A stolen passport will only get you so far. In my case, that was through Customs and Immigration at Heathrow, where I stood in the line for EU travelers, praying I wouldn’t have to fake a Swedish accent as an impassive official ran a check on my documentation.
“You’re here for three weeks.” She glanced at my landing card. “The purpose of your visit?”
“Vacation.”
There are advantages to being a six-foot-tall blonde arriving on a flight from Reykjavík. The passport official nodded, slid the passport back across the counter, and turned her attention to the person behind me.
In a police lineup you could mistake me for the woman in the Swedish passport photo: we were both tall, with shoulder-length ragged blond hair and gray-blue eyes. The main difference was that Cassandra Neary, of New York, New York, could be charged as an accessory to more than one murder. Dagney Ahlstrand of Uppsala, Sweden, was a junkie, but as far as I knew, she hadn’t killed anyone. Yet.
I’d left Iceland under a cloud: Shortly after takeoff I looked out my window and saw a lurid red eye open then burst in the black wilderness far below. A volcanic eruption, an appropriate sendoff for a thirty-six-hour visit that had begun with me searching for my sometime lover and ex-con Quinn and ended with an escalating body count. The eruption delayed our landing, which gave me a chance to recover slightly from the lingering affects of hypothermia and a near-fatal amount of crank.
I was anxious to put as many miles as possible between me and Reykjavík, and even more anxious to meet up again with Quinn, who’d booked a later flight to Heathrow. We’d agreed to rendezvous at a bar owned by a friend of his in Brixton. I had my share of the blood money I’d earned in Iceland—a decent stash, but I had no idea how long I’d be in London, or how long until Quinn joined me. He’d said a few days. Given that thirty-odd years had passed before our most recent reunion, I could be in for a long wait.
I’d never been to London. Technically, I still wasn’t here. Until recently, I’d spent my life thinking that downtown New York was the center of the known universe. The last few decades had eroded that belief system, as billionaires and chain stores moved in and NYU continued its land grab, converting the Lower East Side into dorms for kids whose dreams of beatnik glory didn’t quite jibe with their eight-hundred-dollar Jimmy Choos and bespoke tablet cases.
The stolen passport belonged to an ex-girlfriend of Quinn’s. Dagney resembled me in that we were both lanky women of a certain age with substance abuse issues. I could only assume I’d imprinted on Quinn back when we first got involved in high school—that would explain his predilection for rogue blondes who could throw a punch then hit the ground running.
I shoved the passport into the battered satchel that held my old thirteen-millimeter Konica, a couple of moth-eaten cashmere sweaters, socks, and an extra pair of stovepipe jeans, all black. That, my leather jacket and ancient Tony Lamas, and a few canisters of Tri-X B&W film were all she wrote. I don’t own much, besides seven hundred vinyl LPs and 45s and an impressive collection of stolen coffee table books on photography, all back in my rent-stabilized apartment on Houston Street. No laptop, no smartphone, no presence on social media. I’m the ghost of punk, haunting the twenty-first century in disintegrating black-and-white; one of those living fossils you read about who usually show up, dead, in a place you’ve never heard of.
I unzipped my battered motorcycle jacket and headed for the exit, glancing back at the people who thronged the queue for non-EU and UK nationals. Three uniformed men were questioning a family group—a man in a rumpled suit, a burka-clad woman, and several small children. The man began gesturing angrily as a cop grasped his arm and dragged him toward a door. The woman began to cry.
I looked away, quickening my pace till I reached the door, where a beefeater on a brightly colored sign proclaimed WELCOME, WE HOPE YOU ENJOY YOUR STAY. I kept my head down and pushed my way through the crowd inside the terminal.
This, too, is what it means to be a ghost: You forever witness your own slow self-destruction, and that of those around you. But no one knows what you’ve seen until it’s too late.