Surrender, New York

by Caleb Carr

  “We don’t need to,” I said, hoping that it would sound reassuring rather than self-serving. “Her role as a conduit will be an entirely nonoperational one. All we need are regular reports—there’s no reason she has to come back here to deliver them.”

  “Are you shitting me, L.T.?” Mike said, astonished, yet still keeping an eye on the playfully stalking Marcianna. “I’m not going to let her play any goddamned future role in this investigation, passive or otherwise.” Suddenly, Marcianna made a move forward (not as quickly as she could have, of course), and Mike, displaying fast reflexes of his own, dashed around to walk on my left instead of my right side, leaving the disappointed Marcianna feeling cheated and wronged.

  “Don’t listen to him, girl,” I said. “He’s just being a pain in the ass.”

  “I fucking well am not,” Mike replied. “I’m just getting you prepared. We are not putting Gracie in anything close to harm’s way again.”

  I considered the matter. “Gracie won’t agree to being ordered out—you know that.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ll make her agree,” Mike declared. “No bullshit, L.T.: she does not get anywhere near our work, from here on out.”

  Considering the matter for a moment, I then nodded. “You’re right, Mike. I’m sorry.”

  “Fucking well better be sorry, asshole.”

  I eyed him critically. “What obscure reptile made its way up your rectum and laid its eggs before dying?”

  Mike sighed, lighting a cigarette. “None. Let’s just drop it.”

  Hoping to dispense with this argument, I asked, “You clear on our present objectives?”

  “Probably not,” he answered, in the same tone. “We’re going down to meet Lucas’ sister. Then we fetch the two boys up to get examined by Clarissa; but first, while we’re down there, you give this Ambyr chick the real story about our investigation—or as close as you ever get to telling anybody the real story.”

  I ignored his little dig. “Just remember how important it is to get the sister’s blessing for Lucas’ involvement in what we’re doing. During the next phase he will be particularly important.”

  “You mean, if we go down to the city?”

  “I mean when we go down to the city. The people these kids end up with, like most wealthy degenerates, probably like to have degenerate-club parties—after all, they’ve got nobody else to enjoy their lifestyle with. And, whether those gatherings take place in town or at the nearby horse farm we’ve posited as an alternate site, we won’t be able to either get any answers or infiltrate such an occasion without a young man or girl—a ward, if you will—of our own to bring.”

  Mike exhaled smoke in a disgusted fashion. “You’ll be putting that kid in one lousy situation, Trajan, one that may mess with his head—and mess with it for years to come. You sure it’s worth it?”

  “He’s sure it’s worth it, Mike,” I answered, perhaps a little sharply. “You going to do everybody’s thinking for them?”

  “No,” he said, matching my tone. “Just one more person’s—yours. You need, between now and whenever we leave for the city, to cover some basic possibilities that we haven’t yet, about this group of ‘degenerates’ that we’re supposedly going to take down.”

  “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that we haven’t got all the pieces to state with absolute certainty that such a group exists—but you’re talking about it in certain terms, anyway, to anyone who will listen.”

  “Hey, look, pal,” I defended, as we reached the car and I got Marcianna into the back seat, “you’re the one who came up with all the physical evidence that points south.”

  “Yeah,” Mike replied, not at all fazed. “I did.” Just before getting behind the wheel, he interrupted his lecture to warn: “If Marcianna tears up that seat, you’re paying for it.”

  “When the fuck has she ever torn up that seat? What the hell’s the matter with you, anyway?”

  “Nothing’s the matter with me,” Mike said, starting the Empress up and letting the V-8 idle for a bit. “But you, on the other hand—you have been making one big assumption ever since that night over in Fraser. And the things that happened up on the mountain on Sunday, along with Gracie’s crash, have only accelerated the process.”

