Before the Fall

Chapter 18. Cunningham

It’s never been a secret that Bill Cunningham has problems with authority. In some ways that’s his brand, the fire-breathing malcontent, and he’s translated it into a ten-million-dollar-a-year contract with ALC. But in the same way a man’s nose and ears become exaggerated as he ages, so do the psychological issues that define him. We all become caricatures of ourselves, if we live long enough. And so over the last few years, as his power grew, so too did Bill’s fuck you and the horse you rode in on attitude. Until now, he’s been like some blood-drinking Roman caesar who believes deep down he may be a god.

Ultimately, this is why he’s still on the air, after all the bullshit corporate crybabying over his alleged “phone hacking.” Though, if he’s being honest (which he isn’t), he’d have to admit that David’s death had a lot to do with it. A grief response and power vacuum in a moment of crisis that Bill was able to exploit by delivering what he calls “leadership,” but was really a kind of moral bullying.

“You’re gonna—” he said, “let me get this straight, you’re gonna can me in a moment of all-out war.”

“Bill,” said Don Liebling, “don’t you do that.”

“No, I want — you need to say it on the record — so when I sue your asses for a billion dollars I can be specific on the stand while I’m jerking off into some caviar.”

Don stares at him.

“Jesus. David’s dead. His wife is dead. His—”

He gets quiet for a moment, overcome by the immensity of it.

“His goddamn daughter. And you’re — I can’t even say it out loud.”

“Exactly,” said Bill, “you can’t. But I can. That’s what I do. I say things out loud. I ask the questions no one else is willing to — and millions of people watch this channel because of that. People who are gonna run to CNN if they turn on our coverage of the death of our own fucking boss and see some second-string automaton with Fisher-Price snap-on hair reading his opinions off a teleprompter. David and his wife and daughter — who, I held her at her fucking baptism — are lying somewhere at the bottom of the Atlantic with Ben Kipling — who I’m hearing was about to be indicted — and everybody’s using the word accident like nobody on earth had reason to want these people dead, except then why did the man travel in a bulletproof limousine and his office windows could take a hit from a goddamn bazooka?”

Don looks over at Franken, Bill’s lawyer, already knowing that in the war between common sense and marketing genius, marketing is going to win out. Franken smiles.

Gotcha.

And that’s how it came to pass that Bill Cunningham was back on the air Monday morning, three hours after news of the crash broke.

He sat before the cameras, his hair unbrushed, in shirtsleeves, his tie askew, looking for all intents and purposes like a man felled by grief. And yet, when he spoke, his voice was strong.

“Let me be clear,” he said. “This organization — this planet — has lost a great man. A friend and leader. I wouldn’t be sitting in front of you right now—”

He paused, collected himself.

“—I’d still be throwing weather in Oklahoma, if David Bateman hadn’t seen potential where no one else could. We built this network together. I was his best man when he married Maggie. I am — I was—godfather to his daughter, Rachel. And that is why I feel it is my responsibility to see that his murder is solved, and that the killer or killers are brought to justice.”

He leaned forward and stared into the lens.

“And yes, I said murder. Because whatever else could it be? Two of the most powerful men in a city of powerful men, whose plane disappears over the dark Atlantic, a plane serviced just the day before, flown by top-notch pilots who reported no mechanical issues to flight control, but somehow dropped off radar eighteen minutes after takeoff — look at my face — no one on earth can convince me there wasn’t some kind of foul play involved.”

The ratings that morning were the highest in the history of the network, and they continued to climb from there. As the first wreckage was found, the first bodies washed up on shore — Emma Lightner found by a dog walker on Fishers Island on Tuesday, Sarah Kipling hauled in by lobstermen on Wednesday morning — Bill seemed to rise above himself, like a relief pitcher in the bottom innings of a too-close-to-call game seven.

That day Bill spun the grim discovery of human remains toward further intrigue. Where was Ben Kipling? Where was David Bateman? Didn’t it seem convenient that of the eleven people on the plane, passengers and crew, only seven bodies remained missing, including those of the two men most likely to have been targeted by as-yet-unknown forces? If Ben Kipling was sitting with his wife, as had been reported, why was her body recovered and not his?

And where was this Scott Burroughs character? Why did he still insist on hiding his face from the world? Is it possible he was involved somehow?

“Clearly he knows more than he’s saying,” Bill told the viewers at home.

Sources inside the investigation had been funneling ALC information since the first boots hit the ground. From this, they were able to break the seating chart before anyone else. They were also the first to break news of Kipling’s imminent indictment.

It was Bill who broke that the boy, JJ, had been asleep when he arrived at the airfield and was carried onto the plane by his father. His personal connection to the story, the marathon hours he spent behind the anchor desk, frequently having to pause to collect himself, made it hard for viewers to change the channel. Would he break down entirely? What would he say next? Hour after hour, Bill cast himself as a kind of martyr, Jimmy Stewart on his feet in the Senate chambers, refusing to succumb or surrender.

But as the days went on, even the back-channel leaks began to seem false. Could there really be no new leads on the location of the wreckage? And now that all the other outfits had the Kipling story — the Times ran a six-thousand-word piece on Sunday that showed in minute detail how his firm had laundered billions from North Korea, Iran, and Libya — Bill became less interested in digging for dirt there. He was reduced to opinion pieces, to going over old ground — pointing at time lines, yelling at maps.

And then he had an idea.

* * *

Bill meets Namor at a dive bar on Orchard Street — black box, no sign. He chooses it because he figures none of the grungy liberal elite of the nouveau riche knows his face. All the bearded Sarah Lawrence graduates with their artisanal ales who think every conservative pundit is just another friend of their dad’s.

In preparation, Bill exchanges his trademark suspenders for a T-shirt and leather bomber jacket. He looks like a former president, trying to be cool — Bill Clinton at a U2 concert.

The bar — Swim! — is defined by low lighting and glowing fish tanks, giving it the look of a mid-1990s sci-fi action movie. He orders a Budweiser (un-ironically) and finds a table behind a big saltwater tank, then watches the door for his man. Sitting behind the tank gives the illusion that he is underwater, and through the glass the room takes on a funhouse-mirror quality — like what a hipster bar would look like after the oceans rose and consumed the earth. It’s just after nine p.m. and the place is half filled with bro-clusters and hipster first dates. Bill sips the king of beers and checks out the local talent — blond girl, decent tits, a little chubby. Some kind of East Asian number with a nose ring—Filipino? He thinks about the last girl he fucked, a twenty-two-year-old intern from GW he bent over his desk, coughing his orgasm into her brown hair after six glorious minutes of watch the door! jackhammering.

His man enters in a raincoat, an unsmoked cigarette tucked behind his ear. He looks around casually, sees Bill’s comically oversize head magnified through the fish tank, and approaches.

“I’m assuming you thought you were being stealthy,” he says, sliding into the booth, “choosing this dump.”

“My core audience are fifty-five-year-old white men who need two heaping tablespoons of fiber to take a halfway-decent shit every morning. I think we’re in the clear here.”

“Except you came by town car, which is loitering at the curb this very minute, drawing attention.”

“Shit,” says Bill, pulling out his phone and telling his driver to circle.

Bill met Namor on a junket to Germany during the second Bush’s first regime. Namor was introduced to him by a local NGO as a man to know. And right off the bat the kid was feeding him gold. So Bill cultivated him, buying him meals, theater tickets, whatever, and making himself available whenever Namor felt like talking, which was usually north of one thirty in the morning.

“What did you find out?” he asks Namor after his phone is back in his pocket.

Namor looks around, gauging volume and distance.

“The civilians are easy,” he says. “We’re already up on the flight attendant’s father, the pilot’s mother, and the Bateman aunt and uncle.”

“Eleanor and — what’s it? — Doug.”

“Right.”

“They must be giddy,” says Bill, “winning the goddamn orphan lottery. It’s gotta be something like three hundred million the kid inherits.”

“But also,” says Namor, “he’s an orphan.”

“Boo hoo. I wish I was an orphan. My mother raised me in a boardinghouse and used bleach for birth control.”

“Well, taps are up there on all three phones, hers, his, and home. And we’re seeing all their electronic messages before they do.”

“And this feed goes where?”

“I set up a dummy account. You’ll get the info by coded text when we walk out tonight. I also hacked her voice mail so you can listen late at night while you’re humping your pillow.”

“Trust me, I get so much pussy — when I go home at night the only thing I put my cock in is ice.”

“Remind me not to order a margarita at your house.”

Bill finishes his beer, waves at the bartender for a second.

“And what about King Neptune,” he says, “the long-distance swimmer?”

Namor sips his beer.

“Nothing.”

“Whaddya mean, nothing? It’s two thousand fifteen.”

“What can I say? He’s a throwback. No cell phone, doesn’t text, pays all his bills by mail.”

“Next thing you’re gonna tell me is he’s a Trotskyite.”

“Nobody’s a Trotskyite anymore. Not even Trotsky.”

“Probably ’cause he’s been dead for fifty years.”

A waitress brings Bill a new beer. Namor signals he wants one too.

“At least,” says Bill, “tell me where this fucking Boy Scout is — on what planet.”

Namor thinks about that.

“What’s got you so bent about this guy?” he asks.

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m just saying — this swimmer — everybody else thinks he’s a hero.”

Bill makes a face like the word has made him physically sick.

“That’s like saying everything that’s wrong with the country is what makes it great.”

“Yeah, but—”

“Some failed drunk hobnobbing with men of actual accomplishment, a hitchhiker on the bootstrap express.”

“I don’t know what that—”

“He’s a fraud, I’m saying. A nobody. Muscling his way into the spotlight, playing the humble knight, when the actual heroes, the great men, are dead at the bottom of the deep blue bullshit. And if that’s what we call a hero in two thousand fifteen, then, buddy, we’re fucked.”

Namor picks his teeth. It’s no skin off his nose either way, but there’s a big ask here, a lot of laws about to be broken, so it’s probably worth being sure.

“He saved the kid,” he says.

“So what? They train dogs to wear whiskey barrels and find warm bodies in an avalanche, but you don’t see me teaching my kids to grow up to be malamutes.”

Namor thinks about that.

“Well, he didn’t go home.”

Bill stares at him. Namor smiles without teeth.

“I’m sifting through some chatter. Maybe he’ll turn up.”

“But you don’t know — is what you’re saying.”

“Yes. For once. I don’t know.”

Bill pumps his leg, suddenly uninterested in his second beer.

“I mean, what are we talking about here? A drunken degenerate? A black ops sleeper agent? Some kind of Romeo?”

“Or maybe he’s just a guy who got on the wrong plane and saved a kid.”

Bill makes a face.

“That’s the hero story. Everybody’s got the fucking hero story. It’s human interest bullshit. You can’t tell me that this dried-up has-been gets a seat on that plane just because he’s a good guy. I couldn’t even get a ride on the plane three weeks ago. Had to take the goddamn ferry.”

“And you’re definitely not a good guy.”

“Fuck you. I’m a great American. How is that not more important than what? Being nice?”

The waitress brings Namor’s second beer. He sips it.

“Here’s the thing,” he says. “Nobody stays buried forever. Sooner or later, this guy goes to the deli to buy a bagel and somebody gets a cell phone photo. Or he calls someone we’ve already tapped.”

“Like Franklin at NTSB.”

“I told you. That one’s tricky.”

“Fuck you. You said anybody. You said pick a name from the phone book.”

“Look, I can get his personal line, but not the satphone.”

“What about email?”

“In time, maybe. But we gotta be careful. They monitor everything now, since the Patriot Act.”

“Which you called amateur hour. Get some sack already.”

Namor sighs. He has his eye on the blonde, who’s texting someone while her date is in the can. Once he has her name he can fish up naked selfies in less than fifteen minutes.

“My memory is you said we had to cool it for a while,” he says. “Wasn’t that the phone call? Burn everything. Wait for my signal.”

Bill waves him off.

“That was before ISIS killed my friend.”

“Or whoever.”

Bill stands, zips his bomber.

“Look,” he says, “it’s a simple equation. Secrets plus technology equals no more secrets. What this thing needs is a brain trust, someone at twenty thousand feet who’s got access to all the intel — governmental, personal, fucking forensic weather data — and he — this elevated godhead — uses that information to paint the real picture, uncover who’s lying and who’s telling the truth.”

“And that someone is you.”

“Fucking A right,” says Bill, and walks out to his town car.

Chapter 19. Funhouse

Scott sits alone that night and watches himself on television. It is less an act of narcissism and more a symptom of vertigo. To see his face onscreen, features reversed, to have childhood photos—how did they get them? — unearthed and displayed in a public forum (between commercials for adult diapers and minivans), to be told the story of his own life, as if in a game of telephone. A story that resembles his own, but isn’t. Born in the wrong hospital, attended a different elementary school, studied painting in Cleveland instead of Chicago — like looking down and seeing someone else’s shadow follow you on the street. He has a hard enough time these days knowing who he is without this sentient doppelgänger out there. This third-person him now a subject of rumor and speculation. What was he doing on that plane? Last week he was an ordinary man, anonymous. Today he is a character in a detective story. The Last Man to See the Victims Alive or Savior of the Child. Each day he plays his role, scene by scene, sitting on sofas and hard-backed chairs, answering questions from the FBI and NTSB, going over and over the details — what he remembers, what he doesn’t. And then seeing the headlines in the paper, hearing disembodied voices from the radio.

A hero. They are calling him a hero. It is not a word he can handle right now, being so far outside his own sense of himself, the narrative he has created that allows him to function — a broken man with modest ambitions, a former blackout drunk who lives moment-to-moment now, hand-to-mouth. And so he keeps his head down, dodging the cameras.

Occasionally he is recognized on the subway or walking down the street. To these people he is something more than a celebrity. Yo, you saved that kid. I heard you fought a shark, bro. Did you fight a shark? He is treated not like royalty — as if his fame is based on something rare — but more like a guy from the neighborhood who got lucky. Because what did he do really, except swim? He is one of them, a nobody who did good. And so when he is recognized, people approach smiling. They want to shake his hand, take a picture. He survived a plane crash and saved a kid. There is juju to touching him, the same boost you get from a lucky penny or a rabbit’s foot. By doing the impossible he — like Jack — proved that impossible is possible. Who wouldn’t want to rub up on that?

Scott smiles and tries to be friendly. These conversations are different from what he assumes it will feel like to talk to the press. They’re contact on a human level. And though he feels self-conscious he makes sure he is never rude. He understands that they want him to be special. It’s important to people that he be special, because we need special things in our lives. We want to believe that magic is still possible. So Scott shakes hands and accepts the hugs of random women. He asks that they not take his picture, and most respect that.

“Let’s keep this private,” he says. “It means more when it’s just you and me.”

People like this idea, that in a time of true mass media, they could have a unique experience. But not everyone. Some take his picture brazenly, as if it is their right. And others get upset when he refuses to pose for a photo with them. An older woman calls him an asshole outside Washington Square Park, and he nods and tells her she’s right. He is an asshole and he hopes she has a great day.

“Fuck you,” she tells him.

Once anointed a hero by your fellow man, you lose the right to privacy. You become an object, stripped of some unquantifiable humanity, as if you have won a cosmic lottery and woke one day to find yourself a minor deity. The Patron Saint of Good Luck. It stops mattering what you wanted for yourself. All that matters is the role you played in the lives of others. You are a rare butterfly held roughly at a right angle to the sun.

On the third day he stops going outside.

He is living in Layla’s third-floor guest apartment. It is a space of pure white — white walls, white floor, white ceiling, white furniture — as if he has died and moved on to some kind of heavenly limbo. Time, once mired in hard-fought routine, becomes fungible. To wake in a strange bed. To make coffee with unfamiliar beans. To lift rich bath towels from self-closing cupboards and feel their hotel texture against your skin. In the living room there is a bar filled with Scottish malts and clear Russian courage. A cherrywood, mid-century case with an elaborate folding lid. Scott stared at it for a long time that first night, the way a man in a certain mental state regards a gun cabinet. So many ways to die. Then he covered the bar with a blanket, moved a chair in front of it, never to look at it again.

Somewhere, the Kipling wife and that beautiful flight attendant are lying faceup on a steel slab. Sarah, that was her name, and the model in the short skirt was Emma Lightner. Several times a day he reviews the names like a Zen koan. David Bateman, Maggie Bateman, Rachel Bateman…

He thought he had come to terms with this thing, its full import, but there was something about the news that bodies had been found that threw him off balance. They’re dead. All of them. He knows they’re dead. He was there, in the ocean. He dove beneath the wave. There could be no survivors, but hearing the news, seeing the footage—first bodies recovered from Bateman crash—made the whole thing real, the way your legs go out from under you only after a crisis is over.

The mother is still out there, the father and sister. So are the pilots, Charlie Busch and James Melody. So is Kipling, the traitor, and the Batemans’ security man, buried somewhere deep beneath the waves, swaying in permanent black.

He should go home, he knows, back to the island, but he can’t. For some reason he finds himself unable to face the life he once lived (once, in this case, being just days ago, as if linear time means anything to a man who’s survived what he’s survived. There is before and there is after), unable to approach the little white gate on a quiet sandy road, to step over the old slip-on shoes left absently by the door, one behind the other — the toe of the back shoe still resting on the heel of the front, where he stepped out of it. He feels unable to return to the milk in the fridge gone sour, and his dog’s sad eyes. That is his home, the man on TV who wears Scott’s shirts and squints into the lens of old photographs—are my own teeth that crooked? Unable to face the gauntlet of cameras, the endless barrage of questions. Talking to people on the subway is one thing, but addressing the masses — that’s something he can’t handle. A statement becomes a pronouncement when delivered to the crowd. Random observations become part of the public record to be replayed for all eternity, Auto-Tuned and memified. Whatever the reason, he feels unable to retrace his steps, to withdraw to the place he lived “before.” And so he sits on his borrowed sofa of the now and stares out at the treetops and brownstones of Bank Street.

Where is the boy at this moment? In a farmhouse somewhere in the country? At a breakfast table surrounded by spiky green strawberry tops and calcifying oatmeal splotches? Every night before bed, Scott has the same thought. In sleep he will dream of the boy lost in an endless black ocean, dream of his Dopplered cries — nowhere and everywhere at once — as Scott splashes around, half drowning, searching but never finding. But the dream does not come. Instead there is only the deep vacuum of sleep. It occurs to him now, sipping cold coffee, that maybe these are the boy’s dreams. A projection of his anxiety, floating on the jet stream like a dog whistle only Scott can hear.

Is the bond between them real or implied, a product of guilt, an idea he has contracted like a virus? To save this child, to have him cling to you for eight exhausting hours, to carry him in your arms to the hospital — did that create new pathways in the brain? Isn’t the life saved enough? He is home now, this child the world knows as JJ, but whom Scott will always think of simply as the boy. Safe and cared for by a new family, by the aunt and her — well, let’s be honest—shifty husband. An instant millionaire hundreds of times over who will never want for anything, and him not even five. Scott saved his life, gave him a future, the chance of happiness. Isn’t that enough?

He dials information and asks for the aunt’s number in Westchester. It is nine p.m. He has sat alone in the apartment for two days straight. The operator connects him and as he listens to the phone ring he wonders what he is doing.

On the sixth ring she answers, Eleanor. He pictures her face, the rosy cheeks and sad eyes.

“Hello?”

She sounds wary, as if only bad news comes after dark.

“Hey, it’s Scott.”

But she’s already talking.

“We already made a statement. Can you please respect our privacy?”

“No, it’s Scott. The painter. From the hospital.”

Her voice softens.

“Oh, sorry. They just — they won’t leave us alone. And he’s just a boy, you know? And his mom and dad are—”

“I know. Why do you think I’m hiding out?”

A silence as she switches from the call she thought it was to the reality — a human moment with her nephew’s savior.

“I wish we could,” she says. “I mean, it’s hard enough going through this all in private, without—”

“I’m sure. Is he—”

A pause. Scott feels he can hear her thinking — how much should she trust him? How much can she say?

“JJ? He’s, you know, he’s not really talking. We took him to a psychiatrist — I mean, I did — and he said, just—give him time. So I’m not pressing.”

“That sounds — I can’t imagine what it’s like—”

“He doesn’t cry. Not that he — I mean, he’s four, so how much can he really understand? But still, I thought he’d cry.”

