The Lie (43 page)

“About all what, Mr. President?”

“The big lie. The one that has the world believing Mainz is still alive and well and running the Wannsee Project. Do you feel
there might be some profit to be squeezed from it?”

“Yes, sir. If it’s handled right.”

“Who knows the truth at this point?”

“Just the three of us. And Kate, of course.”

Jimmy Dunster looked at his director of intelligence. “Talk to me, Tommy,” he said.

“Why? You never listen to me anyway.”

“That’s probably true,” said Dunster. “But you know there’s no one whose judgement I respect more.”

Cortlandt sighed. “Come on, Jimmy. This whole concept is even more insane than your showing up at Wannsee in the first place.
And we’ve all seen how that turned out.”

The president was silent.

“I’m sorry,” said Cortlandt. “That was a real cheap shot.”

“But deserved. My coming to Wannsee was a world-class disaster. That’s why I’m grabbing at straws with this; I need
something
back.”

Cortlandt shook his head. “But there’s no guarantee it will even work, sir.”

“It will
have
to work,” said the president fiercely. “It’s working already. We’ve seen it in the responses we’ve been getting to Mainz’s
latest demands.”

“You’re talking about a dead man, Mr. President.”

“Yes. But he’s alive for us. We evidently have that need. A man with guns at our heads. Even if he’s only a lie.”

The president looked at Paulie. “I want to meet your Kate. How soon can you get her here?”

“By early evening, Mr. President.”

Dunster’s eyes, still holding to Paulie’s face, turned moist.

“Let me tell you something, Paulie. Less than an hour ago my wife came back to me from the dead. She actually looked at me,
squeezed my hand, and smiled. So if for no other reason than that, how can I give up on Mainz?”

A
FTER THE USUAL SECURITY CHECK
, they walked into the president’s hospital room at 8:27 that evening. Paulie was holding Kate’s arm as they came through
the door. It was half pride of possession, half fear of losing her. Besides Jimmy Dunster, only Tommy Cortlandt was present.

Feeling strangely awkward, Paulie introduced her to both men.

“Mr. President,” she said. “Mr. Director.”

She shook their hands. Then she sat down facing the president in his bed. Cortlandt sat beside her. There was another chair,
but Paulie remained standing.

How poised she is, he thought. How controlled, how beautiful.

“I assume Paulie told you what this is all about,” said Jimmy Dunster.

Kate Dinneson nodded.

“As we understand it, the whole idea for this lie based on the existence of a dead man was Dr. Vorelli’s. With you and Daniel
Archer helping to carry it out. Is that true?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And after Vorelli and Archer were killed? Did you plan to continue with it alone?”

“That was my hope.”

“With Paulie to help you?”

Kate glanced at Paulie and found what she was looking for in his face. “That was my hope too.”

“The two of you never discussed it?”

“Not in so many words,” said Kate.

The president looked at Paulie. “Would you object to being part of a continuing lie like that?”

“I’m already part of it, sir.”

“So you are,” said Jimmy Dunster.

“Understand,” said the CIA director, “that for all practical purposes this conversation has never taken place. If either of
you claims it has, both the president and I will deny it. If you ever get into trouble, it will be entirely your own. Neither
the Oval Office nor the Central Intelligence Agency must ever be involved. Is that clear?”

Kate and Paulie nodded.

“Another thing,” said Cortlandt. “What happened with that bomb in the Taylor Building must never be repeated. Not anywhere.
Make whatever threats you feel are necessary. But no bomb is ever to be armed and put on a clock again. Any questions?”

“Yes,” said Kate. “What about the money?”

Cortlandt stared blankly.

“The hundred million we buried near the lake house in France,” she said.

The director turned to Jimmy Dunster. “That could be a problem, Mr. President. We certainly can’t return it to each contributing
country. And it would be an embarrassment if someone stumbled over it.”

“I don’t see any problem,” said the president. “Since the money was supposed to support the infrastructure and practical needs
of the Wannsee Project, I suggest the new directors of the project simply use it for those purposes.”

