Purity

The Killer

When the two-way radio chirped and erupted in the burry voice of Pedro, it seemed to awaken Andreas from a dream that was aware of having lasted too long and was trying to end itself. “Hay un señor en la puerta que dice que es su amigo. Se llama Tom Aberant.”

On the table by his bed was a sandwich with one bite taken out of it. He couldn’t have said what day of the week it was. The system that had placed him under house arrest was in his head. Hearing the name Tom Aberant barely moved him. He seemed to remember investing enormous obsessional energy in Tom Aberant, for months, maybe for years, but the recollection was faint and flavorless. He no more hated Tom or feared him than he did anything else now. He had only an intolerable, chest-crushing anxiety. That, and a wan perception of the cruelty of being visited, for whatever reason, by a journalist. He no longer met the fundamental requirement of an interviewee, which was to like yourself.

“Hacelo pasar,” he told Pedro.

* * *

Before he’d quit doing interviews, the previous fall, he’d taken to dropping the word totalitarian. Younger interviewers, to whom the word meant total surveillance, total mind control, gray armies in parade with medium-range missiles, had understood him to be saying something unfair about the Internet. In fact, he simply meant a system that was impossible to opt out of. The old Republic had certainly excelled at surveillance and parades, but the essence of its totalitarianism had been more everyday and subtle. You could cooperate with the system or you could oppose it, but the one thing you could never do, whether you were enjoying a secure and pleasant life or sitting in a prison, was not be in relation to it. The answer to every question large or small was socialism. If you substituted networks for socialism, you got the Internet. Its competing platforms were united in their ambition to define every term of your existence. In his own case, when he’d started to be properly famous, he’d recognized that fame, as a phenomenon, had migrated to the Internet, and that the Internet’s architecture made it easy for his enemies to shape the Wolf narrative. As in the old Republic, he could either ignore the haters and suffer the consequences, or he could accept the premises of the system, however sophomoric he found them, and increase its power and pervasiveness by participating in it. He’d chosen the latter, but the particular choice didn’t matter. He was in relation to the Revolution either way.

In his experience, few things were more alike than one revolution to another. Then again, he’d experienced only the kind that loudly called itself a revolution. The mark of a legitimate revolution — the scientific, for example — was that it didn’t brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred. Only the weak and fearful, the illegitimate, had to brag. The refrain of his childhood, under a regime so weak and fearful it built a prison wall around the people it allegedly had liberated, was that the Republic was blessed to be in history’s vanguard. If your boss was a shithead and your own husband was spying on you, it wasn’t the regime’s fault, because the regime served the Revolution and the Revolution was at once historically inevitable and terribly fragile, beset with enemies. This ridiculous contradiction was a fixture of bragging revolutions. No crime or unforeseen side effect was so grievous that it couldn’t be excused by a system that had to be but easily could fail.

The apparatchiks, too, were an eternal type. The tone of the new ones, in their TED Talks, in PowerPointed product launches, in testimony to parliaments and congresses, in utopianly titled books, was a smarmy syrup of convenient conviction and personal surrender that he remembered well from the Republic. He couldn’t listen to them without thinking of the Steely Dan lyric So you grab a piece of something that you think is gonna last. (Radio in the American Sector had played the song over and over to young ears in the Soviet sector.) The privileges available in the Republic had been paltry, a telephone, a flat with some air and light, the all-important permission to travel, but perhaps no paltrier than having x number of followers on Twitter, a much-liked Facebook profile, and the occasional four-minute spot on CNBC. The real appeal of apparatchikism was the safety of belonging. Outside, the air smelled like brimstone, the food was bad, the economy moribund, the cynicism rampant, but inside, victory over the class enemy was assured. Inside, the professor and the engineer were learning at the German worker’s feet. Outside, the middle class was disappearing faster than the icecaps, xenophobes were winning elections or stocking up on assault rifles, warring tribes were butchering each other religiously, but inside, disruptive new technologies were rendering traditional politics obsolete. Inside, decentralized ad hoc communities were rewriting the rules of creativity, the revolution rewarding the risk-taker who understood the power of networks. The New Regime even recycled the old Republic’s buzzwords, collective, collaborative. Axiomatic to both was that a new species of humanity was emerging. On this, apparatchiks of every stripe agreed. It never seemed to bother them that their ruling elites consisted of the grasping, brutal old species of humanity.

Lenin had been a risk-taker. Trotsky had been one, too, until Stalin had made him the Bill Gates of the Soviet Union, the excoriated crypto-reactionary. But Stalin himself hadn’t needed to take so many risks, because terror worked better. Although, to a man, the new revolutionaries all claimed to worship risk-taking — a relative term in any case, since the risk in question was of losing some venture capitalist’s money, at worst of wasting a few parentally funded years, rather than, say, the risk of being shot or hanged — the most successful of them had instead followed Stalin’s example. Like the old politburos, the new politburo styled itself as the enemy of the elite and the friend of the masses, dedicated to giving consumers what they wanted, but to Andreas (who, admittedly, had never learned how to want stuff) it seemed as if the Internet was governed more by fear: the fear of unpopularity and uncoolness, the fear of missing out, the fear of being flamed or forgotten. In the Republic, people had been terrified of the state; under the New Regime, what terrified them was the state of nature: kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. In both cases, the fear was entirely reasonable; indeed, it was the product of reason. The full name of the Republic’s ideology had been Scientific Socialism, a name pointing backward to la Terreur (the Jacobins, with their marvelously efficient guillotine, may have been executioners, but they fashioned themselves as executors of Enlightenment rationality) and forward to the terrors of technocracy, which sought to liberate humanity from its humanness through the efficiency of markets and the rationality of machines. This was the truly eternal fixture of illegitimate revolution, this impatience with irrationality, this wish to be clean of it once and for all.

It was Andreas’s gift, maybe his greatest, to find singular niches in totalitarian regimes. The Stasi was the best friend he’d ever had — until he met the Internet. He’d found a way to use both of them while standing apart from them. Because it reminded him of his similarity to his mother, Pip Tyler’s remark about the Moonglow Dairy had wounded him, but she was right: for all the good work the Sunlight Project did, it now functioned mainly as an extension of his ego. A fame factory masquerading as a secrets factory. He allowed the New Regime to hold him up as an inspiring example of its openness, and in return, when it couldn’t be avoided, he protected the regime from bad press.

There were a lot of could-be Snowdens inside the New Regime, employees with access to the algorithms that Facebook used to monetize its users’ privacy and Twitter to manipulate memes that were supposedly self-generating. But smart people were actually far more terrified of the New Regime than of what the regime had persuaded less-smart people to be afraid of, the NSA, the CIA — it was straight from the totalitarian playbook, disavowing your own methods of terror by imputing them to your enemy and presenting yourself as the only defense against them — and most of the could-be Snowdens kept their mouths shut. Twice, though, insiders had reached out to Andreas (interestingly, both worked for Google), offering him dumps of internal email and algorithmic software that plainly revealed how the company stockpiled personal user data and actively filtered the information it claimed passively to reflect. In both cases, fearing what Google could do to him, Andreas had declined to upload the documents. To salvage his self-regard, he’d been honest with the leakers: “Can’t do it. I need Google on my side.”

Only in this one respect, though, did he consider himself an apparatchik. Otherwise, in interviews, he disdained the rhetoric of revolution, and he inwardly winced when his workers spoke of making the world a better place. From the example of Assange, he’d learned the folly of making messianic claims about his mission, and although he took ironic satisfaction in being famed for his purity, he was under no illusions about his actual capacity for it. Life with Annagret had cured him of that.

Three days after Tom Aberant had helped him bury the bones and rotted clothes of her stepfather in the lower Oder valley, he’d gone to Leipzig to look for her. He’d intended to go even sooner, but he was already much in demand for interviews with the Western press. Already, on the strength of his once having published a few naughty poems in Weimarer Beiträge, lived in a church basement, and blundered out of Stasi headquarters at the right moment, he was labeled PROMINENT EAST GERMAN DISSIDENT. Already, too, there were grumblings among the old embarrassments on Siegfeldstraße, mutterings that he’d done little but sleep with teenagers while the others were risking persecution. But none of them had a father on the Central Committee, none of them a résumé as sexy as the story of his acrostic poems, and by giving a dozen interviews back to back, always under the label of PROMINENT DISSIDENT (and always taking care to acknowledge the bravery of his Siegfeldstraße comrades), he made himself so much realer than the embarrassments that they had little choice but to accept the media’s version. His fame soon changed even their memories of him.

Annagret didn’t live with her sister in Leipzig, but the sister directed him to a teahouse frequented by feminists, a group until recently even more demoralized than environmentalists; polluted though it was, the Leipzig sky was less gray than the Republic’s leadership was grayly male. It was two in the afternoon when he pushed open the teahouse’s squeaky door. Annagret came out from the kitchen in back, wiping her hands on a dish towel.

Smile, Andreas thought.

She didn’t smile. She looked around the room, which was empty. On the walls were a picture of Rosa Luxemburg, a poster celebrating Women of Heavy Industry, and slightly more daring images of Western female musicians and activists. Everything faded and filmed over with the sadness he’d once mistaken for ridiculousness. A Joan Baez tape played quietly.

“We don’t have to talk now,” he said. “I just want you to know I’m here.”

“Now is fine,” she said, not looking at him. “We may not have much to say.”

“I have things to say.”

She faintly smirked. “‘Good news.’”

“Yes, good news. Should I come back later?”

“No.” She sat down at a table. “Just tell me your good news. I think I already know some of it. I saw you on TV.”

“I know,” he said, sitting down, “I’m an overnight sensation. And you didn’t believe me when I said I was the most important person in the country. Do you remember that?”

“I remember that.” She wouldn’t look at him. “I remember everything. Do you?”

“Yes.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because we’re safe now. We’re safe and I love you.”

She stared for a while at the tabletop. Then she nodded.

“Do you want to know why we’re safe?”

“No,” she said.

“I have the case files, and I’ve moved what needed to be moved.”

She nodded again.

“You’re not happy to hear that?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because of what we did.”

“Annagret. Please look at me.”

She shook her head, and he understood that the problem had never been that they weren’t safe. The problem was that he reminded her of what he’d put her through.

“It’s better if you just go,” she said.

“I can’t go,” he said. “I can’t imagine life without you.”

Before she could reply, the front door squeaked open and two women came in, talking about the New Forum. Annagret jumped up and disappeared into the kitchen. Soon other regulars arrived, all women. Though they didn’t seem actively hostile, Andreas felt like a foreign body in an organism quietly trying to rid itself of him. A midge in a watering eye.

A girl he recognized, the friend he’d seen with Annagret in Berlin two months ago, arrived and joined her in waiting tables. The friend asked him if he wanted anything.

“Nothing, thank you.”

“I don’t want to be rude,” the friend said. “But maybe you should leave now.”

“Yeah, OK.”

“It’s not personal. It’s just the kind of place we are.”

The midge was as relieved to be expelled as the watering eye was to expel it. Outside, in a cold drizzle, he considered taking the train back to Berlin and resuming his role as a PROMINENT EAST GERMAN DISSIDENT, giving Annagret more time to think. If Tom Aberant hadn’t vanished on him, he might have done it. Having even one real friend, a friend who knew his secret and had volunteered to help him bury it forever, might have lessened the urgency of his need for Annagret. But Tom hadn’t kept his date for dinner. Andreas had waited for hours for him to show up. The next day, returning from a round of interviews, he’d asked every person at the church whether an American had come around to look for him. He hadn’t had the sense, not at all, that Tom was merely seducing him for journalistic purposes. Even if he was, it made no sense for him to disappear before Andreas had got him into the Stasi archives. The explanation had to be that Tom had gone home to his wife: he hadn’t liked Andreas as much as he liked the woman he supposedly was sick to death of. The sting of this rejection was a measure of the swiftness and depth of the liking Andreas had taken to him. To be rejected by Annagret as well was simply not an option.

He went to the Leipzig train station and fished newspapers from trash cans and read them, feeling fortified when he saw his own name. Who could resist the temptation of believing one’s own press? In the evening, he returned to the teahouse and waited outside until it went dark and Annagret and her friend were lowering its shutters.

“Go away,” the friend said to him. “She doesn’t want to see you.”

“That sounds personal,” he said.

“Yes, now it’s personal.”

“I have to go back to Berlin. There’s a lot going on, and I need to be part of it. My name is Andreas, by the way.”

“I know who you are. We saw you on TV.”

“Annagret,” he said. “I have to go back. Won’t you at least take a walk with me?”

“She doesn’t want to,” the friend said.

“A short walk,” he said. “We have some private family things to talk about. The three of us can get together later on.”

“All right,” Annagret said suddenly, pulling away from the friend.

“Annagret—”

“He’s not like the others. And he’s right — there is a family thing.”

Andreas noted, not for the first time, that she had some skill at lying. When he and she were alone, walking under umbrellas, she apologized for the friend. “Birgit is just very protective.”

“She seems particularly good at keeping men away.”

“I can do that myself. But it gets tiring, the constant attention. It’s nice to have some help.”

“The attention is that constant?”

“It’s disgusting. It’s actually been worse in Leipzig. Yesterday a guy pulled up next to me on his bike and asked me if I’d marry him.”

Although Andreas would have liked to break the guy’s nose, he couldn’t help feeling proud of the testament to Annagret’s beauty. “That’s very hard,” he said. “It’s hard to be you.”

“He didn’t even know me.”

They walked in silence for a while.

“The thing we did,” she said. “I did it for you.”

He was sorry to hear it, but also the opposite of sorry.

“I was out of my mind,” she said. “I was crazy for you. And I did a thing that ruined my life, and now it’s all I can think of when I see you. The thing I did for you.”

“But I did what I did for you, too. I’d do it again right now. I’d do anything to protect you.”

“Hmm.”

“Come to Berlin with me. Leipzig is a shithole.”

“You’re not going to leave me alone, are you.”

“There’s no other way. We were meant to be together.”

She stopped walking. No one else was on the sidewalk, and he’d already lost track of where they were. “The most terrible thing of all?” she said. “I like that you’re a killer.”

“I think I’m more than that.”

“But that’s the reason I’ll go with you, if I go. Isn’t that terrible?”

It did seem a little terrible, because only now, when she called him a killer, was he overcome with lust for her. He steeled himself against the urge to take her in his arms.

“We have to try to make amends,” she said. “We have to do good things.”

“Yes.”

“Lots and lots of good things. Both of us.”

“That’s what I want. To be good with you.”

“Oh God.” A sob escaped her. “Please go back to Berlin. Please, An—”

She’d been about to say his name. He realized that he’d never heard her say it.

“Can you say my name?” he said, pursuing an instinct.

She shook her head.

“Just look at me and say my name. Then I’ll go back to Berlin. I’ll wait however long I have to.”

