Sliver of Truth

15

We are not our parents. We’re not. You’ve probably heard all your life that the traits you’ve found so annoying in your mother or your father will eventually manifest themselves in your own personality. Maybe you even believe it. Personally, I think it’s bullshit. It’s a cop-out, something people tell themselves to feel better about not taking responsibility for their lives. Maybe if you go through your life without examining yourself, without dealing with your issues, without consciously deciding what to bring forward and what to leave behind, or if you can’t take responsibility for your own inner happiness, then perhaps it is likely that you become the drunk, the abuser, the cold and distant judge your mother or your father was. But I believe you have a choice. I believe we all choose our lives, that our existence is the sum of our choices—the little ones, the big ones. We don’t always choose what happens to us, and we don’t choose where we came from, but we do choose how we react to the events of our lives. We choose to be destroyed or to grow wiser. Nietzsche (whom I always thought was a bit of a psychopath) said, “What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” I cling to this philosophy; I need to believe it.

I have to believe now that I am not my father. That his DNA is not a contagion I carry in my body, a sleeper virus that might take hold of me one day and turn the blood in my veins to poison.

I think Dylan gave me an hour with the file and then returned to the room, sat back beside me. The file was open in my lap. There was more to read but I’d lost my nerve. I couldn’t bring myself to turn the page. In my mind, I saw Max standing over his mother’s beaten body, smiling ghoulishly. I saw him waiting outside Nick’s window staring up with soulless eyes, his very presence a terrible threat. I saw him punching my brother in the face with his closed fist.

“I’m sorry,” Dylan said.

I stared at the flames, which were flickering low. The air around me was growing colder. I could hardly believe the things I’d read, the photographs I’d seen. I tried to fit my brain around them, tried to make it work, but I felt like I do when I see images of grinding poverty or war on the television. You know it’s real but part of you just can’t accept what you’re seeing, so removed are you from the actual experience.

“I don’t know this man,” I said.

He nodded; he understood what I meant.

“Why did you show this to me?” I asked him mildly. It seemed as if someone was always handing me a file filled with bad news. I was starting to resent it.

He was quiet for a moment, just stared at the floor between his feet.

“We’ve talked about this before. I think you’re the only way to him.”

I remembered then our conversation that first day.

Do you know the number one reason why people in the witness protection program get found by their enemies and wind up dead?

Why?

Love.

Love.

They can’t stay away. They can’t help but make that call or show up incognito at a wedding or a funeral. I’ve seen his apartment. It’s practically a shrine to you. Max Smiley did some terrible things in his life, hurt a lot of people. But if he loved anyone, it was you.

I knew it was true. It had always been true. Max and I were connected. We would always find each other.

“You want to use me as bait,” I said without emotion.

“The truth is, Ridley, you’ve been bait for a while. We just haven’t had any bites until recently.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Jake Jacobsen has been using you since before he met you,” he said softly.

“It might have started out that way,” I admitted. “He wanted to get to Ben.”

Dylan shook his head, lowered his eyes to the floor again. The conversation seemed to pain him.

“He saw my picture in the Post,” I said, leaning forward. Something in my chest started to thump. “Same as Christian Luna did. It was a coincidence. He needed my help.”

“You think that’s how he found you?”

That day on the Brooklyn Bridge (it seemed like a lifetime ago) when Jake finally told me the truth (part of it, anyway), he admitted that he’d moved into my building to get close to me, to find a way to get closer to Ben. He needed to know more about Project Rescue and couldn’t think of another way. I’d forgiven him for that—a long time ago. I told Dylan as much.

“Think about it, Ridley. When did Jake move into that building?”

I searched my memory for something that might orient the event in the time line of my recent life. I thought of the morning I’d saved Justin Wheeler. Two things had delayed me in getting out of the building. First there was my mailbox overstuffed with bills and magazines and an angry note from my mailman. I’d retrieved the mail from my box and run it back up to my apartment. But before that, it had been my elderly neighbor Victoria. She stopped me to talk about the noisy man moving in upstairs. I felt my stomach bottom out as I remembered the conversation. It was a week later that Jake and I met face-to-face. As it came back to me, the present disappeared and all the events of our meeting and what followed swirled around me.

Our meeting and the passion and the drama that had followed had been so intense, so all-consuming. Maybe that’s why I never made the connection. Or maybe I just didn’t want to. I realized now the point Dylan was trying to make: Jake moved into my building the night before the single event that forever altered my world.

Was it possible? What did it mean? I’m not sure how long I sat there, analyzing the time line, trying to figure out a way that I might be wrong. A thick fog moved into my brain.

I had to force the words out. “Are you saying that he knew who I was…before I did?”

Dylan hung his head.

“How is that possible?” I felt so ashamed suddenly, like the kid who’d been the butt of a terrible joke at school, around whom everyone had gathered to laugh. I felt my face grow hot.

