No Harm Can Come to a Good Man

by James Smythe

  ‘Listen, Dee, I wasn’t planning on going anywhere until this was done. This is going to get worse before it gets better. They’re not going to let this lie. They haven’t broken him yet, but they will, because there’s a reason for them to do it.’ He reaches out to her, taking her arm. She lets him. ‘You’ve got my number, my email. Get in touch if this gets worse. I don’t know what I can do, but I’ll do whatever I can.’

  ‘Okay,’ she says. He opens the door. The news teams are ready this time, and there are cameras flashes and shouts for his attention – as if he could miss them – and their calls are what suddenly alerts him to their otherwise subtle presence. The door slams behind him as he steps into the throng. As Deanna turns, she sees Laurence standing halfway up the stairs. ‘Are you all right?’ she asks.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he says. ‘I’m absolutely fine.’ He stretches, and she thinks of a mantis, rising up to strike. ‘We’ve got to brave the rain, right?’ He comes towards her and squeezes her arm, the same arm that Amit just held, and he walks into the living room and starts talking to Alyx. His feet seem to drag across the floor as he walks. She doesn’t know where he’s gone; only that he’s not here any more.

  Amit drives back to DC. He puts gobby nineties punk music on the stereo, the stuff that he listened to when he was a kid, and he spits the lyrics along with the songs, relishing every swear word and ‘oi’ screamed from the speakers. He hammers the steering wheel with his hands to the drumbeats, trying to pick himself up. Laurence’s career might be done, but his isn’t. Amit has got another career ahead of him, another candidate entirely. All he needs to do is lay the blame firmly at Laurence’s door, claim that he was unstable, that he was difficult, insinuate there were secrets in that family that nobody talked about with half-truths and vague lies, and he’s fine. If he makes suggestions that this was out of his control, buries the past fully, he’ll get another candidate. But still, he thinks, there’s more to this. He pictures Laurence with the gun, an image that came from nothing.

  He doesn’t turn off for his apartment. Instead he stays on roads that lead him up through the tourist areas, up past hotels and boutique shops and towards Georgetown. He parks in a shopping-center car park, watching to see if he’s followed in. Laurence was sure that there were people watching them before; if he was wrong, there certainly will be now. The delegates will have made sure of that. Amit has enough missed calls from them, begging for him to call them. They say that they just want to talk strategy, but these are conversations that only really end one way.

  He walks to Hershel’s gated street. Hershel was the only other person who knew about the video, who had access to it. He hasn’t heard from him since it leaked, no emails or tweets or texts asking him if he’s all right, nothing asking if he should stop working on it. It’s possible that he doesn’t watch the news, so maybe he’s missed what has happened; but it’s equally possible that there’s another reason. Somebody had to have leaked the video.

  Amit goes to the security gate. It’s the same officer as before, and he seems to recognize him.

  ‘You’re here for …’ he says, leaving it hanging, as if it’s on the tip of his tongue.

  ‘Hershel. Thom Hershel.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Of course. I remember you now.’ He picks up the small telephone on the desk and presses a button, and the phone rings and rings. He frowns. ‘No answer,’ he says to Amit. ‘Maybe you should try calling his phone or something.’

  ‘I can’t just get in myself? I knock on the door, he’ll wake up. He must be asleep or something.’

  ‘Not going to happen,’ the guard says. His eyes twitch past Amit at the door. ‘Shut that on your way out.’

  Amit stands in the street. He wonders if Hershel is avoiding him on purpose; if this is his guilt at leaking the video manifesting itself in avoidance. A car turns off the main road, and Amit sees the driver for a second, an elderly lady, string of jewels lying across her neck. The gates open, creaking, and Amit runs. He doesn’t know why, exactly, other than he needs to look Hershel in the eyes and ask him what he did, and why he let the video out into the world.

