The two-engine jet flew them to Ashland, Wisconsin. The Fairchild-Hiller FH-1100, a utility five-seater helicopter, had been flown up from Chicago and was waiting to take them out to Schrader Island pad. They were set down beside Professor Cerutti’s big house in twelve minutes’ time. There was a short scuffle. A guard with a machine rifle told them they were trespassing. Nick identified himself, but it didn’t seem to mean anything to the guard, so Alvin knocked him down and disarmed him so he wouldn’t lose his head.
With Alvin carrying the rifle, the three men walked around the large, pink box, a copy of a late Georgian house, and kept walking to the long, low laboratory building where much of Pa’s power was stored. Professor Cerutti was annoyed to see them. They went into the enormous file room. Professor Cerutti was at his writing center in view of the door. When he saw them he exploded. “Look here, Thirkield,” he said coldly, “I don’t know what the hell you think you are doing here, but you are not here at my invitation, and you are most distinctly not welcome.”
“We’ve come for Yvette Malone,” Nick said.
“Did your father send you for her?”
“No,” Nick said.
“You mean you yourself deduced that Miss Malone was here?”
“Elementary, my dear Watson,” Nick said, unsmiling, “considering all the blunders you made.” If Cerutti’s sense of superiority was his self-image, the mirror held up to his tiny world, Nick had decided this would be the quickest way, perhaps the only way, to break him down. The statement inflamed Cerutti. He gasped at the size of the insult. His face became mottled. “Blunders?” he said with outraged incredulity. “What are you talking about—blunders?”
“Tell us where Miss Malone is, then you and I can talk about that.”
“She’s in the main house. Who are these men?”
“New York Police Department,” Nick said.
Alvin flashed his badge. Keifetz tried to look as mean as Alvin.
“Call the main house,” Alvin said to Cerutti. “Tell them we’re on our way. Tell them to watch their manners.” Cerutti telephoned the main house and gave instructions. Alvin and Keifetz left.
Professor Cerutti, trembling with rage, led Nick to the facing sofas at the far end of the building. They sat down opposite each other. “What blunders?” Cerutti said.
“You mean you’d like to hear the worst blunder first, I guess. It has to do with Z. K. Dawson’s daughter, Professor. In your most recent scenario for my father you killed the wrong woman.”
“Do you mean Lamers?” Cerutti said with disdain. “I knew Lamers wasn’t Dawson’s daughter. But I also knew you knew nothing about Dawson, had never met him, and were absolutely ready to accept any plausible woman as his daughter—so what are you talking about?”
“I am going to marry Yvette Malone.”
“Really? How nice for you.”
“Yvette Malone is Z. K. Dawson’s only daughter.”
Cerutti’s face puckered. It began to fold in upon itself—a dutiful company man’s mock-up of his employer’s face when in crisis, Nick thought. For a moment it seemed possible that he was going to cry, but he recovered as he stared at Nick with bulging eyes like wet grapes and said, “His daughter?”
“This morning my father told me the story you had written for him. The rousing scenario about Mrs.—I mean Signora—Luigi Debole, and all the while he told it he was thinking about Chantal Lamers and I was thinking about Yvette. We were talking and threatening and weeping about two different women, Professor. He didn’t know Yvette, really didn’t know she was alive, much less that she was Z. K. Dawson’s daughter. He meant Lamers, so he thought I meant Lamers. He thought I had fallen in love with Lamers. I mean it was just about the lousiest piece of staff work and research anybody ever handed his boss. I mean it is such a lousy piece of staff work that it is going to hang you or electrocute you or whatever it is they are going to do to you, because you are cooked, Professor Cerutti. When I went to that morgue in New York and looked down at Chantal Lamers, baby, I knew you were cooked.”