Scott thinks about this. What’s there to say? “He’s just processing, I guess. Something that — traumatic. I mean, for kids whatever they go through is normal, right? I mean, in their heads. They are learning what the world is, so that’s what he thinks now. That planes crash and people die and you end up in the drink. Which, maybe he’s having second thoughts about the whole thing if that’s what life on this earth is all—”

“I know,” she says. And they sit for a minute in a silence that is neither awkward nor uncomfortable. Just the sound of two people thinking.

“Doug doesn’t talk much either. Except about the money. I caught him the other day downloading spreadsheet software. But — emotionally? I think he’s freaked out by the whole thing.”

“Still?”

“Yeah, he’s — you know, he’s not good with people. He had a hard childhood too.”

“You mean, twenty-five years ago?”

He can hear her smile over the phone.

“Be nice.”

Scott likes the sound of her voice, the pace of it. There is an implication of intimacy to it, as if they have known each other a long, long time.

“Not that I’m one to talk,” he tells her. “Given my track record with women.”

“That is bait I will not take,” she says.

They talk for a while about the daily routine. She gets up with the boy while Doug sleeps — he goes to bed late, it seems. JJ likes toast for breakfast and can eat a whole container of blueberries in one sitting. They do art projects until nap time and in the afternoons he likes to look for bugs in the yard. On trash days they sit on the porch and wave at the haulers.

“A normal kid, basically,” she says.

“Do you think he really understands what happened?”

A long pause, then she says:

“Do you?”

Chapter 20

On Wednesday the funerals begin. Sarah Kipling is first, her remains buried at Mount Zion Cemetery in Queens, a graveyard in the shadow of looming pre-war smokestacks, as if there is a factory next door manufacturing bodies. Police hold the news trucks to a cordoned area on the south side of the wall. It’s a cloudy day, the air stilted, tropical. Thunderstorms are forecast for the afternoon and already you can feel the unsettled electricity in the atmosphere. The line of black cars stretches all the way to the BQE, family, friends, political figures. There will be eight more before this is through — assuming all the bodies are recovered.

Overhead, helicopters circle. Scott arrives in a yellow cab. He’s wearing a black suit found in Layla’s guest closet. It’s a size too big, long in the sleeves. In a dresser drawer he found, conversely, a small white shirt, too tight in the neck, that leaves a noticeable gap under his necktie. He’s shaved badly, cutting himself in two places. The sight of his blood in the bathroom mirror and the sharp slice of pain startled him back to a kind of reality.

He can still taste salt water in the back of his throat, if he’s being honest, even in sleep.

Why is he alive and they dead?

Scott tells the driver to leave it running and steps out into the mug. For a moment he wonders if the boy will be here — he forgot to ask — but then he thinks, Who would bring a toddler to a stranger’s funeral?

The truth is, he doesn’t know why he came here. He is neither family nor friend.

Scott can feel the eyes on him as he walks up. There are two dozen guests in black ringing the grave. He sees them see him. He is like lightning that has struck twice in the same place. An anomaly. He lowers his eyes out of respect.

Standing at a respectful distance he sees half a dozen men in suits. One is Gus Franklin. He recognizes two of the others, Agent O’Brien from the FBI and the other is — Agent something or other from, what is it, the Treasury? They nod to him.

As the rabbi talks, Scott watches dark clouds move over the skyline. They are on a planet called Earth at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy. Spinning, always spinning. Everything in the universe appears to move in a circular pattern, celestial objects rotating in orbit. Forces of push and pull that dwarf the industry of man or beast. Even in planetary terms we are small — one man afloat in an entire ocean, a speck in the waves. We believe our capacity for reason makes us bigger than we are, our ability to understand the infinite vastness of celestial bodies. But the truth is, this sense of scale only shrinks us.

The wind kicks up. Scott tries not to think about the other bodies still buried with the plane — Captain Melody, Ben Kipling, Maggie Bateman and her daughter, Rachel. He pictures them there, like a lost letter in the lightless deep, swaying silently to unheard music as the crabs consume their noses and toes.

When the funeral ends, a man approaches Scott. He has a military carriage and a handsome, leathery face, as if he spent years of his life in the hot Arizona sun.

“Scott? I’m Michael Lightner. My daughter was—”

“I know,” says Scott softly. “I remember her.”

They stand among the tombstones. In the distance there is a domed mausoleum, topped by the figure of a man, one leg raised, walking staff in hand, as if to say even now the journey was not done. He is dwarfed by the city skyline, gleaming in the late-afternoon sun, so that if you unfocused your eyes you could convince yourself that all the buildings are just tombstones of a different kind, towering edifices of remembrance and regret.

“I read somewhere that you’re a painter,” Michael says. He takes a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, taps out a smoke.

“Well, I paint,” says Scott. “If that makes me a painter, I guess I’m a painter.”

“I fly airplanes,” says Michael, “which I always thought made me a pilot.”

He smokes for a moment.

“I want to thank you for what you did,” he says.

“Living?” says Scott.

“No. The boy. I ditched once in the Bering Strait on a life raft, and that was — I had supplies.”

“Do you remember Jack LaLanne?” asks Scott. “Well, I went to San Francisco when I was a kid and he was swimming across the bay pulling a boat behind him. I thought he was Superman. So I joined the swim team.”

Michael thinks about that. He is the kind of man you wish you could be, poised and confident, but salty somehow, as if he takes things seriously, but not too seriously.

“They used to broadcast every rocket launch on TV,” he says. “Neil Armstrong, John Glenn. I’d sit on the living room rug and you could almost feel the flames.”

“Did you ever make it up?”

“No. Flew fighter planes for a long time, then trained pilots. Couldn’t bring myself to go commercial.”

“Have they told you anything?” asks Scott. “About the plane?”

Michael unbuttons his jacket.

“Mechanically it seemed sound. The pilot didn’t report any issues on an earlier run across the Atlantic that morning, and maintenance did a full service the week before. Plus, I looked over Melody’s record, your pilot, and he’s spotless — though human error — can’t rule it out. We don’t have the flight recorder yet, but they let me see the air traffic control reports and there were no maydays or alarms.”

“It was foggy.”

Michael frowns.

“That’s a visual problem. Maybe you get some turbulence from temperature variation, but in a jet like that, flying by instruments, it wouldn’t have been a factor.”

Scott watches a helicopter come in from the north, gliding along the river, too far away to hear the blades.

“Tell me about her,” he says.

“Emma? She’s — was — You have kids and you think I made you, so we’re the same, but it’s not true. You just get to live with them for a while and maybe help them figure things out.”

He drops his cigarette on the wet ground, puts a foot on it.

“Can you—” he says, “anything about the flight, about her, you can tell me?”

Her last moments, he is saying.

Scott thinks about what he can say — that she served him a drink? That the game was on and the two millionaires were jawing and one of the millionaire’s wives was talking about shopping?

“She did her job,” he says. “I mean, the flight was, what, eighteen minutes long? And I got there right before the doors closed.”

“No, I understand,” says the father, bowing his head to hide his disappointment. To have one more piece of her, an image, to feel one more time that he can learn something new, it’s a way to keep her alive in his mind.

“She was kind,” Scott tells him.

They stand there for a moment, nothing left to say, then Michael nods, offers his hand. Scott shakes it, tries to think of something to say that could address the grief the other man must be feeling. But Michael, sensing Scott’s turmoil, turns and walks away, his back straight.

The agents approach Scott on his way back to the cab. O’Brien is in the lead, with Gus Franklin on his heels — one hand on the agent’s shoulder as if to say, Leave the fucking guy alone.

“Mr. Burroughs.”

Scott stops, his hand on the taxi door.

“We really don’t want to bother you today,” says Gus.

“It’s not called bothering,” says O’Brien. “It’s called our job.”

Scott shrugs, no way around it.

“Get in,” says Scott. “I don’t want to do this on camera.”

The cab is a minivan. Scott rolls the door back, climbs inside, and sits on the back bench seat. The agents look at each other, then climb in also. Gus in front, O’Brien and Hex in the middle jump seats.

“Thank you,” says Scott. “I’ve lived this long without being captured by helicopter camera—”

“Yeah, we noticed,” says O’Brien. “You’re not a big fan of social media.”

“Any media,” says Hex.

“How’s the search going?” Scott asks Gus.

Gus turns to the driver, a Senegalese man.

“Can you give us a minute?”

“It’s my cab.”

Gus takes out his wallet, gives the man twenty dollars, then another twenty when that doesn’t work. The driver takes it, climbs out.

“Hurricane Margaret is moving north from the Caymans,” Gus tells Scott. “We’ve had to call off the search for now.”

Scott closes his eyes. Maggie, Margaret.

“Yeah,” says Gus. “It’s a bad joke, but they name these things at the beginning of the season.”

“You seem pretty upset,” says O’Brien.

Scott squints at the agent.

“A woman died in a plane crash and now there’s a hurricane named after her,” he says. “I’m not sure how I’m supposed to seem.”

“What was your relationship with Mrs. Bateman?” asks Hex.

“You guys have a way of saying words that’s very judgmental.”

“Do we?” says O’Brien. “It probably comes from a deep-seated philosophical belief that everybody lies.”

“I might give up on conversation entirely, if I thought that,” says Scott.

“Oh no. Makes it fun,” says O’Brien.

“People are dead,” Gus snaps. “This isn’t a game.”

“With respect,” says O’Brien, “you focus on what made the plane go down. We’ll zero in on the human factor.”

“Unless,” says Hex, “the two things are actually the same.”

Scott sits back and closes his eyes. They appear to be having this conversation without him now and he feels weary. The ache in his shoulder has subsided, but there is a headache creeping up the rim of his brain, a deep-tissue echo of the swelling barometric pressure outside.

“I think he fell asleep,” says Hex, studying him.

“You know who sleeps in a police station?” says O’Brien.

“The guy who did it,” says Hex.

“You boys should get your own radio station,” says Gus. “Morning sports. Traffic and weather together on the eights.”

O’Brien taps Scott’s chest.

“We’re thinking of getting a warrant to look at your paintings.”

Scott opens his eyes.

“What would that look like?” he asks. “A warrant to look at art?” He pictures a drawing of a document, an artist’s rendering.

“It’s a piece of paper signed by a judge that lets us seize your shit,” says O’Brien.

“Or maybe come over Thursday night,” says Scott. “I’ll serve white wine in paper cups and put out a tray of Stella D’oro breadsticks. Have you been to a gallery opening before?”

“I’ve been to the fucking Louvre,” snaps O’Brien.

“Is that near the regular Louvre?”

“This is my investigation,” says Gus. “Nobody’s seizing anything without talking to me.”

Scott looks out the window. All the mourners are gone now. The grave is just a hole in the ground, filling with rainwater as two men in coveralls stand under a canopy of elm and smoke Camel Lights.

“What practical value could my paintings have, in your mind?” he asks.

He truly wants to know, as a man who has spent (wasted?) twenty-five years smudging color on canvas, ignored by the world, chasing windmills. A man who has resigned himself to impracticality and irrelevance.

“It’s not what they are,” says O’Brien. “It’s what they’re about.”

“Disaster paintings,” says Hex. “That’s from your agent. Pictures of car wrecks and train crashes.”

“Which,” says O’Brien, “putting aside the intrinsic fucked-upness of that as an art form, is interesting to us on a procedural level. As in, maybe you got tired of looking for disaster to paint, decided to cause your own.”

Scott looks at them with interest. What fascinating brains these men have, creating plots and deception from whole cloth. His eyes move to Gus, who is pinching the bridge of his nose as if in great pain.

“How would that work?” Scott asks. “On a practical level. A penniless painter with a three-legged dog. A man who spends his days chasing something he can’t define. A story with no verbs. How does this man — I don’t even know how to put it — turn?”

“It happens all the time,” says O’Brien. “Small men in small rooms thinking big thoughts. They start thinking things, going to gun shows, looking up fertilizer bombs online.”

“I don’t go online.”

“The physical fucking library then. Notice me, is the point. Revenge.”

“On who, for what?”

“Anyone. Everyone. Their mothers, God. The kid who buggered them in gym class.”

“In the actual class?” says Scott. “In front of everybody?”

“See now you’re joking, but I’m being serious.”

“No. It’s interesting to me is all,” says Scott. “How your mind works. Like I said, I walk on the beach. I sit in coffee shops and stare into my cup. I think about image, about color and mixing media. This is new to me, this kind of television projection.”

“Why do you paint what you paint?” asks Gus quietly.

“Well,” says Scott, “I mean, I’m not sure really. I used to do landscapes and then I just started putting things in them. I guess I’m trying to understand the world. I mean, when you’re young you expect your life to go well, or at least you accept that that’s possible. That life can be navigated. If you choose a path, or even if you don’t, because how many people do you know who end up on top by accident? They fall into something. But what I fell into was bourbon and my own asshole.”

“I’m falling asleep over here,” says O’Brien.

Scott continues because Gus asked, and, because he asked, Scott assumes he actually wants to know.

“People get up in the morning and they think it’s another day. They make plans. They move in a chosen direction. But it’s not another day. It’s the day their train derails or a tornado touches down or the ferry sinks.”

“Or a plane crashes.”

“Yes. It’s both real, and — to me — a metaphor. Or it was — ten days ago. Back when I thought painting a plane crash was just a clever way to hide the fact that I’d ruined my life.”

“So you did paint a plane crash,” says Hex.

“We’re gonna wanna see that,” says O’Brien.

Through the window, Scott watches the men drop their cigarette butts in the mud and grab their shovels. He thinks about Sarah Kipling, who humored him on a sunny day in August, a weak handshake, a perfunctory smile. Why is she in the ground and not him? He thinks of Maggie, of her daughter, nine years old. They’re both at the bottom of the ocean somewhere and he is here, breathing, having a conversation about art that is really a conversation about death.

“Come by anytime,” he tells them. “The paintings are there. All you have to do is turn on the lights.”

* * *

He has the cab drop him at Penn Station, figuring that with all the press at the funeral someone will have followed the cab, and as he pushes through the doors he sees a green SUV pull up to the curb and a man in a denim jacket jump out. Scott moves quickly to the subway, descending to the downtown number 3 train platform. Then he doubles back and makes his way to the uptown platform. As he does he sees his pursuer in the denim jacket appear on the downtown side. He has a camera out and as the uptown train sharks in, the man sees Scott and raises his camera to get a shot. Scott turns on his heels as the train screeches past him, obscuring his face. He hears the sluice of air and the subway ding and backs through the doors. He sits, holding his hand in front of his face. As the doors close he peers through his open fingers, and as the train pulls out he catches a glimpse of denim on the far track, camera still raised, praying for a shot.

Scott rides uptown three stops, then gets out and takes the bus going downtown. He is in a new world now, collision city, filled with suspicion and distrust. There is no room for abstract thought here, no room to ruminate on the nature of things. This is the other thing that died in the turbulent Atlantic. To be an artist is to live at once in the world and apart from it. Where an engineer sees form and function, an artist sees meaning. A toaster, to the engineer, is an array of mechanical and electrical components that work together to apply heat to bread, creating toast. To the artist, a toaster is everything else. It is a comfort creation machine, one of many mechanical boxes in a dwelling that create the illusion of home. Anthropomorphized, it is a hang-jawed man who never tires of eating. Open his mouth and put in the bread. But poor Mr. Toaster Oven. He’s a man who, no matter how much he eats, is never truly fed.

* * *

Scott eats cereal for dinner, still dressed in his borrowed suit, tie askew. It feels disrespectful to take it off somehow. Death, so permanent for the dead, should be more than just an afternoon activity for the mourners. So he sits and shovels and chews in all black, like a breakfast undertaker.

He is standing at the sink, washing his single dish and spoon, when he hears the front door open. He knows without looking that it’s Layla, the sound of her heels and the smell of perfume.

“Are you decent?” she says, coming into the kitchen.

He lays his bowl on the dish rack to drain.

“I’m trying to figure out why you need place settings for thirty,” he says. “Cowboys used to travel the country with a single plate and fork and spoon.”

“Is that what you are?” she asks. “A cowboy?”

He goes to the living room and sits on the sofa. She pulls the blanket off the roll-top bar and pours herself a drink.

“Are you keeping the booze warm or—?”

“I’m an alcoholic,” he tells her. “I think.”

She sips her drink.

“You think.”

“Well, probably a safe bet, given that when I start drinking I can’t stop.”

“My father is the richest alcoholic on the planet. Forbes did an article, how he probably drinks three hundred thousand a year in top-shelf booze.”

“Maybe put that on his tombstone.”

She smiles, sits, her shoes dropping from her feet. She curls her right leg under her left.

“That’s Serge’s suit.”

He reaches for the tie.

“I’m sorry.”

“No,” she says. “It’s fine. He’s in Romania now, I think. On to his next epic fuck.”

Scott watches her drink her scotch. Outside the rain smacks and streaks the windows.

“I ate a peach once,” he says, “in the Arizona desert, that was better than any sex I’ve ever had.”

“Careful,” she tells him. “I may take that as a challenge.”

After she’s gone he carries her glass to the sink. There is still a finger of scotch inside and before he pours it into the sink he holds it to his chin and smells, transported by that familiar earthy peat. The lives we live, he thinks, are filled with holes. He rinses the glass and lays it upside down to drain.

Scott goes into the bedroom and lies down on the bed, suit still on. He tries to imagine what it’s like to be dead, but can’t, and so he reaches over and turns off the light. The rain drums against the window glass. He stares at the ceiling, watching shadow streaks moving in reverse, raindrops slithering from down to up. Tree branches splayed in a Rorschach weave. The whiteness of the apartment is an empty canvas, a place waiting for its occupant to decide how to live.

What will he paint now? he wonders.

Chapter 21. Threads

There was an answer. They just didn’t have it yet. This was what Gus told his bosses when they pressed. It had been ten days since the crash. There was a hangar on a naval base out on Long Island where they collected the debris they’d recovered. A six-foot section of wing, a tray table, part of a leather headrest. It’s where the remaining bodies would be brought when they were recovered — assuming they were found with the wreckage and didn’t wash up on a beach like Emma Lightner or get pulled from a lobsterman’s net, like Sarah Kipling. Those bodies had been sent to local morgues and had to be recovered by federal mandate over a period of days. Jurisdiction was one of the many headaches you dealt with when investigating a crash into coastal waters.

Every day the divers put on wet suits, the pilots gassed their choppers, and captains divvied up the grid. Deep water is dark. Currents shift. What doesn’t float, sinks. Either way, the more time that went by, the less likely it was that they would find what they were looking for. Sometimes, when the waiting was too great, Gus would call in a chopper and fly out to the lead ship. He’d stand on the deck and help coordinate the search, watching the gulls circle. But even in the middle of the action Gus was still just standing around. He was an engineer, a specialist in airplane design who could find the flaw in any system. The caveat was he needed a system to analyze — propulsion, hydraulics, aerodynamics. All he had was a torn piece of wing, and the top-down pressure of a man being buried alive.

And yet even a small piece of wreckage tells a story. From the wing fragment they’d determined that the plane hit the water at a ninety-degree angle — diving straight down like a seabird. This is not a natural angle of descent for an airplane, which wants to glide on contoured wings. That suggested pilot error, even possibly a deliberate crash — although Gus reminded everyone of the possibility that the plane had actually descended at a more natural angle, only to impact a large wave head-on, simulating a nose-down crash. In other words, We don’t know anything for sure.

A few days later, a chunk of the tail section was spotted off Block Island. From this they got their first look at the hydraulic system — which appeared uncompromised. The next day two more pieces of luggage were found on a Montauk beach — one intact, the other split open, just a shell. And so it went, piece by piece, like searching a haystack for hay. The good news was that the wreckage seemed to be breaking up underwater, revealing itself a little at a time, but then, four days ago, the finds stopped coming. Now Gus is worried they might never find the bulk of the fuselage, that the remaining passengers and crew are gone for good.

Every day he faces pressure from his superiors in Washington, who, in turn, face mounting demands from the attorney general and from a certain angry billionaire to find answers, recover those missing, and put the story to rest.

There is an answer. We just don’t know it yet.

On Thursday he sits at a conference table reviewing the obvious with twenty-five bureaucrats, going over the things they already know they know. This is in the federal building on Broadway, home turf for Agent O’Brien of the FBI and Hex of the OFAC, plus the half dozen subordinates they control. To O’Brien this crash is part of a larger story — terrorist threats and splinter cell attacks targeting American interests. To Hex the crash is only the latest piece in a war story about the US economy and the millionaires and billionaires who devote massive capital to the breaking of rules and laws. Gus is the only one in the room thinking about the crash as a singularity.

These people on that aircraft.