A hundred million dollars worth of infrastructure and practical needs, thought Paulie, and he waited to see whether he was
the only one who found the irony of Nicko Vorelli’s highly inflated style of living even remotely amusing.

Apparently he was.

But a couple of loose ends still remained.

“What about your vice president?” Paulie asked Jimmy Dunster. “Have you done anything about him yet?”

“I had Jay Fleming over here yesterday. He’ll be resigning tomorrow for reasons of health. Then he’ll just disappear someplace
abroad.”

“He’s getting off easy,” said Paulie.

“I know. But so is the country, which is all that really matters. And it sure beats hell out of a long ugly trial.”

“And Ken Harris and his three goons?” asked Paulie.

“Killed in the line of duty,” said the president. “Unfortunately they’ll have to be buried with honors. But that’s still infinitely
better than the bloodbath you saved us from when you stopped those clocks.”

Cortlandt looked at Paulie with tiredly sardonic eyes.

“My hero.”

T
HE NIGHT WAS BLACK
. Kate Dinneson had only been there that once, with Nicko driving, so she was less than certain that she would be able to
find the place again. Still, she was trying, although this time Paulie was at the wheel, and he had never been there at all.

They drove slowly along the dirt trail in silence, the forest pressing close on both sides. The only sound was the soft crunching
of the tires.

Finally, the headlights picked up a narrow track cutting off to the left and Kate said, “Turn here.”

“Are you sure?” asked Paulie.

“No. But it feels right.”

My only true compass of direction
, thought Kate.
How it feels
. That was why they were here in the first place. Because it had suddenly felt wrong to leave Klaus Logefeld to rot forever
in that concrete bunker.

Paulie had a far more practical reason for getting Klaus and the other German out of there when Kate told him how she felt.
Their combined odors would inevitably work their way into Wannsee’s basement and up through the floorboards to the main conference
room itself. Then where would their lie be?

So they had stayed over in Berlin, picked up what they would need to effect a more conventional burial, and returned to Wannsee
to take care of it. That is, if Kate could ever find her way back to the tunnel entrance. After close to half an hour of blundering,
she at last managed to do so.

Prepared with a wheeled dolly, Paulie lowered it down half a dozen steps as Kate lit their way with a lantern. Then he followed
her along the concrete-lined tunnel until they reached the closed metal door of the bunker.

They stopped for a moment to put on sterile masks.

Then Kate pressed against the door, felt it give, and lit their entrance into the bunker.

Klaus Logefeld lay on the bunk where she had seen him last. But he did not look the same. A few small days made a big difference.

Yet even now he had a human look, thought Kate. From a heritage of German shame, he had fought to make something of himself.
He’d had loyalties to certain pure states and he refused to compromise them. He knew there had been good Germans before him,
that there would be good Germans to come, and he had died trying to be one of them.

And me? I’m trying for him still
.

The other dead German, whose name had been Hans and whom Kate had never seen alive, remained invisible under his tarpaulin
in a far corner of the bunker.

Paulie lifted the tarp and looked at the man beneath it.

“Who was this one?”

“His name was Hans. He had already been shot when Nicko and I got here. Daniel Archer killed him.”

“Why?”

“Because Harris had hired Hans to kill Archer.”

“Nice bunch.”

Kate was silent. She was staring at Klaus. It was still hard for her to think of him as Alfred Mainz, although it was as Mainz
that he had achieved his celebrity and his death. She noticed how well combed his hair was, how neatly in place, and tried
hard to despise him. He had, after all, done despicable things. But the purity of his motives kept getting in the way.

“Let’s do it,” she said.

Along with the wheeled dolly, gloves, and a shovel, they had brought several large plastic bags, and they worked the two bodies
into them. Kate caught a final glimpse of Klaus’s
face. The nostrils, the eye sockets, were very dark, the cheeks pale and waxlike. In the lips, frozen bitterness and a grimly
reluctant humor.

They took out the bodies one at a time and buried them deep in the woods, in separate graves.

