John Verdon - Shut Your Eyes Tight

The man blinked, looked embarrassed. Gurney waited.

“I guess… I guess he might like the idea that he broke the kid’s story… you know, that he succeeded in the interrogation.”

“Absolutely,” said Gurney. He caught the eye of another previously silent attendee. “Name one more.”

The very Irish face beneath a carroty crew cut grinned. “Thought he’d win a few points, maybe. Must report to somebody. Enjoy walking into the boss’s office. ‘Look at what I did.’ Get some props. Maybe a boost for a promotion.”

“Sure, I can see that,” said Gurney. “Can anyone name another reason he might want to believe the kid’s story?”

“Power,” said the young Hispanic woman disdainfully.

“How so?”

“He’d like the idea that he forced the truth out of the subject, forced him to admit painful things, forced him to give up what he was trying to hide, forced him to expose his shame, made him crawl, even made him cry.” She looked like she was smelling garbage. “He’d get a rush out of it, feel like Superman, the all-powerful genius detective. Like God.”

“Big emotional benefit,” said Gurney. “Could warp a man’s vision.”

“Oh, yeah,” she agreed. “Big time.”

Gurney saw a hand go up in the back of the room, a brown-faced man with short, wavy hair who hadn’t yet spoken. “Excuse me, sir, I’m confused. There’s an interrogation-techniques seminar here in this building and an undercover seminar. Two separate seminars, right? I signed up for undercover. Am I in the right place? This, what I’m hearing, it’s all about interrogation.”

“You’re in the right place,” said Gurney. “We’re here to talk about undercover, but there’s a link between the two activities. If you understand how an interrogator can fool himself because of what he wants to believe, you can use the same principle to get the target of your undercover operation to believe in you. It’s all about maneuvering the target into ‘discovering’ the facts about you that you want him to believe. It’s about giving him a powerful motive to swallow your bullshit. It’s about making him want to believe you-just like the guy in the movie wants to believe the confession. There’s tremendous believability to facts a person thinks he’s discovered. When your target believes that he knows things about you that you didn’twant him to know , those things will seem doubly true to him. When he thinks he’s penetrated below your surface layer, what he uncovers in that deeper layer he’ll see as the real truth. That’s what I call the eureka fallacy. It’s that peculiar trick of the mind that gives total credibility to what you think you’ve discovered on your own.”

“The what fallacy?” The question came from multiple directions.

“The eureka fallacy. It’s a Greek word roughly translated as ‘I found it’ or, in the context in which I’m using it, ‘I’ve discovered the truth.’ The point is…” Gurney slowed down to emphasize his next statement. “ The stories people tell you about themselves seem to retain the possibility of being false. But what you discover about them by yourself seems to be the truth . So what I’m saying is this: Let your target think he’s discovering something about you. Then he’ll feel that he really knows you. That’s the place at which you will have established Trust. You will have established Trust, with a capital T , the trust that makes everything else possible. We’re going to spend the rest of the day showing you how to make that happen-how to make the thing you want your target to believe about you the very thing he thinks he’s discovering on his own. But right now let’s take a break.”

Saying this, Gurney realized that he’d grown up in an era when “a break” automatically meant a cigarette break. Now, for virtually everyone, it meant a cell-phoning or texting break. As if to illustrate the thought, most of the officers getting to their feet and heading for the door were reaching for their BlackBerrys.

Gurney took a deep breath, extended his arms above his head, and stretched his back slowly from side to side. His introductory segment had created more muscle tension than he’d realized.

The female Hispanic officer waited for the tide of cell phoners to pass, then approached Gurney as he was removing the videotape from the machine. Her hair was thick and framed her face in a mass of soft, kinky curls. Her full figure was packed into a pair of tight black jeans and a tight gray sweater with a swooping neckline. Her lips glistened. “I just wanted to thank you,” she said with a serious-student frown. “That was really good.”

“The tape, you mean?”

“No, I mean you. I mean… what I mean is”-she was incongruously blushing under her serious demeanor-“your whole presentation, your explanation of why people believe things, why they believe some things more strongly, all of that. Like that eureka fallacy thing-that really made me think. The whole presentation was really good.”

“Your own contributions helped make it good.”

She smiled. “I guess we’re just on the same wavelength.”

By the time Gurney was nearing the end of his two-hour drive from the academy in Albany to his farmhouse in Walnut Crossing, dusk was settling stealthily into the winding valleys of the western Catskills.

As he turned off the county road onto the dirt-and-gravel lane that led up to his hilltop property, the jazzed illusion of energy he’d received from two large containers of strong coffee during the afternoon seminar break was now sinking deep into its inversion phase. The fading day generated an overwrought image that he assumed was the product of caffeine withdrawal: summer sidling off the stage like an aging actor while autumn, the undertaker, waited in the wings.

Christ, my brain is turning to mush .

He parked the car as usual on the worn patch of weedy grass at the top of the pasture, parallel to the house, facing a deep rose-and-purple swath of sunset clouds beyond the far ridge.

He entered the house through the side door, kicked off his shoes in the room that served as a laundry and pantry, and continued into the kitchen. Madeleine was on her knees in front of the sink, brushing shards of a broken wineglass into a dustpan. He stood watching her for several seconds before speaking. “What happened?”

“What does it look like?”

He let a few more seconds pass. “How are things at the clinic?”

“Okay, I guess.” She stood, smiled gamely, walked over to the pantry, and emptied the dustpan noisily into the plastic trash barrel. He walked to the French doors and stared out at the monochrome landscape, at the large pile of logs by the woodshed waiting to be split and stacked, the grass that needed its final mowing of the season, the ferny asparagus ready to be cut down for the winter-cut and then burned to avoid the risk of asparagus beetles.

Madeleine came back into the kitchen, switched on the recessed lights in the ceiling over the sideboard, replaced the dustpan under the sink. The increased illumination in the room had the effect of further darkening the outside world, turning the glass doors into reflectors.

“I left some salmon on the stove,” she said, “and some rice.”

“Thank you.” He watched her in the glass pane. She seemed to be gazing into the dishwater in the sink. He remembered her saying something about going out that night, and he decided to risk a guess. “Book-club night.”

She smiled. He wasn’t sure whether it was because he’d gotten it right or wrong.

“How was the academy?” she asked.