Beside him, the CEO of the private security firm responsible for the Bateman family is describing the process they use to assess threat levels. He’s brought a six-man team with him, and they hand him documents as he speaks.

“—in constant contact with dedicated agents of Homeland Security,” he is saying. “So if there was a threat, we knew about it within minutes.”

Gus sits at the conference table, looking at his reflection in the window. In his mind he is on a Coast Guard cutter, scanning the waves. He is standing on the bridge of a naval frigate reviewing sonar imagery.

“I supervised a comprehensive review of all intel and activity myself,” the CEO continues, “for a full six months before the crash, and I can say with complete confidence — nothing was missed. If somebody was targeting the Batemans, they kept it to themselves.”

Gus thanks him, hands off to Agent Hex, who begins a review of the government’s case against Ben Kipling and his investment firm. Indictments, he says, were handed down as planned the day after the crash, but Kipling’s death gave the other partners the perfect scapegoat. So to a man, all have said that any trades with rogue nations (if they existed) were the brainchild of a dead man, laundered through their books as something else. They were duped, in other words. I’m as much of a victim here as you, they said.

Eighteen of the firm’s accounts have been frozen. Total value, $6.1 billion. Investigators have tied the money to five countries: Libya, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. They know from Kipling’s phone records that Barney Culpepper called him fifty-one minutes before the flight departed. Culpepper has declined to comment on what they discussed, but it’s clear the call was to warn Kipling about the indictment.

As far as Agent Hex and his superiors at the OFAC are concerned, the crash was a move by a hostile nation to silence Kipling and hamper their investigation. The question of exactly when the Kiplings were invited to fly back with the Batemans arises. The CEO of the security firm checks the logs. There’s a communiqué from the Batemans’ body man at eleven eighteen the morning of the flight, reporting a conversation with the principal (David Bateman, aka Condor) in which Condor stated Ben and Sarah would be flying back with them.

“Scott,” says Gus absently.

“What?” says Hex.

“The painter,” Gus clarifies. “He told us Maggie invited Sarah and her husband — it was earlier that morning at the farmers market, I think. And he’d already been invited — check the notes, but I think it was sometime Sunday morning. He ran into Maggie and the kids.”

Gus thinks about his last conversation with Scott, sitting in a taxi at the cemetery. He’d hoped to have a more detailed discussion, going minute by minute through Scott’s memories of the flight, boarding, the subsequent takeoff, and what he remembered from the air, but the conversation was hijacked by men looking for faces in the clouds.

In the absence of facts, he thinks, we tell ourselves stories.

This is clearly what the news media is doing — CNN, Twitter, Huffington Post—the twenty-four-hour cycle of speculation. Most of the reputable outfits are sticking to facts and well-researched op-eds, but the others — Bill Cunningham at ALC being the worst offender — are building legends, turning the whole mess into some giant soap opera about a lothario painter and his millionaire patrons.

Gus thinks of the boy, settled in now with his aunt and uncle in the Hudson River Valley. He drove out to meet them two days ago, sitting in their kitchen and drinking herbal tea. There is never a good time to question a young child, no perfect technique. Memories, which are untrustworthy even in adults, are unreliable at best in children, especially after a trauma.

He’s not talking much, Eleanor said, bringing him his tea. Ever since we got him home. The doctor says that’s normal. Or, not normal, but not abnormal.

The boy sat on the floor playing with a plastic front loader. After letting him get used to Gus’s presence in the room, Gus settled on the floor beside him.

JJ, he said, my name is Gus. We met before. At the hospital.

The boy looked up, squinting, then went back to playing.

I thought we could talk about the airplane, when you went on the plane with your mommy and daddy.

And sissie, the boy said.

That’s right. And your sister.

Gus paused, hoping the child would fill the silence, but he didn’t.

Well, said Gus, do you remember the plane? I know you were — Scott tells me you were asleep when it took off.

The boy looked up at Scott’s name, but didn’t speak. Gus nodded to him encouragingly.

But, he said, did you — do you remember waking up at all, before—

The boy looked over at Eleanor, who had taken a place behind him on the floor.

You can tell him, sweetie. Just — anything you remember.

The boy thought about this, then took his digger and crashed it into a chair.

Raar, he yelled.

JJ, said Eleanor. But the boy ignored her, getting up and running around the room with the digger, smashing it into walls and cabinets.

On the floor, Gus nodded, climbed wearily to his feet, his knees popping.

It’s okay, he said. If he remembers anything, it’ll come out. Better not to push.

Now, in the conference room, a logistical conversation is in progress about the techniques a hit squad (from Libya, North Korea, et cetera) might have used to bring down the plane. The most likely scenario is a bomb planted at some point during the flight’s time either at Teterboro or on the Vineyard itself. Schematics of the plane are brought out and they stand around the table pointing at possible hiding spots. The exterior of the plane is unviable, given the pilot’s thorough visual examination before takeoff.

Gus has spoken to the ground-crew techs who refueled the jet on the runway, working-class men with Massachusetts accents who drink green beer on Saint Patrick’s Day and eat hot dogs on July Fourth. No gaps can be found where a third party could have come aboard and planted an explosive device.

O’Brien floats (again) the idea that they should look at Charlie Busch, a last-minute addition to the crew. There are rumors, unconfirmed, that he may have dated the flight attendant, Lightner, but no hard proof. Gus reminds him that a thorough background check of Busch has been done. He was a jock from Texas, nephew of a US senator and something of a playboy, if his personnel file was to be believed. Nothing in the man’s past suggests he might have crashed the plane deliberately, no matter what his dating profile said. He certainly didn’t fit any known terrorist profile.

The day before Gus had been summoned to Washington to meet with Busch’s uncle, Senator Birch. Birch was a lifer in the Senate, six terms in. He had a full head of white hair and the broad shoulders of a former college running back. Off to the side, his chief of staff sat typing on his cell phone, ready to step in if the conversation floated too far afield.

“So — what’s the answer?” Birch asked him.

“Too early to tell, sir,” Gus said. “We need the plane, need to analyze the systems, recover the bodies.”

Birch rubbed his face.

“What a mess. Bateman and Kipling. And meanwhile, my poor sister.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Look,” said Birch, “he was a good kid. Charlie. A little bit of a fuckup early on, but he pulled his shit together, as far as I can tell. Made something of himself. What are Jim Cooper’s people saying at GullWing?”

“His record was good. Not great, but good. We know he was in London the night before the crash, that he socialized with a number of GullWing employees, and that Emma Lightner was there as well. But as far as anyone can tell, it was just another night. They went to a bar. Emma left early. We know that sometime that night your nephew switched flights with Peter Gaston. He wasn’t meant to be on Flight Six Thirteen.”

Birch shook his head.

“Bad luck.”

Gus bobbled his head to say, Maybe it was bad luck. Maybe it wasn’t.

“Your nephew caught a jump seat on a charter to New York the next day. We don’t yet know why. Gaston says the switch was Charlie’s idea. Said he just felt like going to New York. Apparently he was like that, though — impulsive.”

“He was young.”

Gus thought about that.

“He may also have had some boundary issues with women.”

Birch made a face as if to say, That’s not a real thing.

“What are you gonna do? He was a handsome guy. His whole life he basically skated by on a smile. If he was my kid I’da taken him out to the woodshed and beat some discipline into him, but his mama thought the sun rose and set up his ass. But I did what I could, made some calls, got him into pilot training at the guard, helped him find his footing.”

Gus nodded. He was less interested in knowing what kind of person the copilot was, and more interested in understanding his physical and mental state on the day of the event. Planes don’t crash because pilots grew up without fathers. Backstory gives you context, but it doesn’t tell you what you really need to know. Which is, what happened in the eighteen minutes between the wheels leaving the tarmac and the plane touching down in the ocean? Were there any mechanical faults with the aircraft?

As far as he was concerned, the rest was just something to do while they waited for a real lead.

Across from him, Birch nodded to his aide. Time to wrap it up. He stood, extended his hand.

“If this thing looks like it’s going to reflect badly on Charlie, I want you to tell me. I’m not asking you to do anything illegal, just a heads-up. I’d like to protect the boy’s mother as much as possible.”

Gus stood, shook the senator’s hand.

“Of course, sir,” he said. “Thank you for seeing me.”

Now, in a high-rise conference room, Gus watches himself in the glass, tuning out the suited men around him. They too are filling time. Right now the investigation is a game of Clue where the cards are missing. He needs a plane. Until then, all they can do is guess.

Hex bumps Gus’s arm. He realizes O’Brien is talking to him.

“What?”

“I said I got a warrant,” says O’Brien.

“For what?” Gus asks.

“The paintings. We seized them from Burroughs’s studio about an hour ago.”

Gus rubs his eyes. He knows from O’Brien’s file that he is the son of a boarding school principal, Andover or Blair Academy, he can’t remember which. This seems like as good way as any to design a judgment machine, one whose function is to police and punish — which is clearly how O’Brien sees his role in life.

“The man saved a child,” he says.

“He was in the right place at the right time, and I’m wondering why.”

Gus tries to keep his temper under control.

“I’ve done this job for twenty years,” he says, “and no one has ever described being in a plane crash as being in the right place at the right time.”

O’Brien shrugs.

“I gave you the chance to make this your idea. Now I’m moving on it myself.”

“Just — bring them to the hangar,” Gus tells him, then, before O’Brien can protest. “And you’re right. We should look. I would have done it differently, but it’s done now. So bring them to the hangar. And then pack your bags, because you’re off the task force.”

“What?”

“I brought you on because Colby said you were his best man, but we’re not going to do this. It’s my investigation, and how we treat the survivors and the suspects is a tone that I set. So it’s done now. You seized artwork created by a man who may one day get a medal of honor from the president. You’ve decided he’s hiding something, or maybe you just can’t accept that life is full of random coincidence, that not everything that seems meaningful is meaningful, but the truth is, it’s not your decision to make. So pack your shit. I’m giving you back to the FBI.”

O’Brien stares at him, jaw tight, then stands slowly.

“We’ll see,” he says, and walks out.

Chapter 22. Painting #3

You are underwater. Below you there is only darkness. High above, you see light, a gradual gray hinting toward white. There is texture to the murk, what appear to be black crosses peppering your field of vision. They are not obvious at first, these slashes of black, like something has been drawn and crossed out, but as your eyes adjust to the painting you realize they are everywhere, not simply brush technique, but content.

In the bottom right corner of the frame you can make out something shiny, a black object catching some glint of light from the surface. The letters USS are visible, the final S sinking below the edge of frame. Seeing it draws your eye to something else, cresting the very bottom of the canvas, the tip of something triangular, something primordial rising.

It is in this moment you realize that the crosses are bodies.

Chapter 23

TRANSCRIPT Leaked Document shows tension inside the Bateman crash Investigation, raises questions about the role of a mysterious passenger. (Sept. 7, 2015, 8:16 p.m.)

BILL CUNNINGHAM (Anchor): Good evening, America. I’m Bill Cunningham. We’re interrupting our regular programming to bring you this special report. ALC has acquired an internal memo written by Special Agent Walter O’Brien of the FBI to National Transportation Safety Board’s lead investigator, Gus Franklin, penned just hours ago. The memo discusses the team’s current theories of the crash, and raises questions about the presence on the plane of purported crash hero, Scott Burroughs.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

CUNNINGHAM: As seen here, the document — which starts off cordial — shows disagreement between the investigators in how to handle the case going forward. As listed in the memo, investigators are currently working on four main theories. The first is mechanical error. The second is pilot error. The third is listed as sabotage, possibly to impede a government investigation into Ben Kipling and his investment firm. The final reads as quote a terrorist attack, aimed at David Bateman, chairman of ALC News.

But there is a fifth theory, raised here for the first time, one that questions the role played by Scott Burroughs in the crash. It is a theory Agent O’Brien clearly raised in person with the lead investigator earlier that day, only to be rebuffed, and so now, as he writes, quote: and though I know you’ve said in person that you have no interest in this line of questioning, given recent revelations, I feel I must put in writing a possible fifth theory, and that is the idea that passenger Scott Burroughs either knows more than he’s saying, or bears some culpability in events leading to the downing of the aircraft.

And wait till you hear why, my friends. Quote, Interviews with local vendors and residents of Martha’s Vineyard suggest that Burroughs and Mrs. Bateman, wife of David, were very close and appeared to have a comfortable physical relationship — hugging in public. It is known that Mrs. Bateman had visited Mr. Burroughs at his studio and seen his work.

And friends, as a personal friend of the family, I can tell you I don’t read those words lightly, nor am I suggesting that an affair took place. But the question of why Mr. Burroughs was on that plane continues to nag at me. But fine, say they were friends, even good friends. There’s no harm or shame in that. It’s the next thing Agent O’Brien writes that is, to me, the bombshell.

And I quote, Interviews with Mr. Burroughs’s manager in New York confirm that he had several meetings with gallerists set for the week. Upon further questioning, however, a startling (to me) detail emerged, and that concerns the content of Mr. Burroughs’s most recent work. As described by Mrs. Crenshaw, there are fifteen paintings in total and all present a different photorealistic disaster scenario, with many of the images focused on large-scale transportation accidents. These include (1) a train derailment, (2) a fog-bound highway pileup, and (3) a large passenger plane crash.

Continuing on, O’Brien writes: Given this, I can’t stress enough the need for further questioning of the man who, at very least, is our only witness to events that resulted in the crash of this flight, and claims that he was knocked unconscious when the plane first pitched should be tested.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a hard time understanding why Gus Franklin, the team’s lead investigator, would hesitate for a second to listen to the advice of what is clearly a very smart and very experienced agent of our nation’s greatest law enforcement agency. Is it possible that Franklin has his own agenda? That the government agency he works for has an agenda or is being pressured by this liberal administration to bury this case quickly, lest it become a rallying cry for men and women who, like our heroic former leader, David Bateman, can’t stomach any more business as usual?

For more on the story we turn now to ALC’s Monica Fort.

Chapter 24. Allies

When she pulls into the driveway, a car Eleanor doesn’t recognize is parked under the elm tree. A Porsche SUV with a press sticker in the front window. Seeing it, Eleanor panics — the boy is inside with her mother — and she ditches Doug and runs to the house, banging through the front door, already calling—

“Mom?”

She scans the living room, moving deeper into the house.

“Mom?”

“In the kitchen, hon,” her mother calls back.

Eleanor throws her bag onto a chair, hurries down the hall. She is already chewing two people out in her mind, her mother and whoever owns the Porsche.

“You’re sweet,” she hears her mother say, and then Eleanor is through the door and into the kitchen. There’s a man in a suit and red suspenders sitting at the table.

“Mom,” Eleanor barks, as the man hears the door and turns.

“Eleanor,” he says.

Eleanor stops in her tracks, recognizing Bill Cunningham, news anchor. She has met him before, of course, at David and Maggie’s parties, but he exists in her mind mainly as an oversize head on television, brow furrowed, talking about the moral bankruptcy of liberal minds. When he sees her, he opens his arm, a patrician gesture, as if expecting her to run to him.

“The things we must endure,” he says. “Savagery and setbacks. If you knew how many funerals I’ve been to in the last ten years—”

“Where’s JJ?” says Eleanor, looking around.

Her mother pours herself some tea.

“Upstairs,” she says. “In his room.”

“Alone?”

“He’s four,” her mother tells her. “If he needs something he’ll ask.”

Eleanor turns and goes into the hall. Doug is coming toward her, looking puzzled.

“Who is it?” he asks.

She ignores him, takes the stairs two at a time. The boy is in his room, playing with a pair of plastic dinosaurs. Crossing the threshold, Eleanor takes a cleansing breath and forces a smile.

“We’re back, we’re back,” she says breezily.

He looks up, smiles. She kneels on the floor in front of him.

“Sorry it took so long,” she says. “There was traffic and Doug was hungry.”

The boy points to his own mouth.

“Are you hungry?” Eleanor asks.

He nods. She thinks about what that means, bringing him downstairs into the kitchen. She is about to tell him to wait here, but then she thinks, He’s hungry, followed by an intuition about the power of the boy in her arms. The strength he will give her, she who was always such a people pleaser.

“Okay, come on.”

She holds out her arms. He climbs in and she lifts him from the floor and carries him downstairs. He plays with her hair as they go.

“There’s a man in the kitchen,” she tells him. “You don’t have to talk to him if you don’t want to.”

Bill is sitting where she left him. Doug is at the fridge, digging around.

“I’ve got a Belgian ale,” he says, “and this Brooklyn microbrew some friends of mine make.”

“Surprise me,” says Bill, then sees Eleanor and JJ.

“There he is,” says Bill. “The little prince.”

Doug grabs two bottles of the microbrew, comes over.

“It’s a pilsner,” he says, handing one to Bill, “not too hoppy.”

“Fine,” says Bill dismissively, putting the bottle down without looking at it. He smiles at the boy.

“You remember your uncle Bill.”

Eleanor switches JJ to her right hip, away from him.

“Is that what this is,” Eleanor asks, “a family visit?”

“What else?” he says. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get here sooner. It’s a terrible thing when your life becomes the news and the news becomes your life. But somebody had to be up there telling the truth.”

Is that what you do? she thinks. I thought you reported the news.

“What is the latest on this thing?” asks Doug, sipping his beer. “We’re, you know, we try to stay focused on the kid and not—” Then, worried he’s alienated his celebrity guest, “I mean, you understand — watching the news isn’t really—”

“Of course,” says Bill. “Well, they’re still looking for the rest of the plane.”

Eleanor shakes her head. Are they insane?

“No. Not in front of JJ.”

Doug’s mouth gets tight. He has never liked being scolded by women, especially in front of other men. Eleanor sees it, adds it to the list of today’s offenses. She puts the boy in a chair and goes to the fridge.

“She’s right, of course,” says Bill. “Women are better at these things than men. Feelings. We tend to focus on the facts. What we can do to help.”

Eleanor tries to tune him out, focuses on feeding her nephew. He’s a picky eater, not fussy but selective. He’ll eat cottage cheese, but not cream cheese. He likes hot dogs, but not salami. It’s just a question of dialing it in.

Bill, meanwhile, has decided it’s his mission to get the boy to smile.

“You remember Uncle Bill, right?” he says. “I was at your baptism.”

Eleanor brings the boy a cup of water. He drinks.

“And your sister,” Bill continues, “at hers too. She was — such a beautiful girl.”

Eleanor gives Bill a look. Watch it. He nods, shifts focus without hesitating, trying to show her he’s a good listener, a good partner. That they’re in this together.

“And I know I haven’t been around much lately, unfortunately. Work and, well, your dad and me didn’t always see eye-to-eye. Too close maybe. But, you know, there was love there. Especially on my end. But in the end it’s what we do, grown-ups. You’ll see. Or I hope you won’t, but probably you will. We work too much at the expense of love.”

“Mr. Cunningham,” says Eleanor. “It’s nice of you to visit, but this is — after we eat it’s nap time.”

“No. He napped this morning,” her mother offers. Eleanor glares at her. She too is a people pleaser, Bridget Greenway, especially men. The original welcome mat. Their father, Eleanor and Maggie’s, left their mother when Eleanor went off to college, divorcing her and moving to Florida. It was the smiling he couldn’t take, their mother’s constant Stepford grin. Today he lives in Miami and dates brooding divorcées with fake tits. He’s meant to come next week, after Bridget leaves.

Bill picks up on the tension between mother and daughter. He looks at Doug, who raises his half-drunk beer as if in a toast.

“Good, right?” he says, oblivious.

“What?” says Bill, who has clearly decided Doug is some kind of hipster douchebag.

“The beer.”

Bill ignores him, reaches over and ruffles the boy’s hair. Four hours ago he stood in Don Liebling’s office and faced down Gus Franklin from the NTSB and representatives of the Justice Department. They said they wanted to know where he got O’Brien’s memo.

I bet you do, he told them, thumbing his suspenders.

Don Liebling straightened his tie and told the government shock troops that of course their sources were confidential.

Not good enough, said the attorney from Justice.

The black guy, Franklin, seemed to have his own theory.

Did O’Brien give it to you? Because of what happened?

Bill shrugged.

It didn’t just fall out of the sky, he said. That much we know. But I’ve been to court before, defending a source, and I’m happy to go again. I hear they validate your parking now.

After the agents stormed out, Liebling closed the door and put himself in front of it.

Tell me, he said.