Kate had insisted on it, although Paulie pointed out that it was double the work and who cared anyway?

“
I
care,” she told him.

“I
T’S STARTING
!” Kate Dinneson called to Paulie Walters, who was working in his studio.

Paulie put down his palette and brushes and went into the living room to watch the televised opening of what had come to be
known as the Second Wannsee Conference on Human Rights.

It had taken almost two months to arrive.

There had been delays.

Repairs to the bombed-out villa had been held up by unexpectedly severe structural damage. The seven leaders taking part had
scheduling problems. President Dunster’s recovery suffered setbacks.

Every complication along the way had to be worked out through a combination of publicly announced messages from a nonexistent
Professor Mainz, and personal telephone calls to Jimmy Dunster from the phantom professor’s supposedly anonymous representative.

The long-awaited moment had finally arrived. Kate and Paulie sat together on their couch in Ravello and gazed at President
Dunster leaning over to kiss his wife, then slowly making his way toward the speaker’s podium.

The president still limped, still had to walk with the help of a cane. But his progress across the floor of the big conference
room was sure, and he received the same standing ovation he had been given during his surprise appearance at the first conference.

Except that this time there was something more. This time blood-filled history was included in the tribute.

This time he’s paid his dues in advance
, Paulie thought.

The president stood waiting for the applause to quiet. When it did, he lifted his head and gazed evenly into the magic eye
of the camera.

“We’re finally here,” he said. “Now let’s get to work and do what has to be done.”

Paulie guessed it was about as good an opening to a speech as he had ever heard. Left alone, the two short sentences might
even have been sufficient in themselves. But man had become an explaining creature, and the soul wanted what it wanted.

So instead of simply sitting down and getting to work, the president explained, in detail, his hopes for the conference.

Nevertheless, the speech was effective and stirring. On her couch in Ravello, Kate reached for Paulie and held him. She wept,
soaring with a degree of hope equal to that of the president.

Not so Paulie. Hope was fine if there was some reasonable basis for it. Sadly, all he could see ahead for his own benighted
species was hate, degraded clowning, and death.

Except for some bloody ethnic cleansing and at least one long-term civil war in central Africa. Volunteer strike forces had
quickly moved in and established several genuine ceasefires that were still holding after five incredible weeks of peace.

Yet even here, Paulie chose to reserve judgement.

P
AULIE
W
ALTERS HAD STARTED THE PAINTING
on the same morning the Second Wannsee Conference began with such high hopes. There was no advance planning to it. The painting
simply evolved bit by bit over a period of hours and days. The finished work was a surprise even to Paulie.

At first it was little more than a mass of swirling color, a dark abstraction from some hidden memory of the womb. Then Paulie
had seen that first floating eye, so muddy and soiled, so perfectly somber and evil. But it was, after all, an eye. If only
one. Then he and the emerging face were on their way, with a curving shadow for a nose and a dark opening below that would
be the mouth.

Working his brush with care, he laid on red blood and green mud like medals of death pinned to the chest. Then a stab went
in above the mouth and sucked the face in backward, as though upon the gouge of a bullet. The look was that of an old man,
toothless, sly, reminiscent of fear and pain. An arm appeared, but only one, the other lost somewhere, or blown off, or eaten
away.

Klaus Logefeld’s grandfather?

But just briefly. Because there was no single particular creature reflected there.
Whap!
went the brush, and a hole appeared where the heart should have been. The face above grinned with a clown’s deep gloom, as
if there was pleasure even in this.

Paulie could no longer face the single eye. Now it contained
it all—the blood, the carnage, the dark screams that never sounded. He faltered and had no stomach for the rest.

Enough, he thought.

Then the stubborn part of his brain took hold, and he went back to the painting to do what he had known all along had to be
done.

He showed it to Kate after dinner one evening, bringing her into his studio, sitting her down in front of the canvas, and
silently gazing with her at the big nude. This was what it finally had become, a life-size male nude painted in the stained
and ugly hues of frozen flesh in winter tombs.