She ran away from him. Suddenly, full speed, holding her umbrella to one side. He lost a few seconds in deciding to chase after her, and she was so young and so fleet, his judo girl, that he would never have caught up with her if she hadn’t come to a red light and taken too sharp a turn at the corner. The drizzle must have frozen there. Her feet went out from under her, and it sickened him to see her fall.

She was still on the ground, clutching her hip, when he reached her.

“Are you all right?”

“No. Or actually, yes. I’m all right.” And there it was — the smile he’d longed to see. “You told me not to self-dramatize. Do you remember?”

“Yes.”

“I remember everything. Every word.”

He crouched down and took her cold hands in his and let her look into his eyes. He saw that he could have her. But instead of a symphony of joy and gratitude, he heard a horrid little voice of doubt: Are you sure you really love her? No sooner does she chide herself for being self-dramatizing than she claims to remember every single word you ever said to her! She has no sense of humor — don’t you think this might become oppressive? He tried to deafen himself to the voice. She was, after all, uniquely beautiful. Two years ago, when he’d presented her with a menu of options that included murder, she’d picked murder. She was a good girl who was also dirty and a liar. Other men’s interest disgusted her, but somehow his didn’t. She knew he’d been bad and she wanted him anyway; was offering him a better life.

“Let’s go to your place and pack your bags,” he said.

“Birgit will hate me.”

“Not as much as she hates me.”

For two or three years, he was happy with her. She was very young and didn’t know anything about anything, certainly not how to share a life with a man, and although he himself had never shared a life with a woman, he was older and she presumed that he knew everything. She had a way of gazing solemnly into his eyes while he was on top of her, inside her, completely having her, and the mere recollection of this gaze turned him on for reasons he was slow to understand. As long as her idealistic ardor lasted, he let her buy little things, bedspreads, earthenware mugs, lampshades, that he knew were ugly. He praised the dismal Indian meals she’d taught herself to cook. He took pleasure in watching her find her way in Berlin, making new friends and reuniting with old ones, joining collectives, going to work at a women’s support services center. When they were out together, he felt proud, not oppressed, that she held him by the arm and never looked at any man but him. When they were at home, she was heartbreakingly eager to please. She seemed to have the idea that the more they made love, the more it confirmed that they were meant to be a couple and that she hadn’t done a bad thing in succumbing to the killer of her stepfather. For two or three years, he was the happy beneficiary of this idea more nights than not.

But the problem with sex as an idea was that ideas could change. By and by, Annagret developed a different and much drearier idea, of total honesty in bed, with heavy emphasis on discussion. He indulged it at first, trying to be a good man, trying to live up to an ideal image that he, too, still had of himself, but there was finally no way around it: endless discussion with a humorless twenty-three-year-old bored him. During the day, when they were apart, he kept picturing her solemn gaze, but when he came home he found a person with no resemblance to the object he’d desired. She was tired, had cramps, had evening plans, some needy woman’s hand to hold somewhere, some no-chance cause to organize another protest for. Or, even worse, wanted to discuss her feelings. Or, worst of all, wanted to discuss his feelings.

To escape domestic boredom, he attended overseas conferences, in Sydney and São Paulo and Sunnyvale. Besides his work on the Gauck Commission, administering the Stasi archives, he did transitional-justice consulting all over the former Eastern Bloc, sitting in overlit conference rooms identical in every respect but the languages on the mineral-water bottles from which unreconciled antagonists were pouring. Because reporters and cameras were so fond of him, he was starting to hear directly from corporate and governmental whistle-blowers in reunified Germany, and because committee work didn’t suit his personality (he was singular, not collegial) he was thinking about setting up on his own, becoming a clearinghouse for secrets, omitting the committees and dealing directly with the media. But his domestic problem, the disparity between the nighttime object he desired and the daylight actuality of Annagret, followed him everywhere. Even when he was alone in a hotel room in Sydney, turned on by the recollection of her solemn gaze, he had only to call home and hear her voice for two minutes to be bored with her. The boredom was immediate and overwhelming. Whatever they were talking about was wildly irrelevant, intolerably irrelevant, to what he wanted.

He saw that he’d trapped himself. He’d set up house less with a woman than with a wishful concept of himself as a man who could live happily ever after with a woman. And now he was bored with the concept. Although he never raised his voice with Annagret, he began to sulk and take offense at inoffensive things. He made subtly mocking comments about her work and was unfair to her female friends, whom he considered losers and resented for exploiting the weak link of Annagret to latch on to his fame. He gave lame excuses for avoiding them, and when a social outing couldn’t be avoided he was alternately cold, silent, or insulting. He behaved like a jerk and paid a price for it in self-regard, but he persisted in it, hoping that she would recognize it as a well-known sign of trouble in a relationship, and that maybe, eventually, he would be able to escape the trap.

But she was relentlessly good to him. When she got angry, it was rarely for long. She, who was otherwise a stalwart feminist, surrounded by man-distrusters, continued to carve out an exception for him. She took his work seriously and gave him helpful advice. She washed the dirty clothes and dishes he’d taken to leaving scattered around the flat. And the nicer she was, the more deeply he was trapped. Trapped by his gratitude for her high esteem and his fear of forfeiting it, trapped also by the early promises and avowals he’d made, the fuel with which he’d fired her idealism (and, for a while, his own). And because there were very few women who could top her combination of beauty and youth, and none at all from whom he wouldn’t have had to conceal that he was a murderer, and because he was in any case already famous enough that word of an affair was liable to get back to Annagret and shatter her idealization of him, other women seemed foreclosed to him.

Completing his entrapment was Annagret’s friendship with his mother. Back in 1990, after they’d set up house in Berlin and accustomed themselves to appearing in public together, unlearning the fear of incriminating themselves by doing so, he’d taken her to meet his parents. For the sake of his father, to whom he felt grateful and whose good opinion he prized, he ran the risk that his mother would be jealous of Annagret and cruel to her. But Katya was charming. She seemed to welcome Annagret’s beauty, which made her a suitable Wolf ornament, and Annagret’s youthful pliancy, which made Andreas’s own hostility seem perverse. She wanted Annagret to go back to school, and when Annagret demurred, saying she preferred to roll up her sleeves and help other people, Katya gave her a wink and said, “We’ll allow that. But you have to promise to attend my university instead. You can study with me in your free time, we’ll work on your English, and everything you learn will be interesting. Believe me, I know where the boring things are.” She winked again.

Instinctively alarmed by the proposal, Andreas took Annagret home and told her his worst Katya stories, the ones he’d been holding back for fear that they’d reveal the family sickness in him. Annagret listened earnestly and said she liked Katya anyway. She liked her for having given birth to him. She liked her — no matter what he said — for obviously loving him as much as she did. And he was still so new to the miracle of possessing Annagret’s body, the miracle of feeling capable of love, that he assented to the proposal. He managed to imagine that he might solve the problem of Katya by farming it out to Annagret.

Annagret’s own mother was a disaster. As threatened, she’d pushed the police to investigate her husband’s disappearance, but she was a known thief and drug addict, fresh out of prison, and made a poor impression. The police said honestly that the case file was lost and there was little they could do except circulate her husband’s photograph. The mother tried to enlist the help of her husband’s widowed mother and learned that the Stasi, two years earlier, had told his mother that he’d escaped to the West; she was still waiting to hear from him. Soon enough, Annagret’s mother was using again. She came to Annagret and Andreas and badgered them for money. Annagret coldly suggested that her mother get sober and look for work in a foreign country where nurses were in short supply. Annagret’s hatred of her was both genuine and convenient, since it protected her from the guilt of having had her husband murdered. The mother continued to harass them, turning up at their door to descant on Annagret’s ingratitude, until she succeeded in trading her looks for drugs and lodging with a Polish carpenter who also used.

Katya, by comparison, was an angel to Annagret. After Andreas’s father died, in 1993, she kept the old flat on Karl-Marx-Allee. She’d resigned from the university and endured a decent two-year interval of rehabilitation before resuming work as a Privatdozent and publishing a book-length study of Iris Murdoch to admiring reviews. She power walked eight kilometers every morning and traveled often to London with her Lhasa apso, Lessing. Annagret saw her at least once a week when she was in Berlin. The arrangement that Andreas had envisioned, whereby Annagret took over the distasteful job of keeping up family appearances, was working out much the way he’d hoped — except that he became insanely jealous of how close the two women were.

He hadn’t seen this coming. Annagret’s earnestness was never more unbearable to him, their wrongness as a couple never more evident, than on the evenings when she was at his mother’s. He blamed her both for liking his mother and for being liked by her. And he had no acceptable outlet for his jealous rage. Even when they fought, his voice merely became chalkily rational. She detested this chalky voice, but it was effective in contrast to her red-faced blurting: he was a good man, in firm control of his temper and everything else. But if she happened to stay at Katya’s even half an hour later than expected, he descended into a state of such eye-widened, heart-thudding rage that all he could do was sit with his arms pressed to his sides and try not to explode. It was so extreme that he began to suspect there was something inside him, some other self that had always been in him, that wasn’t in other people. Was very unusual and sick and particular to him.

This thing, which he came to think of as the Killer, was like a neutrino or an esoteric boson, detectable only by inference. Observing his subatomic self with rigorous honesty, investigating the deep structure of his unhappiness, taking note of certain strange and evanescent fantasies, he slowly pieced together a theory of the Killer and the paradoxical equivalencies and time-bendings that characterized it. Boredom and jealous rage, for example, were equivalent. Both had to do with the Killer’s frustration at not getting its object of desire. The Killer was enraged with Katya for depriving him of the object and no less enraged with Annagret herself. And what was this object? According to his theory, it was the fifteen-year-old girl he’d killed for. He’d believed he was attracted to her goodness, for its potential to redeem him, but to the Killer she was a fellow killer and liar and seducer. Her solemn gaze turned him on because it took him back to the night behind his parents’ dacha, to the body of the man whom she’d seduced and lied to and helped him kill. The more she became her own person, became his mother’s friend and many other women’s friend, the harder it was to see her as that fifteen-year-old.

Denied this particular satisfaction, he was prone to Killer-sponsored fantasies, some of them so offensive to his self-image (for example, the fantasy of coming on Annagret while she was sleeping) that it took a huge exertion of honesty to clock them before he suppressed them. All of the fantasies, without exception, involved darkness at night, the darkness at his parents’ dacha, the darkness of a hallway down which he was eternally walking to a bedroom. In his subatomic self, no chronology was stable. The object he wanted predated the piercings, the hair choppings, the gauzy Indian smocks she’d taken to wearing, and not because he “secretly” preferred fifteen-year-olds (if he ever had, he’d outgrown it) but because it was Annagret the socialist judo girl who’d helped him kill. Had made him kill; was equivalent to killing. The older Annagret, who was going to absurdly altruistic lengths to atone for the murder, didn’t suit the Killer’s purposes one bit, and so the Killer, in its fantasies, reversed the arrow of time and made her fifteen again. And more than that: when he examined certain fantasies closely, it was sometimes not he but her stepfather who walked down the dark hallway to the bedroom where she was sleeping. He was at once the man he’d killed and the man who’d killed him, and since another dark hallway existed in his memory, the dark hallway between his childhood bedroom and his mother’s, there was a further twisting of chronology whereby his mother had given birth to the monster who was Annagret’s stepfather, he was that monster, and he’d killed him in order to become him. In the shadowy world of the Killer, nobody was ever dead.

He would have loved not to believe in his theory, would have loved to lump it with the mumbo-jumbo of contemporary physics and dismiss it, but the thing he loved most about himself was his refusal to lie to himself, and no matter how busy he got and how much he traveled, there always seemed to come another night when he found himself alone at home, in the grip of a homicidal rage that he had no other way of explaining.

On one such night, Annagret returned from his mother’s with an especially earnest look on her face. He was sitting on the sofa, not even pretending to be reading something. It was all he could do not to punch a wall; it was that bad.

“I thought you were coming home at nine,” he managed to say.

“We got to talking about things,” Annagret said. “I asked her about the fifties, what the country was like then. She told me all sorts of interesting things. But then — this is very strange. It’s important. Do you mind talking to me now?”

He could feel her looking at him, and he willed his lips to curl upward, to smile. “Of course not.”

“Have you eaten?”

“Not hungry.”

“I’ll make us some noodles later.” She sat down on the sofa by him. “Your mother was talking about your father’s career, how brilliant he was, how busy he was. And then suddenly she stopped and said, ‘I had a lover.’”

The rage inside him was titanic. How to keep from exploding? What a relief exploding was. How excellent it must have been for him to crush a man’s skull with a shovel. If only he could recall — reexperience — the relief of doing that! He couldn’t recall it. But the thought of it slightly calmed him; gave him something to hold on to.

“That’s interesting,” he murmured.

“I know. I couldn’t believe she was telling me. You said she’s always claimed it never happened. I was too afraid to ask her to say more about it, and she didn’t. Just ‘I had a lover.’ And then she changed the subject. But then she kept looking at me, I don’t know, like she wanted to make sure I’d noticed what she’d said.”

“Mm.”

“But listen. Andreas. I know we can’t tell anyone our secret. I know that. But I see her so often, she’s in her seventies, she is your mother. I had an impulse to tell her, and the impulse felt right. She would never tell anyone else, I’m sure of it. Do you think it’s all right if I tell her?”

He didn’t think so, not one bit. That Annagret could even imagine telling Katya! Previously unguessed vistas of female closeness opened up to his mind’s eye. Katya having her way with him by way of pliant Annagret. Annagret so credulous, so earnest, so ready to betray him. Coming home at ten thirty when she’d promised to be home by nine — so many hours with Katya. Talking, talking, talking. Cunts, cunts, cunts. He was out of his mind.

“Are you out of your mind?” he said.

“No, I’m not,” she said, immediately on guard. “And she isn’t, either. I actually think she’s better. I know she was difficult when you were little, but that was a long time ago.”

She knew? Difficult? She didn’t know. Nobody could know what having Katya as a mother had been like. What it was like to be psychically fucked with, day after day, and to be not only too young and weak to fight it but unable even to be angry, because she’d seduced him into wanting it. Annagret had wanted it from her stepfather for a week or two, a month at most. Andreas had wanted it throughout his childhood. And yet again he was trapped, because, unlike Annagret, he hadn’t been physically raped. He had to live with the possibility that there had never been anything so monstrous about Katya. Her version of reality was seamless, especially in old age, her youthful peccadilloes now forgotten or rendered harmless by a nice French word like lover. She’d always insisted that the disturbance was in him, not her; that it was sick of him not to believe she was a good and loving mother. And indeed it was he who’d been sitting for hours in a jealous rage, waiting for the ladies to finish with their cozy chat.

“It can be a relief to confess things,” Annagret said. “Sometimes I think you forget that you got to confess to your father. I don’t get to confess to anyone.”

COULD KILL HER WITH BARE HANDS RIGHT NOW

“Once you start confessing,” he said chalkily.

