by JP Delaney
“Patrick…I need time to think about this. Please?”
He considers for a moment. Then, turning to the girl, he speaks to her in French. Her terrified eyes widen. Desperately, she nods.
“Good.” He pulls out a knife and cuts through the tether tying her to the wall, leaving her hands bound. Then he places the knife a few feet in front of her.
“I just told her that if she wants to get out of here alive, her only option is to kill you,” he says matter-of-factly. “So now you really have to make a choice, Claire.”
Rose is edging toward the knife.
“You know, there’s a poem by Baudelaire about this very conundrum.” Patrick takes a gun from one of the backpacks and holds it out to me. “He describes a menagerie, a zoo filled with every kind of vice. And he poses a riddle: Who is the monster even worse than these? The answer is you, the reader, who can enjoy the horrors in his poems without having to bloody your own hands.”
“Don’t pick up the knife, Rose,” I say desperately. She doesn’t appear to hear me. I don’t even know if she speaks English.
“Well, now you have to bloody your hands,” Patrick tells me.
Rose hesitates, then lunges for the knife, scrabbling to pick it up with her bound hands.
Reluctantly, I take the gun.
“Good,” Patrick breathes. “Now, my love. Do it now.”
To kill or be killed. It has the unreal clarity of a dream. I can’t even begin to process the emotions—revulsion, terror, disbelief—flooding through me.
And something else, too: a terrible realization that this moment was always going to happen. That at some level, I always knew.
I wanted this.
102
Every child in foster care is there for a different reason. Some have parents who are alcoholics or users. Some are orphans. Others have been neglected or abused.
I used to tell people I was an orphan. But that wasn’t true. My parents had been going through what people call a bad patch. There were fights that went on all night. Once, my dad marched into my bedroom and woke me up to yell at me about my mum—he wanted me to know what a whore she was, wanted me to know the truth about this so-called angel who thinks she’s so much better than me. I remember glimpsing her behind him as she tried to pull him off me; the way he wheeled around with his arm flung out, as carelessly as if he was scattering seed. The way his hand connected with her face and she spun to the floor. To a child, it looked as seamless as a dance.
Once, he broke all the furniture in the living room and used a table leg to beat her unconscious. Time after time she threw him out, but he kept coming back, always with the same mantra: This is my house, my daughter, and you’re not going to deprive me of them.
I used to hide under the bed when they fought.
That was where he found me, that night.
“Come on out, Claire,” he said. “Mummy’s hurt herself.”
* * *
—
“I’ve got to go away now,” he said when I was sitting on the bed. “Let Mummy rest, okay? Mummy needs to sleep, then she’ll feel better. And in the morning, can you get yourself dressed and go to school? If anyone asks, don’t tell them about Mummy being in bed. Just say she’s fine. Can you do that? Can you pretend? For me?”
I nodded. “Yes, Daddy.”
“Good girl. I love you. Do you love me?”
“I love you loads,” I said.
At his trial, they offered to let me give evidence by video or behind a screen but I didn’t want that. I wanted him to see me telling everyone out loud all the things I’d had to keep secret before.
The judge told me I was one of the bravest witnesses he’d ever had in his courtroom.
Then he sentenced my dad to life for murder. I never visited him in prison, not once.
103
INT. CATACOMBS, PARIS—NIGHT
Patrick speaks to me calmly, soothingly.
PATRICK
You’ve been here before, Claire. You pulled the trigger then. You remember how easy it was? Trust me. This will be easy too.
As if I’m simply in a scene we’re rehearsing, I turn. I aim the gun. I shoot. I shoot Patrick. The monster I love.
104
I pull the trigger. The gun clicks. Patrick sighs.
“When I say I’m trusting you with the gun…I was speaking metaphorically. It wasn’t loaded.”
He takes the gun from my hand and loads it with bullets. Then he points it at Rose, plucking the knife from her grasp. She sobs despairingly through her gag as he fastens the rope back to the hoop in the wall.
“Come,” he says to me, ignoring her.
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know. Nowhere. Everywhere. I didn’t want this to happen, Claire. I wanted you to do it. To understand me. To share my world.”
We retrace our steps toward the pool chamber. The candles Patrick lit earlier have burned low now, guttering and flickering in the faint stale draft, their flames gouging shadows into the rock.
He takes a bottle from his backpack. “Drink this. It will numb the pain.”
I take a long pull. Absinthe.
“And read for me,” he says softly. “Read one aloud. Like you did that first time.”
I take the book he hands me and in a flat toneless voice begin to read.
“I have more memories than if I had lived a thousand years…”
There are tears on Patrick’s face. I let the book fall from my hands, reciting the rest from memory.
“An old desk full of dead ideas
Is not more full of secrets than my aching head…”
He puts his hands around my neck.
“Constantinople,” I say.
“What?” Patrick says, frowning.
