Deceit

by James Siegel

  That seemed to momentarily brighten his disposition.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll give it a shot.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  Hello, who is this? Hello?”

  I’d followed the usual pattern of first getting drunk-soused enough to dial his number, but not so drunk that I couldn’t remember it. It was a delicate balancing act.

  “Hello, hello…”

  It’s me. Tom.

  I was the second most surprised person on the line to realize that the words had actually been said out loud.

  “Tom? Tom Valle?”

  I reverted back into silence-for a moment I did, contemplating the enormity of finally beginning a two-way conversation with the man whose life I’d personally and irrevocably destroyed.

  “Yeah.”

  Now it was his turn to retreat into silence, a silence so complete that I thought I could hear the second hand ticking away on the grandfather clock that sat against the east wall of his study. I’d been invited into that inner sanctum in the halcyon days of yore, when I was the rising hot shot and he the editorial conscience in residence.

  “Was that you?” he finally said. “All those other times? That was you on the phone?”

  “Yes, that was me.”

  “I see.” Another moment of silence. “Mind telling me why, Tom? Did you wake up one day and decide to add phony phone calls to your oeuvre of phony journalism?”

  Okay, it hurt. But the pain was accompanied by a sudden sense of relief. I once wrote a piece on a sect of self-flagellators; it had taken till now to understand the rapture on their faces as they punished themselves for sins against God.

  “I wanted to talk to you,” I said. “I didn’t have the balls. Every time I called, I thought I was actually going to say something.”

  “Well, that’s good to hear. I was beginning to think I had a female admirer.”

  “No. Just a male one.”

  Silence again.

  “You had an odd way of showing it.”

  “What I wanted to say, what I need to tell you, is I’m sorry. I am so fucking sorry. I should’ve-look, I know it doesn’t change anything, but I needed to say it. I needed you to know… I never intended…”

  “To what, Tom? Get caught? What didn’t you intend to do? When you sat in your little cubbyhole and practiced your creative writing, where did you think it would lead? To a Pulitzer Prize?”

  “I never thought that far ahead. Just to the next deadline.”

  “I see.” The creak of a chair, the soft shuffling of papers. “I wondered if I’d ever hear from you. It was kind of ungallant of you not to drop me a line. Or something.”

  “I know. I apologize. It was incredibly unfair what they did to you. It was…”

  “Unfair? Not at all. I was in charge. I looked at your stuff and didn’t have the brains or the God-given cynicism. Rumor has it that was my stock and trade. I lacked the editorial wisdom to see what was right in front of my nose. I failed, grandly and publicly. Unfair? Nah.”

  “They didn’t have to take you down with me…”

  “No? You know, after it happened, after I took the long walk home, I had more than enough time on my hands to think things through. You were my star, Tom-every editor wants one. It’s our legacy to some extent, what we leave behind. Maybe I got as caught up in that as you did. Maybe, just occasionally, that little voice in my head looked at something I was supposed to pass judgment on and said wait a minute. Stop. It’s too perfect-Mercury’s too aligned with Mars here. Maybe I told that voice to take a hike. I think here and there I did. I forgot the oldest axiom there is. Don’t believe everything you read in the papers.”

  I felt something large and inexorable welling up in me. I put the phone down, tucked my face into my shoulder to keep him from hearing.

  “Tom? You still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve often wondered about you. Where you washed up. Are you still in New York?”

  “California.”

  “California. Doing what?”

  “Reporting.”

  A small but noticeable intake of breath. “The prodigal son, huh?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. They must be rather forgiving in California, that’s all.”

  “It’s not much of a paper.”

  “Maybe so. But it’s a hell of a profession. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Not this time, okay?”

  “That’s why I’m calling you.”

  “I thought you were calling to offer your much-belated apologies.”

  “Yes. And this other thing.”

  “What other thing?”

  “Something’s happening. I’ve fallen into a story. It’s a hell of a story, the one you look for your whole life. I know it. It goes back, it goes forward, it goes places it’s not that healthy to follow. But I am. I am following it. I wanted you to know.”

