The Truth Itself

by James Rayburn

  “Jesus.”

  “There’s more.”

  “Of course there is,” Mosley said, all street gone from his voice, sounding like what he was: an Ivy League lawyer with things on his mind.

  “The black box from AirStar Flight 2605 has been found.”

  “Interesting timing.”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “Pilot error. There was a failure of the onboard computer. The co-pilot took over the controls and put the plane into a stall from which it never recovered. The investigation is ongoing and there’ll still be an official report, but . . .” Poster shrugged.

  “I’ve been played like a cheap banjo?”

  “Yes. Your enemies are already making a lot of noise. There’s talk of you witch-hunting an innocent man to his death.”

  “Lucien Benway could never be described as innocent.”

  “In general terms, no. But as far as AirStar Flight 2605 goes . . .” Poster raised his palms to the ceiling. “Anyway, you’re being accused of trying to discredit the administration with baseless and inaccurate assertions.”

  “And my friends? What are they saying?”

  “What friends?” Poster shook his pitted head. “I hear from the Speaker’s office that he’ll be addressing the press within the hour and he’ll say you acted unilaterally and in your own interests rather than the party’s. He’s already called your accusations,” Poster consulted his iPad, “ ‘A farrago of nonsense contradicted by inconvenient facts and simple common sense.’ ”

  “Well, at least he didn’t it an imbroglio,” Mosley said with an empty laugh. “Okay, so we’ve got a fight on our hands?”

  “Yes. The media are all over me for a statement from you. I’m suggesting we ‘no comment’ them for now.”

  “Have you ever heard me use those two words?”

  “Not consecutively, no.”

  “Don’t be a smartass.”

  “Then what do you want me to tell them, sir?”

  Mosley sat up straight, swelled his barrel chest and said, “You tell them no motherfuckin comment.”

  EIGHTY-EIGHT

  Another taxi. Another traffic jam. This time on Wireless Road in Bangkok’s swish Lumpini district, home to embassies and the opulent shopping precincts that were evidence of booming Thailand’s Rising Tiger economy.

  Hook sat in the back of the cab beside the kid, sweating in the afternoon heat that overwhelmed the air conditioner, hanging for a smoke, a drink—Jesus, anything to get him through the next few minutes.

  “Where are we going, Grandpa?” Suzie asked.

  “We’ll be there soon,” he said, deflecting.

  She looked at him and, heartbreakingly, took his hand and he knew just how Judas must’ve felt.

  Hook didn’t have it in him to withdraw his hand but he couldn’t meet her eyes and looked out the window as the taxi trundled past a ridiculous mall—all towering campanili and soaring belvederi—built to realize some Asian developer's Italianate wet dream.

  When Hook had returned to the hotel room from the business center he’d found the girl still sleeping. He’d opened the refrigerator and, looking past the chorus line of little booze bottles that had winked and waved at him, lifted out a can of Coke and cracked the tab, feeling the fizzy bubbles on his face as he’d taken a sip.

  Hook sat at the desk and used the remote to switch on the TV, keeping the volume low. He surfed until he got CNN and watched in amazement as a reporter stood outside Lucien Benway’s house and spoke of the little troll’s death. A death that was being called a suicide, though Hook couldn’t see it. The reporter called Lucien an innocent man, which made Hook laugh.

  He had a sudden flash of Dudley Morse, unbound from his creator, adrift on an ice floe, sailing to his end like Frankenstein’s monster.

  A White House spokesman, a youngish man with a sharp haircut and a Harvard accent, appeared on the screen.

  “Even in this era of conspiracy theorists,” he said in the voice of privilege, “accidents do happen. And it was an accident that caused the crash of AirStar Flight 2605. A tragic accident, but still an accident, that claimed the lives of one hundred and seventy-one people, including Kate Swift and her daughter, Susan.”

  Hook killed the tube and sat watching the child sleep. Watching her but seeing her mother, and an image came to him, an image from some fantastical parallel reality: his toddler daughter running in the snow, wearing a jumpsuit of a red so deep that when her little legs faltered and she fell she looked like a bloodstain, and he saw his younger self lifting her against a Kodachrome-blue sky as she giggled through a beard of snowflakes.

  Hook rose from the chair and hurried to the window, letting the hard sunlight burn away all remnants of the absurd daydream and when he felt tears in his eyes he told himself they came from the glare not from self-pity, but he knew he had to act.

  Fast.

  He returned to the desk, found a sheaf of hotel stationary and a pen and he wrote everything he could about who the child was and who her mother had been and folded the pages and sealed them in a yellow envelope.

  Then he’d dumped the contents of the backpack and filled it with the new clothes he’d bought for the child earlier.

  Hook had shaken her awake and said, “Come on, kiddo. Let’s go do some sightseeing.”

