CHAPTER 29

Gillespie, after finishing one of his secret phone calls out at the pool, reentered the bedroom. He looked concerned.

“Why so blue?” Pick said.

He grabbed her wrist and squeezed, pulling it toward him. With her other hand she dug her nails into his forearm and he let go, pulling back his hand to deliver a slap. She covered up, but it was just a feint. He snickered. He never let out genuine laughs, but a little violence sometimes brought forth a smile. He still didn’t understand that joking about his complexion was a way to diminish its control over him. No sense trying to explain it again. After looking up argyria on the Internet she was even more convinced how deluded he must be. It had been known for centuries that silver, ingested in a liquid form known as colloidal silver, wards off some diseases but also discolors the skin. Only the wealthy could afford to take it so they became known as blue bloods. After penicillin and other antibiotics came along a blue complexion became the private preserve of fools and crackpots.

“They’re gonna show you a mug shot of somebody because of that . . . you know, that deal over at Sussman’s place. We need to get going.”

“To the station? Can’t they just e-mail an attachment? Which century do they live in?”

“Listen, this won’t be the guy, okay? You give them a strong enough no, maybe we can skip the lineup, unless Sussman IDs him. If he does, we’ll worry about that later.”

“I don’t understand.”

“All you need to understand is this was not the guy. When you see the picture? You never saw this dude in your life.”

Then she understood. It was a giant blast of data compressed into a few words. “Oh my God,” she said.

The only sounds now were the humming of the pool filter coming through the open french doors and a barky little neighbor dog. Finally he said, “Hey, don’t look at me like that.”

“You had something to do with it, didn’t you?”

He looked at her like she was wearing a tinfoil hat. “ ’Course not. He’s one of my informants, that’s all.”

“And you’ve been hiding it. All this time.”

“Look, you know how you offered to pay me? Well, this is part of the deal. You help me, I help you. C’mon, get dressed and I’ll take you to the station. I told ’em we’d be there in less than an hour. Just remember what I said. It’s not him.”

“They know you’re here?”

“I told ’em I could find you.”

It seemed like she was never dressed anymore. Not completely anyway. Yet lately he’d been leaving his own clothes on, baring his uncircumcised member only when circumstances called for it, and even then baring nothing else, freeing it to poke out of his fly like a stiff eel. With him mostly dressed and her in various stages of undress, the contrast had become a kind of a rite that paid homage to his masculinity. Or maybe she was reading too much into it. Maybe it was more about the shape of his phallus, which, he must have been aware, was distinctly unattractive. When flaccid it was a fat stump that made gender a riddle. Lower primates had a similar condition. Pick was silently appreciative he kept the thing covered up until ready for use, like the gun beneath his shirt. Meanwhile, whatever was eating at the two of them still led to sex, but sex was a diminishing solution, giving their paraphilia a more desperate quality and proving once again there was no secret key to the universe. Every time you found one, it eventually stopped working. She was also tired of having to prove that her lack of sexual hang-ups didn’t make her his fool.

“Listen to me,” she said calmly. She’d learned that in a long-ago speech course. Speak softly and they’ll strain to listen. “I really don’t care what sort of deal you and that monster have together. I just don’t like being lied to. And I especially don’t like it when you act like I’m stupid for not believing you. I’m a fucking PhD. Do you even know what that means? I’m not the bimbo here.”

She threw on her robe and stuck her chin out, daring him to slap, but he just bit his lower lip. Strange, the things that frightened Gillespie—that a commie government would steal everyone’s guns or the world would expire when clocks marked a new millennium. Yet he refused to accept, for example, the slow Apocalypse of a baking planet. His mind was stuck in reverse, unable to acknowledge what was genuine but eager to embrace remarkably absurd myths and dark wishes that, unlike the foundations of paranoid beliefs, had no relationship to facts.

“Here’s something to think about, okay? What if Sussman made up that story about the geek? What if he pressured you into going along? His career was on the rocks and douche bags like him, they figure a little publicity never hurts.”

“That puts me in trouble too. And it still doesn’t solve my problem.”

“You’d be cooperating. A cooperating witness. You want to show everybody what a liar he is, right? Think about it while you get dressed.”

“You must be more desperate than I am.”

“Don’t you worry about me.”

