spend the rest of my life wondering what happened to her. I might end up like you.”
Ethan shot her a sideways glance. “End up like me?”
“Cynical,” Rachel said, “aloof, nihilistic, thinking that nothing is worth anything. I want to know why you’re like you are so I can try to be something else.”
Ethan looked outside again for a long moment before whispering a name as though he were speaking of a ghost.
“Joanna.” He could see Rachel staring at him in the window’s reflection. His own face was illuminated starkly on one side by the glow from the city ahead, the other half lost in deep shadow. “Joanna Defoe was my fiancée. We met while I was serving in the Marines and she was covering the invasion of Iraq, embedded with our platoon. We fell in love, the usual crap. I resigned my commission and worked freelance with her after my unit pulled out of Iraq, traveling together to wherever the news was: New Orleans, Aceh, Afghanistan, Africa, you name it.”
Having started, Ethan let the words fall from his lips, not looking at Rachel but staring out into the shadows sprawled like slumbering demons in the desert darkness.
“While everyone else was covering the war on terror, we decided to change tack and cover the smaller stories, human stories, things that were forgotten in the wake of the obsession with terrorism.”
“Where did you go?” Rachel asked in a whisper.
“Bogotá, Colombia,” Ethan replied. “We’d uncovered a lot of reports there of abductions, criminal syndicates that owned the police forces, a hostage-ransom industry, not to mention the trade in drugs coming from South America. After exposing a number of corrupt officials within the Colombian government, we decided to do the same again, this time in Gaza. During that time we gained a reputation for being able to locate missing people as a result of our investigations.”
Ethan did not feel as though he was speaking, the words drifting through his awareness as though he was picking up a faint distress signal on an archaic radio.
“We wrote several articles about atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza City by both Hamas and Israel that made the international press, but I suppose somehow we dug too deep or pissed off too many people who were making too much money to see their dirty little industries shut down. Joanna Defoe vanished from Gaza City on the afternoon of December 14, 2008, abducted by persons unknown. No ransom, no contact, no information or evidence. Nobody knew a thing about it except that a cleaner said she’d seen someone wearing clothes that matched Joanna’s being dragged from the back door of the hotel we were staying in, with a bag over her head, and that the person was dumped into a car that disappeared. No plates, maybe dark blue in color, she thought. Maybe.”
Ethan’s voice trailed off as though he was miming the words, watching in his mind’s eye as the past replayed itself once again on an endless, miserable loop.
“I spent the next two years searching for her. I used up all of our savings, sold everything we possessed, spent months scouring the alleys and back streets, the refugee camps and villages for her. I printed thousands of pictures of her and put them up all over Gaza City.” He shook his head. “I never heard a word.”
Rachel waited patiently as he went on.
“When the money ran out I thought I’d just curl up and die, that there was no point in going on because there was nothing worth going on for. It was Amy O’Hara, a journalist friend who had covered our stories, who helped me from Chicago to find Joanna. I’d done a piece on missing journalists in the hope of raising awareness. Amy read it, hated what had happened, and decided to help me out. She actually came out to Jerusalem in the end, lent me some money, and told me to get out of the city and find the world again. That Joanna was probably dead and gone, and that even if she wasn’t, there was nothing more that I could do. That if I didn’t leave I’d just destroy myself.”
Rachel remained silent, Ethan speaking without thought or conscious planning.
“So I did. I went back to Chicago, back to work. I did okay until the pointlessness of it all hit me. I resigned my job, gave up on whatever it was I had left. The thing about it was, I didn’t care, didn’t give a shit. I