She rode up the elevator with Krelnikov. They had both gotten to work early. Krelnikov made Eve nervous, but in her desire not to appear to be the kind of person who recoiled at any suggestion of confidentiality, she tried to hide her aversion to him and to act as if his insinuations were nothing serious.
“Hot day, again,” he said.
The elevator was empty, but he stood close to her as if it were crowded, and he had intimate things to say.
“Nobody understands translation isn’t an act of convenience. Every company wants their job toot sweet.” He looked at her pleadingly. She wasn’t in the mood for Krelnikov, didn’t want to talk to him or figure out what he was trying to say.
“What do you want from me? What can I do about deadlines?”
“I’m sorry, Eve.” He looked hurt.
She wondered what she had done and thought she would never stop apologizing to him.
Leaning against the polished steel paneling, he looked as if he’d spent days sitting on the edge of a chair in a dark room and could no longer stand up straight. Face wet from the heat, he punched a hole in the lid of his coffee cup and took a sip. Although he’d lived in New York for many years, he retained a strong accent.
“They forgot the sugar. You want this?”
“No thanks. I have my own. What are you working on?”
“I’m watching Spanish Conquistadors travel up the Amazon. Their boats are beginning to take on water, and they swim with alligators. They haven’t figured out how to make wallets.”
“Are they lost in time?” Eve watched the lit numbers as the elevator slowly ascended, feeling Krelnikov’s breath less than a foot away. She made up a story. “As the ship navigates a bend in the river they suddenly find a modern city with skyscrapers and an underground train system; they see men in suits, women in short skirts.”
“No, it isn’t that picture.”
“How much time do you have left?”
“About ninety more minutes of the sixteenth century remains. Let me tell you I wouldn’t mind a little civilization at this point: a village, a trading post, signs of a market economy. A group of Jesuits, I wouldn’t mind,” Krelnikov explained.
“It’s in German?”
“Yes, of course, it’s a German movie.”
They reached the eleventh floor and the offices of Talk Around the Clock, Incorporated, a business that provided translation services for foreign-language films needing to be subtitled in English and American films requiring translation into other languages. The reception area was covered by movie posters unchanged for years: Jean Seberg, Judy Holliday, Orson Welles. Krelnikov stopped in front of Piper Laurie in The Hustler and imitated a pool shot, bending over so Eve had to walk around his butt. She guessed the coffee cup was supposed to be the ball at the point of his imaginary cue. Krelnikov and Eve went their separate ways. His office was to her left. The only kinds of movies he got excited about had to do with angels returning to earth as temporary humans or epics about great individuals. If he wanted to live his life over, if he wanted a second chance, Eve wondered what he was so desperate to erase, to tape over.
“Who wouldn’t,” he said, “grab at the opportunity to do something else in a younger body? You like romances and screwball comedies, which always seem opaque to me. I never laugh at mistaken identity, misplaced trust, or puns that I waste time trying to translate. You can keep your bedroom scenes and banana peels. Give me a second chance any day, and I’ll grab it.”
EVE SWORE in French as dialogue was spoken, then checked what she wrote against the film, and last of all, translated the dialogue or voice-over narration into English. She kept two sets of papers for each movie, the original and her translation. The mechanics of attaching subtitles to film was done at a lab. She threaded the film through the gates, one reel for sound, one reel for image. Usually she worked from an optical print, one reel alone. The room contained a Steenbeck editing table, a telephone, an extra chair, and a shelf of English and foreign dictionaries. The blinds were drawn in order for Eve to see her work. A messenger brought cans of films from producers, and Dell, the receptionist, distributed the reels to Eve and the others.
Une femme inconnue . . .
An unknown woman, Eve wrote quickly, checked into a hotel. The hotel looked like the kind of place where John Barrymore had contemplated suicide in Dinner at Eight. It was late afternoon, but the woman, whose short brown hair and black glasses were deceptive in their severity, fell asleep. When she awoke, it was the middle of the night. Her room was not shabby but not very well kept either. Its wallpaper appeared soft and worn. The bed, night table, and chairs looked as if they had been used and cleaned too many times. The camera pulled back to reveal a view across an airshaft, glowing dark blue and gray except for two squares of yellow light: windows. The hotel was designed so that it wrapped around a central courtyard. From an exterior shot Eve quickly identified the unnamed city as New York. The telephone rang, and in a sleepy voice the actress answered it.
