Empire of Lies (42 page)

I thought about it a lot, in fact: killing myself, I mean. I took long drives to deserted country lanes, parked in the grass by the roadside, and thought about ways to do it. After months of considering various methods, I settled on a gun as the surest and quickest. I even began shopping around for a gun and had my eye on an elegant little Beretta 9mm. With that, I figured, if I decided to live, I would still have something for home protection.

So it went, through Christmas, into January, February, March. And all in spite of the fact that most of my worst fears of what would happen in the aftermath of
The End of Civilization
never actually materialized. For instance, I had worried quite a lot early
on that I might have to go to jail for what I did to Rashid or at least stand trial for it. I had worried that I might even still be a suspect in Anne Smith's death. For weeks I had bouts of paranoia during which I imagined that all the details of my sordid earlier life would somehow become news and so become known to my children and my neighbors on the Hill. Even the idea that my children and neighbors would hear about Rashid—how I had taped him up and gagged him and shattered his knees with a hammer to make him talk—haunted and sickened me and kept me awake at night.

But none of the things I worried about happened. What happened instead was this:

I was questioned for nearly a week after the explosion. Police officers, FBI agents, spies, lawyers, people who for all I know were just dropping by to deliver Chinese food—everyone seemed to want to hear my story. As I had with Detective Curtis, I stuck to the truth with all of them no matter how awful or embarrassing it was. I told the tale day after day, again and again and again.

Then, after I don't know how long, Detective Curtis himself showed up. I was relaxing between interrogations in a pleasant room on one of the upper floors of One Police Plaza. It was a conference room, with a long table and a wall of windows looking out at the big white clouds over the Brooklyn Bridge. I was sitting at the head of the table, swiveling in a chair, reading about the explosion in the
Times.
There were the usual angry and fretful stories asking the usual angry and fretful questions that arise after such an incident: How had the terrorists infiltrated security? Where had they gotten the C4? Which conservative politician was to blame? Which American policy had driven the murderers to act? And how could anyone call Christianity a tolerant religion after the Crusades? And so on. There was even a piece demanding to know how Patrick Piersall had gotten into the building with a gun. I knew the answer to that one: celebrity. He'd wangled a
ticket to the show from his manager, then found a die-hard
Universal
fan among the guards, one of those guys who attends
Universal
conventions dressed up as a Borgon in his spare time. He'd convinced the guard to let him in early so he could tour the theater, and made sure the idiot neglected to put him through the metal detector. Piersall was clever, I'll say that for him. It was a good thing he was on our side.

I was still paging my way through the stories when the door opened and in came Curtis.

His tough brown face went wide with a shockingly friendly smile. It didn't suit him. It looked foreign to his features. Even as I stood up to meet him, even as he swung his hand to me for a friendly shake, I could see in his eyes that he was the same, that he discounted any illusion of decency in me or in anyone. I was just another squirrelly felon who hadn't been caught out yet, that's all. He knew a lot about people, Curtis did, but all of it was bad.

He gestured me back into my chair and sat in a chair beside me. He laid a manila folder on the table between us, but he never opened it. He just liked them, I guess, those folders. He always seemed to have one around.

He pointed casually to the
Times
open on the table in front of me. "So? What do you think of the coverage?"

I shrugged. "Seems like you haven't told them much yet."

"Not too much. They just get it wrong anyway."

"I notice, for instance, you haven't told them about Rashid." That was foremost in my mind. I figured once the press found out he was involved, the whole incident would become public start to finish.

"Well, we will," Curtis said. "We're going to tell them today."

"All right."

"We're going to tell them Rashid is gone."

My reaction must have looked comical, a comical imitation of
surprise. I bolted straight up in my chair, opened my mouth wide, blinked my eyes. "Gone? What do you mean?"

"I mean gone," said Curtis, smiling again beneath those suspicious eyes. "We've searched his office, his apartment, his weekend place: no sign of him."