“And I don’t like you calling him a douche bag.”

“That’s practically all you talk about—what a douche bag he is. That and your brother. Sorry, didn’t mean that, the last part.”

She pulled out some underwear, threw it on the bed, and spent a minute at her dressing table touching up her lipstick. Tossing her robe on the floor, she entered the walk-in closet, searching for suitable police station attire. “The person and the body of work are two different things!” she shouted out to him. “It happens a lot. Dos Passos, Hemingway, Picasso . . . Assholes, every one of them.”

Gillespie, though a barbarian, was probably no less understanding of literary mastery than that ignorant corner of the literature establishment that viewed Sussman’s work as disturbingly accessible. Also, it failed to be humorless. She’d long since faced up to the living paradox embodied in Sussman, a classic genius hypocrite. His condition was by no means singular. Einstein and Shakespeare were also cruel to their women and more or less got away with it. That wouldn’t happen this time. She deserved the comforts she’d debased herself to acquire from such a deceitful man, but hanging on to her compensation would be challenging in a world with so little justice at its core. It was difficult not to flee the horror that had to be approaching, but she couldn’t bear to leave the rewards behind. She wasn’t sure whether she thought about it too much or not enough.

ON THE way to the station Pick found herself pouring out more details about her brother, Marty, about the praise his teachers used to heap on him, how his beatific aura made it harder for her in school because of the inevitable comparisons, but she never held it against him. Like everyone else, she loved Marty. As a teenager he took bag ladies out for coffee. And she just now decided he’d signed up for the army on September 12, 2001. More and more, when she was particularly upset or fearful, she added garlands to the tale of a sweet brother who’d adored her. She knew that contriving too many details could trip her up later, but she so loved them. The way she dressed and carried herself made it difficult to obtain anyone’s sympathy, but the tale of Marty altered all that. Even Gillespie was respectful. The young men killed by Cheney’s cut-rate showers were thinking about breakfast or whatever soldiers thought about when they were lucky enough to be back in a safe area with hot showers when sweet Jesus, the voltage ran through them and for that last minimoment they smelled their hair and flesh burning and hit the concrete dead. To this day no one knew just how many soldiers lost their lives to defective Halliburton wiring. She’d looked it up many times. The Pentagon failed to keep a trustworthy total.

Pick decided Marty had been buried at Arlington on a rainy day and that many of his friends flew across the country to be there, including the very real Arnold Isaacson she’d pursued in high school who later, she learned, changed his name to Arnold I. Saxon. Sussman, upon learning about the new Saxon, said he should have gone all the way and called himself Arnold Anglo Saxon. “That’d be taking the bull by the horns,” he said.

Her mother, Pick told Gillespie, declined to accept the flag from the astonished officer. All of it could be true, she decided, just as Grapes of Wrath was truer than cable news and Catch-22 was more accurate than your average presidential library.

SUSSMAN WAS exiting as she and Gillespie approached the building from the parking lot. She entered only after he pulled away in his car. Four cops waited for her inside the room. Gillespie made five. They strained to be polite, offering her coffee and a designated chair. Pick reminded herself she wasn’t a criminal and must not act like one. In fact, she was a victim and a hero. The one in charge was a man named Rosen who looked like Richard Dreyfuss before his hair turned white, but this Dreyfuss head was stuck atop a Schwarzenegger body.

Two photos, eight by tens, in color, lay on a table. And yes, that was the geek all right. Same little nose, same Jupiter-sized head, but the profile showed there was no braid anymore. She studied them awhile, pulling them closer and farther, finally setting them back.

“It’s not him,” she said. A wave of displeasure enveloped the room.

Rosen, showing no expression, said, “How can you be sure?”

“It’s just not him.”

“He matches the description in every way.”

“If it were him I’d see it. It’s just not the one.”

Silence. Gillespie offered no help. She’d looked into Kazakhstan, Dubai, and other spots without extradition treaties. But they all came with negative baggage. The post nine-eleven world was so much smaller, everyone tracked and stamped like supermarket oranges.

“Get him down here,” said a cop who hadn’t spoken before. Pick had barely noticed him but now saw he had plenty of stars on his collars.

“Right boss,” said Rosen. “Let’s get him someplace where Ms. Manville can smell him.”