  He runs to Hershel’s house, to his front door, and he hammers his palms on it. It’s reinforced, barely making a sound under his hands. A shout comes from the security guard, now in pursuit. Amit tries the handle and it turns, the door opening. All the lights are on, but the house is quiet. Everything reflects off everything else: all the marble, the lights and the mirrors and the glass that covers the paintings hanging from the walls. He runs through, shouting Hershel’s name, and there’s nobody here; so he runs up the stairs. The security guard is in the house as well, shouting wordless cries to get Amit to stop. Amit tries the doors on the upper level: empty bedrooms, the beds made up. Then, finally, he finds Hershel. From the light in the hallway, Amit can see two other people, a woman and a man, sprawled out on top of the covers next to Hershel. They stir at the light; Hershel turns over, away from it.

  ‘Wake the fuck up!’ Amit says. The security guard appears, grabbing Amit’s shoulder.

  ‘I am so sorry, Mr Hershel,’ he says.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Hershel says. He sits up and rubs his face, and he looks at Amit. ‘It’s fine. Let him be, whatever.’ He shuffles to the edge of the bed and covers his groin, hiding his penis behind his hands. ‘Didn’t expect this,’ he says. The guard lets Amit go and walks off, huffing and heaving as he goes downstairs. Hershel stands up and finds a pair of boxer shorts on the floor and pulls them on; and then a T-shirt, emblazoned with a logo from some sci-fi television show that hasn’t been on the air in decades. ‘I saw what happened,’ he says. He walks out of the bedroom, pulling the door shut, letting his companions sleep still. He wipes his face. ‘Big night.’

  ‘Did you leak it?’ Amit asks.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You had the video. Did you leak it?’

  ‘Why the fuck would I do that?’

  ‘Maybe somebody paid you for it.’

  ‘And you think I need the money?’ Amit follows Hershel down the marble staircase. On the far wall is a painting of some man on a horse; a lord or a baron or something. It’s not nice, doesn’t even demonstrate much skill that Amit can see, but it’s evidently worth something. That says a lot.

  ‘Maybe one of the people who was here.’

  ‘They’ve got better things to do. Besides, you think they know who the fuck you even are?’

  ‘They might know who Laurence is.’

  ‘They don’t.’ He says it sternly. ‘Look, I’ve got some stuff for you.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When did you leave ClearVista?’ In the living room Hershel boots a PC, a thick black box that’s in a drawer, bringing up the OS on the HoloGas. He swipes to maneuver the desktop, loading up software that Amit recognizes the name of. TNG, The Numbers Game, the software that they created at ClearVista to test the algorithm.

  ‘You took builds when you left?’

  ‘I took everything,’ Hershel says. He grins. ‘Where was it at when you quit?’

  ‘It was running, just about. Start of 2014.’

  ‘Jesus. You weren’t there when they got the miner up and running, then.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Okay, so that’s when the algorithm started to work. We were able to gather enough variable information to start to actually decipher things. We went back through history, testing the algorithm – which was still growing, I should stress, we weren’t even close to a final equation – but we tested it with the miner, seeing what it could help to do. It enhanced everything. We called every single election result we could get any data for. Everywhere. UK election in ’15 was the big one. We called that two months before it actually happened, got it down to a percentile. Not even joking. After that, every major world election we refined the algorithm; every sporting event, every fricking Oscar winner. We did nothing but push that thing to be able to sift and work data. But here’s the thing: we didn’t know exactly how it worked
.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Look, it’s numbers. And there’s a part between feeding in the info from the data miner and running the algorithm with that data that just … worked. I mean, look, we knew what we were doing for most of it. But then, it’s not like you can watch the cogs.’ He brings up a keyboard. ‘Pick something. A sports event, something like that.’

  ‘Football.’

