VI.
I’m at the office by eight the next morning, which is the earliest I’ve managed this year by a generous margin. Becks isn’t in yet. I turn on the lights, disarm the alarm system; Squirrel has rigged everything up on our phones, so all I need to do is tap icons. From the outside our building looks like the other Federal-style town houses on Harrison Street, three stories of stately redbrick and symmetrical windows, but Veracity’s decor is all modern minimalism. White walls and ash wood floors, unadorned desks and chairs. Everything about it whispers discreet.
I dump my bag on my desk and then take my time making my tea in the pantry in the back. I even go into the room I still think of as Komla’s office to water his overgrown-yet-still-growing potted plant, and end up standing by the windows for a few minutes. A pair of workmen are unloading a van, the only movement on the street. The lemony morning light slants across the cobblestones, and I must admit they look charming from where I am. It’s soothing, being here alone like this, after last night’s drama—I’m a literary contrarian when it comes to Hemingway, but right now I’ll give him his clean, well-lighted place.
After Komla left Veracity, Becks asked if I wanted to take over his office, rather than continuing to sit out front like a glorified receptionist. I said no. I like watching our clients come in through the door—you can tell a lot from how they walk, the way they look around, whether they hesitate at all. (Mason Perry, for instance: entitled as a viscount.) Also, I guess there’s a bit of superstition on my part, of trying to bargain with the universe: if we leave Komla’s room empty, maybe he’ll be more likely to come back.
Becks arrives a little after nine. When she sees me she says, like I’ve let her down, “Aren’t you out today?”
I had originally told her that I would take the first day of Lunar New Year off, with the idea of visiting my mother. I’ve already fallen behind on my every-three-weeks resolution, which just goes to show why I should stop making resolutions: I don’t adjust my behavior, but I feel guiltier about it. I say, “I changed my mind.”
She transfers her thermos to her other hand. “Is your family that insufferable?”
“What?”
“You’d rather come to work than see them.”
“I like coming to work,” I say. “I mean, not that I don’t like my family, too. I like them both. Just saying that one has nothing to do with the other.”
She considers me. She’s brought the cold in with her, lingering like a scent around her hair and her coat. “Good for you,” she says. “Mine is a huge pain in the ass.”
Then she turns around and walks back out through the front door.
I stare at her through the glass. She’s raising her phone to her ear as she steps into the elevator and out of view. What just happened?
It’s only when I sit back down at my desk that I register the truly bizarre part of that exchange. Her family? Becks Rittel and I have worked together for seven months now, during which time we’ve solved a murder, gate-crashed a gala, uncovered a corporate conspiracy, and become co-owners of an online-dating detective agency, and she still acts like disclosing anything personal could launch a nuclear war. Pretty much all I know about her life, based on daily observation, is that she has a monochromatic wardrobe and reading tastes wide-ranging enough to stock a library. And, now, a pain-in-the-ass family. Unsurprising, on one hand, given what a pain in the ass Becks herself is; but also semi-shocking, that the concept of family is applicable to her at all. She puts me in mind of Athena, sprung fully formed from some divine source, regal and wrathful. Not that I’ll ever tell her that.
Becks returns in the early afternoon with the news that we have a client intake meeting in thirty minutes. “Pradeep Mehta,” she says. “He’s in the calendar for tomorrow, but he’s been harassing me for an earlier slot. Since you’re here today, I figured we could move him forward.”
“You don’t usually care about what our clients want,” I say.
“I don’t. But if that man sends me one more whiny email I’m going to punch him when he shows up.”
Pradeep Mehta gives me the impression of having run all the way from the subway station on Chambers Street and up the two flights of stairs to our office. He pulls open the door, steps inside, and says to me from several feet away, “Excuse me. I have an appointment.”
He glances at his watch, taps it, looks back at me. He’s a slim man, medium height, with a cap of wavy black hair and large, intent eyes. There’s a jitteriness about him, like he’s either overcaffeinated or inordinately anxious. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s here, ready to hire us to audit whomever he’s dating without their knowledge or consent. It makes almost all our prospective clients uneasy, to some extent, and the ones who are unfazed we reject. As Becks pointed out: “The worse they feel about what they ask us to do, the less likely they are to ever blab to anyone about it.”