Acceptance was slow. Then, when I realized that it was true, I tried to think of something to make it all right that he’d lied to me about how he’d found me, a reason he would have to make up a false scenario as he did. Pathetic, I know. Anyway, I couldn’t think of anything. Then I started to wonder: If he’d lied about how he found me, what else had he lied about? I thought about the things Jake had told me. How he’d tracked Max to a bar in Jersey and confronted him about Project Rescue. How just a few weeks later Max was dead.

I’d come to believe that it had been Max’s realization of how much harm he’d done that led him to drink so much the night he died—that in a sense Max had killed himself by drinking and driving off that bridge. But the man in the dossier was not a man to die over the grief of others. The man in the dossier didn’t have a conscience at all. Did that mean Jake had something more to do with his death than I’d believed? Or something more to do with Max than he’d revealed? The possibilities were chilling.

“A lot of what you know about Jake is true, I think,” Dylan said kindly. “He didn’t make up the stuff about his childhood, about his quest to find out who he really is and where he came from.”

“How do you know?” I said angrily. “How do you know all this about Jake?”

“Because I’ve been watching him for years.”

I looked at him sitting there.

“Why?” I asked him.

He smiled at me sadly. The answer was clear. I spoke for him.

“Because he’s been watching me, waiting for Max to approach me. He never believed Max died that night, and he believed that one day Max would reach out for me, try to contact me. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“And when Max did, Jake would be sleeping beside you,” said Dylan. “He knew he’d be the first person you told.”

I felt as if someone was stepping on my chest. I thought of all my nights with Jake and all the love I’d had for him. The idea that it had all been a part of some design, or something to do to pass the time as he waited for Max to make contact, sliced me open.

“And you’d be listening when I did.”

He shrugged again. “Max Smiley is a man with the means, the resources, and the motives to drop off the face of the earth forever. As far as we know, he only has one weakness, one place in his heart that feels.”

I didn’t have to ask who or what that was. I thought about the patience it must have taken to wait day after day for Max to contact me, how badly Jake must have wanted it.

“I’ve never understood Jake’s obsession. All this time, I thought it was just his needing to know what happened to him, his wanting to bring Max and the other people responsible for Project Rescue to justice. I thought he just wanted some closure. But there has to be more to it than that.”

“That’s probably how it started.”

“Then?”

“My guess is that the more he learned about Max, the more obsessed he became with finding him. I think his obsession grew beyond his personal quest for answers. I think the search for Max became his whole reason for living. Eventually it started to define him.”

I could see how that might happen; in fact, I could feel it happening to me. But at the same time, Dylan’s answer didn’t quite work for me. I realized then that Jake’s obsession had seemed out-sized for months; it had grown in a way that had felt incongruous. Early in our relationship, I’d believed that it would lessen over time, but the opposite had happened. It was one thing for me to be obsessed; the man was my father.

“I guess you know a thing or two about obsession,” I said.

I thought about the crime-scene photos I’d seen in the dossier. I’d seen what Max did to Dylan’s mother. I understood Dylan better now.

“I guess I do.”

“You turned yours into a career.”

He shrugged. “It’s a living.” He tried for a smile but it died on his face. I, for one, wondered if I’d ever smile again.

“How did Jake know I was Max’s daughter?”

“Maybe he didn’t. Maybe he just knew that Max had loved you.”

“Then why would he lie about how he found me?”

“I can’t answer that.”

There was so much more to ask, so many questions about the last couple of years and the last couple of weeks. We hadn’t scratched the surface. But I sat there for a minute before launching into all that. I wanted to ask about the men at the Cloisters, how I’d wound up in London, and whom he had killed in the hospital. I was afraid that once I started, the answers would only lead to more questions.

“Myra Lyall is dead,” I said. “They found her body floating in a trunk in a canal.”

Dylan nodded. “I know.”

“What did she find out? The people who took her—are they the same people who took me?”

“I’m not sure, Ridley. I don’t know what happened to either one of you. I was hoping you could answer some of those questions.”

I frowned at him. I guess I kind of had the idea that the only reason I didn’t end up in a trunk floating is that Dylan Grace had saved my ass, as he so eloquently put it. Wrong again.

“Then how did you find me?”

REMEMBER HOW EASY it was for me to get away from Dylan in Riverside Park? It turns out he expected me to try to run from him. In fact, he wanted me to run.

“I thought you were hiding something. I figured I’d let you run and I’d follow, see where you led me. We were listening to your cell phone calls and were able to track your movements to the Internet café, the SRO on Forty-second Street. Then we lost you. Actually, you walked right by my partner. Nice job with your hair, by the way. You’ve got a whole Sex Pistols thing going there.”

“Thanks,” I said with a narrowing of my eyes. “You don’t look that great, either.”

“You made some calls from Inwood, so we headed up there. The last call we picked up was your conversation with Grant Webster. By the time we figured out where you were and got up there, you were gone. NYPD had already arrived—they’d been called about gunshots and a helicopter, but they didn’t know what happened. They were searching the area, picked up some shell casings from automatic and semiautomatic fire. That was it.”

