Deceit

by James Siegel

  America’s Unknown Nuclear Disaster

  The headline of the issue that never ran.

  Three-inch type.

  All in red.

  And something more. It came complete with illustrations.

  A schematic drawing. A diagram.

  A fucking blueprint.

  Faded, crisscrossed with lines, even a layman able to discern the shape and function of the thing being built.

  The core. The fuel rods. The shell.

  A real blueprint. As opposed to fake ones they’d trotted out at Lloyd Steiner’s trial.

  Yes, Anna, your father did give something to Wren.

  Something he must’ve held on to all those years. Hid away-a kind of legacy. For you, maybe. So you’d know who he really was. That he might’ve gone to jail, but he was never guilty. Not really. No guiltier than anyone else who’d helped build a nuclear reactor out in the desert and kept their mouth shut after it blew sky-high.

  Wren’s Rule Number One.

  Back up your notes for protection.

  He had.

  Sooner or later, he’d told Anna, someone would bring it into the light.

  Literally.

  Unfortunately, he’d made one mistake.

  He’d anointed Seth Bishop the protector.

  Seth Bishop, who, hearing neither hide nor hair of Wren for two weeks, was supposed to rip two hundred front pages of the Littleton Journal out of a wall and, even with his limited intellectual curiosity, understand that someone needed to see them. That its three-inch headlines were screaming bloody murder.

  Only Seth adhered to the credo of the dedicated stoner. No need to do the work if you’ve already got the cash-no doubt already blown on some primo Panama Red and six-packs of Coors Light.

  On my way out of Littleton, I heard a siren going in the opposite direction.

  The sheriff on his way to make the climactic arrest, I supposed. Perpetrator and gun, nabbed red-handed.

  He’d find an empty house with an empty drawer.

  I made one stop before I pulled onto Highway 45.

  Mrs. Weitz opened the door, then continued to stand there-all three hundred or so pounds of her.

  “Is Sam home?” I asked her.

  She appeared to be on the verge of lying to me, but then Sam yelled from the kitchen, asking her where the damn Yodels were, so she had no choice but to let me in.

  “It’s okay,” I told her, as she moved aside, barely, to let me through. “I won’t be staying long.”

  Sam was more hospitable than his wife. Though he did surreptitiously peek through both study windows before pulling the shades, wondering, I imagine, if there was about to be a major guns-drawn bust in his front yard.

  “Jesus.” Sam’s first word to me. “You have no idea what they’ve been saying about you.”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Is any of it true?”

  “Not much.”

  “Okay-good enough for me. Anything for a bowling team member. You need some help?”

  “Just a little.”

  “Shoot.” Then he blushed and said, “Poor choice of words.” He’d noticed the gun peeking out of my waistband.

  “How long have you been trying to sell me some insurance, Sam?”

  “What? Wait, come on. You mean to tell me you came all the way here for insurance?”

  “Yeah. Exactly.”

  FIFTY-FIVE

  I am here.

  In room four of the roach motel.

  Disgraced journalists check in, but they don’t check out.

  I am almost done. Nearly. Just about.

  Have you got it all?

  Have I sufficiently illuminated? Enlightened? Made clear?

  Do I need to regurgitate the whole enchilada?

  What don’t you get?

  What they did? What they constructed? What they cobbled together, like a movie assembled scene by scene, as if by screenwriter by committee?

  What did Wren say over the phone? The faux Wren, of course, one of several in a crucial cast of players. If I had to guess, another actor hired from that Web site, and told what to say-a simple voice-over job this time.

  It reads like a bad movie, he said.

  Don’t you get it? Don’t you see?

  It was supposed to.

  That was the whole point.

  It was its whole raison d’etre.

  Back in New York, when I was down to borrowing the conventions of a cheap thriller:

  Anagrams.

  Clandestine meetings in the ruins of destroyed towns.

  Con men actors.

  Auto Tag.

  The works.

  I read them. Your canon of deceit, he said to me.

  I read them.

  Of course they read them. But they did more than read them. They studied them. Then they re-borrowed them, those hackneyed conventions, wove them together into a veritable masterpiece of Valle’s greatest hits.

  Remember how he’d goaded me over the phone-never went five minutes without reminding me what a disgrace I’d been. How I’d dishonored an entire profession. How I’d set journalism back fifty years.

  Fifty years exactly.

  All the way back to 1954.

  Why?

  Why goad? Why needle? Why prod?

  Why was he such a font of useful information?

  It was part of the script.

  They told me about Lloyd Steiner.

  They sent Anna Graham into Belinda’s birthday party, then into the parking lot of Muhammed Alley, where she scrawled that anagram into my fuselage.

  Kara Bolka, my muse, my siren.

  And the plumber. When I first woke up, strapped down and shot up.

  How helpful was he? What a chatterbox. What a blabbermouth.

  Why?

  You still don’t grasp it?

  They were trying to hide something, you say? Weren’t they?

  Yes.

  And no.

  You can’t put the water back in the bottle. It’s spilled, I told the plumber that day.