I get up from my desk. “Yes,” I say. “Pradeep, right?” He’s ten minutes early, which means the ten minutes I intended to spend looking over his precheck results no longer exist and I’m heading into this session knowing nothing about the guy except that he’s in full-on crisis mode. Luckily, Becks will be prepared—she always is. “I’m Claudia. Let me go get Becks.”
Pradeep starts talking the moment we enter the conference room. “My identity’s been stolen. I need your help to stop it.” The rolling slope of his accent is slight but distinct: he didn’t grow up speaking American English.
Becks and I look at each other. She clicks the door shut behind her. “Do you even have any idea what we do?”
“Yes, of course. You check up on people who are dating online. Breon Jones told me about your service.”
So Pradeep is Breon’s referral. I remember Breon Jones well. He contacted us the week before Christmas, having impulsively invited the man he’d been dating for three months to spend the holidays with his family in Atlanta. I don’t so much mind if he’s lied here and there, he told us. I mean, I have, right? Nothing too big, but, you know. I just need to know what he lied about, because my mom and my sis will find all that out once they get their hands on him, and I need to be ready. Becks gave him hell for jamming us on the deadline, but we completed our verification in time, and he was so grateful that he delivered a hummingbird cake as a thank-you. Custom made—he owns a bakery up in Harlem. I still dream about that cake.
Becks says, “Then why are we even talking right now? Go put a freeze on your credit cards instead of wasting our time.”
“It’s not that kind of…” Pradeep shakes his head. “Maybe I’m not being clear. This is my online identity—my Let’s Meet profile. Someone stole it.”
I ask, “Someone has taken over your dating profile?”
Another head shake. “Cloned it.” He digs into the pocket of his jacket. “I’ll show you.”
What Pradeep shows us, holding out his phone like an entry pass, is a picture of a South Asian man around his age, with the same milky-tea skin tone. I glance from the screen to Pradeep’s face and back. They do look similar, like two permutations of the same set—although once I think that I worry that I’m just being racist—but these are clearly two different people. Handle: Silent G. Last active: Two hours ago.
I hear Becks take a breath. I say, before she can lead with anything too rude, “That’s, um, not your picture.”
“Not the pictures. The information.” He points at the text right below the photo. “Thirty-three years old. Midtown, New York. Same as me.”
“I didn’t know anyone actually lived in Midtown,” I say. Or would want to.
“It’s close to my work. That, also.” Pradeep flicks a finger across the screen. “Works in commercial real estate. Came to New York four years ago. Vegetarian.” Another flick. “Cricket player. Likes action movies and video games. And this.”
I read: On my life to-do list: Cycle the Friendship Highway. “What’s the Friendship Highway?”
“A cycling route. Through Tibet—you go from Lhasa to the Nepal border. This isn’t even in my profile.”
Seems like something I should include on my own currently nonexistent life to-do list. “It sounds epic,” I say. “How long is the ride?”
“Google it later,” says Becks. To Pradeep: “If that wasn’t in your profile, how could it have been copied from your profile?”
“It wasn’t. He already knew about it. I told him. That’s why he put it in.”
This is reminding me of the Shadow Fist sequence in Inspector Yuan and the Chrysanthemum Palace: the more practitioners learn of that skill, the less they can recall of it. (Which seems at once profound as a life philosophy and unworkable as a martial art.) What follow-up question to even ask here?
“Are you being incoherent on purpose, or do you really not know how to talk to people?”
Definitely not that. I grab Becks’s arm as the slightly more acceptable alternative to telling her to shut up. Pradeep’s restless manner, together with those Bambi eyes, makes me think of an injured deer. He’s stumbling toward us now—emphasis on stumbling—but he could just as easily panic and flee.
Becks glances at me, one eyebrow arched. I immediately let go. Very warm in this conference room, all of a sudden. I say to Pradeep, “What you said just now. That he already knew about it. Who are you referring to?”
He lowers his phone. “He’s…” For the first time in the conversation, I sense him pausing over what words he should use. “We were…together. Not anymore.”
“When you say together,” I say, “you mean you were dating this person?”
Pradeep shifts his feet. “Yes,” he says. “I guess so.”
“The profile picture you showed us. Is that him?”
“No. Matthew is American.”
