Empire of Lies

  "I told you: I never even saw her. I never reached the apartment."

  "You just went up the stairs, turned around, and ran away?"

  "Yes."

  "Why would you do that?"

  I licked my dry lips, hesitated. Tell the truth, I thought again. But I could see now why people lied in these situations. The truth was so humiliating—so small, so sleazy—that the temptation to lie was almost overwhelming. Even as I opened my mouth, I wasn't sure I would be able to force the words out. But I did. I told him: "I went there because I was attracted to her. I wanted to see her, flirt with her, maybe even sleep with her, I don't know. But at the last minute, I thought better of it and I left."

  "You left."

  "Yes."

  "Running."

  "Yes."

  He paused. He seemed to change tack. "How'd you know where she lived?"

  "She gave me her address and phone number," I said. "She liked me. She told me to call."

  He gave a short laugh. "She liked you. She told you to call her."

  "Yes."

  "So you went there—but then you ran away."

  "It was stupid. I just wanted to get out of there without anyone seeing me."

  "Because...?"

  "Because I'm married and I love my wife very much and it would hurt her very badly if I cheated on her and it would hurt my kids."

  He gave me a conspiratorial grimace. Trying to form a bond with me, I guess, gain my trust. "Women, right?" he said.

  I only shook my head in answer. It seemed an inopportune moment to tell him to go fuck himself.

  Just then, a guttural grinding noise started up nearby. I glanced in the direction of the sound. I saw the door of one of the garage bays grinding upward, opening slowly.

  "So let me get this straight," said Curtis. And as he spoke, there was another noise to go with the rumble of the rising door: a high, piercing tone repeating rhythmically. It was a truck—a small panel truck. It was backing toward the opening bay. The repeated blast of its warning signal stabbed into my brain like a baby's cry. Curtis had to raise his voice to speak over it. "You happened to show up at Anne Smith's apartment right around the time she was murdered. You went upstairs to bang her, but your conscience or whatever bothered you, and you ran away without even seeing her."

  "My conscience or whatever—that's right," I nearly shouted back.

  "That's what you're telling me: your story."

  "That's right, that's what happened."

  The truck stopped. Its signal stopped. The bay door came fully open and its throaty rumble stopped. The roar and rush of traffic on the avenue seemed like a whispering quiet after that.

  "Or maybe you saw something," Curtis suggested helpfully. "Maybe you got there and you saw she was already dead. You saw her body and got scared and ran away. I could understand that."

  He could understand that. The old confessor's ploy. Get it off your chest, son. I can understand. oh, and by the way: You're under arrest for murder.

  "That didn't happen," I said firmly. "I never reached her apartment. I just left."

  "I don't know, man," Curtis said dryly. "You must have a lot of willpower. To come all that way for some action, then just go back down the stairs. You must have a lot of strength of character."

  "Not enough, obviously, or I wouldn't have been there in the first place."

  He shrugged. "Ah. Pretty girl. Guy on his own ... These things happen."

  His voice was sympathetic, but his stare was relentless and mocking. I turned away from it. I saw the truck backed up to the garage bay. A pair of men in white overalls were bringing a wooden box out of the garage. They carried it between them toward the rear of the truck. The truck driver was climbing out of the cab. He came back to open the truck's rear door so the men could put the box inside. The box was a coffin. It was a cheap wooden coffin made of naked pine boards sloppily nailed together. I could see more boxes piled up in stacks of three waiting just within the bay.

  I turned back to Curtis. He went on in his sympathetic man-of-the-world voice. Making a face as much as to say: Hey, we're both guys here, it's the modern world, no one's passing judgment on anyone. "What I understand, this girl was into some very interesting stuff, sexually speaking."

  "I wouldn't know." The lie came out automatically before I could stop it. I had to force myself to go back, to say: "No. That's not true. I did know. The last time I saw her, she was wearing an O-ring. I noticed it."

  "An O-ring. What's that?"

  My eyes locked on his, met the mocking humor in them. "I expect you know what it is," I said.