Yes, this is Corinne.
That established her name. Corinne hung up and returned to the window without switching on her lamp. Beside a long striped curtain she stood very still. There was music on the sound track, uninterrupted by dialogue or voice-over. Eve fast-forwarded. Suddenly Corinne saw a man and woman struggling. Their fight seemed partly a drunken brawl, but then the woman, a blonde whose hair was twisted up in the back of her head, gave a final push. The man went over the edge and down the airshaft. The blonde woman didn’t scream or appear distraught. She wiped her hands on her skirt as if she’d just dirtied them and fingered the stray wisps that had escaped her twist in the effort. Less than a minute passed, but in movie time, it wasn’t clear how long she sat in the room where the man had been murdered. Eve noticed the sky on the little screen of the Steenbeck editing table growing lighter. The police came. The woman was, or pretended to be, grief-stricken, as if the fall had been an accident. She handed them a letter, which they read, nodding, handling it with gloves and tweezers, then putting the paper in a plastic bag. The police went away. The woman ran a comb over her tightly twisted hair without undoing it, picked up her keys, and prepared to go out. Corinne cleaned her glasses on a shirttail, put on her jacket, intending to trail her. The camera followed the two women as one and then the other passed an appliance store whose signs were in Arabic. Washing machines, hair dryers, cameras, and radios all glowed in the shadows behind the grating. Corinne dogged the other woman’s steps as she went into a drugstore, and pretended to look at magazines and birthday cards while the blonde woman waited for a prescription to be filled, struggling but failing to overhear what was said.
Dell knocked on her door. Before answering, Eve froze the two women who, once back at the hotel, had walked the corridors circling the airshaft only to bump into one another at the elevator. They came face to face but still behaved like the strangers they were.
“I’m going home, Eve. You’ll be the last one in the studio tonight.”
“When did Krelnikov leave?”
“A half hour ago, but he might be coming back. Sometimes he leaves early on Friday, sometimes not.”
“Have a good weekend.”
“I wouldn’t hang around here alone, you know. People get ideas and what not. You should go home.”
So far there hadn’t been much dialogue; the job was mainly voice-over. She rubbed her eyes and told Dell to wait for her, writing: The woman who just gave you her key, what was her name?, before turning off the machine. Eve marked her place, rewound the film and left the office.
Complaining of the heat, Dell stopped to buy a Mister Softee from a truck parked at a corner. The tinkling music blaring from a speaker in the front seat of the Mister Softee van gave Eve a headache, but at the same time she found it oddly soothing and out of place on an urban street where the song had as much impact as a car horn that played the theme from The Godfather over and over again. As they walked to the subway Eve imagined Krelnikov wandering aimlessly around the city before returning to a long night of work, staring at shop displays, looking over the shoulder of someone busy with Space Wizard or Donkey Kong.
“PEOPLE WILL do anything to get an apartment,” Mr. O’Neill said. He often sat out on the steps in front of their building reading newspapers or thrillers he found in the trash or on the street. He claimed to be the lost son of Eugene O’Neill.
“What do you mean?”
“Two men, both from Iron Curtain countries,” he explained, “shared a place over on East Seventh Street, but the name of only one of them appeared on the lease. The other, you see, had just arrived, and had been here no more than a few weeks. He murdered the first guy, cut up his body, took the dead man’s credit card, went to the hardware store and bought trash bags to dispose of the parts. He might have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been a long weekend, but it was the Fourth of July and hot, you know, so naturally the corpse in the dumpster began to smell. When the man was caught, he claimed that his only motive had been to get his name on the lease. He just wanted his own apartment. I haven’t seen your friend Lenny around lately. Does he have another job that took him to California again?”
“He just wanted an apartment of his own,” Eve said.
When she got upstairs she looked up the name of Corinne’s hotel in the telephone book. She thought she might walk by it sometime, just because she enjoyed seeing places she knew in the movies and seeing places where films had been shot. Hotel des Fauves, Hotel Curry, Hotel Development Assocs, Hotel Dexter, Hotel Dixie, Hotel Fane Dumas, Hotel Franconia. It wasn’t listed.
