Purity (27 page)

“Hey, stop,” called a member of the crew that had been scrambling. “Say that all again.”

He said it all again. He was utterly improvising, but the longer he spoke and the more his image was recorded, the safer he was from being seized by the guards behind him. It was his first moment of media fame, the first of many. He spent the rest of the morning on Normannenstraße, giving interviews and rallying onlookers, demanding that sunlight be shined on the abscess of the Stasi. By the time the members of the Citizens' Committee emerged from the compound, they had no choice but to welcome him to their cause, because he'd already stolen their media moment.

His plastic shopping bag was visible in thousands of frames of video that day. It was firmly under his arm when, late in the afternoon, he ran home to the basement of the church. He was almost free. His only worry now was the unsecurely buried body, he was very close to having Annagret, his libido was back. He didn't even glance at the files in the bag, just shoved them under his mattress and ran outside again. In a state of sex-mad lightness, he crossed the old border at Friedrichstraße and made his way west to the Kurfürstendamm, where he met the good American Tom Aberant.

 

Too Much Information

 

Ordinarily, Leila looked forward to traveling on assignment. She was never more of a professional, never more defensibly excused from her caretaking duties in Denver, than when she was locked in a hotel room with her green-tea bags, her anonymized Wi-Fi connection, her two colors of ballpoint, her Ambien stash. But from the moment she arrived in Amarillo, on a commuter jet from Denver, something felt different. It was as if she didn't even want to be in Amarillo. The normally pleasurable economies of her competence, the preferred-customer getaway from the rental-car lot, the optimal route she took to the small house of Janelle Flayner, the swiftness with which she secured Flayner's trust and got her talking, weren't pleasurable. Late in the afternoon, she stopped at a Toot'n Totum convenience mart and bought a chef salad in a polyethylene box. In her hotel room, which a recent occupant had smoked in, she uncapped the cup of salad dressing and felt nailed by the product's targeting of her demographic: the solitary 50
+
female looking for something sensible to eat. It occurred to her that what she was feeling wasn't generic loneliness. She had a new research assistant, Pip Tyler, and she was wishing she could have brought the girl along.

With a little ache in her throat, for which only work was a remedy, she set out after dinner to meet the former girlfriend of Cody Flayner. She left her room lights burning and the privacy card on her doorknob. Outside, the sky was cloudless and nicked with random dull stars, their contextualizing constellations obscured by light and dust pollution. The Texas Panhandle was in year five of a drought that might soon be upgraded to permanent climate change. Instead of April snowmelt, dust.

While she drove, she Bluetoothed her phone into the car stereo and listened uncomfortably to her interview of Cody Flayner's ex-wife. She considered herself a good-hearted person, an empathetic listener, but in playback she could hear herself manipulating.

Helou—what kind of last name is that?

It's Lebanese … Christian. I grew up in San Antonio.

You know, I was just sitting here thinking you sound Texan.

But Leila no longer sounded Texan, except when she was interviewing Texans.

Layla, if you don't mind my saying, you don't strike me as the kind of gal who picks wrong.

Ha. Take a closer look.

So you know what cheated-on feels like.

Anything that's unhappy and has to do with marriage—yes.

It's a sisterhood, all right. That phone of yours close enough?

We don't have to use it if—

I told you, I want it on. It's about time somebody listened to me—I'd started thinking nobody cared. If you want to put me on the Internet saying Cody Flayner is a DEADBEAT CHEATER MORON, you be my guest.

I hear he's become very active in a Baptist church.

Cody? Gimme a break. The Ten Commandments is like his personal to-do list. I know for a fact he's having relations with a nineteen-year-old girl in that congregation. He only joined that church because his daddy made him.

Tell me about that.

Well, you know. We wouldn't be talking if you didn't know. They caught him with his pants down. He could of started World War Three, taking that thing home on his precious Ram truck. And the plant didn't even fire him! Fired his boss, but all Cody got was “reassignment.” It sure helps when your dad's a muckety-muck at the plant. And I'll say this for the old man, he drove a good bargain. First time I been getting my payments since the day Cody walked out on us.

