Empire of Lies

by Andrew Klavan

  "Those terrorists—I saw on TV they arrested some terrorists who wanted to blow up Wall Street. You think that's part of this?"

  "You'll have to ask the guys in New York. Like I said, I'm sure they'll bring us up to date."

  I turned away from the backs of those two heads and looked out the window, up at the roiling, ominous clouds.

  It was almost eleven as we crossed into Queens. There was plenty of traffic, but the cop car, being a cop car, cut through it quickly, keeping to the left lane while other cars ducked out of its path like saloon dwellers in a cowboy movie dodging out of the way of Black Bart. Since Fitzgerald wasn't saying much, I used the travel time to make some phone calls. I canceled my flight home. I checked in at the office. I called my wife. I got Cathy's voice mail, both at home and on the cell. I remembered today was her day to play lunch lady at our daughter's school so she had probably shut her phone off. To tell the truth, I was glad of it. I had no idea how I was going to explain to her what was happening here. I left a message:

  "Listen. I'm all right, but I've run into a problem. I can't come home yet. I'm with the police. I'm fine, but some men broke into the house last night and took Serena. Don't be worried or anything, all right? I didn't get hurt and it's gonna be okay. I'll call you when I can."

  As I pressed DISCONNECT, I caught Fitzgerald and the uniform exchange another glance across the front seat.

  I managed to ignore that or to ignore the fact that it fed into my suspicion that something was wrong, that there was some catastrophe impending. And I managed to ignore it when the squad car left the expressway for the parkway, too, and when it crossed the bridge into uptown Manhattan and when it crossed Manhattan to the West Side. Up until then, I'd just assumed we were heading for police headquarters downtown.

  "Where are we going?" I asked the back of Fitzgerald's head. "Are we going up to the university?"

  "They're working this out of the twenty-sixth," he answered. Whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.

  We passed along several streets of aging brownstones, and finally turned onto a street crowded with cop cars. The cars were parked in slanted spaces outside a cookie-cutter New York precinct house of concrete and yellow brick. Our driver slid his county squad car in with the others.

  They were waiting for us inside. That much seemed clear. Fitzgerald only had to flash his Nassau County shield at the officer behind the reception desk and a locked door buzzed open. We passed through it into the precinct's inner halls.

  A man met us in a cinder-block corridor. He was about forty, youthful-looking, black or half-black—with tan skin, anyway. He was short and trim, with a round, hard, handsome face, a serious face under clipped, serious black hair. He was in shirtsleeves, a buttoned-up white shirt with a blue tie, the pants of a charcoal suit. Everything about him seemed serious and efficient.

  I didn't like him. To put it bluntly, he frightened me. The second I saw him, I sensed he was a man of little feeling and dour expectations, the kind of person who waits for you to reveal the nature of your depravity, who doesn't wonder whether you committed a crime but only which crime you committed. The world to him was like a child's frame puzzle where there are empty spaces and a piece to fit the shape of every space—except that every space was a kind of sin and the pieces that fit them were human beings. Frankly, I thought that attitude probably made him a pretty good detective, but that didn't make me like him any better. Anyway, that was what I sensed about him in that first moment, and nothing I saw later made me change my mind.

  He had a manila folder in his right hand. He didn't put it down or move it to his left hand, so naturally I didn't offer to shake hands with him. I had a feeling that was the whole point of the folder.

  "Mr. Harrow, thanks for coming in. I'm Detective Curtis."

  Fitzgerald hadn't introduced me, hadn't spoken at all. Curtis just knew who I was. Now his eyes shifted toward the Long Island detective. At once, Fitzgerald turned around and walked away, just like that, without a word to either of us. I'd been handed off—like a case file or a report—something that needed working on.

  "What's going on?" I said. "Is there any news about Serena?"

  Curtis gestured to a doorway with the folder in his hand. "Would you come this way, Mr. Harrow?" He didn't smile. He looked at me with interest, but without feeling as if I were ... well, as if I were a puzzle piece.

  He led me down the cinder-block hall to a door, through the door into a cramped, unpleasant room.

  "Sorry for the accommodations." His voice had no more feeling than his eyes. "We're kind of short on space. I'll be with you in a couple of minutes. You want anything meanwhile? A cup of coffee or..."