  These were words that Mike knew would cut me to the quick. “Is this still your concern for Gracie talking?” I asked carefully. “Because, if it is, I have to tell you, Mike, it’s not me that’s letting my judgment become clouded—”

  “No, it’s not my concern for Gracie talking!” Mike pretty well shouted, at which Marcianna issued a long, sad chirrup that tailed off into a kind of whining groan: a sound she made whenever Mike and I raised our voices to each other. Mike, to his credit, turned to her, and, as she laid her head on the inner edge of each of our seats atop the gap between them, he said, with as much affection as he could muster, “I’m sorry, Marcianna…” Then, to prove his point, he gently stroked the top of her head a few times. “We wouldn’t have to shout, if your boyfriend over there would be straight with me.”

  “And again I must ask—what the hell is bugging you?” I lifted my own hand to continue calming Marcianna as Mike turned back to the dashboard. “Because we’ve got to settle it before we get to the Kurtzes’: we need to come off like an expert investigatory team that has gotten its most basic shit together on this case.”

  Mike sighed and put his forehead to the steering wheel. He seemed to be puzzling with some deep quandary, but when he lifted his head once more, his face had taken on an expression of quiet determination. “Okay,” he breathed, taking a last drag of his cigarette and then powering his window down to throw the butt out. “Listen to me, Trajan—I know you think you’ve covered all the angles on what could be happening, in terms of these kids and the adults they interacted with before their deaths. And instinctively, I agree with you. But we do have a method; and that method should tell you that there are still unknowns that stand in the way of endorsing it absolutely.”

  I was somewhat taken aback: as I had told Mike, it had been his trace work that in large part had allowed me to assemble my profiles both of the throwaway kids and of the proposed group of wealthy pedophiles or hebephiles in New York City that were behind the deaths of those kids, if not directly, then through agents of procurement and disposal. And he had seemed to accept—and more, to agree with—that theory completely; yet now he was questioning some basic aspect of it, to an extent that was at least troubling, and perhaps something a good deal more than that. “All right, Mike,” I said at length. “Suppose you just tell me what factors should prevent us from endorsing the theory that I put together—and would not have been able to put together without your own work.”

  Putting the car into gear, Mike adjusted the front and rear windows to the heights that we usually employed when Marcianna was aboard, which would allow her to enjoy the especially strong wind created by Mike’s greed for speed, while preventing her from jumping out of the moving vehicle. In response, Marcianna plopped her big head down on my right shoulder, so that she would receive the full force of the wind from my window in particular. In doing so, she completed the necessary illusion of actually looking like some breed of enthusiastic but well-behaved hunting dog.

  “Look,” Mike said, as he, very uncharacteristically, backed slowly out of the barn lot and then started down the hollow at a similarly deliberate speed, to underscore what he was trying to say. “I get it. I get what you’re after, and I get why. I saw the way your brain lit up out on 22 at the mere thought that there might be some new NAMBLA-type organization at work, tied to some of the people in the city who you see—and okay, maybe I do, too—as representative of everything that’s gone wrong with the place, our home, including the fact that we don’t live there anymore.”

  “And you’re saying that you don’t accept that theory, all of a sudden?”

  “Trajan,” Mike replied, attempting supreme patience, “of course I accept the theory—as
just that: a possible explanation, maybe even a probable one. But I’m asking you to remember that there are still too many questions we haven’t answered about these disappearances, reappearances, and suicides for us to draw absolute conclusions. I mean, yes, the theory is possible—”

  “But look at the reactions, Mike—don’t they make it more than possible? You heard Gracie: in the space of—what, about a week?—our theory has put real fear into politicians and law enforcement, and, it looks like, the people actually responsible, as well.”

  “But it could still be wrong,” Mike replied, with rising volume to match mine, which brought another little growling whimper from Marcianna, who stuck her face a little closer to my window. “Suppose,” Mike continued, “that the attempt to provide those kids with new lives, lives with futures, was actually benign, in many or even most cases?”

  “ ‘Benign’? How the hell do you figure it could be benign?”