“What?”

“Where does it stop?”

“I’m saying we tell one person. Your own mother. Don’t you want to? Your father was very understanding, and you felt better. I bet your mother would be all the more understanding, because she knows what it’s like to make mistakes.”

Suddenly his mind changed temperature, as minds will do. In a cooler state, he imagined his mother knowing what they’d done. Katya was truly the last person in the world he had reason to be ashamed in front of, Katya who to him was vileness personified, and yet he imagined himself ashamed of being a killer. Ashamed of everything, every particle of himself, right up to this moment. Strangle his sweet judo girl to silence her? What was wrong with him?

Without looking at her face, he rotated toward her and buried his own face in her chest. He swung his legs up onto her lap and hung his arms around her neck. He looked like that stupid picture of John Lennon in Yoko’s arms but who cared. He needed to be held. She was better than good, because she hadn’t always been good. Had known badness and chosen goodness.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, stroking his hair, babying him. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Shh.”

“Are you all right?”

“Shh, shh.”

“What is it?”

“We can’t tell her,” he said.

“We can, though. We should.”

“Please, no. We can’t.”

He began to cry. The Killer stirred in him again, sensing opportunity in his tears, his regression. The Killer liked regression. The Killer liked it when he was four and Annagret fifteen. Blindly, with his eyes squeezed shut, he sought her lips with his. For a moment, hers were open and available, but then, as if she were prey, instinctively sensing a Killer she couldn’t see, she averted her face. “We have to finish discussing this,” she said.

Discuss, discuss, discuss. Talk, talk, talk. He hated her. Needed her, hated her, needed her, hated her. Eyes still shut, he tried to kiss her again.

“I’m serious,” she said, trying to stand up. “Get off my lap.”

He got off her lap and opened his eyes. “Go to a priest,” he said.

“What?”

“If you want to confess. Find a Catholic church, go to the confessional, say what you have to say. You’ll feel better.”

“I’m not Catholic.”

“I can’t stop you from seeing her, but I don’t like it.”

“She worships you! You’re practically her Jesus.”

“She worships what she sees in a mirror. We’re just useful objects to her. The more you tell her, the more she can use us.”

“I’m sorry, but I think you’re very wrong.”

“Fine. I’m wrong. But I can’t keep living with you if you tell her what we did.”

Her face went red. “Then maybe we shouldn’t live together!”

“Maybe not. Maybe you should live with her instead.”

“I’m trying to have a close relationship with your mother, because you can’t do it. I’m doing you a big favor, and now you’re jealous!”

“I’m not jealous.”

“I think you are.”

“Not true. Not true.”

Everything she said was accurate, every word of his a lie. And yet he was a well-paid transitional-justice consultant, and everywhere he went people were happy to see him. They fawned over his honesty and openness, they laughed at his irreverent humor, they took flattering pictures of him. He was trapped from all sides.

Meanwhile the leaks kept coming, in plain brown envelopes and cartons without return addresses. Being German, and East German at that, he was technologically conservative and still thought in terms of paper documents and physical computer disks. As late as the summer of 2000, he shared a home computer and email address with Annagret. She, with her community-organizing, her fringe causes, was the tech-savvy one. More and more often, he came home to find her typing and clicking away, in her absurdly limber posture on a chair, knees drawn up to her chin, arms reaching around them, a tea mug by her computer mouse, and thought: My God, is this the rest of my life? To the Killer in him, it seemed as if she’d armed herself with the Internet to defend herself against the person he really was. There was no prying her away from it.

But then she did him a seemingly lifesaving favor. She made him buy his own powerful computer and take full advantage of it. Which he proceeded to do. By night, he developed a network of malcontents and hackers and created the Sunlight Project; by day, while Annagret was off holding hands at her community center, he viewed pornography. It was really the latter more than the former that sold him on the Internet and its world-altering potential. The sudden wide availability of porn, the anonymity of access, the meaninglessness of copyright, the instantaneity of gratification, the scale of the virtual world within the real world, the global dispersion of file-sharing communities, the sensation of mastery that mousing and clicking brought: the Internet was going to be huge, especially for bringers of sunlight.

It was only much later, when the Internet had come to signify death to him, that he realized he’d also been glimpsing death in online porn. Every compulsion, certainly his own viewing of digital images of sex, which quickly became day-devouringly compulsive, smacked of death in its short-circuiting of the brain, its reduction of personhood to a closed loop of stimulus and response. But there was also already, in the days of file-transfer protocols and “alt” newsgroups, a sense of the unfathomable vastness that would characterize the mature Internet and the social media that followed it; in the uploaded images of somebody’s wife sitting naked on a toilet, the characteristic annihilation of the distinction between private and public; in the mind-boggling number of wives sitting naked on toilets, in Mannheim, in Lübeck, in Rotterdam, in Tampa, a premonition of the dissolution of the individual in the mass. The brain reduced by machine to feedback loops, the private personality to a public generality: a person might as well have been already dead.

And death, of course, was catnip to the Killer. The images on the screen of his computer distracted him from thoughts of dark hallways and secret defilements, and for a while he believed that he’d found a way to make life with Annagret livable in the long run. He could preserve his ideal self in his own eyes by remaining mindful of the male exploitation of women he was witnessing on his screen, deploring it even as it stimulated him, and then, after discharging his urges, he could preserve the ideal in Annagret’s eyes as well. To paraphrase Frank Zappa, she’d thought it was a man she wanted, but instead it was a muffin. Maybe she was punishing him for forbidding her to confess their crime to Katya, or maybe it was gender politics or maybe just the normal course of things, but she seemed not to care if they ever had sex again. What she wanted — explicitly asked for, in her concept-heavy way — was closeness and togetherness. These could be achieved by cuddling, and Andreas, with his needs met elsewhere, was fine with cuddling. The Internet had made it easier for both of them to be like children.

It took him half a year to realize that, far from escaping, he’d trapped himself more deeply. He believed that if he couldn’t make a life work with beautiful Annagret, wedded to her by their secret and by his old hope of redemption, he’d never again muster enough hope to make a life work with anyone. To leave her would be to admit that something had always been wrong with him. But something was wrong with him. He was even more of a compulsive masturbator now than he’d been as a teenager. Repetition was objectively boring but he couldn’t stop it. The right-thinking incantations that had worked for a while, his scrupulous efforts to imagine the circumstances under which a teenage girl would permit three thuggish Russian men to ejaculate on her face in front of a camera, and to feel compassion for such a girl, no longer worked. What happened in the virtual world, where beauty existed for the purpose of being hated and besmirched, was more compelling than what happened in the real world, where beauty seemed to have no purpose at all. He became afraid of being touched by Annagret. He took a deep breath whenever he saw it coming, so that he wouldn’t flinch. Closeness and togetherness were precisely what he couldn’t bear now, and it was all the more desperately important that she not find this out and leave him in disgust. Without her idealization, there was no hope for him. He began to wonder if suicide, his own death, was what the Killer really wanted.

Although he knew the Killer was his enemy, he could never quite bring himself to hate it. Whenever he tried to tell himself that he hated it, his mind took a step back and saw that he was lying: he didn’t honestly want to be anything but exactly who he was. This was especially evident in the lack of guilt he felt about killing Horst Kleinholz. He was never able to wish he hadn’t done it. Indeed, when he was being fully honest with himself, he was immensely glad he had. And the same was true of the afternoons he spent jerking off at his powerful computer. He condemned what he was doing by the principles he wanted to believe in, but he could never hate it in the moment. Instead he resented Annagret, resented his own moral considerations, resented his other responsibilities, for standing in the way of his compulsion. And yet it was complicated, because when his watchful self stepped back from the computer over which he was hunched with his pants around his ankles, he hated what he saw. He wasn’t constituted to hate himself subjectively, but he did hate the object he was in the world. The shameful, loathsome object with which something was very wrong. And it was beginning to occur to him that Annagret and his mother might be better off without that object; that he should have chosen a higher bridge to jump from as a teenager.

In something near desperation, he wrote a letter to Tom Aberant. Over the years, he and Tom had kept up a postcard correspondence. Tom’s cards had the wry American tone that Andreas had liked in him, but they lacked the confessional warmth that had incited him to make his own confession. In his letter, he tried to revive the warmth. He said he now understood what had happened in Tom’s marriage; he mentioned, with what he hoped was self-deprecating humor, that he was somewhat overly preoccupied with Internet porn; he pretended he had business that might soon take him to New York. It shouldn’t have been hard for Tom to read between the lines and discern a plea for help. But the postcard Tom sent in reply was wry and distant and contained no invitation to New York.

It fell to Andreas’s mother, of all people, to rescue him. At her invitation, he went to her flat for lunch on a rainy September Friday, four days before Al Qaeda’s masterstroke. He was late because he’d found it necessary to experience orgasm one more time before he left, to bring himself as low as he could. Depression could be a sort of narcotic, dulling the impulse to argue with Katya and contradict her. The less he said to her, the better. Best of all would have been not to have lunch with her, but she’d told him that they needed to discuss Annagret’s future privately. She’d hinted that it had to do with drawing up a new will.

Naturally, this turned out to have been a lie. At her flat, while she was setting out the prepared foods she’d bought at the Galeria, Andreas asked her, dully, about her will.

“I didn’t invite you here to talk about my will,” she said. “That’s my own business.”

He sighed. “I only asked because you mentioned it when you called me.”

“The two things were not related. I’m sorry if you thought they were.”

The narcotic was working. He didn’t argue.

“You look so tired,” she said.

“Life in the computer age.”

When they sat down to eat, her little dog came over to her. She smiled at Andreas. “We go through the same charade at every meal.”

“Which charade is that?”

“The charade of withholding and discipline.”

“I remember it well.”

“Lessing,” she said to the dog. “Begging does not become you.”

The dog barked and put its paws on her linen-clad thigh.

“It’s terrible,” she said. “It’s as if I’m her pet, not the other way around.” She gave the dog a morsel of roast potato. “Be happy with that potato,” she told it. “That’s all you’re getting.”

“So,” Andreas said, “I’m not very hungry, and I have a lot of work to do.”

“Yes, all right. Silly me for thinking you might spend a few hours with your only parent.”

“You know you’d rather read about me than experience me in person. Why pretend?”

The dog had its paws on her thigh again. She gave it more potato.

“I’ll come to the point,” she said. “I’m concerned about Annagret.”

Dulled though he was, spent though he was, it occurred to him that if the lunch were a short one he might still have some free hours with his computer before Annagret came home. There was certainly nothing to like about the real world he was inhabiting.

“Andreas,” Katya said. “I think she might have to leave you.”

“Excuse me?”

“You know how fond I’ve always been of her — almost as if she were my own daughter. In a sense, she’s been my daughter. She really doesn’t have another mother.”

“So — what? I’ve been sleeping with my sister?”

“Leave it to you to have a thought like that and say it out loud. You know that’s not what I meant. I meant that we’ve become very close.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“And I also know you better than anyone else in the world does.”

“So you like to say.”

“I never worry about what will happen to you. You’re a dominant person, born to dominate, and everyone can sense it. You can do whatever you want, and somehow the world will find a way to love you for it. You’ve been extraordinary since the day you were born.”

He pictured this extraordinary, dominant person forty-five minutes earlier, pants down, whacking away. “So you like to say,” he said.

“Well, Annagret isn’t like you. She’s bright but not brilliant. She admires you but isn’t like you. And I’m afraid — I can only assume — that she’s decided she doesn’t belong with a person so brilliant and dominant. There’s no other explanation. And—” Katya’s face hardened. “I hate to say this. But I think she’s right.”

“Do go on,” Andreas said.

“We’re speaking in confidence.”

“Of course.”

“Lessing—” She gave an entire pork cutlet to the dog, which scampered away with it. “Are you happy now?” she called after it mockingly.

“It’s becoming less of a mystery how you stay so trim,” Andreas said.

“Annagret confessed something to me.”

He felt light-headed.

“I promised her I wouldn’t tell you. I’m breaking that promise now, but I won’t apologize for it. Those that betray them do no treachery.” Katya was quoting something in English. “Besides which, I think she knew I would tell you. She said it was weighing on her conscience — but why tell me? She knows very well that I’m your mother.”

He frowned.

“She isn’t right for you, Andreas. I thought I would be the last person ever to say that. But she’s not right, and I’m very angry with her now. In a sense, she betrayed me, too.”

“What exactly are we talking about?”

“I’m sure there are strains in your life with her. No couple can live for ten years without any strains at all. But look at you!” She sized him up with a fanatical blaze in her eyes. “She shouldn’t love anyone but you!”

There seemed to be no end to the ways his mother could disturb him. He kept thinking that he must have seen it all, that she’d finally exhausted her supply. But there was always more.

“Annagret thinks better of me than I deserve,” he said quietly. “I’m not an entirely well person.”

“I can only imagine what she was thinking, but she appears to be in some sort of relationship with a woman at her community center. I don’t know how far it’s gone, but obviously it’s far enough that she needed to confess it—to me. Well, I didn’t know what to say. I asked her if she thought she might be a lesbian. She said she didn’t think she was. It didn’t really make sense, what she was saying, but I gather that the woman is older and they have some sort of friendship-that’s-more-than-just-friendship. She kept using the phrase a special kind of closeness, whatever that means. And she wanted me — me! — to tell her what it meant.”

He knew the person in question. “The woman’s name is Gisela?”

“Andreas, I’ve been studying literature my entire life. I know a thing or two about human psychology. What I’m seeing is that Annagret isn’t right for you and she knows it. But I’m not the one to tell her that. In fact, I’m not sure I ever need to see her again.”

If Katya was to be believed (admittedly a big if), Annagret had given him an amazing gift, a deus ex machina, a way out of the trap. But he was wary of it. It seemed as if Annagret knew more about him than he’d realized, and was disgusted by him, and had consciously gone to someone else for what he wasn’t giving her. Would she feel guilty enough to keep her mouth shut after she was free of him?

“People have affairs all the time,” he said. “You had affairs and stayed married. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”

“If you were the one doing it,” Katya said, “it wouldn’t necessarily mean anything. You have the soul of an artist, beyond good and evil. But she’s too small for you. She knows it. She’s said it to me herself, how hard it is to live in your shadow.”

“I haven’t seen any sign of that.”

“She wouldn’t tell you. She did tell me. And she turned for comfort to this special friend of hers, and she told me about that, too. You’re gifted at math — you tell me what two plus two is.”

“This is so sick. That we’re having this conversation.”

“I’m sorry. I know how much you care about her. But I really don’t think I need to see her anymore. My loyalty is to you, not to the person who finds it necessary to betray you.”

