Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

  For a year, he searched “tierney andreas milliken” two and three times a day. He monitored Tierney on Facebook and Twitter no less compulsively. His paranoia was evidently a fixed quantity. If he suppressed it in one place, it popped out in a different place. When Tierney finally ceased to worry him so much—if the guy was going to blab, he would have done it by now, and Andreas would have known about it—he didn’t become any less anxious. He worried, serially, about former girlfriends, about disgruntled former employees, about surviving Stasi functionaries, until he arrived at the mother of all worries: Tom Aberant.

  For a long time, for twenty years, he’d assumed that the secret of his homicidal past was safe with Tom. By helping to move the body, Tom had committed a serious crime himself, and in the letter he’d sent Andreas some months later, from New York, he’d apologized for “bailing” on him, had assured him that nothing he’d said in Berlin would ever see the light of day, neither in Harper’s nor anywhere else, and had expressed the wish that their “little adventure” would allow Andreas to have the life he wanted with his girl. Injured though Andreas had felt by the distant tone of Tom’s later postcards, especially the one in reply to his confessional letter, he hadn’t been worried by it. Even when he’d taken one last stab at reviving their friendship, in 2005, by calling Tom in Denver and offering a major leak to Denver Independent, and Tom had rebuffed him, he hadn’t worried. At worst, he’d thought, Tom was in professional competition with him. It was the sort of thing that could happen in abortive friendships.

  But then one morning, in the barn at Los Volcanes, reading the daily digest of news about himself, he came across an interview that a Denver Independent journalist, Leila Helou, had given to the Columbia Journalism Review.

  The leakers just spew. It takes a journalist to collate and condense and contextualize what they spew. We may not always have the best of motives, but at least we have some investment in civilization. We’re adults trying to communicate with other adults. The leakers are more like savages. I don’t mean the primary leakers, not Snowden or Manning, they’re really just glorified sources. I mean the outlets like WikiLeaks and the Sunlight Project. They have this savage naïveté, like the kid who thinks adults are hypocrites for filtering what comes out of their mouths. Filtering isn’t phoniness—it’s civilization. Julian Assange is so blind and deaf to basic social functioning that he eats with his hands. Andreas Wolf is a man so full of his own dirty secrets that he sees the entire world as dirty secrets. Fling everything at the wall, like a four-year-old flinging poop, and see what sticks.

  Dirty secrets? Andreas reread the offending passage with cold dread. Who the fuck was Leila Helou? A quick search turned up photos of her and Tom Aberant together at professional functions, along with catty remarks, on bottom-feeding blogs, to the effect that sleeping with Denver Independent’s publisher had done wonders for her talent. Leila Helou was Tom’s girlfriend.

  Dirty secrets? Flinging poop? Where was the filtering in that?

  He thought of the call he’d made to Denver in 2005. The Halliburton Papers had been the Sunlight Project’s most significant international leak to date. He could have taken them straight to the New York Times, but he knew that Tom had started up an online news service and would probably jump at the chance for overnight notoriety. Although his motive in calling Tom was less than fully pure—he enjoyed the idea that Tom now needed something from the friend he’d abandoned, the friend who was now more famous and powerful than he was—the old yearning for his friendship was part of it. He’d imagined that Denver Independent could be the Project’s American mouthpiece; that he and Tom could finally work together, albeit from separate continents. And Tom, on the phone, had sounded interested. Yes, almost gushing—it was fifteen years since they’d heard each other’s voice. He’d asked Andreas for one hour to discuss the leak with a “trusted adviser.”

  This had sounded like a mere formality. But when Tom had called back, after an hour and fifteen minutes, his tone of voice had changed. “Andreas,” he’d said, “I really appreciate the offer. It means a lot to me, and it’s a tough call. But I think I have to stick with my core mission, which is to nurture investigative journalism. Boots-on-the-ground journalism. I’m not saying there’s no place for what you’re doing. But I’m afraid that place isn’t here.”

  Hanging up the phone, Andreas had vowed never to let himself be hurt by Tom again. But only now, eight years later, when he read the Helou interview, did he understand that Tom wasn’t merely indifferent to him. Tom was an existential threat.