After a moment I say, “And when you say American, you mean…white?”
“Yes.”
I would be more irked by these staunchly uncooperative responses if not for the feeling I’m getting that, to Pradeep, this relationship—or this man, or both—was a danger to him, such that he’s only able to talk around it, even now. “So, it sounds like you think your ex—Matthew, that’s his name?—set up this Silent G profile with your information in it?”
“Yes, yes. That’s what I’ve been saying this whole time. That’s why I came to you.”
“Why do you think he would do that?”
“That’s not important. He is, so I have to stop it.”
“Who’s asking for help here?” says Becks. “Answer Claudia’s question.”
Again, that pause: selecting his words, and his story. Then he says, “I ended it. Between us. It made Matthew angry.”
Becks says, “That doesn’t mean he’s behind this.”
“Of course he is.” Pradeep gestures at his phone with his free hand. “He knows all these things about me, and he put it on Let’s Meet, and—”
“What does the fact that it’s Let’s Meet have to do with anything?” says Becks.
“Matthew works at Let’s Meet.”
“That’s called a coincidence.”
“No,” says Pradeep, “it’s not. He has access to the back-end systems. He changed the…What is it called? How you rank with other people.”
“The compatibility score,” I say. Now there’s an industry term I wish would be replaced. The idea of a points system feels antithetical to romance, although that might also just be my visceral reaction from a lifetime of mediocre grades.
“I have a one hundred percent score with Silent G.”
“That’s not possible,” says Becks. “The algorithms never go above ninety-six.”
He taps his phone screen and then turns it to us. His matches are ordered in list view. Silent G’s thumbnail picture is at the top, and the badge icon next to it that Let’s Meet uses to display its comp scores indeed says 100%.
Becks takes out her own phone. After a few seconds she says, “Hmm.” She tilts the screen so I can see. She’s pulled up Pradeep’s Let’s Meet profile (handle: That’s Deep) on Match Insights—same comp score.
That was how he came to know about Silent G, Pradeep tells us: the profile showed up in his matches. Once he viewed it, he realized Matthew had set everything up. “You see. He’s messing with me.”
Becks is still scowling at her screen. “How do we know this Matthew even exists?”
“What? Of course he exists. Why would I make up all this?”
“Any reason. No reason. Veracity wouldn’t be here if people didn’t go around making up dumb shit all the time.”
I say, “Not that we think you did”—the accusatory edge of Becks’s tone notwithstanding.
“What’s his full name?” says Becks. “As a start we can look at his LinkedIn profile and see what it says about his role at Let’s Meet.”
“He’s not on LinkedIn,” says Pradeep. “He doesn’t like social media.”
“Smart of him. And convenient for you.”
“I’m not…” He pulls his shoulders back. “I’m not crazy, and I’m not lying. Matthew is real. He’s real and he’s doing this to me.”
This is one of those times when I wish Komla were still here, not simply because I miss him, his magnificent smiles and his unflappability and the way he had of making you feel like what you had to say was important, but also because he was our client whisperer. If he were running this intake, Pradeep would be reading us entries from his diary by this point. But it’s just me and Becks now, and without a personality reboot Becks wouldn’t be anyone’s last choice for a confidante.
I nod and say, “That’s exactly why it’s important for us to have a better understanding of who he is.” One of Inspector Yuan’s maxims in witness interviews and sword fighting showdowns alike: use your counterparty’s momentum to move yourself forward. “He’s at the center of this situation. We won’t be able to assess your situation without information about him as well.”
Pradeep looks from Becks to me and back again. I find myself willing him to be convinced. There’s a mystery here—what really happened between him and Matthew, what’s happening to him now—and I want to find out.
“Matthew Espersen,” he says. “That’s his name.”
I spend the next ten minutes tweezing additional splinters of information out of Pradeep: Matthew has been at Let’s Meet for the past three years, as an IT infrastructure specialist; Pradeep met him on Ballsy, a boutique hookup app for gay men; they dated for a year; they broke up in December, shortly before Pradeep flew back to India to visit his family. “It was the right thing to do,” he says. “Yes.”
He looks down at his phone. He taps the screen a few times, stares at it, and then abruptly holds it up to me. “This is him.”