On the sofa, Bill spread his legs wide. He’d been raised without a dad by a weak woman who clung to shitbird men like she was drowning. She used to lock Bill in his room at night and go paint the town red with menstrual blood. And look at him now, a multimillionaire who tells half the planet what to think and when. The fuck if some silver spoon, Ivy League lawyer was going to shake him in his shoes. No way was he going to out Namor. This was about David. About his mentor. His friend. And okay, maybe they didn’t get along that well at the end, but that man was his brother, and he will get to the truth here, no matter what the cost.

Like the spook said, he told Don, it was the FBI man. They kicked him off the team and he was pissed.

Liebling stared at him, wheels turning in his head.

If I find out, he started.

Gimme a break, said Bill, standing, then walked to the door, step by step, putting himself in the lawyer’s face. Forget you’re in an office, he said with his body. Forget hierarchy and the laws of social behavior. This is a warrior you’re facing, king stud on the open savanna, poised and ready to rip off your face, so either lower your horns or get the fuck out of my way.

He could smell the salami on Liebling’s breath, saw him blink, off balance, unprepared for the old bear versus bear, the dirt-pit cockfight. For thirty seconds, Bill hate-fucked him with his eyes. Then Don stepped aside and Bill sauntered out.

Now, in the kitchen, he decides to take the high ground.

“Just a friendly visit,” he says. “These are difficult times and you — well, to me you’re family — you were family to David and that makes us — so I want you to know I’m looking out for you. Uncle Bill is looking out — watching over.”

“Thank you,” says Eleanor. “But I think we’re going to be fine.”

He smiles generously.

“I’m sure. The money will help.”

There’s something in his tone, a bite that belies the sympathy on his face.

“We’re thinking of moving into the town house in the city,” says Doug.

“Doug,” Eleanor snaps.

“What? We are.”

“It’s a beautiful place,” says Bill, thumbs hooking into his suspenders. “A lot of memories.”

“I don’t mean to be rude,” says Eleanor coldly, “but I need to feed JJ.”

“Of course,” says Bill. “You’re the — I mean, a boy this age still needs mothering, especially after — so don’t feel you have to—”

Eleanor turns away from him, seals the ziplock with the turkey in it, puts it in the fridge. Behind her, she hears Bill stand. He’s not used to being dismissed.

“Well,” he says, “I should go.”

Doug stands.

“I’ll walk you out.”

“Thanks, but there’s — I can find it.”

Eleanor brings JJ his plate.

“Here you go,” she says. “There’s more pickles if you want them.”

Behind her, Bill walks to the kitchen door, stops.

“Have you spoken to Scott?” he asks.

At the name, the boy looks up from his meal. Eleanor follows his eyes to Bill.

“Why?”

“No reason,” says Bill, “just, if you’re not watching the news then maybe you haven’t heard the questions.”

“What questions?” asks Doug.

Bill sighs, as if this is hard for him.

“There’s just — people are wondering, you know. He was the last one on the plane, and — what was his connection to your sister, really? And then, have you heard about his paintings?”

“We don’t need to talk about this now,” says Eleanor.

“No,” says Doug, “I wanna know. He calls, you know. In the middle of the night.”

Doug looks at his wife.

“You think I don’t know, but I do.”

“Doug,” says Eleanor. “That’s not his business.”

Bill thumbs his suspenders, bites his lower lip.

“So you are talking to him,” Bill says. “That’s — I mean, just — be careful, you know? He’s — look, it’s just questions right now, and this is America. I’ll fight to the death before I let this administration take away our right to due process. But it’s early days, and these are real questions. And I just — I worry about — you’ve been hurt so much — already. And who knows how bad this’ll get? So, my question is, do you need him?”

“That’s what I said,” says Doug. “I mean, we’re grateful. What he did for JJ.”

Bill makes a face.

“Of course, if you — I mean, a who-knows-how-long swim in the middle of the night. And with a busted arm, dragging a little boy.”

“Stop,” says Eleanor.

“You’re saying,” says Doug, picking up the idea like a germ — that the hero maybe isn’t that much of a hero after all—“hold on. Are you saying—?”

Bill shrugs, looks at Eleanor, his face softening.

“Doug,” says Bill, “come on. Eleanor’s right. This isn’t—”

He leans right, trying to see JJ around Eleanor’s blocking body, then keeps bending “comically” until the boy looks at him. Bill smiles.

“You be a good boy,” he tells him. “We’ll talk soon. If you need anything, tell your — tell Eleanor to call me. Maybe we’ll go see the Mets sometime. You like baseball?”

The boy shrugs.

“Or the Yankees. I’ve got a box.”

“We’ll call you,” says Eleanor.

Bill nods.

“Anytime,” he says.

* * *

Later, Doug wants to talk, but Eleanor tells him she’s going to take JJ to the playground. She feels as if she’s being squeezed inside a huge fist. At the playground she forces herself to be fun. She slides with the boy and bounces on the seesaw. Trucks in the sand, digging it, piling it, watching it fall. It’s a hot day and she tries to keep them in the shade, but the boy just wants to run, so she feeds him water to keep him hydrated. A thousand thoughts are going in her head, colliding, each new idea interrupting the last.

Part of her is trying to put together why Bill came. Another part is parsing through what he said, specifically about Scott. What is she supposed to think, that the man who saved her nephew actually crashed the plane somehow and then faked his heroic swim? Every idea in that sentence is absurd in its own right. How does a painter crash a plane? And why? And what did he mean about Scott’s relationship with Maggie? Was he saying there was an affair? And why drive out to the house to tell her this?

The boy taps her arm and points to his pants.

“You have to go potty?” she asks.

He nods, and she picks him up and carries him to the public bathroom. As she helps him with his pants, it hits her with a sway of vertigo that given his youth there is little chance he will remember his real parents when he’s an adult. She will be the mother he thinks of the second Sunday of every May. Not her sister. But, she thinks, does that mean that Doug will be his father? The thought of it sickens her a little. Not for the first time she curses herself for the weakness of her youth, this need for constant companionship like an elderly widow who leaves the TV on and gets a dog.

But then she thinks maybe all Doug needs is a chance. Maybe inheriting a four-year-old boy will motivate him, turn him into a family man. Then again, isn’t thinking a child can save your marriage the classic delusion? They’ve had JJ with them for two weeks now, and Doug isn’t drinking any less, hasn’t changed his comings and goings, hasn’t treated her any better. Her sister is dead and the boy is now an orphan, but What about Doug’s needs? he says with every thoughtless comment. What about how this affects him?

She helps JJ get his pants up and wash his hands. Uncertainty is making her light-headed. Maybe she’s not being fair. Maybe she’s still upset about meeting the estate attorneys and business managers, the finality of the thing. And maybe Doug’s right. Maybe they should move into the house in the city, give JJ a sense of continuity — use the money to re-create the luxury he knows? But her instinct is that that would only confuse him. Everything has changed. To pretend otherwise feels like fraud.

“Ice cream?” she asks him as they walk back outside and the full heat of the day hits him. He nods. She smiles and takes his hand, leading him to the car. Tonight she will talk to Doug, lay it all out, how she’s feeling, what she thinks the boy needs. They will sell the real estate and put the money into the trust. They will give themselves a monthly stipend that’s big enough to cover any additional expenses the boy brings, but not enough to allow them to quit their jobs or become people of luxury. Doug won’t like it, she knows, but what can he say?

The decision is hers.

Chapter 25. Rachel Bateman, July 9, 2006–August 23, 2015

She remembered none of it. What details she knew had been told to her, except for the image of a rocking chair in a bald, bare attic, rocking back and forth on its own. She saw that chair from time to time in her mind, mostly in the ether on the verge of sleep, an old wicker rocker creaking toward and away, toward and away, as if to soothe a ghost, dog-tired and cross.

Her parents named her Rachel after Maggie’s grandmother. When she was really little (she was nine now) Rachel decided she was a cat. She studied their cat Peaches, trying to move like it. She would sit at the breakfast table and lick the back of her hand, wiping her face with it after. Her parents put up with it until she told them she was going to sleep during the day and roam the house at night. Maggie, her mother, said, “Babe, I just don’t have the energy to stay up.”

Rachel was the reason they had bodyguards, the reason men with Israeli accents and shoulder holsters followed them everywhere. There were three normally. In the lingo of the business, Gil, the first, was a body man — paid to stay in direct physical proximity to the principal. In addition, there was an advance team, usually rotating, of four to six men who watched them from farther away. Rachel knew they were here because of her, because of what had happened, though her father denied it. Threats, he said vaguely, implying that running a TV news network was somehow more relevant to their daily threat level than the fact that his daughter had been kidnapped in her youth, and that quite possibly one or more of the kidnappers were still out there.

At least those were the facts in her head. Her parents had assured her, as had men from the FBI (as a favor to her father last year) and a high-paid child psychiatrist, that the kidnapping had been the work of a single, deranged man (Wayne R. Macy, thirty-six), and that Macy had been killed (shot through the right eye) during the ransom exchange by a lawman in a flak jacket, but not before Macy had shot and killed a second lawman in the opening salvo of a fleeting firefight. The dead lawman was Mick Daniels, forty-four, a former FBI agent and veteran of the First Gulf War.

All she remembered was a chair.

* * *

She was supposed to feel things. She knew that. A nine-year-old girl in summer, on the verge of her teen years. She had been out on the Vineyard with her mother and brother for the last two weeks, lying about. As a child of great wealth there were countless options available to her — tennis lessons, sailing lessons, golf lessons, horseback riding, whatever — but she didn’t feel like being trained. She had studied piano for two years, but ultimately wondered to what end and moved on. She liked being home with her mom and her brother. That was basically it. She felt useful there—a four-year-old boy is more than a handful, her mother would say — and so Rachel played with JJ. She fixed him lunch and changed his pants when he had an accident.

Her mother told her she didn’t have to do it, that she should go out, enjoy the day, but it was hard to do with a large Israeli man (three sometimes) following your every move. Not that she could argue the need for it. Wasn’t she herself proof that you can’t be too careful?

So she stayed home, lying on the porch or the back lawn, staring at the ocean — blinded by it sometimes, that diamond sparkle. She liked to read books about wayward girls, girls who fit in nowhere, then discovered they had magic powers. Hermione, Katniss Everdeen. She’d read Harriet the Spy when she was seven and Pippi Longstocking, and they were competent, but in the end simply human. As she grew, Rachel felt she needed more from her heroines, more teeth, more fight, more power. She liked the thrill of danger they faced, but didn’t want to have to actually worry about them. It made her too anxious.

Whenever she reached a particularly distressing section (Hermione versus the troll in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, for example), she would walk the book inside and hand it to her mother.

“What’s this?”

“Just tell me — does she make it?”

“Does who make what?”

“Hermione. A troll escaped, a giant — and she’s — can you — just read it and tell me she’s okay.”

And her mother, who knew her well enough not to push, would stop whatever she was doing and sit, reading as many pages as it took to get the answer. Then she would hand the book back, her thumb marking a new spot.

“Start here,” she’d say. “She didn’t have to fight it. She just yelled at it that it was in the girls’ bathroom and should go away.”

They had a giggle about that, yelling at a troll, and then Rachel went back outside to read.

* * *

It started with the nanny. They didn’t realize it, though, at the time. Her name was Francesca Butler, but everyone called her Frankie. This was when the family summered on Long Island, at Montauk Point, before private planes and helicopters, when they would just pile in the car and drive out on a Friday night, battling the shifting bulge, like the LIE was just a giant anaconda that had swallowed a traffic jam, the clot of snarled cars shifting downward in surges.

Her brother wasn’t even an idea yet. It was just David and Maggie and toddler Rachel, sleeping in her car seat. The news channel was six years old and already a profit- and controversy-generating machine, but her father liked to say, I’m just a figurehead. A general in a back room. Nobody knows me from Adam.

The kidnapping would change that.

That was the summer of the Montauk Monster, which washed up on shore on July 12, 2008. A local woman, Jenna Hewitt, and three of her friends were walking on Ditch Plains Beach and found the creature.

“We were looking for a place to sit,” she was later quoted saying, “when we saw some people looking at something…We didn’t know what it was…We joked that maybe it was something from Plum Island.”

Described by some as a “rodent-like creature with a dinosaur beak,” the monster was about the size of a small dog and mostly hairless. The body was stocky and the limbs slender. It had two front paws with elongated, pale claws. Its tail was slim and approximately equal in length to the head and neck combined. It was short-faced, wearing an expression of agony or dismay; the postorbital part of the skull appeared long and stout. It had no teeth visible in the upper jaw, instead showing what could be described as a hooked beak of bone. The lower jaw contained a large pointed canine and four post-canines with tall, conical cusps.

Was it a raccoon, as some suggested, that had decomposed in the ocean? A sea turtle whose shell had been removed? A dog?

For weeks, photos of the bloated, distended corpse appeared in tabloids and online. Speculation increased that it was something cooked up in a lab at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center, a mile or so offshore. The Real Island of Dr. Moreau, they started calling it. But eventually, as with all things, a lack of answers led to a lack of interest, and the world moved on.

But when David and Maggie arrived in Montauk that weekend, monster fever was full-blown. Roadside T-shirt kiosks had sprung up. For five dollars you could see the spot where the monster was found, now just an anonymous patch of sand.

The Batemans were renting a house on Tuthill Road. It was a two-story white clapboard across the road from a small lagoon. Mostly secluded, the house was directly parallel to a stalled modern remodel, sheet plastic flapping over a gaping wound to the living room. In years prior, Rachel’s family had rented a house farther north, on Pinetree Drive, but that one had sold to a hedge-fund billionaire in January.

Their new clapboard home (Maggie would stay out there with Rachel through Labor Day weekend, and David would drive out on Fridays and take off the last week of August) was cozy and quaint. It had a large farmhouse kitchen and a sloped and creaky porch. The bedrooms were on the second floor, Mom and Dad facing the ocean. Rachel’s room (complete with a Victorian-era crib) faced the lagoon. They brought Frankie (the nanny) with them, a third pair of hands, as Maggie liked to say. Frankie sat in the back of the Audi with Rachel, engaged in a road-trip-long game of pick up Rachel’s pacifier, wipe it off, and hand it back. Frankie was a night-school nursing student at Fordham who helped take care of Rachel three days a week. She was twenty-two, an émigré from the wilds of Michigan who moved to New York with a boyfriend after college, only to have him leave her for the bass player in a Japanese surf-punk band.

Maggie liked her, because spending time with Frankie made her feel young, something that being with David in his world — populated entirely by people like David, in their forties, and some even in their fifties and sixties — did not. Maggie had just turned twenty-nine. She and Frankie were seven years apart. The only difference between them, really, was that Maggie had married a millionaire.

“You got lucky,” Frankie used to tell her.

“He’s nice,” Maggie would say.

“So even luckier,” Frankie would say and smile. Among her friends there was a lot of talk about landing a rich man. They used to put on short skirts and tall boots and go to bottle-service clubs, hoping to land a Wall Street up-and-comer with a full head of hair and a dick of steel. But Frankie wasn’t really like that. She had a softer edge, having been raised with goats and chickens. Maggie never worried that Frankie was out to steal her husband away. It would be absurd, after all, to trade in your twenty-nine-year-old trophy wife for a twenty-two-year-old, like a cliché on steroids. And yet, she supposed, stranger things had happened.

Just a few years earlier she had been the one paid to teach other people’s children. A twenty-two-year-old preschool teacher, living in Brooklyn. She rode her bike over the Brooklyn Bridge every morning, using hand signals like she was supposed to. The foot traffic on the bridge was minimal at that hour. Joggers mostly. A few health-conscious commuters brown-bagging their way across the river. She wore a lemon-yellow helmet, her long brown hair fluttering behind her like a cape. She didn’t wear headphones or sunglasses. She braked for squirrels, stopping mid-span to take in the view and have some water. In the city she took Chambers to Hudson and rode north, checking behind her every minute or so for taxi drivers on cell phones or slicksters in German automobiles who’d stopped looking at the road.

She got to work every morning by six thirty. She liked to straighten up before the kids arrived, to restock supplies. The schoolhouse was small, just a few rooms in an old brick building next to a parking lot that had been turned into a playground. It was on a tree-lined street in a part of the West Village that had an almost old London feel. Sidewalks curved like crooked fingers. On Facebook she once posted that she liked this part of the city best, its timeless, genteel nature. The rest of the city felt too cold to her; wide avenues of windy business towers, like gleaming bank machines of human resource.

The first student usually arrived at eight, strolling or shuffling or scootering, hand in hand with Daddy or Momma, sometimes still half asleep, lying in a futuristic Maclaren or Stokke supercarriage. Little Penelope or Daniel or Eloise, shoes so small they could fit on a doll, tiny short-sleeved shirts with checks or stripes like one day they would grow up to be wealthy nerds, just like Daddy. Four-year-old girls in eighty-dollar dresses with one pigtail or flowers in their hair picked from a pot outside a brownstone by a harried parent on the way to school.

Maggie was always there to greet them, standing in the asphalt playground, smiling with sunny exuberance as soon as they appeared, like a dog who jumps to its feet at the sound of a key in the front door.

Good morning, Miss Maggie, they cried.

Good morning, Dieter; good morning, Justin; good morning, Sadie.

She gave them a hug or mussed their hair, then said good morning to Mommy or Daddy, who often grunted their replies, having started texting the moment their kid’s feet touched school property. They were lawyers and advertising executives, magazine editors and architects. The men were forty or older (the oldest father in her class was sixty-three). The women ranged from late-twenties supermodels with children named Raisin or Mudge to harried working moms in their thirties who had given up on finding a living, breathing husband and convinced a gay friend to come in a cup in exchange for six weekends a year at the summer house in the Catskills and the honorary title of “uncle.”

She was a patient teacher, sometimes inhumanly so, warm and thoughtful, but firm when necessary. In their evaluations, some parents wrote that they wished they could be more like her, a twenty-two-year-old girl who always had a smile and a kind word, even to a screaming child who had just screwed their nap.

Maggie usually left the school around four, walking her mahogany-colored bike to the curb before snapping her chin strap and lurching into traffic. In the afternoons she liked to ride over to the river and take the bike path south. She stopped sometimes to sit on a bench by the water and watch boat traffic, the helmet forgotten atop her head. She would close her eyes every time the wind blew. On days when the temperature was over ninety she might buy a shaved ice from a Mexican man with a cart — usually cherry — and sit in the grass eating it with the flat thumbnail of a tiny spoon. On those days she would take off her helmet and lay it on the grass like a lemon drop. She’d relax on her back in the cool green and stare at the clouds for a long time, flexing her toes on the lawn, before reaffixing her helmet and starting the long ride home, her lips stained the color of childhood.

How distant it seemed to her now, just seven years later, the unemployed mother of a toddler or, more precisely, the pampered wife of a millionaire.

As soon as they arrived at the house, she and David would go to the market and stock up on supplies, while Frankie stayed home with Rachel. Montauk at this point wasn’t the brand-name scene of the Hamptons, but you could feel it creeping in. The local general store now sold specialty butters and artisanal jams. The old hardware store stocked heirloom linens and had been remodeled in distressed white bead board.

From a roadside stand they bought tomatoes, fat and cracked, and went home and sliced them thick and ate them with sea salt and olive oil. There was no such thing as hardship anymore, certainly nothing more than a fleeting inconvenience, and yet when she reflected on it late at night Maggie was amazed by how her sense of life’s difficulties ebbed and adapted to fit her new circumstances. Whereas, before David, she would have to bike home in the rain some days through gridlock traffic and scour her apartment for pennies to do laundry (and even that couldn’t truly be considered hardship in a world where children went to bed hungry), now she found herself exasperated by foolish things — misplacing the keys to her Lexus, or being told by the clerk at D’Agostino that he didn’t have change for a hundred. When she realized this, how soft she was becoming, how privileged, Maggie felt a wave of self-loathing. They should give all their money away, she told David, raise their kids hand-to-mouth with the proper values.

“I want to go back to work,” she’d say.

“Okay.”

“No. I mean it. I can’t just sit around all day. I’m a worker. I’m used to working.”

“You’re taking care of Rachel. You tell me all the time how much work that is.”

She would twist the phone cord between her fingers, keeping her voice down so as not to wake the baby.

“It is. I know. And I just can’t — I’m not going to have my daughter raised by nannies.”

“I know. We both feel that way, which is why it’s so magical that you can—”

“I just — I don’t feel like myself anymore.”

“That’s a normal postpartum—”

“Don’t do that. Don’t make it about my body, like I can’t control myself.”

Silence from the other end. She couldn’t tell if he was being taciturn or writing an email.

“I still don’t understand why you can’t take more time,” she said. “We’re only up here a month.”