“No sign of Jake.”

He shook his head. “No, Ridley. I’d tell you if I knew something. I promise.”

I nodded.

“We went to Grant Webster’s apartment in the Village.”

“Was he…?” I couldn’t stand to finish the question.

“Dead? Yes,” answered Dylan softly. I felt that sick guilty feeling that was becoming so familiar to me. I held some culpability for the things that had happened to Sarah, to Grant, to Jake, even to myself. I wasn’t sure how to deal with that. So I just blocked it out. Dylan went on.

“From his phone call, we knew you were in trouble, that he’d found something and tried to warn you. But Grant has some kind of kill button on his network. He managed to wipe all his data before he died. Anything he knew was gone.”

I shook my head. “I really doubt that. There must be backup somewhere.” I remembered his website, how he’d chastised people for not protecting and backing up sensitive data. He impressed me as a person who’d practiced what he preached.

“If there is, we haven’t found it.”

“He said I was walking into a trap, that ‘they’ thought I knew where Max was, that I could lead them to him.”

“Is that true?”

I gave him a look. “Um, no. You know, why don’t you believe me about this? You’ve been watching me for a long time now. If I was secretly communicating with Max, wouldn’t you know?”

“I didn’t know about the website. For all I know, you’ve been using the computer at your adopted parents’ house to communicate with him.”

I thought about what Grant had said about the government’s dislike of encrypted websites and steganographic software. I started thinking about that streaming video and how maybe it was just a way to hide a message. Again, I wondered what my father’s log-in might be. I was betting I could figure it out if I could get to a computer.

Dylan was watching me in that way that he had, as if he believed he could stare me into admitting all the many lies he’d thought I told. The sad part was I was just as clueless as he was. I sighed. What was obvious was that we didn’t trust each other. We could go around and around like this for hours. I didn’t bother repeating how I’d just found the website recently, that I had no way to log in.

“Anyway, the point is that we lost you,” he said. “I didn’t even know where to start looking. The fact that I’d taken you into custody when I really didn’t have the right to and then allowed you to escape caused me a lot of trouble. I was reprimanded and might have been suspended, except that I’m so entrenched in this investigation, I would be impossible to replace at this point.”

“So you do work for the FBI?”

He nodded slowly. “I work for the FBI Special Surveillance Group. We monitor foreign agents, spies, and others who are not specifically targets of criminal investigations.”

“Like me?”

He nodded. “And like Jake Jacobsen. The point is that I’m not exactly a field agent. I gather data, conduct surveillance, monitor communications and movement. If I see something suspicious, I raise the alarm. Jacobsen has been interesting to us because of his skills as an investigator. We’ve been on him for nearly two years. As a result, we’ve also been watching you.”

I thought about this for a second, the fact that I’d been under surveillance for I didn’t know how long. I looked at Dylan Grace, a man who’d likely heard every private conversation, read every e-mail, seen every move I made since I met Jake. The thought embarrassed and intrigued me. How well could you know a person, watching her live her life from a bird’s-eye view? You’d see all the faces she wore for the various people in her life. You’d hear the same stories and events repeated for different people, each version sounding a little bit different, tailored for the listener. You’d see her face when she thought no one was watching. You might hear her cry herself to sleep at night or make love to a man she cared for but couldn’t trust. For all of this, would you know her better, more intimately, than if you’d been her lover or her friend? Or did you know her not at all, never having been allowed entry into her heart?

He went on. “I watched your cell phone records, credit cards, ATM records, passport control. I didn’t find anything for two days. I feared the worst. I thought you’d disappeared like Myra Lyall.”

“Then?”

“Then a charge from the Covent Garden Hotel popped up on your Visa bill. I was on the next plane to London. I bribed the desk clerk for your room number, found you in the state you were in. Through my London contacts, I was able to get you some antibiotics and painkillers—that’s what I was jabbing into your arm. I went out to get some more bandages and antiseptic to take care of your wound. When I came back, you’d stumbled into the lobby. I watched as they took you away in an ambulance.”

I thought about the time line of his story. It seemed credible enough under the circumstances. It was still hard for me to believe that this was my life now, that I’d wound up with him here at all. And while I didn’t totally trust this man, I didn’t fear him, either. And these days, that was something.

“Okay, so where’s the rest of the FBI? If you really do work for them, why isn’t there anyone to help us?”

“Because—don’t you get it? I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be behind a desk listening to your phone calls. I’m not supposed to be out here with you.”

“Unsupported?” I asked, using the word he’d used.

He nodded.

“Okay,” I said. “What now?”

He pressed his mouth into a tight line, and glanced at the fire for a second, then back at me.

“I’m open to suggestions,” he said.

“Great.”