He stood up and walked away from the table. If Katya was to be believed, Annagret blamed herself and still idealized him. The exit door was open wide. But all at once he felt terribly sorry for her. That she still revered him and considered herself small by comparison and had been so lonely that she crawled to Gisela: he felt restored to the sweet compassion he’d experienced in the church sanctuary on Siegfeldstraße, and with it to all the hope he’d invested in Annagret, to the innocence of his yearning to be a better person, before he’d descended into filth and doubt. His darling lost judo girl.

“Andreas,” his mother said softly.

He turned to her, struggling not to cry. “It was wrong of you to tell me.”

“Nothing a person does out of love can be wrong.”

“Wrong! Wrong!”

He fled through the front door, past the elevator, and into the stairwell, where he could sob without fear of being discovered by his mother. It was years since there had been a shred of evidence that he was happy with Annagret. Everything about his miserable existence, down to the rawly chafed dick in his underpants at this very moment, argued against them. He couldn’t be any more miserable without her than he already was, and she’d be happier without him, too. But none of this lessened his grief. He’d never experienced grief like this. It seemed as if he really loved her after all.

Grief passed, however. Before he was even home again, he could see his future. He would never again make the mistake of trying to live with a woman. For whatever reason (probably his childhood), he wasn’t suited for it, and the strong thing to do was to accept this. His computer had made a weakling of him. He also had a vague, shameful memory of climbing onto Annagret’s lap and trying to be her baby. Weak! Weak! But now his mother, with her meddling, had given him the pretext he needed to be free of both her and Annagret. A double deus ex machina — the good luck of a man fated to dominate. It was ironic, of course, that the person who’d recalled him to his stronger self and made his weakness visible to him was Katya. Ironic that, although she was a liar, he’d recognized the truth of her description of him. Ironic that he would owe his new freedom to her. But this didn’t make her meddling any less despicable. She’d played herself out of any future with him.

At home, he cleansed his hard drive of downloaded obscenity. His new sense of purpose and sobriety felt well worth the compulsive binge it had cost him to attain it. He washed the dishes in the sink and dried them. He saw that he would soon be bringing other women to wherever he lived, one after another — the repetition of a strong man — and that his new place would have to be clean and orderly, to signify self-mastery.

He was sitting straight-backed at the computer, bringing self-mastery to bear on his email queue, when Annagret came home with some dismal “bio” vegetables in a string bag.

“I’m only here to change clothes,” she said. “We have a protest for the rent strikers.”

“That’s fine,” he said. “But sit down for a minute first.”

She sidled into the living room and perched on the edge of a chair and fixed her eyes on the floor. It seemed to him that she was radiating guilt. Interesting that he hadn’t perceived it sooner. He’d carefully thought through the wording of what he had to say to her, but now that it was time to say it, he hesitated. He still had grief in him, and he wondered if he shouldn’t be saying something very different with his newly regained sense of command: Enough bullshit, enough cuddling. Strip naked for me. We’re going to do things differently now. Conceivably she might welcome it; conceivably it could save them. But more likely she’d refuse, which would hurt him and shame him, and there were, in any case, many other women to whom he could speak like that. Their appeal, too, was perceptible in a way it hadn’t been before.

“We’re not happy together,” he said.

She bowed her head and shifted uncomfortably. “It’s been difficult lately, I know. We haven’t been so close. I know that. But…”

“I know about you and Gisela.”

She blushed intensely, and he felt another surge of compassion for her, but also, for the first time, anger. She’d betrayed him, just as Katya had said. Until this moment, he hadn’t been angry at all.

“Go to her,” he said coldly. “Stay with her. I’ll find another place to live.”

She bowed her head further. “It’s not what you think…”

“I don’t care what it is. It’s just a pretext anyway. We shouldn’t be together.”

“But who told you?”

“People come to me with dirt. It’s my job to know things.”

“Did Katya tell you?”

“Katya? No. It doesn’t matter anyway. Do you honestly like being with me?”

It was a while before she answered. “It used to be better,” she said, “when we felt closer … I think you’re a good person … A great person. It’s just…”

“What?”

“Sometimes I wonder why you wanted to be with me in the first place.”

Hearing this, the Killer in him became alert.

“You were the one who said we had to be together,” she said. “I knew in my heart that it was wrong. I thought there was a way for us to not be so guilty, if we stayed apart, but as soon as we got together it meant we’d been guilty from the beginning.”

“I was in love with you. I made a mistake.”

“I was in love with you, too. But it was never right, was it.”

“No.”

She began to cry. “And now we’ll never get over what we did.”

“Not as long as we stay together.”

“I’m so tired of living with it. I’m sorry I did this new bad thing, it’s not even what you think. I guess I thought, ‘I’m guilty anyway — what does it matter what I do?’”

“It’s good you did it. I wouldn’t have had the guts.”

He wondered if he should go ahead and mention the computer now, make a clean breast of his own transgressions and give her some consoling company in her guilt. But the Killer said no. The Killer had only one objective now: to make sure she never had moral cause to betray him by telling someone else about the killing. Although it pained him to see her crying and apologizing, it was also reassuring. She still suffered from a sense of worthlessness for having wanted Horst, for having been abused, and even as Andreas was pitying her for this he was savoring his coming freedom. The sweet freedom of getting away with everything, of never having to see her dowdy and earnest friends again, of never having to have another discussion.

“We could have spent ten years in prison,” he said. “Instead we spent ten years together. Maybe that was our prison. Maybe we’ve served our sentence. You’re only twenty-eight — you can do whatever you want now.”

“You’re right. It did start to feel like prison. It … Oh! I’m sorry!”

“Things will be better when you’re out of it.”

“I’m sorry!”

“Don’t be sorry. Just go. Go to your protest.”

The grief returned when she was gone. He welcomed it, almost luxuriated in it, because it was a real emotion, untainted by doubt about his secret motives. Like the compassion it grew out of, it suggested that there might not, after all, be anything so wrong with him. Maybe, if he took care never to live with another woman, he could succeed in living up to the image other people had of him. Maybe the Killer had been merely a figment, a projection of his embattled but still fundamentally sound moral sense, an artifact of the misfortune that the love of his life was also the person with whom he’d committed a murder. A misfortune, certainly. But maybe it was enough to explain his vile feelings, his rage, his jealousy, his radical doubt, his sick urges. Maybe, with self-mastery, he could put all that behind him now.

After the planes hit New York and Washington, Annagret ran home to make sure he was OK. This was irrational but not unusual that day; there was a sense that with crazy things happening in America they could be happening anywhere, to anyone. But he and Annagret had been growing apart for so long that when the thread of togetherness was snapped they elastically sprang even farther apart, finding themselves with no friends or even any interests in common. All he had left, really, was the sentimental and periodically grief-inducing conviction that she had been the love of his life.

Cutting the cord with Katya wasn’t as easy. He deleted her phone messages without listening to them, and when she came to him in person he closed his door in her face and threw the bolt loudly; a week later, he moved to a new and more secure flat in Kreuzberg. But it wasn’t hard to find his phone number, and later in the fall, after he’d been in the headlines for breaking the news of German computer sales to Saddam Hussein, one of his first big Internet leaks, he got a call from a man who said he had a document of interest to him.

“If it’s paper, put it in the mail,” Andreas said. “If it’s digital, email it to me.”

The caller had a Berlin accent and vocal cords that sounded slack with age. “I’d prefer to bring it to you in person.”

“No. As you might imagine, I have some fear for my personal safety these days.”

“I’m not bringing you a bomb. Just a document. It concerns you personally.”

“Mail it.”

“I’m not sure you understand. The revelations in this document refer to you personally.”

Andreas didn’t know who besides Tom Aberant could still expose his old crime. Captain Wachtler, who’d brought him his files at Stasi headquarters, was long dead — Andreas had used his position on the Gauck Commission to track the downward progress of Wachtler’s health — but there were an indeterminate number of nameless functionaries above and below him on the old chain of command. They would all be older men with Berlin accents. It was possible that he was speaking to one of them now.

“What exactly do you want?” he said as levelly as he could.

“I want you to help me publish the document.”

“Even though it concerns me.”

“Yes.”

Andreas agreed to meet the caller at the Amerika Haus library, where security was heavy. The man he found waiting there, the following afternoon, had a handsome, ruined, clean-shaven drinker’s face. He looked to be in his late sixties and was dressed in tired Beatnik garb, a red turtleneck, a leather-elbowed corduroy blazer. Emphatically not former Stasi. There was a briefcase in front of him on the library table.

“So we meet again,” he said, with a smile, when Andreas was seated across from him.

“We’ve met?”

“I was younger. I had a beard. I’d spent a week sleeping under a bridge.”

Andreas never would have recognized him.

“How are you, my son?” his father said.

“Not so bad, until this moment.”

“I’ve been following your exploits. I hope you won’t mind that I’ve permitted myself some pride in you. Pride and a certain gloating satisfaction, given that the last time we met, you were so uninterested in learning secrets. How the world turns, eh? Now secrets are your business.”

“I’m aware of the irony. What do you want?”

“Some occasional contact with you wouldn’t be unwelcome.”

How to explain the distaste he felt at the prospect? It wasn’t just the red turtleneck, the elbow patches. It was that he sided with the memory of his other father. “Not interested,” he said.

His father’s smile became more pained. “Of course you’re an arrogant son of a bitch. You grew up privileged, everything’s always gone your way. How could you be anything else?”

“That pretty well sums it up.”

“You’re still on good terms with your mother, I suppose?”

“Hardly.”

“It’s shocking how little she’s changed.”

“You’ve seen her?”

“Through her doorway, briefly.”

“What do you want?”

His father opened his briefcase and took out a manuscript three fingers thick. “You’re not curious,” he said. “But I can tell you that not everything has gone my way. I was sent back to prison. Got out again and drove a taxicab until the Stasi was no more. Married a girl who was kind but a drinker. Became quite a drinker myself. I’m sober now — thank you for asking. I have a son — another son — with serious congenital disabilities. My wife took care of him until she died, two years ago. Our boy is in a facility now, not a very nice one, but the best I could manage. After the Turn, I was able to get work teaching English to eighth and ninth graders. I have a bit of a pension now from that, but mostly I live on federal charity.”

“That’s a tough story,” Andreas said with feeling. “I’m sorry.”

“Not your responsibility. I didn’t come here to accuse you. I’m sure it wasn’t easy having Katya as a mother. I was destroyed after only six years of her. Or, no, that’s not fair. I was crazy about her the whole time. The side of her she’d never show a child was really something.”

“I think I saw some of that side.”

“She’s sublime in her way. But, of course, she also destroyed me.”

“So…”

With a trembling hand, his father pushed the manuscript across the table. “In my retirement, I’ve taken to writing. This is my memoir. Have a look.”

The Crime of Love. By Peter Kronburg. Andreas was sorry to see his father’s name. Without a name, his existence had been conveniently spectral.

“I want you to read it,” Peter Kronburg said. “It won’t be a chore — I’m a good, clear writer. Your mother always said so.”

“No doubt. And presumably there are detailed scenes of sex with her? The very title seems to promise it.”

Peter Kronburg reddened slightly. “Only as pertinent to a larger story about the private life of the Central Committee.”

“My mother wasn’t on it.”

“Her husband was. The descriptions of sex stay within bounds of good taste, and that’s only half the book anyway. The rest is about prison and socialist ‘justice.’”

“And me. You said it pertained to me.”

Peter Kronburg reddened further. “At the end, I tell the story of our first meeting, and I admit that I’ve mentioned this aspect in my inquiries to publishers. I’m told it’s important to describe a potential marketing plan in the query letter.”

“The untold story of Wolf’s sordid origins. And you want my help?”

“With your name attached to the marketing plan, I believe the book could be a bestseller. I have a disabled son to provide for when I’m gone. The book simultaneously partakes of Ostalgie and represents a searing critique of it. We’re at a perfect historical moment for publishing it.”

“It’s astonishing that you haven’t created a bidding war.”

Peter Kronburg shook his head. “I get the same answer again and again. It seems that every publisher already has too many East memoirs coming out. Only one publisher even asked to see the manuscript, and some very young-sounding woman sent it back with the comment that it wasn’t enough about you.”

Andreas was feeling sad for his father. For his smallness in relation to the largeness of his son. For his grasping after the main chance from a position of marginality, his talk of a marketing plan. It was heartbreaking to see old Ossis trying to ape the thinking of Wessis, trying to master the lingo of capitalist self-promotion.

“I met my son a second time, at the Amerika Haus library,” Andreas said. “This meeting itself could be the coda to your book.”

Peter Kronburg shook his head again. “The purpose of the book isn’t to shame you. I’m not angry at you. At your mother, at your father, at the Stasi, yes. But not at you. Unless you care about protecting Katya, the book won’t hurt you in the slightest. Quite the contrary, I think.”

“How does that work?”

“As I understand it, your own marketing plan is sunlight. If you endorse the book, if you help me present it to publishers again — to high-level editors, not frightened twenty-three-year-olds — you’ll demonstrate that no secret is so sacred that you won’t expose it. You’ll be even more famous. Your legend will only grow.”

And yours along with it, Andreas thought. Maybe his father wasn’t quite as clueless as he’d imagined. Not quite so different from him. Maybe not different at all, just less lucky.

“And if I don’t help you?” he said. “You’ll go to Stern and tell them I’m a hypocrite?”

“I’m doing this for my son — my other son — and for justice. And I’m not sure that justice is so important at this point. It isn’t news to anyone that the Stasi and people like your parents were evil. But in the world that’s come after them, money is very important.”

“I have no money for you.”

“I suspect in time you will.”

Andreas riffled the dot-matrixed pages of the manuscript. His eye fell on the sentence She was a wildcat on her hands and knees. No need to read any more of that. But he was curious, a little bit, about the red-turtlenecked man across the table from him. Had he always been on the make? Had he imagined that he could ride Katya’s coattails, as her lover, to power and prestige within the socialist system? To be sent to prison as a state-subverter wasn’t an injustice if you really were a state-subverter. Injustice was to have been an apparatchik and not received your promised reward.

“I won’t give you money,” he said. “I don’t want to see you again, either. I buried my father, and I don’t need another one. But I’ll read the book and do what I can.”

With evident emotion, Peter Kronburg extended a trembling hand across the table. Andreas grasped the hand, as a parting gift to him. Then he took the manuscript and left without another word.

A decade earlier, he’d carefully read his own Stasi file. It was mostly tedious, because he’d never been the target of a full operation, but there were some surprises. At least two of the fifty-three “at-risk” girls he’d slept with had been unofficial collaborators, confounding his theory that the Stasi rarely employed females and never such young ones. One of the informants had reported that he told inappropriate jokes at the expense of the state, sowed disrespect for Scientific Socialism among his counselees, and exploited his church authority to prey on them sexually; that after endeavoring to gain his more complete trust by submitting to relations with him and discovering that he had aberrant sexual tendencies (by which she’d presumably meant that he preferred eating her state-subverting pussy to kissing her state-sanctioned mouth), she’d feigned a strong interest in environmental activism; and that he’d laughed and said the only green thing that interested him was pickles. It turned out that this informant had been twenty-two; he remembered only her name, not her face. The other one, whom he remembered better, had been legitimately seventeen. She’d reported that he didn’t fraternize with other antisocial elements at the church, didn’t encourage questioning of the guiding principles of Marxist-Leninist thought, and presented himself as a monitory example of the consequences of frivolously counterrevolutionary behavior. Not coincidentally, she’d had no complaints about the sex, either.

