and the steel door shut, and understood that he had gotten his answer and would spend the rest of this affair trying to un-know it.