  Mike was ready to shout again, but he got the urge under control. “By using our system, damn it. By positing an opposing idea that works. And what are its central elements? Well, we can’t say, for instance, just how many children went down to the city, shepherded by this organization. And we therefore can’t say how many landed in the homes of adults who had perfectly understandable, even laudable reasons for taking them on in the way they did: maybe they were just couples who failed New York State’s adoption regulations—which are fucking arcane and arbitrary, at times, and you know it. Or maybe some of these throwaways have taken the place of kids who went missing without explanation sometime in the past, and whose parents, because of that fact, live under a cloud of endless suspicion, one that prevents them from ever adopting anyone legally—because the city and state of New York view most such parents with just such suspicion, and you know that, too. But the suspicion doesn’t stop the parents from continuing to want a kid to raise—one to take the place of the lost child. These are real possibilities, possibilities that contradict our theory, and our method demands that we fucking factor them into the process before we leap to the conclusion—a leap the moron state investigators have, I remind you, already made—that sexual exploitation was the sole motive behind both the disappearances and the strangulations. Remember what the goddamned state has apparently put out of its mind: no signs of sexual assault or even recent activity on any of the victims’ bodies. That is what I’m saying: you’ve been cutting corners, and it’s gotta stop. For the moment, we’ve got a theory—a good theory, but it is not definitive. Not yet.”

  I sat back, a bit stunned. Everything Mike had said about our method was accurate, and he had provided not one but two credible antitheses to my theory of a cabal of ultra-wealthy child abusers. Was I, then, filling in blank spaces with assumptions, in order to make the theory fit the mold I wanted it to, and thus employing confirmation bias? Was I, in fact, guilty of one of the things I most indicted law enforcement agencies for—tunnel vision?

  “Hang on, now, Mike,” I eventually said. “If what you’re saying is true, then how do you explain the stagings themselves? Why make the suicides look like murders? And how about what happened on the mountain the other night?”

  “Could you go to court with any of that?” Mike replied. “No, you couldn’t—because it’s not definitive, not conclusive enough. You know that, L.T.—it’s fucking Jurassic Park logic!”

  Now he was really swinging hard. “Jurassic Park logic” was a uniformly derisive phrase that Mike and I often used, especially in relation to forensic science television shows, to describe a habit displayed by both real and fictional law enforcement officials of filling in blank spaces in their theories of a crime with the most desirable or necessary possible elements and circumstances, despite the implausible or even fantastic nature of those elements. The phrase arose out of the mutual enthusiasm that Mike and I still shared for Michael Crichton’s novel, an enthusiasm we had developed when we were each about Lucas’ age, and the book had first appeared; and when we met later in life, we spent long hours affectionately dissecting the logical and scientific improbabilities whose resolution had to be achieved in order for the tale to work: the kind of improbabilities that, according to my partner, I was exhibiting, by filling in gaps in our theory not with what I was actually seeing, but with whatever facts would make that theory work.

  “Gracie could simply have had an accident, Trajan,” Mike explained further. “We need to get a look at the truck that clipped her, but we have no idea about how close they are to even finding it, because you’ve been so fixated on getting a look at those authentication documents—which Pete could perfectly easily photograph on the sly, and then transmit to us electronically, if he doesn’t want to risk a confrontation with Mangold. Above all, the throwaways still could have been unconnected deaths, all of them: proving that they spent some time in moneyed company down south says nothing about why they killed themselves—maybe they were just a few out of many who didn’t like the experience. Throw in what Latrell said about ‘them,’ about how ‘they’ had engaged him to place Donnie Butler’s body in that abandoned building, and you have every reason to think that the suicides happened locally; we’re almost certain that Shelby’s did. And didn’t you say that Donnie OD’d at ‘their’ place, wherever that might be?” I only nodded a few times in response. “Well, there you go—do you really think that Latrell got called in to the luxury apartment or fancy horse farm of some ultra-wealthy person so many miles away from Fraser? Did he really seem like the type? And did he really expect to hear from such people when he ran into trouble like he did?”

