Sliver of Truth (32 page)

I looked at Dylan’s face but it was blank. Behind his glasses, I couldn’t see his eyes. I wanted to leave but I heard another door open and I knew it was too late.

She entered the room from behind a velvet curtain and then swept it open with an expansive sweep of her arms.

“Max,” she said, soft and sultry. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

She wore a wide smile that faded almost immediately when she saw us. She would have been stunning, this Asian woman with long, thick tresses of dark black hair, the impossibly slim lines of her body. The memory of beauty resided in her fine features. But she looked used and tired. She looked broken. I thought of the women and girls abducted and sold into sexual slavery I’d read about in the articles in Jake’s file. I wondered if she’d been one of those girls once, and if this was what you looked like ten, fifteen years later. The thought made me sad.

“Who are you?” she asked.

I saw her start to move backward toward the curtain, but Dylan was on her before she could get far. He grabbed her quickly and spun her around roughly, putting his hand around her mouth. She struggled against him, then she froze. It took me a second to realize that he had his gun to her back. I didn’t even know he’d brought it with him. My stomach hollowed out.

“Keep your fucking mouth shut,” he said to her, his voice low and menacing. He moved her over to the chair and sat her down heavily.

“Dylan,” I said. I barely recognized him suddenly.

He ignored me. “How?” he asked her, wrapping his hand around her throat and pointing the gun to her temple. “How have you been trying to reach him?”

She released an awful gurgling noise and clawed at the hand he had on her neck. I saw that she’d drawn blood from him but he didn’t flinch.

“How?” I didn’t even recognize his voice. It was more of a growl.

He released his grip on her just slightly and she drew a harsh, rasping breath. She looked at him with pleading eyes and I moved to put a hand on his shoulder.

“I can’t tell you,” she said. Tears welled in her eyes and ran down her face, horrible black rivers of mascara. “He’ll kill me.”

“Die now. Die later. Your choice.”

Her eyes met mine and I felt a horrible clenching in my gut—guilt, fear, pain.
What
were we doing?

“Dylan, stop it,” I said.

“Ridley,” he said, turning to me, “stay out of this.”

I backed away from him and stood by the door. I was useless, totally out of my league. I had no frame of reference for dealing with a situation like this. How had I imagined this encounter would go? I didn’t know.

“I’m going to give you one more second and then I’m going to snap your neck, do you understand me?”

I froze. Would he really kill this woman if she didn’t tell us what we wanted to know? I didn’t think so, but he was convincing as hell. Maybe that was part of being successful in a matter like this. I saw her nod and I was flooded with relief. He released his grip on her throat. She coughed and let out a little sob.

“I can only leave messages for him on the Internet,” she said, her voice hoarse. “There’s a website.”

“Give me the address, your log-in, and password,” he said. He looked at me and I quickly produced a pen and paper from my pocket and handed them to her. (Well, I
am
a writer. We don’t go very many places without those things.) She scribbled on the paper for a second and then handed it to me. I wasn’t surprised to see the address that I had by now memorized. Her log-in was
angellove,
her password
serendipity.

“How do you know him?” I asked. “Who is he to you?”

She looked at me as if I were a moron, began massaging her neck where Dylan had grabbed her.

I tried to imagine Max in a place like this. I couldn’t picture it, no matter how hard I tried. So much about the things I’d learned about Max just didn’t compute with my memories. I realized I was staring at her and she turned away from my gaze. Dylan took the paper from my hand, glanced at it and then back at her.

“If you’re lying, I swear to God, I’ll find you,” he said.

The way he looked, the way his voice sounded, I didn’t even know him.

She shook her head, gave him a little laugh. “I’m already dead.”

He moved into her quickly and hit her hard on the back of the head. She crumpled like a marionette with her strings cut, slumped into the chair. He turned and must have seen the horror on my face because it stopped him in his tracks.

“She’s not dead, Ridley,” he said. His accent was heavier than I’d ever heard it. “I just need her to be quiet for a few minutes so we can get out of here.”