  What he saw all at once: that Tom had glimpsed the Killer. In the light of dawn, in the Oder valley. The monster stiffy that hugging Tom had given him was not, as he’d supposed, the natural unleashing of the libido he’d suppressed since the night of the murder. Nor was it a gay man’s stiffy, not in any meaningful sense. But it was nonetheless a stiffy for Tom. He had it for the same reason he’d had it for the fifteen-year-old Annagret: because Tom had made himself part of the murder. Man, woman—the Killer didn’t trouble with such distinctions. And what had he done then? He couldn’t remember for sure, it might have been a dream. But if it was a dream it must have been a vivid one. Straddling the grave, his stiffy in hand: had this really happened? It must have happened, because how else to explain why Tom had thenceforth shut him out? Tom had witnessed the thing the Killer had made him do. Tom had promised to have dinner with him but instead had run home to New York, taken refuge in his woman. And Andreas had proceeded to pursue him with a totally uncharacteristic lack of pride, sending him postcards, writing him a self-exposing letter, and finally calling him on the phone, not because the two of them were destined to be friends but because the Killer never forgot what it wanted, once it wanted it. There was no such thing as love.

  The “trusted adviser” Tom had mentioned on the phone: who else could it have been but Leila Helou? Tom had asked his new woman what to do about the Halliburton Papers, his new woman had nixed it, and now, eight years later, it was all too obvious why: because Tom had told her about the murder of Horst Kleinholz. What else could dirty secrets refer to? She’d practically accused Andreas of cold-blooded murder.

  When he reread her words yet again, the Killer stepped right out into the open, in the form of a wish to crush Tom’s cranium with a blunt object. If there had been a way to get past U.S. Immigration, he would have gone to Denver and murdered Tom. For having glimpsed the Killer. For rejecting the most authentic overtures of friendship Andreas had ever made. For spurning him again and again, for the shame of that. And for submitting to his wife and deferring to his girlfriend. For seducing Andreas and then betraying him to the girlfriend; for not keeping his pretty mouth shut. But above all for his American sanctimony: “I’m not saying there’s no place for the loathsome, criminal, fame-chasing, poop-flinging, grave-defiling things you do. But I’m afraid that my clean house is not the place for them.” He’d all but said that on the telephone.

  “I can’t believe you did this to me,” Andreas muttered. “I can’t believe you did this to me…”

  He was rational enough to recognize that Tom still wasn’t likely to incriminate himself by exposing Andreas’s crime. What inflamed his paranoia was the thought that Tom had seen the Killer in him. The thought was like an electrode in his brain. He couldn’t stop pushing the button, and it gave him, each time, an identical jolt of dread and hatred.

  Pleading illness to his interns, he holed up in his bedroom and searched for dirt on Tom and Helou. Already the blogosphere and social media were a-crackle with outrage at her CJR interview. In the world of so-called adults, Helou was a respected journalist, but in the online world she was getting reamed as fiercely as Andreas was being defended. Somehow, instead of reassuring him, this made him hate the Aberant-Helou nexus all the more. They’d deliberately provoked the very bloggers and tweeters whom he was devoting more and more of his existence to appeasing. Again the pointed sanctimony, again the message: We’re what you can never be.
We disdain not only you but the virtual world in which you increasingly exist. We’re capable of the love you were incapable of having for Annagret …

  According to Google, Helou was married to a disabled novelist on whom she presumably was cheating. But if she was appearing in public with Tom, they must not have cared what people thought. A more promising question was what had happened to Tom’s wife. After 1991, there were zero contemporaneous records for anyone with her name and birth date. Andreas was seized with the hope that Tom had murdered her and gotten away with it. This seemed fantastically improbable, but in a way it also didn’t. Tom had spoken, after all, of being unable to live either with Laird or without her. And he had, after all, helped Andreas bury a body.

  Following an instinct, he turned his attention to Laird and discovered that her billionaire father had set up a trust fund for her; the Wichita Eagle had reported on the tax filings. There was also evidence that Tom had founded Denver Independent with money from the father. But not a lot of money. Not the kind of money that Anabel would be worth if she was still alive. Was she alive? Or, better yet, a corpse? An instinct told Andreas that, dead or alive, she might be a way to inflict pain and chaos on Tom from a distance.

