The Truth Itself

by James Rayburn

  Hook was catching his breath when Carnahan gripped him around the legs and toppled him, his forehead striking the edge of the table as he fell.

  Carnahan was reaching for the knife that had spun under the table. Hook’s beer bottle had shattered on the floor and he seized a blade-sized shard of glass—immune to the pain when it cut his hand—and threw himself at the big man’s back, grasped Carnahan by the hair, lifting his head, exposing his thick neck, as furrowed as a bull seal’s.

  He cut Carnahan’s throat and blood geysered, spraying hot across Hook’s hands and flinging wet red gouts onto the wall.

  Impossibly, Carnahan, a hand gripping his torn gullet, gained his feet and blundered toward the door, gasping and sobbing, toppling the kitchen table and chairs.

  Hook tried to get up and slipped in the blood and fell to the floor. As he clutched onto the counter and hauled himself upright, Carnahan was out the kitchen and staggering for the balcony, leaving a swathe of blood in his wake.

  Hook, puke dribbling down his jaw, followed and saw the man plunge from the balcony to the beach, where he lay face down.

  Surely to god this had to be the end of him . . .

  But by the time Hook jumped down onto the sand that was still warm beneath his feet, Carnahan was upright again, lurching toward the Zodiac.

  Hook’s foot caught the spade that JP had abandoned earlier and he lifted it and ran at Carnahan, belaboring him about the head with the blade.

  Carnahan fell to his knees, crawling on all fours despite the blows that rained down on him and, blinded by blood, floundered into the water.

  Hook, gasping, exhausted, took the spade back as if he were wielding a Louisville Slugger and swung it with everything he had left, the steel chiming like a dinner gong against the white-haired man’s skull.

  Carnahan collapsed into the water and lay still, the surf fizzing around his prone form.

  Hook stood leaning on the shovel like a peon, waiting for a sign of life from his erstwhile friend.

  Nothing.

  Under the baleful yellow eye of the fat moon that rose from behind the palms Hook folded to his knees in the tepid water, the hiss of the surf and the drill-bit whine of the cicadas drowned by his ragged, sawing breath.

  FIFTY-SIX

  Philip Danvers sat on the bench in Battery Lane Park, waiting for the journalist who was fifteen minutes late. Danvers knew he was too conspicuous, bathed in the cold glare of a streetlight, but, standing in the shadows near the restrooms, he’d found his knees trembling from more than the cold and had he not sat he’d have collapsed in the snow.

  So he waited, bundled in his Burberry, his head warmed by his Tyrolean hat, holding a brown envelope in his gloved hands, his breath ghostly in the lamp light, each exhalation bringing him closer to his inevitable end.

  He forced away the images of blood splattering the porcelain of his toilet bowl earlier as he’d sweated and shaken as he’d tried to piss, the liver-spotted hands clutching the cistern those of an ancient stranger.

  Since Benway and his creature had left him the night before Danvers had not slept. He’d driven to a 7-Eleven, purchased a disposable cell phone and had sat in front of his fire making calls to a list of numbers he kept in a small notebook.

  Many of the numbers were no longer in service, and it had saddened but not surprised him that most of the people who did answer had hung up when they’d heard his voice.

  He was reaching out to the men and women who had once belonged to his shadowy unit. Who had once been his people, operatives he’d groomed and nurtured and guided through marital strife and addiction and sexual confusion and paralyzing fear until they’d realized their true potential.

  Only to be taken from him when Lucien Benway had staged his little putsch and Danvers had been pushed out into the cold, scorned and useless, like an unwanted codger in a bathchair.

  And when Kate Swift had done what she’d done and ripped the unit apart, leaving Lucien the exiled pariah—ah, how the mad world spins—there had been both a purge and a diaspora. Those most loyal to Lucien Benway had been pruned away like diseased elm branches, their silence bought with golden handshakes and threats.

  The rest of the personnel had been absorbed into the greater corpus of the intelligence apparatus, demoted and sent to hardship posts in grim Third World countries, posts that were dangerous, or worse, cripplingly humdrum.