I went over to her and felt her throat. I was relieved to feel her pulse beneath my fingers. Dylan grabbed my arm and we walked out of the Kiss as if nothing had happened.

We hopped into a cab outside the club and asked the cabbie to take us to an Internet café. He talked the whole way about the subway bombings just a few months earlier and about the “fucking Arabs” and “fucking Americans” and how they were fucking up the whole world. I barely heard him as I stared out the window, watched the buildings race by. I kept stealing glances at Dylan, who’d taken his dark glasses off and kept stealing glances back at me.

“Did you think she was just going to
give
us the information?” he asked finally.

I shrugged and shook my head. “Would you have killed her if she hadn’t?” I whispered.

“Of course not,” he said, incredulous. “No.”

“So you were just playing the tough guy?”

“Yes,” he said, frowning at me.

“It was pretty convincing.”

He shrugged. “It wouldn’t have worked if it hadn’t been.”

We were silent for a second. Then he said, “I guess I keep forgetting.”

“What?”

“That you don’t know me as well as I know you.”

I looked over at him and saw that the nail marks Angel had left looked raw and painful. I didn’t know what to say. He was right, and it reminded me how inorganic this relationship was, how it had started under a veil of lies and existed in a crucible of danger and uncertainty. Our only social encounters consisted of a murder in a dark hospital room and the menacing of a prostitute in an after-hours club in the West End of London. I wondered if we had anything in common other than our shared obsession with my father. I wondered if we’d ever have a chance to find out.

Some of us are lost and some of us are found. I think that’s really the difference Max had observed. Some people don’t have that many questions and lack that belly of fire when it comes to their encounters with the world. They’re content in their predictable lives, where everything that lies before them is like a rerun of
Jeopardy.
They already know the answers and how the game will end. They don’t have the urge to travel or to ask the questions that boggle the mind: Who am I? Why am I here? Is this all there is? Instead there’s a certainty about themselves and the world around them. They work. They go to church. They take care of their families. They know their beliefs are correct; they know that anything different is wrong or bad.

Others of us are lost. We’re forever seeking. We torture ourselves with philosophies and ache to see the world. We question everything, even our own existence. We ask a lifetime of questions and are never satisfied with the answers because we don’t recognize anyone as an authority to give them. We see life and the world as an enormous puzzle that we might one day solve, if only we collect enough pieces. The idea that we might never understand, that our questions might go unanswered until the day we die, almost never occurs to us. And when it does, it fills us with dread.

I was filled with this dread as we hovered over the computer screen in the back of the twenty-four-hour Internet café. It was nearly four
A.M.
and I felt as if we were the only two people in London. We entered the address into the browser and the red screen popped up. I tabbed for the windows and entered Angel’s log-in and password. A small window opened in the center of the screen. I watched as the same streaming video piece I’d seen at Jake’s place started. It was broad daylight in the video, so I knew that it wasn’t a live feed. I found myself leaning in closer. Then, from the right of the screen, a man moved into the frame. He moved slowly, with the help of a cane. His motion was unsteady and the other people on the street seemed to race by him. He wore a long brown coat and a brimmed tweed cap. Then he stopped and turned.

He was thin and ghostly pale, as if something was eating him alive inside. He was not the man I knew. He was someone shelled out and broken. He lifted his eyes to the camera, which must have been somewhere across the street. He moved his mouth but I couldn’t hear what he was saying, just like in my dreams. Even as changed as he was, there was no mistaking who I was looking at. It was Max. My father.

I felt this terrible ache inside that I suppose had always been there, that had been driving me all this time. This ache was the reason for everything I had done, every mistake I had made, every reckless and careless action since Dylan first approached me on the street. I had wrecked my whole life to fill the empty space inside me that was the dark shadow of my father. I needed something that I still believed only he could give me. And I’d almost destroyed myself to get it.

“What’s he saying?” Dylan asked.

The video was on some kind of a loop. It came to an abrupt stop and then replayed Max walking slowly across the street, turning and saying something as he faced the camera. The whole thing lasted maybe ten seconds.

