Empire of Lies (25 page)

Then he explained it all.

I won't go over the whole thing here. Diggs's obsessive, paranoid writings are public record now. You can look them up online and read them yourself and good luck to you. You'll find detailed glosses on all of Arthur Rashid's writings, translations of interviews Rashid gave to the Arab press, interviews with sources Diggs had uncovered on his own, not to mention a complex mathematical and what I guess you'd call
symbological
calculation based on religious prophecies and—so help me—the phases of the moon. It was Casey Diggs's version of my mother's Spiral Notebooks.

And what it all came down to was this: Rashid, according to Diggs, believed that Americans had become so rich through their financial institutions, so powerful through their military, and so free through their system of government that they had forgotten that the financial institutions, the military, and the government were merely the visible structures that had been built on the foundation of an ancient culture and its ideas. Rashid, Diggs said, loved this culture intellectually for its genius, but hated it in his heart because it made him feel inferior on his father's side, made him feel his British mother was humiliating his Egyptian father
every day the West thrived. He wanted to destroy America, said Diggs, and he believed the country could be decoyed into pouring all its resources into protecting the visible structures of its success while it left the cultural foundations open to a devastating attack. This attack—and here's where all the mathematical and symbological hoo-ha came in—this attack, Diggs believed, was to take place on the highly symbolic eve of both Ramadan and Yom Kippur, which arrived this year on the same day: Saturday.

"So Diggs thought Rashid was planning an attack for Friday, then?" I asked Piersall.

"Friday," the actor muttered. His words were becoming slurred now.

"Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow ... yeah."

"You're not talking about an intellectual attack here, right? A diatribe or—I don't know—a really sharp editorial or something? You mean an actual bombing or assassination?"

Piersall nodded heavily, as if all that alcohol had gone to his head now and made it weigh twice as much as normal. His torso had begun to tilt forward in his chair with the weight so that he was hovering horizontally over the table, staring down at his hands where they sat wrapped around his latest beer glass. All of which is to say: The guy was so shit-faced, he looked like he was about to sink right into the table. A drop of drool fell from his open mouth and ran down the liver-spotted back of one hand.

I sat and studied him a long, quiet moment. I thought of him as I'd seen him on TV. Augustus Kane delivering the camp sci-fi histrionics that had somehow intersected with a momentary zeitgeist. The man who had watched that zeitgeist slip away like a balloon through a child's fingers, his career earthbound while the culture vanished into the blue.

Now here he was before me in the flesh, an old drunk raving
about the fate of the world. Like Casey Diggs raved after he got booted off the school newspaper. Or like I had been raving these last two nights, after I'd forced myself to clean out my mother's attic and burn the Spiral Notebooks. The world always seems like it's going to hell when you're depressed. And, of course, it always is going to hell in some way. That's what makes it so hard to tell the difference between Armageddon and the blues.

Well, I guess I was a little better off now than when I'd walked into the bar anyway. Now, at least, I was certain that the Diggs Conspiracy Theory was a lot of crazy nonsense. You only had to listen to Piersall explain it to understand why the authorities had brushed it aside.

But I still wasn't sure what to do. Even if it had nothing to do with Rashid, Diggs could still have been murdered. Serena's story about the Great Swamp might still be true. And while I hated to set the police on the girl, I didn't see how I was going to avoid it, especially now that Anne had confirmed seeing her and Diggs together about the time he disappeared and had linked Jamal to their meeting.

But there was one thing I knew I wasn't going to do. I wasn't going to tell any of this to Patrick Piersall. Really, he was nearly unconscious now. What would be the point?

"Well..." I said aloud. I stood up out of my chair.

The movement seemed to reach Piersall even in his stupor. He roused himself a little. With what seemed a great effort, he lifted his head. He reached out a hand spasmodically and seized my wrist.

"They killed him, you know," he said—and I couldn't tell anymore whether he was a drunk speaking his deepest truth or a drunk playing the part of a Drunk Speaking His Deepest Truth. He blinked slowly, trying to focus on me. "Diggs. They killed him."

"Did they?"