“IF YOU REALLY let life take you, if you release control and stop clinging to sameness, you can’t imagine the places you’ll end up. But most people don’t do that. Most people get this death grip on what they know, and the only thing that loosens their grasp is some kind of tragedy. They live in the same town they grew up in, go to the same schools their parents went to, get a job that makes a decent living, find someone they think they love, marry and have children, take the same vacation every year. Maybe they get restless, someone has an affair, there’s divorce. But it will just be the same boring life with the next person. Unless something awful happens—death, house fire, natural disaster. Then people start looking around, thinking, Is this all? Maybe there’s another way to live.”

Max always ranted like this when he was drinking. He was hung up on the concept of “normal” people and how sad they were. He felt that most people were just zombies, sleepwalking through their lives, and would just die without ever leaving even a footprint on the planet. Max was a titan, a shooting star. In his lifetime he was responsible for the erection of thousands of buildings, countless charitable works in countries all over the world. He put at least ten kids that I knew of through college with the scholarship he established in his mother’s name in Detroit. He had to live a big life. That was his normal.

I think most people are just trying to be happy, and that most of their actions, however misguided, are in line with that goal. Most people just want to feel they belong somewhere, want to be loved, and want to feel they’re important to someone. If you really examine all the wrongheaded and messed-up things they do, they can most often be traced back to that basic desire. The abusers, the addicted, the cruel and unpleasant, the manipulators—these are just people who started this quest for happiness in the basement of their lives. Someone communicated to them through word or deed that they were undeserving, so they think they have to claw their way there over the backs of others, leaving scars and creating damage. Of course, they only create more misery for themselves and others.

Even the psychopaths and sociopaths in this world who commit the most heinous possible acts against innocent victims are in this quest for happiness. But their ideas are twisted and black; these people were wired wrong. Many people believe that evil is the presence of something. I think it’s the absence of something.

Was Max an evil man? I still didn’t know. If I’d looked closer, I might have seen signs that told me yes, as Ace did. But I was in his thrall completely. If the series of events that shook the foundation of my life hadn’t occurred, I may never have asked who he really was. I may have lived on in ignorance. A part of me—a big part of me—wishes I’d taken Nick Smiley’s advice; I should have let the dead lie.

I looked down at the file in my lap, trying to reconcile the snapshots in front of me. They were of a man who looked different in every picture; they spanned decades. Max, maybe in his thirties at the time, slimmer than I’d known him, in a white shirt and khakis, exiting a black Mercedes near an abandoned stadium in Sierra Leone, flanked by two men armed with machine guns. Max sporting a full beard, sitting in a Paris café among a group of men, his hand resting on a fat manilla envelope, a wolfish grin on his face. Max shaking hands with a dark-skinned man wearing black robes and a turban. There were numerous shots like these, all vague, taken from a distance. Clandestine meetings around the world in empty fields and parking lots, boatyards and abandoned warehouses. Lots of guns and dangerous-looking men.

The Max Smiley I knew was an internationally renowned real-estate developer, whose business called for international travel. He built luxury condos in Rio, hotels in Hawaii, high-rises in Singapore. He golfed with senators and went deep-sea fishing with Saudi princes. There were always shades of gray in Max’s business, yes, always whispers about whom exactly he conducted his business with. Then the Project Rescue scandal revealed that Max had dealings with organized crime, through his lawyer Alexander Harriman. The FBI starting digging deep into Max’s banking history, though he was legally dead.

“We found hundreds of millions of dollars in offshore bank accounts.” Dylan’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “And that’s just what we could trace. How much else is out there in accounts I couldn’t link to him or his business or his various ‘charities,’ I couldn’t even begin to guess.”

I put the file on the table and lay down on the couch. I don’t know how long we’d been talking. I should have been resting but sleep didn’t seem like an option. My body was beyond fatigued but my mind was restless.

“And I take it that this money didn’t come from real-estate development.”

“No. Legitimately, Max Smiley was a rich man, making several million a year in pure personal profit. This money came from other dealings. We started watching some of the accounts. There was activity—withdrawals and deposits.”

“That’s what made you think he might still be alive?”

He nodded. “Then our investigation got blocked.”

“By whom?”

“By the CIA. ”

“Why?”

“They told us our surveillance conflicted with an ongoing investigation. We were asked to stand down. Or told to.”

“These men in the photographs, these meetings—what kind of business was he conducting?”

He came over and sat on the floor beside me, took the file from where I’d left it, and pulled a snapshot from the pile.

“These men are affiliated with the Albanian Mafia.”

“How did he know them?” I said. My voice didn’t sound like my own. It was thin and distant. Black thoughts were blooming in my mind. I thought of the Project Rescue babies. I had to wonder how much more there was to it all than I had even imagined. Dylan ran down the list of other men in the photographs. Known terrorists, men associated with the Russian, Italian, and Italian-American Mafia.

“So whatever his dealings were with these people, this is why the CIA is still looking for him.”

“I think so.”

I wondered if he was being vague on purpose, if he was stalling. I asked him as much.

“Like I told you, my investigation was blocked. I still don’t know what Max was doing with these men. Here,” he said, pulling out another snapshot that seemed more recent. “These men are CIA operatives. This meeting took place just a month before he died.”

