“Okay,” says Aysa, breathing heavily, nodding her head, gathering her thoughts. “Okay,” she says. “Okay. So. I went back to the office to finish reviewing.”
“Reviewing what?”
“The stretches. Can I come in?”
“What stretches, Ms. Paige, did you go back to finish reviewing?”
“On Crane’s apartment. The stakeout stretches from Mose Crane’s apartment. I never—I hadn’t finished them.”
She holds up her hand and a shiver cuts through me. She’s got one tight in her fist, a slim rectangle of silver plastic. She’s been back to the office, and not only was she watching the stretches, she made an echo of one: she burned it and stuck it in her pocket and brought it here.
“You weren’t supposed to do that,” I say, glancing up at the doorway capture, and I’m trying to be stern but I fear I sound like a child, like a small, scared child. “You can’t have done that.”
Of course I could be talking to myself. The Prisoner is in the bedroom, still quietly singing. Its alternate truth is still glimmering in here, glossing the furniture, fogging my vision. If she’s broken the rules, then I certainly have too. When these stretches are played, when this reality is requisitioned, when this whole story enters the Record, it will be both of us who are found to have strayed.
“We were pulled from that case,” I tell Aysa. “That is not a case.”
“No, I know. Can I just come in? There’s something you need to see.”
“We can’t look, Paige. There’s nothing there.”
“Well, Petras said so. But just because she says there’s no anomaly, that doesn’t mean there’s no anomaly.”
I’m stunned. I laugh. “Yes,” I tell Paige. “That’s exactly what it means. That’s literally what it means. Petras was speaking for the State.” The thing is determined. It is done. “We fucked it up.” Catch it. Correct it. “I did. I fucked it up. Investigation complete.”
She is shaking her head, gritting her teeth. She won’t accept it—she can’t. I wonder with a sudden horror whether Paige is sensing the presence of the novel in my house. She must be: with her discernment, her attention to falsehood, she must feel that it’s here. Is she being polite? Deferential to my superior rank? Or can it be that she is so focused on the mission that brought her here, frantic in the dead of night, that she isn’t catching it?
“Can I just show this to you? Can I just tell you what I’m looking at here?”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Paige. No.”
“Yes.”
She doesn’t stamp her feet, but she might as well. She is like a defiant child, but somehow serious, more serious than me. She is more of a Spec than I have ever been, has more of whatever it is that puts a person in law enforcement—she has started and she can’t stop. She cannot leave it be and that is her truth, bone truth, deep truth, she could not leave the matter of Mose Crane because that’s who she is—and who am I? I’m the one who is told that it is over and says okay, it’s over, just goes home and gives up. Abandons himself to a work of fiction, of all things, a malfeasant artifact. Hides his fearful face from the dangers of the real world.
And that’s been it the whole time, hasn’t it? Arlo told me to hold this young Speculator back, to ballast her, keep her calm and deliberate and cautious like I am calm and deliberate and cautious, but I never wanted to. I don’t want to make another me. The parts of her I’m supposed to tamp down are the parts I like the best.
Paige went back to the office because she’s not like me, she’s like him, she’s like Charlie, she is Charlie, and she won’t stop. She can’t.
“All right, kid,” I say, and hold out my hand. She puts the stretch into it. “Let’s see what you got.”
Two minutes later we are crouched in front of my wall-mounted, in the center of the living room, staring at the front door of Mose Crane’s apartment.
I glance at Aysa’s somber face, blanketed in the light of the wall-mounted. She has not seemed to notice that I am in my underclothes, or that my house is a mess, and she certainly hasn’t looked with curiosity into the bedroom and wondered why there’s a copy of The Everyday Citizen’s Dictionary lying on the floor like a spent shell.
On the screen is the familiar static shot of Crane’s front door.