“Cooked? Hanged? Me? You are mistaken, Mr. Thirkield. I did nothing. I killed no one. All I did was to make up scenarios. I gave your father some perfectly harmless stories. It is a method we developed many, many years ago. In business, as in all other life situations, people tend to accept the plausible if it is wondrously documented; they definitely tend to believe what they want to believe. We stumbled on this system when your father wanted to take over a certain large corporation, but his way was blocked by the company president and two members of their board. Your father said to me—this is almost thirty-five years ago, Mr. Nicholas Thirkield—if he could only get something on those men, he could use it as a lever to pry them out of their places, and I told him I would think about it. I did. I decided that in our modern society truths did not matter. The illusion of truth, the appearance of truth, indeed, let us say the application of the techniques of fiction playing like searchlights upon a fancied façade of truth, would entirely suffice. We pioneered these methods in modern society, we did it—until today, as we see, our politicians and political structure could not exist without them. Life and truth have been turned into diverting, gripping, convincing scenarios, Nicholas Thirkield. All they require is a command of an extensive research facility and a fixed target upon which to project the new truth.”
“The New Truth,” Nick murmured.
“Communications has come a long, long way from Dr. Goebbels, the father of our science.”
Nick slid the photograph out of its envelope and extended it to Cerutti. “Who is this?”
Cerutti looked at the picture of the round old man with the sweeping white forelock and the wide pink hair part. “In my scenario that was Casper Junior or William Casper. And other variants.”
“Who was it really?” Nick said harshly.
Cerutti grinned at him. It was a proverbial ear-to-ear grin. “Actually, it was Major General James Nolan,” he said.
Nick’s jaw dropped. Cerutti giggled. “Counting everything,” Nick said, “he must be a fairly filthy son-of-a-bitch.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because my father would never let me meet him.”
“Yes. The General has been a background character for thirty years. But so have I. I made a tremendous amount of money, but I never found myself anyplace where I could spend it.”
“It’s probably just as well.”
“Why?” asked Cerutti quickly, feeling cheated of a main chance to prove his devotion to duty.
“That way you had less of a chance to fuck up. But why did every succeeding scenario conflict with and contradict the one before it?”
“The use of these techniques both personally, as in your case, or upon masses of people—as, for instance, when the techniques are used by politicians—requires that the subject remain confused, that he become exhausted by the unrelenting confusion and, ultimately, hopeless that anything he could ever do, any effort he might ever make would produce any solution whatever inside his maze. We were, after all—the politicians and I—able to stay ahead of you.”
Nick took a deep breath. He exhaled very slowly. “Professor,” he said, staring into Cerutti’s eyes with loathing, “the police who arrived with me don’t know why they are here, except that they know they are to take Mrs. Malone out. They don’t know who you are or what you’ve done under instructions from my father. I’ll just assume for the time being that you would rather not be hanged or that you would rather be hanged than to go into a building with twelve thousand other prisoners, sleep in a cell with five other men in a three-level bed, the other men sharing you.”
Cerutti became pale. A small tic developed at the corner of his mouth. He had been feeling the pressure, but now he was beginning to understand what pressure was.
“I am prepared to offer you this deal on my own,” Nick said. “If you don’t accept it, these police will take you in. After that no deals can possibly be made, as you can understand, considering the nature of the charges that will be brought against you.”
“Mr. Nicholas Thirkield, I want you to understand something. These records you see all around you are so terribly incriminating to your father, to me and to hundreds of people whom they involve, that this entire building is wired with an explosive charge so tremendous that nothing on this island could live once it is detonated.”
“Very sensible precaution, I’m sure,” Nick said.
“You don’t think I am intimidated by a New York cop flashing his badge?”
“I think you would regret being executed for kidnapping. Let’s put it that way.”
“In short, you are defying me. You are saying to me, ‘Go ahead, Cerutti, blow us all up.’”
“I am counting on you fucking up, Cerutti.”
“What do you mean?” the professor snapped.
“I mean you are very fond of what you like, and you like Cerutti being alive, therefore no crazy idea of my father’s orders to blow this place up would have any effect on you if you had to be blown up with it.”
“What is the deal you are offering me?”
“Tell me everything you know about my brother’s assassination, Professor, and everything that followed it—everything. Then I can let you disappear in any way you choose.”
“I’ll accept that. Very kind of you, I’m sure.”
“Not at all. Please don’t thank me. They’ll catch you anyway.”
“I don’t think so,” Cerutti said. “I have been thinking about this for some years.”
“Professor, what was real and what was a scenario?”