"But he was
in
his office. That's impossible. How could he get away? He couldn't walk."

Curtis seemed to consider it. "I don't know. Maybe he had some help. Maybe you didn't hurt him as badly as you thought you did."

I added a few moments of comical sputtering to my ridiculous facial expression. "I ... I..."

"Anyway..." Curtis slid the folder off the tabletop into his hand and rose from his chair. I was too flummoxed to stand up myself. I just sat there, staring up at him. "We're gonna tell the media we suspect he may have been smuggled out of the country by his masters and possibly executed for betraying the Wall Street operation. That's it. Anything else you want to tell them is up to you. It's a free country."

He was at the door before I managed to say, "Is that really what you think happened? You think someone smuggled him out of the country?"

Curtis snorted. It was quite a sound. It was hard and mirthless, and yet it registered a deep, genuine amusement of a kind I don't really like to think about. It made my balls tighten and go cold. For a moment, after the door shut behind him, I just sat where I was, swiveling slightly, trying to think. I thought:
I'm free then. They're not going to prosecute me. I'm free.
But I didn't feel free or, if I did, I didn't feel much joy about it. I just kept thinking about that sound, Curtis's short, snorting laugh. A deep feeling of pity welled up in me—pity for Rashid—and maybe a sense of awe and
terror, too. I did not think he had left the country. And I did not think his life was going to be very pleasant from now on, or that it would be pleasant ever again until its end.

So the rest of the story—the story of how I tortured a university professor on what was essentially a hunch—never came out—not until now, at least; not until I told it here. In fact, after that week or so of questioning, the law was more-or-less done with me.

The media, on the other hand—they were a different story altogether.

At first, they treated me as a hero—a second-string hero maybe, next to the celebrity, next to Patrick Piersall, but a hero still. The newspaper writers and TV and radio commentators compared me to characters in movies, guys who hunt down the truth when the authorities suspect them or won't believe them, who stop the killers in the nick of time, and so on. Some of the praise started to sound pretty overheated, even to me.

Then one day, Piersall and I were interviewed on a television show together. It was one of those morning news programs with a sort of domestic feeling—you know, some perky female and some housebroken male acting almost like husband and wife as they chat with newsmakers and celebrities.

Anyway, it was the perky female interviewing Piersall and me. And she was basically asking the same sorts of questions all the other journalists I'd spoken to had asked. "Were you scared?" and "How did you feel?" and "What was the first moment you realized this was really happening?" Even with the bright lights and with the cameras swirling around me and with the perky female's face uncannily sharp and distinct in front of me because of her makeup and celebrity, I grew bored with the whole thing and my mind began to wander. I began to think about the television room in my mother's house. About the fact that I'd programmed the TiVo there
to record every show that had Patrick Piersall in it. I wondered if my old friend the enormous TV was recording me right now.

Then, unexpectedly, the perky female interviewer put on her Serious and Thoughtful Face. She leaned toward me over her crossed knees and asked, "When you look at a situation like this, do you have any thoughts about what the root causes of our current troubles in the world might be? Do you think America might share some of the responsibility?"

She was giving me a chance, you see. A chance to show I was deep and nuanced like herself and could understand that sometimes the victim of an attack is really the perpetrator and vice versa. Unfortunately, the question caught me off guard. I had no prepared response. I just began speaking and I said, "You know, Perky (or whatever her name was), I saw one of these fundamentalist imams on TV recently. And he said that when the Soviet Union fell, the forces of faith had triumphed over the forces of atheism. And he said that now, we had to fight a holy war to decide which faith would rule. The more I think about that, the more I think maybe he got it exactly right. Maybe in some sense, this is a holy war..."

Now, I was about to go on to say that, with atheism a discredited force in the world, there were basically two different ways in which you could believe in God. You could believe in a God who had spoken one time and then demanded submission ever after to his Word. Or you could believe in a God who was still speaking, still unfolding his creation to us in the strange equation of every soul and in the unfathomable design thrown up by all our souls together. That God—that second God—requires not submission but liberty, so that every soul can speak, even the errant and foolish ones. Ultimately, I was going to say, one of those two versions of God has to triumph over the other. They obviously can't live side by side.