  “Be careful, Tom.”

  “I am. I think one person’s already dead because of it. I am being careful.”

  “I’m not talking about your safety, Tom. I’m talking about the nauseating stink of deja vu that just wafted in over the phone. I’m talking about being able to finish your sentences. You understand what I’m saying, Tom? I’ve heard this already. This is old news. This is a tired script from a tired fabulist. Rip it up.”

  “It’s not like before. This is real. This is genuine. I’m telling you, something incredibly weird is-”

  “And I’m telling you, Tom. It was always real. It was always genuine. The weirdness was all yours.”

  “Not this time. I’m being legitimate.”

  “Legitimacy isn’t about being, Tom. You either are or you aren’t. You can’t try it on like a coat. It doesn’t work like that.”

  “When I’m done, when I put it all together, you’ll see. I’m going to send it to you and you’ll see.”

  “Don’t bother. I’m not your editor anymore. And you’re not my star. I really have to be getting to sleep, Tom. It’s a lot later here than there.”

  No, I thought. It’s a lot later for both of us.

  THIRTY-THREE

  I was 99 percent sure I was being followed.

  This feeling manifested itself whenever I turned a corner or pulled into a parking lot, whenever I entered or exited my home, whenever I snuck outside the Littleton Journal for a smoke, or ducked into JP Drugs for some Tums, or grabbed a cheeseburger at the DQ, or drove to bowling night.

  In other words, all the time.

  Whenever I stopped and turned and looked, I felt as if I’d just missed him. Or them. Like seeing your shadow suddenly vanish when the sun darts behind a cloud.

  That quick.

  I walked into Ted’s Guns amp; Ammo and walked out with a.38 Smith amp; Wesson handgun-I was a neophyte concerning the benefits of one gun manufacturer over another, but the plurality of the name somehow made Smith amp; Wesson feel more substantial. There was a little problem, of course. As someone who’d served probation, I was legally banned from owning a gun in the state of California. Luckily, Ted, who offered Michael Moore targets gratis with each purchase, had an NRA mentality when it came to state and federal gun laws.

  He refused to acknowledge them.

  I went two miles outside town and practiced shooting the arms off cacti. I was accurate only about 25 percent of the time.

  I started locking my front door, kept all the shades in my house drawn tight. One night I ventured downstairs, gun in hand, and rechecked the basement. Looking for what, exactly? Bugs, maybe, remembering the open phone jack; the only one I discovered was a six-inch centipede tucked inside a drainpipe. I took another look in the hole the plumber had punched into the wall. Plaster dust and the ripped paper they used for cheapo insulation in these parts. That’s it. I remembered I was going to ask Seth to fill it in-he’d done Sheetrock work on the house before. That’s how I’d first met him, when he came around to check on something for the landlord.

  I had the feeling that hal
f of Littleton was playing a part, everyone in on the joke but me.

  I was having a hard time telling who was playing whom. I needed a playbill.

  Sam Savage in the part of Ed Crannell, sure.

  Someone else in the crucial if unrewarding role of Dennis Flaherty’s corpse. But who exactly?

  Benjy Washington?

  The second survivor of the Aurora Dam Flood? How could I prove it?

  Then I did. Sort of.

  I received corroboration.

  I’d called the sheriff to ask if they’d dug up that body in Iowa yet, even as I held back telling him that the man in the pickup truck had hired a desperate actor willing to take nontraditional parts for enough cash-that Ed wasn’t Ed. I wanted to tell Swenson how I’d stumbled onto that theater in Santa Monica, how I’d followed this actor down the block and even been knocked to the sidewalk, how I’d gotten back up and wheedled the story out of him.

  I kept hearing my editor’s voice.

  This is old news. This is a tired script from a tired fabulist. Rip it up.

  He was right.

  It was a tired script. Very tired. L.A. actors moonlighting as con men. You could look it up.