  If she’d wondered why they were taking the backpack she hadn’t asked.

  The taxi pulled up outside the sprawling wedding cake that was the U.S. Embassy, the boom at the gate manned by Thai cops and a contingent of Marines in their khaki shirts and black and white peaked caps.

  Hook been there many times in his operational days, his last visit more than a decade ago to placate the ambassador who had been embarrassed when it was leaked that Lucien Benway—without troubling the Thai government for their permission—had set up a so-called “black site” in the country’s northern province of Udon Thani to torture an Al-Qaeda nabob who’d been renditioned from Malaysia.

  The highlight of the meeting had been when Hook’d had to explain to the ambassador—those were more innocent times—that waterboarding wasn’t a form of aquatic recreation, but was, rather, one of Benway’s “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

  Glory days.

  Hook opened the door and stepped out into the heat, carrying the backpack with him. He gestured for Suzie to follow.

  She stood looking up at Hook as he slung the pack from her shoulders, removed the yellow envelope from his shirt pocket, handed it to her and pointed to the stairs leading to the consular and American citizen services office.

  “You take this letter and you go up those stairs and you tell the people inside who you are and you give it to them, okay?”

  “Aren’t you coming with me, Grandpa?”

  His voice was missing in action so he shook his head and turned and climbed back into the taxi, slamming the door.

  The child ran to the cab and slapped the closed window, crying, calling his name.

  “Go,” Hook said to the driver. The man’s dark eyes regarded him in the rearview. “Go! Get me the fuck out of here!”

  The taxi accelerated and Hook looked back and saw Suzie sprinting after the car, shouting his name, and then she stopped running and her cries faded and when the cab changed lanes she was lost from view.

  EIGHTY-NINE

  When Nadja Benway, wheeling a small Louis Vuitton suitcase, approached the front door of the townhouse, a towering young man with buzzed hair, his muscular body fighting to free itself from his dark suit, stood in her way, thick hands clasped before him.

  “Please step aside,” she said.

  “I’m afraid I can’t, ma’am,” he said.

  “Do you want me to scream?” she asked, looking past him at the baying media who were being held in check by the chunky man’s cookie-cutter cousins.

  These men had invaded her house within minutes of her calling 911 to report the death of Lucien, flashing badges that identified them as agents of the FBI
and the Department of Homeland Security.

  She’d sat at the kitchen table, still in her dressing gown and pajamas—the ankle monitor covered by the flannel pants—doing her finest impersonation of a grieving widow and told of how she’d come down in the morning to look for her husband. When she’d seen his coat hanging in the hall but no sign of him she’d looked in the garage, where she’d found him slumped dead in the rear of the car, its engine still idling.

  At this she’d produced honest-to-god tears and had to wipe her eyes and blow her nose on a paper towel.

  Once their questions were done they let her go to her room upstairs where she stood at her closet and weighed her options.

  She made her selection and laid her clothes out on the counterpane of the bed: a crème silk blouse with long sleeves, a very plain black skirt and a charcoal cashmere cardigan. A pair of burgundy penny loafers, the leather newly buffed, stood by the bed.

  It was time to remove the ankle monitor.

  Nadja lifted her foot onto the vanity stool and took a pair of scissors to the band, amazed at how easily the blades carved through the rubber. She tossed the ugly thing into the trash, unconcerned about what the spooks would make of it when they scoured her bedroom, as they undoubtedly would.

  After she dressed she sat at her mirror and arranged her hair in a chignon and she applied only a little lipstick and just a hint of Samsara behind her ears and on her pulse points. She checked her hands—the ring finger tellingly bare—to see that the muted sage nail varnish hadn’t suffered damage during last night’s hijinks.

  Satisfied with her appearance she looked up the number of Vanity Fair magazine in New York, dialed it on her cell phone and asked to speak to the editor, Graydon Carter.

  A bored sounding woman asked who was calling.

  When Nadja identified herself the woman sounded a lot less bored and told her she’d get Mr. Carter out of a meeting.

  Nadja sat smoking while she waited, listening the men tearing Lucien’s office apart. It had taken time and effort for them to penetrate the door.

  Earlier, Nadja had considered which of the media to talk to. Certainly, she could have commanded any one of the hacks downstairs to do her bidding if she’d chosen, but she knew it was time to be strategic. Time to secure her future.

  She was beautiful.

  She was mysterious.

  She was the very recent widow of a deliciously Machiavellian little toad.

  She was made for Vanity Fair.

  “Mrs. Benway,” Carter said in his smooth Canadian accent. “May we express our condolences? We’ve just heard the news.”

  “Thank you, Graydon,” she said, laying on the Balkans a little thicker, placing the emphasis on the second syllable: Gray-don. “And please call me Nadja.”

  “So, Nadja, you must have quite a story?”

  “What do they say, Graydon? Stories happen only to people who can tell them.”