He gave a short laugh, as much as to say:
Of course, you fool.
Then a sly smile came over his face, that famous, englamoured, once-handsome face. He let go of me. He raised his chin in a gesture meant to bid me stay and watch him. Then he tried to reach inside his natty corduroy sports coat. It took several attempts for his unsteady hand to find the coat's opening. Finally, the hand slipped in under his arm. When it came out again—just halfway out, just peeking out—I could see he was holding a gun. I don't know what kind of gun it was. I could just see the grip. It was something blocky, powerful, and deadly, by the look of it.

"Oh, fuck!" I believe I remarked.

"They won't get me, though," Piersall said.

"Would you put that away, please?"

The gun vanished inside his coat again. "There's more where that came from," he murmured darkly.

I sighed. I nodded. Again, not entirely without pity, I laid a hand on his shoulder by way of farewell.

"Oh," he said, with a final glimmering of that actorly graciousness he'd shown before, "on your way out, would you ask Charlie if he could possibly bring me another?"

I left the bar. A faint rain had begun to fall, a drizzling autumn mist. People hurried past on the sidewalks, their shoulders hunched, their heads ducked down, their hands shoved in their pockets. The cabs and cars and buses on the street had their headlights on against the gloom, their windshield wipers working wearily away at the weather. I had the impression that the day had ended early somehow, that the day had been called off midway and the night had come down at noon.

I had no hat. I wore only a light windbreaker over my sweatshirt. I felt the cold damp in my hair and on my scalp. The chilly air came through my clothes and made me shiver. Still, it was good to be outdoors, good to be away from the smell of morning beer, away from Piersall's whiskeyed breath and from the claustrophobic closeness of his outsized ego.

I joined the pedestrians hurrying past, shoulders hunched and head ducked down and hands shoved into my pockets like them. As I walked back to the parking lot where I'd left my car, the heaviness of the abrupt darkness seemed to settle inside me. So did the dead day's graveyard chill.

I felt—what's the word for it?—
bereft,
I guess. Bereft. Depressed. Adrift. Deprived of—what
?—purpose.
The purpose of my coming here today. The—how can I say it?—
justification
—yes—for my meeting with Piersall. I was
appalled
—appalled at myself for having daydreamed my way into the heart of a global conspiracy that I now saw was nothing but the fantasies of a troubled boy and the narcissistic melodrama of a washed-up actor. This was what I had convinced myself to worry about rather than—what?—rather than confront my own—what is the word? What is the word I want?—
grief.
Yes, that's it. My own grief. For my mother. My poor father. My angry, brutal, waste of a brother. Myself. My crappy past. My damaged heart.

That's all this was about. This urgency I'd been feeling, this sense of fear. It was really all about the past, wasn't it? I'd come back here to confront the past, and instead I'd been swallowed up in it. In my mother's madness and my father's death, in my brother's cruelty, and in the consequences of my own mistakes. You tried to break free of these things. You lived on your hill in a studied, earnest happiness, clinging to your wife, your kids, your faith, telling yourself you had won through to a better life. But it was always there, the past, within you and without you, governing your mind, your vision, your little unconsidered choices, creating a destiny out of its own broken logic, waiting for you to return to it, for its time to rise again. It was there in the surge of lust I felt when I saw the ring around Anne's neck. It was there in Lauren and her hold over me, the way she played my emotions and roped me in. It was there in Serena—in Serena most of all. She was the problem I'd been avoiding. She was the living token of the fact that nothing ever goes away—not one act, not one error. The world is a machine for turning sin into history and history back into sin. It's a closed system, and there's no way out of it.

I reached the lot. A baleful-eyed Balkan sat hunched in his little booth, glowering out through the rain-streaked glass. I pushed money in at him through a slot in the window. He pushed my car keys back out at me.

