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Alex Scarrow

City of Shadows

Prologue

13 September 2001, New York

Roald Waldstein stared at the Manhattan skyline. The pallid sky above the south end of the city was still smudged with a faint pall of dust. The thin twist of smoke, coming from where the Twin Towers had stood just two days ago, looked like the careless rubbing out of a pencil drawing, a ghost of the towers that had once been there.

‘God,’ he said. ‘And it’s still burning. ’

‘My dad said it might carry on burning for weeks. ’

Roald turned to look at Chanice Williams. ‘Really?’

‘Uh-huh. ’ She nodded confidently, working gum in her mouth almost mechanically. ‘Said so on Fox News too. ’

Like everyone else at Clinton Hill Elementary School, Chanice had become something of a news-station junkie, tuning in before and after school, the cartoon channels completely forgotten for now.

‘You think anyone’s alive in there still?’ asked Roald.

‘Dunno. I heard they lookin’ just in case, tho’. ’

He watched the puffs of dark smoke rising lazily. ‘I hope there’s no one trapped in that… alive. That would be horrible. ’

‘Come on. We should get on to school,’ said Chanice. ‘We’ll be late. ’

Roald nodded at her to head back up the alleyway without him. ‘I’ll come in a bit. ’

‘Shizzy. ’ She clucked her tongue. ‘You gonna get youself another demerit. You want that, Waldo?’

The kids all called him Waldo.

As in Where’s Waldo? It took the first five minutes of the first day of school to get lumped with that stroke-of-genius nickname. The thick-framed glasses and untameable hair had played their part too.

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘OK, your funeral, Mr Professor. ’

He watched her turn and go, weaving her way up the alleyway, stepping round a dustbin that had spilled rubbish across the cobbles.

‘I’ll be along in a bit,’ he called after her.

‘Your funeral!’ She shrugged again. ‘Jus’ don’t miss registration,’ she called over her shoulder. ‘Or Miss Chudasama gonna get medieval on yo’. ’

He turned back to watch the skyline. A train rumbled noisily overhead across the Williamsburg Bridge, heading into Manhattan. They were saying the trains and subway into Manhattan were still pretty deserted — easy seats. Everyone figured something else bad was bound to happen again at any moment: another plane, a bomb perhaps.

His mother said that too. Just like Chanice, like every New Yorker, like every American, dull-eyed from watching too much TV. ‘ They’ll be back. They’ll be back to finish us all off. Just you see. ’

It was just him and his mother and the TV set in their one-bedroom apartment. She had three different part-time jobs and what time was left after that was spent microwaving TV dinners or pop-tart breakfasts. Outside work, her life was Montel Williams, Judge Judy or Oprah Winfrey so she didn’t really ever have much to say that wasn’t already a newspaper headline. To be honest, she rarely had much to say that was original or vaguely interesting. But she had this morning. Something that had lodged firmly in his mind.