Before the Fall

by Noah Hawley

  Let them come, he thought, surrendering himself to fate, then he squeezed Sarah’s hand, breathing again, and walked her to the plane.

  2.

  Chapter 18

  Cunningham

  It’s never been a secret that Bill Cunningham has problems with authority. In some ways that’s his brand, the fire-breathing malcontent, and he’s translated it into a ten-million-dollar-a-year contract with ALC. But in the same way a man’s nose and ears become exaggerated as he ages, so do the psychological issues that define him. We all become caricatures of ourselves, if we live long enough. And so over the last few years, as his power grew, so too did Bill’s fuck you and the horse you rode in on attitude. Until now, he’s been like some blood-drinking Roman caesar who believes deep down he may be a god.

  Ultimately, this is why he’s still on the air, after all the bullshit corporate crybabying over his alleged “phone hacking.” Though, if he’s being honest (which he isn’t), he’d have to admit that David’s death had a lot to do with it. A grief response and power vacuum in a moment of crisis that Bill was able to exploit by delivering what he calls “leadership,” but was really a kind of moral bullying.

  “You’re gonna—” he said, “let me get this straight, you’re gonna can me in a moment of all-out war.”

  “Bill,” said Don Liebling, “don’t you do that.”

  “No, I want—you need to say it on the record—so when I sue your asses for a billion dollars I can be specific on the stand while I’m jerking off into some caviar.”

  Don stares at him.

  “Jesus. David’s dead. His wife is dead. His—”

  He gets quiet for a moment, overcome by the immensity of it.

  “His goddamn daughter. And you’re—I can’t even say it out loud.”

  “Exactly,” said Bill, “you can’t. But I can. That’s what I do. I say things out loud. I ask the questions no one else is willing to—and millions of people watch this channel because of that. People who are gonna run to CNN if they turn on our coverage of the death of our own fucking boss and see some second-string automaton with Fisher-Price snap-on hair reading his opinions off a teleprompter. David and his wife and daughter—who, I held her at her fucking baptism—are lying somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic with Ben Kipling—who I’m hearing was about to be indicted—and everybody’s using the word accident like nobody on earth had reason to want these people dead, except then why did the man travel in a bulletproof limousine and his office windows could take a hit from a goddamn bazooka?”

  Don looks over at Franken, Bill’s lawyer, already knowing that in the war between common sense and marketing genius, marketing is going to win out. Franken smiles.

  Gotcha.

  And that’s how it came to pass that Bill Cunningham was back on the air Monday morning, three hours after news of the crash broke.

  He sat before the cameras, his hair unbrushed, in shirtsleeves, his tie askew, looking for all intents and purposes like a man felled by grief. And yet, when he spoke, his voice was strong.

  “Let me be clear,” he said. “This organization—this planet—has lost a great man. A friend and leader. I wouldn’t be sitting in front of you right now—”

  He paused, collected himself.

  “—I’d still be throwing weather in Oklahoma, if David Bateman hadn’t seen potential where no one else could. We built this network together. I was his best man when he married Maggie. I am—I was—godfather to his daughter, Rachel. And that is why I feel it is my responsibility to see that his murder is solved, and that the killer or killers are brought to justice.”

  He leaned forward and stared into the lens.

  “And yes, I said murder. Because whatever else could it be? Two of the most powerful men in a city of powerful men, whose plane disappears over the dark Atlantic, a plane serviced just the day before, flown by top-notch pilots who reported no mechanical issues to flight control, but somehow dropped off radar eighteen minutes after takeoff—look at my face—no one on earth can convince me there wasn’t some kind of foul play involved.”

  The ratings that morning were the highest in the history of the network, and they continued to climb from there. As the first wreckage was found, the first bodies washed up on shore—Emma Lightner found by a dog walker on Fishers Island on Tuesday, Sarah Kipling hauled in by lobstermen on Wednesday morning—Bill seemed to rise above himself, like a relief pitcher in the bottom innings of a too-close-to-call game seven.

  That day Bill spun the grim discovery of human remains toward further intrigue. Where was Ben Kipling? Where was David Bateman? Didn’t it seem convenient that of the eleven people on the plane, passengers and crew, only seven bodies remained missing, including those of the two men most likely to have been targeted by as-yet-unknown forces? If Ben Kipling was sitting with his wife, as had been reported, why was her body recovered and not his?

  And where was this Scott Burroughs character? Why did he still insist on hiding his face from the world? Is it possible he was involved somehow?

  “Clearly he knows more than he’s saying,” Bill told the viewers at home.

  Sources inside the investigation had been funneling ALC information since the first boots hit the ground. From this, they were able to break the seating chart before anyone else. They were also the first to break news of Kipling’s imminent indictment.

  It was Bill who broke that the boy, JJ, had been asleep when he arrived at the airfield and was carried onto the plane by his father. His personal connection to the story, the marathon hours he spent behind the anchor desk, frequently having to pause to collect himself, made it hard for viewers to change the channel. Would he break down entirely? What would he say next? Hour after hour, Bill cast himself as a kind of martyr, Jimmy Stewart on his feet in the Senate chambers, refusing to succumb or surrender.

