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  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF CAMPBELL ARMSTRONG

  “Campbell Armstrong is thriller writing’s best-kept secret.” —The Sunday Times

  “Armstrong is among the most intriguing of blockbuster writers … near to unputdownable.” —GQ

  “While touching on suspense with a skill to please hard-core thriller addicts, he manages to please people who … warm to readable novels of substance.” —Daily Mail

  “Armstrong’s skill is not just an eye for a criminally good tale but a passion for the people that will populate it.” —The Scotsman

  “Subtle and marvelous … This is a dazzling book.” —The Daily Telegraph on Agents of Darkness

  “A consummate psychological thriller … Without doubt, Armstrong is now in the front rank of thriller writers.” —Books on Heat

  “Armstrong has outdone both Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett.” —James Patterson on Jig

  “A full throttle adventure thriller.” —The Guardian on Mambo

  “A wonderful puzzle that keeps us guessing right to the end.” —Publishers Weekly on Mazurka

  Mr. Apology

  Campbell Armstrong

  To the memory of my father, Thomas Black

  ONE

  1.

  Harrison looked at the red light that glowed on his answering machine. Without taking off his wet coat, he sat down on the edge of the bed and, as if hypnotized, gazed at it. The light meant there had been an incoming message, maybe more than one. So soon, he thought. He glanced at Madeleine, who was shaking her damp hair from side to side, drying the strands in the corners of a towel. He wondered why he felt so suddenly nervous, so apprehensive. A message on an answering machine from some anonymous voice out there—wasn’t that what he wanted to hear in any case? Wasn’t that precisely what the whole thing was about? He rubbed his hands together. Then he raised one hand and let it hover above the PLAYBACK button.

  “Well?” Madeleine said. She came and sat alongside him on the bed, curling her legs up under her body. The damp towel lay in her lap. She took his hand and squeezed it, as if for encouragement. “Aren’t you going to listen, Harry?”

  He smiled. “It’s weird,” he said. “It’s like when you want to start a new canvas, a new painting, and you hold the brush in the air for a long time because you’re not certain you’re going to get it right; you’re conscious of all the things that are going to go wrong—”

  “Stage fright,” she said.

  “Something like that.” He touched the PLAYBACK button without pressing it. He stared along the floor, looking at the little pile of posters, the ones they hadn’t had time to put up anywhere yet. He remembered going around the streets with Madeleine only a few hours ago, walking in the rain, moving like fugitives through the darkness, sticking the posters up wherever they could. The windows of stores, phone booths, lampposts, the bus terminal, Grand Central Station—anywhere people might find them and read them. He had enjoyed the surreptitiousness of it all, making sure nobody saw them: Secrecy was the most important aspect of everything. Anonymity was the core of it all. On Lexington Avenue he thought somebody had spotted him—a little guy in a store doorway—but then he’d realized the guy was a drunk sleeping off his alcoholic intake. Another time, near Times Square, he was sure a passing patrol car had caught him, but the cops didn’t even stop to ask questions. Now he reached down and picked up one of the posters, which was damp against his fingertips. He looked at the words:

  ATTENTION

  CRIMINALS

  BLUE COLLAR, WHITE COLLAR

  YOU HAVE WRONGED PEOPLE. IT IS TO THE PEOPLE YOU MUST APOLOGIZE. NOT TO THE STATE. NOT TO GOD. GET YOUR MISDEEDS OFF YOUR CHEST!

  CALL MR. APOLOGY (212)555-2748

  THE IDEA OF APOLOGY IS TO PROVIDE A WAY FOR PEOPLE TO APOLOGIZE FOR THEIR WRONGS AGAINST PEOPLE WITHOUT JEOPARDIZING THEMSELVES. MR. APOLOGY WILL AUTOMATICALLY TAPE-RECORD YOUR ANONYMOUS PHONE CALL. DO NOT IDENTIFY YOURSELF. CALL FROM A PAY PHONE TO PREVENT TRACING. DESCRIBE IN DETAIL WHAT YOU HAVE DONE AND HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT IT. WHEN ENOUGH STATEMENTS HAVE BEEN COLLECTED THEY WILL BE PLAYED TO THE PUBLIC AT A TIME AND PLACE TO BE ADVERTISED. THIS IS A PRIVATE EXPERIMENT. ITS SOLE PURPOSE IS TO PROVIDE A NEW AVENUE OF COMMUNICATION. IT IS NOT ASSOCIATED IN ANY WAY WITH ANY POLICE, GOVERNMENTAL, RELIGIOUS, OR OTHER ORGANIZATION.

