Jonathan Franzen - Purity

The “trusted adviser” Tom had mentioned on the phone: who else could it have been but Leila Helou? Tom had asked his new woman what to do about the Halliburton Papers, his new woman had nixed it, and now, eight years later, it was all too obvious why: because Tom had told her about the murder of Horst Kleinholz. What else could dirty secrets refer to? She’d practically accused Andreas of cold-blooded murder.

When he reread her words yet again, the Killer stepped right out into the open, in the form of a wish to crush Tom’s cranium with a blunt object. If there had been a way to get past U.S. Immigration, he would have gone to Denver and murdered Tom. For having glimpsed the Killer. For rejecting the most authentic overtures of friendship Andreas had ever made. For spurning him again and again, for the shame of that. And for submitting to his wife and deferring to his girlfriend. For seducing Andreas and then betraying him to the girlfriend; for not keeping his pretty mouth shut. But above all for his American sanctimony : “I’m not saying there’s no place for the loathsome, criminal, fame-chasing, poop-flinging, grave-defiling things you do. But I’m afraid that my clean house is not the place for them.” He’d all but said that on the telephone.

“I can’t believe you did this to me,” Andreas muttered. “I can’t believe you did this to me…”

He was rational enough to recognize that Tom still wasn’t likely to incriminate himself by exposing Andreas’s crime. What inflamed his paranoia was the thought that Tom had seen the Killer in him. The thought was like an electrode in his brain. He couldn’t stop pushing the button, and it gave him, each time, an identical jolt of dread and hatred.

Pleading illness to his interns, he holed up in his bedroom and searched for dirt on Tom and Helou. Already the blogosphere and social media were a-crackle with outrage at her CJR interview. In the world of so-called adults, Helou was a respected journalist, but in the online world she was getting reamed as fiercely as Andreas was being defended. Somehow, instead of reassuring him, this made him hate the Aberant-Helou nexus all the more. They’d deliberately provoked the very bloggers and tweeters whom he was devoting more and more of his existence to appeasing. Again the pointed sanctimony, again the message: We’re what you can never be. We disdain not only you but the virtual world in which you increasingly exist. We’re capable of the love you were incapable of having for Annagret …

According to Google, Helou was married to a disabled novelist on whom she presumably was cheating. But if she was appearing in public with Tom, they must not have cared what people thought. A more promising question was what had happened to Tom’s wife. After 1991, there were zero contemporaneous records for anyone with her name and birth date. Andreas was seized with the hope that Tom had murdered her and gotten away with it. This seemed fantastically improbable, but in a way it also didn’t. Tom had spoken, after all, of being unable to live either with Laird or without her. And he had, after all, helped Andreas bury a body.

Following an instinct, he turned his attention to Laird and discovered that her billionaire father had set up a trust fund for her; the Wichita Eagle had reported on the tax filings. There was also evidence that Tom had founded Denver Independent with money from the father. But not a lot of money. Not the kind of money that Anabel would be worth if she was still alive. Was she alive? Or, better yet, a corpse? An instinct told Andreas that, dead or alive, she might be a way to inflict pain and chaos on Tom from a distance.

He went to his lead hacker, Chen, and asked how easily they could steal a lot of computer processing capacity.

“How much?” Chen said.

“I have two good photos of a twenty-four-year-old woman who’s now in her late fifties. I want to run a facial-recognition match on every photo database we can access.”

“Worldwide?”

“Start with the U.S.”

“It’s a lot. Try to do it fast, they’ll catch us. So many of these farms, you can only grab a few minutes at a time. We got some really good farms, but we don’t want to lose them.”

“What would less than fast be?”

“Weeks, maybe more. And that’s just for U.S.”

“See what you can do. Be as safe as you can.”

Their facial-recognition software was nearly NSA-grade but still didn’t work very well. (The NSA’s didn’t either.) Every day for several weeks, Chen forwarded Andreas pictures of late-middle-aged women who didn’t look much like Anabel Laird. But going through the images gave him something to do, made him feel as if a plot were being advanced, took the worst edge off his paranoia. And then, for neither the first time nor the last time, he got lucky.

He’d always considered good luck his birthright — his mother had said it herself: the world conformed to whatever he felt like doing — but his bad luck with Dan Tierney had shaken his faith in it. The resolution of the image of a gray-haired supermarket employee in Felton, California, was too low to show the scar visible on Laird’s forehead in the older pictures, and because the employee wasn’t smiling he couldn’t confirm the gap between her front teeth. But when he saw the employee’s name, Penelope Tyler, and connected it with her years at Tyler School of Art, he sensed that his good luck had returned. He walked out of the tech building and looked up at the Bolivian sun, spread his arms, and soaked up its hot light.

Penelope Tyler was clearly a person who’d tried to disappear. The employee photo was the only image of her anywhere, and her official footprint was impressively faint. It took Andreas nearly an hour to discover that she had a daughter. This daughter, Purity, was relatively richly documented, with profiles on Facebook and LinkedIn and a very shaky credit history. He studied the pictures of her and recent pictures of Tom, comparing her eyebrows with Tom’s eyebrows, her mouth with Tom’s mouth, and concluded that she had to be his daughter. But there was no sign of contact between them, not on social media, not in her college or health records, nothing anywhere. Given that she’d been born not long after Laird vanished, it could only be that Tom didn’t know she existed. Why else would Laird have changed her identity?

The girl was indirectly worth a shitload of money, a billion-size sum, and almost certainly didn’t know it. She was making student-loan payments, living in a house that looked semi-derelict in Street View, and working as an “outreach associate” for an alternative-energy start-up. The money interested Andreas to the extent that it might make his life easier if he could get his hands on some of it. But it wasn’t the reason he kept clicking through the photographs he had of Purity Tyler. Nor were her looks, though pleasant enough, the reason he conceived such a murderous desire for her. What mattered was that she was Tom’s.

He set up a secure connection and called Annagret. Over the years, he’d been careful not to fall completely out of touch with her. He remembered her birthday and occasionally forwarded her links pertaining to one of her causes. For all the energy she’d invested in the project of closeness, it was remarkable how unclose she felt to him. How random it was — apart from her beauty — that he’d ever had anything to do with her. Not only was she small in her ambitions, she seemed perfectly content to be small. She’d left Berlin and moved to Düsseldorf . But her emails to him were always cordial and admiring, with many exclamation marks.

On the phone, after making sure she was alone, he explained what he needed her to do. “Consider this a free vacation in America,” he said.