The Truth Itself Page 11

  Hook sat up, threw aside the mosquito net and walked through to his front room.

  The TV set was on, sound muted, tuned to a Thai news channel, the only one he—without a satellite dish, just a twisted coat hanger dangling from a nail in the wall—could receive. A car bomb in the far south had replaced the ill-fated plane as the major news item.

  He crossed to the table in the kitchen and clicked on his laptop, and while he listened to its aged drives churn and grumble he eyed the bottle of Cutty Sark, still sealed, standing beside the sink.

  Why didn’t he throw it out?

  Or drink it?

  The screen of his computer lit up and he went online and surfed all the major international news channels for information on AirStar Flight 2605.

  On CNN there was an interview with a Spaniard—already back home in Seville—whose passport had been stolen in Pattaya a month ago and had been used by one of the passengers who died on the plane. “Look,” he said, pointing at his face, “I am alive!”

  The BBC offered up a press conference where a harried airline official, a wizened Asian man blinking behind truck-windshield glasses, tried to explain inaccuracies in the passenger manifest. “It is very complicated process. What we do is to assemble from many, many list, from manifest, from baggage list, from immigration list. We are checking all these. Check, check, check. But some peoples we are not finding. Yes, them we are still not finding.”

  Hook surfed on. SKY. Al-Jazeera. CNN again. He googled until his eyes blurred, but there was nothing about Kate Swift’s finger.

  Had Klein failed him?

  A possibility, but somehow he doubted this. The man was too terrified of exposure.

  Somebody was suppressing the information.

  Hook saw Kate Swift lying unconscious, blood spraying as the drunken Dane took her fifth digit.

  He saw the child watching him through the window as he set fire to the amputated finger.

  “Well, I guess you overpromised, sport,” he said out loud and this made him laugh a hollow laugh.

  He stood and crossed to the sink and got as far as laying a hand on the curve of the Scotch bottle.

  Then he turned and walked away and stood at the window and looked out into the dark jungle.

  He didn’t need a drink. He needed a miracle.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Philip Danvers lurked under a tree in Battery Lane Park, Bethesda, Maryland, close enough to the men’s washroom to catch the tart whiff of urine and dung, reminded of times gone by when he’d risked far too much with hasty and furtive assignations in dank privies like this one.

  He heard a car door slap and saw a bulky shape move into the orange light of the lamp that hovered over a bench.

  The big man stood a while, his breath condensing, stamping his feet in the snow. He looked around, rubbing his gloved hands together, and then he sat, jiggling his knees.

  As he watched David Burke, taking a few minutes to make sure that the man was alone, Danvers allowed himself to slip back in time to the dying days of the last century, back to a restaurant in Beirut eating tabbouleh, fattoush and baba ghanoush and drinking arak in the company of Harry Hook and a couple of new recruits who’d hung on Hook’s every word. Hook pointedly ignoring the very young and very beautiful Bryn Mawr blonde who would be in his bed within the hour.

  Hook was delivering his Subterfuge 101, and even though Danvers had heard it in all its many evolving forms over the years, he was still held in its grip.

  “The thing with any good lie,” Hook had said, wiping oil from his lips with the back of his hand, “is how you propagate it. In this Age of Misinformation the boundaries between truth and fiction, which have always been nebulous, have become increasingly porous. And cheers to that.”

  He threw back his arak and one of the acolytes topped up his glass.

  “There is a machine out there, boys and girls. An insatiable machine. Hungry for information. Eager to chew it up and spit it out. Bully for that, we say. Makes our job easier. But what’s vital is how we feed that machine.”

  He stopped eating, all eyes on him.

  “The vital component is this: find your nightingale. Then let it sing. Let it shout its song from the fucking rooftops.”

  The bulky shape on the bench looked more like a trussed turkey than a nightingale, but he would have met even Harry Hook’s exacting standards.

  A self-styled crusader.

  A believer in good.

  A believer in the righteous power of the Fourth Estate.