“CIA,” I repeated.

“They could have been undercover. He most likely didn’t know who he was really with. Their investigation started long before ours did.”

“So Myra Lyall could have stumbled onto any of these dealings—whatever they were. Any one of these people could be responsible for her death. For Sarah Duvall, for Grant Webster. Any one of them could have taken me in the park, come after me in the hospital.”

He nodded. “Any one of them. Including the CIA.”

I let the information sink in. “Now you’re just being paranoid.”

He looked at me as if I was slow. I was about to ask him about his mother when he rose suddenly.

“I think that’s enough for tonight. We can’t stay here for long, and you need to rest before we start moving again.”

I didn’t argue. There was so much more to say and countless questions to ask, but I had too much to deal with already. I was in brain overload; if I took on any more information, I’d lose something crucial like my ability to add and subtract. I let him lead me to a small bedroom off the main room. There was a rocker and a queen-size bed with a wrought-iron headboard and a patchwork quilt. He helped me beneath the musty sheets, then started another fire. I lay there watching him, thinking that my father had killed his mother and that such a thing did not bode well for our relationship—whatever that was. I wondered if I’d ever meet a man whom Max had not totally destroyed on a deep emotional level. That was the last thought I had before I drifted into a light and troubled slumber.

Twice during the night, Dylan brought me pills, which I took without protest. The second time, I saw him linger in the doorway. I couldn’t see his expression. I waited for him to say something, but after a minute or two, he left, closed the door softly behind him. I thought about calling him back and asking what he was thinking, but then I wondered if I really wanted to know.

THE MORNING DAWNED to rain. It tapped at my window, and for a second before I opened my eyes, I could almost imagine that I was back in the East Village just an hour or so before I saved Justin Wheeler and set this nightmare in motion. I imagined the myriad choices that lay before me, beginning with sleep in or hop up and race to the dental appointment that I’d canceled instead. Anything I’d done differently that morning might have saved me from waking in this strange place, a stranger to myself.

My sinuses were swollen but my side hurt much less. I slipped out of bed, put my feet on the frigid wood floor and walked over to the six-pane window, and peered out into a thick glade of trees. There was a doe and her tiny foal nibbling on grass in the misting morning rain. I held my breath and watched them. They were perfect and peaceful, oblivious to me and my chaos. It soothed me to watch as they meandered back into the woods until I could no longer see them. I felt safe, as if nothing could hurt me here.

I saw some clothes neatly piled on the rocker by the door. A blue wool sweater, a pair of beat-up jeans, and some Nikes in halfway decent shape that looked like they might fit. No socks. No underwear. But what did I expect?

There was a small bathroom off the room to the side of the fireplace. The fire burned well, as if it had recently been stoked. I entered the bathroom and mopped myself off in cold water from the sink, spent a few minutes staring in dismay at my hair. I checked the bandage on my side and saw that it was clean and decided to leave well enough alone.

The sweater was huge; I rolled up the sleeves. The jeans were a tad tight in the rump and the sneakers pinched my little toe. But okay.

When I walked into the living room, I expected to see Dylan standing sentry by the door, but he was dozing on the couch.

“Some watchdog,” I said.

“I’m not sleeping, just resting my eyes.”

I saw the gun in his hand then and realized he probably hadn’t slept at all. I should have felt bad for him but I didn’t. Part of me blamed him for all of this, though I couldn’t say why. I walked past him toward the door. He’d left my bag there and I bent down gingerly to pick it up and bring it over to the small dining table. I heard him sit up and felt his eyes on me as I rummaged through the contents, hoping I’d find what I was looking for. Near the bottom I did. I took the matchbook I’d found at Max’s apartment a couple of lifetimes ago and handed it to Dylan.

I told him where I’d found it, how I’d sensed that someone else had been there that day. “Does it mean anything to you?”

He held it up to the light of the fire. After a second, he nodded slowly. “I think this is from an after-hours club in London called the Kiss. This symbol is part of Descartes’s tangent-circle configuration. The Kiss is from a poem called ‘The Kiss Precise,’ which explains how each of the four circles touch the other three. Though Decartes’s ideas were pretty much confined to circles, I think the club owner kind of sees it as a symbol of how all things are connected.”

“Wow,” I said after a beat. “I wouldn’t have pegged you as a math geek.”

He shrugged. “I guess I’m just full of surprises.”

That’s what I was afraid of.

“There’s a note inside,” I said. He opened the matchbook and read it, didn’t say anything.

“Who do you think Angel might be?”

He shook his head. “No idea.”

“We need to go there. And we need a computer to try our luck getting into that website. I’d like to check my e-mail, too, in case Grant sent me anything before he—” I couldn’t bring myself to finish the sentence. These were the things I’d been thinking about as I’d washed and dressed. I wanted to somehow take back control of my trashed existence. I didn’t like the broken person with the bleached blond hair, Max’s daughter injured and in hiding from various threats. I wanted to be me again.