He's started paying child support.

For now. We'll see how long his newfound faith'll last. I reckon about as long as his little buddy in Christ don't completely blimp out.

Does this girl have a name?

Porky Bonehead.

But on her driver's license?

Marli Copeland. Just an “i” at the end. You're probably thinking it's bad of me to even have that information.

No, I totally get it. He's the father of your children.

But that girl won't talk to you, no way. Not if Cody don't.

To drive east on Amarillo Boulevard was to pass, in quick succession, the high-security Clements Unit prison complex, the McCaskill meat-processing facility, and the Pantex nuclear-weapons plant, three massive installations more alike than different in their brute utility and sodium-vapor lighting. In the rearview mirror were the evangelical churches, the Tea Party precincts, the Whataburgers. Ahead, the gas and oil wells, the fracking rigs, the overgrazed ranges, the feedlots, the depleted aquifer. Every facet of Amarillo a testament to a nation of bad-ass firsts: first in prison population, first in meat consumption, first in operational strategic warheads, first in per-capita carbon emissions, first in line for the Rapture. Whether American liberals liked it or not, Amarillo was how the rest of the world saw their country.

Leila liked it. She came from the blue part of Texas, and from a time when the blue part was larger, but she still loved the whole state, not just San Antonio and the Gulf-softened winters and the burning green of the mesquite in spring but the in-your-face ugliness of the red parts. The embrace of ugliness; the eager manufacture of it; the capacity of Texan pride to see beauty in it. And the exceptional courtesy of the drivers, the enduring apartness of the old republic, the assurance of being a shining example to the nation. Texans looked down on the other forty-nine states with a gracious kind of pity.

Phyllisha's one of them girls that all she has to do is shake her goldy locks and the men all lose their mind. You know the expression “one-trick pony”? That's her with her hair. Shakey-shakey-shakey. And Cody's dumber than a post. A post knows it's dumb and Cody don't. And I suppose I'm the dumbest of all, because I married him.

So after Cody was “reassigned,” Phyllisha Babcock left him?

It was Mr. Flayner Senior made Cody break it off. That was part of their bargain if he wanted to keep working at the plant. That girl is some bad news. Not enough to wreck his home, she had to try and wreck his career.

No sources were more reliably forthcoming than ex-wives. The former Mrs. Flayner, a dyed redhead whose facial features were somehow concave, giving her a look of bashful apology, had baked a coffee cake for Leila and held her captive at her kitchen table until her kids came home from school.

Arranging to see Phyllisha Babcock had been harder. Since her break with Flayner, she'd shacked up with a controlling guy who screened her calls at the only number findable for her. All the boyfriend would say to Leila, the three times she called, was “I don't know you, so good-bye.” (Even he was not without Texan courtesy; he could have said worse.) Phyllisha had also—another red flag of the controlling boyfriend—vanished from social media. But Pip Tyler was a very good researcher. By tedious trial and error, she'd located Phyllisha's new place of work, a drive-in Sonic in the town of Pampa.

Two weeks before going to Amarillo, at the dead hour of eight on a Tuesday night, Leila had reached Phyllisha by phone at the drive-in. She'd asked if they might talk a little bit about Cody Flayner and the July Fourth incident.

“Maybe not,” Phyllisha had said, which was encouraging. The only words that truly meant no were
fuck you
. “Maybe, if you were from the Fox channel, but you're not, so.”

Leila explained that her employer, Denver Independent, was a foundation-supported investigative news service. She mentioned that DI had partnered with many national news outlets, including
Sixty Minutes
, in breaking stories.

“I don't look at
Sixty Minutes
,” Phyllisha said.

“Why don't I just stop by the Sonic some weeknight. Nobody has to know we even spoke. I'm just trying to get the story right. It can be as off the record as you like.”