I watched it replay several times, zooming in on his mouth. After the fourth time, I knew. I leaned back in my chair.

“What?” Dylan asked me. “What is he saying?”

I looked up at Dylan. “He’s saying, ‘Ridley, go home.’”

They descended on us then, maybe realizing that it was the end of the road, that my pathetic little leads had led me as far as I could go. They entered from the front of the café and from the back. They shined their lights in the windows beside us. They entered with guns drawn, wearing body armor and making lots of noise. Overkill, if you ask me. But I just sat staring at the screen, watching Max, put my hands on my head, felt the spiky strands of my strange hair. Dylan, standing beside me, did the same. Two men patted him down and took his gun.

I wasn’t surprised to see Inspector Madeline Ellsinore when she came through the door. She had her eyes on me; in them I imagined I saw empathy.

In fact, I wasn’t even surprised to see Jake or the black bulletproof vest he wore over his clothes, the gun in his hand.

18

Up until recently, my life has been pretty uneventful. Not to say that I was just plodding along until a single event turned my world on its axis. But now that you mention it, that’s not too far off. As I sat in a cold gray room, lit horribly with flickering fluorescent bulbs, I thought about that moment when I raced into the street to save Justin Wheeler. Dylan was right. Part of me would go back and change it all if I could. But I know now that all of this was set in motion long before that day. I had been laboring under the delusion that I had some control over my life. I was only beginning to understand that it wasn’t true.

He walked into the room and closed the door. He didn’t say anything as he sat across the table from me. I couldn’t bring myself to raise my eyes. His betrayal was so profound, so incomprehensible, that in that moment I was afraid I’d burst into flames if I looked at him.

“Ridley,” he said finally.

“Was it all lies? Everything?”

He didn’t answer for a second. Then: “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?”

“I
have
cared for you, Ridley,” he said in a voice I didn’t recognize. There was something so cold and officious about him, especially in this place, in this setting. “I still do. You know that. But that wasn’t part of the plan. It was a contingency I never planned for, a complication.”

“A mistake,” I said. Did he say “care for”? Like you
care for
the environment or
care for
an aging aunt? I thought of all the love I’d felt for this man, all the times I’d given him my body and my heart, my deepest trust; all the truths I’d revealed, all the painful confidences I’d shared. I’d sliced myself open and bared it all. I felt a deep sense of shame, a desire to cover my nakedness before him.

“Not a mistake,” he said softly, more like the man I knew. I felt his hand on mine and I pulled it back quickly. I mustered my strength and looked up. He seemed tired and sad, with dark circles under his eyes, the line of his mouth straight and firm.

“Don’t ever put your hands on me again,” I said.

He hung his head. I couldn’t have hated him more.

“I just need to be clear,” I said. “Everything about you—your personal history as a Project Rescue baby, our relationship, your sculpture, everything I know about you as a person—all of it just lies? Just a cover story?”

He nodded slowly. “Yes.”

I felt a wave of nausea so strong, I swear I thought I was going to puke right there. But I managed to hold it in. I tasted that dark beer I’d had a while ago. It tasted like the truth, bitter and acidic on the back of my throat.

“Why?” I asked, hearing the desperation in my own voice.

“You know why.”

I shook my head. “No. You didn’t need to deceive me so personally to find Max. You could have had me under surveillance, watched me from a distance. I never would have known.”

He didn’t answer me, let me think about it. And then I understood.

“You needed to be able to manipulate me. Keep the issues alive for me, plant little seeds here and there, show me that file. You got to know me well enough to push my buttons, to get me chasing when the time was right.”

I was happy to see shame and regret on his face, but it didn’t even come close to being enough. So many things that had never made sense to me were so obvious to me now: Jake’s obsession with Max, how he always found me wherever I was, how he always seemed to know what I was thinking, how he managed to stoke the flames of my curiosity, always keeping the past alive. Nearly two years of this. Suddenly I didn’t feel so bad about sleeping with Dylan.