Empire of Lies

The Allegory of the Interrogation Room

That last day, the sky was gray and roiling. The rain had stopped for now, but there seemed a great, surging turbulence in the thick, low clouds. Watching them from the squad-car window, I had the feeling a storm was being prepared behind them, like some spectacular effect being readied behind the curtains of a stage. The sight called forth a physical response from me: a churning in my belly; a sense of portent and foreboding. I was just worried about Serena-that's what I told myself.

But it was more than that, though I wouldn't let myself see it. And when I did see it, I wouldn't let myself acknowledge what I saw. That nausea, that foreboding: It was my brain picking up hints and details faster than my mind could interpret them. It was sitting in the backseat of the squad car like that and looking at the backs of the two heads up in front of me, the head of the young uniformed cop who was driving and the head of Fitzgerald, where he was riding shotgun. It was their terse answers to my questions and their subtle glances at each other and the tense irony in the eyes of the uniform when I caught a look at them in the rearview mirror and when they stole a look at me. I had no reason to see anything ominous or wrong in any of this, but I did see it-I saw it and I convinced myself I didn't.

"So you haven't heard anything at all about Serena?" I asked for maybe the third time.

"Nope," said Fitzgerald, in the tone of a man long comfortable with casual lying. "I guess we'll find out more when we get there."

"They didn't say why they wanted to talk to me?"

"Just, you know, follow-up. Pretty routine in a case like this."

"Those terrorists-I saw on TV they arrested some terrorists who wanted to blow up Wall Street. You think that's part of this?"

"You'll have to ask the guys in New York. Like I said, I'm sure they'll bring us up to date."

I turned away from the backs of those two heads and looked out the window, up at the roiling, ominous clouds.

It was almost eleven as we crossed into Queens. There was plenty of traffic, but the cop car, being a cop car, cut through it quickly, keeping to the left lane while other cars ducked out of its path like saloon dwellers in a cowboy movie dodging out of the way of Black Bart. Since Fitzgerald wasn't saying much, I used the travel time to make some phone calls. I canceled my flight home. I checked in at the office. I called my wife. I got Cathy's voice mail, both at home and on the cell. I remembered today was her day to play lunch lady at our daughter's school so she had probably shut her phone off. To tell the truth, I was glad of it. I had no idea how I was going to explain to her what was happening here. I left a message:

"Listen. I'm all right, but I've run into a problem. I can't come home yet. I'm with the police. I'm fine, but some men broke into the house last night and took Serena. Don't be worried or anything, all right? I didn't get hurt and it's gonna be okay. I'll call you when I can."

As I pressed DISCONNECT, I caught Fitzgerald and the uniform exchange another glance across the front seat.

I managed to ignore that or to ignore the fact that it fed into my suspicion that something was wrong, that there was some catastrophe impending. And I managed to ignore it when the squad car left the expressway for the parkway, too, and when it crossed the bridge into uptown Manhattan and when it crossed Manhattan to the West Side. Up until then, I'd just assumed we were heading for police headquarters downtown.

"Where are we going?" I asked the back of Fitzgerald's head. "Are we going up to the university?"

"They're working this out of the twenty-sixth," he answered. Whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.

We passed along several streets of aging brownstones, and finally turned onto a street crowded with cop cars. The cars were parked in slanted spaces outside a cookie-cutter New York precinct house of concrete and yellow brick. Our driver slid his county squad car in with the others.

They were waiting for us inside. That much seemed clear. Fitzgerald only had to flash his Nassau County shield at the officer behind the reception desk and a locked door buzzed open. We passed through it into the precinct's inner halls.

A man met us in a cinder-block corridor. He was about forty, youthful-looking, black or half-black-with tan skin, anyway. He was short and trim, with a round, hard, handsome face, a serious face under clipped, serious black hair. He was in shirtsleeves, a buttoned-up white shirt with a blue tie, the pants of a charcoal suit. Everything about him seemed serious and efficient.

I didn't like him. To put it bluntly, he frightened me. The second I saw him, I sensed he was a man of little feeling and dour expectations, the kind of person who waits for you to reveal the nature of your depravity, who doesn't wonder whether you committed a crime but only which crime you committed. The world to him was like a child's frame puzzle where there are empty spaces and a piece to fit the shape of every space-except that every space was a kind of sin and the pieces that fit them were human beings. Frankly, I thought that attitude probably made him a pretty good detective, but that didn't make me like him any better. Anyway, that was what I sensed about him in that first moment, and nothing I saw later made me change my mind.

He had a manila folder in his right hand. He didn't put it down or move it to his left hand, so naturally I didn't offer to shake hands with him. I had a feeling that was the whole point of the folder.

"Mr. Harrow, thanks for coming in. I'm Detective Curtis."

Fitzgerald hadn't introduced me, hadn't spoken at all. Curtis just knew who I was. Now his eyes shifted toward the Long Island detective. At once, Fitzgerald turned around and walked away, just like that, without a word to either of us. I'd been handed off-like a case file or a report-something that needed working on.

