In Search of Ezra Wick

It took Marsh nine days to assemble what the city knew about Ezra Wick, and the city knew nothing. The man existed in the negative space of databases: no license, no tax record, no lease, no traffic citation, no photograph. He had signed nothing with his own hand except, apparently, the backs of other people's misfortunes. What Marsh had was a signature authority routed through a foundation account, a freight door, and a name in a will. At the end of the nine days he wrote the sum of the search on a single slip of paper and taped it inside the file: He does not exist. Somebody pays for that to be true. He did not take the slip out of the file again until the morning the note came.

The girl's family found him before he found them.

On the tenth day he went to see an old friend of his client's, on the theory that a man who has known Julian Voss for twenty years will know Julian Voss's shadow.

Dr. Miriam Adler received him in a book-lined office at the university hospital, where she was emeritus and prepared to stay that way. She had been, twenty years back, the second-most-cited endocrinologist in the country; now she was a straight-backed woman of seventy with white hair cut close and a laugh she spent rarely. When Marsh asked her, generally, whether she had any knowledge of a Mr. Wick, she set down her pen and looked at him for a moment with real attention.

"You are the lawyer," she said. "The executor. I have heard your name at every dinner Julian has ruined by leaving early. Sit down, Mr. Marsh, and ask me what you actually came to ask."

"I came to ask whether you know the man named in my client's will."

"And I will answer the question I heard, which is a different question." She folded her hands. "Julian and I stopped being colleagues years ago, when his science stopped being science. I called his program theology dressed in a lab coat, and he called my caution cowardice in a white coat, and we were both right, and we have dined together every year since because being right is a thin broth to live on. Whatever Julian is carrying now, whatever he has built down in that red-brick annex he pretends is storage, he built it after he stopped showing his work to anyone whose respect he feared. I have not seen his laboratory in six years. I have never heard the name Wick in my life. Does that answer the man I heard?"

"It answers the man I came to," Marsh said, and he stood to go, and she stopped him with one raised finger.

"A piece of advice that is not about science. When you have known a man for thirty years and he begins to disappear by increments, you will be offered two explanations, and one of them will be flattering to you. Take the other one."

He went from her office to Pioneer Square and spent the afternoon where the lane met the market, on the theory that a man who swerves toward a child will come again. He was right on the second Sunday.

The records search he ran in parallel, quietly, through two paralegals who were trained not to wonder, came back thinner than the paper on most parking lots, and the thinness was itself a finding. The annex on Fuller Lane sat on land owned since 1961 by a holding company whose shares were held by a trust whose trustee was a lawyer whose client list was one name long; Marsh followed the chain through three counties and four decades and arrived, at the end of the week, at his own drafting hand, on a deed he had written in the institute's second year and had not thought of since. The fire records showed the building's certificate of occupancy amended eleven years ago, on the institute's application, for laboratory use with secured storage; the amendment described the reinforced door on the north corridor and the reason for it, which was given in the application's own language as the custody of controlled precursor inventory. The building permit file held the floor plans, and the floor plans held a thing Marsh sat looking at for a long time, which was that the annex had two exits on the lane side, the green door for the offices and the freight door for the laboratory floor, and that the freight door's bolt, per the plans, was on the inside. A door locked from within, in a building owned by a trust he had drafted, leased to a laboratory he had chartered, reinforced at the request of a client he had represented for twenty years, and the client had done none of it through counsel. Every paper in the chain was clean, and the cleanliness had the specific look of work done by someone who knew precisely which filings attract attention, and Marsh closed the folder and put it in the safe with the will, and sat for a while with the professional knowledge, arriving at last and unwelcome, that he had spent two decades drafting the architecture of other people's secrecy and had never once been asked to inspect what the architecture was for.

The records, when they came back, went into the safe and taught him one thing, which was that the lane was where the answers lived. He gave up on paper and went back to waiting. He saw Wick from across the lane, in daylight, and felt his stomach drop with a recognition he could not explain, the way one's stomach drops on a staircase that has one step more than the legs have budgeted for. The man was small, ten years younger than Voss, plainly and poorly dressed in a good coat too big in the shoulders, and he was not doing anything at all. He was standing at the padlocked freight door, at four in the afternoon, waiting, and he stood the way furniture stands, with his weight settled and his long fingers loose at his sides, and his coat hung off shoulders that did not fill it, and his face was arranged in a mild, settled pleasure, the expression of a man reading good news, and Marsh, who had spent a career reading the faces of the bereaved, could not look at it and then had to.

He crossed the lane.

"Ezra Wick," he said.

The man turned without hurry. Up close he was even smaller, with a slight stoop and long fingers, and his eyes were the eyes of a man doing arithmetic on you.

"That is my name," he said. "You have the advantage of a profession that gets names out of documents. What document am I in?"

"A will," Marsh said. "I am Alden Marsh, attorney for Dr. Julian Voss. My client and I have an old disagreement about a clause, and I am told you are the clause."

Something moved across the small face, some rearrangement of appetite, and Marsh understood in one cold drop that he was the first thing in this man's day that had been interesting.

"Say your business in the lane," Wick said. "I am at home here."

"Then I will say it plainly. If there is anything against your standing in that will, this is the time to say it. I have watched your signature authority move money in this neighborhood, and I will tell you what I told the girl's family: daylight is the cheapest disinfectant there is. Sell me your interest in Dr. Voss and name your figure, and I will consider the account settled to everyone's benefit. I have no doubt you are lying about something. Everyone who waits at a locked door is lying about something. I have simply not yet established what."

He had said it harder than he intended, and he braced for the small man's anger, and it did not come. Wick smiled instead, slow, and it was the worst thing Marsh had seen in thirty years of probate.

"You have made a mistake in your accounting," Wick said. "You think you are buying me out of a document. Suppose I told you that I am not in the document, Alden Marsh. Suppose the document is in me." He put a key in the padlock. "And suppose that the day Dr. Voss is done with me, and done with the lot of you who ring his doorbell and audit his conscience, you will find that I step into his place as easily as a hand into a glove, and the whole city will learn to say my name without your help. Now. You wanted daylight. Here is mine. If I am the man you have heard about, and I am, then you should be asking whether I am the man who can be killed. I am not. Good afternoon."

The padlock snapped. The freight door opened on a black passage that smelled of dust and refrigerant and something under both, a smell like a coin held too long in the mouth, and then it closed, and Marsh was alone in the lane with his hand still half extended and his heart going like a trapped bird.

He walked home the long way, twice the distance, and made himself a strong drink, and sat with it untouched for an hour. He had drafted the substitution clause with his own pen. He remembered now the exact resistance in Voss's voice, four years ago, when he had argued against it: the mild, amused, bottomless patience of a man watching a dog bark at the tide.

"Julian," he said out loud, to the empty room. "What did you sign?"