  But as the days went on, even the back-channel leaks began to seem false. Could there really be no new leads on the location of the wreckage? And now that all the other outfits had the Kipling story—the Times ran a six-thousand-word piece on Sunday that showed in minute detail how his firm had laundered billions from North Korea, Iran, and Libya—Bill became less interested in digging for dirt there. He was reduced to opinion pieces, to going over old ground—pointing at time lines, yelling at maps.

  And then he had an idea.

  * * *

  Bill meets Namor at a dive bar on Orchard Street—black box, no sign. He chooses it because he figures none of the grungy liberal elite of the nouveau riche knows his face. All the bearded Sarah Lawrence graduates with their artisanal ales who think every conservative pundit is just another friend of their dad’s.

  In preparation, Bill exchanges his trademark suspenders for a T-shirt and leather bomber jacket. He looks like a former president, trying to be cool—Bill Clinton at a U2 concert.

  The bar—Swim!—is defined by low lighting and glowing fish tanks, giving it the look of a mid-1990s sci-fi action movie. He orders a Budweiser (un-ironically) and finds a table behind a big saltwater tank, then watches the door for his man. Sitting behind the tank gives the illusion that he is underwater, and through the glass the room takes on a funhouse-mirror quality—like what a hipster bar would look like after the oceans rose and consumed the earth. It’s just after nine p.m. and the place is half filled with bro-clusters and hipster first dates. Bill sips the king of beers and checks out the local talent—blond girl, decent tits, a little chubby. Some kind of East Asian number with a nose ring—Filipino? He thinks about the last girl he fucked, a twenty-two-year-old intern from GW he bent over his desk, coughing his orgasm into her brown hair after six glorious minutes of watch the door! jackhammering.

  His man enters in a raincoat, an unsmoked cigarette tucked behind his ear. He looks around casually, sees Bill’s comically oversize head magnified through the fish tank, and approaches.

  “I’m assuming you thought you were being stealthy,” he says, sliding into the booth, “choosing this dump.”


  “My core audience are fifty-five-year-old white men who need two heaping tablespoons of fiber to take a halfway-decent shit every morning. I think we’re in the clear here.”

  “Except you came by town car, which is loitering at the curb this very minute, drawing attention.”

  “Shit,” says Bill, pulling out his phone and telling his driver to circle.

  Bill met Namor on a junket to Germany during the second Bush’s first regime. Namor was introduced to him by a local NGO as a man to know. And right off the bat the kid was feeding him gold. So Bill cultivated him, buying him meals, theater tickets, whatever, and making himself available whenever Namor felt like talking, which was usually north of one thirty in the morning.

  “What did you find out?” he asks Namor after his phone is back in his pocket.

  Namor looks around, gauging volume and distance.

  “The civilians are easy,” he says. “We’re already up on the flight attendant’s father, the pilot’s mother, and the Bateman aunt and uncle.”

  “Eleanor and—what’s it?—Doug.”

  “Right.”

  “They must be giddy,” says Bill, “winning the goddamn orphan lottery. It’s gotta be something like three hundred million the kid inherits.”

  “But also,” says Namor, “he’s an orphan.”

  “Boo hoo. I wish I was an orphan. My mother raised me in a boardinghouse and used bleach for birth control.”

  “Well, taps are up there on all three phones, hers, his, and home. And we’re seeing all their electronic messages before they do.”

  “And this feed goes where?”

  “I set up a dummy account. You’ll get the info by coded text when we walk out tonight. I also hacked her voice mail so you can listen late at night while you’re humping your pillow.”

  “Trust me, I get so much pussy—when I go home at night the only thing I put my cock in is ice.”

  “Remind me not to order a margarita at your house.”

  Bill finishes his beer, waves at the bartender for a second.

  “And what about King Neptune,” he says, “the long-distance swimmer?”

  Namor sips his beer.

  “Nothing.”

  “Whaddya mean, nothing? It’s two thousand fifteen.”

  “What can I say? He’s a throwback. No cell phone, doesn’t text, pays all his bills by mail.”

  “Next thing you’re gonna tell me is he’s a Trotskyite.”

  “Nobody’s a Trotskyite anymore. Not even Trotsky.”

  “Probably ’cause he’s been dead for fifty years.”

  A waitress brings Bill a new beer. Namor signals he wants one too.

  “At least,” says Bill, “tell me where this fucking Boy Scout is—on what planet.”

  Namor thinks about that.

  “What’s got you so bent about this guy?” he asks.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I’m just saying—this swimmer—everybody else thinks he’s a hero.”

  Bill makes a face like the word has made him physically sick.

  “That’s like saying everything that’s wrong with the country is what makes it great.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Some failed drunk hobnobbing with men of actual accomplishment, a hitchhiker on the bootstrap express.”

  “I don’t know what that—”

  “He’s a fraud, I’m saying. A nobody. Muscling his way into the spotlight, playing the humble knight, when the actual heroes, the great men, are dead at the bottom of the deep blue bullshit. And if that’s what we call a hero in two thousand fifteen, then, buddy, we’re fucked.”