  "Yeah," I said. "A cup of coffee would be great."

  "How do you take it?"

  "Black."

  He left me there, the door hissing shut behind him.

  I turned to look at the room. It was cramped, as I say. There was a small wooden table in the center and three cloth-and-wood chairs. The furniture nearly filled the gray floor so there wasn't much space to move around in. The walls were cinderblock, painted an institutional pale green. The rough, naked, heavy look of them gave me the feeling of being bricked in. There were dingy white soundproofing tiles in the ceiling, and a single ancient air vent, and a single long fluorescent light that made my eyes ache. There was the door—a heavy wooden door—on one wall and on the wall to the right of it there was a mirror: one-way glass.

  About ten minutes went by. Then a uniformed officer—a short, chesty black woman—brought me my coffee in a paper cup. She held the door ajar with one hand and gave me the coffee with the other.

  I was already getting antsy, waiting. "Do you know when Detective Curtis will be back?" I asked her.

  "He'll be with you as soon as he can, sir," she said in a flat singsong, the voice of an uncaring nurse speaking to a querulous patient. Then she drew back and the door hissed shut again.

  After that, I waited some more. I waited a long time. As the minutes passed, the room began to have a strange effect on me. It began to seem as if the place had some kind of meaning, as if it were a metaphor for something, as if my being there were some sort of allegory, though I'm not sure even now what the allegory was all about.

  I drank my coffee. I checked my watch. I checked my phone. There was no reception here, no way to call in or out. I sat in one of the chairs. I stood up and paced. The room was so small and crowded with furniture, I had to go to the edges of the floor to do it. I could take five paces along the width of the place and six paces along the length. Pretty soon, I sat down again. I drummed my fingers on the table. I got up and paced some more.

  I eyed the door. The door was part of the allegory. The door was unlocked the whole time. I checked. I could've opened it. I could've stepped out into the corridor. I could've left the precinct house altogether, if I wanted to. But I didn't do any of those things. I never so much as poked my head into the hall to ask someone where the hell Curtis had gone off to. I thought about it. I argued with myself. I thought, yes, damn it, I should find out what's taking so long. But minute by minute, I put it off. I was afraid if I seemed too impatient, it would make me look bad somehow. It would make me look uncooperative or guilty. That was the effect the room had on me. Four men had broken into my house, nearly killed me, kidnapped a teenaged girl—and I was the one who was afraid of looking guilty. I even began to think of things I had done wrong. Not just recently, but in the past, too. I began to imagine Detective Curtis questioning me.

  Why didn't you call the police after you heard about the murder in the Great Swamp? Why did you go to see Lauren without telling your wife? Why did you go to see Anne Smith? Tell me about That Night in Bedford.

  I was interrogating myself in the interrogation room. Explaining myself to Curtis or whoever was secretly watching me.

  Which brings me to the mirror, the one-way glass. That was part of the allegory, too. I could see myself in it, my face still badly bruised, painfully
disfigured, purple and yellow all along one side. I looked into my own eyes, and I felt sure there were cops on the other side of the image, on the other side of the glass, watching me. I paced close to it and stole glances at it, trying to make someone out back there. But I didn't want to seem nervous about it so I didn't stop and stare or look too close. I wanted my behavior to convey that I was a good guy, that I was here to cooperate. That was part of the reason I never left the room, too, never complained about how long I'd been kept waiting. I was acting innocent, see—acting innocent for whoever was watching behind the glass. I was playing a role for them: the role of an innocent man. I watched my performance in my mind's eye. I imagined I was on the other side of the mirror looking in. It made me wonder: Why would a person have to pretend to be innocent unless he were actually guilty of something? I began to become suspicious of myself.

  Why didn't you call the police, Mr. Harrow? Why did you go to see Lauren? Why did you go to see Anne Smith? What were you thinking when you went to see her? You didn't mention her to your wife, either, did you? What about That Night in Bedford?

  I was in the interrogation room nearly an hour. Finally I began to get angry. I was sitting at the table again, drumming my fingers on the surface again. I thought: This is ridiculous. I'm going to find Curtis right now. Right now.