  WHEN YOU CALL YOU WILL BE ALONE WITH A TAPE RECORDER.

  Harry let the handbill slide from his fingers.

  “I played my part in this too,” Madeleine said. “Speaking as your partner, I’d like to listen to what’s on that tape. I didn’t exactly scurry around the city for nothing. If you won’t press the button, I will. My curiosity is killing me.”

  Harrison turned his face to look at her. Nerves, he thought. Simple uncomplicated nerves, like the kind you always felt on a project when you weren’t sure if you’d considered everything, if you’d taken everything into account. You get so wrapped up in the central focus of things you’re not certain you’ve had time to look around the edges. He reached out and touched her wrist. How did she manage to look so good with her hair streaked and wet? “Okay,” he said. “Here goes.” And he pushed the PLAYBACK button.

  Nothing.

  There was a short silence, then the click of a receiver being put down and the long sound of a dial tone. Nothing else. No voice, no apology.

  Madeleine smiled. “I guess somebody out there got cold feet, Harry.”

  “You’ve got to expect that kind of thing,” he said. A little disappointment, an unsettled moment. He tried to imagine somebody inside a phone booth, dialing the Apology number, then becoming hesitant and confused and hanging up. Embarrassed, maybe.

  Madeleine said, “I wonder what I’d do if I came across your poster and I had something on my mind. I wonder if I’d like the idea of calling a certain number and talking into a tape recorder. I think I’d get the strange feeling that there was really somebody listening to me, somebody sitting there and looking smug.…”

  The dial tone stopped. There was another click.

  And then:

  HI, I SAW YOUR NUMBER SO I THOUGHT I’D CALL.… I GOT SOMETHING THAT BOTHERS ME.… IT’S NO BIG DEAL, YOU UNDERSTAND, IT’S JUST THAT I’VE BEEN STEALING BREAD FROM MY MOTHER AND SHE DOESN’T KNOW ABOUT IT, BUT WHAT REALLY BUGS ME IS THAT SHE KEEPS GIVING ME MONEY. I MEAN SHE’S REALLY GENEROUS, SHE’S KIND, AND SHE THINKS THE WORLD REVOLVES AROUND ME.… I GET GUILTY AS HELL ABOUT IT. I’M SUPPOSED TO BE GOING TO SCHOOL BUT I KEEP CUTTING CLASSES AND SHE HASN’T FOUND OUT ABOUT IT YET AND I GET GUILTY AS HELL ABOUT THAT TOO. THAT’S IT. THANKS FOR LISTENING.

  The message ended.

  Harrison pressed the STOP button and looked at Madeleine. He had the weird feeling of having eavesdropped on a stranger’s life; it was as if he had stood with his ear pressed to a door and listened to the mumble of voices from the room beyond. Faceless voices. Thanks for listening. He watched Madeleine get up from the bed and walk to the window. Dawn was already in the sky, faint grey lines running like spidery cracks through the dark.

  The first Apology message, he thought. A kid who’s cheating on his mother. A kid adored by his mother and who’s feeling bad because he’s a walking disappointment. He stood up and went towards Madeleine, slipping his arm around her waist. He looked at the sky a moment, the makings of a watery morning. Faint rainslicks slid down the pane. The first Apology message—the realization excited him suddenly. The idea that his handbill had inspired somebody to call the number and talk with his answering machine pleased him. Connections, tiny threads: A kid feels depressed, guilty, wan
ts to get something off his chest, comes across the poster, goes inside a phone booth, dials the number, talks.

  “I feel a little relieved,” Madeleine said.

  “Like how?”

  “The message.” She shrugged. “It’s like I expected to hear the voice of a mass murderer or something. Something awful. I don’t really know. And what we get is a poor kid who’s ripping off his mother.”

  “He needed to talk to somebody,” Harrison said. “Which is the reason behind Apology. The poor kid needed somebody. Something.”

  “Are you going to see if there are any other messages?” she asked.

  “Sure.” He turned away from the window and reached out to the answering machine. He pushed the PLAYBACK button again and waited.