  He went to his lead hacker, Chen, and asked how easily they could steal a lot of computer processing capacity.

  “How much?” Chen said.

  “I have two good photos of a twenty-four-year-old woman who’s now in her late fifties. I want to run a facial-recognition match on every photo database we can access.”

  “Worldwide?”

  “Start with the U.S.”

  “It’s a lot. Try to do it fast, they’ll catch us. So many of these farms, you can only grab a few minutes at a time. We got some really good farms, but we don’t want to lose them.”

  “What would less than fast be?”

  “Weeks, maybe more. And that’s just for U.S.”

  “See what you can do. Be as safe as you can.”

  Their facial-recognition software was nearly NSA-grade but still didn’t work very well. (The NSA’s didn’t either.) Every day for several weeks, Chen forwarded Andreas pictures of late-middle-aged women who didn’t look much like Anabel Laird. But going through the images gave him something to do, made him feel as if a plot were being advanced, took the worst edge off his paranoia. And then, for neither the first time nor the last time, he got lucky.

  He’d always considered good luck his birthright—his mother had said it herself: the world conformed to whatever he felt like doing—but his bad luck with Dan Tierney had shaken his faith in it. The resolution of the image of a gray-haired supermarket employee in Felton, California, was too low to show the scar visible on Laird’s forehead in the older pictures, and because the employee wasn’t smiling he couldn’t confirm the gap between her front teeth. But when he saw the employee’s name, Penelope Tyler, and connected it with her years at Tyler School of Art, he sensed that his good luck had returned. He walked out of the tech building and looked up at the Bolivian sun, spread his arms, and soaked up its hot light.

  Penelope Tyler was clearly a person who’d tried to disappear. The employee photo was the only image of her anywhere, and her official footprint was impressively faint. It took Andreas nearly an hour to discover that she had a daughter. This daughter, Purity, was relatively richly documented, with profiles on Facebook and LinkedIn and a very shaky credit history. He studied the pictures of her and recent pictures of Tom, comparing her eyebrows with Tom’s eyebrows, her mouth with Tom’s mouth, and concluded that she had to be his daughter. But there was no sign of contact between them, not on social media, not in her college or health records, nothing anywhere. Given that she’d been born not long after Laird vanished, it could only be that Tom didn’t know she existed. Why else would Laird have changed her identity?

  The girl was indirectly worth a shitload of money, a billion-size sum, and almost certainly didn’t know it. She was making student-loan payments, living in a house that looked semi-derelict in Street View, and working as an “outreach associate” for an alternative-energy start-up. The money interested Andreas to the extent that it might make his life easier if he could get his hands on some of it. But it wasn’t the reason he kept clicking through the photographs he had of Purity Tyler. Nor were her looks, though pleasant enough, the reason he conceived such a murderous desire for her. What mattered was that she was Tom’s.

  He set up a secure connection and called Annagret. Over the years, he’d been careful not to fall completely out of touch with her. He remembered her birthday and occasionally forwarded her links pertaining to one of her causes. For all the energy she’d invested in the project of closeness, it was remarkable how unclose she felt to him. How random it was—apart from her beauty—that he’d ever had anything to do with her. Not only was she small in her ambitions, she seemed perfectly content to be small. She’d left Berlin and moved to Düsseldorf. But her emails to him were always cordial and admiring, with many exclamation marks.

  On the phone, after making sure she was alone, he explained what he needed her to do. “Consider this a free vacation in America,” he said.

  “I hate America,” she said. “I thought Obama would change things, but it’s still just guns, drones, Guantánamo.”

  “Guantánamo is unfortunate, I agree. I’m not asking you to like the country. I’m just asking you to go there. I’d do it myself if I could, but I can’t.”

  “I’m not sure I can, either,” she said. “I know you always thought I was a good liar, but I don’t like doing that anymore.”

  “It doesn’t mean you’re not still good at it.”

  “And maybe … Well. Is it really so terrible if this person tells the world what we did? I still think about it almost every day. I can’t watch movies with any violence in them. Twenty-five years later, it still gives me panic attacks.”

  “I’m sorry about that. But Aberant is threatening to discredit everything I’ve done.”

  “I understand. The Project is very important. And I’ve always wished there was some way to make up for what I did to you. But—how does bringing his daughter to Bolivia help you?”