Ms. Paige says “Go” and “Fast,” and reality races past, one minute, two minutes, three minutes passing in a rush, and then here he comes. “Slow it down,” she says, and we watch him enter: a man in a suit, moving quickly, eyes cast down, holding his hat down on his head as he rushes up the stairs. The stretch does not show his face. I get as close as I can to the monitor but I can’t see it.
“Do you see?” says Aysa.
“See what?”
“That’s him.”
“Who?”
She looks at me, and then back at the screen. I stare.
“Are you—sure?”
“One hundred percent.”
“Stop,” she says, and the image pauses and I recognize him in that instant—a face turned slightly to one side, a high brow, a chin tucked downward. It’s Doonan, all right.
Do you know the figure, my right hand? Mr. Doonan is my right hand.
“When is this? Is this—is it during the missing two weeks?”
She shakes her head. “Laszlo. This is yesterday. Two hours and nine minutes after Crane falls off the roof.”
“Wait,” I say. “Wait.” My mind is pinwheeling, turning over itself, but I can’t keep up with Aysa Paige. “Go,” she says, and Doonan goes, walks briskly up the steps and stands at Crane’s door, his back to us, his face once again hidden from the capture by his hat, and he knocks, shifts on his heels a moment, and then the door opens. “Wait,” I say again. “You said this was yesterday. Two hours and nine minutes after the fall. But doesn’t that mean—”
“Yes,” she says, snapping her fingers impatiently, pointing at the upper-right corner of the screen. “There’s no one home. Look at the time.” The stamp at the top right shows 10:54. “We’re going to be there at eleven oh one.”
“Who is?”
“You and me. Laszlo. Come on. It’s yesterday. It’s the day he died. It’s ten fifty-four. He’s already dead. He’s at the morgue by now, and we’re going to get to his apartment in a few minutes.”
“And no one was home.”
“That’s correct.”
“Aster comes up the stairs to the landing. She lets us in.”
“Yeah, but watch. Back ten.” The stretch backs up ten seconds and then resumes, and Doonan knocks again, and the door opens again. There is someone inside. A shadow of a person, and Doonan is laughing at whatever the person says, a murmur of low happy greeting, and then he steps inside.
“Whoa,” I say. I’m leaning closer in my chair. We slow it down to watch it again, frame by frame.
Paige is good, but I’m good too, and I can see that what Petras’s right hand is enacting here is a kind of dumb show. He is playing for the captures. He puts his hand on the handle, seemingly trying it but really picking the lock, working the cheap lock quickly and expertly with small tools. And then he stands back, makes a big show of checking his watch, and then the door opens, as if from inside, but it’s really Doonan pushing it open, with the tip of one of those brown shoes he pushes the door open and turns his body to block the person at the door, because there is no one at the door. There is a shadow, and it is his own. He says hello to nobody, laughs at a pleasant word of welcome that nobody makes, and enters at nobody’s invitation.
“Shit,” I say, and Paige says, “I know,” and then we watch it again slow. I explain to Paige how he does it, how Doonan, the soft unassuming administrator, is traveling with tools, hidden in his coat, secreted up his sleeve. He’s breaking in, and he knows that the stretch will be watched. He’s breaking in and he knows to make it look like he’s not breaking in, and he knows how.
“He’s there to take those days,” I say. I stand. I start to pace, making tight circles in my narrow house, from wall to wall. I have shaken off the last tendrils of my dream, emerged from the world created by The Prisoner. It’s like rising from a pool of water and shaking the droplets free.
“He’s there to go down to that basement and steal days out of Mose Crane’s Provisional Record.”
“You think?”
“Yeah.”
I don’t just think. I know. I know. It strikes me with the force of certainty, as clear as daylight, as true as doors on houses. And other things are becoming clearer too.
“This is two hours after Crane dies? They know—Petras knows, Doonan knows—that the Specs are going to go search Crane’s house, and they know what they’re going to find. On those days in particular. If we were to go to the ninth floor and ask Woody Stone for the stretches from the alley outside—between the building and the Chinese place—five minutes after he goes in? We’d see Doonan coming out, putting the door back quick and careful and scurrying off.”