  ‘Right. The Superbowl, okay? So we take the Giants, and we ask their chances of winning. Simple. Pick these values …’ He drags in data, websites and newspapers. He types quickly, beating out formulae in the air. ‘Okay. So, we run this – and this isn’t the full thing, because obviously that’s cloud-powered over at ClearVista. Far, far more processing power than this. This is, like, a muted version of it, but the point should stand.’ He points at the desktop in the air, walks up to it. ‘I press go, and it does the data mining first. It goes through the Internet and it finds out everything it can. Past results of the teams involved, past results of the players taking part, injury form, personal details. Does their defense hold up when they’re, I don’t know, playing against the 49ers? I don’t have the answers, but the Internet does, so now the algorithm will. And it brings that information in.’ They wait; there’s a beep. ‘That’s done. I only used the first twenty pages of Google results, but still. That’s raw data. Now, I click this, and I apply the algorithm to it.’ He presses a button on the desktop. Another beep; an icon bounces in the dock, and a PDF document fills the screen. ‘And we’ve got an answer. That’s all happened, and we can’t see it. Can’t check it. We trust it, because it works. But there’s no way of looking under the hood and seeing exactly what it did with the information. It just works.’ He scrolls through the document: the Giants, no chance of winning the Superbowl. That’s likely going to be the Chiefs. Maybe the Ravens. It’s almost a foregone conclusion.

  ‘It’s not an accident. You all knew what you were doing when you programmed it.’

  ‘Yeah, we did. But sometimes, with math … I don’t know, sometimes things just work. Some of the guys said it was like doing math in the dark. Like, you can’t see it, and you can’t tell it’s happening. It was like magic. And that’s the problem now.’ He tosses out the new document and opens Laurence’s results. ‘I can see this stuff, and I can see the results of the data mining. There’s nothing throwing up red flags. It’s all normal stuff, far as I can see. But it’s what I can’t see that’s caused this. There’s something twisted in the machine.’

  ‘So it’s wrong?’

  ‘No. No! It’s right. But I’m going to try and pick this thing apart, maybe find out why and how. It’s going to take time.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Took us years to put the algorithm together. No idea what it’s going to be like going the other way. But I’m on it. No idea what else I can tell you, man. I’m on it.’ He minimizes the desktop. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to bed.’ He walks off through the house, the sound of his plastic sandals clapping against the marble. Amit lets himself out and walks back to his car. The gates open as he approaches, and he stands outside the guard’s hut, wondering if he should knock and apologize. He does, but there’s no answer. He wonders if the guard is asleep as well.

  Deanna goes to bed early, because she wants to keep the lights in the house off; and she orders the girls to do the same. She doesn’t ask what Laurence is doing. She leaves him downstairs alone, and when the house is quiet he puts his coat on and leaves through the kitchen’s French windows. In the garden he moves some of the lawn furniture, a table and a chair, to the intersecting wall at the end, which leads onto the woodlands that run behind their house. He reasons that nobody’s going to be watching the back at this time of night, so he pulls himself up and over. He’ll have to return through the front, sure, but that’s not the part he’s worried about. This is more important to him; getting out of the house and feeling something like freedom again. He pulls his hood out of the back of the coat, up and over his hair, and he trudges through the long grass towards the edge of the field. He sees the paths here that lead down towards the woods, and the lake, and the cabin. In the distance, lit by the moon, he can see glimpses of the lake through the trees, the reflective black of the water – and then a flash of Sean underwater. He can feel the water in the basement lapping at his shins, the water licking at him as his son tries to not drown. He walks on.

  The grass is wet with the night and it soaks his shoes, but he doesn’t care. He breathes the air and turns from the path, towards the street. He can see the lights of the town, the handful of restaurants and bars that keep this place powered during the evenings. People going about their business, doing as they want to do. Freedom, as a commodity, cannot be underestimated, he thinks. Actually, it’s a right. It is a basic human right.

  He climbs the fence that runs alongside the road and sets foot on the tarmac, cracked and dug up and in need of repair. The road stretches off, the night sky reflected on it. It glistens from the earlier rain. He walks down further, past the houses of people he knows and who know him. He has friends here. They have shared beers; they have promised to vote for him, given the chance. Had promised, he reminds himself. Past tense. Seems like everything is in the past tense, now.

  He sees Peaforks, the town’s best restaurant. He smells crab, their specialty, on the air. But it’s busy, and it’s bright, and through the window he sees people that he knows, grinning, eating meals together. The Four Fathers, Staunton’s only bar, is opposite, the inside darker, and the lot nearly empty; so he chooses that instead, running up the steps. The soaked-through hardwood is damp and muffled. There’s very little noise from inside, only a few voices, and the crack of the pool table. As he opens the door, he hears rock music, stuff that they listened to when he was at college; the distant chunk of power-chords and strained vocals. There are four people here: they all turn to look at him.