“I hear you. It’s frustrating for me too, but we’re in the middle of a big expansion on a corporate level—”

“Never mind,” she said, not wanting to hear the details of his job. It’s not like he enjoyed her war stories — the woman who cut ahead of them at the supermarket, the playground soap operas.

“Okay. I’m just saying — I’m going to try to make it out Thursday night at least twice.”

Now it was she who was silent. Upstairs Rachel was asleep in her crib. Maggie could hear sounds from the other side of the kitchen that made her think Frankie was changing over the laundry. On the edge of things was the sound of the ocean, that tectonic drum, the heartbeat of the earth. At night she slept like the dead because of it, some core genetic pulse once again in phase with the rhythm of the sea.

It was late the following week that Frankie disappeared. She had gone into town to see a movie at the little old art house theater. She was meant to be home by eleven and Maggie didn’t wait up. It was her night with Rachel — rising at her earliest cries and soothing her back to sleep — and her instinct on those nights was always to front-load her sleep, so as soon as the sun went down (sometimes before) her head would be down on the pillow, her tired eyes perpetually reading and rereading the same short pages of her book, without ever making it past the second chapter.

In the morning when she rose with Rachel (who had come to bed with her just after midnight) and Frankie wasn’t up, Maggie thought it was a little strange, but the girl was young and maybe she met someone at the movie or went for a drink after at the old sailor pub on the way home. It wasn’t until eleven when she knocked on Frankie’s door — they’d agreed that Maggie would have the day to herself — and then opened it and found the bed empty and unused, that Maggie began to worry.

She called David at the office.

“What do you mean she’s gone?” he said.

“Just, I don’t know where she is. She didn’t come home and she’s not answering her phone.”

“Did she leave a note?”

“Where would she leave a note? I checked her room and the kitchen. She went to a movie. I called her cell, but she’s not—”

“Okay, let me — I’ll make a few calls, check to see if she came back to the city — remember she was having troubles with that boy — Troy something — and if I don’t turn up anything or she’s still not back, I’ll call the local police.”

“Is that — I don’t want to overreact.”

“Well, we’re either worried or we’re not. You tell me.”

There was a long pause, while Maggie thought it through — during which time she also made a snack for Rachel who was biting at her ankles.

“Babe?”

“Yeah,” she said, “it’s weird. You should call.”

Three hours later, she was sitting across from the local sheriff, Jim Peabody, whose face looked like the last piece of jerky in the jar.

“Maybe I’m just being silly,” she said, “but she’s usually so responsible.”

“Don’t do that to yourself, Mrs. Bateman. Take your power away. You know this girl and you had an instinct. You gotta trust that.”

“Thank you. I — thank you.”

Jim turned to his deputy — female, heavyset, about thirty.

“We’ll visit the theater, talk to Sam, see if he remembers her. Grace’ll go by the pub. Maybe she stopped in there. You said your husband was calling her people?”

“Yes. He phoned some friends and some of her family — nobody’s heard from her.”

Rachel was coloring — mostly on the paper — at a small round kid’s table Maggie had picked up at a flea market, the kind that came with two adorable little folding chairs. Maggie was amazed the girl hadn’t bothered them once during the entire visit, as if she understood the importance of what was happening. But then she had always been a sensitive and serious child, so much so that Maggie sometimes worried she was depressed. She’d read an article about it in the Times—children with depression — and now it hung in the back of her mind, a Big Idea that could tie all the little ideas together — the poor sleeping, the shyness — or maybe she was just allergic to wheat.

This is what motherhood was, one fear eclipsed by another.

“She’s not depressed,” David would say. “She’s just focused.”

But he was a boy, and a Republican to boot. What did he know about the intricacies of female psychology?

When there was still no word by sundown, David put the rest of the week’s activities on hold and drove out. In the minutes after he arrived, Maggie felt like a balloon deflating: The strong business-as-usual facade she had put on disappeared. She poured herself (and him) a stiff drink.

“Rachel asleep?” he asked.

“Yes. I put her in her room. Do you think that’s a mistake? Should I have put her in ours?”

He shrugged. It made no real-world difference, he thought. It was just an issue in his wife’s head.

“I called the sheriff on the way in,” he told her when they were sitting in the living room. The ocean roared in through the screens, invisible in the black night air. “He said she definitely went to the movie. People remembered her — a pretty girl dressed like the city — but nothing from the bar. So whatever happened, it happened on her way home.”

“I mean, what could have happened?”

He shrugged, sipped his drink.

“They checked the local hospitals.”

Halfway through her drink, Maggie grimaced.

“Shit. I should have done that. Why didn’t I—”

“It’s not your job. You were busy with Rachel. But they checked the hospitals and no one fitting her description came in last night. No Jane Does or anything.”

“David, is she dead? Like lying in a ditch or something?”

“No. I don’t think so. I mean, the longer this goes the less positive I’m gonna spin it, but right now it could just be — I don’t know — a bender.”

But they both knew Frankie wasn’t the bender type.

That night Maggie slept fitfully. She had a dream that the Montauk Monster had come to life and was slithering out of the lagoon and across the road, moving inevitably toward their house, leaving a slug trail of gore behind. She stirred and rolled, imagining it surging up the siding to the second-floor window — Rachel’s window. Had she left the window open? It was a warm night, stuffy. She usually closed it, but this time — given her absent brain, her distraction over Frankie — had she left it open?

Maggie woke with her feet already on the floor, a mother’s panic moving her down the short hall to her daughter’s room. The first thing that struck her was that the door was closed. Maggie knew she hadn’t closed it. In fact, she always put a doorstop in front of it to keep it from closing in the wind. She hit the door almost at a run, and the knob wouldn’t turn. Her shoulder hit the door hard, making a loud bang.

Behind her she heard David stir, but from inside the room she heard nothing. She tried the knob again. It was locked.

“David!” she yelled, then again, her voice taking on a tinge of hysteria.

Then he was behind her, moving fast but still sluggish, some part of his sleeping brain left behind.

“It’s locked,” she said.

“Move,” he told her.

She did, flattening herself against the wall to let him get in there. He grabbed the knob in his big hand and tried to turn it.

“Why isn’t she crying?” Maggie heard herself say. “She must be awake. I must have woken her up. Banging.”

He tried the knob again, then gave up, put his shoulder into it. Once, twice, three times. The door stretched the jamb but didn’t open.

“Motherfucker,” he said, now fully awake, taken by fear. Why wasn’t his daughter crying? Instead, all that came under the door was the surge of the ocean.

He stepped back and kicked the door hard, reaching down for some primal Neanderthal strength. The jamb shattered this time, one of the hinges popping, the door flying open and bending backward, like a boxer who’s been gut-punched.

Maggie pushed past him into the room and screamed.

The window was wide open.

The crib was empty.

* * *

Maggie stood staring at it for a long time, as if the sight of an empty crib was a surreal impossibility. David ran to the window and looked out, first one way, then another. Then he was out of the room past her. She heard his feet thundering down the stairs, then heard the front door slam and heard his feet running through first grass, then sand, then gravel, as he made his way to the road.

He was on the phone downstairs when she found him.

“Yes,” he said. “This is life or death. I don’t care what it costs.”

A pause as he listened.

“Okay. We’ll be up.”

He hung up, eyes locked on some point in the middle distance.

“David?” she said.

“They’re sending someone.”

“Who?”

“The company.”

“What do you mean someone? Did you call the cops?”

He shook his head.

“This is my daughter. They took my daughter. We’re not using public servants.”

“What are you talking about? Who took her? She’s missing. They need to — we need to have someone, a lot of someones, out there looking for her right now.”

He stood and started turning on lights, going room to room, making the house look awake. She followed.

“David?”

But he was lost in thought, some kind of masculine scheme playing out in his head. She turned and grabbed the car keys off the hook.

“Well, I can’t just sit here.”

He caught up to her at the door, grabbed her wrist.

“It’s not—” he said, “she didn’t wander off. She’s two. Someone climbed up to her window and took her. Why? For money.”

“No.”

“But first,” he said, “first they took Frankie.”

She leaned against the wall, her head spinning.

“What are you—”

He put his hands on her, not in a rough way, but firmly, to let her know she was still connected to the earth, to him.

“Frankie knows us. She knows our routines, our finances — or at least a general sense of our finances — she knows which room Rachel sleeps in. Everything. They took Frankie so she could give them Rachel.”

Maggie went over and sat down on the sofa, purse still on her arm.

“Unless she’s working with them,” said David.

Maggie shook her head, shock calming her, making her limbs feel like seaweed floating on the waves.

“She’s not. She’s twenty-two. She goes to night school.”

“Maybe she needs money.”

“David,” said Maggie, looking at him. “She’s not helping them. Not on purpose.”

They thought about this, what it might take to compel a conscientious young woman to give up a sleeping toddler placed in her charge.

Forty-five minutes later, they heard car tires on the driveway. David went outside to meet them. He came back in with six men. They were clearly armed and had what could only be described as a military demeanor. One of the men wore a suit. He was olive-skinned, graying at the temples.

“Mrs. Bateman,” he said. “I’m Mick Daniels. These men are here for your protection and to help me ascertain the facts.”

“I had a dream,” she found herself telling him.

“Honey,” said David.

“About the Montauk Monster. That it was sliding up the side of our house.”

Mick nodded. If he found this odd at all, he didn’t say so.

“You were sleeping,” he told her, “but some part of you heard something. It’s genetic training. An animal memory of spending a few hundred thousand years as prey.”

He had them show him their bedroom and then Rachel’s room, had them retrace their steps. Meanwhile, two of his men examined the perimeter. Another two set up a command center in the living room, bringing in laptops, telephones, and printers.

They met up again with the full group ten minutes later.

“A single set of footprints,” they were told by a black man working a piece of bubble gum, “and two deeper marks directly under the window. We think that’s from the ladder. Tracks lead to a smaller structure on the property, then disappear. We found a ladder inside. Extendable. Tall enough to reach the second floor, I think.”

“So he didn’t bring his own ladder,” said Mick, “he used one that was already here. Which means he knew it was here.”

“We had a rain gutter fall last weekend,” said David. “The landlord came and put it up, used a ladder. Not sure where he got it, but he drove up in a sedan, so he didn’t bring it with him.”

“We’ll look at the landlord,” said Mick.

“No visible tire marks on the road,” said a second man, holding a rifle. “Nothing fresh, at least. No sense of which direction he or they may have taken.”

“I’m sorry,” said Maggie, “but who are you people? Somebody took my baby. We need to call the police.”

“Mrs. Bateman,” said Mick.

“Stop calling me that,” she said back.

“I’m sorry, what would you like me to call you?”

“No. Just — will somebody please tell me what’s happening?”

“Ma’am,” Mick said, “I am a paid security consultant for the biggest private security firm in the world. Your husband’s employer retained my services at no cost to you. I served eight years with the Navy SEALs, and eight more with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I’ve worked three hundred kidnapping cases with a very high rate of success. There is a formula at work here. As soon as we figure it out, I promise you we will call the FBI, but not as helpless bystanders. My job is to control the situation from now until we get your daughter back.”

“And can you do that?” Maggie said, as if from another dimension. “Get her back?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Mick. “I can.”

Chapter 26. Blanco

It’s the white walls that wake him. Not just in the bedroom; the whole apartment is embossed in pure ivory — walls, floors, furniture. Scott lies there, eyes open, heart beating fast. To sleep in white limbo, like a new soul suspended in ether waiting for a door to open, for the bureaucratic check box of body assignment, praying breathlessly for the invention of color, can drive a man mad apparently. Scott tosses and turns under white sheets on white pillows, his bed frame painted the color of eggs. At two fifteen a.m. he throws off the covers and puts his feet on the floor. Traffic sounds creep through the double-pane windows. He is sweating from the exertion of forcing himself to stay in bed, and he can feel his heart beating through the walls of his rib cage.

He goes to the kitchen, and considers making coffee, but it feels wrong somehow. Night is night and morning is morning and to confuse the two can lead to lingering displacement. A man out of time, phase-shifted, drinking bourbon for breakfast. There is an itch behind Scott’s eyes. He goes into the living room, finds a credenza, opens all the drawers. In the bathroom he finds six tubes of lipstick. In the kitchen he finds a black Sharpie and two Hi-Liters (pink and yellow). There are beets in the fridge, frazzled and fat, and he takes them out and puts a pot of water on the stove to boil.

They are talking about him on the television. He doesn’t need to turn it on to know that. He is part of the cycle now, the endless worrying. Whitewashed floorboards creak underfoot as he pads into the living room (white). The fireplace is still charred from recent use, and Scott crouches on the cool brick lip and searches the ashes. He finds a lump of charcoal by feel, pulling it forth like a diamond from a mine. There is a floor-length mirror on the far wall, and as he straightens he catches sight of himself. By coincidence his boxers are white and he wears a white T-shirt — as if he too is slowly being consumed by some endless nothing. Seeing himself in the mirror in this all-white world — a pale, white man draped in white cloth — he considers the possibility that he is a ghost. What is more likely, he wonders, that I swam for miles with a dislocated shoulder and a toddler on my back, or that I drowned in the churning salt, like my sister all those years back, her panicked eyes and mouth drawn under the greedy black water of Lake Michigan?

Charcoal in hand, he goes around the apartment turning on lights. There is an instinct to it, a feeling not exactly rational. Outside he can hear the grinding brakes of the day’s first trash truck, its geared jaws pulverizing the things we no longer need. The apartment now fully illuminated, he turns a slow circle to take it all in, white walls, white furniture, white floors, and this single turn becomes a kind of spin, as if once started it cannot be stopped. A white cocoon punctuated by black mirrors, window covers raised.

Everything capable of producing color has been piled on the low white coffee table. Scott stands with ashen charcoal in hand. He switches the lump from left to right, his eyes drawn to the feral black stain there on his left palm. Then, with gusto, he claps his dirty palm to his chest and draws it down across his belly, smearing black ash onto the cotton.

Alive, he thinks.

Then he starts on the walls.

* * *

An hour later he hears a knock on the door, and then the sound of the key in the lock. Layla enters, still dressed for evening in a short gown and high heels. She finds Scott in the living room, throwing beets at the wall. His T-shirt and shorts are ruined in the common parlance, or much improved in the eyes of this particular painter — stained black and red. The air smells vaguely of charcoal and root vegetables. Without acknowledging her arrival, Scott pads over to the wall and crouches, lifting the smashed tuber. Behind him, he hears footsteps in the hall, hears the sound of a breath drawn in. A startled rush.

He hears it and doesn’t hear it, because, at the same time, there is nothing but the sound of his own thoughts. Visions and memory, and something more abstract. Urgent — not in the sense of earth shattering, but as it feels to urinate finally after a long drive home, stuck in stop-and-go traffic, the long run to the front door, fumbling for keys, fly unbuttoned shakily on the hurried move. And then the artless stream. A biological necessity fulfilled. A light, once off, now turned on.

The painting is revealing itself to him with every stroke.

Behind him, Layla watches, lips parted, taken by a feeling she doesn’t really understand. She is an intruder on an act of creation, an unexpected voyeur. This apartment, which she owns and decorated herself, has become something else. Something unexpected and wild. She reaches down and unstraps her high heels, carrying them to the speckled white sofa.

“I was at a thing uptown,” she says. “One of those endless who cares—and I saw your light on from the street. All the lights.”

She sits, one leg folded under the other. Scott runs his hand through his hair, his scalp now the color of cooked lobster. Then he goes to the coffee table, chooses a lipstick.

“A fifty-year-old man said he wanted to smell my panties,” she says. “Or wait, that’s not it — he wanted me to take off my panties and slip them into his pocket and then later, when his wife was sleeping, he said he would hold them to his nose and jerk off into the sink.”

She unfolds and walks to the liquor cabinet to pour herself a drink. Seemingly oblivious, Scott tests the lipstick color on the wall, then recaps it, chooses a different shade.

“Imagine his wide eyes when I told him I wasn’t wearing any,” Layla says, watching him select a color called Summer Blush. She sips her drink. “Do you ever wonder what things were like before?”

“Before what?” says Scott, not turning.

She lies back on the sofa.

“I worry sometimes,” she says, “that people only talk to me because I’m rich or they want to fuck me.”

Scott is a laser beam, focused on a spot.

“Sometimes,” he says, “they’re probably just wondering — do you want to order an appetizer or potentially a cocktail.”

“I’m not talking about if it’s their job. I’m saying in a room full of people. I’m saying socially or at a business meeting. I’m talking about somebody looking at me and thinking, There’s a human being with something meaningful to add to the great debate.”

Scott caps the lipstick and steps back to inspect his work.

“When I was seven,” he says, “I ran away from home. I mean, not from home, but from the house. I climbed a tree in the backyard. This’ll show them, I thought, for who remembers what reason. My mom — from the kitchen window — saw me up there, a boy in the bough of a tree with his knapsack and a pillow, glaring, but she just went about making dinner. Later, I watched them eating at the kitchen table — Mom, Dad, my sister. Pass the biscuits. After the dishes were done, they sat on the sofa watching TV. Real People, possibly Full House. I started getting cold.”

He smudges charcoal, perfecting an effect.

“Have you ever tried sleeping in a tree?” he asks. “You have to be a panther. One by one the house lights go out. I’d forgotten to bring food, is the thing, or a sweater. So after a while I climb down and go inside. The back door is open. My mother has left a plate of food on the table for me with a note. Ice cream in the freezer! I sit and eat in the dark, then go upstairs to bed.”

“What are you saying?”

“Nothing. It’s just something I did.”

He smudges charcoal lines on the drywall, adding shadows.

“Or maybe,” he says, “what I mean is, people can say all kinds of things without ever opening their mouths.”

She stretches her arms and legs away from her body, turning her hip to the ceiling.

“They’re saying on the news that the boy stopped talking,” she says. “That he hasn’t spoken a word since the accident. I don’t know how they know, but that’s what they’re saying.”

Scott scratches his face, leaving an inky smudge on his temple.

“When I was drinking,” he says, “I was what they call a motormouth. Just one thing after another, mostly the things I thought people wanted to hear, or — that’s not true — things I thought were provocative. The truth.”

“What was your drink?”

“Whiskey.”

“So male.”

He uncaps the yellow Hi-Liter, rubs the wet felt absently across his left thumb.

“The day I sobered up, I stopped talking,” he says. “What was there to say? You need hope to form a thought. It takes — I don’t know—optimism to speak, to engage in conversation. Because, really, what’s the point of all this communicating? What difference does it really make what we say to each other? Or what we do, for that matter?”

“There’s a name for that,” she says. “It’s called depression.”

He puts the Hi-Liter down, turns slowly, taking in the work. Shape and color, open to interpretation. He feels exhausted all of a sudden, now that the room has depth, dimension. As his eyes reach Layla, he sees she has removed her dress and is lying naked on the sofa.

“You weren’t kidding about the underwear,” he says.

She smiles.

“All night I was so happy,” she says, “knowing I had a secret. Everybody talking about what happened, the mystery — a plane crashed. Was it terrorism? Some kind of kill the rich beginning-of-the-end scenario. Or some North Korean mosquito swat to keep Kipling from narcing. You should have been there. But then things turn, become more — personal. All these moneyed elitists talking about the boy, will he ever talk again.”

She studies him.

“Talking about you.”

Scott goes to the kitchen sink, washes his hands, watching ash and lipstick run down the drain. When he comes back the sofa is empty.

“In here,” she calls from the bedroom.

Scott thinks about that — what a naked woman in his bed will lead to — then he turns and goes into the study. The walls here are still white. It offends his sense of accomplishment, so he presses his stained torso to the drywall, leaving a body shape like Wile E. Coyote. He goes over to the desk and picks up the phone.

“Did I wake you?” he asks when she answers.

“No,” says Eleanor. “We’re up. He had a nightmare.”

Scott pictures the boy tossing and turning, the inside of his head a raging sea.

“What’s he doing right now?”

“Eating cereal. I tried to get him back to sleep, but he wouldn’t have it. So I found WordWorld on PBS.”

“Can I talk to him?”

He hears her put down the phone, hears the muffled sound of her voice—JJ! — across the room. Surrendering to gravity, Scott lies on the floor, the phone cord stretching along with him. After a second he hears the plastic of the receiver dragged across a hard surface, then breathing.

“Hey, pal,” says Scott. He waits. “It’s Scott. I was — looks like we both woke up, huh? You had a bad dream?”

From the other room, Scott hears Layla turn on the TV, mainlining the twenty-four-hour news cycle. Through the phone he hears the little boy breathing.