  Namor picks his teeth. It’s no skin off his nose either way, but there’s a big ask here, a lot of laws about to be broken, so it’s probably worth being sure.

  “He saved the kid,” he says.

  “So what? They train dogs to wear whiskey barrels and find warm bodies in an avalanche, but you don’t see me teaching my kids to grow up to be malamutes.”

  Namor thinks about that.

  “Well, he didn’t go home.”

  Bill stares at him. Namor smiles without teeth.

  “I’m sifting through some chatter. Maybe he’ll turn up.”

  “But you don’t know—is what you’re saying.”

  “Yes. For once. I don’t know.”

  Bill pumps his leg, suddenly uninterested in his second beer.

  “I mean, what are we talking about here? A drunken degenerate? A black ops sleeper agent? Some kind of Romeo?”

  “Or maybe he’s just a guy who got on the wrong plane and saved a kid.”

  Bill makes a face.

  “That’s the hero story. Everybody’s got the fucking hero story. It’s human interest bullshit. You can’t tell me that this dried-up has-been gets a seat on that plane just because he’s a good guy. I couldn’t even get a ride on the plane three weeks ago. Had to take the goddamn ferry.”

  “And you’re definitely not a good guy.”

  “Fuck you. I’m a great American. How is that not more important than what? Being nice?”

  The waitress brings Namor’s second beer. He sips it.

  “Here’s the thing,” he says. “Nobody stays buried forever. Sooner or later, this guy goes to the deli to buy a bagel and somebody gets a cell phone photo. Or he calls someone we’ve already tapped.”

  “Like Franklin at NTSB.”

  “I told you. That one’s tricky.”

  “Fuck you. You said anybody. You said pick a name from the phone book.”

  “Look, I can get his personal line, but not the satphone.”

  “What about email?”

  “In time, maybe. But we gotta be careful. They monitor everything now, since the Patriot Act.”

  “Which you called amateur hour. Get some sack already.”

  Namor sighs. He has his eye on the blonde, who’s texting someone while her date is in the can. Once he has her name he can fish up naked selfies in less than fifteen minutes.

  “My memory is you said we had to cool it for a while,” he says. “Wasn’t that the phone call? Burn everything. Wait for my signal.”

  Bill waves him off.

  “That was before ISIS killed my friend.”

  “Or whoever.”

  Bill stands, zips his bomber.

  “Look,” he says, “it’s a simple equation. Secrets plus technology equals no more secrets. What this thing needs is a brain trust, someone at twenty thousand feet who’s got access to all the intel—governmental, personal, fucking forensic weather data—and he—this elevated godhead—uses that information to paint the real picture, uncover who’s lying and who’s telling the truth.”

  “And that someone is you.”

  “Fucking A right,” says Bill, and walks out to his town car.

  Chapter 19

  Funhouse

  Scott sits alone that night and watches himself on television. It is less an act of narcissism and more a symptom of vertigo. To see his face onscreen, features reversed, to have childhood photos—how did they get them?—unearthed and displayed in a public forum (between commercials for adult diapers and minivans), to be told the story of his own life, as if in a game of telephone. A story that resembles his own, but isn’t. Born in the wrong hospital, attended a different elementary school, studied painting in Cleveland instead of Chicago—like looking down and seeing someone else’s shadow follow you on the street. He has a hard enough time these days knowing who he is without this sentient doppelgänger out there. This third-person him now a subject of rumor and speculation. What was he doing on that plane? Last week he was an ordinary man, anonymous. Today he is a character in a detective story. The Last Man to See the Victims Alive or Savior of the Child. Each day he plays his role, scene by scene, sitting on sofas and hard-backed chairs, answering questions from the FBI and NTSB, going over and over the details—what he remembers, what he doesn’t. And then seeing the headlines in the paper, hearing disembodied voices from
the radio.

  A hero. They are calling him a hero. It is not a word he can handle right now, being so far outside his own sense of himself, the narrative he has created that allows him to function—a broken man with modest ambitions, a former blackout drunk who lives moment-to-moment now, hand-to-mouth. And so he keeps his head down, dodging the cameras.

  Occasionally he is recognized on the subway or walking down the street. To these people he is something more than a celebrity. Yo, you saved that kid. I heard you fought a shark, bro. Did you fight a shark? He is treated not like royalty—as if his fame is based on something rare—but more like a guy from the neighborhood who got lucky. Because what did he do really, except swim? He is one of them, a nobody who did good. And so when he is recognized, people approach smiling. They want to shake his hand, take a picture. He survived a plane crash and saved a kid. There is juju to touching him, the same boost you get from a lucky penny or a rabbit’s foot. By doing the impossible he—like Jack—proved that impossible is possible. Who wouldn’t want to rub up on that?

  Scott smiles and tries to be friendly. These conversations are different from what he assumes it will feel like to talk to the press. They’re contact on a human level. And though he feels self-conscious he makes sure he is never rude. He understands that they want him to be special. It’s important to people that he be special, because we need special things in our lives. We want to believe that magic is still possible. So Scott shakes hands and accepts the hugs of random women. He asks that they not take his picture, and most respect that.

  “Let’s keep this private,” he says. “It means more when it’s just you and me.”