  The sheriff told me that the body was still stuck in the fallow Iowa ground, that it took an amazing amount of bureaucratic shit to get someone unburied, even when the name on the gravestone was still walking around. Then I asked him about the day I came in to tell him that Dennis Flaherty was still alive.

  “Remember, I wanted to know if anyone who supposedly died in the flood had ever come back. You looked like you were going to say something. Like maybe you were going to say yes. Why?”

  “Huh?” he said. “Oh, that. It was just a little odd.”

  “A little odd, how?”

  “The timing. Someone had called one of my deputies. A week before, maybe. Said he had some information we needed to know. About the Aurora Dam Flood.”

  “What did your deputy say?”

  “He said, ‘What the fuck is the Aurora Dam Flood?’”

  “The information? What was it?” I asked. That feeling again, like when I stared at the picture on the theater wall. Like the world was a kaleidoscope that wouldn’t stop turning.

  “Who knows? He made an appointment to come in, then never showed up. Of course, when my deputy discovered the Aurora Dam Flood happened fifty fucking years ago, he wasn’t too surprised. Phony phone callers usually don’t bother stopping by for coffee.”

  “Did he give his name?”

  “Yeah. That’s how he knew it was a prank call. It was one of the kids that died that day.”

  A very pregnant Mary-Beth came to the office to help out in Hinch’s absence. She waddled in like a mother duck and asked me if I’d switch chairs with her, since hers was small and uncomfortable, and mine came complete with the football seat cushion I’d dragged all the way from New York, though the New York Jets logo was pretty much worn out by now.

  I chivalrously agreed.

  Nate the Skate was furiously working the computer and phones, his new assignment having seemingly lifted the veil of despair that had settled over him with Rina’s unexpected pronouncement.

  I went back to searching for the girl of my dreams.

  No, not Anna. The girl of my bad dreams, of my whirling dervish nightmares.

  Kara Bolka.

  To whose greetings neither Belinda Washington nor myself had been able to reply.

  Considering I’d been through the entire state of California, I tried other states, tried everywhere in the end, and still came up empty.

  I rang up Mrs. Flaherty and asked her how Dennis was doing.

  “Fine,” she said. “He’s alive. And how are you doing, Tom?” inquiring with the genuine concern befitting the miracle worker who’d brought back her son.

  “I’m okay, Mrs. Flaherty. Could I have a word with Dennis?”

  “I don’t think so, Tom. He’s sleeping.”

  I calculated that it was 3 in the afternoon there.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll try him tomorrow.”

  There was something else I needed to do, something that was sitting on the ledge of consciousness that I couldn’t quite coax back in. Something else that needed to be checked out. Only someone interrupted my reverie.

  “Those science awards?” Nate said. “I know why.”

  He looked both exhilarated and exhausted-as if he hadn’t slept much over the last few days, and maybe he hadn’t.

  “Okay,” he said. “Ready?”

  We’d walked outside so we could both light up-and so I could keep Norma and Mary-Beth from hearing.

  “You wanted to know how one high school could have five Westinghouse finalists, right?” he said. “Well, it’s not that hard when the parents are fucking geniuses.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “What am I talking about?” He took an enormous drag on his cigarette, then let the smoke seep out through a grin that resembled the Cheshire Cat’s. “I took that death list you gave me-you know, the list of flood victims. I Googled them one at a time-and pretty much got nothing. At first. I mean, it was fifty years ago, so why should I. They were mostly what… housewives, kids, and dam workers, right? Nothing was coming up, and I was going to tell you it was probably a statistical anomaly-you know what that is, right?”

  “Yeah, Nate. I know what that is.”

  He told me anyway.

  “I took a class on it-statistics and probabilities. You’d be surprised how often it happens. Cancer clusters for no discernable reason. Two tornados touching down at the very same spot. Anyway-I was thinking that having five big-time science award finalists from this same rinky-dink high school was just a statistical anomaly.”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  “No,” he said. “Uh-uh. No statistical anomalies here, boss. There was one name-alphabetically speaking, we’re talking way down at the bottom. One name, one hit-that’s it. Franklin Timmerman. Only I was going to ignore it, because Franklin Timmerman from Littleton Flats was a sluice operator at the Aurora Dam, and the Franklin Timmerman I Googled was something else.”

