Empire of Lies

THURSDAY
The Amoeba

They arraigned Piersall the next morning at Manhattan Criminal Court. I was there.

It was a hell of a strange feeling. It was as if I'd stepped right into the giant TV screen: got up off the sofa, put my foot through the screen's liquefying glass and whirlpooled into the reality beyond like some character in a kids' sci-fi movie. I had parked my red Mustang in a lot on Chambers Street and walked to the courthouse. The route took me right past the spot where Piersall had been arrested the night before. I say "right past it" with a sort of awestruck emphasis because I'd been shown the damned video of the scene so many times that the location was blazoned on my imagination like some famous site-the Alamo, say, or the White House, some site where history had happened. The sparse grass of City Hall Park, the grimy white of the security bunkers, even the very gray of the street pavement seemed charged with last night's events, as if a roly-poly has-been of a second-rate TV actor being carted off to the drunk tank where he belonged were the stuff of song and story.

Beyond, down the street, was the court building, 100 Centre Street, a bold, imposing ziggurat looming against the turbulent autumn sky. As I came near, I saw a mob of between fifty and a hundred cameramen and reporters already gathered out in front, waiting for the disgraced space admiral to arrive. It was cold and growing colder. There was a damp, chill wind coiling off the harbor, cramming through the concrete corridors of Wall Street and bursting in staggered gusts over the open plaza. The reporters' coats and jackets and skirts blew around them, and their hair blew. I saw a print guy with his hands shoved deep in his leather bomber jacket, his chin pressed into his necktie. I saw a radio guy, thick as an Irish thug, hunched and shivering, clutching his heavy mike like a hammer. The TV reporters stood out from the others, their faces all made up for the lights, shiny and plastic as kewpie dolls. They looked colder than the others, too, because they were dressed lighter for the cameras, the girls in skirts, the guys in sports jackets. As my eye picked them out, I spotted Amy Lopez, the very same smart-eyed newswoman who had shared the screen with the Piersall video last night. She stood rigid, gripping her microphone down by her side, bouncing on the toes of her high-heeled shoes to keep her blood moving. Stray brown hairs blew onto her forehead. She scraped them off with a couple of fingernails as her keen eyes scanned the streets to the north. Now and again, she touched a hand to her ear, and I knew someone was speaking to her through an earpiece, keeping her up to date on Piersall's progress downtown from the Tombs, the city jail where he'd been kept overnight.

I had an unaccustomed fluttery feeling in my belly. I felt out of my element, on the spot. It had been a long time since I'd been a reporter and there were probably twenty-five-year-old punks in this crowd who had covered more big stories in the last month than I had in my whole career. I wasn't sure I could compete with them. And I had to. I had to get through them and reach Piersall myself.

That was my plan. Well, I had to do something, and that was all I could think of. If Piersall had information about Casey Diggs's death, maybe he could help me. Maybe we could help each other. Maybe together we could get the police to believe us.

And yes, for the record, I'd tried to call his lawyers. I got through to a bored secretary who sounded as if she'd taken a hundred calls about Piersall in the last half hour and would take a hundred more in the next. "He'll get back to you," she told me. But I knew he never would.

I neared the crowd of milling reporters. The Lopez girl was at the edge of the group, standing off to herself. Since she'd been on my TV last night, alone with me in my television room, I felt I knew her somehow. I felt maybe she would help me negotiate my way to Piersall's side so I could hand him the note I held folded in my jacket pocket. I approached her.

"You guys waiting for Piersall?" I asked.

She turned and looked at me like a dead fish looking at another dead fish. Her glance took in my sneakers, my jeans, my red windbreaker over my black sweatshirt. "You press?" she asked suspiciously.

I nodded. "Out of town," I lied.

"What, like, some blog?" She said the word with a snort and a sneer of disdain.

"A newspaper."

"Ever cover a celebrity perp walk before?"

I tried to think if I ever had. I hadn't. "No."

The girl put her tongue in her cheek. She considered my face-my honest, open, still-boyish face. Disdain gave way to amusement and pity. "Well, put your cup on, farmboy. It's a 24/7 cycle around here, and we're feeding the beast."

I did my best not to look as humiliated as I felt. Man, I thought bitterly, this dame was a lot sweeter on TV-though come to think of it, she wasn't all that sweet on TV, either.

"I didn't realize Piersall was this big a celebrity," I said.

Amy shrugged. "He is now. It's a good story. It's a big beast." Then she shot her elbow into my solar plexus as hard as she could.

I'm not sure she meant to do that. I'm not sure she didn't mean it, either. But the cops had just shown up, and the paddy wagon was right behind them. The crowd of reporters had erupted into motion and she-elbows flying-went charging into the thick of it.

A double line of patrolmen pushed into the mob, forcing a corridor through the crush. The reporters reacted instantly, surging back against the line of cops. They all wanted the same thing: to get to the front. The cameramen wanted to take their pictures there. The radio guys wanted to record their sound. The TV personalities wanted to be seen on the video shouting their questions. And the print guys-well, they weren't just going to be pushed out of the way. They all shoved forward together, congealing into one living force, a great plasmic creature with a single mindless mind, a single mindless purpose: to get to the front, to get close to the disgraced celebrity.

That was my purpose, too. Amy's elbow to my breadbasket got me off to a slow start just as it propelled her into the heart of the seething mass and out of sight. Taken completely by surprise, I caught the blow full force on the soft spot. I bent forward, grunting the air out of my lungs. At the same time, I was pressed from behind by a phalanx of technos hoisting mikes on booms like lances. They shoved me to the edge of the boiling, amoebic soup, and I was sucked in. The next moment I was part of it, spun round and drawn forward and pushed back all at the same time.

