Blood Will Out

by Walter Kirn

  Rayermann’s face grew boyish as he spoke, acquiring a dreamy cast. For the first time since the trial began I could picture John Sohus alive, as something other than a bag of bones or the half-hooded face in a photo of his and Linda’s Halloween wedding. John was like Mike, a friend of mine from childhood who had also lived under the spell of science fiction. We read Ray Bradbury paperbacks together. We launched model rockets from a hilltop hay field and ran along under their drifting plastic parachutes until all hope of recovering them was lost. When we were seven, Man landed on the moon—“Man,” that long-gone Enlightenment abstraction—and Mike and I stood in the road between our houses and hurled stones straight up into the darkness, trying to hit the flag Armstrong had planted. We were sons of the space race, just like John and Rayermann, enthralled by its expansive, gee-whiz spirit and prone to regard the night sky as a vast prophecy of civilization’s potential progress. Around us, in missile silos, jets, and submarines, terrible forces had massed themselves for conflict, but there was also a sense of a broad counterforce pressing onward toward astounding breakthroughs. We might fly someday, personally fly, lofted by jetpacks or one-man helicopters. We might even learn to converse with chimps and dolphins. We might meet a man who’d sailed off past Andromeda and come back younger. We might not have to die. That, or we’d inherit an earth of ashes, our radioactive limbs reduced to stumps. The perils and the promises. The wonder. That sense of intimacy with the infinite could make a boy feel simultaneously tiny and immense.

  “What about novels?” I asked Rayermann. “Are there Star Trek novels?”

  No hesitation. “The first Star Trek novel was Mission to Horatius.”

  “Did John read them?” I asked him.

  “Definitely yes.”

  There, in that space-station lobby with the colonel, who had grown up to do what John had dreamed of doing and Clark had pretended in Cornish he did secretly—and so proficiently the Chinese were stalking him—my theory of psychopathy came together. There was no sign that Clark had been a Trekkie or an aficionado of jet propulsion until he killed a man who was and assumed his fantasies and hobbies. Clark was worse than a murderer and dismemberer and graveside board-game player. He was a cannibal of souls.

  He also might be, as Rayermann taught me over dinner, an incarnation of something called “the entity.” This term emerged when I challenged his tipsy claim that “everything you need to know, you can learn from Star Trek.” All right then, sir: of all the monsters and villains on the series (the original series; the colonel disdained the sequel), were there any resembling the defendant?

  The colonel looked off toward the lobby, computing, processing, though not for any longer than ten seconds. “Second season. The crew is on Argelius II, the planet of Love, a place unused to violence. There have been stabbings and killings of several women, and Scotty—Engineer Montgomery Scott—has been found at the scene of one of these crimes. The local authorities put him on trial. It turns out that the culprit is an alien creature, a sort of noncorporeal entity that is more thought and energy than physical and first appeared on earth as Jack the Ripper. When humanity started reaching out to the stars, this creature, this entity, moved with us, preying on other colonies and planets. In the end it’s defeated by Kirk and Spock, who set the Enterprise’s Transporter beam on ‘widest possible dispersion’ and blast the entity out into space. The episode—I don’t recall its name—ends with a line from McCoy. I think he wonders, ‘Can it coalesce again?’”

  “The episode is called ‘Wolf in the Fold,’” the colonel said. “I would have been pissed at myself if I’d forgotten that.”

  “It fits.”

  “Star Trek is a remarkable resource, don’t you think?”

  I granted him this and thanked him for enlightening me, not lightly or facetiously at all but with what I hoped was my own civilian’s version of his precision. He’d offered a fact at a moment when facts felt scarce: Star Trek—the original, not the sequel—was as helpful a reference work in the present matter as any I’d come across so far. “The entity.” It named the restless thing beneath the aliases, the thing that seemed to change but never did. The metaphor might have run away with me if I’d known more about the show that spawned it. Destruction by “widest possible dispersion.” That sounded pretty fitting too.