“I was thinking about maybe coming up there — to see you,” says Scott. “You could show me your room or — I don’t know. It’s been hot here. In the city. Your aunt says you’re near the river. I could maybe teach you how to skip stones, or—”

He thinks about what he has just said, Let’s you and I visit another large body of water. Part of him wonders if the boy screams every time the toilet flushes, if he shies from the sound of the filling tub.

“What helps me with fear,” he says, “being afraid, is preparation, you know? Knowing how to do things. Like if a bear attacks they say you’re supposed to play dead. Did you know that?”

He feels the weight of exhaustion pulling on him from deep below the floor.

“What about lions?” the boy says.

“Well,” says Scott, “I’m not sure there. But I tell you what. I’ll get the answer and tell you when I see you, okay?”

A long silence.

“Okay,” says the boy.

Scott hears the boy drop the phone, then the sound of its retrieval.

“Wow,” says Eleanor. “I don’t know what to—”

It hangs between them, this miracle worker exchange. Scott doesn’t want to talk about it. The fact that the boy will speak to him and no one else is simply a fact, as far as he’s concerned, without what psychologists call meaning.

“I told him I’d visit,” says Scott. “Is that okay?”

“Of course. He’d — we’d like that.”

Scott thinks about the inflection of her voice.

“What about your husband?” he asks.

“There are very few things he likes.”

“You?”

A pause.

“Sometimes.”

They think about that for a while. From the bedroom, Scott hears a sigh, but he can’t tell if it’s a human noise or a sound effect off the screen.

“Okay,” says Scott. “Sun’ll be up soon. Try to get a nap today.”

“Thanks,” she says. “Have a nice day.”

A nice day. The simplicity of it makes him smile.

“You too,” he says.

After they hang up, Scott lies there for a beat, flirting with sleep, then climbs to his feet. He follows the sound of the television, peeling off his T-shirt and dropping it on the floor, then takes off his boxers and walks to the bedroom, turning off lights as he goes. Layla is half under the covers, posing hip-up — she knows what she looks like, the power of it — her eyes arranged coyly on the screen. Chilly now, Scott climbs into bed. Layla turns off the TV. Outside, the sun is just starting to rise. He lays his head on the pillow, feeling first her hands and then her body move toward him. Waves climbing a white sand beach. She arranges herself across his hips and torso. Her lips find his neck. Scott feels the warmth of the comforter pulling him down. The white box has been vanquished. Limbo is now a place. Her hand touches his chest. Her leg floats up along his shin and settles across his thighs. Her body is hot, the arc of her breasts flush against his arm. She nuzzles and whispers into the groove of his neck, taking her time.

“You like talking to me,” she says, “right?”

But he is already asleep.

Chapter 27. Painting #4

At first it looks like a blank canvas. A long white rectangle covered in gesso. But stepping closer you can see there’s a topography to the white, shadows and valleys. White paint has been built up in layers, and there are hints of colors underneath, the blush of something hidden. And you think, maybe the canvas isn’t blank after all. Maybe the image has been covered, erased by white. The truth is, the naked eye alone will never be able to uncover the story. But if you take your hand and run it over the valleys and ridges of gesso, if you close your eyes and allow the topographic truth to seep through, then maybe the contours of a scene begin to leak through.

Flames. The outline of a building.

Your imagination does the rest.

Chapter 28. Public / Private

A car horn wakes him, long and insistent. Layla is gone. The horn comes again. Scott gets to his feet, walks naked to the window. There is a news crew outside, satellite van parked on the curb, dish deployed.

They have found him.

He steps back from the curtain, finds the remote, turns on the television. The image of a house appears, a white three-story with blue windows and black stars on a tree-lined street in New York City. It is the house he’s standing in. A news scroll slides along under the house, displaying words and numbers — the NASDAQ down 13 points, Dow Jones up 116. On the left-hand side of the screen, Bill Cunningham occupies his own box, leaning into the lens.

“—he’s shacking up, apparently, with the famous radical heiress, whose father gave over four hundred million dollars to lefty causes last year. You remember, dear viewers, the man who tried to buy the 2012 election. Well, this is his little girl. Although — not so little anymore — look at these pictures of her from a film festival in France earlier this year.”

Onscreen, the house slides to a smaller box, replaced in the main window by still images of Layla in a series of revealing ball gowns, clipped from style sheets and scandal rags. There is a bikini shot long-lensed from an actor’s yacht.

Scott wonders if Layla is in the house, watching this.

As if hearing his thoughts, the apartment door opens. Layla comes in. She is dressed for a day of meetings, it appears.

“I didn’t tell anyone,” she says. “I swear.”

Scott shrugs. He never assumed she did. In his mind they are both an endangered species, discovered mid-molt by a curious child with poor impulse control.

Onscreen, he watches fifteen curtained windows, a narrow front door painted blue, two garage doors, also blue. The only thing shading his safe house from view is a narrow sapling, just a stick really with a halfhearted spray of green leaves. Scott studies the house he’s in on TV, concerned but also strangely fascinated, like a man watching himself being eaten alive. It seems he cannot avoid becoming a public figure now. That he must participate in this commercial dance.

How strange, he thinks.

Layla stands beside him. She is thinking about saying more, but doesn’t. After a moment she turns and wanders out of the apartment again. Scott hears the apartment door close, then the sound of her heels on the staircase. He stands staring at the house on television.

Bill Cunningham, looking energized, says:

“—movement in an upstairs window just moments ago. Sources tell us that Ms. Mueller lives in the house alone, which — how many bedrooms are there, dear viewers? Looks like at least six to me. And I can’t help but make some connections here — the head of a conservative news network dies in mysterious circumstances, and then the lone survivor of the plane crash shacks up with the daughter of a left-wing activist. Well, some people might call it a coincidence, but I do not.”

Onscreen one of the garage doors starts to open. Scott leans forward, watching more than just television now. He half expects to see himself pull out, but instead a black Mercedes emerges, Layla behind the wheel wearing oversize sunglasses. The news cameras move in, looking to block her way, but she pulls out quickly — more than willing to run them over — and makes a left turn, roaring off up Bank Street toward Greenwich before they can pen her in.

In her wake, the garage door closes.

“—the homeowner, definitely,” says Cunningham. “But I’m wondering, potentially, was this Burroughs fellow crouched down in the rear seat well, like some jailbreaker from a Peckinpah film.”

Scott turns off the TV. He is alone in the house now, standing naked in a white room, sun casting shadows on the floor. If he rations what he has, eats one meal a day, he can stay in this apartment for six days. Instead, he takes a shower, dresses for the day. Magnus, he thinks. If anyone talked, it was him. But when he calls Magnus, the Irishman claims ignorance.

“Slow up,” says Magnus. “What house is on television?”

“I need you to rent me a car,” Scott tells him after talking in circles around it. Magnus is uptown in what used to be Spanish Harlem, half in the bag, though it’s only ten in the morning.

“You put in a good word, yeah?” says Magnus. “With Layla? Whispered a little something in that beautiful ear. Magnus is the best painter. Something along those—”

“Last night. I went on at length about your use of color and light.”

“Right on, boyo. Right fecking on.”

“She was hoping to come by this weekend, maybe see the new work.”

“I’ve gone full chubby,” says Magnus, “just in the last few seconds. The head is purple and engorged, like a snakebite.”

Scott crosses to the window. The curtains are sheer, but not see-through. Scott tries to look down, aware that people are out there looking back at him. He catches a glimpse of a second news van pulling into the curb.

“Doesn’t have to be a big car,” he says. “I just need it for a couple of days to drive up to Croton.”

“Want me to come?” says Magnus.

“No. I need you here,” Scott replies. “Holding down the fort. Layla likes to stay up all night, if you get my meaning.”

“Consider it held, my friend. I’ve got enough Viagra to last until Halloween.”

After they hang up, Scott grabs his jacket, walks into the living room, then stops short. In all the chaos he has forgotten the hours he spent last night eradicating the white. He stands now in a cube of charcoal and lipstick, beet stains dried in ruby streaks. The Martha’s Vineyard farmers market surrounds him — a study for a painting in three dimensions — so that the room’s furniture appears to be set in the middle of the open square. There is the fishmonger on the far wall, open coolers of ice below a long white card table; rows of vegetables, triple trays of berries. And faces, reconstructed from memory, sketched quickly with crumbling coal.

And there, seated on a white canvas chair, is Maggie, her head and shoulders sketched on the wall, her body outlined on the fabric of the chair. She is smiling, eyes shadowed by a big summer hat. Her two children flank her on either side of the chair, the girl, standing to her shoulder, on the right. The boy, half obscured behind a side table, on the left — just his tiny arm visible, attached to a slice of shoulder, a striped shirt, stripes the color of beets, stopping in the middle of his biceps, the rest of him hidden by wood.

Scott stands frozen in the middle of this scene, out of time, surrounded by ghosts. Then he goes downstairs to face the crowd.

Chapter 29. Jack

I never liked to exercise,” said Jack LaLanne. “But I like results.”

This was clear from his triceps definition alone, not to mention the Clydesdale heft of his beer-barrel thighs. A man of average height, bursting at the seams of his short-sleeved jumpsuit. In his house he kept an exercise museum, packed with obscure tech, most of it self-made. Jack invented the leg extension machine in 1936, you see. His approach was to work a muscle until it failed, believing, as he did, in the power of transformation through deep-tissue annihilation.

In the beginning, he wore a T-shirt and your standard pair of pants to train. He liked the feeling he got from stressing the weave. Then he had the idea to display himself in fitted jumpsuits — a uniform of self-improvement — so he went to the Oakland Pants Factory. He gave them sketches, an array of color choices. Blues and grays mostly. An African American woman took his measurements with a cloth tape, rolling around him on a squeaky metal chair. In those days wool was the only fabric that would stretch, and so they made the jumpsuits out of that, milled as thin as the material would allow. Jack liked them shiny, he told her, peacocking, and sleeveless to show his rolling arms, and tapered at the waist.

Jack wore them so tight you could see what he ate for breakfast.

A local health store paid Jack to create a local access show for KGO-TV. He taught people about the power of diet, designing workouts for every muscle, from toe to tongue. Six years later, the show went national. People ate breakfast to images of Jack bouncing on his tiptoes. They ran in front of their television, aping what they saw, bending at the waist and rotating their arms in bird-like windmills. As things picked up steam, certain words and phrases entered the American lexicon. Jumping jack, squat thrust, leg lift.

His jumpsuits had a tone-on-tone belt that cinched at the waist.

In his prime, Jack was a square-jawed hourglass of a man, his ink-black shag cut into a classic Italian wave on his head. Frankie Valli, for example. To most people in the early years he existed only in black and white, an ethnic fireplug pointing at anatomy charts, explaining what went on inside the human body. See, he seemed to say, we’re not just animals. We’re architecture. Bones and sinew and ligament as a foundation for a rolling musculature. Jack showed us that everything about the human anatomy was connected and could be used in glorious tandem.

To smile was to use an entire system of muscles, powered by joy.

One day he showed Americans how to get their faces “ath-u-letic looking,” opening and closing his mouth comically wide, to the take-me-out-to-the-ball-game lilt of a sports organ.

Then, in the 1970s, Jack went full color, bounding onto a wood-paneled set in shiny blues and purples. He became a kind of talk-show host, interviewing bodybuilders about diet and lifestyle. It was the era of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Vietnam had been lost, American men had walked on the moon, and Nixon seemed poised to resign in disgrace. You tuned in because you liked his boundless energy. You tuned in because you were tired of looking down and seeing your own stomach. You tuned in to get your heart rate moving and turn your life around.

“Now, direct from Hollywood,” boomed the announcer, “here’s your personal health and fitness instructor, Jack LaLanne.”

For thirty minutes what you got was can do gumption. You got a corporate-sponsored attitude adjustment. You got mountains to climb, inspiration. You got skills.

“Isn’t it better to be happy with a problem,” he said, “than to be miserable with it?”

Don’t wallow, Jack told a nation stumbling under recession. When life gets hard, you need to get harder.

This was during Jack’s inspirational phase, when he realized that what people needed was not just a muscular regimen, but a better way of looking at the world. The network would throw back from commercials and there he’d be, the jumping jack man, sitting backward on a metal chair, laying down the science.

“You know,” he’d say, “there are so many slaves in this country. Are you a slave? You’re probably saying, Jack, how can you be a slave in this wonderful free country of America? I don’t mean a slave in the idea that you’re thinking of it. I’m talking about you’re a slave when you can’t do the things you want when you want to do them. Because you are a slave, just like the slaves of old who were captured and put in chains. They were shackled, you know, and not allowed to go anyplace.”

Jack looked directly into the lens.

“You’re a slave just about as much as that.”

And at this point he leaned forward and pointed right at the camera, enunciating each syllable.

“You’re a slave to your own body.”

The mind, said Jack, remains active until the day you die, but it is a slave to the body — bodies that have become so lazy all they want to do is sit. The dawn of the couch potato. And you’ve allowed it to be that way.

“Instead of you ruling your body,” he said, “your body is ruling you.”

It was the dawn of the television age, and already the lethargy had set in, that flicker-glow hypnotism. The idiot box. And here was Jack speaking truth to power, trying to break you from the smothering shackles of the modern world.

This is not complicated shit, he told you with his eyes, the movement of his body seeming to answer every question he asked. No French philosopher living or dead could convince Jack LaLanne that the problems of man were existential. It was a matter of will, of perseverance, of mind over matter. Where Sartre saw ennui, Jack saw energy. Where Camus saw pointlessness and death, Jack saw the board-breaking power of repetition.

Jack rose to power in the era of Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong, the age of John Wayne. America was the go-getter nation, as far as he was concerned. There was no challenge too great, no obstacle too big.

Jack told us that America was the nation of the future, that we were all on the verge of traveling to a science-fiction nirvana in gleaming rocket ships.

Except, as far as Jack was concerned, we should be running there.

Chapter 30. Imago

He is assaulted by artificial light, framed by cameras with halogen spots. Scott squints reflexively, ensuring that the first image the world sees of him is of a man wincing slightly, left eye bowed in squint. Bodies surge forward as he steps from the front door, men with shoulder-mounted cameras and women with balled microphones, trailing cords across the gum-stained sidewalk.

“Scott,” they say. “Scott, Scott.”

He settles in on the threshold, door half open, in case he needs an easy escape.

“Hello,” he says.

He is a man starting a conversation with a crowd. Questions are hurled toward him, everybody speaking at once. Scott thinks of what this street once was, a forested stream winding toward a muddy river. He holds up his hand.

“What’s the goal here?” he asks.

“Just a few questions,” says one of the journalists.

“I was here first,” says another, a blond woman holding a microphone with the letters ALC embossed on a rectangular box. Her name, she says, is Vanessa Lane, and she has Bill Cunningham speaking into her ear from mission control.

“Scott,” she says, pushing to the front, “what are you doing here?”

“Here on this street?” he asks.

“With Ms. Mueller. Is she a friend of yours, or more maybe?”

Scott thinks about this. Is she a friend or more maybe. He’s not sure what the question means really.

“I’d have to think about that,” he says. “Whether we’re friends. We just met really. And then there’s her point of view — how she sees things — because maybe I get it wrong, the meaning, which — who hasn’t done that before, thinking something is black when it’s really white.”

Vanessa frowns.

“Tell us about the crash,” she says, “what was it like?”

“In what sense?”

“Out there alone, the raging ocean, and then you hear the boy crying.”

Scott thinks about this, his silence peppered by other questions, shouted in 5/6 time.

“You’re looking for a comparison. This is like that. An analogy to help you understand.”

“Scott,” yells a brunette with a microphone, “why did the plane crash? What happened?”

A young couple approaches from the east. Scott watches as they cross the street to avoid the spotlight. He is the accident now, rubbernecked by pedestrians.

“I suppose I’d have to say it was like nothing,” Scott tells Vanessa, not ignoring this new question, but simply focused on the last. “Certainly there’s no comparison for me. The size of the ocean. Its depth and power. A moonless sky. Which way is north? Survival, at its basest form, isn’t a story. Or, I don’t know, maybe it’s the only story.”

“Have you spoken to the boy?” someone shouts. “Was he scared?”

Scott thinks about that.

“Wow.” he says. “That’s — I don’t know that that’s a question for me to — the four-year-old brain — I mean, that’s an entirely different conversation. I know what the experience was for me — a speck in a vast and hostile darkness — but for him, at this moment in development, biologically, I mean. And with the nature of fear — at a certain level — the animal power of it. But again, at his age—”

He breaks off, thinking, aware that he is not giving them what they want, but concerned that their questions are too important to answer in the moment, to define in passing, simply to meet some kind of arbitrary deadline. What was the experience like? Why did it happen? What does it mean going forward? These are subjects for books. They are questions you meditate over for years — to find the right words, to identify all the critical factors, both subjective and objective.

“It’s an important question,” he says, “and one we may never really know the answer to.”

He turns to Vanessa.

“I mean, do you have kids?”

She is twenty-six at most.

“No.”

Scott turns to her cameraman, in his forties.

“You?”

“Uh, yeah. A little girl.”

Scott nods.

“And see, then there’s gender, and the time of night, how he was asleep when the plane went down, and did he think it was a dream maybe? At first. Like maybe he was still sleeping. So many factors.”

“People say you’re a hero,” shouts a third reporter.

“Is that a question?”

“Do you think you’re a hero?”

“You’d have to define the word for me,” says Scott. “Plus, what I think doesn’t really matter. Or — that’s not true — what I think about myself hasn’t always proven to be accurate, according to the world at large. Like, how in my twenties I thought I was an artist, but really I was just a kid in his twenties who thought he was an artist. Does that make sense?”

“Scott,” they shout.

“I’m sorry,” says Scott, “I can tell I’m not giving you what you want.”

“Scott,” says Vanessa. “This is from Bill Cunningham directly. Why were you on that plane?”

“You mean, in a cosmic sense, or—”

“How did you end up on the plane?” she says, correcting herself.

“Maggie invited me.”

“Maggie is Margaret Bateman, wife of David.”

“Yes.”

“And were you having an affair with her, with Mrs. Bateman?”

Scott frowns.

“Like a sexual affair?”

“Yes. Just as you are now having an affair with Ms. Mueller, whose father donates millions to liberal causes.”

“Is that a real question?”

“People have a right to the truth.”

“Just because I’ve been inside her house, you’re saying I’ve had — that she and I have had sex. This is your Einstein conclusion.”

“Isn’t it true that you wooed your way onto that plane?”

“In order to what — crash into the sea and have to swim ten miles to shore with a busted shoulder?”

He feels no anger, just bafflement at the line of questioning.

“Isn’t it true the FBI has questioned you multiple times?”

“Does two count as multiple?”

“Why are you in hiding?”

“You say in hiding like I’m John Dillinger. I’m a private citizen, living his life in private.”

“You didn’t go home after the crash. Why not?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Maybe you feel you’ve got something to hide.”

“Staying out of sight is not the same thing as hiding,” says Scott. “I miss my dog. That’s for sure.”

“Tell us about the paintings. Is it true the FBI has seized them?”

“No. Not that I — they’re just pictures. A man stands in a shed on an island. Who knows why he paints what he paints? He feels like his life is a disaster. Maybe that’s where it starts. With irony. But then — he sees something greater there, a key maybe to understanding. Is this—? Am I answering your—”

“Is it true you painted a plane crash?”

“Yes. That’s one of the — it feels like, to me, I mean, we’re all gonna die. That’s — biology. All animals — but we’re the only ones that — know. And yet we — somehow we manage to put this profound knowledge into some kind of a box. We know, but at the same time we don’t. And yet in these moments of mass death — a ferry sinks, a plane crashes — we are brought face-to-face with the truth. We too will die one day, and for reasons that have nothing to do with us, our hopes and dreams. One day you get on a bus to go to work and there’s a bomb. Or you go to Walmart looking for savings on Black Friday and get crushed by a mob. So — what started as irony — my life, the disaster — opened a door.”

He chews his lip.

“But the man in the shed is still just a man in a shed, you know?”

Vanessa touches the plastic in her ear.

“Bill would like to invite you to come to the studio for a one-on-one interview.”

“That’s nice of him,” says Scott. “I think. Except the look on your face doesn’t seem like you’re being nice. More like the police.”

“People are dead, Mr. Burroughs,” she says. “Do you really think now is the time for nice?”

“Now more than ever,” he tells her, then turns and walks away.