  The perfect song bird.

  Danvers walked forward and the big man sprang to his feet, towering over him.

  “Sit please,” Danvers said.

  Burke sat.

  Danvers, hitching up his trousers and lowering himself onto the bench, said, “Of course I will deny ever being here. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  He removed the ziplock bag from his coat pocket and held it up to the light. Burke recoiled a little, his mouth open, a flash of white in his beard.

  “What’s that?”

  “A finger.”

  “I can see it’s a finger.”

  “It belonged to Kate Swift.”

  Burke stared at him.

  “It was recovered from the wreckage of AirStar Flight 2605 that crashed in Thailand three days ago.” The man stayed silent, listening. “The intelligence apparatus, and, I believe, the White House, know about this. Know that Kate Swift and her daughter were on that plane.”

  “And yet they’ve said nothing?”

  “Quite.”

  “Why?”

  Danvers shrugged. “That is the question.”

  “Did we down that plane?”

  “Define we.”

  The big man chuckled softly—the sound of a rasp on wood.

  “As I’m sure you're aware,” Danvers said, “within hours of the crash the usual suspects were abroad on Fox News and the Internet, perceiving the work of the Islamic State, PLO, the Iranians or Putin, or decrying yet another ‘false flag’ operation by the forces of the New World Order.”

  “And who was it?”

  “I don’t have a clue. There may have been no author. For all I know it may have been pilot error or metal fatigue. Those Asian airlines are notoriously lax when it comes to crew training and aircraft maintenance.” He stared at Burke. “What is indisputable is that the powers that be are staying silent. Curious, no?”

  “Surely you’re able to find out why?”

  Danvers shook his head. “I’m no longer invited to the table, Mr. Burke. All I’m privy to are the crumbs that fall to the floor.”

  “Where did you get the finger?”

  “It fell my way.”

  The man hesitated. “Why me?”

  “Why did I choose you?”

  “Yes. Why not some hotshot investigative reporter?”

  “Because, Mr. Burke, you have something very rare in this sordid world.”

  “What?”

  “Integrity.”

  Burke laughed and scratched his beard. “Okay, but there’s a huge elephant in the room, man.”

  Danvers stared at Burke. “An elephant?”

  “Yeah. Benway. Lucien Benway.”

  Danvers bit back a smile. “What’s Benway got to do with this?”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  Burke shook his head. “Sure you do. Knocking a plane out of the sky to kill the woman who ruined him isn’t beyond Benway.”

  “That’s pure speculation.”

  “And it would be a mega fucking embarrassment for the White House. Their one-time dirty tricks head honcho pulling a stunt like this.”

  “Well, that’s an interesting theory.”

  Burke looked at him. “What do you want me to do with all this?”

  “Only your job.”

  “I no longer have a job.”

  “Oh come on, we aren’t living in the time of Gutenberg. You know how you can get this out t
here.” He dangled the ziplock. “Take it.”

  Burke shook his head but he took the bag and put it into his coat pocket.

  Danvers stood and walked away and didn’t look back.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Benway left his office, and, even though it was very late at night—or early in the morning, rather—and he was alone in the house, he locked the door after him. He walked past his bedroom, as monastic as a monk’s cell, and entered the bedroom of his wife, clicking on the light.

  The room was dominated by a neatly made double bed with ornate brass head and footboards. On the black lacquer wood vanity positioned against the wall a bottle of Samsara, a tube of Chanel lipstick and a pack of Marlboro Lights stood amidst an array of framed photographs.

  Benway shut the door and approached the vanity. After inspecting the photographs (Nadja in Rome with the Fontana del Tritone in the background; Nadja, dressed in evening clothes, caught in the harsh glare of a flash bulb as she drank a vodka and smoked a cigarette at a Foggy Bottom cocktail party; Nadja on a Nantucket beach, fully dressed, her chinos rolled to her ankles, a breeze tugging at her hair) Benway uncapped the Chanel and twisted the tube, a peach-colored sheath rising from its interior.