  Of the handful of people who had spoken to him, only two had mustered sufficient loyalty—Danvers coaxing and cajoling like a painted old roué—to do his bidding.

  He’d gathered their offerings via email (sent to a desolate Internet café in a strip mall) and he’d driven home and downloaded the intelligence from a thumb drive onto his computer and constructed a collage of lies and half-truths in the manner of Harry Hook, his inkjet printer clattering and spitting photographs, flight manifests and what would pass for classified CIA communiqués.

  His work had none of Hook’s sparkle and genius—a little like the inferior efforts of an Old Master’s apprentice—but he felt it would suffice.

  He heard the growl of an engine and a car bumped to a halt at the entrance to the park. A door closed and he waited, the footsteps of whoever was approaching muffled by the recent fall of snow. Then the burly reporter hove into view, wearing a woolen beanie and a scarf.

  David Burke waved his gloved hands and said, “I’m sorry. My wife had the car. Her yoga class ran late.”

  Danvers almost laughed at this glimpse into Burke’s prosaic little world.

  “No matter,” he said as the hefty man flopped down beside him, his breath coming in the great, steamy snorts of a plow horse. “I need you to listen very carefully.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I don’t know if you are aware of the war being waged on Thailand’s border with Malaysia?”

  “Vaguely. Some provinces wanting to secede from Thailand?”

  “Yes. Provinces that are overwhelmingly Muslim in a predominantly Buddhist country.”

  “Yeah, rings a bell.”

  “There are a number of insurgent groups at work. The usual alphabet soup of acronyms. One of them, the GMIP, is rumored to have Al-Qaeda connections. More significantly, for the purposes of our conversation, they receive support, both financial and in terms of manpower from the sultan who rules over the sovereign state of Palang, a fly speck in the Indonesia archipelago. A place where the clock is turning back, where sharia law prevails, where adulterers are stoned and homosexuals are lynched in public. Three men from the sultan’s bodyguard have been on the CIA’s radar for years. One of them was killed by the Thai army in their southernmost province last month. The other two were seen at a Thai airport five days ago. The airport from which AirStar Flight 2605 departed.”

  Burke looked at him. “What are you saying?”

  Danvers flapped the envelope. “It’s all in here. But, in brief, a little less than a decade ago Lucien Benway was instrumental in helping the sultan wrest power from a secular government and has continued to provide his services. Two of the passengers on that aircraft were traveling on stolen passports: one belonging to a Greek, the other to a Spaniard. I believe that Benway put those men on that aircraft along with Kate Swift and her child.”

  “And they what? Blew up the plane?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps.”

  “Just to kill Kate Swift? What was in it for them?”

  “Well, the eighteen Israelis on board would have sweetened the deal.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Yes.”

  “But nobody has claimed responsibility.”

  “Not yet, no.”

  The big man scratched at his beard and stared at the snow.

  Danvers stood and held out the envelope. “Keep fighting the good fight.”

  Burke took the envelope, looked down at it, and then up at Danvers. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know what?”

  “This is heavy shit, man.”

  “It is.
”

  “Dangerous shit.”

  “It’s a story that deserves to be told.”

  “Sure, but maybe not by me.”

  “You’re the man of integrity, Mr. Burke. It’s your story to tell.”

  “Integrity?” The big man laughed. “Is integrity going to console my wife when I’m lying on a slab wearing a nifty little toe tag?”

  “Oh, come, don’t be melodramatic. You’re a public figure now. With all the protection that affords you.”

  Danvers walked away, feeling feverish and faint, desperate not to crumple to the snow under the eyes of his songbird.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Nadja Benway woke before dawn sprawled face down on her bed, still dressed in the soiled clothes she’d worn to Michael’s wake, her mouth dry and bitter from the handful of pills she had swallowed to hurl herself into oblivion.

  She sat up and clicked on the bedside lamp, wincing at the light, her thoughts moving as slow as mud. Her alarm clock told her it was 6:00 AM. She had been asleep—or unconscious, rather—for close to eighteen hours.

  A memory had her gazing down at her right ankle, just to make sure that the faceless black thing secured to her lower leg was real, and not a figment of her imagination

  It was real.