It takes a few blocks, but eventually they stop following him. He tries to walk normally, aware of himself both as a body in space and time, and as an image viewed by thousands (millions?). He takes Bleecker to Seventh Avenue and jumps in a cab. He is thinking about how they found him — a man in a locked apartment with no cell phone. Layla says she didn’t talk, and he has no reason to doubt her. A woman with a billion dollars doesn’t lie unless she wants to, and from the way she acted it seemed like Layla liked having Scott as her own little secret. And Magnus, well, Magnus lies about a lot of things, but this doesn’t feel like one of them. Unless they gave him money, but then why did Magnus end their phone call by hitting Scott up for a hundred bucks?

The universe is the universe, he thinks. I suppose it is enough to know there is a reason without having to know what it is. Some new kind of satellite maybe? Software that burrows into our bones while we sleep? Yesterday’s science fiction becomes today’s IPO.

He was an invisible man and now he’s not. What matters is that he runs toward something and not away. Sitting in the back of a cab, Scott pictures the boy eating cereal in front of the television late at night — unable to sleep — watching a dog drawn from the letters d-o-g talk to a cat drawn from the letters c-a-t. If only real life were that simple, where everyone we met and every place we went was fashioned from the pure essence of its identity. Where you looked at a man and saw the letters f-r-i-e-n-d, and looked at a woman and saw the word w-i-f-e.

The screen is on in the cab, playing clips from late-night television. Scott reaches forward and turns it off.

Chapter 31. Gil Baruch, June 5, 1967–August 26, 2015

There were legends about him, stories, but more than stories. Theories might be a better word. Gil Baruch, forty-eight, Israeli expat. (Though one of the theories was that he owned a home on the razor’s edge of the West Bank, an edge he himself had forged single-handedly from Palestinian land, driving up one day in an old jeep and setting up his tent, enduring the stares and taunts of the Palestinians. Rumors he had chopped the wood himself, poured the foundation, a rifle strap over his chest. That the first house had been torched by an angry mob, and Gil — rather than using his prodigious sniper skills or hand-to-hand prowess — had simply watched and waited, and when the crowd dispersed he urinated his disdain into the ashes and started again.)

That he was the son of Israeli royalty, no one disputed, his father, Lev Baruch, being the trusted right hand of Moshe Dayan, renowned military leader, mastermind of the Six Day War. They say Gil’s father was there in 1941 when a Vichy sniper put a bullet through the left lens of Dayan’s binoculars, that it was Gil’s father who cleaned out the glass and shrapnel and stayed with Dayan for hours until they could be evacuated.

They said Gil was born on the first day of the Six Day War, that his birth coincided with the opening shot down to the second. Here was a child forged in war from the loins of a military hero, born of cannon recoil. Not to mention, people said, that his mother was the favorite granddaughter of Golda Meir, the only woman tough enough to forge an entire nation inside the belly of an Arab state.

But then there were others who said Gil’s mother was just a milliner’s daughter from Kiev, a pretty girl with a wandering eye who never left Jerusalem. This is the nature of legend. There’s always someone lurking in the shadows, trying to poke holes. What’s undisputed is that his oldest brother, Eli, was killed in Lebanon in 1982, and that both his younger brothers, Jay and Ben, were killed in the Gaza Strip during the Second Intifada — Jay annihilated by a land mine and Ben in an ambush. And that Gil lost his only sister in childbirth. This was part of the legend, that Gil was a man surrounded by death, that everyone close to him died sooner rather than later, and yet Gil prevailed. He was rumored to have been shot six times before turning thirty, to have survived a knife attack in Belgium, and to have shielded himself from an explosion in Florence by hiding in the belly of a cast-iron tub. Snipers had targeted him and missed. Bounties on his head, too numerous to list, went perpetually uncollected.

Gil Baruch was an iron nail in a burning building, left gleaming in the ashes after everything else had been destroyed.

And yet all that death and sorrow hadn’t gone unnoticed. There was a biblical quality to the travails of Gil Baruch. Even in Jewish terms his suffering was exceptional. Men would clap him on the back in bars and buy him drinks, and then remove themselves to a safe distance. Women laid themselves at his feet, as they would on the tracks of a train, hoping that in the collision of bodies they would be annihilated. Crazy women with fiery tempers and bountiful G-spots. Depressive women, fighters, biters, poets. Gil ignored them all. At his core he knew that what he needed in his life was less drama, not more.

And yet the legends prevailed. During his tour in private security, he had bedded some of the most beautiful women in the world, models, princesses, movie stars. There was a theory, prominent in the 1990s, that he had taken Angelina Jolie’s virginity. He had the olive skin, hawk nose, and heavy brow of a great romantic. He was a man with scars, both physical and emotional, scars he carried without complaint or remark, a taciturn man with a glint of the ironic in his eyes (as if deep down he knew he was the butt of a cosmic joke), a man who carried weapons and slept with a gun under his pillow, his finger on the trigger.

They said a man had not yet been born that Gil Baruch could not best. He was an immortal who could only be killed by an act of God.

And yet what else can one call a plane crash, except the fist of God sent to punish the bold?

* * *

He had been with the family for four years, joining their detail when Rachel was five. It had been three years since the kidnapping, three years since David and Maggie felt the cold chill of discovery — an empty crib, an open window — in the middle black of night. Gil slept in what old-world architects would have called the maid’s quarters — a monk’s cell behind the laundry room in the city, and a larger room facing the driveway on the Vineyard estate. Depending on the current threat level — ascertained from email analysis, as well as conversations with foreign and domestic analysts, both private and in the government, based on the melange of extremist threats and the controversial nature of current ALC network programs — Gil’s support team grew and shrank, numbering at one point after the 2006 Iraq surge a dozen men with Tasers and automatic weapons. But, baseline, there were always three. A trinity of eyes watching, calculating, coiled, and ready to act.

Their travel was planned in the home office, always in consultation with the on-site team. Commercial flights were no longer optimal, nor was public transportation, although Gil indulged David’s desire to ride the subway to the office a few times a month, but never in any kind of pattern, a day chosen at random, and on those days they first sent a decoy in the town car, exiting the building dressed in David’s clothes, head down, hurried out by his team and stuffed into the backseat.

On the subway, Gil stood far enough from David to let him feel like a man of the people, but close enough to intervene if outside agents chose to strike. He stood with his thumb resting on the hilt of a curved folding blade, hidden on his belt. A blade so sharp it could cut paper and was rumored to be poisoned with the venom of the molten brown recluse. There was a small semiautomatic pistol tucked somewhere undetectable, one David had seen his body man pull once without seeming to move. A homeless man charged them screaming outside the Time Warner building, holding some kind of pipe, and David took a fast step back, looking to his aide. One minute Gil’s hand was empty. The next he held a snub-nosed Glock, which he produced from the ether like a magician revealing a dull and scarred coin.

Gil liked the rocking of the subway, the corner shriek of metal on metal. He had a deep-marrow certainty that his life would not end underground. It was an instinct he had learned to trust. Not that he feared death. There were so many people he had lost, so many familiar faces now waiting for him on the other side — if there was another side, and not just tar-black silence. But even that didn’t sound bad, an end to the Sisyphean immensity of life. At least the eternal question would be answered, once and for all.

The Torah, it should be noted, makes no clear reference to the afterlife whatsoever.

As he did every morning, Gil rose before dawn. It was the fourth Sunday in August, the family’s last on the Vineyard. They had been invited to Camp David for the Labor Day weekend, and Gil had spent much of yesterday coordinating security with the Secret Service. He spoke four languages, Hebrew, English, Arabic, and German, joking that it was important for a Jew to know the language of his enemies, so he could tell when they were plotting against him.

This joke, of course, was lost on most listeners. It was the look on his face when he told it, like a mourner at a funeral.

The first thing Gil did after he rose was change his status to active. He did it instantly, the moment his eyes opened. At most, he slept four hours a night, waiting an hour or two after the family went to sleep, and rising an hour or two before they woke. He liked that quiet time when the lights were out, sitting in the kitchen, listening to the mechanical hum of the appliances, the trigger click of the HVAC as it engaged to cool or heat the house. He was a master of immobility, having sat still — the legend went — for five days straight on a Gaza roof, deep inside enemy territory, his Barrett M82 balanced on metal legs, waiting for a high-value target to emerge from an apartment complex, the threat of discovery by Palestinian forces a constant.

Compared with that, sitting in the air-conditioned, luxury kitchen of a multimillionaire’s estate was like an ocean cruise. He sat with a thermos of green tea (no one ever saw him make it), eyes closed, listening. As opposed to the domestic craziness of the waking day, the night sounds of a house — even a big one like this — were consistent and predictable. The house was wired, of course, sensors on all the windows and doors, motion detectors, cameras. But that was technology, and technology could be tricked, disabled. Gil Baruch was old school, a sensualist. Some said he wore a garrote for a belt, but no one had ever seen the proof.

The truth was, when Gil was a child, he and his father fought all the time, about everything. Gil was the middle child, and by the time he was born the paterfamilias was already well on his way to drinking himself to death. Which he did, in 1991, when cirrhosis became heart failure and heart failure became silence.

And then, according to the Torah, Gil’s father ceased to be. Which was just fine with Gil, who sat now in the air-conditioned kitchen and listened to the barely audible hush of the surf as it pounded the beach outside.

The security logs from that Sunday are unremarkable. The husband (Condor) stayed home (read newspaper 8:10 am–9:45, napped in upstairs guest room 12:45–1:55, made and received several phone calls 2:15–3:45, prepared and cooked supper 4:30–5:40 pm). The wife (Falcon) went to the farmers market, accompanied by Rachel and a body man, Avraham. The boy played in his room and had a soccer lesson. He napped from eleven thirty to one. Anyone looking back at the log later, trying to piece together a mystery, would find nothing but times and dry entries. It was a lazy Sunday. What made it meaningful were not the facts or details, but the imperceptibles. Inner life. The smell of the beach grass and the feel of sand on a bathroom floor when changing out of a swimsuit.

The heat of American summer.

Line ten of the log read simply: 10:22 Condor ate second breakfast. It couldn’t capture the perfect toasting of the onion bagel or the saltiness of the fish in contrast with the thickness of cream cheese. It was time lost in a book — a journey of imagination, transportation — which to others simply looks like sitting or lying stomach-down on the rug in front of a summertime fire, legs bent at the knees, up ninety degrees, kicking absently, feet languid in the air.

To be a body man did not mean being in a state of constant alarm. In fact it was the opposite. One had to be open to changes in the way things were — receptive to subtle shifts, understanding that the frog was killed not by being dropped into boiling water, but by being boiled slowly, one degree at a time. The best body men understood this. They knew that the job required a kind of tense passivity, mind and body in tune with all five senses. If you thought about it, private security was just another form of Buddhism, tai chi. To live in the moment, fluidly, thinking of nothing more than where you are and what exists around you. Bodies in space and time moving along a prescribed arc. Shadow and light. Positive and negative space.

In living this way, a sense of anticipation can evolve, the voodoo pre-knowledge that the wards you are watching are going to do or say something expectable. By being one with the universe you become the universe, and in this way you know how the rain will fall, the way cut grass will blow in fixed starts in a summer wind. You know when Condor and Falcon are about to fight, when the girl, Rachel (Robin), is getting bored, and when the boy, JJ (Sparrow), has missed his nap and is going to melt down.

You know when the man in the crowd is going to take one step too close, when the autograph fan is, instead, looking to serve legal papers. You know when to slow down on a yellow light and when to take the next elevator.

These are not things you have feelings about. They are simply things that are.

Falcon was up first, in her robe, carrying Sparrow. The machine had already made coffee. It ran on a timer. Robin came down next. She went straight to the living room and put on cartoons. Condor was up last, an hour later, shuffling in with the newspaper, thumbs digging into the blue Sunday plastic bag. Gil lurked, staying out of the way, eyes on the periphery, hugging the shadows.

After breakfast he approached Condor.

“Mr. Bateman,” he said. “Okay if I brief you now?”

Condor looked up over his reading glasses.

“Should I be worried?”

“No, sir, just an overview for the week.”

Condor nodded, stood. He knew Gil didn’t like to talk shop in casual settings. They went into the parlor. It was lined with books that Condor had actually read. Old maps lined the walls, photos of Condor with notable global figures — Nelson Mandela, Vladimir Putin, John McCain, the actor Clint Eastwood. There was an autographed baseball in a glass case on the desk. Chris Chambliss’s tenth-inning blast from that game, because who in the tristate area didn’t remember the way the stands emptied onto the field, the way Chambliss had to push and twist through civilian lunatics to round the bases — did he even touch home plate?

“Sir,” said Gil, “would you liked me to get command central on the line to do a more formal briefing?”

“God no. Just run it down for me.”

Condor sat behind his desk, picked up an old football. He juggled it mindlessly, hand to hand, as Gil spoke.

“Sixteen email threats intercepted,” he began, “sent to mostly public addresses. Your private lines seem uncompromised since our last reshuffle. At the same time, corporate is tracking some specific threats against American media companies. They’re working with Homeland Security to stay up to the moment.”

Condor studied him as he spoke, spiraling the ball from left to right and back.

“You were in the Israeli army.”

“Yessir.”

“Infantry, or—?”

“That’s not something I can talk about. Let’s say I did my duty and let that be that.”

Condor flipped the ball, missed the catch. It bounce-rolled in a sloppy parabola, settling under a curtain.

“Any direct threats?” he asked. “David Bateman, we’re going to kill you. That type of thing.”

“No, sir. Nothing like that.”

Condor thought about it.

“But okay, so this guy? The one we don’t talk about who took my girl. When did he ever make a threat against a media conglomerate or send a bullshit email? This was a scumbag who thought he could get rich and didn’t mind murdering the maid.”

“Yessir.”

“And what are you doing to protect us from those guys? The ones who don’t make threats.”

If Gil felt dressed down he didn’t show it. To him it was a fair question.

“Both homes are secure. Cars are armored. Your protection detail is visible, high-profile. If they’re looking for you, they see us. We’re sending a message. There are easier targets.”

“But you can’t guarantee?”

“No, sir.”

Condor nodded. The conversation was over. Gil headed for the door.

“Oh, hey,” said Condor. “Mrs. Bateman invited the Kiplings to fly back with us later.”

“Is that Ben and Sarah?”

Condor nodded.

“I’ll let command know,” said Gil.

The key to being a good body man, he had decided over the years, was to be a mirror: not invisible — the client wanted to know you were there — but reflective. Mirrors weren’t intimate objects. They reflected change. Movement. A mirror was never static. It was the part of your environment that shifted with you, absorbing angle and light.

And then, when you stood flush in front of it, it showed you yourself.

* * *

He had read the file, of course. What kind of bodyguard would he be if he hadn’t? The truth was, he could quote certain sections from memory. He had also spoken to the surviving agents at length, looking for sensory details, for information on how the principals comported themselves — was Condor calm under pressure or explosive? Did Falcon succumb to panic and grief, or did she show a mother’s steel? The kidnapping of a child was the nightmare scenario in his line of work, worse than a death (though — to be realistic — a kidnapped child was, nine times out of ten, a dead child). But a kidnapped child removed the normal human safety mechanisms from a parent’s mind. Survival of the self was no longer a concern. Protection of wealth, of home, became secondary. Reason, in other words, went out the window. So mostly what you fought with in the kidnap-and-ransom scenario (other than the clock) were the principals themselves.

The facts at the time of Robin’s kidnapping were these: Twenty-four hours earlier the nanny, Francesca Butler (“Frankie”), had been taken, most likely while traveling on foot on her way home from the movies. She had been coerced at a second location to share information about the Batemans’ rental home and routines — most important, which room was the baby girl in? On the night of the abduction (between twelve thirty and one fifteen a.m.), a ladder had been removed from a shed on the property and propped against the south wall, extending to the lip of the guest room window. There were signs that the window lock had been jimmied from the outside (it was an old house with original windows and over the years they had swollen and shrunk until there was a healthy gap between the upper and lower frames).

Later, investigators would conclude that the kidnapping was the work of a single perpetrator (though there was some dispute). And so the official story was that one man set the ladder, climbed up, retrieved the girl, and took her back down. The ladder was then re-stowed in the shed (what had he done with the child, placed her in a car?). And the child removed from the property. In the words of the principals, She disappeared. But of course, Gil knew that no one really disappeared. They were always someplace, bodies at rest or in motion in three-dimensional space.

And in this case, where this single kidnapper had taken Rachel Bateman (aka Robin) was across the street, to the stalled modern remodel, hidden away behind plastic. To a sweltering attic space, soundproofed with newspaper, where food came out of a plastic red cooler and water from a hose connected to a second-floor bathroom sink. The nanny, Frankie Butler, lay dead in the open foundation, covered with cardboard.

It was from this spot that the kidnapper — a thirty-six-year-old ex-con named Wayne R. Macy — watched the comings and goings across the street. From his vantage point in the future, Gil knew that Macy was not the criminal mastermind they first thought they were dealing with. When you have a principal like David Bateman — worth millions, as well as a high-profile political target — you must assume that the child’s kidnapper has targeted the principal for specific reasons, with full knowledge of his profile and resources. But the fact is, all Macy knew was that David and Maggie Bateman were rich and unprotected. He had done a stretch in Folsom Prison in the 1990s for armed robbery and had come home to Long Island with the idea that he might turn his life around. But straight life was punishing and unrewarding, and Wayne liked his booze, and so he burned through job after job, until finally one day — hauling trash bags out of the back of the Dairy Queen — he had decided, Who am I kidding? It’s time to take my fortune into my own hands.

So he set out to grab a rich man’s kid and make a few dollars. Details came out later that he had cased two other families first, but certain factors — the husbands were on the premises full-time, both houses had alarm systems — deterred him from acting, and ultimately steered him to settle on a new target — the Bateman family — the last house on a quiet street, unguarded, populated by two young women and a child.

The consensus was that he had killed Frankie that first night, after getting all the information out of her he could — there were signs of physical cruelty and also evidence of sexual assault, possibly posthumous.

The child was taken at twelve forty-five a.m. on July 18. She would be missing for three days.

* * *

The word came back as they were already in transit. Command relayed it to the lead car and the lead car transmitted it to Gil, who listened to the voice in his ear, speaking to him through fiber and void, without betraying anything.

“Sir,” he said in a certain tone of voice, as the car left their road. Condor looked over, saw Gil’s expression, nodded. Behind them, the kids were animated, like push-button toys. They always got this way before getting on the plane, excited, nervous.

“Kids,” he said with a look on his face. Maggie saw it.

“Rachel,” she said, “that’s enough.”

Rachel sulked, but stopped the game of poke and tickle. JJ was too young to get the message the first time. He poked Rachel and laughed, thinking they were still playing.

“Stop,” she whined.

Condor leaned over to Gil, who closed the gap, speaking quietly into Condor’s ear.

“There’s a problem with your guest,” he said.

“Who, Kipling?” said Condor.

“Yessir. Command did the routine check and a flag came back.”

Condor didn’t respond, but the question was implicit: What flag?

“Our friends in State are saying Mr. Kipling may be indicted tomorrow.”

The blood drained from Condor’s face.

“Jesus,” he said.

“The actual charges are sealed, but research think he may be laundering money for non-friendlies.”

Condor thought about that. Non-friendlies. Then it hit him. He was about to host an enemy of the state on his plane. A traitor. How would that look in the press, if the press found out? Condor pictured the bored paparazzi at Teterboro, waiting for all the celebrity returns. They would stand when the plane taxied in, then — when it was clear Brad and Angelina weren’t on board — they’d snap a few photos just in case and go back to their iPhones. Photos of David Bateman arm in arm with a traitor.

“What do we do?” he asked Gil.

“Up to you.”

Falcon was looking at them, clearly worried.

“Is there something—?” she said.

“No,” Condor told her quickly. “Just — it looks like Ben’s in some legal trouble.”

“Oh no.”

“Yeah, bad investments. So I was just — the question comes up for me — do we want to — if we’re seen together — after the news comes out — are we going — it could be a headache is all I mean.”

“What’s Daddy saying?” Rachel asked.

Falcon was frowning.

“Nothing. Just a friend of ours is having some trouble. So we’re going to—”

— this directed at Condor—

“—we’re going to stand by him, because that’s what friends do. Sarah especially is just such a lovely person.”

Condor nodded, wishing now that he’d dodged the question and handled things privately.

“Of course,” he said. “You’re right.”

He looked forward, met Gil’s eye. The Israeli had a look on his face, which implied he needed direct confirmation that they were going with the status quo. Against his better judgment, Condor nodded.