  He chuckled before saying, “Forgive me for being indelicate, Nadja, but you haven’t yet spoken to anyone else in the media, have you?”

  “Graydon, my pearls are reserved for a very high class of swine.”

  He had the good grace to laugh and then handed her over to a lackey who took care of her flight details to New York and a reservation at Soho House.

  She ended the call and sat on the bed smoking, seeing her life spooling out ahead of her.

  The Vanity Fair piece would inevitably lead to a book deal and the television appearances she would make to publicize her memoir would ensure a profitable future of minor celebrity.

  This was, after all, only her due.

  She’d earned it.

  Nadja had carried the Louis Vuitton down to the kitchen, removed her charcoal of the peasant girl from the wall and zipped it away in the suitcase that held just a few of her things. There wasn’t much she wanted. Most of it would only serve to remind her of her lost years with Lucien.

  She’d walked to the door where she now stood and looked up into the eyes of the hefty young man and said, “I mean it. If you don’t let me pass I shall scream.”

  “Let her go,” a voice said, and she saw a blunt-faced man with lifeless white hair standing in the doorway to the living room.

  The thug stepped aside and Nadja walked out into the biting cold, a low gray sky perched like a lid atop the cluster of row houses, to her waiting cab, welcoming the catcalls of the media with their thrusting microphones and bursting flashbulbs and whirring video cameras, knowing that rather than robbing her of something, they were giving to her, adding to her notoriety, adding to her cachet.

  Adding to her bankability.

  NINETY

  In the taxi, fleeing the child, a cold hand reached in from nowhere and took hold of Hook’s heart and squeezed it until he couldn’t breathe, could barely find the air to hunch forward and say to the driver, “Stop. Stop the car.”

  Fighting the door open he threw money at the man, stepping out into a wall of heat and gasoline fumes that almost knocked him to the blacktop, dodging cars and bikes as he ran in a lurching lope back toward the embassy, his lungs aflame, his bruised ribs screaming, sweat stinging his eyes, certain that Suzie would be gone, but he found her sitting on the sidewalk, crying, still clutching the yellow envelope, a Thai policeman and a couple of passersby standing over her.

  Hook, sweating, drinking thick air, lifted the girl, hugging her to him as he found enough breath to smooth things over with the cop. He waved down another cab and bundled her inside. Suzie didn’t look at him as they drove away, just sat hunched and crying, crying for what he had done, sure, but crying too from way more fear and sorrow than a kid her age should have ever had to know.

  He patted his pockets for a tissue but came up empty and she wiped her nose on her sleeve and turned her face away from him and closed her eyes and fell asleep or pretended to.

  It was suddenly gloomy and it started to rain softly, car headlights reflected in the wet streets, and the traffic was as slow as mud.

  Hook sat hypnotized by the patter of the rain, the hiss of the A/C and snatches of Thai pop music wafting in from adjacent cars, and only when a barefoot old monk in saffron robes, begging alms from the pedestrians, overtook the taxi did he realize they weren’t moving at all.

  That was okay. He had nowhere to go.

  As he watched vivid bursts of neon blooming across the Blade Runner skyline, Hook tried to conjure a plan.

  A way forward.

  He could not and a rush of panic took him low.

  Then, when he closed his eyes and tried to calm himself, he saw a face, the pink, closely-barbered face of the one man who could grant Kate Swift’s wish for her child, and as Hook opened his eyes, blinking, a string of numerals coiled from somewhere deep in his memory (a memory blunted by lassitude and excess) and took the form of a long-forgotten telephone number.

  Mistrustful of the provenance of the number—and doubting its currency—Hook punched it into his cell phone and listened to a purr that went unanswered for an eternity before he heard a flat Midwestern voice say, “Yes?”

  “This is Harry Hook.”

  A beat and then the Plumber said, “Harry, it’s been a long time.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in Bangkok,” Hook said.

  “The hottest city in the world, or so I’m told.”

  “I have Kate Swift’s daughter with me. Susan. ”

  There was a longer pause. “And what of Kate?” the Plumber asked.

  “That’s for another conversation.”

  “What do you want, Harry?”

  “We want a lot of things.”

  The Plumber sighed. “Yes, I’ll bet you do.”

  “First of all we want to come home.”

  “Do you now?”

  “Yes.”

  “So it’s a happy ending you’re writing then, Harry?”

  “Well, we’re American. Happy endings are our national belief.”

  Th
e Plumber chuckled, a dry sound like rice being sieved, and they talked for a few more minutes before Hook ended the call.

  He looked at the child beside him and reached out a tentative hand, his fingertips touching her upturned palm, and when his granddaughter’s fingers tightened on his and she opened her eyes and stared at him, Hook thought about fate and the laws of chance and how everything that can happen will happen.

  THE END