Falling, panicking, I thought, What am I doing here? What am I doing? I no longer cared about Patrick Piersall or Casey Diggs or plots and conspiracies and shadowy threats of danger. I just wanted to get out. I just wanted to go home, away from the sight of these slavering, crazy-faced men, from the sound of these women buzzing like locusts, screaming like harpies. Only a rage for survival, a terror of being trampled into the pavement and smothered down there, made me corkscrew viciously, gripping and tearing at the bodies around me in order to stay on my feet. Only that rage made me battle forward with all the strength I had. Somehow I got my balance back. I rammed myself headlong through the congealed human mass, looking for a clearing, for open air.
And then there I was. I was at the police line. I was at the edge of the corridor. I had broken through the mob and was standing between two NYPD patrolmen, at the point where their hands met to form their barricade against the press. There was no one else in front of me. I could see right into the corridor itself.
There was Piersall and his entourage of lawyers and lawmen—and they had already passed me by. I'd missed them by a few steps. The trailing pair of COs was a pace to my right, then the attorneys, then Piersall and the officers who held him, then the COs in the lead—who were nearly at the building's stairs, nearly at the door.
The pressure of the amoeba behind me drove me hard against the cops' arms. The creature's voices were shouting loudly on every side of me. I stuck my hand into the pocket of my windbreaker. I felt it close on the note I had folded there. I brought the note out, crumpled in my fist. But there was no way to get it to the lawyers or to Piersall. I had missed my chance.
But wait. The next moment, just before he reached the steps, Piersall stopped. He turned—swung around so hard that he brought the two startled corrections officers at his elbows swinging around with him. The actor was glowering with rage. His cheeks were red. His eyes were white and rolling. He was like a chained beast goaded into a fury by captivity and the mob and the questions hurled at him like stones.
He shouted. His voice was a ragged growl. He sounded just as I remembered him, as we all remembered him, from those moments of highest melodrama on the besieged deck of the spaceship Universal.
"This!" he bellowed at us. "This is not the news!"
He tried to charge at us like a bull. The force of it pulled his corrections officers after him a step before they could restrain him. The lawyers—the tidy men in suits—stumbled back several paces, jumbling together with the COs in the rear, who fell back too. One of the lawyers stuck his hand out to recover his balance.
On the instant, I saw my chance. I lunged forward, reaching out between the policemen. I grabbed the lawyer's hand and forced my note into it.
My name is Jason Harrow, it said. I have information about the disappearance of Casey Diggs. I will only speak to Patrick Piersall. Call this number.
A Prayerful Interlude
Afterward, I felt awful: stupid, ashamed. I had bruises on my arms, one on my side. I thought I had one on my forehead, too—it felt bruised though I couldn't see it. My jaw hurt, my ribs ached. And for what? Piersall's lawyers would simply throw my note away. Of course they would. What had I accomplished? Nothing.
Wearily, I limped back to the parking lot, to my Mustang. I settled stiffly behind the wheel. I sat there, staring through the windshield at the Mercedes parked across from me. I felt far away from the living surface of the world. Dazed, dissociated, dead to feeling, confused about what was real and what wasn't. Why the hell had I come here? What was I thinking? I remembered, as if it were long ago, feeling some sense of threat, of danger. A sense I had to do something, do something fast. But why? What was it all about? A story told to me by a lying teenager? The wild accusations of a crazy college dropout? A lecture on Shakespeare by a college professor? The maunderings of a drunken, washed-up actor trying to jump-start his career with sensationalistic self-destruction? Nothing. It was all about nothing. Lies, rumor, suspicion hyped to an intensity of desperation by those days in my mother's house, those nights, those drunken nights, in the craziness of the television room. It really was true: I'd fallen through the screen and landed here, a drowning fall into other people's delusions.
I drove out of the lot and began wending the complicated way toward the East Side and the FDR Drive. The traffic was thick and I kept finding my path frustrated by one-way streets and security barricades. It took me the better part of an hour to reach the highway. There, the traffic grew lighter. I went quickly up along the East River, glancing out the window at the water running turbulent and dull beneath a sky darkening with running clouds. I was heading for the Midtown Tunnel, for the Island and my mother's house.