The other small surprise in his file was that, until September 1989, his mother had received a visit from the Stasi on the first Friday of every month, simply to attest that she’d had no contact with her son. The reports on those visits, of which there were more than a hundred, were brief and basically identical, except that for the first three years they’d included annotations, typed on a different typewriter, confirming that the wiretap on her office telephone was negative for communication with AW. On the first report without an annotation, someone had scrawled telephonic monitoring of KW suspended at request of Undersecy W.

Andreas had been moved, in spite of himself, to learn of the extent to which Katya herself had been oppressed by the Stasi. He could never quite blind himself to the many ways in which she was a victim — of her own mental instability, of parents who’d dragged her back to the Republic instead of leaving her in England, of a secret police that had exiled and possibly killed those parents, of a husband she didn’t love but was compelled to obey, of a system that stifled her native brilliance, of a lover who’d come back to Berlin to turn her son against her, and, finally, of that son himself. Mostly he hated her, but the potential for compassion continued to lurk in him. Compassion for the broken, lost, victimized girl she’d been. Sometimes he even wondered if he’d seen a young Katya in the fifteen-year-old Annagret; if this was the real idea behind his idea of her.

As he carried Peter Kronburg’s manuscript home to his flat, his compassion was afoot. Although he could see that Kronburg was right, that getting The Crime of Love published might help his own career, he could also see that he wasn’t going to read it himself. Partly he felt squeamish, but mostly he felt protective. The few friends Katya had nowadays were Brits and old Wessis — she wanted nothing to do with Ostalgie—and she would probably lose them if they read the book. Even in an era of forgive and forget, collaborating to put an innocent man in prison for ten years, as she must have done, could not, once remembered, be so easily forgiven. The proud mother of the Bringer of Sunlight would become the reviled mother.

And so, although he’d vowed to himself not to, he went to see her one more time. When she came to the door, she was pouty about his having avoided her for three months, but her pouting turned to anger after he’d sat her down and explained the situation.

“It’s because I refused to see him again,” she said. “He must have gone home and taken the only revenge he could.”

“My understanding is that money is his motive.”

“He preyed on me before, and now he’s doing it again.”

“It takes two to tango,” Andreas said in English.

“I’m not going to discuss this with you. I just shudder to think of you reading his version.”

“Truth is a tricky thing, isn’t it?”

“He had subversive levels of contact with the West. He was infatuated with America, the music especially. He’s lying if he says there was any other reason for his heavy sentence.”

“Oh, Mother.”

“What?”

“That’s the best you’ve got? He deserved ten years in prison for being an Elvis fan?”

Katya tossed her head. “It was a very frightening time, and he was disloyal. He wanted to leave the country with me, and then, when the Wall went up, he became desperate. He tried to destroy me. Destroy us, your father and me. I don’t imagine you read any of this in his version.”

Again and again, her dishonesty was the acid dissolving his compassion. He’d come to her with a wish to protect her from embarrassment. If she’d been authentic for just one moment, if she’d admitted that she’d made a mistake and regretted what she’d done to Peter Kronburg, he would have protected her.

“You loved him enough to keep his baby,” he suggested.

“Don’t say ‘his.’ You were my baby, not his.”

“Ha. If I could have resigned from that position, I’d have done it in a heartbeat.”

“You’re thriving. You’re magnificent. How bad a childhood could you have had?”

“Good point. I’m a famous credit to your mothering skills. But if I don’t help him publish his memoir, he can make me look like a hypocrite. Would you like that?”

She shook her head. “It’s an empty threat. He wouldn’t do that. Just burn the manuscript and ignore him. People have stopped caring about our dirty laundry. This will blow over.”

“Possibly. But here’s a thought experiment for you: would you rather that I look bad, or that you look bad? Think about it carefully before you answer.”

She stared straight ahead, her jaw set.

“Knotty little problem, right?”

She slumped against the rear cushions of her sofa, continuing to stare blankly. It was as if he were witnessing his question’s short-circuiting of her troubled brain. He imagined the fugue: A loving mother always puts her son’s welfare first, and to be a loving mother looks good, but in this case putting my son’s welfare first would entail my looking bad, and the whole point is not to look bad, and yet to worry about looking bad is not to put my son’s welfare first, and a loving mother always puts her son’s welfare first … Around and around like that.

“No-answer is an answer,” he said, standing up. “I’m going to leave now.”

She didn’t stop him; didn’t say anything at all. The last look he’d seen on her face had been so desolate that he wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d jumped out a window to her death. But the difference between him and her was her capacity for self-deception. She didn’t kill herself. Instead, after he’d worked his magazine connections and found a book publisher for The Crime of Love, and after it had spent twelve weeks on the Spiegel bestseller list and he’d reaped universal praise for promoting it, she moved to London and rented a flat near the house of her widowed sister. She published — in the London Review of Books, no less — a long and self-justifying and chokingly dishonest essay on the unreliability of East German memory. She kept living, living.

He did, too. There were plenty of women who really liked sex and wanted it with him, and there was global fame to be pursued. Both were compulsions but not pathological ones. For a long time, while talented young people flocked to the Sunlight Project, and while he applied his math and logic skills to becoming a crack technologist and a pretty good writer of code, and while the excitement of leaking increased with the pervasiveness of the Internet, until he had a bodyguard to protect him from crazies and a team of pro bono lawyers to defend him against the governments and corporations he lived to taunt, his ten years in prison with Annagret and the Killer seemed to him like a long bad dream that he’d awakened from. He never saw his mother, but in the great decade that followed the nineties, as he savored the ease of serial monogamy and the joy of consistently winning at the fame game, he sometimes thought back on her rhetorical question: how bad could his childhood have been? Even when he fled arrest in Germany, fled extradition from Denmark, found precarious refuge in Belize, luck was with him.

And then one day, in Belize, the Killer was back. Probably it had never been away, but he didn’t become aware of it until he was leaving the beachside compound of Tad Milliken, after a delicious lunch. Tad Milliken was the Silicon Valley venture capitalist who’d retired to Belize to avoid the inconvenience of a statutory-rape charge pending against him in California. He was certifiably insane, an Ayn Rander who fancied himself an Übermensch and “the Singularity’s chosen avatar,” but he was surprisingly good company if you kept him on topics like tennis and fishing. He considered Andreas the second-most world-historical person residing in Belize, a fellow Übermensch, and wanted to be his friend, but this was awkward. Andreas badly needed money and hoped that Tad might give him some, and Tad still had Internet apologists who remembered him fondly as a father of the Revolution and insisted that he had an airtight insanity defense on the rape charge, but Tad had recently been in the news again for shooting a neighbor’s pet macaw with the silver-plated Colt.45 he carried with him everywhere, and Andreas couldn’t afford to be seen in public with him. Creepy sex stuff had already tarred Assange’s reputation. Andreas imagined people googling “tad milliken,” seeing “Andreas Wolf” and “statutory rape” on the first page of results, conflating his blondness and his line of work with the unfortunate orthographic proximity of “Andreas” to “Assange,” and receiving the subliminal impression that he had a thing for fifteen-year-olds. Which he no longer did. And so he went to socially contortionate lengths to conceal from Tad his wish to see him only at his compound or on his fishing boat. It helped that, whenever they had a date, Tad sent a driver in a dark-windowed Escalade.

Tad was a self-documentarian. He had a self-activating camera in the Yankees cap he always wore and a tiny video device on a lanyard around his neck. At lunch, which was served poolside by a barefoot beauty named Carolina, conceivably as old as sixteen, Andreas had asked whether Tad might, for once, turn the cameras off. Tad, who was wearing a Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned to show off his sea-turtle belly, his tanned and heavily crunched abdominals, laughed and said, “You have something to hide today?”

“I’m just wondering where all this data goes.”

“Let the sun shine in, man. You’re on Candid Camera.” Tad laughed again.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you. But if something were to happen to you…”

“You mean, if I die? I’m never going to die. That’s the whole point of life-logging.”

“Right.”

“The data’s in the cloud, and the cloud is eternally self-renewing. The error rate compared to DNA self-replication? Five orders of magnitude lower. Everything will be there, pristinely preserved, when they reboot me. I want to remember this lunch. I want to remember Carolina’s little toes.”

“I see what’s in it for you. But from my point of view—”

“You don’t care for the cloud.”

“Not so much.”

“It’s still in its infancy. You’ll love it when they reboot you.”

“I already spend every day fishing unsavory things out of it.”

“Ah, speaking of fish—”

Carolina had appeared with a platter of grilled fish on banana leaves. She moved Tad’s silver gun to one side and set down the platter, and he pulled her onto his lap and kissed the side of her neck. Her smile seemed somewhat pained. Pulling the low-cut bodice of her dress away from her chest, Tad pointed his video device down inside the dress. “I’m going to want to remember these, too,” he said. “These especially.”

Carolina slapped away the camera and wordlessly extricated herself.

“She’s still mad at me about the bird,” Tad said, watching her go.

“I can’t say it’s playing well in the press, either.”

“Oh, it wasn’t that she liked the bird. It was worse than living next door to a sheet-metal plant, the shrieking of that thing. She just didn’t think I could bag it without a shotgun. It was almost religious-superstitious. Thou shalt not use a revolver on a bird. She was deaf to my argument that a revolver is more sporting.”

Andreas took some fish. “Let’s talk about Bolivia.”

“The country has no coast,” Tad said. Possibly the most repellent thing about him was the dainty way he stabbed at food and poked it into his mouth, as if contact with it were a necessary evil. “It had a coast, but Chile stole it. Anyway, I can’t live there. I need the sea. But there’s a place in the mountains, Los Volcanes. Used to be owned by a German guy who does ecological survey work. I’d hired him when I was thinking I could corner the world market in lithium. He told me he’d been flying in a small plane and seen this little Shangri-la valley and said to himself, What the fuck? Bought it for thirty-five thousand American, unbelievable. I took an extra day to go and see it, and he was right. The place is unearthly. I offered him a million, he settled for one and a half. Some things you see and you just gotta have ’em.”

“Does it have electricity? Cable?”

“Nothing. But the country has a president you can do business with. He was president of the coca growers’ association when he got elected. Did he stop being president of the association? No way! That’s what I call style. President of Bolivia and the coca growers’ association. He screwed me on the lithium thing, but it was the right thing to do if you were him. And now he owes me. I can make the introduction. I can lease you Los Volcanes for a dollar a year. Throw in ten million for infrastructure improvements and operating expenses — you’ll want to lay a fiber-optic line.”

“Why would you do this for me?”

“You need a secure base. I need black-swan insurance. Belize is working for me now, gotta love the police here, but we’re still pre-Singularity. If people like you and me are going to re-create the world, we may need a place where we can ride out transitional disruptions. Also, I don’t see Greenland melting down before the Singularity, but if it does, nuclear weaponry could be utilized. We’ve backed away from nuclear-winter capability, but there could still be a nuclear autumn, a nuclear November, in which case the equator’s where you want to be. Isolated valley in the center of an untargeted continent. Make sure you’ve got some comely young females, some spare parts, some goats and chickens. You can make the place cozy. I’d hate to have to join you there, but it could happen.”

Tad stopped talking to stab at his fish and consume it with distrustful, snapping lunges with his mouth. Then he pushed his plate away as if disavowing something shameful.

“I’m not sure how to say this except bluntly,” Andreas said, “or why I’m bothering to say it with your cameras sending this conversation to the cloud. But it would be important to me that no one know where the money is coming from.”

Tad frowned. “Do I embarrass you?”

“No, of course not. I think we understand each other. But I have my own identity in the world, and … how to say this? Your legal troubles don’t mesh well with it.”

“My legal troubles are nothing compared to yours, my friend.”

“I violated German official-secrets law and American anti-hacking law. That plays well even in the mainstream media. Certainly better than a sex charge.”

“The old media live to smear me. I am the Primary Disruptor, and they know it.”

“I get some of that, too. Which is why—”

“Of all the antenimbusian systems, the legal system is the most intellectually offensive to me. ‘One size fits all’—my God. It’s even worse than brick-and-mortar commerce. Why on earth, when we have the computing power to individually tailor everything else, do people still think the law should apply equally to everyone? Not every fifteen-year-old is alike, believe me. And am I exactly the same as every other sixty-four-year-old male?”

“It’s an interesting point.”

“And the rules of evidence — it’s not a search for truth, it’s an affront to truth. I have the truth, I have it recorded. And the lawyers cover their ears with their hands, literally cover their ears, and tell me they don’t want to hear about it. Can a system be any more fubar than that? I am counting the days until a ‘trial’ consists of nothing more than sitting down and viewing the digital truth.”

“But in the meantime…”

“It’s fine,” Tad said, somewhat crossly. “You can keep my name out of it. The Volcanes place is registered to a Bolivian corporation I set up to get around their foreign-ownership nonsense. There’s three layers of shell there. The Bolivian entity can disburse the money.”

“You really don’t mind?”

“We’re both truth-tellers, but I’m the more radical one. I have the guts to look you in the eye and tell you that your form of truth-telling is lesser than mine. But you’re more likable. You can be truth-telling’s friendlier public face.”

“Sounds good to me,” Andreas said.

The bad incident occurred after he and Tad had walked out to the compound’s main gate. Not seeing the Escalade there, Tad phoned the driver, who said he was returning from a gas station. A few minutes later, as the gate was opening inward and the Escalade coming through it, a bald man with a camera, a gringo in a many-pocketed khaki vest, popped out from behind a palm tree across the road. He auto-fired at least ten shots of Andreas and Tad, with Tad’s house behind them, before Andreas took cover behind the Escalade.

How could he have been so stupid as to stand in plain sight? It was bad, and it got worse. Tad had assumed a firing stance, aiming his revolver at the photographer, whose shutter Andreas continued to hear clucking. “Drop the camera, asshole,” Tad shouted. “You think I wouldn’t do it? You think I’m afraid?”

The gun was surprisingly unsteady. Tad’s driver jumped out of the Escalade, looking bewildered. There was a scuffle of footsteps from the road. Tad lowered the gun and ran to the cages along the wall by the gate and released two of his Rottweilers.

Thus endeth my run of good luck, Andreas thought.

He and the driver followed Tad through the gate and watched the dogs tearing up the road after the photographer. This was the point at which the Killer made its presence known. The photographer stumbled against a parked minivan, and the dogs caught up with him and lunged without hesitation, one of them biting his arm, the other his leg. Andreas found himself hoping the dogs would kill him.