  I SAW YOUR POSTER.… I WAS OVER IN GRAND CENTRAL AND I JUST HAPPENED TO SEE IT THERE.… I THINK IT’S A TERRIFIC IDEA.… I JUST LEFT HOME. I WALKED OUT. I JUST WALKED OUT ON MY WIFE AND DAUGHTER. I DIDN’T GIVE THEM ANY WARNING OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT; I JUST WOKE UP AND I WAS SICK TO MY HEART WITH EVERYTHING SO I TOOK SOME CASH OUT OF MY SAVINGS ACCOUNT AND I CAUGHT A TRAIN.… I DIDN’T TELL THEM WHERE I WAS GOING. I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHY I’M IN NEW YORK.… I’M SORRY.…

  The message ended.

  Madeleine said, “Jesus, that’s sad.”

  Harrison nodded. He was trying to imagine—not the face of the caller, not the emotions of the man—but the sudden emptiness of the lives of his wife and daughter, how they’d wake up and find the guy gone, how they’d wonder where he was; if he didn’t go back home, if he didn’t contact them, he’d become a statistic in the ledger of Missing Persons, a casualty of the human accounting system. “Yeah, it is sad,” he said.

  Madeleine sat down on the edge of the bed again. “Did you expect to get that kind of call, Harry? I mean, what did you really expect?”

  Harrison shrugged. He pressed the STOP button; the machine came to a halt. What did you expect, Harry? What kind of voices, what kind of messages? “I’m not sure,” he told her. “I didn’t really figure on domestic crises, I guess. I imagined the callers would be more inclined to criminal acts—and I don’t really count stealing from your mother’s purse a criminal act. I don’t count walking out on your family either. It’s pretty damn sad, but it’s not criminal.”

  Madeleine laid her head against his shoulder. For a moment Harrison stared through the open bedroom door across the dark space of the loft; he could see the window that faced the street. A slight dawn wind had sprung up, carrying rain, knocking against the panes of glass.

  She said, “It’s like being a fisherman, Harry. I imagine you trawling with this big net and you’re catching all kinds of things inside it and you’re bound to land your criminal types sooner or later.”

  Harrison glanced at the answering machine. He was longing to turn it back on again, and at the same time, like some miser counting pennies, he wanted to dole the messages out sparingly to himself. A kid who steals his mother’s money, a guy who just walks away from his family. Other lives, the misdemeanors of strangers, the tiny acts of betrayal and theft that constitute human behavior. He shut his eyes a moment. What he remembered was the vague origins of the Apology Project, the small perceptions that had led to the installation of an answering machine and the printing of handbills. What he remembered was discussing it all with Madeleine weeks and weeks ago, trying to assuage her puzzlement, settle her bewilderment, win her over to the point where she understood what it was he was trying to do.

  I know it sounds pretty strange, Maddy, but it begins with graffiti, graffiti I saw one time on the side of these boxcars. Then I saw the same kind of things in the subway or written in the yard of the school where I teach. And the main impression I got was of all this pent-up violence, if that makes sense. So I wondered about that. It was the same kind of criminal violence I felt when I saw a group of bums standing around just savagely kicking this other bum who was bleeding all over the sidewalk. I wondered about that too. Then one day I was walking down near Battery Park and I saw this derelict guy stroking a bird, a pigeon maybe, and he was touching it lovingly like he really cared about it when all of a sudden he bit its goddamn head off. Just like that. Wham. Out of nowhere. All these acts of violence. Then this kid in my class was caught trying to rape a seven-year-old girl and I had him pegged as an okay kind of kid, pretty studious, decent, and he said something to the cops I’ve never quite forgotten—he said, “I wished I’d had somebody who’d listened to me.” And somehow these things came together in my mind, if you can understand that. It was just like all these tiny connections fused together in one bright explosion and I came up with the idea of Mr. Apology. There’s so much shit going on out there and there’s nobody prepared to listen to the people who are doing all this shit, so I thought about Apology, I thought about a kind of confession line where people could call in and get stuff off their minds without having to be afraid of reprisals.

  Madeleine had looked at him for a long time after that before she’d asked: Where does it connect with art, Harry? Where does it connect with your art?

  He remembered suddenly that they’d been lying in bed during this conversation; they had just made love and she’d had her head cradled against his shoulder and the palm of one hand spread out across his chest. He’d said: It connects at the point where the tapes are made public, Maddy. Don’t you see it? I put the voices together after I’ve edited them and I play them in some public place—

  Harry, I need to hear it a little clearer—

  Okay, imagine the human voice as art. You’re too stuck on pictures and statues and things like that. Why couldn’t the sounds of people confessing to their crimes be considered art? Music is art; so is drama. Why can’t my assembled confessions be thought of in the same way?