But I went another way. I don't know why. Maybe it was just my reluctance to return to that house, that room—I'm not sure. But when I got off at the 34th Street exit, I turned away from the tunnel without thinking. I headed west instead, across the city.
At first, I wasn't sure where I was going—then I was: the Church of the Incarnation, the brownstone church on Madison Avenue I had come to in the depths of my craziness so many years ago.
I remembered that day as I stepped through the church doors, that day I had prayed in the side chapel: Forgive me, help me. I thought of that now as the great axial moment of my life, the moment around which my soul had swung like a compass needle from misery to happiness. I yearned to feel the intensity of that day again, even the intensity of its despair, anything rather than this zombie malaise that had come over me. I tried to milk the stately place for some celestial emotions. I grasped at the sweetness of the quiet as I stepped from the vestibule into the nave. I savored the door swinging shut behind me, muffling the hectic street sounds that had followed me in. I drank in the otherworldly light that fell in beams through the stained-glass windows, crimson and indigo and gold. I tried to lift myself from this daze of unreality into the crystal solidity of the high, imagined spheres. But my mind remained muddy and faraway.
I slipped into a pew near the middle of the church. There were only two other people there with me: an old woman sitting on the far right side, and an even older woman sitting on the left. In my sullen distraction, they looked to me like refugees from the battle for the world, survivors who had stumbled into this ruin to die. All that was left of the broken body of Christ.
I sat and clasped my hands in my lap. I bowed my head and closed my eyes and tried to pray. But a moment later, I looked up again. I looked around. My eyes came to rest on the reredos up behind the altar. Herald angels flanking a trio of cherubs who were unrolling a scroll. and the word was made flesh and dwelt among us, the scroll read. What the hell was that supposed to mean? I wondered. I mean, now that you have your spaceships and quantum physics and computers and television sets? The Word was made flesh. What the hell was that?
I shook my head, looking over the apse and the empty pews. This place—this place that had been so important to me once. Now it just seemed like a hiding place for frightened old women, somewhere restful they could go to die, away from the crap and holler of life.
I closed my eyes again. I closed my hand into a fist, hoping to feel Christ's hand in mine. I felt nothing. I forced out a prayer.
Show me the way, Lord. Something terrible is happening—or is going to happen—I don't know which—something terrible is happening to my brain or is going to happen to this city—I don't know, I don't know which—maybe there's some kind of attack in the works—or maybe it's all me, maybe what happened to my mother is happening to me now, maybe even you are just some flash in my brain, some electrochemical kind of ... Ach! Show me the way. Show me the way.
He answered by cell phone. Hey, it's the modern world, what can I tell you? I'd forgotten to turn the phone off and just at that moment, it sang out with a sort of shrill, gleeful rudeness, the way a mischievous demon might fart in a place like this. The two old ladies swung around at me, their faces wrinkled and wrathful and dark. I made an apologetic smile and unwoun
d from my pew. I hurried up the aisle and pushed out the doors, back into the city.
I answered the phone as I stepped onto the sidewalk. I could barely hear the voice on the other end above the grind and rumble of a bus passing on its way uptown. I stuck a finger in my free ear.
I said, "I'm sorry. I couldn't hear you. What'd you say?"
The voice was a man's voice. It was featureless, nondescript: "Mr. Piersall will meet you in an hour," it said, "in the Ale House downtown."
Augustus Kane and the Ale House of Doom
The Ale House was one of the oldest pubs in the city. Sawdustt covered the floor. Old newspapers and photos of dead Irishmen covered the walls. Left of the door as you came in, there was a brass-and-mahogany bar that probably predated the Draft Riots. Dusty bottles crowded the ancient shelves behind it. Above the bottles, there were more photos and more headlines, plus a mounted fish that looked like it might've been caught by James, son of Zebedee. Come to think of it, the bartender—with a face that had collapsed into a mass of frowning wrinkles—looked like he might've been there with James at the time. He was swiping down the top of the bar with a rag. There was an old pile of clothes in front of him that turned out to be a man drinking beer.