Tad was hustling up the road with his gun.

Andreas got in the Escalade and told the driver to do the same. By the time they were through the gate, the dogs were mewling and staggering — the photographer must have pepper-sprayed them — and the minivan was heading straight at Tad, who seemed to have lost interest in confrontation. He wandered off the road, his gun hanging loosely in his hand. The driver had to jerk the wheel of the Escalade to avoid collision with the minivan.

“Turn around and follow him,” Andreas said.

The driver nodded, not very happily, and didn’t hurry. By the time he’d turned the vehicle around, the road was empty. “He’s gone,” he said, as if this settled the matter.

Apparently nothing had changed. The Killer hadn’t gone anywhere. Andreas felt like a dreamer awakening to an existence that had grown all the more desperate in the decade he’d been happily asleep. Instead of love, he had fame. Instead of a wife or children or real friends, like the friend Tom Aberant could have been, he had Tad Milliken. He was alone with the Killer.

He instructed the driver to take him to the nearest clinic. The photographer’s minivan was parked outside it. Drops of fresh blood on the asphalt led to a red smear on the linoleum inside the door. Two Belizean women and four sick children were in the waiting room.

“I need to see my friend,” Andreas told the receptionist. “The one who was bitten.”

This being Belize, he was ushered right in to an examination room where a young doctor was cleaning a gnarly wound, one of several, on the photographer’s arm. “Please wait outside,” the doctor said without looking up.

The photographer, on his back, rolled his head toward Andreas. His eyes widened.

“I’m a friend,” Andreas said. “I want to make this right.”

“Your friend tried to kill me.”

“I’m sorry. He’s insane.”

“You think?”

“Please wait outside,” the doctor said.

The camera was sitting on a chair. Easy enough to walk away with it, but the pictures were only part of the problem. Money would have helped with the rest of the problem, but he was famed for having none. Famed for the Gandhian simplicity of his existence, the suitcase and briefcase in which his earthly possessions fit. Mostly this worked in his favor, but it wasn’t working now.

Out in the parking lot, under a roasting sun, he called his former girlfriend Claudia, in whose family’s beach house the Sunlight Project was currently conducting operations. The family’s patience with being denied access to their own vacation place, and with being billed for the Project’s expenses, was wearing perilously thin, but Claudia’s loyalty was still solid and cost him nothing but submission to her teasing. It was only midnight in Berlin. She was at a Spree-side club when he reached her and directed her to cover the photographer’s medical expenses. “I’ll text you the number,” he said.

Claudia laughed. “Do you want me to hop on a plane and bring you a latte while I’m at it?”

“Low-fat milk, half caffeinated.”

“It wasn’t like I was sitting down to dinner with my friends or something.”

Andreas knew very well that the only thing that could make her shine brighter in her friends’ eyes than taking a midnight call from him was leaving the club to do important business for him. They knew she’d been his girl for six months, back in the middle of the sweet decade that now was over, the decade when fame was all good and no bad. He’d received interesting sex from Claudia, along with other considerations worth at least two hundred thousand euros, and yet she was the one who felt more grateful, because he was the famous outlaw hero. How sweet it all had been.

The photographer, whose name was Dan Tierney, emerged from the clinic an hour later. His shaved head made him seem older than he probably was. The bandages on his arm and leg didn’t look too serious. “Somebody in Berlin seems to have taken care of my bill,” he said.

“A friend of mine,” Andreas said. “How are you feeling?”

“The benchmark for me is getting stung on the eyelid by a scorpion. I’m maybe at four out of ten on that scale.”

“Can I buy you a drink?”

“No. I’m going back to my hotel room and taking a Percocet.”

“Rum goes well with Percocet.”

“So you’re my friend now? I wonder where you were when Insane Person was pointing a gun at me.”

“Hiding behind a sport-utility vehicle.”

“Rain check on the rum drink. Sorry.”

“Do you mind if I ask who you work for?”

Tierney limped toward his minivan. “It varies. The Times is doing another Milliken story. The macaw thing, the local police. Tech world’s biggest creepizoid, et cetera. It’s hard to see how my image of him pointing a gun at me changes anyone’s opinion.”

“I don’t suppose I can persuade you to delete the images of me and not tell anyone you saw me at his place.”

“Why would I do that?”

“To help the Sunlight Project.”

Tierney laughed. “You want me not to shed sunlight on your being pals with Insane Person. Is this irony, hypocrisy, or a contradiction? I’m never sure which term is appropriate.”

“Call it all three if you want,” Andreas said.

“Chutzpah. That’s a fourth term.”

“The thing is, I’m not Tad’s pal. You’d be shedding false light.”

“Really. I didn’t know there was such a thing.”

“The Internet is radiant with it.”

“I’m surprised to hear you say that.” Tierney unlocked his vehicle and got in. “Or half surprised. It’s not that I don’t like what you do. Your batting average is pretty good in terms of going after the right people. But I have to admit I always sort of figured you for an asshole.”

Hearing this, the Killer stirred again in Andreas. If Tierney had figured him for an asshole, it was likely that many other people had, too. He felt a sudden strong anxious need to get to a computer and find out who they were and what exactly they were saying.

“I have nothing to offer you,” he said to Tierney, “except the truth. Can I buy you a drink and tell you the truth?”

It was his best line, the line he’d used over and over in the past decade. He used it even when he didn’t have to, because even when a woman had already signaled availability he loved to see the effect the line had. Everybody wanted to hear the truth from him. He watched Tierney think it over.

“I admit you’re not a man I ever expected to meet in person,” Tierney said. “There’s a bar at my hotel.”

At the bar, Andreas began with his boilerplate TSP speech, the list of governments he’d embarrassed and the longer list of corporations and power-abusing individuals. He hurried through the latter because Tierney seemed impatient. “So the truth has two parts,” he said. “The first is that the Project lives or dies on the public’s perception of me personally. The reason we’re still thriving and WikiLeaks is going under is that people think Assange is an autistic megalomaniac sex creep. His tech capabilities haven’t changed. What’s changed is that people with dirt won’t go to someone dirty. People who expose dirt do it because they’re hungering for clean. If you don’t help me out, we’re in danger of going the way of WikiLeaks.”

“Oh, come on,” Tierney said. “It’s one picture of two Internet titans inside a gated compound. Unless you’re telling me this is just the tip of an iceberg—”

“That’s the second part of the truth. This is where you really have to believe me. There is no iceberg. I lead a clean life. I was wild in my twenties, but I was living in a sick country and I was young. Given the level of scrutiny I’ve been under since then, do you think that if anyone had any dirt on me it wouldn’t be all over the Internet?”

“I think if someone did, your hackers would be especially good at getting it buried.”

“Seriously?”

“OK, so you’re clean. Whatever. It only proves my point. One photograph is not a big deal.”

“My being seen with Milliken is a disaster for the Project. It’s like having one red sock in a load of white laundry. One red sock, and nothing is ever white again.”

Tierney shifted in his chair and grimaced. “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this. But you are one strange dude. Who cares if your sheets are a little pink? Everybody’s sheets are a little pink. People still go to Hugh Grant movies. People like Bill Clinton more than ever.”

“Their business isn’t being clean. Mine is.”

“What were you doing at Milliken’s anyway?”

“I was begging for money.”

“Then I really don’t see how you have anyone but yourself to blame for this.”

“You’re right, I don’t. I was desperate and I had shit luck. You have total power over me.”

“Is this the point where you offer me money?”

“If I had money, I wouldn’t have been at Milliken’s. And I’m less hypocritical than you think. I wouldn’t offer money even if I had it. That would be a true betrayal of Project principles.”

Tierney shook his head as if confounded by Andreas’s strangeness. “I can probably get a couple thousand dollars for a picture of you two. I was also attacked by Rottweilers.”

“If it’s a matter of simple compensation, not hush money, my friend in Berlin can pay you a fair market rate.”

“Nice friend.”

“She believes in the Project.”

“No matter what you say, you want me to not do to you the thing you do to other people.”

“That’s the truth.”

“So you are an asshole.”

“Sure. But I’m not Tad Milliken. I own nothing. I live out of a suitcase. Repressive governments hate me. There are only about ten countries in the world I can safely travel to.”

This sounded good, came out well, and Tierney sighed. “Get me five thousand dollars,” he said. “I’d be suing your pal Tad if I thought I could win a lawsuit in Belize. I’m still going to report him to the police. They’ll ask who else was there. Do you want me to lie?”

“Yes, please.”

“Of course you do.” Tierney turned on his camera and let Andreas watch while he deleted, one by one, the images in which his face was visible. Andreas was reminded of the day, in a different decade, a different life, when he’d scrubbed the porn from his computer, and of his favorite lines of Mephistopheles: Over! A stupid word. How so over? Over and pure nothing: completely the same thing! “It’s over now!” What’s that supposed to mean? It’s as good as if it never was.

But it hadn’t never been. All Tierney had to do was mention the incident somewhere online, and it would stay in the cloud forever. In the weeks following the incident, while Andreas was closing down the beach house and exchanging strongly encrypted emails with Tad Milliken, his paranoia spread roots and flourished. With every different keyword he entered with his name in every different search engine, he was no longer content to read the first page or two of results. He wondered what was on the next page, the one he hadn’t read yet, and after he’d looked at the next page he found yet another page. Repeat, repeat. There seemed to be no limit to the reassurance he required. He was so immersed and implicated in the Internet, so enmeshed in its totalitarianism, that his online existence was coming to seem realer than his physical self. The eyes of the world, even the eyes of his followers, didn’t matter for their own sake, in the physical world. Who even cared what a person’s private thoughts about him were? Private thoughts didn’t exist in the retrievable, disseminable, and readable way that data did. And since a person couldn’t exist in two places at once, the more he existed as the Internet’s image of him, the less he felt like he existed as a flesh-and-blood person. The Internet meant death, and, unlike Tad Milliken, he couldn’t take refuge in the hope of a cloud-borne afterlife.

The aim of the Internet and its associated technologies was to “liberate” humanity from the tasks — making things, learning things, remembering things — that had previously given meaning to life and thus had constituted life. Now it seemed as if the only task that meant anything was search-engine optimization. Once he was up and running in Bolivia, he created a small team of truest-believing hackers and female interns who performed SEO by means both fair and foul. Tad’s dream of luxury reincarnation may have been technically unrealistic, but it was a metaphor for something real: if — and only if — you had enough money and/or tech capability, you could control your Internet persona and, thus, your destiny and your virtual afterlife. Optimize or die. Kill or be killed.

For a year, he searched “tierney andreas milliken” two and three times a day. He monitored Tierney on Facebook and Twitter no less compulsively. His paranoia was evidently a fixed quantity. If he suppressed it in one place, it popped out in a different place. When Tierney finally ceased to worry him so much — if the guy was going to blab, he would have done it by now, and Andreas would have known about it — he didn’t become any less anxious. He worried, serially, about former girlfriends, about disgruntled former employees, about surviving Stasi functionaries, until he arrived at the mother of all worries: Tom Aberant.

For a long time, for twenty years, he’d assumed that the secret of his homicidal past was safe with Tom. By helping to move the body, Tom had committed a serious crime himself, and in the letter he’d sent Andreas some months later, from New York, he’d apologized for “bailing” on him, had assured him that nothing he’d said in Berlin would ever see the light of day, neither in Harper’s nor anywhere else, and had expressed the wish that their “little adventure” would allow Andreas to have the life he wanted with his girl. Injured though Andreas had felt by the distant tone of Tom’s later postcards, especially the one in reply to his confessional letter, he hadn’t been worried by it. Even when he’d taken one last stab at reviving their friendship, in 2005, by calling Tom in Denver and offering a major leak to Denver Independent, and Tom had rebuffed him, he hadn’t worried. At worst, he’d thought, Tom was in professional competition with him. It was the sort of thing that could happen in abortive friendships.

But then one morning, in the barn at Los Volcanes, reading the daily digest of news about himself, he came across an interview that a Denver Independent journalist, Leila Helou, had given to the Columbia Journalism Review.

The leakers just spew. It takes a journalist to collate and condense and contextualize what they spew. We may not always have the best of motives, but at least we have some investment in civilization. We’re adults trying to communicate with other adults. The leakers are more like savages. I don’t mean the primary leakers, not Snowden or Manning, they’re really just glorified sources. I mean the outlets like WikiLeaks and the Sunlight Project. They have this savage naïveté, like the kid who thinks adults are hypocrites for filtering what comes out of their mouths. Filtering isn’t phoniness — it’s civilization. Julian Assange is so blind and deaf to basic social functioning that he eats with his hands. Andreas Wolf is a man so full of his own dirty secrets that he sees the entire world as dirty secrets. Fling everything at the wall, like a four-year-old flinging poop, and see what sticks.

Dirty secrets? Andreas reread the offending passage with cold dread. Who the fuck was Leila Helou? A quick search turned up photos of her and Tom Aberant together at professional functions, along with catty remarks, on bottom-feeding blogs, to the effect that sleeping with Denver Independent’s publisher had done wonders for her talent. Leila Helou was Tom’s girlfriend.

Dirty secrets? Flinging poop? Where was the filtering in that?

He thought of the call he’d made to Denver in 2005. The Halliburton Papers had been the Sunlight Project’s most significant international leak to date. He could have taken them straight to the New York Times, but he knew that Tom had started up an online news service and would probably jump at the chance for overnight notoriety. Although his motive in calling Tom was less than fully pure — he enjoyed the idea that Tom now needed something from the friend he’d abandoned, the friend who was now more famous and powerful than he was — the old yearning for his friendship was part of it. He’d imagined that Denver Independent could be the Project’s American mouthpiece; that he and Tom could finally work together, albeit from separate continents. And Tom, on the phone, had sounded interested. Yes, almost gushing — it was fifteen years since they’d heard each other’s voice. He’d asked Andreas for one hour to discuss the leak with a “trusted adviser.”

This had sounded like a mere formality. But when Tom had called back, after an hour and fifteen minutes, his tone of voice had changed. “Andreas,” he’d said, “I really appreciate the offer. It means a lot to me, and it’s a tough call. But I think I have to stick with my core mission, which is to nurture investigative journalism. Boots-on-the-ground journalism. I’m not saying there’s no place for what you’re doing. But I’m afraid that place isn’t here.”

Hanging up the phone, Andreas had vowed never to let himself be hurt by Tom again. But only now, eight years later, when he read the Helou interview, did he understand that Tom wasn’t merely indifferent to him. Tom was an existential threat.