Cerutti dialed at the console. The table opened and a tray with a pot of tea and one cup and saucer ascended. Cerutti poured the tea and said, “Captain Heller, Joe Diamond, Turk Fletcher and Willie Arnold were as real as real can be. That guard who beat you up on the fiftieth floor of your father’s building was very real. He was telling you specifically and incontrovertibly that you were to stop.”
“The rest was fantasy?” Nick asked.
“Almost.”
“Except the twenty-four murders.”
“I had nothing to do with those. Furthermore, most of those deaths were only coincidental—people wanted to believe they were connected with the assassination.”
“What did Z. K. Dawson have to do with any of it?”
“Nothing. Dawson was just a mistake of your father’s. He was off Dawson because of an aluminum deal Dawson won about twenty-six years ago, so he thought he’d give Dawson a hard time—create a public scapegoat and pay off an old score. But your father’s mistakes got worse. He decided he wanted to protect Fletcher. He wouldn’t let us find Fletcher. Are you going to tell me that a man who doesn’t even bother to change his own name, who has limited means of earning a living, who has to be in touch with his centenarian mother and who had an Amarillo accent like a knife sharpener in Indonesia could have gotten away from our people?”
“But, why would Pa—”
“Oh, your father knew where he was. He told General Nolan to give Fletcher a letter of reference, and your father followed Fletcher straight through to Bangladesh and Brunei, but I think he wanted Fletcher alive to keep himself sharp. There was no way for him to get old and flaccid while Fletcher was still alive, and then there was the biggest reason of all, which your father didn’t know himself. He could not stand the guilt of what he had done. He wanted to get caught and he wanted to be punished. Deep, deep down in his mind and in his soul he had put the whole combination together. He knew Fletcher was working for you. Maybe he even told Nolan to tell Fletcher that there would be a safe job for him with you. Then he waited for something to happen that would make Fletcher talk, make Fletcher draw you in, because your father knew absolutely that if you could get pulled into this you would surely turn to him, and with him steering the whole investigation through you, he could force its course and could bring about his own apprehension.”
“Pa was using me to make sure he was punished for what he did to Tim?”
“Yes. But he didn’t know that. And considering all that he had done over fourteen years’ time to cover his tracks, he didn’t have to lay down an order on the first day that you were to be protected—no matter what—that no harm was to come to you. He didn’t have to demand that I bring Lola Camonte into the scenarios. That was getting close to the bone, that was right down at the real issue.”
“Camonte and Frank Mayo were real, then. Just the way the witnesses said they were?”
“Camonte and Mayo are real people, God knows,” Cerutti said. “But except for one section, they were just characters in the scenarios and therefore unreal. The real part was the tape your father had made about the meeting between Camonte and the President, when the President heard for the first time that your father had stolen the two-million-dollar campaign contribution that had been made through Camonte by the crime industry. All of the rest about Camonte I fabricated, because our science functions in the balance between the real and the fanciful, and that is what makes our scenarios the marvelously effective things they are—the task-force strength of all modern American political action.”
Nick inhaled very deeply again. “Professor”—he sighed helplessly—“did Pa have Tim killed?”
“Yes.”
There was a silence. Nick covered his face with his hands. Then he released them and sat back, staring at Cerutti.
“Your brother knew that your father and his friends had been taking him down the wrong road in the Presidency. For eleven months he had gone along because he could see no way to break with the men who had elected him. Then your father gave him his chance over the issue of the stolen campaign contribution, and the President barred your father and the rest of the oligarchs he could identify from access to the White House and key government offices. He became, so to speak, his own President. When he did that he sealed his death warrant.”
“His death warrant?” Nick cried out. “Who signed it? Who ordered it? Who are these—the rest of the oligarchs Tim barred?”
“The executive committee of the men and women who own this country met and voted. Your brother had to be punished, and a man they could trust had to be moved into the White House in his place. They controlled the CIA, the Secret Service and the FBI, and it was understood that one of these would organize the strike, but your father said it was his right to get that part of the work done. It was he who had lost your brother in the first instance. It was his job to make it all good and to re-establish himself among his peers. That motion was carried.”