  “Leave that to me.”

  A silence fell. Worrisome.

  “Andreas,” she said finally. “Do you feel bad about what we did?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “OK. I don’t know what I’m thinking about. I guess our time together. Sometimes I feel really bad about it. I know I disappointed you. But that’s not why I feel bad. There’s something else—I can’t explain it.”

  He was alarmed but spoke calmly. “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. I see your life now, all your girlfriends, and … Sometimes I wonder why you didn’t have affairs when you were with me. It’s OK if you did. You can tell me now.”

  “I never did. I was trying to be good to you.”

  “You are good. I know all the fantastic good things you’ve done. Sometimes I can’t believe I used to live with you. But still … Do you really feel bad about the thing we did?”

  “Yes!”

  “OK. I don’t know what I’m thinking about.”

  He sighed. So many years, and they still had to have discussions.

  “I feel bad about the sex,” she said suddenly. “I’m sorry, but that’s what it is.”

  “What about it?” he managed to say.

  “I don’t know. But I have more experience now, more to compare it to. And hearing your voice—I don’t know. It’s bringing back something I don’t like to think about. Some really bad feeling I can’t describe. It’s making me panic, a little bit. Right now. I’m feeling panic.”

  “It was all mixed up with the thing we did. Maybe it was why we couldn’t stay together.”

  She took an audibly deep breath. “Andreas, this girl—why do you want me to bring her to you?”

  “To make her believe in the Project. That’s our best protection. If she’s on our side, her father won’t do anything.”
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  “OK.”

  “Annagret, that’s all it is.”

  “OK. OK. But can I at least take Martin with me?”

  “Who is Martin?”

  “A man I feel close with. Safe with.”

  “Certainly. All the better. Just, obviously”—he laughed creakily—“don’t tell him anything.”

  Safe with: the words pushed the button connected to the electrode. All these years, and he was still thinking of killing her. How much of his subatomic life he must have unwittingly betrayed in his ten years with her! He’d been lucky that she was too young to make sense of it. But she’d lived with it and become aware of it in hindsight. The thought of her latter-day awareness, his hideous exposure in the eyes of someone who wasn’t him, was almost as bad as the thought of what Tom had seen.

  While he waited to hear from her in Oakland, he took honest stock of himself and saw how much ground he’d lost in his battle with the Killer. How laughably venial his old preoccupation with online porn now seemed; how poignantly tempered with good intentions his plot to murder Horst. His inner life now consisted of little but obsessing about his image on an Internet that felt like death to him; of hating Tom and conspiring to take revenge on him. At the rate he was going, he might soon be all Killer. And again he sensed that he would be a dead man, literally, once the Killer was fully in command. That he was who the Killer was actually intent on killing.

  It therefore came as something of a relief to hear from Annagret that she’d botched her sales pitch to Pip Tyler and alienated the girl. With a sense of reprieve, he threw himself into the less insane work of collaborating on the film that the American auteur Jay Cotter was making of his life, based in part on The Crime of Love. He holed up at the Cortez for two weeks with Cotter and his production designer; he had long phone talks with Toni Field, instructing her in the ways of Katya. When he returned to Los Volcanes, another project, no less dear to his heart, was coming to fruition—a splendid dump of emails and under-the-table agreements between the Russian petroleum giant Gazprom and the Putin government. Although the Project now ran substantially on autopilot, Andreas had personally brokered the Gazprom leak and dictated the terms of its release to the Guardian and the Times. The leak’s provenance had required intricate laundering, an impenetrable maze of electronic red herrings to protect the source. Andreas also particularly loathed Vladimir Putin, for his youthful work with the Stasi, and he was determined to inflict maximum embarrassment on Putin’s government, because it was harboring Edward Snowden, about whose purity of motive far too much had been said online. In the twelve-minute video he recorded for uploading the day before the Times and the Guardian ran their stories, he was at his artful best in needling Putin and rebuking, subtly, the online voices who’d allowed the one-hit wonder Snowden to distract them from his own twenty-five-year record. His continuing ability to rise to great occasions, coupled with the prospect of being the hero of a medium-budget movie with global distribution, was a welcome distraction from the problem of Tom Aberant.