Matt Ruff - Bad Monkeys

“Uh-huh,” I said. “So you just saw the light then?”

“It wasn’t exactly Saul on the road to Damascus,” said Love. “But it was a significant epiphany. So I looked at this pretty, helpless girl who wasn’t helpless at all, and said to her, ‘I surrender.’”

“And they recruited you?”

“Well. It wasn’t quite that simple. The road from there to here was a long and twisted one, and along the way I gave True more than a few opportunities to regret his leniency towards me. But in the end, yes, here I am, running the circus.

“And the reason I’m telling you all this,” Love continued, “is that I want you to know I understand evil. I’ve been there; I’ve felt its draw, and almost succumbed.

“I understand it, but I don’t condone it. I know that I was lucky. The organization would have been right to put me down. And if I’d gone ahead and done to that pretty girl what I was thinking of doing…A quick death would have been a mercy to me.

“So maybe you are a good Jane. We’ll proceed on that assumption for now. And if you are a good Jane, then all will be well: if the Troop wants to play tricky, we’ll show them what tricky really is.

“But if you’re a bad Jane? If you’re lying to us now, if even a drop of True or Wise’s blood is on your hands?…You’ll weep before we’re through. True was enlightened; Wise was patient. I’m neither. Are we clear?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I think I have the ground rules straight.”

“Good.” He brightened, and held out his hand—like I was really going to touch him after hearing that story. “Let’s go in the next room. We’ll talk strategy…and see what we can’t do about that brother of yours.”

IN THE WHITE ROOM, ONE LAST PROP has been laid on the table.

“Where did you get this?” she says.

“From Officer Friendly.”

“You found him?”

“It wasn’t difficult,” says the doctor. “He’s retired now, but he draws a pension, so his address is on file. I thought he would be worth contacting. Most of the policemen I know, over the course of their careers, have a handful of cases that continue to haunt them long after they are officially closed. With Officer Friendly, I had an inkling that your case might be one of those.”

Wary, now: “What did he tell you?”

“You know that even after she learned about John Doyle, your mother still blamed you for your brother’s abduction. And she wasn’t just accusing you of being irresponsible: she believed you’d abandoned your brother in the garden deliberately, as you’d abandoned him many times before, hoping that something would happen to him.”

“My mother was out of her mind.”

“She made some outrageous claims. The social worker thought she was paranoid, and Officer Friendly wanted to agree, but his patrolman’s intuition told him not to dismiss her so quickly. So when he volunteered to drive you to your aunt and uncle’s house, he wasn’t just being kind—he wanted to spend more time with you.”

“That son of a bitch…He actually thought I wanted Phil to get kidnapped?”

“He wasn’t sure. It bothered him that he wasn’t sure. Unfortunately, the car ride didn’t settle the matter. He said you seemed like a normal, if very troubled, girl—one who’d done a careless thing and was now putting up a tough front to keep remorse from eating her alive. Ordinarily, he said, he’d have been worried about you hurting yourself, especially if your brother was found dead. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that you were hiding something, and that made him wonder if your remorse was just an act.

“So he went back to your mother. She repeated her claims: That you were an evil child. That you hated your brother. That you’d intentionally put him in jeopardy as a way of getting rid of him.”

“If I was so evil,” she says, “why did she make me watch Phil? I mean, does that make sense, that you have your monster daughter babysit the brother she’s trying to kill?”

“Officer Friendly asked her about that. She said she didn’t have a choice—as a single mother working to support two children, she couldn’t afford a real babysitter…”

“Oh, that’s good. Why didn’t she just get a pit bull to watch Phil? I hear they’re great with kids.”

“She also said she’d been in denial about your true nature. She said of course you were no angel, she’d always known that, but it was only now she saw what a devil you were.”

“And Officer Friendly bought that?”

“No,” the doctor says. “He thought it was nonsense. He was about to concede that the social worker had been right after all. Then your mother said one more thing.

“She said she should have known that this was going to happen—she’d had a clear warning, and she’d never forgive herself for ignoring it. Officer Friendly asked what she was talking about, and she said that the day before your brother was abducted you’d all been at the post office together. Your mother left the two of you in the lobby while she went to stand in line, and when she came back, your brother was crying. It was obvious something had frightened him badly, but he wouldn’t say what, and neither would you. Then that night, he woke up screaming. She asked him again what was wrong, and he told her that the man who collected children for the gypsies was coming to get him. ‘Jane showed me his face,’ he said.

“It sounded like more paranoia, but when Officer Friendly went to the post office to have a look around, he found this tacked up on a bulletin board in the lobby. ‘Jane showed me his face…’”

She’s silent a long time before asking: “Did he tell my mother about this?”

“No,” says the doctor. “It’s possible she’d already seen it, but he saw no reason to upset her further if she hadn’t. It’s not as if it were evidence—at least, not the kind he could act on. But you can see why he kept this, even after the hunt for Doyle was abandoned. And you can understand why, when I called him a few days ago, he knew right away which Jane I was referring to…So what about it, Jane? How does this figure into the story you’ve been telling me? Or does it?”

“Of course it does.”

“Really? Because I was under the impression the story’s almost over. Shouldn’t this have come at the beginning?”

“Sure, if I was an honest person…I wanted to forget it all, you know? What happened to Phil, or even that I had a brother. Well, I couldn’t do that. I got good at lying about it, but that’s not the same as forgetting. But this…” She nods at the piece of paper on the table. “This I almost did manage to forget. I thought I was the only one who knew—other than Phil, I mean. But it turns out it’s not just Panopticon on the lookout for bad behavior.”

“You’re losing me again, Jane.”

“Just listen,” she says. “I’m getting to it.”

WHEN LOVE FINALLY LET ME GO, I went down to the street and stood there taking deep breaths until I was sure, absolutely sure, that I was really outside, on the actual Vegas Strip, and not in some ant-farm extension of the Mudgett Suite. What ultimately convinced me wasn’t the air quality so much as the sheer number of tourists bumping past me on the sidewalk: even the organization, I figured, couldn’t afford to hire that many extras.

It was late afternoon. Which afternoon was harder to say, but that didn’t matter: I had a job to do. Panopticon had confirmed that John Doyle was in his suite at the Venetian. It was time to pay him a visit. I joined the flow of pedestrians headed north, past the Casino Royale to the fake Doge’s Palace.