What he saw all at once: that Tom had glimpsed the Killer. In the light of dawn, in the Oder valley. The monster stiffy that hugging Tom had given him was not, as he’d supposed, the natural unleashing of the libido he’d suppressed since the night of the murder. Nor was it a gay man’s stiffy, not in any meaningful sense. But it was nonetheless a stiffy for Tom. He had it for the same reason he’d had it for the fifteen-year-old Annagret: because Tom had made himself part of the murder. Man, woman — the Killer didn’t trouble with such distinctions. And what had he done then? He couldn’t remember for sure, it might have been a dream. But if it was a dream it must have been a vivid one. Straddling the grave, his stiffy in hand: had this really happened? It must have happened, because how else to explain why Tom had thenceforth shut him out? Tom had witnessed the thing the Killer had made him do. Tom had promised to have dinner with him but instead had run home to New York, taken refuge in his woman. And Andreas had proceeded to pursue him with a totally uncharacteristic lack of pride, sending him postcards, writing him a self-exposing letter, and finally calling him on the phone, not because the two of them were destined to be friends but because the Killer never forgot what it wanted, once it wanted it. There was no such thing as love.

The “trusted adviser” Tom had mentioned on the phone: who else could it have been but Leila Helou? Tom had asked his new woman what to do about the Halliburton Papers, his new woman had nixed it, and now, eight years later, it was all too obvious why: because Tom had told her about the murder of Horst Kleinholz. What else could dirty secrets refer to? She’d practically accused Andreas of cold-blooded murder.

When he reread her words yet again, the Killer stepped right out into the open, in the form of a wish to crush Tom’s cranium with a blunt object. If there had been a way to get past U.S. Immigration, he would have gone to Denver and murdered Tom. For having glimpsed the Killer. For rejecting the most authentic overtures of friendship Andreas had ever made. For spurning him again and again, for the shame of that. And for submitting to his wife and deferring to his girlfriend. For seducing Andreas and then betraying him to the girlfriend; for not keeping his pretty mouth shut. But above all for his American sanctimony: “I’m not saying there’s no place for the loathsome, criminal, fame-chasing, poop-flinging, grave-defiling things you do. But I’m afraid that my clean house is not the place for them.” He’d all but said that on the telephone.

“I can’t believe you did this to me,” Andreas muttered. “I can’t believe you did this to me…”

He was rational enough to recognize that Tom still wasn’t likely to incriminate himself by exposing Andreas’s crime. What inflamed his paranoia was the thought that Tom had seen the Killer in him. The thought was like an electrode in his brain. He couldn’t stop pushing the button, and it gave him, each time, an identical jolt of dread and hatred.

Pleading illness to his interns, he holed up in his bedroom and searched for dirt on Tom and Helou. Already the blogosphere and social media were a-crackle with outrage at her CJR interview. In the world of so-called adults, Helou was a respected journalist, but in the online world she was getting reamed as fiercely as Andreas was being defended. Somehow, instead of reassuring him, this made him hate the Aberant-Helou nexus all the more. They’d deliberately provoked the very bloggers and tweeters whom he was devoting more and more of his existence to appeasing. Again the pointed sanctimony, again the message: We’re what you can never be. We disdain not only you but the virtual world in which you increasingly exist. We’re capable of the love you were incapable of having for Annagret …

According to Google, Helou was married to a disabled novelist on whom she presumably was cheating. But if she was appearing in public with Tom, they must not have cared what people thought. A more promising question was what had happened to Tom’s wife. After 1991, there were zero contemporaneous records for anyone with her name and birth date. Andreas was seized with the hope that Tom had murdered her and gotten away with it. This seemed fantastically improbable, but in a way it also didn’t. Tom had spoken, after all, of being unable to live either with Laird or without her. And he had, after all, helped Andreas bury a body.

Following an instinct, he turned his attention to Laird and discovered that her billionaire father had set up a trust fund for her; the Wichita Eagle had reported on the tax filings. There was also evidence that Tom had founded Denver Independent with money from the father. But not a lot of money. Not the kind of money that Anabel would be worth if she was still alive. Was she alive? Or, better yet, a corpse? An instinct told Andreas that, dead or alive, she might be a way to inflict pain and chaos on Tom from a distance.

He went to his lead hacker, Chen, and asked how easily they could steal a lot of computer processing capacity.

“How much?” Chen said.

“I have two good photos of a twenty-four-year-old woman who’s now in her late fifties. I want to run a facial-recognition match on every photo database we can access.”

“Worldwide?”

“Start with the U.S.”

“It’s a lot. Try to do it fast, they’ll catch us. So many of these farms, you can only grab a few minutes at a time. We got some really good farms, but we don’t want to lose them.”

“What would less than fast be?”

“Weeks, maybe more. And that’s just for U.S.”

“See what you can do. Be as safe as you can.”

Their facial-recognition software was nearly NSA-grade but still didn’t work very well. (The NSA’s didn’t either.) Every day for several weeks, Chen forwarded Andreas pictures of late-middle-aged women who didn’t look much like Anabel Laird. But going through the images gave him something to do, made him feel as if a plot were being advanced, took the worst edge off his paranoia. And then, for neither the first time nor the last time, he got lucky.

He’d always considered good luck his birthright — his mother had said it herself: the world conformed to whatever he felt like doing — but his bad luck with Dan Tierney had shaken his faith in it. The resolution of the image of a gray-haired supermarket employee in Felton, California, was too low to show the scar visible on Laird’s forehead in the older pictures, and because the employee wasn’t smiling he couldn’t confirm the gap between her front teeth. But when he saw the employee’s name, Penelope Tyler, and connected it with her years at Tyler School of Art, he sensed that his good luck had returned. He walked out of the tech building and looked up at the Bolivian sun, spread his arms, and soaked up its hot light.

Penelope Tyler was clearly a person who’d tried to disappear. The employee photo was the only image of her anywhere, and her official footprint was impressively faint. It took Andreas nearly an hour to discover that she had a daughter. This daughter, Purity, was relatively richly documented, with profiles on Facebook and LinkedIn and a very shaky credit history. He studied the pictures of her and recent pictures of Tom, comparing her eyebrows with Tom’s eyebrows, her mouth with Tom’s mouth, and concluded that she had to be his daughter. But there was no sign of contact between them, not on social media, not in her college or health records, nothing anywhere. Given that she’d been born not long after Laird vanished, it could only be that Tom didn’t know she existed. Why else would Laird have changed her identity?

The girl was indirectly worth a shitload of money, a billion-size sum, and almost certainly didn’t know it. She was making student-loan payments, living in a house that looked semi-derelict in Street View, and working as an “outreach associate” for an alternative-energy start-up. The money interested Andreas to the extent that it might make his life easier if he could get his hands on some of it. But it wasn’t the reason he kept clicking through the photographs he had of Purity Tyler. Nor were her looks, though pleasant enough, the reason he conceived such a murderous desire for her. What mattered was that she was Tom’s.

He set up a secure connection and called Annagret. Over the years, he’d been careful not to fall completely out of touch with her. He remembered her birthday and occasionally forwarded her links pertaining to one of her causes. For all the energy she’d invested in the project of closeness, it was remarkable how unclose she felt to him. How random it was — apart from her beauty — that he’d ever had anything to do with her. Not only was she small in her ambitions, she seemed perfectly content to be small. She’d left Berlin and moved to Düsseldorf. But her emails to him were always cordial and admiring, with many exclamation marks.

On the phone, after making sure she was alone, he explained what he needed her to do. “Consider this a free vacation in America,” he said.

“I hate America,” she said. “I thought Obama would change things, but it’s still just guns, drones, Guantánamo.”

“Guantánamo is unfortunate, I agree. I’m not asking you to like the country. I’m just asking you to go there. I’d do it myself if I could, but I can’t.”

“I’m not sure I can, either,” she said. “I know you always thought I was a good liar, but I don’t like doing that anymore.”

“It doesn’t mean you’re not still good at it.”

“And maybe … Well. Is it really so terrible if this person tells the world what we did? I still think about it almost every day. I can’t watch movies with any violence in them. Twenty-five years later, it still gives me panic attacks.”

“I’m sorry about that. But Aberant is threatening to discredit everything I’ve done.”

“I understand. The Project is very important. And I’ve always wished there was some way to make up for what I did to you. But — how does bringing his daughter to Bolivia help you?”

“Leave that to me.”

A silence fell. Worrisome.

“Andreas,” she said finally. “Do you feel bad about what we did?”

“Of course I do.”

“OK. I don’t know what I’m thinking about. I guess our time together. Sometimes I feel really bad about it. I know I disappointed you. But that’s not why I feel bad. There’s something else — I can’t explain it.”

He was alarmed but spoke calmly. “What is it?”

“I don’t know. I see your life now, all your girlfriends, and … Sometimes I wonder why you didn’t have affairs when you were with me. It’s OK if you did. You can tell me now.”

“I never did. I was trying to be good to you.”

“You are good. I know all the fantastic good things you’ve done. Sometimes I can’t believe I used to live with you. But still … Do you really feel bad about the thing we did?”

“Yes!”

“OK. I don’t know what I’m thinking about.”

He sighed. So many years, and they still had to have discussions.

“I feel bad about the sex,” she said suddenly. “I’m sorry, but that’s what it is.”

“What about it?” he managed to say.

“I don’t know. But I have more experience now, more to compare it to. And hearing your voice — I don’t know. It’s bringing back something I don’t like to think about. Some really bad feeling I can’t describe. It’s making me panic, a little bit. Right now. I’m feeling panic.”

“It was all mixed up with the thing we did. Maybe it was why we couldn’t stay together.”

She took an audibly deep breath. “Andreas, this girl — why do you want me to bring her to you?”

“To make her believe in the Project. That’s our best protection. If she’s on our side, her father won’t do anything.”

“OK.”

“Annagret, that’s all it is.”

“OK. OK. But can I at least take Martin with me?”

“Who is Martin?”

“A man I feel close with. Safe with.”

“Certainly. All the better. Just, obviously”—he laughed creakily—“don’t tell him anything.”

Safe with: the words pushed the button connected to the electrode. All these years, and he was still thinking of killing her. How much of his subatomic life he must have unwittingly betrayed in his ten years with her! He’d been lucky that she was too young to make sense of it. But she’d lived with it and become aware of it in hindsight. The thought of her latter-day awareness, his hideous exposure in the eyes of someone who wasn’t him, was almost as bad as the thought of what Tom had seen.

While he waited to hear from her in Oakland, he took honest stock of himself and saw how much ground he’d lost in his battle with the Killer. How laughably venial his old preoccupation with online porn now seemed; how poignantly tempered with good intentions his plot to murder Horst. His inner life now consisted of little but obsessing about his image on an Internet that felt like death to him; of hating Tom and conspiring to take revenge on him. At the rate he was going, he might soon be all Killer. And again he sensed that he would be a dead man, literally, once the Killer was fully in command. That he was who the Killer was actually intent on killing.

It therefore came as something of a relief to hear from Annagret that she’d botched her sales pitch to Pip Tyler and alienated the girl. With a sense of reprieve, he threw himself into the less insane work of collaborating on the film that the American auteur Jay Cotter was making of his life, based in part on The Crime of Love. He holed up at the Cortez for two weeks with Cotter and his production designer; he had long phone talks with Toni Field, instructing her in the ways of Katya. When he returned to Los Volcanes, another project, no less dear to his heart, was coming to fruition — a splendid dump of emails and under-the-table agreements between the Russian petroleum giant Gazprom and the Putin government. Although the Project now ran substantially on autopilot, Andreas had personally brokered the Gazprom leak and dictated the terms of its release to the Guardian and the Times. The leak’s provenance had required intricate laundering, an impenetrable maze of electronic red herrings to protect the source. Andreas also particularly loathed Vladimir Putin, for his youthful work with the Stasi, and he was determined to inflict maximum embarrassment on Putin’s government, because it was harboring Edward Snowden, about whose purity of motive far too much had been said online. In the twelve-minute video he recorded for uploading the day before the Times and the Guardian ran their stories, he was at his artful best in needling Putin and rebuking, subtly, the online voices who’d allowed the one-hit wonder Snowden to distract them from his own twenty-five-year record. His continuing ability to rise to great occasions, coupled with the prospect of being the hero of a medium-budget movie with global distribution, was a welcome distraction from the problem of Tom Aberant.

The email that Pip Tyler then sent him, out of the blue, intensified his sense of reprieve. In reality, she was nothing like the figure from his vengeful imaginings. She was young-sounding, intelligent, amusingly reckless. The humor and hostility of her emails were a balm to his nerves. How sick of sycophancy he’d become since he succumbed to paranoia! How refreshing it was to be called out on his dishonesty! As he found himself warming to Pip’s emails, he imagined an escape route that the Killer had failed to foresee, a providential loophole: what if he could reveal to a woman, piece by piece, the complete picture of his depravity? And what if she liked him anyway?

Inconveniently, principal photography had commenced in Buenos Aires, and Toni Field had fallen for him hard. He appreciated, for the first time, the travails of male porn stars and the utility of Viagra. As if it weren’t bad enough that Toni was nearly his age and was portraying his mother, he couldn’t stop mentally comparing her with Pip Tyler. And yet, for any number of strategic reasons, not least to keep the leading actress happy, it was vital that he seem gratified by the affair. During his days in Argentina, and even more so after he’d returned to Bolivia and met Pip, he engaged in grueling Toni management. If it hadn’t been so inconvenient, it would have been hilarious how much like his mother Toni became before he managed to be rid of her.

He fell in love with Pip. There was no other way to describe it. His motives initially were nothing if not vile, and the dark part of his brain never stopped whirring with calculation, but real love couldn’t be willed. Yes, he did his manipulative best to create a bond of trust with her, he confessed to the murder, he persuaded her to spy for him. But when, at the Cortez, to his amazement and delight, she let him undress her, he wasn’t thinking about her father; he was simply grateful for the sweet good girl she was. Grateful that she’d lured him into her room even though he’d confessed to the murder; grateful that she wasn’t repelled when he told her what he wanted to do to her. And when she then chastely declined to go further, there was, to be sure, a moment when he felt like strangling her. But it was only a moment.

He began to think she was the woman he’d waited all his life for. The hope she gave him was sweeter than the hope Annagret had once given him, because he’d already showed Pip more of his real self than he ever showed Annagret, and because, twenty-five years earlier, when he’d hoped that Annagret could save him, he hadn’t even been aware of the Killer he needed to be saved from. Now he knew what the stakes were. They had nothing to do with Tom Aberant. At stake was the possibility that he might not have to be alone with the Killer. That he could finally have what he’d sought, unrealistically, in Annagret. A life with a young, bright, kindhearted woman who had a sense of humor and accepted him as he was and was nothing like his mother. Might it be possible, now that he was well into his fifties, to settle down with a woman without becoming bored? All the good luck he’d ever had was like nothing compared to the luck of spontaneously loving the person he’d intended to abuse for sick reasons. He daydreamed of marrying her on a sunny morning in the goat pasture.