  She had shrugged then and rolled over on her side, propping herself up on an elbow and smiling at him. Let me get it straight, Harry. One, you’re offering a kind of human service. You might say it’s a social service of a kind, right? Two, you see this as a kind of art form. Am I on the right beam, Spock?

  You’re close enough.

  Why criminals?

  Why not? It was the idea of violence that sparked the project. It doesn’t have to stop at physical violence, does it? It can go the whole spectrum of crime. Embezzlers, say. Burglars. Confidence tricksters. Anybody with something lying heavy on his mind.

  Maybe she’d been convinced. Maybe not. But at least she’d been pleased enough to help him in preparing the handbills and stalking the dark streets to paste them up. At least she was on his side. If she didn’t exactly share his enthusiasm, at least she wasn’t skeptical, scornful, critical of the whole notion. Now, as he looked at her, he was conscious of some distance in her eyes, as if she were still trying to work something out inside.

  “What’s on your mind?” he asked.

  “I was just thinking. This whole thing’s so different from what you’ve done in the past, that’s all.” She lay flat across the bed. Her hair was beginning to dry, curling as it did so. “It’s pretty far removed from the canvases.”

  She was referring to the pile of unfinished canvases that lay stacked against the walls of the loft. His yellow phase. Everything had been yellow back then—skies, suns, oceans, tides, even the whites of the human eye. It had given the world a jaundiced appearance. Who could explain that now? Who could explain why one color had dominated everything else in the past? The answer was lost to him. Old works didn’t interest him in any case—they might have been the creations of a stranger. They might have been done by someone who’d trespassed in the loft more than a year ago and painted all those canvases while Harrison was out teaching high school art history to pay the rent. You couldn’t identify any longer. Besides, the Apology Project was what captivated him now.

  He reached out to the answering machine, touching the PLAYBACK button. He gazed at Madeleine’s face as he listened; she had closed her eyes. The eyelids were glossy, frail; under the skin you could see the thinnest net
work of veins. He lightly touched the lids: Sometimes you had to marvel at the frailty of other lives, the way they appeared, in certain kinds of light, as insubstantial and yet rich.

  WHO THE FUCK YOU THINK YOU ARE, ANYHOW? HUH? I MEAN, JUST WHO THE FUCK YOU IMAGINE YOU ARE, MAN? HEY, YOU LISTENING TO ME? YOU LISTENING TO ME RIGHT NOW? I GOT GOD ON MY SIDE. YOU UNNERSTAND ME? I’M ONE OF GODS VIGILANTES. I SAY YOU GOTTA BE IN LEAGUE WITH FUCKING SATAN, MAN.

  The voice stopped. The message was over.

  Madeleine said, “Now that’s what I call really sad, Harry. That’s worse than the guy walking out on his family.”

  Harrison didn’t say anything for a time. One of God’s vigilantes. The sound of the deranged. It was bound to happen. You were sure to drag in some of the crazies in that trawling net Maddy had mentioned. It was unavoidable. He tried to imagine the mind of this caller, the curious disjointed perceptions, the way he must walk the streets with the umbrella of God perched over his shoulders. He would see satanic flames issue from the doorways of bars and poolhalls and movie houses. What the hell, it was out there, it was out there in its endless varieties and intricate patterns. Dark figures in doorways and frightened faces in desolate subways and the incoherent mutterings of panhandlers that suggested private worlds of sheer insanity. And Madeleine had said it was really sad. He pushed the STOP button.

  Madeleine said, “When I hear somebody like that, somebody demented, I’m glad there’s no way anybody can associate you with that telephone number, Harry.”

  Harrison nodded. It was true, a necessary precaution he’d thought about from the very beginning. The telephone number on the Apology handbill wasn’t listed in any directory. Nobody could trace his name from the number. It gave him a certain immunity, a distance from the callers—Madeleine had once called it a safety factor, but he was more inclined to think of it as a preservation of the idea of anonymity. If he didn’t know the names of the callers, why should they know his identity? It was important to the whole project. He looked at the answering machine for a second. Briefly, it appeared to have a life of its own—an electronic life suggested by the red CALL button and the green READY button, which might have been two small unblinking eyes. He reached out and touched the machine, a squat oblong box with artificial walnut veneer and metal trim. Then he turned towards Madeleine and stroked her hair, which was slightly damp even now. She was still lying with her eyes closed, a faint smile on her lips.