“Are you up to it?” he asked skeptically.

“Not really. But what are our choices, sit around here waiting for the cops or for one of Max’s enemies to come after us? Better to be proactive, don’t you think?”

“I was thinking we should turn ourselves in,” he said, coming to stand beside me.

“No,” I said quickly, certainly. “Not yet.”

The thought of being trapped somewhere filled me with dread. A window was closing. If I didn’t find Max soon, he’d be gone for good like the ghost that he was. There’d be time to pay for whatever mistakes I’d made. But later.

I turned to Dylan and was surprised to find him so close.

“I fucked up, Ridley. You were right—we’re out of our league here.” It was a simple admission of error, nothing dramatic or even regretful about it. I liked the ease with which he could admit that he’d made mistakes. I think it’s a good quality in a person.

He put a hand on my shoulder. I didn’t like being so close to him, didn’t like his scent, the warmth of his body. I wanted to move away but found that I couldn’t, and moved in closer instead. He pulled me to him and then his lips were on mine. I felt heat travel through my body. It was in a desperate seeking of comfort that I let him kiss me, that I kissed him back. I felt his arms enfold me. He held me with conviction but also with care, with tenderness. Jake always kissed me with a kind of reverence, a painful gentleness. Dylan kissed me as if he owned me, as if he knew me. I pulled away from him, pushed him back, then slapped him hard. The sound my hand made against his face was a satisfying smack. It felt good. Almost as good as it had felt to kiss him.

“Asshole,” I said, hating my pulse for racing and hating the mutinous heat on my face.

“That’s three,” he said with a big smile. He put his hand lovingly to his face as though I’d kissed him there.

“You think because you’ve read a few of my e-mails, listened in on my conversations, that you know something about me.”

He put his hands in his pockets and cast his eyes to the floor.

“Well, you don’t. Okay?”

He nodded. I couldn’t see if he’d stopped smiling but I didn’t think so. I put my bag over my shoulder and walked toward the door.

“Are we going or what?”

I COULD TELL you that it was cool, that the sky was a flat, dead concrete gray, and that the sun was trapped hopelessly behind thick cloud cover. But it was England and late autumn, so yeah. We drove in silence toward the city. I kept my eyes closed or turned out the window, so as not to invite any conversation from Dylan. I had a million questions but I wished I could get my answers from somewhere else.

For a while, I tried to retrieve some of the missing fragments of my memory: how I’d gotten to England, what had happened to me, how I’d come to check myself in to the Covent Garden Hotel, whose voice I heard in my head, asking the same question over and over. But I was overcome with a terrible foreboding that discouraged me from mentally exploring my recent past. Maybe some things were better off forgotten.

Eventually I got bored ignoring Dylan and turned to him.

“I was a shit to kiss you like that,” he said as soon as I did. “You’ve got enough going on. I wasn’t trying to take advantage of you. I just…”

He didn’t finish and the sentence hung between us.

“Will you tell me about your mother?” I asked.

“You don’t want to hear my sad story.”

“I do,” I said. I felt the urge to reach out to him, to touch him where I’d slapped him or to put my hand on his arm. But I didn’t. “I really want to know.”

There’d been crime-scene photographs in the file. Alice Grace was beaten to death and left to die in an alley behind the Hôtel Plaza Athénée in Paris in 1985.

He released a sigh. Then: “I always thought, growing up, that my parents were in the hotel business, that they traveled the world buying struggling hotels and turning them into five-star properties. That had been my mother’s family business and I never questioned it. It wasn’t until long after my mother was killed that I learned the truth. That my parents were both former intelligence officers with British Special Forces and that upon their retirement from military service before I was born, they were recruited by Interpol.”

He watched the road and didn’t even glance at me. I could see that he had a white-knuckled grip on the wheel.

“Interpol’s primary function is intelligence gathering and acting as a global police communication system. Agents are not law enforcement personnel; they have no rights of arrest or of search and seizure. My mother was really an analyst, specializing in the gathering and analyzing of intelligence in the form of clandestine communications and surveillance.”

“Your mom was a spy?” I asked, staring at him. I wondered if he was a bit crazy. I was actually starting to feel a little sorry for him. I knew all about trying to find explanations for your family, trying to understand the things they’d done and coming up with a way to make it okay.

He nodded. “In a sense, I suppose that’s what she was. My father was a surveillance photographer. Some of those older pictures you saw of Smiley, they were mostly taken by my father.”

I waited for him to go on. I watched the trees race past us in a blur of green and black. He was driving fast.

“Most of their activities were classified. But I was able to find out through an old friend of my father’s that they gathered data on Smiley for over seven years.”

“Why? For whom?”

“It had come to the attention of the CIA that Max Smiley had some questionable relationships overseas and they were interested in knowing more about his activities. Interpol agreed to watch him when he was in Europe and Africa. My parents were two of the agents assigned to the task.”

He released a long breath here. I kept my eyes on his profile, watching him as I’d felt him watching me for signs that he might be telling the truth. But what did I know about honesty? I probably wouldn’t have recognized it if it kicked me in the teeth.