  He hadn’t disagreed with me.

  He couldn’t.

  Plumbers fix leaks, sure.

  But sometimes, they do exactly the opposite. They flush those old and leaky pipes; they send all that rotten water shooting out at a hundred miles an hour. They cleanse the system.

  You can only keep a secret so long, Wren had told Anna, and then you can’t.

  It’s a fact.

  Two people can keep a secret, someone once said, if one of them is dead.

  One of them was. Wren. He was dead. And Eddie Bronson-him too, I imagined. Not to mention that poor gas-station clerk, who was simply caught in the crossfire, metaphorically speaking.

  And Benjy Washington.

  Who’d flown the coop and headed back to Littleton.

  Which must’ve sent them all into a dither.

  He’d made it into the nursing home. He’d seen his mom. He’d called the sheriff’s office. Who else had he talked to? Who else had he sat down with and told the story to?

  First Bronson flies the coop. Now him.

  Where would it end?

  After all, Wren might be as dead as a doornail, but they were still scared stiff of him. Scared of a corpse.

  Why?

  Because he’d told Anna, plain as day:

  The story was protected.

  The story. The secret.

  Protected.

  The story was someplace they couldn’t get to it.

  But somewhere someone else could. The story would be brought into the light.

  What did he mean?

  They’d ripped his house apart to find out. They’d ripped his cabin apart.

  They’d sent the plumber back into my house three times after Benjy made it back to Littleton.

  Here’s the irony.

  If they’d really ripped his house apart, taken that Sheetrock by the hands and pulled the walls down, they would’ve found exactly what they were looking for.

 
Nestled there behind the Sheetrock. The story Wren had painstakingly pursued and put together and paginated in the dead of night, too paranoid by then to share it with someone like Hinch. He didn’t know whom to trust anymore. Littleton loco, and for good reason.

  Only they didn’t rip his house apart.

  The sword of Damocles was still hanging over their heads.

  Wren had put it there.

  What’s a plumber to do?

  Easy.

  You set up a Web site for desperate actors who, if they aren’t willing to kill for a part, won’t care if you do.

  You send the biggest liar in the universe out to Highway 45 to cover an accident.

  You play Auto Tag with him on a desert road.

  You send a doctor on a house call to a dead town.

  You make sure a dreamy-looking girl named anagram bats her eyes at him in the parking lot of Muhammed Alley.

  You direct him to Fifth Street, just off the promenade.

  You goad.

  You needle.

  You prod.

  You steal his gun and shoot someone with it.

  You lock him in a mental ward and throw away the key.

  But just for a while-just long enough to blacken his veracity that much more.

  Then you put that key in poor Dennis’s hands and you set him free.

  Now do you understand?

  Now do you see?

  Sometimes it doesn’t matter if a secret comes out.

  It does not matter.

  As long as you control how.

  FIFTY-SIX

  I turned my cell phone back on two weeks ago.

  Emitted its signal to those tireless satellites spinning slowly in space that would’ve bounced it back to earth, where some exhausted tech in the NSA or the FBI or maybe just the DOE would’ve triangulated, diagrammed, and computed it, then sent it on up to the interested parties.

  Two weeks ago, when I first arrived in room four.

  What did people do before Microsoft Word?

  Before laptops, cursors, delete keys, desktops-before backing up, dragging things in, and dragging things out?

  Before you could make one document two. Drag it onto the desktop and rearrange it, pare it down, edit it just so.

  This is Document One.

  Which either will or won’t make it to where it needs to go.

  I have no such fears about Document Two, which is the only one left on my computer.

  It reads remarkably like this one-minus a few things. Minus the insights, conclusions, and connective tissue. To go back to what must by now be a tiresome and overused analogy-think of it as a connect-the-dots drawing minus the connections.

  The dots are there.

  The entire cast of characters.

  Miss Anagram and Sam Savage and Doctor Death himself.

  Benjy and Bronson and Bailey et al.

  It is the story the way they wanted it written.

  Why they kept leading me on and putting a cork in me at the same time. Letting the leash out, then jerking it back. Why they tainted me, incarcerated me, and then set me free.

  For this.

  Another saying comes to mind-courtesy of Stalin or one of his minions, orchestrators of the first Karabolka.

  Forgive me it if I get it wrong. Something about history. It’s not what happens in history that matters, he said.

  It’s who writes it.

  Me.

  That’s who’s writing it.

  Tom Valle.

  I was meant to tell the story that was never meant to be told.

  Before someone else told it.

  Because once a story’s been discredited-once it’s been ridiculed, ripped apart, and indicted-it forever loses its claim to legitimacy. It passes into urban legend, to the canon of conspiracy theorists, onto the refuse pile of hack history. Remember that story about a certain president’s discharge from the National Guard? By the time handwriting experts had discredited the documents, by the time a national anchor had resigned and a nationally respected producer was fired-by then, it didn’t matter if the basic truth of the story remained unchallenged. It was trash. It was a tissue of lies. It was garbage.

  The very fate awaiting Document Two.