“My safe word. The one I said I couldn’t remember. It meant come and get me. Now. Constantinople.”
“So, Claire?” he says disbelievingly.
Something tumbles into the chamber. A round, metallic object. Out of the corner of my eye I watch it roll along the ground. It hits the wall and stops.
For a split second, nothing happens. Then there’s an explosion of white light. Noise follows a moment later, a percussion blast so powerful it knocks us both off our feet. A high-pitched ringing fills my ears. Torch beams slice through the smoke-filled darkness as shadowy figures in black uniforms storm the cavern from all sides.
One of them kneels beside me and lifts his visor.
SWAT TEAM LEADER
Claire! Claire—are you okay?
I feel his hands dig gently under my shoulders as he lifts me into his arms.
“Frank,” I say. “You came.”
105
La Martine, just outside the city of Lyon, has a long and checkered history. Originally a lunatic asylum, it was later used by the Gestapo for interrogations. Now it houses some of Europe’s most high-security prisoners. Because of its proximity to Interpol headquarters, it has become the nearest thing there is to a prison of the world.
Kathryn Latham comes here one frosty morning in December, as so many have come before her, to conduct an interrogation. She’s shown into a small, pastel-colored room where, once upon a time, the questioners used lengths of rubber hoses, baths full of shit, truncheons, thumbscrews.
She’s brought a pen and paper, a small recording device, and a pack of French cigarettes.
Patrick Fogler is led in. He’s wearing the standard-issue prison uniform: loose-fitting jeans and a denim jacket. His wrists are cuffed.
“I brought you some cigarettes,” she says as he sits down. “I’d heard you were smoking now.”
“Everyone smokes here. It isn’t like America.”
“Are they treating you well?”
He shrugs. “What do you care? It’s tolerable.�
��
She pushes the cigarettes across the table. “I have a proposition for you, Patrick.”
“Ah, yes,” he sneers. “The fearless academic in her quest for the truth. Not to mention professional advancement. The pressure to publish is so intense these days, isn’t it? No doubt you’re hoping to get a nice fat monograph out of me.”
“Your relationship with the other users on Necropolis,” she says calmly. “I want to know more about how it worked. Who fed off who? Did you and Furman see each other as competitors, or as fellow artists collaborating in different media? Would some of your own desires have remained unrealized if it hadn’t been for the images he created? Or did you always hope the translations would find followers like him? There’s a lot of material here, Patrick, and it’s all new territory for us. If you cooperate, I might be able to do something for you in return.”
“Somehow I don’t think there’ll be a plea bargain in my case, Dr. Latham.”
“That’s not what I’m offering. More like a trade. You answer my questions…and I’ll answer yours.”
“What makes you think I have any questions for you?” he says witheringly.
“Oh, I think you do. One question, anyway.”
She’s got him, and he acknowledges it with a grudging nod.
“You want to know how much of it was real,” she adds. “Whether Claire meant a single word she ever said to you. Or whether she was simply doing our bidding all along.”
He sits back. “So tell me.”
“She’s a remarkable person, Patrick. And a remarkable actress. When we found her, she was studying a kind of acting that involved immersing herself in the part with absolute commitment. It was her suggestion that she do the same with the role we were asking her to play.”
INT. KATHRYN LATHAM’S OFFICE—NIGHT
Kathryn’s briefing me.
KATHRYN
You need to become a more extreme version of yourself. And you need to live that character twenty-four hours a day, week in, week out—even when it seems the people you trusted the most have betrayed you the worst.
ME
I can do that.
KATHRYN
There’s something else…Something you’re going to have to do, if this is going to be believable.
ME
I know.
“I told her she had to fall in love with you,” Kathryn says simply. “And I told her she had to follow the logic of that emotion wherever it took her. No matter how disloyal or crazy or dangerous it seemed.”
Briefly, Patrick closes his eyes. “So it was a lie. All of it.”
“You’re missing the point. For her, there’s no difference. She loved you. She made herself love you. That was what we needed from her.”
“ ‘Yet all my lady’s virtues are a mask,’ ” Patrick quotes softly. “ ‘Her beauty just a painted face.’ ” He gives Kathryn a sharp look. “And Necropolis?”
“What about it?”
“You’d infiltrated it somehow, hadn’t you? The FBI. But instead of shutting it down, you just sat there and watched us. Studied us. Like we were crawling around some glass-sided ants’ nest in a lab. I’m even willing to bet it was you who sent me Furman’s images in the first place.” He leans forward. “You do know you’re complicit in every one of the murders that took place after that? Stella’s included. Poor Stella. I may have killed her, but it was you who set those events in motion.”
Kathryn presses a button on the Dictaphone.
“Interview with Patrick Fogler,” she says. “Tape one.”
106
INT. DELTON HOTEL BAR, W. 44TH ST., NEW YORK—EARLY EVENING
I sit in a quiet corner of the bar, a drink in my hand, trying to make it last. You’d probably think I was waiting for my date.