  He saw Nadja’s lips, parted on her very slight overbite.

  He had never kissed his wife. Not even on the day they were married.

  As Benway closed the lipstick with a little click he noticed a slender string of pearls snaking from behind one of the picture frames and when he tugged at it the necklace dragged in its wake Nadja’s white gold wedding band and diamond engagement ring. Benway rested the rings on the palm of his hand, the lamplight a starburst on the gemstone.

  He returned the rings to the vanity and avoided his eyes in the mirror.

  Lifting the lid of the pack of Marlboros he drew out a filter-tipped cigarette and placed it between his lips. Benway clicked open his Ronson, catching the gassy whiff of lighter fuel. He flicked at the wheel and at first produced nothing more than a spark and then a bluish flame danced and he applied it to the cigarette, hearing the paper burn like a far-off brush fire.

  He crossed to the plain wooden desk by the window on which a Montblanc fountain pen and a Moleskine notebook lay, as if waiting for Nadja to sit down and write.

  Surrendering to temptation, Benway opened the notebook and saw that it contained just one line in his wife’s beautiful cursive handwriting: “There are mistakes too monstrous for remorse . . .”

  The American cigarette was noxious to him and he stubbed it out in the ashtray on the desk where two other butts, stained with Nadja’s lipstick, lay curled like dead silkworms.

  Benway shut the notebook and sat on the bed, closing his eyes, inhaling the mingled scents in the air—the ever-present residue of tobacco smoke and the carnal whiff of tuberose redolent of both jasmine and bloody meat, as if the mattress of the bed had been doused in perfume to disguise darker more base odors: the stink of his wife’s lust and betrayal.

  Benway, suddenly short of breath, rose from the bed and left the room, closing the door after him. He unlocked his office and sat behind the desk, staring at the photograph of Kate Swift’s severed finger, using it to focus his thoughts, to shut down his emotions, to take himself to a place that was cold and dry and clean.

  And safe.

  THIRTY-THREE

  “Mrs. Benway?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t I call you Nadja? Are you comfortable with that?”

  Nadja shrugged the shoulders of her white hospital gown, staring out the window at the stripped trees silhouetted against a taupe sky.

  “Please sit down,” the psychiatrist—doctor something, Nadja hadn’t allowed his name to become fixed in her memory—gestured toward the chair that faced his.

  He’d visited her each day (the only person she’d seen aside from the Latina nurse; Lucien had never reappeared after that one occasion, and she was still uncertain if she’d imagined that or not), taking her pulse, checking her blood pressure and laying his cool, pink fingers on her abdomen, gently palpating her flesh as if selecting fresh produce at a market, all the while quietly humming a tune Nadja almost recognized.

  Nadja turned from the window of the cramped office and walked to the chair, feeling as if she were wading through water, her movements made sluggish by the medication that dimmed her brain.

  As Nadja sat he said, “Are you feeling calm today?”

  “Yes.” Nadja felt nothing.

  “Good. Then perhaps we can review the events that brought you here?”

  Nadja nodded, the room blurring and lagging with the movement of her head, leaving the pale, bespectacled quack in the rumpled white coat as formless as a wraith.

  This was the first time Nadja’d been allowed out of the ward—a huge brown orderly whistling Motown tunes had sped her along endless, fluorescent-lit corridors in a wheelchair, tires screaming on the polished floors.

  “How long have I been here?” Nadja asked in a dead voice.

  “Five days,” the doctor said.

  Nadja blinked. “Five days?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  Her eyes were drawn again to the light from the window, her thoughts as difficult to contain as a tumbling waterfall.

  “Nadja,” he said, and she slowly focused on him, seeing her twin reflections in his glasses. “Do you have any recollection of how you came to be here?”

  Nadja scratched at her arm, trying to conjure up some memory. Nothing.

  “No,” she said.