When I walked in, the barkeep took one look at me and tilted his head toward an archway. I went through the archway into the tavern's main room.
There were no windows here. The ceiling lights were dim as candles and had the same yellowish glow. The wooden tables were crowded against the walls left and right. Between them was the open floor with the sawdust on it streaked by passing footsteps. The place could've looked the same a hundred years ago. Only the paper napkins and glass bottles of ketchup on every table served as a jarring reminder of the modern world.
It was still early—before lunchtime. At first glance, the room seemed empty. Then I looked again at a potbellied woodstove whispering and snickering in one far corner. A lone drinker sat hunched at the table just beyond the stove, his back to me. He seemed, in that setting, like a figure in an old painting or photograph, a thing of more meaning than substance, a representative, say, of the Urban Man who carries the nation's lonely vastness inside himself, a symbol of that peculiar American solitude one finds in midnight diners and daylight bars.
I walked across the sawdust until I was standing over him. He raised his face to me. It was Piersall.
I'd seen him in the hectic crush that morning, of course, but it was different now, quiet and close like this. He had the glamour of TV on him, that camera magic that made him seem embossed on the flat facade of life, raised up from it, more real than real. His face was like a living billboard of itself—and not just his face, but the face beneath his face, the dashing features of Admiral Augustus Kane, distorted by bloat and hidden under wrinkles, but still glowing within somehow, still there.
He had his hand wrapped around a mug of beer. There was a shot of whiskey by it. They weren't his first of the morning, I could tell. His fat cheeks were flushed, his blue eyes hectic. A blood vessel throbbed on his mottled nose. Not quite noon, and he was already half in the tank.
"You Harrow?" he said. There was that voice, too—the same as it always had been: terse, rhythmic, distinctive, the admiral's voice.
I nodded down at him, tight and quiet in his starry presence.
"Have a seat. Have a seat," he said. He gestured to the chair across from him. He looked back over his shoulder. Startled me by shouting out, "Charlie! Two more!" Then he jacked the shot and finished the beer in two quick motions, his right hand flashing back and forth between the glasses.
I sat down. "Thanks for seeing me," I said.
He didn't answer. He looked me over, studied me, openly, not trying to hide it, cocking one outgrown eyebrow and running a sharp, narrow gaze up and down me. It gave him the aspect of a keen observer of men, a man who could peer right into your heart. As the moment went on and uncomfortably on, I began to get the feeling he meant me to think that about him. I began to suspect it was a part he was playing: the Keen Observer of Men. I'm a guy you can't put anything past, he seemed to be telling me. Don't even try.
Charlie—the wrinkly Bartender from Ages Past—clapped mugs of beer and whiskey shots on the table in front of us. He swept Piersall's empties onto his tray and retreated to the front room.
I put my hand on the mug, grateful to have something to fiddle with while Piersall stared. Piersall went on staring, waiting until the barkeep was gone. Then he said, "You've been. Following the news. I take it," in that syncopated way of his.
I wasn't sure what he meant: news of his canceled show? His arrest? The arraignment this morning? "I saw the news last night," I said. "Not today though."
He gave a snort, a sort of man-of-the-world, seen-it-all snort. I got the feeling this was a performance, too, another part he was playing: the Man of the World Who Has Seen It All.
"The news," he said. "The media! It's like Alice in Wonderland—only without the Wonderland. They have this—story they want to tell. This nonsense story. 'Angry TV Star Goes Nuts.' That's the story and if you challenge that—if you're brave enough, if you're—sane enough—to challenge that—then—oh, then they go at you. Tooth and nail. Hammer and tongs. Off with his head. You must be a drunk, a madman, a..." He waved one pudgy hand about dramatically, as if to conjure the word he was looking for out of the air. And he did: "A has-been." He lifted his shot glass to his lips, and added before he drank, "Which is rich, coming from a bunch of never-weres."