I got hit again. Another elbow, in the side of the head this time, and this time from a radio guy with a lot more meat on him than Amy had. Angry, I shoved him back with both hands. It barely budged him-there was no place for him to go. He grunted a curse at me through gritted teeth. I shouted a curse back at him. A woman tried to snake her way under my arm, deeper into the churning plasma. Angry now, I grabbed her by the shoulder and dragged her out of my way. I began fighting, elbowing, shoving, driving, like everyone else, toward the front.

The corrections van pulled up fast. It stopped hard at the corridor's opening. Two corrections officers leapt out of the front seats. The back of the van opened and two more jumped out there.

The thrashing of the media amoeba became more crazed and urgent. Then Piersall appeared and the jellylike mob roiled and surged with a force and frenzy I could barely believe.

I was deep in the gelatinous flow, struggling against it even as I helped create it. Between heads and over shoulders, I caught tidal glimpses of the action at the front. Two COs helped Patrick Piersall down from the back of the van. His hands were cuffed behind him. His suntanned face, suddenly so shockingly present in the flesh, was set in that wry insouciant smile people wear when they're trying to rise above their shame. Two tidy men in suits, both carrying briefcases-his lawyers-stepped down gingerly after him. These five-Piersall, the COs at his elbows, the lawyers at his back-formed the core of the parade. Two more COs strode ahead of them, two fell in behind. They marched into the corridor between the cops, between the crush of journalists, and headed swiftly for the courthouse doors.

The mindless mind of the amoebic press had a mindless voice now too, a choral cry of male and female tones, of high and low. It shouted what were phrased as questions but uttered as commands, without that uptick at the end that questions have, with only the coughing bark of the imperative.

"Why was your show canceled." Tell me.

"What did you say to Cole Hondler." Tell me now.

"What are you going to plead." Say something.

"Do you think your TV career is over." Fill my airtime. Fill my computer screen. Feed my gobby substance with your shame!

The shouts were coming from all around me, mingled with grunts and curses in the swirling turmoil. Up front, the parade with Piersall at its center was passing swiftly up the corridor. A few seconds more and they would be at the courthouse, inside it, out of reach. Desperate to get to them before they were gone, I struggled toward the police line with fresh force. I set my hands against another man's shoulder. I shoved at him, trying to compress him into a smaller space so I could squeeze past. The man rounded on me with the face of a devil, contorted with anger, eyes afire.

"Get your hands off me or I'll kill you," he said.

I got past him, tumbling deeper into the mass.

Then-the next moment-I was jostled hard from the right. I stumbled. The plasma of the media creature began closing over me. I felt the bodies of men pressing in on me as I nearly lost my footing, felt the comfortless closeness of women as the hurly-burly nearly bore me down. I smelled their aftershave and their perfume. I saw their twisted features above me, their bared teeth, their eyes both bright and dead. Jutted microphones shot past my cheek like bullets. Elbows knocked and clocked me from every side.

Falling, panicking, I thought, What am I doing here? What am I doing? I no longer cared about Patrick Piersall or Casey Diggs or plots and conspiracies and shadowy threats of danger. I just wanted to get out. I just wanted to go home, away from the sight of these slavering, crazy-faced men, from the sound of these women buzzing like locusts, screaming like harpies. Only a rage for survival, a terror of being trampled into the pavement and smothered down there, made me corkscrew viciously, gripping and tearing at the bodies around me in order to stay on my feet. Only that rage made me battle forward with all the strength I had. Somehow I got my balance back. I rammed myself headlong through the congealed human mass, looking for a clearing, for open air.

And then there I was. I was at the police line. I was at the edge of the corridor. I had broken through the mob and was standing between two NYPD patrolmen, at the point where their hands met to form their barricade against the press. There was no one else in front of me. I could see right into the corridor itself.

There was Piersall and his entourage of lawyers and lawmen-and they had already passed me by. I'd missed them by a few steps. The trailing pair of COs was a pace to my right, then the attorneys, then Piersall and the officers who held him, then the COs in the lead-who were nearly at the building's stairs, nearly at the door.

The pressure of the amoeba behind me drove me hard against the cops' arms. The creature's voices were shouting loudly on every side of me. I stuck my hand into the pocket of my windbreaker. I felt it close on the note I had folded there. I brought the note out, crumpled in my fist. But there was no way to get it to the lawyers or to Piersall. I had missed my chance.

But wait. The next moment, just before he reached the steps, Piersall stopped. He turned-swung around so hard that he brought the two startled corrections officers at his elbows swinging around with him. The actor was glowering with rage. His cheeks were red. His eyes were white and rolling. He was like a chained beast goaded into a fury by captivity and the mob and the questions hurled at him like stones.

He shouted. His voice was a ragged growl. He sounded just as I remembered him, as we all remembered him, from those moments of highest melodrama on the besieged deck of the spaceship Universal.

"This!" he bellowed at us. "This is not the news!"

He tried to charge at us like a bull. The force of it pulled his corrections officers after him a step before they could restrain him. The lawyers-the tidy men in suits-stumbled back several paces, jumbling together with the COs in the rear, who fell back too. One of the lawyers stuck his hand out to recover his balance.

On the instant, I saw my chance. I lunged forward, reaching out between the policemen. I grabbed the lawyer's hand and forced my note into it.

My name is Jason Harrow, it said. I have information about the disappearance of Casey Diggs. I will only speak to Patrick Piersall. Call this number.