  Yesterday morning, in the kitchen, when the ankle monitor had locked onto her leg with that smug little click, she’d known that a circle had closed. She was trapped again. Just as she had been trapped more than twenty years ago.

  Once again, with some terrible symmetry, a man was holding her captive.

  She’d looked up into Lucien’s face and seen his smile of satisfaction and known that this was what he’d always wanted from her. Complete subjugation.

  She’d gone up to her room and popped five pills out of the blister pack and swallowed them and passed out.

  A terrible desperation had her gagging and she ran to the bathroom and vomited into the sink, then she sank down on the toilet and, sitting with her eyes closed, listening to the clatter of her urine in the bowl.

  She stood and looked at her reflection in the mirror and the understanding of the terrible loop that she seemed doomed to repeat left her breathless. She stripped off her clothes and drew a steamy bath and used a carbolic soap to scrub herself clean, the astringent, tarry smell an antidote to the musky residue of sweat and genital discharges, her body still sticky with the photographer’s fluids

  She dried herself with such vigor that it was almost an act of self-mortification, her skin red and stinging as she went through to her bedroom closet and stepped into cotton panties fragrant with lavender detergent. She found a very plain white bra and a white silk blouse that she slipped on over a dark skirt that ended at her knees.

  Her legs were bare and the ankle monitor was hard and black.

  She gathered all the pills in her bedroom and took them to the bathroom and popped them out of their blister packs and flushed them.

  Barefoot, she went down to the kitchen and removed the bottle of vodka from the refrigerator. She opened it, caught the strong whiff of the liquor, almost weakened, but she shook her head and poured it down the sink. She uncapped a bottle of spring water and drank a long draft from it.

  If she was going to take on her husband she would have to recalibrate her mind and achieve some balance and stability.

  Nadja sat down at the kitchen table, the blue of dawn leaking in through the windows and clicked on the TV and waited for the world to speak to her.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  First light woke Hook and he lay a moment in the hammock on the balcony of the bungalow, perfectly calm in the lilac dawn, listening to the mutter of the ocean and the mournful wails of the gibbon monkeys.

  Then recall of last evening’s bloodshed had him sitting up, rocking the hammock, staring out across the beach to where a dark form lay in the mud, the tide, under the spell of the moon, having retreated far back during the night.

  He put a finger to his lip. It was swollen and throbbed and one of his teeth felt as loose as a toggle switch.

  Hook, naked, quit the hammock and stood holding onto the bamboo railing, quelling a sudden dizziness.

  His shorts and T-shirt, heavy with gore, lay on the beach by the stairs where he’d discarded them last night, unable to bear the sticky chafe of Carnahan’s blood on his flesh and its old iron smell in his nostrils.

  He stepped down onto the sand, soft and cool to his bare feet, and lifted the clothes. The pale cotton T-shirt was rigid with dried blood and would never be worn again, but the black shorts were made of a non-porous fabric and could be salvaged.

  He walked down to the ocean—avoiding the corpse—the mud sucking at his feet until he reached the water’s edge and kneeled down, his sad balls scraping the cold ooze, and washed his shorts in the sea, a smear of red drawn away on the receding surf.

  Hook stood and pulled on the dripping pants, tying the cord under his burgeoning paunch. He steeled himself and crossed to where Carnahan lay with one cheek flat to the mud, his visible eye open and milky, staring out to sea.

  A small white hermit crab scuttled out of the tear in Carnahan’s throat and Hook gagged and stood with his hands on his knees, retching, but there was nothing left in his gut to vomit. Using the back of his hand Hook wiped slime from his mouth, took a deep breath, and reached down and grabbed Carnahan by his hairy ankles and pulled.

  With a suck the mud released the dead man and Hook dragged him onto the beach.

  The sun was up now, the heat already oppressive, Hook sweating from this exertion. He sat down beside the body and thought of Carnahan placing his hand on Betty’s, his roguish blue eyes disappearing into a maze of wrinkles as he’d smiled at her.