Paige is pacing too; now we’re pacing together, back and forth, making parallel grooves in my small front room. “He’d have to know, right?” she says. “That we would get into the dead man’s boxes and find that days were missing? He’d have to know.”
“So it must be—” I stop. Speculation is here—it’s in the room—I feel it, a swell tide of darkness, speckled with possibility. “Whatever it is they’re hiding. It is worse.”
“Worse than missing days?”
“Yeah. Yes. Because—” I stop. I squeeze my eyes shut and live in the darkness with the truth as it appears. “Nobody would risk stealing two weeks of someone’s days unless the risk of them being found was a thousand times worse than the risk of the theft.”
The stretch is still rolling in the background, the light of the wall-mounted creating the only illumination in my barren house. And suddenly, as we’re talking, we appear on the screen—a few minutes after Petras’s man disappears inside, here we come up the steps. We almost saw him. We were just there. Then we appear on the screen, and Ms. Aster comes out, and we watch ourselves in conversation. The old versions of Ratesic and Paige, from the day before. Another reality. A different world. I stare at my own broad back on the screen with disgust, at the way I hold myself, how I loom with condescending satisfaction over Paige, who after all is so much smarter than me, so much the nimbler mind.
How I comport myself with the contemptuous affect of the senior Spec, moving with undeserved confidence through a world I think I understand.
“Stop,” I say, and the images freeze on the monitor.
“Mr. Ratesic? Laz, are you okay—”
I would say yes, but she knows. It’s already happening. It’s happening and I can’t stop it, speculation rolling me down into itself, into deeper and deeper darkness, and I want it—I let it. I feel it now.
A single candle’s light kisses and winks to life in the dark room of my mind, and it burns warmer, sending out a radiance of light in which I can find the whole truth of this. The entirety of truth.
—the right hand—
—Petras’s right hand in Crane’s doorway—
—Crane the blackmailer, Crane the obscure, skull split—
All the things he knew and never said, all the small truths that flamed out and died along the lines of his neurons, died in his brain the moment he died too.
My eyes fly open.
“A construction worker,” I say. Construction. Three syllables joined in a simple word. I say it just quietly, just to myself, stunned by the suddenness of my understanding, and liberated by it too. Liberated by the knowledge of what I have to do. Because in that moment I know. I know what it is. All of the pieces are flying into place, circling in like birds finding their roost.
“Laszlo?” Aysa stares at me, eyes wide and bright in the dimness.
“Do you remember when we talked to Renner?” I ask.
“At the death scene? Crane’s boss?”
“Yes. Do you remember—he told us that Crane worked odd jobs.” Renner, the construction manager in a sweaty panic, struggling to dig from his anxious mind every possible detail, spitting out facts as fast as he remembered them. “He said that Crane frequently did other jobs in his off-hours. That he was always coming from other work.”
Working under the table on some mansion in the Hills…
“You read Petras’s file, right?”
Nobody likes cheap labor more than the rich…
“Yes, sir. Yes, Laszlo.”
“What was her address—the home address?”
“I forget the number. It’s on Mulholland, though. Mulholland Drive. Laszlo—”
And now I’m seeing it in my mind’s eye, a memory as clear as reality: a slim red binder, unmarked. Doonan sliding it soundlessly off Petras’s shelf, hiding it away as the conversation approached a crisis.
“Laszlo. Where are we going?”
I am scrambling into my clothes. Jeans and a work shirt, whatever’s at hand. Aysa isn’t in her uniform and pinhole, and neither am I. I’ve got my car keys, I’ve got my weapon. I’m halfway out the door.
I ask Paige, as we head to the car: “Did Arlo ever tell you the whole story?”
“What whole story?”
“Of what happened to my brother. To Charlie.”