Alex Berenson: The Midnight House

But Los Angeles was more expensive than either of them figured. They got stuck renting in Chatsworth, the northwest corner of the Valley, a five-room house for $1,625 a month. Robbery. As for surfing, the traffic meant that they were an hour from the beach, on a good day.

To nobody’s surprise but her own, Caitlin didn’t land any gigs. To help pay the rent, she started waitressing at a restaurant called the Smoke House, by the Warner Bros. studio lot. A month later, barely three months after they moved to California, she told Wyly she was leaving. She’d met her soul mate. He made the mistake of asking Who is he? and got the dude’s résumé in return. Bart Gruber. He made the kind of movies that went right to the video store. Gruber had convinced Caitlin her career would take off if she would let the world peek at her C cups in his next movie, The Smartest Girls in the Room, something about lesbian scam artists. Even worse, Caitlin had convinced herself she was in love with him. Probably the best acting she’d ever done.

Wyly was through arguing. Thank God she hadn’t listened when he told her, that first year together, that they should have kids right away. He dragged her suitcases out of the bedroom closet.

“Careful,” Caitlin said, when he started tossing her clothes onto the bed. “A lot of that stuff is new.”

“Now I know where your money’s been going.”

“Mike. Aren’t you even going to fight for me? ”

A single tear ran down her cheek. Typical. Now that she was an actress, she wanted some drama. He almost laughed. “Fight for you. No.”

“Because you never loved me.”

“No, Cate, I loved you, best I could considering we’ve hardly seen each other. I don’t think you ever loved me. And I’m not inclined to take on a fight I’m bound to lose. But I do feel a tiny bit bad for you. You oughta marry a doctor back home, like Cindy and Sandy”—her favorite sorority sisters. “Put those tits to use before it’s too late. You’re gonna whore, get yourself paid.”

“Michael Steven Wyly. I won’t let you speak to me that way.” She hauled off and slapped him across the face. He let her. If he grabbed back, she’d probably call 911. He did not need a domestic violence charge on his back.

“Listen to me here,” he said. “I know you don’t think so, but I’m looking out for you. You wind up staying out here too long, these guys like Geller—”

“His name’s Gruber—”

“They’re gonna use you up. Go home while you still have it.”

“I love California.”

“Love. Sure. That word again. You wouldn’t know love if it gave you a hundred bucks to suck it off.” He guessed he was angrier than he knew. He’d never said anything like that to her before.

She tossed back her hair and tried to slap him again. “You’re a pig, Michael. Bart says you’re a Fascist, just like the Germans.”

Wyly felt his heart race. For a few seconds they were both quiet, and then he spoke, slowly, carefully. “This guy I’ve never met says I’m a what ? Like the who ? ”

“He says you and your unit, what you did to those detainees, it was criminal and you should be in jail—”

Wyly took a breath, stepped away from her so he wouldn’t do something he’d regret. They were in deep waters here. “What did you tell him about me, Caitlin? You know I don’t talk about that.” Not now, and not ever, Wyly didn’t add. He didn’t talk about it, and he didn’t think about it. Different guys had different ways of handling it. He’d decided as soon as he got out that the best way for him would be just to forget it. That plan was working pretty well so far.

“I said you were on an interrogation unit. That’s all.” She sounded defensive. Then her face hardened. “I didn’t have to tell him anything else. He says everybody knows what you did. He says we broke the Geneva convention—”

“You know what the Geneva convention is, Cate? You have any idea? ”

“He says you embarrassed the whole country—”

Ugly words went through Wyly’s mind, slurs about this guy Bart, but he didn’t say them. He wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. He summoned his Ranger discipline and kept his voice even.

“He doesn’t know what it was like over there, and you don’t, either.”

“Just like Apu Grab, Bart says.”

“You mean Abu Ghraib? You don’t have a clue.”

“I know you think I’m stupid, but I have a college degree, Michael. Unlike you.”

“Physical therapy is not a college degree. Even if NC State says it is. Tell your boyfriend we were interrogating top-level terrorists. The guys who pulled the strings. Not random Iraqi farmers who got caught in raids.”

“Just answer me one thing. If you’re so proud of what you did, how come you never talk about it? How come you always change the subject?”

And despite himself, Wyly was carried back to the barracks in Poland. He pushed the images out of his mind. Past was past. “I’m a soldier, Cate. I did what they told me, my superior officers. That’s how it works.”

“Bart said you’d say that. You were the muscle, you followed orders. He said that’s an old story.”

Wyly stepped toward her, raised his hand high. Then he turned away, grabbed a T-shirt and shorts and his running shoes. Los Angeles had a chain of gyms called 24 Hour Fitness. He’d joined a couple of weeks back. If he wasn’t going to get arrested for assault, he needed to get out of this house.

HE RAN SEVENTEEN MILES that night, stayed on the treadmill until 2 a.m. When he got home, Caitlin was gone. A month later they finalized the divorce, a quick no-fault that split their assets — the two cars and the four thousand dollars in their savings account — right down the middle. Wyly celebrated by going to Hollywood and going home with the first girl drunk enough to say yes. She didn’t have Caitlin’s body, but she was a much better lay.

A week later, he saw a posting on a military-only chat board looking for ex-soldiers to do stunts on a television show. He thought maybe the post was a scam, but he applied anyway. It was real. And he got the job.

Now he was working regularly. Making decent money. Enough to pay the rent on the house and have a few bucks left over for this Mustang. Nothing fancy, a gunmetal-gray convertible with the six-cylinder engine. He would have liked a V-8, but he couldn’t make the math work. The odometer on this one read eighty-five thousand miles, which probably meant one hundred eighty-five thousand. It needed a little bit of work, had some rust on the right quarter panel, but nothing major.

He got a loan from the friendly bankers at Wells Fargo and picked it up for eleven-five. After a couple of weekends, he had it running smooth. Of course, it was no good for anything longer than a trip to the beach. These old engines overheated in a hurry, and the six-cylinder was underpowered by modern standards. He needed a week to go zero to sixty. But he could run it back and forth to work, and that was all he wanted.

Yeah, he couldn’t complain. California was all right. He thought about Caitlin less than he would have expected. A couple of weeks back he’d seen her at a club in Burbank, looking pissed, standing with another girl who could have been her twin. No guys around. He wondered if Gruber had dumped her already. He’d ducked out before she saw him, blown the fifteen-dollar cover. He had nothing to say to her.

Once in a while he remembered what Caitlin had said to him on their last night together. No, he couldn’t say he was proud of everything 673 had done. Especially at the end. But he was done now. He lived in the Valley and played drill sergeant to overpaid actors, none of whom cared about his time in the army. If they asked, he said, “Yeah, I was a Ranger.” People in Hollywood preferred to talk about themselves anyway, so most of the time he didn’t need to say anything else. On those rare occasions when somebody pushed him for details, he’d say, “I wish I could tell you. But it’s all classified. Maybe in fifty years.”