  “Okay. What?”

  Nate took another drag and wiped away the sweat that had quickly beaded up on his forehead and in between the bristles on his nearly shaven head. It might’ve been 20 degrees cooler in the shade, but that wasn’t saying much, since it was over 110 just two feet to our left.

  “A height-of-burst tactician.”

  He let that sit there for a while, as if waiting to see if I’d know what a height-of-burst tactician was.

  “Okay, Nate. I give up. What’s a height-of-burst tactician?”

  “Oh, that. Well, it’s someone who makes sure that fission happens at the right height. Nuclear fission. In a bomb. In a nuclear bomb. That it explodes at the altitude that’ll cause maximum damage. Franklin Timmerman, height-of-burst tactician, had worked on this little thing called the Manhattan Project. You’ve heard of that, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, Nate, I’ve heard of the Manhattan Project. You took a class in that too, I suppose.”

  “As a matter of fact… yeah. Pretty cool stuff. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi-all these fucking geniuses out there in the desert at Los Alamos. Little Boy, Fat Man, racing Hitler for the big bang. You know what Oppenheimer said when they finally did it-when they tested the first A-bomb and it basically vaporized everything in a two-mile radius?”

  “I think so. But go ahead.”

  “‘I am become death-the destroyer of worlds,’ a quote from Sanskrit. ‘I am become death’-pretty eloquent, in a creepy sort of way, right?”

  I nodded. “So the Franklin Timmerman listed as…?”

  “I’m getting to that.”

  Good reporting was all in the details, and Nate was committed to relating each and every one of them in chronological order. He was going to give me a blow-by-blow description of his triumph over ignorance.

  “Franklin Timmerman was at Los Alamos-the Franklin Timmerm
an listed in Google, anyway. One of the people who put it all together. Everyone worked in teams there, one team working on one thing, like actual fission, another on the bomb casing, another on making sure it exploded at the right altitude-that was Franklin’s job.”

  “But you said the Littleton Flats Franklin Timmerman was a sluice operator.”

  “Correct. He was listed as a sluice operator on the Aurora Dam. Meaning what? That two people had the same name-which, if you’ve ever Googled someone, happens like all the fucking time. I mean, you put in Quentin Tarantino and you’re suddenly reading about some sheep breeder in New Caledonia. So this was obviously the same deal, right? Because what would an expert on nuclear detonation be doing working a sluice on a federal dam?”

  He stopped, took another puff of his cigarette.

  “Was that a rhetorical question, Nate?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “So maybe you want to continue.”

  “Right. Anyway, I was going to ignore the whole thing; the only reason I read the whole entry on him was because I’m interested in that stuff-the birth of the bomb, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. But then I figure what the hell and I look up the Manhattan Project-I take all the names that worked out in Los Alamos, and just for the simple hell of it I cross-check them with the list from Littleton Flats.”

  Nate had reached that moment-when the rabbit is pulled out of the hat, the ripped twenty made whole, the vanished woman brought back onto the stage.

  “And what do I get, huh?” Nate said. “Ten hits. Ten fucking hits.”

  “Have you seen a pickup truck circling us, Nate?”

  “Huh? What pickup truck?”

  “Never mind. Go ahead,” I said, even though I felt a sudden knot in my stomach. I leaned back against the Free Delivery sign posted in Foo Yang’s window.

  “What do you mean, go ahead? I just told you I got ten hits. You understand what I’m saying? Littleton Flats was teeming with all these little nuclear geniuses. Experimentalists, theoreticians, engineers. That’s how one high school could have five kids vying for a Westinghouse. Can you imagine their science projects-Susie Timmerman is going to split the atom today, class. Right next to this poor kid from La Jolla who made a shortwave radio from a cigar box. It was like having this little Bronx High School of Science out in the middle of nowhere. Fuck high school-it was like having another MIT. Fucking unbelievable.”