  "No, no, go ahead. Enlighten me."

  "It's a piece of jewelry people wear to show they're into sexual submission."

  "Really? I'll be damned. An O-ring, huh? Funny you knowing something like that. A straight-arrow family man like you. I guess you must be into some interesting sexual stuff yourself."

  "I was," I said flatly. "It was a long time ago."

  His jaw worked. He studied me. I think he understood what I was doing now. I think he understood that I was forcing myself to tell the truth, no matter how unpleasant. I think he thought it was a good strategy: You know, telling one truth to hide another. Being honest about everything except the one thing, the murder. I think he admired the cleverness of it.

  I glanced at the garage. The two men in white overalls walked back from the truck to the bay, chatting between themselves, laughing. They lifted another coffin and carried it out.

  "You know, in my experience," Curtis said after a moment, "people don't really change that much in this area. When you're into something you're into it, that's pretty much it. Nothing wrong with it, as long as no one gets hurt. I'm just saying—"

  "Who are those dead?" I asked him.

  "What?" He glanced over his shoulder, following my gaze.

  The men in overalls put the next coffin into the truck, then went back into the garage for yet another. This time, one of the men came out alone. The coffin in his hands was so small, he could carry it himself. A child's coffin.

  "They're John Does," Curtis said. "They're taking them out to Hart Island, to Potter's Field."

  "Hup," said the man in the white overalls as he hoisted the little coffin easily onto the stack in the truck.

  For the love of Christ, I thought. What a horrible place this was.

  "So how about it, Mr. Harrow?" Curtis said.

  Just then, an idea began to take shape in my mind. Something about the coffins being loaded on the truck, and the fractals I'd seen earlier on the computer screen. And Patrick Piersall. I thought of Patrick Piersall—the ruin of Augustus Kane—hunkered over his beer and shot in the old Ale House downtown. Something he had said to me...

  "Mr. Harrow?" said Curtis.

  I faced him. Whatever the idea was, it flitted away, out of reach. "What? I'm sorry—what were you saying?"

  "I'm saying I don't think people really change what they want sexually—not really, not where it counts." He tapped the side of his forehead with an index finger, right at the spot where Anne had that ragged hole. "In their fantasy life, you know. That stays pretty much the same."

  This, I thought, was the sort of thing he lived for. He loved to find the squirrelly little man inside the man before him, to shine a light on the low humpbacked creature of the sewer-mind who a man pretends is not himself. I don't think it excited him to expose that scuttling Igor in me. I don't think it made him feel justified or superior or anything like that. I think he was long past that sort of motivation. It just entertained him, that's all. It amused him, satisfied that curiosity of his about the particular nature of each person's corruption.

  I may have actually sneered at him then. "You want to know about my fantasy life?" I said. "In my fantasy life, I think of balling two teenaged girls at once. I think of doing my neighbor's wife from behind while my wife watches. I think of raping one of the local cheerleaders at gunpoint. And yeah, I still get into a little S&M from time to time. I also
have one fantasy where I rescue the Queen of England from a burning building, and she makes me a knight of the realm. But I don't know: Somehow I don't think that's gonna happen, do you?"

  The mockery died in his eyes. His gaze went hard and angry. His lips went thin. "I'm just saying, Mr. Harrow. It doesn't make sense to me. The kind of guy you are, the kind of twisted shit you're into. Pretty young girl comes along who's into the same shit. Gives you her number, her address, says 'Call me.' It doesn't make sense to me you go over there, then just run away like that without even seeing her."

  "That doesn't make sense to you?"