  Pushing this from his mind, Hook frisked the corpse. He found Carnahan’s cell phone, waterlogged, its gray face blank; a wallet that held a couple of thousand baht in cash, Carnahan’s passport and Thai drivers license and a photograph of a young Bob and Betty standing in the garden of a tract house.

  Hook put the money in his pocket and carried the phone and the wallet over to the balcony and dumped them by the hammock. He went inside and found Carnahan’s pack on the couch in the front room beside his Ray-Ban Aviators. Hook unzipped the pack. Two T-shirts. Two pairs of shorts. A couple of pairs of skivvies.

  And an automatic pistol.

  Hook was no gunman but he knew enough about weapons to see that the automatic was well maintained and that there was a round in the chamber.

  He left the pistol on the couch and put the sunglasses in the pack and zipped it up, slinging it from his shoulder. On his way down to the beach he stepped into his flip-flops, scooped up the phone, wallet and his soiled T-shirt and carried them over to the circle of blackened stones and charred wood where JP had grilled his fish. A book of matches lay beside the stones.

  Hook dumped the bag, the wallet and the T-shirt on the ashes, opened the cell phone and removed the SIM card, dropping it on the pile. He detached the battery from the phone and flung it into the jungle and pocketed the cell. Then he went to the rear of the hut, where the generator still chugged. He killed the motor and dug out the jerry can of fuel that stood beside the generator.

  Hook carried the can across to the beach and poured gasoline over the fire pit. He struck two matches and dropped them onto the pile. The gasoline flared with a soft whump and the flame started eating away at the canvas of the pack.

  Hook went back to Carnahan and grabbed his ankles again and dragged him into the jungle, waving away mosquitoes. He went deep enough to lose the beach from sight and left the corpse in a dense thicket. He tossed the cell phone into the undergrowth and went back for the spade that still lay in the mud.

  Returning to the jungle he dug a hole, sweating, plagued by flies, mosquitoes and gnats. When the hole was deep enough he rolled Carnahan inside and shoveled sand over him, packing it tight. He found a few stones, a thick branch and a few dried palm fronds and covered the grave.

  Returning to the beach he c
hecked on the fire. The flames were dead and the pack and its contents, the wallet and his T-shirt were ash. The Ray-Bans were still intact, the glass shattered and the frame buckled and blackened. Hook hurled them into the jungle. He stirred at the remnants with a stick and took the jerry can back to its home near the generator.

  Hook kicked off his flops and went back into the bungalow and surveyed the carnage.

  Resisting the temptation to torch the place—the blaze and the smoke would be visible from the neighboring island—he plundered the kitchen for cleaning solvents and rags and set about the long and messy task of cleansing the bungalow of Bob Carnahan’s blood.

  FIFTY-NINE

  Lucien Benway had not slept. He’d spent the night sitting behind his desk in his ergonomic chair dressed in yesterday’s clothes that reeked of Turkish tobacco and his unwashed body, stocking feet resting on a carpeted ottoman, drinking more than he should have from a bottle of Cutty Sark as he’d stared into space.

  His glass, made of the fine lead crystal he favored, was smudged and still held a finger of Scotch the color of urine. The elephant’s foot ashtray stationed beside his chair overflowed with white cigarette butts, a fall of them lying on the polished wooden floor.

  The heavy curtains were drawn, but gray early morning light bled in around the edges. Benway sighed and ran a hand over the pale stubble that grew like weeds in irregular clumps on his creased face. He stared at the smeared glass and then he lifted it and swallowed the liquor that burned down to his empty, dyspeptic gut.

  Where had the hours gone since Morse had left the previous night?

  Benway couldn’t account for them—they’d slipped away from him like untethered skiffs floating away on the black river of his musings.

  Benway, an atheist since the age of twelve when he’d killed the drunken preacher who’d attempted to sodomize him in a double-wide in Beaumont, Texas—he’d bludgeoned the pedophile to death with a heavy skillet and walked away without a backward glance, the authorities never thinking to question the stunted boy—had found himself caught up in a stream of mumbled incantations that were too darkly primitive to be any of the long-forgotten prayers of his childhood, taking the form of a bargain with what or whom he couldn’t say.