It's all about the past.
I was still repeating the phrase in my head as I lowered myself behind the wheel of my car; still repeating it as
I drove out into the city, and the Mustang became just one more of the cars with their headlights on and their wipers working wearily back and forth. The traffic had congealed, as it always does in New York when it rains. I drove uptown on Park Avenue South in a slow, sludgy line of cars and cabs and groaning buses. For interminable minutes, we got nowhere. Lights turned red, then green. Horns bleated uselessly in frustration. Finally, for no apparent reason, we moved on again, trudging like bent-backed slaves. The eccentric towers lining the boulevard—the columned porticoes, the mansard roofs, the arched windows framed with brick or stone—were all broken and prismatic images through the raindrops that flecked the windows. The facade of the terminal ahead—winged Mercury surmounting the clock above the entrance—seemed blurred and far away, nearly lost in the foggy distance.

I sat and drove and sat, lost in my thoughts. After a while, the traffic quickened a little. I came back to myself. I noticed Grand Central was growing nearer, Mercury growing clearer behind the moving wipers. As if someone else were driving, I suddenly realized the car had not turned off toward the tunnel, that I was not heading back to the Island and my mother's house at all. I was still traveling uptown.

That was the first time I understood that I was going to see Anne.

Shall I say that I wanted to ask her more questions? To clear up this matter of Serena and Diggs at The Den so I knew what to tell the police? Shall I say it was all part of my heroic efforts to get at the truth? To find out what else she knew about Jamal? What else he had told her? I would like to say those things. I would like to answer the insinuations of the left-wing media, of the
Times
and the
New Yorker
and that loudmouth on CNN and all the conspiracy theorists online and all the rest of them. I would like to make myself out to be a better man than I am. But that's
the whole point. I'm not a better man than I am. I'm just a better man than they are. Because unlike the
Times
and the
New Yorker
and the CNN loudmouth, at least I'm trying to tell the truth.

And the truth is: I wanted to see her. I wanted to touch her. I wanted to do the rough things with her I used to do. If my desire for her was part of the past, then it was the past I was after. It had sucked me back in. I was sinking in it. And I did not want it to let me go.

Her place was off campus, one of a row of renovated brick apartment buildings on Broadway, with storefronts and cafés on the ground floors. I didn't call ahead to tell her I was coming. In some part of my mind, I didn't really believe I'd go through with it. Right up until I reached her neighborhood, I felt sure I was going to turn back. Even once I got there, I thought I would just drive by her building like a kid too frightened to take a dare. Hell, even when I lucked into a parking space right on the street not twenty paces from her door, even as I was
walking
to her door in the rain, I didn't believe anything would come of it. I would just keep walking past or I would turn around, and I would drive home, shaking my head at myself.

Then, of course, there I was, in the entryway, shuddering from the wet and cold, my heart pounding with excitement and anticipation. There was a triple row of brass mailboxes. I felt that surge below my belly again at the simple sight of her name—Anne Smith—on a mailbox in the middle row. I pressed the white button above the box. I was thinking:
I just want to see her, that's all. It's not as if I'm actually going to
do
anything.
But at the same time I was telling myself to stop—stop being a child about it. The truth was—I was telling myself—it didn't make a damn bit of difference what I did, not in the big scheme of things, not in any scheme, not really. It was just what it was, that's all; a moment of life, that's all. People did this sort of thing and you only lived
once and it was a messy business and this was the sort of thing that happened. Ridiculous to make some big puritanical deal out of it. What were you supposed to do anyway? Live out your life in some sort of straitjacket of repression? Be some kind of good little boy all the time, some sort of eunuch? It wasn't your fault things were like this. You were what your life had made you, what nature made you, and history and so forth. You couldn't get away from that. It was useless to think you could. Even worse, it was phony and hypocritical to pretend you had.

"Yes?" the woman's voice was tinny and mechanical over the intercom.

"It's Jason Harrow," I said.

The door buzzed. I pushed in. It wasn't much warmer in the foyer. I kept shuddering. Or maybe that was the excitement. I wasn't sure.

Anne's apartment was on the fourth floor. I moved to the stairs. My heart was really thumping now—bang bang bang against my ribs. I started up the first flight. I was thinking:
It's not as if we're actually going to do anything.
And anyway, it was no big deal if we did. A peg in a hole. You had to stop tormenting yourself about these things.