  "No. No, it doesn't. Scenario that would be more logical to me: The girl invites you to drop by. You're on your own, away from home. You go up there to see her—that's natural. The two of you start going at it. Maybe you get into a little of the rough stuff you like and it's feeling real good. Then—what?—maybe it gets out of hand. That can happen. Or maybe suddenly she's all, like: I don't want it. Forget the whole thing. Look, I mean, let's face it. Something like that: That's not your fault. Girl's a cocktease, gets you worked up, then suddenly she pulls a Virgin Mary on you, going no, no, no. Lot of women, they don't understand what that does to a guy—'specially if maybe it's something he's wanted real bad for a real long time, something maybe his wife won't do for him. And now this young girl says come and get it, gets him all turned on, and then, last minute, pulls the rug out from under him. Hey, there's not a guy in the world wouldn't lose it after something like that."

  I stared at him. It was a strange moment, almost bizarre—almost unreal, somehow. There I was, telling the truth—forcing myself to tell the truth no matter how embarrassing—and it meant nothing to him. He didn't believe me. He was practically accusing me of murder. And I was so shocked, so confused, my thoughts all tumbling and jumbled, that I could hardly take the whole thing in. It was as if someone had pressed the MUTE button on the remote control and I could see the detective's mouth moving and I had the sense of what he was talking about but I couldn't actually hear him. Instead, a million other ideas and images were crowding into my brain, jarring and disjointed, like arguing voices. There were the men in white overalls over there carrying out the coffins of the unknown dead, one after another after another of them as if this place were some kind of factory producing corpses of the dispossessed. unbidden, the lives of the bodies in the boxes came to me, too, their hopes and miseries swirling in my mind. They had been children once, learning the names of things, and now they were nameless and unclaimed, and there were so many, swirling around me like phantoms. I don't know why I thought of that then, but I did. And I don't know why, but then I thought of the fractals again—the designs on my computer screen. Equations like thoughts in the mind of God endlessly repeated to make the patterns of the world. The million nameless dead and the million-times-repeated equations and the raveling fractals and—God knows why—God knows the chain of thought—but it all brought me back to Patrick Piersall, to that old sorry has-been slumped over his drinks, the forthright features of the Universal admiral still pathetically visible beneath his fat, flushed face. Something he said to me about Casey Diggs, about Rashid...

  "It's not about sex," I heard myself say softly then. The idea was coming to me as I spoke, all the swirling notions and images in my head coming together into one idea as I spoke. "This whole thing—you've got it wrong—it's not about sex. It's about God."

  "Excuse me?" said Curtis.

  "It's not about money, either. The Wall Street bombing. That's what Casey Diggs was trying to tell everyone."

  "You lost me now. This is the Smith girl we're talking about."

  "Don't you see? Diggs predicted this. He said Rashid was going to create a diversion. That's what Piersall told me in the Ale House. Rashid was going to get the authorities to put their resources into protecting military bases or economic centers or political institutions. Wall Street, for example. Then he was going to pull off the real attack somewhere else. On some cultural center or something. Because he wanted to attack—what did Piersall say? The American imagination. That's his target. It's always been his target. Because that's where we live. That's where God lives."

  "Look, I told you, the Rashid angle isn't gonna work..."

  "Right," I said. "It doesn't work because he's your informer. He turned in the conspirators who were planning to blow up Wall Street, so you think he's working for you. That's the diversion. Rashid never cared about Wall Street. He just knew that if he was your agent, it would explain away all the evidence against him. The guys you arrested today? They were never meant to succeed. They were just there to throw you off the track, to make you think you stopped the conspiracy with Rashid's help. They were martyrs, sacrificing themselves for the cause: their god. I mean, why not? They're willing to blow themselves up to destroy us—you think they won't go to jail to accomplish the same thing?"

  Curtis squinted. "I must be dense because I don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about now."

  It sounded like babbling nonsense even to me. But the idea was still forming in my mind as I was speaking. And as the idea formed, the fear began to form, too, the fear that it was all real, all true, all happening—and that only I could see it. I babbled on: "It was Diggs—crazy little Diggs—who had it right all along. That's why Rashid's people killed him. And they killed Anne because she could link them to Diggs on the night of the murder. She knew Jamal. She probably knew a lot more than she realized. And once they saw her talking to me, they knew she and I might start to put the whole thing together. Maybe they were following me yesterday—who knows? Maybe they saw me going to talk to her again. So they killed her to shut her up. You see? Because they don't want anyone to stumble onto the other attack they're planning. Not the Wall Street attack—the real one."