  It will be dissected for the amusement of the public-those who give a crap. It will be snickered at, railed at, and ultimately reviled. It will be held up in journalism classes at serious-minded universities across the country as an example of what not to do, a cautionary tale for every cub reporter about to enter the fray.

  It will belong to the LBJ-killed-Kennedy crowd, to the Area 51 cabal, to the Bailey Kindlons of the world.

  Because even if you bought the anagrams, the hired actors-even if you did, you would have to consider the source.

  Enough said.

  That’s what they wanted.

  That’s what I’ll give them.

  I’ve left it here on my computer-right at page 1.

  I am writing this as fast as I can.

  I, myself, am going for a stroll now.

  I’ve already called the front desk and asked them to send Luiza in to clean the room again. I told the manager that I’ll be taking a walk to get out of her hair. Behind the motel, maybe, where I’ve seen a path leading out to the dusty flats.

  When I hear her knock at my door, I’m already up and on my way.

  Half an hour maybe, I think.

  At least that.

  Enough time for them to come in, put that Evelyn Wood speed-reading course to good use, and get the gist of it.

  I’m leaving an offering at the altar and hoping to mollify the gods. Vengeance might be theirs, but if you proffer the proper sacrifice, might you still be spared?

  Luiza wordlessly passes me on her way into the room, and suddenly I’m standing on the deck in the full glare of afternoon. The deserted parking lot. The dead air.

  I descend the stairs one rickety wooden step at a time.

  I look neither right or left. Certainly not behind. I’ve been there, done that. It’s eyes forward now.

  I lope across the parking lot, dead man walking.

  Because that’s what I am.

  One way or another.

  I said this is my last will and testament, and it is. I’ve said you are its executor, and you are.

  It sits in my pocket, this story, on a shiny CD.

  It is next to a forged license, courtesy of Luiza, who slipped it under my door some time ago, after our conversation about illegal documentation. After I slipped her five hundred dollars.

  It’s only a license, but it’s a start.

  Tom Valle will be dead.

  One way or another.

  Dead.

  In my other pocket is the Smith amp; Wesson.

  In case the sacrifice isn’t enough. In case it’s better to have the author dead than alive. The crazy reporter who must’ve shot himself out in the desert behind a ratty motel. The last refuge of a liar.

  I don’t know.

  I’m not a mind reader.

  I will walk and walk and I will not come back, and I will not turn around until I hear the sound of their boots, and then I’ll know.

  It’s hot out here behind the motel, where the desert stretches all the way to Nevada. But it seems like I’ve been enveloped in chill for years. I am warm for the first time in forever.

  This story’s in my pocket. On a shiny CD.

  I will take it with me and we’ll see.

  I walk and walk and walk.

  I’m aware of the time passing, but it’s all time. It’s not minutes; it’s years. It’s then to now. It’s the Acropolis Diner and Queens, New York, and the night of the blizzard and what happened, Tommy and someone standing behind my right shoulder to read my faltering copy. It’s bratwurst sandwiches and walks in Bryant Park and that terrible day when I didn’t have the guts to go into his office and say something. Anything. Like another day when the truth refused to come out of me.

  When I finally hear them, it’s not their boo
ts.

  It’s their tires.

  Their engines.

  Two Jeeps, I think.

  Don’t worry.

  I have one last secret.

  One.

  I have appointed another executor.

  I have heeded the rules of Wren and protected the story.

  My editor. He is shuttered away in his mountain house in Putnam County, New York. Faded, sure, but still faintly glowing, still a beacon for those who believe that we can do good and necessary things in this world. There’s a reputation in tatters there that can still, even now, be mended. There’s an injustice there that can still be rectified. There’s a fearsome debt that can still be repaid.

  By now, Sam would’ve sent it to him.

  He would’ve answered the knock at his front door and signed for the package, then sliced it open with the penknife he’d begrudgingly accepted on one of his unacknowledged birthdays.

  He would’ve pushed his bifocals down on his nose and read what looked like the front page of a small-town California newspaper. The Littleton Journal. Where had he heard that name before?

  He would’ve read it more than once. He would’ve seen the note I sent along with it. The one that explained how this particular front page had never seen the light of day. Till now. But that it wasn’t too late. It’s never too late. There’s no statute of limitations on a story-something he used to say.

  He would’ve dismissed it, of course.

  At first.

  Recalled my phone call and been ready to airmail it into the waste basket. But there was that blueprint. He would’ve been forced to study it-how could you not? The date and location and name clearly written there in official-looking type. He would’ve gone online. He would’ve looked up Littleton Flats. The flood. The dam. Lloyd Steiner. VA Hospital 138. He’s a journalist. He would’ve done what a journalist does. He would’ve investigated.

  He wouldn’t stop investigating until he found out. One way or another.

  He will get the story out.

  Not under the byline of a disgraced fabulist-the polite term for me. For pathological liar. No. It will come out under the byline of a much-respected editor whose only crime was having had me as a reporter.

  The engines grow louder.

  I still haven’t turned around.