But then you’d see the burly middle-aged man who drops into the seat opposite me, and revise your opinion.
I smile across the table at him. “What kept you, Frank?”
“Paperwork. You need to be a fricking touch-typist to be a detective these days.” He waves the waitress over and orders a beer, then turns back to me. “You okay?”
“I’m…okay,” I say. “Thank you for asking.”
“I meant, for a drink,” he says gruffly.
“I know. And yes, I’m okay.”
Frank nods. He reaches into his jacket, pulls out an envelope, and slides it across the table. “Here. You just need to sign it and mail it in. Should have your green card within a week.”
I look at the envelope. But don’t pick it up.
“I might be going back to England, Frank.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Oh?”
“My foster mother’s having a birthday party. I should be there. And then, all those things I was running away from…They don’t seem so scary anymore. Not by comparison with…” I leave the sentence unfinished.
“I guess not,” he says quietly. Then: “Well, if you ever need anything…”
I smile. “Just say Constantinople?”
He grins back. “Right. And I’ll come running. With a SWAT team and a couple of stun grenades.”
I look at him with affection. At this man I’ve shared so much with. My guardian angel. Crouched over his monitors, headphones pressed to his ears, listening through the crackling static for the magic word, the one that would bring the whole illusion tumbling down around our ears.
Even when the weeks turned into months, not once did I doubt that when I needed him, he’d be there.
I’d known from the start they were going to spring a twist, something to help me break through Patrick’s secrecy and paranoia and make him trust me. They’d offered to tell me what, but I hadn’t wanted to know. I’ll react in the moment, I told them. Using whatever you give me. It’ll be more authentic that way.
Even I never imagined quite how far I’d take it. But I was drawing on my only previous experience of love for my affective memory, and there was only one place my instincts were taking me. Three relatively shallow lateral incisions in the left cubital fossa. It would have taken you hours to bleed out.
Same when I glimpsed Frank in the park that day. Not reacting as myself, with a smile or a wave, but asking, What does my character think about that? Using it to make Patrick believe I was still suspicious of him. And, therefore, that he had no reason to be suspicious of me.
Giving him tiny glimpses into a mind almost as twisted and sociopathic as his own. But always, always, following the through line, the one overarching truth that drove my character ever deeper into his arms.
“I still love him,” I say softly.
“Who?” Frank frowns, not understanding, then: “That creep? Why?”
“It turns out Kathryn was right—you can’t just take it off along with the makeup. I made myself go inside his head. And a part of me’s finding it hard to get out.”
He studies me for a moment. “Tell me something, Claire. How far would you have taken it? If we hadn’t been there, I mean. Could you have pulled the trigger on that girl?”
“I guess that’s the question, isn’t it? Where does the acting stop?” I shake my head. “No. No, of course I couldn’t.”
I say it so smoothly that even I’d be surprised to discover it’s a lie.
Because it isn’t the right question. It isn’t the right question at all.
What Frank should have asked is what I’d have done if Patrick had been the one to kill her. Whether I’d have broken character and died at his hands as a result. Or whether we’d have made love beside her still-warm corpse.
Frank’s sentimental, like all Americans. The Hollywood ending I’m providing him with will keep him satisfied, like a box of buttered popcorn.
Who is the real Claire Wright? The one sitting here, with her precious green card permit in front of her, excha
nging pleasantries with the man who provided it? Or the one who fell for the darkness she sensed deep inside the only man she couldn’t seduce?
Which is the performance: Who I was then? Or who I am now?
Some guys, the gray takes hold of them, and they can’t make it let go…
Frank’s looking at me a little strangely. “Maybe you should remember that thing they say on movie shoots, Claire.”
“Yes?” I say. “Which thing is that?”
“Doesn’t Count On Location.”
“Right,” I say, smiling. “Doesn’t Count On Location.”
I raise my glass and touch it to his, a toast. The strange look he just gave me—concern mingled with fear—gets put away somewhere, deep in the filing system.
I’ll use that, someday.
And the invisible camera in my head slowly pulls up and away, releasing us, our voices fading into the background chatter of a New York bar at night, as the words THE END fade up and the credits start to roll.
FOR MICHAEL
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Seventeen years ago, under another title and another name, I wrote a novel about an actress given a role in an undercover operation. It received some favorable reviews, was published in a few countries, and then—like so many books—failed to sell. I was left with a nagging sense of frustration—not with the publishers, who’d done all they could, but with myself. I felt I’d thrown away an interesting idea by not writing it well enough.
Fast-forward almost two decades, and the success of my novel The Girl Before made it possible for me to get the earlier book republished. But I didn’t really want to bring that flawed offering back before the public. I wanted to start again, and rewrite it from scratch.
So that’s what I’ve done. This book, although built around the same idea as the earlier one, and containing some of the same scenes, is completely different in plot, characterization, and structure.