  TWELVE

  THE DAY THAT Sandra Boss was set to testify, my fourteen-year-old daughter, Maisie, came to court with me; her school in Montana was on a break. I hadn’t seen her and her brother in over a month—I was too busy writing and reporting—and we’d spent the weekend, Easter weekend, walking on the beach in Malibu. Dead baby seals had been washing up that spring in what government biologists were calling an “Unusual Mortality Event,” and we’d come across five of them that Sunday morning, their bodies evenly spaced along the sand at intervals of fifty yards or so, marked by glittering clouds of circling flies. Some families might have steered clear, but we were fascinated; our years on the ranch had accustomed us to finding carcasses. Deer. Newborn antelope. Badgers. Porcupines. We poked them with sticks and performed impromptu autopsies. “Dad, I love dead things,” Maisie had told me once as we stood over the body of a fawn whose throat had been torn by a cougar, or so we guessed. I thought I understood. Death allows a closer study of unfamiliar creatures than life does.

  Concerned about looking grown-up in the courtroom, she sat up churchy-proper in a gray cardigan, her waist-length blond hair pushed up into a ball and held with black elastic bands. Her face had my mother’s wide Hungarian cheekbones, but her slanted green eyes were an ancestral mystery. She scanned the scene with a look of mastery, the result of the true-crime shows she liked to watch when she came to visit me on weekends. She knew the layout of the room, the protocol, and the roles of all the players down to the implacable stenographer and the bored, portly bailiff with his gun. What she didn’t know, though, was that I’d brought her here not just to make a peculiar family memory, but to close a loop with the defendant. Our friendship, when it last felt like a friendship, was, ironically, all about our children, our kindred condition as single, divorced fathers.

  The phone calls started in late 2007, just before Christmas, after Clark’s split with Sandy. He fumed and moped, resentful and bereft. “She stole her! She stole my darling Snooks!” he moaned. “I have nothing, Walter. There’s nothing left.” I hadn’t heard strong emotion from him before and his overbred voice in despair was an absurdity. His instrument wasn’t built to play sad songs. His word of choice, “devastated,” pronounced syllabically, made him sound like an Oscar Wilde bachelor mourning something other than a lost daughter—a grease-stained dinner jacket, say, or a cracked champagne flute. He said he was living at his Boston club, and I pictured him lying on a hard divan, his Top-siders kicked off beside him on the rug, in a room full of tea-colored shadows and musty portraits and mean old emaciated wooden furniture. I didn’t envy him. Maybe I never had. What I’d wanted, I think, was for him to envy me.

  Sometimes he called at night, while I was reading, and I’d leave my book open in front of me while he grumped and growled. I couldn’t afford to relapse into bitterness, having survived a long funk of my own. Once he interrupted my kids and me as we were choosing our tokens for a Monopoly game, and for the first time since I’d met him I said I’d call him back later, the next day. I enjoyed this newfound edge; in terms of paternal deprivation, I had a few years of seniority on him. I exploited my rank to advise him on healthy eating and the calming power of regular exercise, but there was no evidence he heard me. In the whole time I’d known him, not one thing that I’d said to him—no story I’d told, no counsel I’d provided, no opinion I’d advanced—had ever come back to me later from his lips.

  Whenever I urged Clark to return to court to press for more frequent visits with his daughter, he’d answer that he was broke, wiped out, and that Sandy, by moving with Snooks to England and taking a job at McKinsey’s London office, was now beyond his legal reach. His defeatis
m disheartened me as a father. What did it mean for ordinary men that even someone with his stupendous name and social leverage could be laid so low by laws and lawyers? I feared he’d harm himself. He sounded isolated. Shelby was gone by then. Yates too, I gathered, since he no longer mentioned him.

  I touched my daughter’s shoulder as Sandra Boss, whose presence had attracted extra press and forced us all to pack in hip to hip, entered the courtroom through its heavy brown doors. Her shoulder-length hair was the blond that covers gray and in her ears were modest single pearls whose luster was that of money banked, not spent. Her bearing was less businesslike than scout-like, and when she raised her truth-affirming right hand, Abe Lincoln sat up straighter in his portrait.