“There aren’t many pictures of my mother, you know. I have one from when she was a girl. But mostly she avoided the camera. She couldn’t afford to have her image floating around—it was so important for her to be invisible in her work. But she was stunning—jet-black hair and eyes so dark they were almost purple. Her skin was this nearly translucent white. She used to keep her hair back and wear these thick dark glasses, because when she didn’t, everyone stared at her. My father used to call her the Showstopper. When she walked into a room, everyone turned to look at her, men and women.”

I could see some of this beauty in him. It resided in the gray of his eyes, in the fullness of his lips, in the strength of his jaw, in the blue-black shine to his hair. But there was something to him that kept him from being easy on the eyes, something about his aura maybe, that made me want to turn away.

“She went alone to Paris. My paternal grandmother was ill—near death. My father stayed behind to care for her.

“There should have been no risk to her. The maître d’ was a supposed Interpol ally and had arranged for a microphone to be placed at the table where Smiley would be dining. Nobody knows how she was discovered. She wasn’t a careless person; she was highly trained. Nobody knows how she wound up dying such a horrible death, her body discarded in the alley behind a grand hotel. She suffered, died slowly. We know that much. The maître d’ was killed as well. Interpol suspected that he had betrayed her and then was killed for what he knew.”

I let a moment pass in respect for his mother, for how she died and how much it must have pained him to discuss it. Then: “How do you know Max killed her?”

I saw his grip tighten on the wheel. A small muscle started working in his jaw. “Because beating women to death with his bare hands was Max Smiley’s signature. That’s what he did to get his rocks off, or haven’t you figured that out yet?”

His tone was so sharp and the words so harsh that I physically shifted away from him in my seat.

“Wake up, Ridley. Wake the fuck up. Your father, your beloved Max, hated women. He murdered them. Prostitutes, call girls, escorts, women he picked up in bars. Discarded them in hotel rooms and alleyways, in Dumpsters, in abandoned cars. In addition to Project Rescue and his involvement with the lowest scum on the planet there’s a swath of brutally murdered women in his path. Women who he murdered with his own bare hands.”

He pulled the car over so suddenly that I was jerked about unpleasantly, nearly knocking my head against the side window; my seat belt locked. He turned to me. His face had gone pale with anger. A blue vein throbbed in his temple.

“He liked to feel their bones collapse beneath his fists,” he said, lifting and clenching his own hand. “He liked to hear them scream and then whimper and sob as he choked and beat the life out of them.”

He was yelling now and I found myself covering my face and leaning against the cool glass until he went silent. I listened to him breathing hard, listened to the cars race by us, their wheels whispering on wet concrete, felt the Peugeot shake with the speed of their passing. When I lowered my hands, I could see that his eyes were wet and rimmed red. There was a grim intensity to the way he was watching me. I could already see regret in the line of his mouth. I stared back at him, mesmerized by what I saw. His was the face of the ugly truth; I recognized it in every pore. That’s what had kept me turning away from him. I realized that I’d never seen it before, the face of someone who had no secrets to hide, no more lies to tell. I hated him for it.

I reached into the back of the car and grabbed my bag, flung the door open, got out, and started walking. The cold air, the now-driving rain, felt wonderful. I heard his door slam and the sound of his feet on the concrete.

“Ridley,” he called after me. “Ridley, please.”

There was so much sorrow in his voice that I almost stopped but kept going instead. I thought I could hitch a ride, go to the police and get myself arrested or deported or murdered or whatever. It didn’t matter.

When I felt his hand on my arm, I spun around and started pummeling him pathetically with my fists. I was so weak, so messed up, that instead of warding me off, he just pulled me into him, effectively pinning me against him. Eventually I stopped struggling. His body was shaking slightly, from cold or emotion, I didn’t know. I could hear the beating of his heart fast and strong in his chest. I let myself sob, standing there on the highway in the pouring rain.

“I’m so sorry,” he said into my ear. “I’m so sorry. You were right. I am an asshole. You didn’t deserve that.” He tightened his arms around me and I wrapped mine around his waist. “You didn’t deserve any of this.”

I looked up at him and saw all the pain in the world in the gray of his eyes.

“Neither did you,” I said. There was a flash of something on his face. I think it was gratitude. And then his mouth was on mine. In his hunger and his passion, I tasted his honesty. I opened myself to it and took it all in—this man, his truth, and his kiss. In that moment, I knew one thing for sure. That Dylan Grace had been right all along. He was the only friend I had.

I FOUND THAT I had about two thousand pounds sterling in my bag, close to four thousand dollars. How it got there, I had no idea. We parked the Peugot in a public lot and then checked into a run-down hotel near Charing Cross Road. The room was ugly but clean and comfortable enough, and Dylan insisted we chill there for a while, wait for the sun to go down. He washed and rebandaged my wound with great tenderness. I let him, though I could have done it myself. Since our kiss on the road, there’d been a charged silence between us. We spoke to each other politely or not at all.