  “No,” I murmured, so softly that I doubt Mike even heard me over the wind rushing through the windows; but he would have seen my steadily shaking head. It took a few more silent moments, but I finally managed an answer, one that made me not a little embarrassed: “Okay, Mike. Your points are taken. And you’re right. I’ve moved a little too fast on a theory that…I happen to like.”

  “I get no fun out of saying it, kid,” Mike answered, in a decently sympathetic tone. “Because I know, like I told you, what’s making you do it. You’re pissed. You’re pissed because, on that last case in the city, we won the battle, but lost the war. We figured it out—and then they shitcanned us. We didn’t deserve that. Yeah, sure, we’d become a little arrogant, a little full of ourselves—but we’d maintained the record to back it up.”

  I grunted once. “Is there a record that ever really backs up arrogance, Michael?”

  “Yeah,” he said, with reassuring definitiveness. “There is—and we assembled it. Name me any one team in the New York law enforcement system that had a higher solve rate than we did—even though we were technically ‘advisors.’ You can’t. But…” Mike sighed once; a big, sad sigh of a kind I hadn’t yet heard from him, and one that made Marcianna pick her head up and look his way, as if to make sure that he was all right. “In the end, it didn’t matter. The new citizens of New York want to believe that their police department is both strong and infallible. That’s what 9/11 did to them. They don’t care if the wrong people go to jail, or if rough justice is handed out to suspects out of the public view, or if people on the outskirts are still having their rights violated fairly constantly. Just so long as the town becomes something that it was never intended to be.”

  I glanced at him. “And what’s that?”

  Mike let out another sigh, this one shorter and angrier. “Los Angeles,” he soon said. To my bemused expression, he explained further: “That’s what New York is playing by, now—L.A. rules. As long as the town is a safe playground for the rich and famous, let the cops do what they have to. Or hire private cops, which, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, more and more neighborhoods in New York are doing. I’m telling you, it’s fucking perverse. New York’s supposed to be the rough-and-tumble melting pot, where the rules for the rest of the country are hammered out. Now…every place is going to become Los Angeles. A desert-town-turned-city that wouldn’t even exist, if Nature had anything to do with it.
Fucking perverse…”

  I did not hide my confusion: “What the hell happened to me needing to get over our exile, to ‘you wouldn’t want to live there now, anyway’?”

  “You wouldn’t. Not the way it’s become. Face it, L.T.: the city we grew up in is gone, dead, wiped out. Drowned in dough. So you do need to get over it. Our life up here is pretty damned good, for a couple of guys who could be doing a lot worse. That’s why I want you to be really fucking careful on this case—do not let the same thing that happened in New York happen here. Don’t blow our deal on an answer that’s right, but makes it necessary for the powers that be to get rid of us. Because, assuming you’re not holding out on me, we’re fresh out of places to be exiled to. Unless you want to go to Yunnan with Mei-lien and teach at the Kunming Medical University–slash–forensic science training center. I’m sure they’d be happy to have us, although I think we’d have to change our curriculum just a bit—like, the whole fucking thing.”

  I couldn’t help but chuckle. “And what happened to you not being Chinese?”

  “I’m not! That’s the whole point. Two American experts in trace evidence and criminal psychology? They’d let us in so fast—”

  “Nah,” I finally decided. “China doesn’t seem like a good fit.”

  “No,” Mike replied. “It doesn’t. Okay—now, where the fuck does that little freak live again?”

  “Just go around the square in town and head out 34,” I answered. “He said it’s a little white house with peeling paint not too far along—wait, I’ve got the number here, somewhere…”

  As I began checking my pockets, finally finding Lucas’ address tucked in behind my watch in the right pocket of my vest, I caught sight of the statue of Colonel Jones in the square: and, despite the green and white streaks of tarnish caused by countless rain- and snowstorms, he continued to look ready to head into battle, as did the noble mastiff Cassius at his side.