  For me, Boss’s manner had a touch of overkill. She surely knew there were skeptics in the audience who couldn’t square her sterling résumé with her record of gullibility. The Lifetime Channel had aired a movie, Who Is Clark Rockefeller?, that had taken her side in the matter of Snooks’s abduction but had failed to inquire very deeply into what she was thinking all those years, living with someone who didn’t seem to work, never introduced her to his relatives, spent her paychecks, and cruelly derided her mothering.

  Like Mihoko Manabe, but in a stronger voice—a posher voice than I remembered; London had buffed and polished her, it seemed—she told a story of a florid courtship decaying into entrapment and rigidity. Clark was gallant and flattering at first, the only man she’d ever dated, she said, who didn’t seem threatened by her intelligence, but soon his obsessions and screwball rules took over. He would always wear some kind of hat when out in public. Whenever they drove together through Connecticut, he forbade her to stop for any reason because his parents’ car wreck had occurred there and he considered the state cursed. He refused to set foot in California, another supposedly evil state. He wired the house with ganglia of phone lines associated with different area codes, and even different country codes. He routed the mail to a series of P.O. boxes. Once, she recalled, he let her glimpse a fax—accidentally on purpose, she now felt—whose edge bore the words “Trilateral Commission.” When asked if she truly believed that Clark belonged to a group that legions of conspiracy theorists accuse of being a shadow global directorate, her answer, startlingly, was yes. “The idea was that he was a sort of junior member and needed to earn his stripes to advance.”

  My daughter, after about an hour of this, took my pen and scribbled in my notebook, “It’s crazy to think that he’s sitting right there with all the answers.” This captured it all right. The murder trial of a silent defendant, especially one who has spent a lifetime lying to everyone about almost everything, can’t help but strike a child as what it is: a hugely laborious exercise in trying to read a mind. I wondered if he was enjoying this guessing game that he’d lured us into. Because here we were again, just the way he liked us: tantalized, off-balance, and in the dark. And there he was, protected by his constitutional rights, fixing his wife with a simulated smile that every book on vampires ever written told her not to regard for even an instant.

  “What do you think?” I whispered to my daughter as Balian continued with his questions. I was proud of myself for organizing this field trip.

  “He seems incredibly lonely,” she whispered back.

  “That’s what happens,” I said, “when you never tell the truth.”

  “I know. Can we be quiet now?”

  “The wife’s in the mountains somewhere, detectives say. They can’t find her body.”

  “I mean it, Dad. Hush up.”

  I put my arm around her to further annoy her; I missed her little fits of teenage temper. They reminded me of my power as her father, and also that my power was fading, which was as it ought to be, life’s normal course. I almost wished Clark would turn around and see us. I’d succeeded in holding on to what he’d lost, and some boastful part of me wanted him to know it, wanted him to acknowledge that I’d won. It wasn’t nice. It was cruel. But men compete.

  My daughter took my pad again and wrote, “What’s heresay?”

  “That’s not how it’s spelled,” I whispered. I spelled it correctly for her.

  “What is it, though?” she wrote.

  “Something you heard that you repeat. It’s not allowed as evidence,” I wrote.

  “Why not?” she wrote. This was fun. Like junior high.

  “It might not be true. It might be a mistake.”

  She sat and thought a bit, looking from Clark to Balian to Boss and then back at Clark and then down at the pad. “I’m still confused,” she whispered. “Hearsay also might be true. What if it is, and it’s the only evidence?”

  ‘That would be too bad,” I said.

  THE NEWS OF THE kidnapping reached me through the Internet at the end of July 2008. I was in Montana, at my computer preparing to write, a transition that grew harder by the month. Something about the structure of my brain, its associative, porous, open-endedness, was defenseless against the ever-enlarging Web. Every video, news story, photo, e-mail, stock chart, sexy picture, and five-day weather forecast was an enticement to step into the forest, and once I was two or three breadcrumbs down the path, the witches had me, I was in their oven. Most of life’s temptations go way back; they’re ancient and perennial, and one is warned about them in one’s youth, but this temptation had appeared from nowhere.