  Her last memory was drinking in some downtown bar. Drinking to cauterize the Michael wound.

  “What is it? What have you remembered?” the quack asked.

  Nadja shook her head. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

  He stared at her before he consulted the clipboard on his lap.

  As if he had read her mind he said, “Who is Michael?”

  Nadja intuited that any mention of Michael had to be suppressed. She had to pretend that he had never existed. All she could do was try to assemble a little raft of sanity and stay perched atop it, riding the roiling waters of grief and madness that were doing their best to capsize her.

  “I don’t know anyone named Michael.”

  The doctor shuffled the pages of his clipboard and hummed that tune again. “You spoke his name on occasion. In your sleep.”

  He stared at her, tapping his pen on the clipboard. Nadja wanted to seize it from him and stab him in the eye.

  The doctor pursed his lips and said, “Would you like to go home, Nadja?”

  It was the last thing Nadja wanted: she desperately wanted to be away from here, but not to return to another prison, the prison of Lucien’s house, but she knew that agreeing to it would be her only escape.

  “Yes,” Nadja said, “I want to go home.”

  “I see no profit in you staying here. I don’t believe you are any longer a danger to yourself. If you agree to keep taking your medication and stay clear of alcohol and return for weekly consultations I will release you immediately.”

  Nadja fabricated a smile. “Thank you.”

  He stood.

  “You have your husband to thank. Mr. Benway called earlier and petitioned me to allow you to go home. He can be very persuasive.”

  Even in her addled state Nadja divined the truth: Lucien had dispensed largesse and controlled the terms of her sojourn at the clinic. If it had pleased him Nadja would have languished here for months, but for some reason he had decided he wanted her free.

  “Yes,” Nadja said as she floated toward the door like an untethered balloon, “my husband is a singular man.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The heat had a heft. A weight. It leaned down on Hook, almost felling him as he threaded his way through the sidewalk stalls that sold cheap trinkets and gaudy beachwear to the tourists with their hot brown flesh, sportive as seals as they avidly lived la dolce goddam vita.

  Sweating, he dodged the skinny Nepalese barkers who called him �
�mate” and tried to corral him into their restaurants for watery curry and overpriced beer and ran the gauntlet of tuk-tuks and snarling bikes, almost getting flattened by a truck festooned with banners of Thai girls in provocative poses, speakers blaring a looped message about a newly-opened titty bar as he jogged across the bubbling blacktop of the main road to the beach.

  Hook stood a moment in the shade of a dusty palm, catching his breath. Suddenly dizzy he reached out a hand and held onto the trunk, the bark rough and unpleasantly fleshy to his touch. In a blink a column of black ants—a Morse-code stipple—had advanced from the bole onto his hand, bites like hot needles in his flesh.

  Hook cursed, pulled his fingers away from the tree and smacked at his hand, battling to open the bottle of tepid water he carried in the pocket of his swimming shorts, pouring the warm liquid over his skin, washing off the ants.

  Sweat pooled under his jaw and his hair was stuck to his forehead and he wondered just what the hell he was doing out here.

  He shook off the thought and the weakness and walked down the ten stone steps to the sand, stepping over prone foreigners basting themselves in the sun, making his way toward the waiting flotilla of long-tail boats that bobbed at anchor, greeting one of the boatmen who gathered passengers for a trip.

  The man’s wooden boat was typical of the area, with a frayed Thai flag, colored sashes and a garland of sun-frazzled flowers tied around the long prow. Hook kicked off his flip-flops and waded up to his knees into the warm water, then hauled himself onto the long-tail, his weight causing it to rock and splash.

  He found a seat under the canopy and ignored the tourists around him who were chatting in a babel of Norse, Italian, Mandarin and Russian.

  More and more Russian.

  The boatman, agile as an acrobat, hopped up and took his station at the rear of the craft, balanced on bandy sea legs as he fired the old car engine that was mounted on an inboard turret-like pole, the propeller seated directly on the driveshaft.