THE MURDERESS didn’t guess she was being followed. Corinne managed to break into her hotel room and read some letters. While she was going through the papers, the camera cut to the other woman entering the hotel, stopping for her messages at the front desk. Eve didn’t like suspense. It made her feel helpless. She resisted speeding ahead to get the tension over with. There was a lot of cutting back and forth between the two women, each getting closer to the point where they would meet. Eve had to translate the contents of one letter as it was held up to the camera. She wasn’t sure how much of it was important, but since only a small part of the text would fit in the margin left for subtitles she had to make a decision. Eve underlined Dear Martine, Meet me at 2:00 at the train station under the clock. That seemed the essential message but she wasn’t certain. The blonde woman now had a name, Martine, and Martine was on her way back to her room. While she stopped down the hall to speak to one of the maids, Corinne slipped out of her room, running quickly around the corner, and so her surveillance continued undetected.
At two o’clock the following afternoon Corinne saw Martine meet a man under a clock at a train station. There was a long embrace and a long kiss but no dialogue and no voiceover. Eve fast-forwarded. She didn’t want to watch. Then the man was taken up to her hotel room.
As Corinne became increasingly obsessed with watching Martine, she began to neglect the reasons for her own trip to the unnamed city. She was a buyer for a French department store and had come to the city to place orders for American T-shirts and sunglasses. Angry telephone messages and notes revealed that while caught up in her fixation with Martine she failed to return calls or attend meetings. Samples of merchandise were sent to her room in vain. Boxes and bags piled near the door. She became convinced that Martine would murder again, and in order to stop her, if that’s what Corinne really wanted to do, she had to determine Martine’s motives.
What linked the two men, one dead, one not yet so, together? Eve wrote, translating Corinne’s voice-over thoughts as she looked out the window, watching, waiting to see if they, too, would fight. “One-notyetso,” Eve said out loud. The phrase sounded like a kind of martial arts gesture, but she left it.
“Give up, Corinne,” Eve shouted into the air. “Martine and her friend are getting along like a house on fire.” Krelnikov banged on the wall.
Corinne finally opened the boxes, scattering lids across the floor. She tried on all the sunglasses and T-shirts, then took them off. Outside all was black until Martine suddenly turned on a light, appearing naked as she walked around the hotel suite. The man she had met in the train station got out of bed, too. They began to dress, but soon abandoned the task, and the two of them could be seen lying on the floor. Corinne stood behind the curtain again, hand over her mouth laughing. “Ah mon dieu.”
EVE RAN into Dell in the bathroom, a series of lefts down a half-green, half-gray hall. She leaned into the mirror holding her eyes open, putting on mascara.
“That Mr. K, he takes too many breaks and comes out of his room to disturb me when I have my own work to do. I’m sick of listening to his crabbing. He makes me feel like I work on the complaint hot line at the Department of Transportation. All I can do is listen and say ‘Please hold,’ then he yells at me as if he thinks I should be taking notes. I tell you this, if I worked for the city I’d probably get paid more than I ever got out of Talk Around the Clock.” Dell jabbed the air with her mascara wand.
“Are you staying late tonight?”
“No. No chance.”
“I’ll probably work all night.”
“No job’s worth it, if you ask me.”
“I’m behind deadline.”
Eve had tried to get the company to pay for cabs when she had to work late nights but the accountant, a retired chiseler named Dumphreys who worked part-time, would look at her over the top of his bifocals and tell her they were low on petty cash.
“All right, I’m leaving, you talked me into it again. If anyone asks why this job isn’t finished tell them I had to leave early because I was sick. Back me up.”
“Krelnikov will rat.”
They walked back to the reception area. Dell dumped ashes from the New York Sheraton ashtray she kept on her desk into an overflowing trash can.
“I’ve been working enough overtime to make up for it.”
They were still talking when the elevator doors opened. Krelnikov jumped when he saw them. He was eating a doughnut, and his mouth was ringed with powdered sugar. He wiped his hands on his pants, saying, “Eleventh floor already. Going out for some air?”
“Yes,” she lied to him.
“It’s hot in my office, too.”
“The air conditioner is on, Mr. K,” Dell said.
“There isn’t enough separation between church and state in this business, Dell.” He said this as if he knew something, had seen things they couldn’t begin to imagine. He often spoke this way, talking down to them in deeply inflected syllables.