  My girlfriend at the time, another journalist, was working in a room across the hall. I yelled and ran in with my laptop, set it down, and read the story aloud to her while she perused it on the screen. “He snapped,” I said. “He finally lost his mind.”

  There had been signs this moment was coming. “I have a plan,” he had said to me one night, and then he’d described for me a vile project that, he said, another divorced father had agreed to back with money. Would I come in as a partner too? The scheme involved building a private offshore facility, possibly in the Philippines or Peru, where American men could impregnate local young women who had sold off their legal interests in the progeny. “We won’t need these silly women then,” Clark said. “Fathers will have sole title to their children.”

  “Did you come up with this idea? Of title?”

  “It’s perfectly workable and it solves the problem. Women who want to be mothers without men are able to do so with donated sperm. Why shouldn’t men have a similar alternative? I do have a point.”

  But a point was all he had. He was like this sometimes: a creature of perfect reason whose conclusions were nonetheless insane. His hateful proposed breeding program not only treated women as dispensable, as hatcheries, it assumed that children were interchangeable. I thought it was his very own Snooks he missed? Wrong. What he missed, I’d come to see, was fatherhood itself, and fatherhood as he defined it meant control. Exclusive control, if he could swing it. On another occasion, in another phone call, he’d told me that Argentina—or was it Chile?—offered safe harbor to American fathers who fled there with their children.

  Maybe he was in South America now. I considered calling the FBI but decided to wait a day, sure Clark would turn up, since how could a Rockefeller ever hope to vanish underground, and why would one want to, especially in Chile? He’d repent of his error, hire a top lawyer, negotiate his freedom, and publicly rehabilitate himself. He’d show humility. Adopt a cause.

  The next morning I read that the manhunt had intensified. I also read that the Rockefellers, through one of those “family spokesmen” that big-shot clans always have at their disposal, were denying that Clark was one of them. What cowards these people were, I thought, forsaking their own blood out of fear of scandal. “This is disgusting. It’s bullshit,” I told my girlfriend. She nodded in apparent solidarity and then excused herself to do some work. I turned on the TV news and phoned my mother. “You’re watching all this?” I said to her. “You’ve heard?”

  “It sounds like your friend was a phony, Walt.”

  “They’re pulling something,” I said. “It’s a big family. It has factions. He’
s from the black sheep side or something.”

  “That’s just silly.”

  “Maybe he’s illegitimate.”

  “Oh, darling.”

  A few hours later a German name came out. I holed up with my computer in my office and sent my girlfriend off to eat alone while I read every report that I could find. About Clark’s origins they all agreed—his German mother and brother were giving interviews—and yet the story made no sense. Then again, nothing had ever made sense with Clark, and in just this crazy way. In truth, I’d always marked him as a phony, but only because they were all phonies, his type, particularly the normal-acting ones who people liked to describe as “down to earth.” Clark’s extravagant, emphatic phoniness demonstrated his honesty, I felt. Earth? He simply had no use for it. Nor would I, if I were born with wings.

  What a perfect mark I’d been. Rationalizing, justifying, imagining. I’d worked as hard at being conned by him as he had at conning me. I wasn’t a victim; I was a collaborator. I’d been taught when I was young, and had learned for myself as I grew older, that deception creates a chain reaction: two lies protecting the one that came before, and on and on and on. Now I was learning something new; how being deceived, and not wishing to admit it, could proliferate into a kind of madness too. The revelations came swiftly after that, but none of them staggered me as the first ones had. The reports of Clark’s suspected role in a two-decades-old murder hardly fazed me; by then I expected nothing less of him. My girlfriend, who lived mostly in New York, slipped back there, away from Montana, during this interlude. My kids showed up on alternating weekends, but I was mentally distant.

  I called my mother to apologize. She’d been right about Clark, and her son had been an idiot. All she cared about was that his daughter had been found safe.

  “I’m curious if he killed those people,” she said.