Chapter Seven

Order is forged in the fires of chaos by the power of coincidence. Ultimately, no matter how usual Matthew's day seemed as he nodded farewell to Maria, nor how mundane New York's suits and schoolchidren appeared as they plodded along the streets, the complete collapse of his logical, straightforward world was always a mere flutter of a butterfly's wing away.
There was, as was the way with many things in today's secular world, a perfectly rational explanation for Matthew's feeling of complete security as he drove away from the police station where Maria had left him. In his eyes, the natural to and fro of the universe, the ebb and flow of causality, was more likely than not to stay the same. It was a usual Day In The Life, another series of New York Minutes that would be just like all the rest. However, as everyone one of us must eventually realise, the natural order of things is always prone to horrific mangling and distortions. For Matthew Keyes, the butterfly's wings had already beaten. It was just a case of waiting for the hurricane.

"Jesus, Ray, it must have been - what - seven years?"
"Yeah. A long time, at least."
She slumped down onto the café sofa, the soft leather pushing against her with all of it's weary might as if to remind her to drink her coffee and vacate her seat as quickly as possible. Ray took the seat opposite her. This was not Sonia.
"Do you... want a coffee?" Ray asked, pausing for an unknown effect.
The report that lay on her desk a few hundred metres away flickered into her mind.
"No." she replied quickly, "I'll... have some juice thanks."
This was not Sonia. Ray got up and left the Woman-Who-Was-Not-Sonia and walked over to the counter. A man in cheery red pinstripes smiled at him.
"What can I get you, son?" he said, a slight drawl suggesting he wasn't of the cultural elite. Ray mimicked him, the instinct of a reporter trying to relate to his subject.
"A coffee and a squeeze."
The Woman-Who-Was-Not-Sonia drifted aimlessly in his mind as he handed over a ten-dollar bill and took an indiscriminant amount of change. He had memories of his childhood where she featured prominently. Alone together, two minds working alike. Yet at the same time... he watched the coffee blend together, mixing with the water and rising slowly in the cup like a dark force. Some of the memories he harboured as his own seemed strangely reminiscent of Sonia's own upbringing. He glanced quickly over to the sofa. But this was not Sonia.

He brought the coffee over, and placed the tall glass of vibrant juice on the table in front of her.
"I feel awful," he said, "But I've forgotten your name. We spent a lot of time together in high school, didn't we?"
The woman took a mouthful of juice and smiled, satisfied. Inwardly, the coldness of the juice terrified her. Suddenly she was back in the mortuary, holding the hand of another dead body. She shook it from herself, and made a mental note to take another dose when she got back.
"It's Caitlin." she said at last, "But you'd always call me Prep. Remember? We were the geeks who stayed in during recess and conspired to take over the world. The seventh-grader and the graduate."
She was startled at herself. It all came back so clear - the childhood ambitions, and how easily they were crushed by the onslaught of time.
For Ray, though, the memories were still jaded. He saw her pained, depressed. But he knew that this was not Sonia.
"We... no-one liked us, did they? I remember us being quite sad."
It was an almost absent-minded comment, and Caitlin decided to brush it away swiftly.
"That was all in the past. Here and now's what's important. What do you these days, anyway?"
"I'm..." Ray paused, unsure, and then "...a journalist. Here and there. Not anything interesting, you understand."
He paused, and they both reflected on how their passions and dreams had been drained out of them.
"What about you?" he offered.
She snorted, "I work at the mortuary just a few blocks from here. Nothing exciting from my perspective either."
From across the street, the contradiction to this claim stood watching them both through the long, glass window, the gun in his jacket nestling comfortably.

"I'm sorry, sir, but I can't help you no matter whose authorisation you've got. I wasn't here when the body came in, my supervisor was."
The boy was young, naive and irriating, and Matthew was getting impatient.
"And where the hell is she?"
"She's taking her lunch."
Keyes closed his eyes lightly for a few moments, feeling his breaths tread through the contours of his body.
"Alright. Can I take a look at his personal effects?"
The intern hesitated.
"Alright, I guess. She shouldn't be too long anyway. Just follow me."
He placed some crude note on the desk about where he was, as if he was expecting anyone coming into a mortuary to be particularly pressed for time, and then walked off, beckoning Keyes to follow him. They walked through a selection of corridors, each painted a dull, pale beige and stabbed with posters and paintings that accentuated the depression. It was mostly abstract art, all bold colours and striking visuals. Keyes wasn't sure the corpses cared for aesthetics.
They turned into what seemed to be an office, but was on a second glance full of filing cabinets. Checking his clipboard in a perfunctory way, he opened one of the cabinets and immediately fished out the first plastic wallet he found. It was filled with a small collection of papers, which he deposited on the table in the middle of the room.
"I've got to get back to the front desk," he said with an air of misplaced pride and urgency, "When you're done, put them back in the filing cabinets. There's a photocopier next door."
He walked out, leaving Keyes with the messy pile of papers and photos. He dragged out the small metal chair with a painful grating sound, and sat down. On top, there was a small piece of notepaper, torn from a ringbound pad. The dead man, he assumed, had scribbled onto it a few broken sentences. 'Ivan not in paper' 'Shot - did she make him?' 'Possibly they know'.
It was now almost an hour after they'd called him and told him to check out the mortuary. Maria had been dropped off as an analyst at the local station, but they needed more than just a name. Fortunately, James Walters already had a minor criminal record. A wallet in his pocket was all the NYPD needed, but for the Commander's purposes they'd need to get everything they could out of his life before anything began to make sense. Matthew put the Ivan connection to one side of the table - that would need to be called in soon. Underneath it was a polaroid photo, poorly taken in poor conditions. There was the jaded face of an old man that Matthew immediately recognised as the Ivan he had seen in his files earlier this morning.
But his eyes were drawn powerfully to the woman he was with. Her face, her hair, her complexion. Even on the battered picture, her beauty shone through. It struck him that he had seen her somewhere else - a government file, an previous sleeper contact. Her presence in the photo began to grow, almost pushing Ivan off the edges of the image. All of his instinct focused him on the girl. He was convinced she was key to the case. Without thinking, he pocketed the image and moved on to the rest of the papers.

Ray waved absentmindedly to Caitlin as she crossed the street, and in his hand fluttered the phone number of the Woman-Who-Was-Not-Sonia. He knew Malchance was behind him even before he began to speak.
"Mr. Hatfield."
Ray turned, "What is it?"
"I believe it's time for your briefing. Would you like to take a walk?"
Ray tried to peer through the dark sunglasses, but all that reflected off them, standing alone in a void of darkness and emptiness, was his own distorted reflection.