Then he did drink. He downed the shot whole and followed it with a knock at his beer.
I could only watch him, bemused. This was not what I'd expected. He didn't seem to care about the note I'd given to his lawyer. He didn't question me about it or try to find out more about me or what I wanted. He didn't seem interested in that at all. He didn't even seem interested in himself, in his situation. I mean, after the night he'd had—and the morning he'd had—I would've thought he'd want to at least try to appear sober in public. But no. He just showed himself as he was: a bitter and blasted man, a sort of Ancient Mariner with nothing left of life but the story he had to tell. And yet ... and yet, even as I thought that, I thought: That little speech he'd just made, the laconic drama of it, the staccato syncopation—tooth and nail, hammer and tongs, off with his head. It was classic Patrick Piersall stuff, wasn't it? It could have been written for him. It could've been written for Augustus Kane. Was it possible that this, too, was a role he was playing: The Bitter, Blasted Man Who Had Yet a Story to Tell?
I watched him gaze into his beer like a lost soul, or like a Lost Soul in a movie during the scene in which he gazes into his beer. He had changed his clothes since the arraignment. He was wearing a natty corduroy sports coat and one of those turtlenecks older guys wear when they start to get wattles on their throats. I could just picture him getting dressed, thinking: Let's see. What's my wardrobe for the scene where I meet the informant in the bar? Was everything about him—every word, every gesture, every expression on his face—part of a performance of some kind? Was he all actor and no man?
"Are you a hard man, Harrow?" he asked me suddenly with the air of a storyteller in a movie suddenly asking his listener a piercing question. And when I opened my mouth without answering, he said: "Mentally, I mean." And added: "Forgive me," with that oily graciousness actors and drunks do so well. "Forgive me, but we don't know each other. I have to ask. Are you a hard man—mentally?"
"Yeah, sure, I guess," I said—it seemed the best way to get on with it.
"Good. Good. It takes a hard man to see the truth when everyone is telling him the lies he wants to hear." He raised his beer mug to me in a toast—a toast to that little piece of wisdom, perhaps, or maybe to my hardness, or maybe just a toast so he could drink some more.
I toasted, drank. The beer was tart and cold. It had a zingy little tang to it. I wasn't used to drinking this early in the day. "What happened at the arraignment?" I asked him. I guessed now that's what we were talking about
. "I haven't seen the news about that."
Another studied gesture—lowered eyelids, a casual movement of the hand—as if I had missed the point somehow, as if my question was a matter of no importance and he was brushing it aside. "Do you want the news—or do you want the truth?"
I nearly laughed out loud at this. I couldn't help it. If he was going to behave as if he were in a movie, I couldn't help watching him as if I were a critic. I was thinking: "Do you want the news or do you want the truth?" What kind of crappy, overwritten, corny dialogue is that? "Well ... I'd like to know what happened at the arraignment," I said, dryly.
"I was released," he declared in orotund tones, "on five thousand dollars bail."
Now here, I felt the line was okay, but he delivered it with way too much melodrama. The pause between released and on, the pregnant turning of his hand in air, the rolling tone of the bail amount—it was all meant to suggest there was a deeper meaning to the words than there seemed to be. But I mean, come on, what meaning? He was released on bail. What was the big deal?
"Was there anything else?" I asked him. "Did you get to make any kind of statement? In court? To the press?"
He held up a finger and half-smiled, as if, ah, now I were beginning to see into the heart of things. "Ah," he said, "now you're beginning to see into the heart of things. Now you're starting—to ask—the right—questions."
I managed not to roll my eyes. "So did you? Make a statement?"
Up went the beer. Down went the empty glass with a bang. "Charlie!" he shouted over his shoulder. He waved a questioning finger at my drinks as well, but I'd barely touched them. "One more!" Then turning back to me, he said, "No statement. Not in court. Not to the press. On the advice—of counsel: no statement."
Empire of Lies Page 18