  Maybe I would have. But I'll never know. Because just then, the allegory ended, whatever the allegory was. The door opened.

  I looked up eagerly—and then my eagerness turned to surprise. Startled, I got to my feet quickly.

  Lauren had stepped into the room.

  Lauren under Glass

  The door swung shut behind her. The last time I'd seen her, she'd been screaming obscenities at me. Fuck you, you coward. You hypocrite. You shit. But of course all that was beside the point now—all our little dramas were beside the point now that Serena was in real trouble.

  She gave a loud, weary sigh. Leaned against the wall, her arms crossed under her breasts. She shook her head at me.

  "Can you believe this shit?" she said.

  It struck a jarring note with me. She didn't seem as distraught as she should've been, not even as distraught as I was. Her daughter was missing—kidnapped at gunpoint—and she seemed merely annoyed, merely put out. The look of her bothered me, too. She was wearing loose black jeans and a baggy purple sweater, artfully arranged to smooth over the bulges of her slovenly body. And she'd put on heavy makeup, much heavier than when I'd seen her before. It covered over her rough complexion. It made her eyes look larger and softer than they had. I wouldn't've thought a woman in her situation would spend so much time in front of a mirror. I tried to tell myself that, well, she had cleaned herself up overnight, the same as I had. Still, it didn't seem right.

  "Is there any news about Serena?" I asked her.

  "No, no. They're looking for this Jamal character of hers. I got tired of sitting around waiting for something to happen. They told me you were in here. I figured we could at least pass the time. Fight with each other or something."

  I nodded and looked away and let out a long breath, frustrated.

  "What the hell happened last night, Jason?" she asked me. "I mean, they just broke in, just out of the blue like that?"

  "Yeah. Why? What do you mean?"

  "I don't know. I mean, it just seems ... bizarre, doesn't it? They just—come to your house, they just take her ... With guns? I mean, it sounds like something out of a TV show or something."

  I didn't like her saying that. It made me uncomfortable. I glanced nervously at the one-way mirror. I didn't want the people behind the glass to get the idea that my story sounded fictional.

  "Well ... I don't know how much the police told you..."

  "Oh, they told me. You know how they are: They told me what they told me. I want to hear it from you, though. You were there."

  "Well, I just ... Look, I think Serena's gotten herself mixed up in something pretty bad. I mean, she doesn't seem to have understood what she was doing, but these guys she's with—Jamal and the others—I think they're in league with this radical professor who may have been part of this attack they were planning on Wall Street." I stammered through it. I couldn't just come out and say it. It sounded ridiculously melodramatic, even to me. Like something out of a TV show, yes.

  That was how Lauren reacted to it, rolling her eyes with disbelief. "Come on, Jason. You think my daughter's a terrorist?"

  I glanced at the mirror again. "I didn't say she was a terrorist."

  "Yes, you did. You said—"

  "I said she's gotten mixed up with these guys, and I think they're terrorists. I think they're connected to those guys who were arrested today."

  This time when she rolled her eyes, she snorted, too.

  "Why do you react like that?" I said.

  "Like what?"

  "Like you don't believe me. You think I'm making this up?"

  "I didn't say that."

  "You're acting like it."

  "Well..."

  "Well, what?"

  "Well, Jason!" she said, as if my name were an argument in itself.

  "Jason what? You think I broke into my own house and beat the crap out of myself? Look at me!"

  This was not what I wanted, not the way I wanted to behave. Squabbling with her. Right there in front of the one-way mirror. As if we were an angry divorced couple fighting over their kid. I could just imagine the sardonic cops exchanging sardonic cop glances on the other side of the glass.

  "Look, I don't know what happened..." Lauren said.

  I told myself not to respond to that—not to take the bait—but I couldn't help it. "What do you mean you don't know? I just told you."

  "Yeah, well."

  "Yeah, well what, Lauren?"