Dell shrugged. Eve interpreted his statement to mean that he was still working on the jungle film and felt everywhere he went was suffocating, humid, and each transaction he faced, from ordering lunch to buying a lottery ticket, was as hopeless as conquistadors swimming with alligators.
PROSTITUTE SLAYING LINKED TO SECRETARY OF STATE
DRUG CZAR SNAGS DOMESTIC KINGPIN
MY DAUGHTER WILL KNOW THE TRUTH
Mr. O’Neill was throwing out old papers. As her eye traveled across the stacks the headlines became increasingly alarmist. He had combed his hair back from his head and was wearing an ancient but elegant suit. By taking out the garbage in a jacket with satin lapels Eve felt O’Neill was unveiling his pretensions to celebrity for all to see, but the exposure revealed only how vulnerable his aspirations were, how open he was to ridicule and curbside dirt. She hung around to talk to him, afraid he would be shoved aside by a crowd of children or an indiscriminate garbage man.
“Car got broken into down the street,” he said.
“Happens all the time, Mr. O’Neill.”
“This one was full of heads.”
“Heads? Not real heads?”
“No, they weren’t real. They were models for Downstate Medical Center’s ocular unit, but the guys who broke into the car didn’t know that. They sure didn’t.”
“What did they do?”
“They screamed. What would you do?”
“I wouldn’t break into a car.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
Eve wasn’t sure this was meant as encouragement. O’Neill sat on a stack of papers and crossed his legs.
“Ever translate Anna Christie?”
“No, I don’t do old movies. If it was ever translated the job was done years ago.”
“I met Garbo when she was working on the movie. My father took me to meet her. She held my face in her hands. ‘Such a beautiful boy,’ she said, ‘I will never forget you.’ I thought that since she lived in New York, she might want to visit me these last years. She never answered my letters.”
“I think she was a recluse.”
“Who in their right mind wouldn’t be?”
“Well, nuts to her.”
“That’s what I say. Eve, will you do me a favor?”
Eve knew this meant a trip to Liquor Plus down the street.
“I used to look at people in the city as a series of open books, or open to different degrees. Now people are video games.” He made binging and bonging noises as he adjusted the papers. Then he straightened up and pretended he was ramming and turning knobs, speeding around a computerized road, ramming other cars, zapping running figures whose knees lifted at ninety-degree angles. If you didn’t know what he thought he was doing, he looked obscene. When Eve turned to make her way toward Liquor Plus someone turned on a fire hydrant, but no children or dogs ran through the water, and it poured into the gutter, rushing toward the stacks of papers O’Neill had so carefully assembled.
“Your friend,” someone said, “is going to get wet, and so are you.” Eve turned around quickly. A group of men standing in front of a laundromat didn’t seem aware that she existed. One of them was sucking a Sugar Daddy, and he threw the yellow and red wrapper into the stream of water. A few of them laughed, but she couldn’t tell if they were laughing at her. She couldn’t tell which one, if any, had threatened.
SHE FELL asleep in the editing room. The others had long gone. Eve lay on the floor telling herself she would rest for only a few minutes, but when she awoke, it was hours later. The room was nearly pitch-black; the only light came from the square image on the editing table. Tiny Corinne had stood watching tiny Martine for hours. The square had a ghostly green light. The room smelled of sticky celluloid. Eve wanted to go home, but home seemed too far and too complicated a trip, even though it was only one fairly short subway ride. She lay down on the floor again, staring at the ceiling this time without sleeping. She thought she heard sounds from Krelnikov’s room next door, a sound like a drawer opening, but she couldn’t be sure. Perhaps the translator who liked angels and epics did live in his office.
Corinne asked for her messages at the hotel desk, but seeing Martine enter the hotel, she dawdled at the counter, pretending to read American Express brochures, while Martine asked for her messages. She was told that a Charles Vague called. Vag, pas Vaig, Martine corrected the clerk’s pronunciation. Eve didn’t know what to do with this line. In voice-over, because the whole incident was being remembered, Corinne wondered if he might be some kind of partner of Martine’s, rather than a potential victim.
“Finally, you figure something out,” Eve said.