“I don't like that you even know where I work. And my boyfriend doesn't like me talking personal to people he doesn't know.”

“Sure. I respect that. I wouldn't want to get you in trouble with him.”

“No, I know, it's kind of dumb. Like, what am I going to do, run off with you?”

“Rules are rules.”

“That's for damned sure. For all I know, he's sitting across the street right now, wondering who I'm on the phone with. Wouldn't be the first time.”

“I won't keep you, then. But if I come by some Tuesday, maybe this time of night?”

“What did you say the name of your magazine was?”

“Denver Independent. We're online only, no print version.”

“I don't know. Somebody ought to tell about the crazy shit that happens at that plant. But I got to worry about myself first. So I guess that's a no.”

“I'll stop by. You can decide when you see me. How's that sound?”

“It's nothing personal. I'm just kind of in a situation.”

The first Leila had seen of Phyllisha Babcock was in the Fourth of July pictures that Cody Flayner had posted on his Facebook page the previous summer. She was wearing a patriotically colored bikini and drinking beer. Her body looked to be only a healthy diet and some regular exercise away from greatness, but her face and hair were on the verge of confirming a wicked little dictum of Leila's: Blondes don't age well. (Leila saw middle age as the Revenge of the Brunettes.) Phyllisha was mostly in the foreground of the pictures and mostly in focus, but the autofocus had erred in one shot, clearly revealing that the large object on the bed of Flayner's Dodge pickup, in the background, parked in the driveway, was a B61 thermonuclear warhead. In the blurred background of another shot, Phyllisha was straddling the warhead and appeared to be making a show of licking its tip.

Leila had been on assignment in Washington when Pip Tyler came to Denver to interview for a research internship, but word of the interview had quickly spread. Pip had brought screen shots of Flayner's photos with her, as an example of a story she might like to pitch, and DI's head of research had asked her how she'd come by them. Pip explained that she had friends in the Oakland nuclear-disarmament community who had hacker friends with access to object-recognition software and (illegally) to the inner workings of Facebook's content delivery network. She said she'd already friended Cody Flayner through an antinuke friend who'd friended him under false pretenses. In response to her private query about the warhead pictures, which had long since been scrubbed from Flayner's Facebook page, Pip had received a one-line answer: “It aint a real one, sugar.” Pip's clips and her other credentials were excellent, and the head of research had hired her on the spot.

The following week, returning from Washington, Leila had gone straight to the corner office of Tom Aberant, the founder and executive editor of Denver Independent. It was no secret at DI that she and Tom had been a couple for more than a decade, but the two of them kept things professional at work. She really just wanted to say, “Hi, I'm back.” But as she approached the open door of Tom's office she caught a strange vibe.

A girl with long and lustrous hair was sitting with her back to the doorway. Leila had the distinct impression that Tom was ill at ease with her; and the thing about Tom was that nothing scared him. Leila herself was afraid of death, but Tom wasn't. The threat of lawsuits and injunctions didn't scare him, corporate money didn't scare him, firing employees didn't scare him. He was Leila's mighty fortress. But in his haste to stand up, before she was even through the doorway, she sensed a perturbation. Uncharacteristic also his fumbling for words: “Pip—Leila—Leila—Pip—”

The girl had a strikingly deep suntan. Tom hurried around his desk and did a herding thing with his arms, bringing the two women together while also moving them toward the doorway, as if eager to get Pip away from him. Or as if to underline that he wasn't trying to hide her from Leila. The girl's face was honest and friendly and less than threateningly beautiful, but she seemed discomfited herself.

“Pip's already turned up more good stuff in Amarillo,” Tom said. “I know you're slammed, but I thought maybe the two of you should work together.”

Leila queried him with a frown and caught something in his averted eyes.

“I'm very busy this week,” she said pleasantly, “but I'm happy to try to help.”

Tom herded them through his doorway. “Leila's the best,” he said to Pip. “She'll take good care of you.” He looked at Leila. “If you don't mind?”