James Siegel - Deceit

Remember how he’d goaded me over the phone-never went five minutes without reminding me what a disgrace I’d been. How I’d dishonored an entire profession. How I’d set journalism back fifty years.

Fifty years exactly.

All the way back to 1954.

Why?

Why goad? Why needle? Why prod?

Why was he such a font of useful information?

It was part of the script.

They told me about Lloyd Steiner.

They sent Anna Graham into Belinda’s birthday party, then into the parking lot of Muhammed Alley, where she scrawled that anagram into my fuselage.

Kara Bolka, my muse, my siren.

And the plumber. When I first woke up, strapped down and shot up.

How helpful was he? What a chatterbox. What a blabbermouth.

Why?

You still don’t grasp it?

They were trying to hide something, you say? Weren’t they?

Yes.

And no.

You can’t put the water back in the bottle. It’s spilled, I told the plumber that day.

He hadn’t disagreed with me.

He couldn’t.

Plumbers fix leaks, sure.

But sometimes, they do exactly the opposite. They flush those old and leaky pipes; they send all that rotten water shooting out at a hundred miles an hour. They cleanse the system.

You can only keep a secret so long, Wren had told Anna, and then you can’t.

It’s a fact.

Two people can keep a secret, someone once said, if one of them is dead.

One of them was. Wren. He was dead. And Eddie Bronson-him too, I imagined. Not to mention that poor gas-station clerk, who was simply caught in the crossfire, metaphorically speaking.

And Benjy Washington.

Who’d flown the coop and headed back to Littleton.

Which must’ve sent them all into a dither.

He’d made it into the nursing home. He’d seen his mom. He’d called the sheriff’s office. Who else had he talked to? Who else had he sat down with and told the story to?

First Bronson flies the coop. Now him.

Where would it end?

After all, Wren might be as dead as a doornail, but they were still scared stiff of him. Scared of a corpse.

Why?

Because he’d told Anna, plain as day:

The story was protected.

The story. The secret.

Protected.

The story was someplace they couldn’t get to it.

But somewhere someone else could. The story would be brought into the light.

What did he mean?

They’d ripped his house apart to find out. They’d ripped his cabin apart.

They’d sent the plumber back into my house three times after Benjy made it back to Littleton.

Here’s the irony.

If they’d really ripped his house apart, taken that Sheetrock by the hands and pulled the walls down, they would’ve found exactly what they were looking for.

Nestled there behind the Sheetrock. The story Wren had painstakingly pursued and put together and paginated in the dead of night, too paranoid by then to share it with someone like Hinch. He didn’t know whom to trust anymore. Littleton loco, and for good reason.

Only they didn’t rip his house apart.

The sword of Damocles was still hanging over their heads.

Wren had put it there.

What’s a plumber to do?

Easy.

You set up a Web site for desperate actors who, if they aren’t willing to kill for a part, won’t care if you do.

You send the biggest liar in the universe out to Highway 45 to cover an accident .

You play Auto Tag with him on a desert road.

You send a doctor on a house call to a dead town.

You make sure a dreamy-looking girl named anagram bats her eyes at him in the parking lot of Muhammed Alley.

You direct him to Fifth Street, just off the promenade.

You goad.

You needle.

You prod.

You steal his gun and shoot someone with it.

You lock him in a mental ward and throw away the key.

But just for a while-just long enough to blacken his veracity that much more.

Then you put that key in poor Dennis’s hands and you set him free.

Now do you understand?

Now do you see?

Sometimes it doesn’t matter if a secret comes out.

It does not matter.

As long as you control how.

I turned my cell phone back on two weeks ago.

Emitted its signal to those tireless satellites spinning slowly in space that would’ve bounced it back to earth, where some exhausted tech in the NSA or the FBI or maybe just the DOE would’ve triangulated, diagrammed, and computed it, then sent it on up to the interested parties.

Two weeks ago, when I first arrived in room four.

What did people do before Microsoft Word?

Before laptops, cursors, delete keys, desktops-before backing up, dragging things in, and dragging things out?

Before you could make one document two. Drag it onto the desktop and rearrange it, pare it down, edit it just so.

This is Document One .

Which either will or won’t make it to where it needs to go.

I have no such fears about Document Two , which is the only one left on my computer.

It reads remarkably like this one-minus a few things. Minus the insights, conclusions, and connective tissue. To go back to what must by now be a tiresome and overused analogy-think of it as a connect-the-dots drawing minus the connections.

The dots are there.

The entire cast of characters.

Miss Anagram and Sam Savage and Doctor Death himself.

Benjy and Bronson and Bailey et al.

It is the story the way they wanted it written.

Why they kept leading me on and putting a cork in me at the same time. Letting the leash out, then jerking it back. Why they tainted me, incarcerated me, and then set me free.

For this.

Another saying comes to mind-courtesy of Stalin or one of his minions, orchestrators of the first Karabolka.

Forgive me it if I get it wrong. Something about history. It’s not what happens in history that matters , he said.

It’s who writes it.

Me.

That’s who’s writing it.

Tom Valle.

I was meant to tell the story that was never meant to be told.

Before someone else told it.

Because once a story’s been discredited-once it’s been ridiculed, ripped apart, and indicted-it forever loses its claim to legitimacy. It passes into urban legend, to the canon of conspiracy theorists, onto the refuse pile of hack history. Remember that story about a certain president’s discharge from the National Guard? By the time handwriting experts had discredited the documents, by the time a national anchor had resigned and a nationally respected producer was fired-by then, it didn’t matter if the basic truth of the story remained unchallenged. It was trash. It was a tissue of lies. It was garbage.

The very fate awaiting Document Two .

It will be dissected for the amusement of the public-those who give a crap. It will be snickered at, railed at, and ultimately reviled. It will be held up in journalism classes at serious-minded universities across the country as an example of what not to do, a cautionary tale for every cub reporter about to enter the fray.

It will belong to the LBJ-killed-Kennedy crowd, to the Area 51 cabal, to the Bailey Kindlons of the world.

Because even if you bought the anagrams , the hired actors -even if you did, you would have to consider the source.

Enough said.

That’s what they wanted.

That’s what I’ll give them.

I’ve left it here on my computer-right at page 1.

I am writing this as fast as I can.

I, myself, am going for a stroll now.

I’ve already called the front desk and asked them to send Luiza in to clean the room again. I told the manager that I’ll be taking a walk to get out of her hair. Behind the motel, maybe, where I’ve seen a path leading out to the dusty flats.