  "Serena's sixteen years old, Jason. She's this little ... fucked-up sixteen-year-old adolescent like every other fucked-up adolescent in the world. I mean, okay, you want to tell me she does drugs. You want to tell me she's doing unprotected sex or whatever. But she's not a terrorist, for Christ's sake! She doesn't even watch the news. What's she gonna be a terrorist about? 'Give me more pink camis or I'll blow up The Gap?' Can I ask you something?" Her tone changed instantly, became instantly casual. That Can I ask you something—it sounded as if she were about to ask me where I'd bought my shoes. "Did you two, like ... get into something together?"

  "What?" It came out of me like a chicken's squawk.

  She leaned in toward me confidentially. "Well ... you know."

  I stared at her. "No, I don't know. What are you talking about?"

  "You know, Jason," she said out of one sly corner of her mouth. "I don't mean you and her were, like, doing anything together, obviously. But ... well, I mean, I know you, Jason. I mean, you have to admit: You can get up to some shenanigans yourself when you're in the mood."

  I opened my mouth to answer her, but I didn't answer, and I shut my mouth again.

  We were close together in that small room, face to face. I could see the eyeliner around her eyes and the eyes themselves, the true feelings in them. I could see the micro-expressions at the corners of her lips, the little giveaways. It was all there, I just hadn't noticed it before. I had been too busy thinking about the cops watching me behind the mirror. I had been too worried that I might seem guilty to them, that I might somehow reveal to them my private sins and peccadilloes. I had been so fearful that they might come to suspect me of some wrongdoing in Serena's disappearance that the whole, awful truth of the situation hadn't really struck me. But now I saw it. Now I thought: Of course. This was what had been bothering me all morning, what had caused that sense of foreboding in me when I looked through the cruiser window at the roiling clouds.

  The truth was: The police suspected me already. It was just as I imagined it, just as I worried, exactly as I feared. They already knew my private sins and failings—whatever Lauren could tell them, and no doubt she'd told them all with relish and malicious glee. And then she had come in here. They had sent her i
n here, to catch me off guard, to get me talking, to get me to confess to ... what? To what? What the hell could they suspect me of?

  I didn't know—I had no idea—and I was afraid. I felt cold sweat gathering on the back of my neck. I felt the fear show itself plainly in my expression, in my eyes. Lauren saw it. I could tell she did. I could tell she liked it, too. She had to fight down a smile.

  "Something," she said with a horrible knowingness. "You got up to something, didn't you, Jason?"

  I turned my back on her.

  "What was it?" she said.

  I stepped to the mirror. I glowered into my own frightened eyes, at my own battered face. Lauren's leering image was at my shoulder.

  "What was it, Jason?" she said behind me.

  "Get the hell in here," I said to the mirror. "This game is over."

  I'd hardly finished speaking—I was still looking at the mirror—when the door to the interrogation room opened and Detective Curtis came in. He held the door ajar with his shoulder while he worked the sleeve of his jacket over his other arm. There were no apologies from him, no pretenses.

  "Mr. Harrow" was all he said, slipping his jacket on. "Would you come with me, please?"

  Of course, it wasn't really a question at all.

  Downtown

  Detective Curtis walked rapidly down the cinder-block hallway. I had to hurry to keep up with him. "What the hell's going on?" I said.

  He didn't answer me—didn't say a word—just walked on, straightening the sleeves of his jacket, shooting his cuffs as he went.

  "Excuse me," I said a little more sharply.

  "I'll explain on the way," he said. And he just walked on. I followed, irritated—and sick with fear.

  We came into another room. It was bigger than the interrogation room, but still small. There was a gunmetal desk in each of the four corners, all of them chaotic with papers and coffee cups and files. Three of the desks were unoccupied, as if their residents had been overwhelmed and fled. At another, a harried man sat bent almost double in his chair, leaning urgently into a cell phone as if he were talking a possible suicide off a bridge. There were lots of cheaply printed flyers papering the walls, cheerful pastel pages, some covering the messages on others. DO YOU HAVE INFORMATION ABOUT ... PROTECT YOUR CHILD ... PATROL YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD ...Somewhere the city was paying someone to print up more flyers to cover over even these. On one wall, an open door led into a connecting office. A dapper, silver-haired man was sitting at the desk in there, signing papers with a mournful expression on his face. He looked as if he'd been signing papers forever, and would go on signing them, always with the conviction that they were no more useful than the unreadable flyers on the wall.