James Siegel - Deceit

“I asked him,” Sam said, an almost whisper.

“And what did he say?”

“He said it was a reality show . Have a nice life.”

“That’s it. You didn’t ask him again?”

Sam shook his head. “Maybe I didn’t want to know. Okay?”

Like someone else , I suddenly remembered. There’d been moments, when this someone else had sat there and listened to my overheated explanations, my rationalizing away one inconsistency or another, and I thought, he knows, it’s right there on the tip of his tongue, but he will not say it. He won’t.

“So you drove back and that’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“Never picked up a paper or looked on the Web to see if anybody really died out there? No curiosity at all?”

He shook his head. “I told you. I wanted to forget about it.”

The first gray glimmer of morning was beginning to poke through the front window where the black paint had flecked off; it looked like a canopy of washed-out stars.

“Tell me about that place on the Web again. Where he just happened to pick you.”

“What about it?”

“How did he know you wouldn’t get out there and just turn around and leave?”

“I told you. It was a lot of money to me.”

“Yeah, you told me. But there’s a limit to what people will do, even for a lot of money. How did he know you’d go along with it?”

Trudy folded her arms and fixed him with a withering stare.

Sam shrugged.

“I don’t understand what you’re asking me.”

“Sure you do. I’m asking you why he picked you . Come on, Sam. What kind of Web site are we talking about here?”

“I told you. Just an actors’ bulletin board.”

“What kind of actors?”

Sam sighed, squirmed in his chair, looked up at the ceiling for divine guidance, maybe.

“I heard about it from another actor, okay-this new Web site that helps actors, you know, who need a little extra cash…”

“Yeah?”

“Actors who are willing to act in nontraditional formats.”

“ Nontraditional formats . Is that what you call it?”

“What’s he talking about?” Trudy didn’t get it; maybe she’d had to swallow a lot in this relationship, but she couldn’t digest this. Not yet.

“Tell her, Sam. Say it.”

“Well, you know…”

I said it for him. “ Cons . For enough money you loaned yourself out for con jobs. That’s the only kind of acting that would pay five thousand dollars for one morning, isn’t it?”

Sam didn’t answer me. He didn’t have to.

A chill was slowly working its way up my spine, one vertebra at a time.

I turned to Trudy.

“I would watch your back if I were you.”

When Sam looked up at me with a suddenly queasy expression, I said: “The man who paid you. He might not like the fact that you’re walking around. Not anymore. Okay?”

That shock of recognition.

Confronted with something half-familiar and half-remembered.

A group of desperate Hollywood actors selling themselves to the Russian mob for cons.

Remember?

One of my stories.

Only it was one of those stories.

Currently featured on a certain online Web site courtesy of a great American newspaper that I’d almost brought to its knees.

Fodder from Valle’s prodigious canon of deceit.

Dramatically constructed. Exquisitely detailed. Rigorously recounted.

But not true.

Not true.

Not one single fucking word of it.

I can hear helicopters outside my motel room.

They sound military. If I had to guess, I’d say Black Hawks, buzzing low in formation, out on a search-and-destroy.

My first instinct is to hide, to dive under the bed and stay put until they pass.

I can’t move. I am frozen stiff. I am stuck in quicksand.

Then I wake up.

My TV’s on. It’s 4 a.m. They’re showing a movie about Vietnam. Bursts of napalm and the rat-a-tat of hopped-up machine gunners as thatch-hatted villagers run for their lives.

Okay, no helicopters.

Still, it reminds me.

They’re looking for me.

I have a deadline.

I am writing as fast as I can.

I am.

I’ll get no extensions. Either I’ll make it, or I won’t.

I’d say the odds are fifty-fifty. No better than that.

I’ve taken to peeking out the window to see if that man is there.

The one Luiza said asked about me.

When I asked her what he looked like, she shrugged and made a distasteful face.

I asked her what he wanted to know.

How long you be here, Luiza said.

Did you tell him?

She shook her head. I say I no know.

That’s it?

He ask what you look like.

Okay, fine. Did you tell him what I look like?

Yes.

Luiza remembered he had a badge.

She didn’t know if it was a policeman’s badge or a dogcatcher’s.

Only that she was afraid of them. Badges.

There was Immigration, after all.

Which is why I don’t 100 percent trust her. I can’t.

They can do things to an illegal. She’d confided in me when she understood I didn’t care and couldn’t hurt her. Her torturous journey up the Central American isthmus and across the Rio Grande at the mercy of a nineteen-year-old coyote high on mesquite. The paper mill that will supply you with a very legitimate-looking license. Not to someone from the INS, though. No. Not to them.

And I’m at a crucial part of the story-the crux of it.

You can sense it, can’t you?

You’re sitting there connecting the dots like I did. I need to present it to you this way, chronologically, so you can follow along and see the way it unfolded, piece by piece. So in the end, you’ll believe . As much as you distrust the messenger, you’ll believe the message.

You’ll know what to do.

When I reported back to work at the Littleton Journal , Hinch was at the hospital with his wife.

Norma appeared to have been crying.

“It’s touch and go,” she said.

Nate didn’t look all that happy himself. He’d received a Dear John letter from Rina-or, more accurately, a Dear John text message, modern times being what they are-and was sulking at his desk in the back.

The overall mood was somber and restrained.

Hinch had left me the usual number of local stories that needed to be written up. I zipped through them like a driver focused solely on his end destination, following the street signs by rote. The Littleton Street Fair was kicking off next week. The Lone Star Rodeo, featuring a women’s bronco-busting tournament, was coming to town. A meeting of the California Historical Society was going to be held at the Littleton Library.

I finished in record time. I patted Nate the Skate on the back and told him to hang in there. I brought Norma a cup of coffee and told her to keep the faith.

Then I disappeared into the microfilm.

I was falling down a rabbit hole and I wanted to see where I’d land.

I was going forward by going back.

To the place I’d visited before when I’d first been hired, when I perused the local history like a traveler scanning the guidebook of a forthcoming destination. When I nosed around town and asked people for their memories. No matter where I seemed to go-up and down the PCH, twenty miles outside town, or through the looking glass-I kept coming back to it.

It had been waiting for me all along.

1954.

The Aurora Dam Flood.

The death of Littleton Flats.

They were listening to Eddie Fisher and Rosemary Clooney on the radio.

Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes…

They went to the Odeon on Sixth and Main to see Brando play an ex-boxer with a conscience.