But before I could go on, before I could say any of that, the perky female interviewer interrupted me. Her startlingly present features were suddenly far less perky, far more dark and fierce.

"So what are you saying? Are you saying this is something like
Smackdown: Jehovah Versus Allah?
Either believe in our Judeo-Christian God or we kill you?"

"Oh, no," I said, horrified. "No, not at all, what I meant—"

"You believe this is some kind of New Crusade—because many in the Muslim world are afraid of exactly that."

"No, that's not what I'm saying, what I'm saying is—"

"Are you a Christian?" she asked me accusingly.

"Well, yes—yes I am, but—"

"So you believe your religion is the right one and other religions are false?"

"Well, yes, I suppose in some sense I do, but—"

Too late. The perky female interviewer rested her case. She swiveled her crossed knees away from me decisively and re-pointed them at Patrick Piersall, where he sat fat and kingly in the chair beside me.

"Patrick, do you agree with that?" she said—and I thought there was a clear tone of warning in her voice.

But Piersall knew the ropes of these things far better than I. "No, no, no, no, no," he said in deep, mellow, almost Santa Clausian tones. I noticed he had carefully tucked the tail of his sports jacket under his buttocks so it wouldn't ride up to his shoulders when he leaned forward. And I noticed he leaned forward whenever he talked. This, I learned later, gave him a more animated, active appearance onscreen. He leaned forward and began to cut the air with his hands in that Patrick Piersall way of his, speaking in those patented Patrick Piersall syncopations. "With respect to my friend—if anything—I think what happened this past week shows"—and his expression here became almost mystic, his hand
trembling like a trapped bird in the air in front of him—"It shows the—the
need
for greater—sensitivity—understanding—among peoples of the world. Because war—war is—not the answer."

The perky female interviewer turned from him to look directly into the camera. "We'll be right back," she said.

The bright lights dimmed and we sank into a duller shade of existence.

Patrick Piersall turned his bloated face toward me and winked broadly. "Kid," he said. "I don't think you're quite ready for TV."

Well, that didn't say the half of it. After that interview—that's when the attacks started. The endless op-eds and editorials in the
Times.
The subtle but unmistakable shift in the tone of coverage on the networks. The honk of that jerk on cable news, the one with a voice like a traffic jam, going on and on about me. Before the interview with the perky female, I was a "hero," a "heartland entrepreneur," an "unprepossessing everyman." Now I was suddenly a "racist," a "rabid right-winger," a "fundamentalist theocrat, as bad as the terrorists themselves." And those were only the opinions. In the news reports, I went from being "handsome with an ironic smile" to "short" and "bland" with "a receding hairline." I went from having no political or religious affiliation to speak of to where journalists seemed unable to mention my name without pointing out that I was a conservative or a Republican or a Christian. Juliette Lovesey, Todd Bingham, and Angelica Eden all condemned me publicly. "It was exactly to change bigoted attitudes like Mr. Harrow's that we made our movie," Juliette said, her eyes growing damp. "This makes me feel the entire project was in vain." For a while, a group called Arab-American Rights got big headlines by demanding an apology from me, and calling for anti-hate-speech legislation to prevent "such dangerous incidents from occurring in the future." Fortunately, the group's leader
was soon after indicted for having ties to Palestinian terrorists—whereupon the story vanished from the news altogether.

Conversely, the "true hero of the New Coliseum"
(Times),
"beloved TV star Patrick Piersall" (CBS Evening News), was soon signed to "light up the airwaves once again" (CNN) with a featured role as "a former sixties revolutionary now turned heroic defense attorney on the surefire hit
False Convictions
" (Sally Sterling). Hey, I was happy for him. He had not spent half a lifetime trying to claw his way back into the limelight for nothing.