Gil turned and looked out the window as they talked. It wasn’t his job to be part of things. To have opinions. On the road, he could see the marine layer hanging low, lampposts vanishing into the mist. Only a hoary glow at height indicated they were whole.

Twenty minutes later, parked on the tarmac, Gil waited for the lead car to disgorge the advance team before he gave the okay to exit. The two lead men were scanning the airfield for irregularities. Gil did the same, trusting them and not trusting them at the same time. As he reviewed the area (entrance points, blind spots), the family climbed from the car. Sparrow was asleep by this point, draped across Condor’s shoulder. Gil made no offer to help carry bags or children. His job was to protect them, not to valet.

From the corner of his eye, Gil saw Avraham sweep the plane, climbing the deployable stairs. He was inside for six minutes, walking fore to aft, checking the washroom and the cockpit. When he emerged, he gave the high sign and descended.

Gil nodded.

“Okay,” he said.

The family approached the gangway, boarding in random order. Knowing the plane was swept clear, Gil was the last to board, protecting against attack from the rear. He could feel the chill of the cabin before he was halfway up, a ghostly kiss on his exposed neck, cutting through the August musk. Did he feel something stir in his lizard brain in that moment, a low foreboding, a wizard’s sense of doom? Or is that wishful thinking?

Inside, Gil remained standing, placing himself by the open door. He was a big man — six foot two — but thin, and somehow found a place in the narrow entryway that kept him out of the aisle as passengers and crew settled in for the flight.

“The second party has arrived,” said a voice in his earpiece, and through the door Gil could see Ben and Sarah Kipling on the tarmac, showing ID to the advance men. Then Gil felt a presence off his right shoulder and turned. It was the flight attendant holding a tray.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “did you want some champagne before we take off, or — can I get you something?”

“No,” he said. “Tell me your name?”

“I’m Emma — Lightner.”

“Thank you, Emma. I’m providing security for the Batemans. May I speak to your captain?”

“Of course. He’s — I think he’s doing his walk-around. Should I ask him to speak to you when he comes back?”

“Please.”

“Okay,” she said. Clearly, Gil felt, something was making her nervous. But sometimes the presence of an armed man on a plane did that to people. “I mean, can I get you anything, or—”

He shook his head, turned away, because now the Kiplings were climbing the front stairs of the plane. They had been fixtures at Bateman events over the years, and Gil knew them on sight. He nodded as they entered, but moved his gaze quickly to deter conversation. He heard them greet the others on the plane.

“Darling,” said Sarah. “I love your dress.”

At that moment the captain, James Melody, appeared at the foot of the stairs.

“Did you see the fucking game?” Kipling said in a blustery voice. “How does he not catch that ball?”

“Don’t get me started,” said Condor.

“I mean, I could have caught that fucking ball and I’ve got French toast hands.”

Gil moved to the top of the stairs. The fog was thicker now, blowing in trails.

“Captain,” said Gil. “I’m Gil Baruch with Enslor Security.”

“Yes,” said Melody, “they told me there’d be a detail.”

He had a slight, unplaceable accent, Gil realized. British maybe or South African, but recycled through America.

“You haven’t worked with us before,” he said.

“No, but I’ve worked with a lot of security outfits. I know the routine.”

“Good. So you know if there’s a problem with the plane or any change in the flight plan I’ll need the copilot to tell me right away.”

“Absolutely,” said Melody. “And you heard we had a change in first officer?”

“Charles Busch is the new man, yes?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’ve flown with him before?”

“Once. He’s not Michelangelo, but he’s solid.”

Melody paused for a moment. Gil could sense he wanted to say more.

“There’s no such thing as an insignificant detail,” he told the pilot.

“No, just — I think there may be some history between Busch and our flight attendant.”

“Romantic?”

“Not sure. Just the way she acts around him.”

Gil thought about that.

“Okay,” he said. “Thank you.”

He turned and went back inside, glancing into the cockpit as he did. Inside, Busch was in the copilot’s seat, eating a plastic-wrapped sandwich. He looked up and met Gil’s eye and smiled. He was a young man, clean-cut but with a slight glaze to him — he’d shaved yesterday, not today, his hair was short, but unbrushed — handsome. Gil had to watch him for only a moment to know that he’d been an athlete at some point in his life, that he’d been popular with girls since childhood, and that he liked the way it made him feel. Then Gil was turning back to the main cabin. He saw the flight attendant, Emma, approaching with an empty tray.

He gestured to her with one finger. Come here.

“Hi,” she said.

“Is there an issue I should know about?”

She frowned.

“I’m not—”

“Between you and Busch, the copilot.”

She flushed.

“No. He’s not — that’s—”

She smiled.

“Sometimes they like you,” she said. “And you have to say no.”

“That’s all?”

She fixed her hair self-consciously, aware that she had drink orders to fill.

“We flew together before. He likes to flirt — with all the girls, not just — but it’s fine. I’m fine.”

A moment.

“And you’re here,” she said, “so—”

Gil thought about that. It was his job to assess — a darkened doorway, the sound of footsteps — he was, by necessity, a connoisseur of people. He had developed his own system for knowing the types — the brooder, the nervous talker, the irascible victim, the bully, the sprite — and within those types had developed subtypes and patterns that signaled possible shifts in anticipated behavior — the circumstances under which the nervous talker might become the brooder, and then the bully.

Emma smiled at him again. Gil thought about the copilot, the half-eaten sandwich, the captain’s words. Travel time was just under an hour, gate-to-gate. He thought about Kipling’s indictment, about the case-closed kidnapping of Robin. He thought about everything that could go wrong, no matter how far-fetched, running it all through the gray matter abacus that had made him a legend. He thought about Moshe Dayan’s eye and his father’s drinking, about his brothers’ deaths, each in turn, and the death of his sister. He thought about what it meant to live your life as an echo, a shadow, always standing behind a man and his light. He had scars he wouldn’t discuss. He slept with his finger on the trigger of a Glock. He knew that the world was an impossibility, that the state of Israel was an impossibility, that every day men woke and put on their boots and went off to do the impossible no matter what it might be. This was the hubris of mankind, to rally in the face of overwhelming odds, to thread the needle and climb the mountain and survive the storm.

He thought of all this in the time it took the flight attendant to pass, and then he got on the radio and told command that they were good to go.

Chapter 32. Countryside

Scott drives north, paralleling the Hudson past Washington Heights and Riverdale. Urban walls give way to trees and low-slung towns. Traffic stalls, then abates, and he takes the Henry Hudson Parkway past the low mall clot of central Yonkers, shifting to Route 9 heading up through Dobbs Ferry, where American revolutionaries once camped in force, probing the Manhattan border for British weakness. He rides with the radio off, listening to the slush of his tires on the rain-slick road. A late-summer thunderstorm has moved through in the last few hours, and he navigates the tail end of it, windshield wipers moving in time.

He is thinking about the wave. Its silent rumble. The loom of it. A towering hump of ocean brine exposed by moonlight, sneaking up on them from the rear, like a giant from a children’s story. Eerie and soundless it came, an enemy without soul or agency. Nature at its most punishing and austere. And how he grabbed the boy and dove.

His mind shifts to the image of cameras — leering mechanically, thrust forward on anonymous shoulders, judging with their unblinking convex eyes. Scott thinks of the lights in his face, the questions overlapping, becoming a wall. Were the cameras a tool for the advancement of man, he wonders, or was man a tool for the advancement of the cameras? We carry them, after all, valeting them from place to place, night and day, photographing everything we see. We believe we have invented our machine world to benefit ourselves, but how do we know we aren’t here to serve it? A camera must be aimed to be a camera. To service a microphone, a question must be asked. Twenty-four hours a day, frame after frame, we feed the hungry beast, locked in perpetual motion as we race to film it all.

Does television exist for us to watch, in other words, or do we exist to watch television?

Overhead, the wave crested, teetering, a five-story building on the verge of smooth collapse, and he dove, squeezing the boy to him, no time to take a breath, his body taking over, survival no longer trusted to the abstract functions of the mind. Legs kicking, he entered the blacks, feeling the spin-cycle tug of the wave pulling all things to it, and then the tilt and inevitable gravity of descent, grabbed by a monster’s hand and thrust deeper, and now it was all he could do to hold the boy to his body and survive.

Was Scott having an affair with Maggie? That’s what they asked. A married mother of two, a former preschool teacher. And to them she was what — a character on a reality show? A sad and lusty housewife from post-modern Chekhov?

He thinks of Layla’s living room, the late-night OCD of an insomniac transforming it into some kind of memory palace. And how this charcoal rendering will most likely be the last picture of Maggie ever created.

Would he have slept with her if she’d asked? Was he attracted to her, and perhaps her to him? Did he stand too close when she came to view his work, or did he bounce nervously on his toes, keeping his distance? She was the first person he’d shown the work to, the first civilian, and his fingertips were itchy. As she walked the barn he felt the urge for a drink, but it was a scar, not a scab, and he didn’t pick it.

This is his truth, the story he tells himself. Publicly, Scott is just a player in a drama not his own. He is “Scott Burroughs,” heroic scoundrel. It’s just the hint of an idea now, a theory. But he can see how it could blossom, becoming — what? A kind of painting. Fact turned to fiction step by step.

He thinks of Andy Warhol, who used to make up different stories for different journalists—I was born in Akron. I was born in Pittsburgh—so when he spoke to people he would know which interviews they’d read. Warhol, who understood the idea that the self was just a story we told. Reinvention used to be a tool of the artist. He thinks of Duchamp’s urinal, of Claes Oldenburg’s giant ashtray. To take reality and repurpose it, bend it to an idea, this was the kingdom of make-believe.

But journalism was something else, wasn’t it? It was meant to be objective reporting of facts, no matter how contradictory. You didn’t make the news fit the story. You simply reported the facts as they were. When had that stopped being true? Scott remembers the reporters of his youth, Cronkite, Mike Wallace, Woodward and Bernstein, men with rules, men of iron will. And how would they have covered these events?

A private plane crashes. A man and a boy survive.

Information versus entertainment.

It’s not that Scott doesn’t understand the value of “human interest.” What was his fascination with the King of Exercise, if not a fascination with the power of the human spirit? But he could count on one hand the things he knows about Jack’s love life, his romantic history. There was a wife, a decades-long marriage. What more did he need to know?

It’s fascinating to him, as a man who concerns himself with image, to think of how his own is being fabricated — not in the sense of being faked, but how it’s being manufactured, piece by piece. The Story of Scott. The Story of the Crash.

All he wants is to be left alone. Why should he be forced to clarify, to wade into the swamp of lies and try to correct these poisoned thoughts? Isn’t that what they want? For him to engage? To escalate the story? When Bill Cunningham invites him on the air, it is not to set the story straight so the story ends. It is to add a new chapter, a new twist that propels the narrative forward into another week of ratings cycles.

A trap, in other words. They are setting a trap. And if he is smart he will continue to ignore them, move forward, live his life.

As long as he doesn’t mind the fact that nobody on earth will ever again see him as he sees himself.

Chapter 33

The house is small and hidden by trees. There’s a port lean to it, as if the wide-plank slats on the left end of the building have given up over the years, slumping from exhaustion or boredom or both. Driving in, Scott thinks it has a kind of shadowy charm, with its blue trim and scalloped white window shutters, a postcard childhood you remember in your dreams. As he pulls in over rough paving stones and parks under an oak tree, Doug comes out of the house carrying a canvas tool bag. He throws it in the open back of an old Jeep Wrangler with some force and moves to the driver’s door without looking up.

Scott waves as he climbs out of the rental, but Doug doesn’t make eye contact, slapping the truck in gear and pulling out in a spray of wood chips. Then Eleanor comes to the front door, holding the boy. Scott finds he has butterflies in his stomach seeing them (her red-checked dress framed against the blue trim and scalloped white shutters, the boy matched in a plaid shirt and short pants). But unlike Eleanor, whose eyes are on Scott, the boy seems distracted, looking back into the house. Then Eleanor says something to him and he turns. Seeing Scott, his face breaks into a smile. Scott offers him a little wave (When did I become such a waver? he wonders). The boy offers a shy wave back. Then Eleanor puts him down and he half runs, half walks over to Scott, who bends a knee and thinks about scooping him up, but ends up just putting his hands on the boy’s shoulders and looking him in the eye, like a soccer coach.

“Hey, you,” he says.

The boy smiles.

“I brought you something,” says Scott.

He stands and goes to the trunk of the rental car. Inside is a plastic dump truck he found at the gas station. It’s bound to a cardboard box by unbreakable nylon ties, and they spend a few minutes trying to wrestle it free before Eleanor goes inside and fetches some scissors.

“What do we say?” she asks the boy, once the truck is free and the subject of vigorous digging.

“Thank you,” she offers after a moment, when it’s clear the boy isn’t going to speak.

“I didn’t want to show up empty-handed,” says Scott.

She nods.

“Sorry about Doug. We had — things are hard right now.”

Scott musses the boy’s hair.

“Let’s talk inside,” he says. “I passed a news van on the way in. My feeling is I’ve been on TV enough this week.”

She nods. Neither of them wants to be on display.

They catch up at the kitchen table while the boy watches Thomas and Friends and plays with his truck. It will be bedtime soon and the boy is fidgety, his body flopping around on the sofa, his eyes glued to the screen. Scott sits at the kitchen table and watches him through the doorway. The boy’s hair has been cut recently, but not completely — so the bangs are blunt, but the back is bushy. It seems like a junior version of Eleanor’s hair, as if he has adapted in order to fit into the family.

“I thought I could do it myself,” Eleanor explains, putting the kettle on the stove, “but he was so agitated after a few minutes I had to give up. So now every day I try to cut a little bit more, sneaking up on him when he’s playing with his trucks, or—”

As she says it she grabs the scissors from the drawer by the stove and pads in toward the boy, trying to stay out of his field of vision. But he sees her and waves her off, making a kind of primal growl.

“Just—” she says, trying to reason with an unreasonable animal. “It’s longer on the—”

The boy makes the sound again, eyes on the TV. Eleanor nods, comes back into the kitchen.

“I don’t know,” says Scott. “There’s something perfect about a cute kid with a bad haircut.”

“You’re just saying that to make me feel better,” she says, dumping the scissors back into the drawer.

She pours them both a cup of tea. Since they sat, the sun has dropped into view at the top edge of the window frame, and when Eleanor leans in to pour his tea, her head slips into the creamy light, creating an eclipse. He squints up at her.

“You look good,” he tells her.

“Really?” she says.

“You’re still standing. You made tea.”

She thinks about that.

“He needs me,” she says.

Scott watches the boy flip around, absently chewing on the fingers of his left hand.

Eleanor stares into the setting sun for a moment, stirs her tea.

“When my grandfather was born,” he says, “he weighed three pounds. This was in West Texas in the ’twenties. Before ICUs. So for three months he slept in a sock drawer.”

“That’s not true.”

“As far as I know,” he says. “People can survive much more than you think is my point. Even kids.”

“I mean, we talk about it — his parents. He knows they’re — passed — as much as he understands what that means. But I can tell from the way he looks to the door whenever Doug comes home that he’s still waiting.”

Scott thinks about that. To know a thing and not know it at the same time. In some ways, the boy is the lucky one. By the time he is old enough to truly understand what happened, the wound will be old, the pain of it faded with time.

“So you said Doug—” says Scott, “—some problems?”

Eleanor sighs, dips her tea bag absently in the cup.

“Look,” she says, “he’s weak. Doug. He’s just — and I didn’t — I thought it was something else at first — how insecurity, you know, defensiveness, can seem like confidence? But now I think his opinions are louder because he’s not really sure what he believes. Does that make sense?”

“He’s a young man. It’s not a new story. I had some of that myself. Dogma.”

She nods, a ray of hope returning to her eyes.

“But you grew out of it.”

“Grew? No. I burned it all down, drank myself into a stupor, pissed off everyone I knew.”

They think about that for a moment, how sometimes the only way to learn not to play with fire is to go up in flames.

“I’m not saying that’s what he’ll do,” says Scott, “but it’s not realistic to think he’ll just wake up one morning and say, You know what? I’m an asshole.”

She nods.

“And then there’s the money,” she says quietly.

He waits.

“I don’t know,” she says. “It’s — I get nauseous just thinking about it.”

“You’re talking about the will?”

She nods.

“It’s — a lot,” she says.

“What they left you?”

“Him. It’s — it’s his money. It’s not—”

“He’s four.”

“I know, but I just want to — couldn’t I just keep it all in an account until he’s old enough to—”

“That’s a version,” says Scott. “But what about food or housing? Who’s going to pay for school?”

She doesn’t know.

“I could—” she says, “I mean, maybe I make two meals. A fancy one for him or — I mean, he gets nice clothes.”

“And you get rags?”

She nods. Scott thinks about walking her through all the ways that her idea makes no sense, but he can tell she knows it. That she is working her way toward accepting the trade-off she’s been given for the death of her family.

“Doug sees it differently, I’m guessing.”

“He wants — can you believe? — he thinks—we should definitely keep the town house in the city, but I don’t know, we could probably sell London and just stay in a hotel whenever we visit. Like when did we turn into people who go to London? The man owns half a restaurant he’ll never open because the kitchen’s not done.”

“He could finish it now.”

She grits her teeth.

“No. It’s not for that. We didn’t earn it. It’s not — the money is for JJ.”

Scott watches the boy yawn and rub his eyes.

“I’m guessing Doug doesn’t agree.”

She worries her hands together until the knuckles are white.

“He said we both want the same thing, but then I said, If we both want the same thing, why are you yelling?”

“Are you — scared — at all?”

She looks at him.

“Did you know that people are saying you had an affair with my sister?”

“Yes,” he says. She narrows her eyes. “I know that. But I didn’t.”

He reads her eyes, her doubt, not knowing who she can trust anymore.

“Someday I’ll tell you what it means to be a recovered alcoholic. Or recovering. But mostly it’s about avoiding — pleasure — about staying focused on the work.”

“And this heiress in the city?”

He shakes his head.

“She gave me a place to hide, because she liked having a secret. I was the thing that money couldn’t buy. Except — I guess that’s not true.”

Scott is about to say something when JJ pads in. Eleanor straightens, wipes her eyes.

“Hey there, boo. Is it over?”

He nods.

“Should we go read some books and get ready for bed?”

The boy nods, then points at Scott.

“You want him to read?” asks Eleanor.

Another nod.

“Sounds good,” says Scott.

* * *

While the boy goes upstairs with Eleanor to get ready for bed, Scott calls the old fisherman he rents his house from. He wants to check in, see how the three-legged dog is doing.

“It’s not too bad, is it?” he asks. “The press?”

“No, sir,” says Eli. “They don’t bother me, plus — turns out they’re scared of the dog. But Mr. Burroughs, I gotta tell you. The men came. They had a warrant.”

“What men?”

“Police. They broke the lock on the barn and took it all.”

Scott has a chill in the base of his spine.

“The paintings?”

“Yes, sir, all of them.”

There’s a long pause as Scott thinks about that. The escalation. What it means. The work is out there now. His life’s accomplishment. What damage will come to it? What will they make him do to get it back? But there’s another feeling deep down, a giddy nerve jangling at the idea that finally the paintings are doing what they’re meant to do. They’re being seen.

“Okay,” he tells the old man. “Don’t worry. We’ll get them back.”

After teeth are brushed and pajamas acquired, and after the boy is in bed, under the covers, Scott sits in a rocking chair and reads from a stack of books. Eleanor hovers in the doorway, not knowing whether to stay or go, unclear of the boundaries of her role — is she allowed to leave them alone? Should she, even if she is?

After three books the boy’s lids are droopy, but he doesn’t want Scott to stop. Eleanor comes over and lies on the bed, nestling in beside the boy. So Scott reads three more, reading on even after the boy is asleep, after Eleanor too has surrendered to it and the late-summer sun is finally down. There is a simplicity to the act, to the moment, a purity that Scott has never experienced. Around him, the house is quiet. He closes the last book, lays it quietly on the floor.

Downstairs, the phone rings. Eleanor stirs, gets out of bed carefully, so as not to wake the boy. Scott hears her pad downstairs, hears the murmur of her voice, the sound of the hang-up, then she wanders back up and stands in the doorway, a strange look on her face, like a woman riding a roller coaster that’s plummeting to earth.

“What?” says Scott.

Eleanor swallows, exhales shakily. It’s as if the door frame is holding her up.

“They found the rest of the bodies.”