"What's going on?" I said. "Is there any news about Serena?"

Curtis gestured to a doorway with the folder in his hand. "Would you come this way, Mr. Harrow?" He didn't smile. He looked at me with interest, but without feeling as if I were… well, as if I were a puzzle piece.

He led me down the cinder-block hall to a door, through the door into a cramped, unpleasant room.

"Sorry for the accommodations." His voice had no more feeling than his eyes. "We're kind of short on space. I'll be with you in a couple of minutes. You want anything meanwhile? A cup of coffee or…"

"Yeah," I said. "A cup of coffee would be great."

"How do you take it?"

"Black."

He left me there, the door hissing shut behind him.

I turned to look at the room. It was cramped, as I say. There was a small wooden table in the center and three cloth-and-wood chairs. The furniture nearly filled the gray floor so there wasn't much space to move around in. The walls were cinderblock, painted an institutional pale green. The rough, naked, heavy look of them gave me the feeling of being bricked in. There were dingy white soundproofing tiles in the ceiling, and a single ancient air vent, and a single long fluorescent light that made my eyes ache. There was the door-a heavy wooden door-on one wall and on the wall to the right of it there was a mirror: one-way glass.

About ten minutes went by. Then a uniformed officer-a short, chesty black woman-brought me my coffee in a paper cup. She held the door ajar with one hand and gave me the coffee with the other.

I was already getting antsy, waiting. "Do you know when Detective Curtis will be back?" I asked her.

"He'll be with you as soon as he can, sir," she said in a flat singsong, the voice of an uncaring nurse speaking to a querulous patient. Then she drew back and the door hissed shut again.

After that, I waited some more. I waited a long time. As the minutes passed, the room began to have a strange effect on me. It began to seem as if the place had some kind of meaning, as if it were a metaphor for something, as if my being there were some sort of allegory, though I'm not sure even now what the allegory was all about.

I drank my coffee. I checked my watch. I checked my phone. There was no reception here, no way to call in or out. I sat in one of the chairs. I stood up and paced. The room was so small and crowded with furniture, I had to go to the edges of the floor to do it. I could take five paces along the width of the place and six paces along the length. Pretty soon, I sat down again. I drummed my fingers on the table. I got up and paced some more.

I eyed the door. The door was part of the allegory. The door was unlocked the whole time. I checked. I could've opened it. I could've stepped out into the corridor. I could've left the precinct house altogether, if I wanted to. But I didn't do any of those things. I never so much as poked my head into the hall to ask someone where the hell Curtis had gone off to. I thought about it. I argued with myself. I thought, yes, damn it, I should find out what's taking so long. But minute by minute, I put it off. I was afraid if I seemed too impatient, it would make me look bad somehow. It would make me look uncooperative or guilty. That was the effect the room had on me. Four men had broken into my house, nearly killed me, kidnapped a teenaged girl-and I was the one who was afraid of looking guilty. I even began to think of things I had done wrong. Not just recently, but in the past, too. I began to imagine Detective Curtis questioning me.

Why didn't you call the police after you heard about the murder in the Great Swamp? Why did you go to see Lauren without telling your wife? Why did you go to see Anne Smith? Tell me about That Night in Bedford.

I was interrogating myself in the interrogation room. Explaining myself to Curtis or whoever was secretly watching me.

Which brings me to the mirror, the one-way glass. That was part of the allegory, too. I could see myself in it, my face still badly bruised, painfully disfigured, purple and yellow all along one side. I looked into my own eyes, and I felt sure there were cops on the other side of the image, on the other side of the glass, watching me. I paced close to it and stole glances at it, trying to make someone out back there. But I didn't want to seem nervous about it so I didn't stop and stare or look too close. I wanted my behavior to convey that I was a good guy, that I was here to cooperate. That was part of the reason I never left the room, too, never complained about how long I'd been kept waiting. I was acting innocent, see-acting innocent for whoever was watching behind the glass. I was playing a role for them: the role of an innocent man. I watched my performance in my mind's eye. I imagined I was on the other side of the mirror looking in. It made me wonder: Why would a person have to pretend to be innocent unless he were actually guilty of something? I began to become suspicious of myself.

Why didn't you call the police, Mr. Harrow? Why did you go to see Lauren? Why did you go to see Anne Smith? What were you thinking when you went to see her? You didn't mention her to your wife, either, did you? What about That Night in Bedford?

I was in the interrogation room nearly an hour. Finally I began to get angry. I was sitting at the table again, drumming my fingers on the surface again. I thought: This is ridiculous. I'm going to find Curtis right now. Right now.

Maybe I would have. But I'll never know. Because just then, the allegory ended, whatever the allegory was. The door opened.

I looked up eagerly-and then my eagerness turned to surprise. Startled, I got to my feet quickly.

Lauren had stepped into the room.