  "All right" was all Curtis said when I'd finished. He took a step toward me. He put his hand on my elbow. "All right, Mr. Harrow. We're not getting anywhere here. I think you better come back uptown with me."

  I heard a clunking thud. Startled, I glanced over my shoulder. The coffins were all loaded. The men in overalls had shut the truck door.

  At the same moment, with his free hand, Curtis opened the passenger door to the car. He began to guide me into it.

  Panic hollowed my stomach, closed my throat. He kept his grip on my elbow. He kept tugging me toward the car. He was going to take me back to the precinct, back to the interrogation room. More hours of waiting, more questioning, more accusations. Hours and hours and meanwhile ... Serena ... Rashid's men ... The plan going forward. The attack on the city. It was all real, all true, all happening somewhere, sometime today, the design of it unfolding like the fractals on the computer screen, moving down the assembly line in the factory of life and of the dead.

  And I realized—it struck me like a blow: There was only me now.... It was ridiculous. It was insane. But it was true—there was only me who knew, only me who saw, only me who could stop it, who might be able to hurl myself into the machinery and bring it to a halt before it churned out more coffins, more and more.

  I was almost at the car. There seemed no way to stop the detective from putting me inside. For a moment, I had the fantasy of punching him, knocking him down, running for it like some innocent fugitive trying to clear his name in a television show.

  But in the end, it wasn't like that, not big and dynamic like that at all. It was the smallest thing, in fact; the smallest flutter. A little decision—yes or no—moving through me almost imperceptibly like the wind from a butterfly's wings.

  I drew back just slightly in the detective's grip, resisted him just slightly. "Are you arresting me?" I asked.

  He put more pressure on my elbow, drew me toward the car more firmly. "I think we need to talk some more uptown."

  I pulled back, pressing the heels of my sneakers into the asphalt. "But are you arresting me? Am I under arrest?"

  "I'm taking you in for questioning."

  "No," I said.

  "What do
you mean, no?"

  "I mean I won't come. I won't come with you."

  He stopped pulling at me. For the last time, our eyes met and he looked right into me, searching, searching. He had his decision to make, too.

  "Mr. Harrow," he said slowly, carefully enunciating every word. "That would be the biggest mistake of your life."

  I started to speak, but I didn't speak. Maybe he was right. Maybe I was just making more trouble for myself. He seized on my hesitation. He started to move me to the car again. I took a half step toward it. Then I pulled back.

  "I didn't kill that girl."

  He kept up the pressure on my arm. "Well, we can clear that all up at the precinct."

  I wouldn't move. All his soothing phrases. All his lies, not even meant to be believed, just meant to tranquilize me so he could take me away, take me back to the interrogation room.

  "No," I said. "I won't go."

  I thought I heard the faintest tone of anger in his level voice. "Mr. Harrow. I'm telling you: For your own sake, do not do this."

  "I didn't kill her. You know I didn't."

  "You walk away from me, and I can't help you anymore."

  "You searched my mind. I saw you do it. You saw that I was innocent."

  "What the hell are you talking about?"

  "You know it's true."

  "I'm telling you: You walk away, you're done. No one will be able to help you."

  "You'd've arrested me by now if you thought I was guilty."

  "We can talk about it as we drive."

  "No. I'm not going."

  "I'm telling you—"

  "Arrest me, Detective. Arrest me or let me go."

  We stood there, stood there, a moment like forever, his hand on my elbow, his eyes on mine. I could feel us balanced on a vanishing edge—him and me and Serena and the city—balanced there motionless while the gears of the corpse factory turned, the great equation of its limitless design working itself out with nothing to skew the end result—nothing except that butterfly flutter in both our breasts.

  Then Curtis's hand opened. He released his hold on me. I went on standing there, staring at him.