There’s an ascetic air to Matthew Espersen, despite his smile and his comfortably baggy T-shirt (the quote on it: I Know a Deep Learning Joke but It’s Shallow). The close-shaved head, maybe, or how his skin looks vacuum-sealed to his bone structure, or his vampiric pallor. He reminds me of a monk let out from his cell after about a decade of prayer and fasting. Pradeep is next to him, shoulder to shoulder. The sun is bright on their faces. They’re on the High Line. I can tell it’s the West Twenties stretch of the park from the wedge of the Chelsea Piers facade visible behind them, and summertime from how intrusively green everything is.
And, Pradeep—he looks all woozy with happiness, as if to be where he is, with this man, like this, is more than he could ever have thought to ask for. It makes me think again about his reticence when it comes to Matthew. Maybe the danger he feels he has to skirt around is really himself.
“That was on my birthday.”
Pradeep presses a button on his phone to dim the screen. He holds up his wrist. The face of his watch gleams at us: another, smaller screen, crowded with icons. “He gave me this. To help monitor my physio KPIs.”
Now that I’m up close I can appreciate what a fancy smartwatch it is. Even the strap looks futuristic, made of some meshy material with a squiggly logo embossed on it. This device should be communicating with other galaxies, not monitoring heart rates and calories burned. “Are you a physio-quant?” I ask. It’s a concept I inadvertently became familiar with while verifying a target who was an endurance-event enthusiast. Three days of observation in, I realized that when she talked about tracking my macros, she was referring to her daily intake of fats, carbohydrates, and proteins, which she carefully regulated for performance optimization. She seemed like she might be a troublesome dinner date, and in the end our client agreed as well; at our final debrief, he told us he didn’t think it was going to work out. (It took every ounce of my self-control, plus Becks giving me the Medusa stare, not to shout out the pun.)
Pradeep shrugs. “The approach makes sense. Your body is like a machine. You need to know the inputs, and how to adjust them, so you get the outputs you want. Most people operate at a suboptimal level and they have no idea why. It’s exercise, nutrition, rest—everything.”
“But,” I say, “at what cost?” Giving up refined sugars to extend sentience by a few years at the scraggly tail end of things really doesn’t seem worth it.
Becks, who has been on her phone during this time—researching Matthew Espersen, I suspect—says, “Can we focus?” She looks at Pradeep. “What are you expecting us to do here?”
He opens his mouth.
“Stop whatever you believe is happening to you. I get that, you’ve said it seventeen times. But how?”
He closes his mouth, then opens it again. “You find out the truth about people. What they put on their profiles. And I’m telling you, this Silent G profile, it’s fake—”
“That’s my point,” says Becks. “We verify the target and we tell the client if there’s anything false. You already know Silent G isn’t a real profile. There’s nothing more for us to do.”
“Maybe…” I say.
She glares at me and I shut up. She’s right, much as I dislike admitting it. This might be a mystery, but it’s not a case. At least not one that Veracity can take on.
Pradeep blinks at us like he’s been spun around. “Breon said you could help.”
“And I’m guessing you didn’t tell Breon what you actually wanted help with.”
He’s silent.
“Look,” says Becks. “Just report Silent G to the matchmaker as a spam profile.”
“I don’t want to draw attention to this. I just want the profile to be taken down.”
“If you want the profile to be taken down, you need to draw attention to it. Let’s Meet will only take action if you make it too annoying for them not to.”
“You don’t understand. I can’t have that profile out there like that.”
Becks steps to the door and opens it. “You don’t understand. We can’t do anything for you.”
I say, because Pradeep is looking through the doorway as if he’s being ordered into the Battle of the Somme, “I know it’s, um, frustrating, having that profile out there, based on your information. If you’re concerned that it could mess with your matching results, you could switch to another platform?”
“I don’t care about that,” he says. “It’s how he could use it to…If people saw, if they thought…It’s just—it’s bad.”
Before I can ask, Bad how? Becks says, “If you can’t live with that profile being up, then report it, for Christ’s sake. This is something for the matchmaker to deal with, not us.”
“He knows,” says Pradeep. “That’s why he’s doing this. He knows exactly how bad this is for me.”
He keeps his gaze ahead of him as he walks out of the room. Becks doesn’t say anything, and so neither do I.