  ‘Hi,’ he says. They don’t break their stares; and they don’t greet him, or ask how he is. ‘Sorry about the journalists. I’ve been, uh, stuck in the house. I needed a break.’ He feels as if he should make an excuse. They’ll be wondering why he isn’t at home. They’ll be wondering all sorts of things. ‘They won’t leave us alone. I had to get out, you know?’ None of the four say anything. Amy Scarsdale, the daughter of the old man who owns the place, is behind the bar. Laurence nods at her. ‘I’ll have one, if you’re pouring.’ She doesn’t move to. She looks at Trent Henderson instead, who is sitting in front of her, nursing one himself. He has both hands around the glass – it’s freshly poured and already half-gone, Laurence can tell, from the prints in the condensation on it – and he looks at her and nods.

  Who is he to give her permission? Laurence thinks. Who the hell is Trent Henderson? He’s a grocer. He doesn’t run this town. She pulls the beer and sets it down, and Laurence walks over and lays a five on the counter for her. ‘Keep the rest,’ he says. He stands at the far end of the bar and sips from it. It tastes amazing, he thinks. It’s better than anything. He doesn’t know how long it’s been since he’s had one, not freshly poured like this, but this tastes better than any he can remember. He drinks again, a bigger gulp this time, and looks over at Trent Henderson again, who hasn’t stopped staring at him.

  ‘What are you doing here, Laurence?’ Trent asks. He doesn’t break eye contact; he doesn’t take his hands from his glass, either. Behind him, Andrew Chase and some boy that Laurence doesn’t recognize – barely eighteen, let alone old enough to be drinking beer – stop playing pool. They stay hunched over the table, their cues in their hands. Trent brings his head to his glass, almost, raising it only slightly from the bar, and he drinks. ‘Don’t you have other matters to attend to?’

  ‘Trent, I needed to breathe,’ Laurence says. ‘You’ve seen the news.’ He lets that hang, as if that’s all the excuse he needs. They’ll understand, he thinks. I’m a wronged man. Trent doesn’t reply, so Laurence speaks again. ‘They’
re outside the house. They’re ruining our lives.’

  ‘We’ve all seen the news,’ Trent says. ‘Saw that video of you, as well.’

  ‘And that video is a lie, is what that is. A mistake. I’ve got people looking into it.’ He thinks about Amit; how maybe he was rash in firing him. ‘It’s horseshit, frankly. It’ll all get sorted out.’

  ‘Good,’ Trent says, ‘because you understand how it looks to us. People like us, we see that … we call it how we see it, and we’re frightful protective of Deanna. She’s been here her whole life; we know her. She’s a part of us. You understand that, Laurence.’

  ‘But you know that I’m not that man,’ Laurence says. ‘You were at our wedding, Trent. You know me.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I do, Laurence. The measure of a man comes in his deeds, not his words. And I’ve heard your words, but until now, hadn’t really seen your deeds.’

  ‘You still haven’t. The video isn’t real. It isn’t my deeds.’ Laurence realizes that he’s gritting his teeth; that he’s raised his voice. The boys at the pool table stand upright, cues in hand. ‘Listen. That stuff, I don’t understand it. I ticked boxes, and I ticked one wrong. You understand that it isn’t real, video like that.’

  ‘Sure seems like that’s not how the television is treating it.’

  ‘No. I know. I mean, they’re fucking—’ Trent seems to squint at Laurence’s swearing. As if that’s a crime in itself, another affront. ‘They’re after anything. They’ve turned this into a story when there’s nothing there. All I want is to protect my family. You have to see that.’

  ‘I don’t have to do anything,’ Trent says. ‘And as long as your wife and daughters stay safe, that won’t change.’ He takes his hands from the glass. The beer is all gone and another takes its place. ‘I think you should probably just leave now, Laurence.’

  ‘I’m only trying to have a quiet drink,’ Laurence says. He lifts his own glass to his mouth and takes a gulp. He feels his arm shake, the glass chatter against his teeth slightly. ‘Please. I just needed a break.’