Corinne looked up Vague in the telephone book. The camera followed her short red nail down a column of print. There was only one Vague listed. After a telephone call, Corinne determined that he was a taxidermist and his company was located downtown, so far west the city was no longer recognizable as itself. There were empty windy avenues with wide garages and loading docks for trucks. Corinne, on the pretense of wanting a parrot stuffed, went to pay a visit to Monsieur Vague, but as she got out of the cab, she saw Martine enter the Vague door, staggering under the weight of an enormous package. Corinne stood in a doorway, watching her from the street. She waited by an empty loading dock, watching as minutes passed. (An hour, Eve figured, in real time.) Finally Martine emerged again, empty-handed, and got into a waiting car.
Watching Corinne climb the dark stairs to Charles Vague’s studio, Eve felt the walls moving in. As she rang the taxidermist’s bell, Eve imagined a disaster in which Talk Around the Clock would be blown up, film frames flying in all directions. Little bits of burnt celluloid like black plastic snow would fall on the sidewalk, on a fire truck, into a stack of newspapers at the corner stand.
Corinne knocked on the pebbled glass door at the top of the landing, then opened it. The room was filled, not only with stuffed animals but old glass cabinets, dusty overstuffed chairs, and stacks of unshelved books. Monsieur Vague introduced himself and asked what he could do for her. Looking concerned, Corinne told him she possessed a dying parrot that meant the world to her and when it passed away, she would like to have it stuffed. Vague was younger and more fashionable than Eve imagined a taxidermist would look.
How long have you had this parrot?
Five years.
What is it dying of?
The cause of illness has the veterinarian puzzled.
“She’s an excellent liar,’’ Eve said.
“I don’t want to hear about it, please!” Krelnikov banged on the wall. He was in.
Eve turned down the sound. Vague asked for Corinne’s number, saying he would send someone round to collect the parrot. She gave it to him, but insisted the bird wasn’t dead yet, and there was a chance, however slight, that it might recover. So please don’t call me. I’ll call you. Eve thought, you dope, you should never have given him the number at the hotel. You’ll die now.
Unable to wait herself, she fast-forwarded. Corinne, showing equal parts stupidity and courage, broke into the taxidermist’s to search the place at night. The plot was simple. Martine and Vague were smuggling all kinds of things out in the animals. Drugs, computer viruses, diamonds, all sealed in Florida alligators, bald eagles, and mountain lions. In close-ups, paws were carefully slit or feathers spilled in the search. It was a diverse business, specializing in endangered species. The men Martine murdered in various ways had each been investigating her connection to Vague. She let them trace her to her hotel room, and she let them think they were acting as seducers. She was very good at what she did, and Corinne admired her, as her own life as a buyer for Printemps had been without adventure or romance. This was indicated by the irate callers and other signs of her dull, quotidian responsibilities. The sunglasses and T-shirts lying in piles were indistinguishable from one another. The film didn’t go into it, but Eve imagined Corinne must have lost her job after spending weeks evading salesmen and obsessively following the woman across the airshaft. Apart from the accident at the elevator, the two never met.
Just before the very end, Eve went backwards. She was shocked by what she saw. Vague was in Corinne’s hotel room. He drew the striped curtains. The room grew very dark. He threatened Corinne, but it wasn’t clear to Eve, who had been skipping around, how much either one of them knew about the other. Corinne took off her clothes slowly, and then Vague too, undressed.
“He looks like a shirt ad,” Eve whispered. “He’s too perfect and too sinister. I don’t believe she would let herself be seduced. The man probably smells of preserving chemicals. Some people will do anything to get what?”
“Pleasure in danger,” Krelnikov said. “Don’t you understand?” He had opened her door, just as Vague approached Corinne.
“Hi. My name’s Vague. Charles Vague.” He imitated James Bond with an exaggerated accent. Either he had been standing there for a while or could hear more through the walls than Eve had imagined possible.
“You had me fooled, Mr. K. Look, I have to finish this translation by tomorrow.” She didn’t say leave me alone.
“Just let me distract you for a moment. I’m done with the film about the Amazon.” He turned off Eve’s editing table, and the room instantly became dark. “I’m working on something else I want to show you.”
Eve didn’t want to be rude to him, she was always rude to him, but she was afraid of Krelnikov’s tiny editing room where his size and neediness filled the office. The last time he had called her in, he had been translating a scene from a science fiction film in which digital waiters served dinners to humans, pouring wine and slicing rare meat with the grace of pre-Industrial Revolution etiquette in spite of their microchip hearts. It had been a story of revenge, predictable but disturbing. Sandblasted by Krelnikov’s moroseness and misanthropy, she marked her place, then turned her notes over. He noticed her gesture.