I was eager to get to an Internet café but saw the wisdom in waiting for dark. Plus, I was feeling worse and weaker by the minute. I lay down on the queen-size bed, which smelled vaguely of cigarettes. Dylan took the chair beside me and turned on the “telly.” After an hour of watching the news, we still hadn’t seen anything about ourselves. A check of the morning papers in the lobby on the way in showed that we hadn’t made the print media, either.

“It’s weird,” said Dylan, looking at me from the chair. “I’d have thought our pictures would be all over the place after a mess like that.”

“Maybe they want to keep it quiet.”

“No way. Two cops and a nurse dead? Whoever I killed lying on the hospital room floor? You missing? No way to keep that quiet. They should be using every resource at their disposal to find us.”

“But they did keep it quiet. Obviously.”

He had his head in his hand and rubbed his temples.

“You can lie down if you want,” I said. I thought he must be tired, every muscle in his body aching from driving and sitting up all night.

He looked up at me. “Yeah?”

I nodded. He rose from his chair and lay down beside me. The bed squealed beneath his weight. I moved into him and let him fold his arms around me. I heard him release a long, slow breath, felt the muscles in his chest and shoulders relax. I just wanted to feel safe for a minute. And I did. I drifted off like that. When I woke again, the sky outside our window was darkening.

He was sleeping soundly, his breathing deep and even. My head was on his shoulder and he had one arm curled around me, one flung over his head. I flashed on how his face had looked in the car when he talked about Max, about the things he’d said. How the pain of it had brought tears to his eyes. I hated what he had told me. I felt as if the knowledge was a cancer growing inside me, something black and deadly that would eventually take over and shut all my systems down. I would die from it; I was sure of that.

I remembered Max’s parade of call girls, women I had always naively thought were his girlfriends. A man like that, so damaged inside, my mother had said once of him, can’t really love. At least he was smart enough to know it. Did she know how much worse it really was? She couldn’t have. She couldn’t.

In the file there’d been a list—a kind of time line. I’d quickly passed it over because I didn’t understand it. I realized now with horror what it was. I slipped myself away from Dylan and went over to the pile of our things on the chair. The file was there beneath my bag. I sat cross-legged on the floor and opened it in my lap, flipped through its leaves until I found what I was looking for. It was a time line, apparently compiled by the FBI’s Serial Crimes Division in cooperation with Interpol, of a list of women found murdered, perpetrator unknown, organized by date and geographic location. It started in Michigan in the ghettos surrounding Michigan State, where Max went to college. Four women, streetwalkers, were found over the four-year period Max resided in that area. One: Emily Watson, seventeen, found in an alleyway beneath some bags of trash behind a Chinese restaurant. Two: Paris Cole, twenty-one, found beneath a bridge over the Detroit River. Three: Marcia Twinning, sixteen, found in a drug den in downtown Detroit. Four: Elsie Lowell, twenty-three, found in an empty lot, her body partially burned. The list went on. Women in New York, New Jersey, London, Paris, Cairo, Milan—around the country and around the world—with two things in common: the brutality of a beating death and the fact that Max was in the area around the time of their murders. Young women, lost women, walking the streets, fallen upon by a predator and left like trash. I noticed that the list ended the year Max died.

I felt my stomach churn, even as my mind clouded with a thousand questions. What did it mean precisely that these deaths corresponded with Max’s passage through the world? Surely you could compile a list like this for almost anyone. People were murdered every day in a thousand different ways all over the globe. And if, in fact, there was any real evidence that he’d murdered these women or that he’d been involved in criminal enterprise with any of the people in the photographs, why wasn’t he ever arrested? Why wasn’t he ever charged? They didn’t seem to have any difficulty finding and following him.

“You want to talk about some of that?” Dylan asked from the bed, startling me.

“No,” I said. “I’m tired of talking.” I felt as if we’d been talking for days.

There was so much I didn’t know and didn’t understand, so many things that didn’t make sense with the information I had. And I always had Jake in the back of my mind. Where was he? What had happened to him? How much of our life together was a lie, a fabrication on his part to be close enough to me to know if Max was still alive? How much of what was in this file did Jake already know? I thought of his own file he’d shown me, the one that had disappeared after the last time we made love. I wished I had paid more attention to what was in there.

I heard Dylan sit up and crack his back. He issued a low groan and I turned to look at him; he was clearly in pain. Looking at him made me think of Jake again. They were such different men but driven by the same desire to find my father. It was weird, karmic in a way. I knew there was a lesson for me to learn here, but I was miles away from understanding. He rested his gaze on me and I felt an odd wash of attraction and guilt. I looked away.

“What do you want to do?” he said softly.

“I need some clothes. I can’t go clubbing like this,” I said, looking down at my pilled blue sweater and ugly, too-tight jeans. I’d unzipped them to spare my injury any additional discomfort, but I couldn’t very well go running around London with my pants open.