“I don’t want to read your translation. I don’t care who the murderer is. I mean, I already know.”
“I can only look for a minute, then I have to get back.”
A MAN picked up half a brick from the rubble on the street and broke the glass window of a building that appeared abandoned. Its doors were boarded up; some of the windows had bars over them, but the bars were twisted in different directions as if a strong wind blowing close to the ground had swept through. Layers of dirt accumulated so densely over the decoration of the lower storeys that what had once been ornate were now like a series of blackened chunks. No longer specific; cornices, keystones, or gargoyles melted into clusters of lumps.
“It was called the Canary Island Rest Stop Hotel,” said Krelnikov. “This is a part of the city in which many buildings have been abandoned. Nobody has figured how they can make any money through reclamation, so the empty offices and lofts stay empty, you see. Subways stop at the edge of the district bringing in Vietnamese and Turks who work in airless sweatshops.”
“This is a German movie?”
“Yes, of course. Why do you always ask me that? It’s supposed to be Berlin. You can see trucks filled with bolts of cloth, and racks of dresses and suits clog the alleys by day. At night everything, even the diners, is closed.”
“Diners? You’ve been here too long.”
“Cafés. I wanted you to understand.”
“The loading bays look as if they were shot a few blocks away.”
“No, I don’t think so.” Krelnikov was breathing hard.
The Canary Island Rest Stop still had erratically supplied electricity. Squatters lived somewhere in its recesses. There were points of light which gleamed from upper balconies looking out onto the lobby. A bank of lit elevators in a glass shaft, lambent and mesmerizing, seemed to travel without stopping.
“What goes on in the upper floors?”
“I don’t know. The stairwells are completely black.”
The man began to climb one spiraling flight, a series of matches illuminating his face as he ascended. His head was shaved, covered by tattoos. Gradually the sound of other voices appeared on the sound track. The man followed the murmur of the voices until he came to a room on what Eve figured must have been the fourth floor. Down a dark hall, a few light bulbs sputtered overhead, but finally he pushed open a door to find a Vietnamese family squatting on the floor, eating a communal meal. Light hit their white bowls; they looked up at the intruder, alarmed.
“You’re going to have to find someone to translate the Vietnamese,” Eve said.
“No, they only want the German translated.” The man pulled out a knife, and Krelnikov abruptly turned off the machine.
“He’s going to kill them.”
“How do you know? Where’s the angel?”
“Whoever said there would be one? There aren’t any. So what I want you to do is listen to this scene while I’m in the hall, then tell me if any German is spoken in it.”
“I don’t do German. Only French.” She immediately regretted her answer.
“But you know what it sounds like. I can’t watch this scene, and I may not have to if there’s no speech in it.’’
“It’s late, Krelnikov. I have to go home.”
INSANE LIQUIDATORS INSANE LIQUIDATORS
INSANE LIQUIDATORS
Eve ran past cut-rate stores that sold piles of merchandise: blenders, toasters, computers. Past window displays of gold chains arranged like starfish and past men who asked what her name was. That night the city was a kind of schizophrenic whose personalities had aged differently. Some parts of the landscape had been rejuvenated from an injection of redevelopment, new if ugly. Others fell to pieces. Window grates peeled away, pried off their hinges like a lattice made of dough. The fire escapes were crowded. A city full of people who may believe they’re being gypped out of their true identity and recognition; a city full of people like Krelnikov who wanted to live their lives all over again. What secrets would she bury in stuffed trophies, hunted and endangered, then mail out of the country? She couldn’t think of any. She envied Dell, who did her eyes three times a day and couldn’t care less.
On her way home Eve looked through the flyblown labels in Liquor Plus and the chicken dinners for two (fries and cornbread included), all for $7.95, which were sold next door. She couldn’t imagine the city where fashionable women gave up on T-shirts and sunglasses, and followed a murderer because perhaps they wanted to kill someone too, but hadn’t ever the nerve, and so tailed a woman who did. Even as she had waited for the elevator she could hear the sound of the translator in the room next to her, sobbing and rewinding film. You couldn’t, she learned, tell him it was just a story, because he had been in that city; and he knew it was all true.