But then the providential loophole closed. Almost as soon as she seemed to have fallen for him, hardly a week after he’d received her burning look, he found himself in a room at the Cortez where, from the very first moment, nothing felt right. He couldn’t understand why she didn’t want to be there, but she obviously didn’t. He tried this, he tried that. Clumsily, feelingly. Nothing worked. She didn’t like him. She didn’t want to be there. But the way it felt to him was that the Killer didn’t like her, didn’t want her to be there; that it was the Killer who’d made him make the mistake of rushing her back to a hotel room before she really loved him, because the Killer was afraid of her.

Left by himself, kneeling on the floor, he didn’t weep with disappointed love. He didn’t weep at all. Three months of love evaporated in an instant. He’d been struggling to climb out of an abyss on a rope that she was holding, and as soon as he’d climbed close enough for her to see his face, she’d recoiled in disgust and let go of the rope. What you felt for the woman who did that to you wasn’t love.

He trashed the hotel room. For some minutes, many minutes, he was both the Killer and the person enraged with the Killer for depriving him of love. He hurled food against the wall, broke dishes, ripped the blanket and sheets off the bed, upended the mattress, and hammered a wooden chair on the floor until its legs broke. He’d clung to his hope until the moment she shut the door behind her. Only then had he seen that she was as bad as her father — too pure for the likes of Andreas Wolf. She was a sanctimonious little cunt of a nobody. He trashed the hotel room to vent his rage at having hoped better of her. Hope was the cheat that had prevented him from ordering her to fuck him (she would have done it! she’d said so!) until it was too late. He’d risked all and got nothing.

That he didn’t physically harm himself that day or night, beyond bruising his knuckles by punching a wall, was owing to an idea that came to him after his rage had passed. It occurred to him that he still possessed a piece of information known to no one else, and that he might use this datum to revenge himself on Pip and Tom simultaneously. Although he hadn’t poked the girl himself, conceivably Tom still could. The possibility was no less delicious for being remote. And then let Tom try being sanctimonious with him. Then let Pip try to say she wasn’t sorry she’d rejected him.

It was a relief to stop fighting the Killer and submit to the evil of his idea; it turned him on so much that he went to the spot on the floor where Pip had stood naked and used the panties she’d left behind to milk himself, three times, of the substance he hadn’t spent in her; it got him through the long night. Early in the morning, he went to several ATMs and withdrew enough cash from the Project’s account to cover the damage he’d done to the room. He showered and shaved and was waiting in the lobby when Pedro arrived to take him to the airport. Katya’s plane was fifteen minutes early. She came through the customs gate wearing a Chanel or Chanel-like suit, wheeling a brocade-fabric suitcase and carrying an old-fashioned briefcase with a shoulder strap, moving more stiffly than she used to, looking older, definitely, and wearing a wig of less wonderful redness, but still lovely from a distance. Andreas pushed through the crowd to greet her. He put his arms around her, and she rested her head on his breast. The first thing he said was “I love you.”

“You always have,” she said.

* * *

It ought to have felt good to be walking up the road to meet Tom Aberant, stretching muscles stiff from a week of inactivity. Down in the meadow by the river rapids, by the tumble of wet boulders, a large woodpecker was drumming on a hollow tree. A buzzard eagle soared past the vertical face of a red pinnacle. Warm late-morning air currents were stirring the woods along the road, creating a tapestry of light and shadow so fine-grained and chaotic in its shiftings that no computer on earth could have modeled it. Nature even on the most local of scales made a mockery of information technology. Even augmented by tech, the human brain was paltry, infinitesimal, in comparison to the universe. And yet it ought to have felt good to have a brain and be walking on a sunny morning in Bolivia. The woods were unfathomably complex, but they didn’t know it. Matter was information, information matter, and only in the brain did matter organize itself sufficiently to be aware of itself; only in the brain could the information of which the world consisted manipulate itself. The human brain was a very special case. He ought to have felt grateful for the privilege of having had one, of having played his small part in being’s knowledge of itself. But something was very wrong with his particular brain. It now seemed able to know only the emptiness and pointlessness of being.

A week had passed since the spyware in Denver had stopped functioning. He could have had Chen uninstall it after Pip asked him to, and he might have escaped detection if he’d acted quickly, but Pip’s final text to him had made him so anxious he could hardly breathe, let alone communicate with Chen. I want to delete all that and have a life here: somewhere inside him his love and hope for her had persisted, in fragmentary form, until he read those words of hers. Now he felt nothing but pain and fear. Didn’t care if he ever saw her again, didn’t care what she or anyone else thought of him. Nothing that anyone did anywhere made any difference to him now.

Or almost nothing. In London, his mother had survived her cancer treatments and was recovering well. If he could have done anything, during the days that he’d been lying in his room, he would have asked her to come and visit him again. She’d always liked everything about him. She, the world’s shittiest mother, was the best mother in the world for him. Lying there in bed, he would have accepted love and care from her on whatever terms she offered. Indeed, this seemed almost to be the essence of his condition.

He was approaching the concrete bridge over the river, trudging in one of Pedro’s tire tracks to avoid the mud from the previous night’s rain, when he heard the Land Cruiser downshifting around the bend in front of him. The one good thing that could be said about his condition was that the Land Cruiser’s approach wasn’t making him more anxious. He was already at maximal anxiety. The worst Tom could do to him was kill him.

But this thought, the idea of being killed by Tom, was like the prospect of rain in a desert. Not a relief in itself but a reason to keep moving forward. Death by any means would put an end to his throttling fear of it; the precise means should have been a matter of indifference. But to be killer and killed was arguably the closest form of human intimacy. In a sense, he’d been more intimate with Horst Kleinholz than he’d been with any other person since he’d left his mother’s womb. And to die knowing that Tom, too, was capable of killing — to exit the world feeling he hadn’t been so alone in it after all — seemed like a kind of intimacy as well.

Food for thought. He picked up his pace a little; he raised his head and squared his shoulders. With every step he took, an increment of time passed. Knowing that the number of steps remaining to him was countably small made the pain of taking them more bearable. When the Land Cruiser came around the bend, he smiled at the sight of his old friend.

“Tom,” he said warmly, extending a hand through the passenger-side window.

Tom frowned at the hand more in surprise, it seemed, than anger. He was wearing the khaki shirt of a gringo journalist. Andreas had seen recent pictures of him, but in person the fact of his physical alteration, his thickness, his baldness, brought home how many years had passed.

“Oh, come on. Shake it.”

Tom shook it without looking at him.

“Why don’t you get out and walk with me? Pedro can go ahead with your things.”

Tom got out of the vehicle and put on sunglasses.

“It’s great to see you,” Andreas said. “Thanks for coming.”

“I didn’t do it as a favor.”

“I’m sure not. And yet — shall we walk?”

They walked, and he decided to plunge right in. The abatement of his mental pain was so liberating that he had the sense of being on the losing side in the final minutes of extra time — throw every man forward, anything goes. “Belated congratulations,” he said, “on having a daughter.”

Tom still hadn’t looked at him.

“I’ve known about her for more than a year,” Andreas said. “I suppose the honorable thing would have been to inform you right away.”

“And Brutus is an honorable man.”

“Well, I apologize. She’s impressive in many ways.”

“How did you find her?”

“Photo recognition. The software is so primitive, it had no business working. But, as you know, things have a way of working out for me.”

“You get away with murder.”

“Exactly!” He felt out of his body, weirdly buoyant. Tom truly was the only person in the world he had no secrets from. “You’ve done pretty well for yourself, too. Great story on the missing nuke. Do you have it up yet?”

“It’s been up for a week.”

“I gave it to you as a present. We should have been collaborating all along.”

On a giddy impulse, he punched Tom’s arm. He prattled away, proudly explicating the features of Los Volcanes, as he led Tom across the pasture and around to the main building’s veranda. His father, Katya’s husband, hadn’t lived to see what he’d built with the gift of freedom he’d given him, but if he’d lived, and had come to Los Volcanes, Andreas might have been similarly giddy with him, similarly performative, enumerating his achievements while knowing that nothing could change his father’s damning judgment of him.

On the veranda, Teresa brought them beer. A few stingless bees were hovering. Tom had been paternally silent for some minutes.

“So, what brings you to Bolivia?” Andreas said.

“You mean, apart from you hacking into my computers?” Tom’s voice sounded choked with self-control. “Apart from you messing with the head of a young woman who happens to be my daughter?”

“Admittedly a dark picture,” Andreas said. “But am I allowed to point out that no harm has come of any of that, and that you were the one who started it?”

Tom turned to him in disbelief. “I started it?”

“We had a dinner date. Do you remember? In Berlin. You never showed up.”

“That’s why you did this to me?”

“I thought we were friends.”

“Given what you’re saying, can you blame me for not wanting to be?”

“Well, at any rate, the score is even now. I’m willing to start over, clean slate. I’m sure we have some new leaks that would interest you.”

“That’s not why I came here.”

“No, I suppose not.”

“I came here,” Tom said, not looking at him, “to threaten you. I will do a story on you. I will write it myself. And I will take the police to the grave site.”

The harshness in his voice was understandable, and yet it hurt Andreas. It seemed like a failure of Tom’s imagination to be unmoved by what he’d implicitly confessed — that he’d liked Tom more than Tom had liked him, and that his mental health was less than tiptop.

“Fine, then,” he said. “You came here to threaten me. I presume there’s an or else?”

“It’s simple,” Tom said. “Two simple things. First, you never communicate with my daughter again, ever, under any circumstances. And second, you digitally shred everything you took from my computers. You keep no copies and you never speak of anything you saw there. If you do all that, I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

Andreas nodded. The Tom he remembered from Berlin had been softer and more forgiving, more motherly. His sternness now was making Andreas feel like a bad little boy.

“I’ll do whatever you say,” he said.

“Good. We’re done, then.”

“If that’s all you wanted, you could have just called me.”

“I believe this merited face time.”

He wondered what it might be that Tom was so intent on having shredded. He hadn’t actually looked at much of what he’d stolen. Once he’d ascertained that Leila Helou wasn’t pursuing a vendetta against him, he’d lost interest in the spyware, and for the past few weeks he’d been too disabled by fear and pain to be curious about the dirt he might have found on Tom’s home computer.

“I don’t care what you know about me,” Tom said, as if reading his thought. “But I do care what Pip knows. If she finds anything out from you, I will destroy you.”

“I take it you haven’t mentioned that you’re her father.”

“I’d rather she not know. I’d rather she not know about the money, either.”

“You don’t want your own daughter to know she has a billion dollars coming to her.”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“She’s a sensible girl. I don’t think the money would ruin her.”

“I’m not going to interfere with Anabel. And you’re not going to, either.”

“So you care more about your ex-wife than you do about your daughter. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. You were the same way in Berlin.”

“It’s just the way it is.”

“And where does that leave your girlfriend? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“It has nothing to do with Leila.”

“Presumably you’ve told her who Pip is?”

“Yep.”

“Quite a shock, I’d guess.”

Tom turned and gave him a smile. It took Andreas a moment to recognize the cruelty in it. “You want to know something?” Tom said. “It’s been good for me and Leila. This famous sunlight of yours. It’s been good for us.”

Andreas closed his eyes. Creating darkness was that simple. He mentally sank into it, wishing it were a deeper darkness. “Say more,” he murmured.

“You sent us Pip.”

“I see.”

“It was hard on Leila. I finally had to tell her everything, including what you and I did in Berlin.”

“But you told her that a long time ago.”

“No. Only after I found out what you’d done to me.”

“You told her.”

“Don’t worry. Your secret’s safe as long as you leave Pip alone. Leila’s a vault, the same as me. But, just so you know, you did us a favor.”

“I helped you…”

“She and I were stuck in something. It wasn’t such a bad thing. But we needed a push.”

“I helped you…”

“Don’t get me wrong — what you did to Pip is unforgivable. I didn’t come here to thank you. I’m simply giving credit where credit is due.”

The darkness into which Andreas was falling was so contourless that he had a sensation of spinning, and to spin was nauseating. Bad enough to have failed to ruin Tom’s life. But to have inadvertently made it happier …

He opened his eyes and stood up.

“I have some pressing work,” he said. “Why don’t you eat lunch, take a nap. We’ll go for a walk when it cools off. Say four o’clock?”

“Thanks, but no,” Tom said. “I’ve said what I came to say.”

“Stay the night at least. Your daughter liked to hike the trails here.”

Tom looked at his watch. He was obviously calculating how soon he could get away from Andreas and back to his woman. In twenty-five years, nothing had changed.

“You’ve already missed the afternoon flights,” Andreas said. “There’s a lot to see here. There’s nothing in the city.”

“I’d need a ride very early in the morning.”

“Of course. We’ll arrange it.”

Upstairs, alone in his room, he opened his copy of Tom’s home hard drive. He searched “andreas” and “anabel” and got few matches, nothing interesting. Tom’s security was lousy — his log-in password, recorded as keystrokes, was leonard1980, no caps, no special characters — and his desktop was punitively well organized, folder after folder of third-party PDFs and boring photographs and business letters that he hadn’t bothered to password protect. There was, however, a subfolder labeled X, in his main documents folder. This subfolder contained a single file, a river of meat.doc, password protected. Andreas tried leonard1980 and was denied access.

The file was substantial, nearly half a meg. He entered obvious variations on leonard1980 before giving up and wading into the keystroke log, the shortness of which was both a plus (less to wade through) and a serious minus, since Tom might not have used all his passwords since the spyware was activated. There was a leonarD1980 and a leonard198019801980. Neither of them opened a river of meat.doc. He went through the keystroke log again, keeping his eyes less focused, the better to see patterns, and this time he noticed a le1°9n8a0rd, followed by numbers that suggested online banking. This slightly less crappy password opened the document.

It appeared to be a novel or a memoir. He searched for his own name and found it toward the end. Everything about the document argued for its being a memoir, an attempt at precise and honest recollection, but when he reached the point in the narrative where Tom spoke of loving him he didn’t believe a word of it. The narrative didn’t become true again until the narrator turned against him. Then it all made sense again. Then it was exactly as he’d always known it was: nobody who knew him could love him. And they were right, as he’d been right. There was something very wrong with him.

He clawed his face. Time was passing. He stared at the computer screen for what seemed like a millisecond but must have been half an hour, because the document file was closed and he knew how the story ended. He was typing le1°9n8a0rd as the subject header of an email. He selected andtylertoo@cruzio.com from his address book and attached a river of meat.doc. The reason he couldn’t feel time passing was that his mind was moving faster than it ever had before, moving without him, leaving him behind. He hit Send.

Tom was waiting for him on the veranda. Andreas couldn’t look at him, but friendly words were issuing from his mouth, the number of hectares that Los Volcanes comprised, the protection status of the national park to the north. They walked down to the river and across the plank bridge and up the first trail leading to a height, a lesser pinnacle. As the trail steepened, Tom began to huff.

He ought to have moderated his pace, for Tom’s sake, but it seemed urgent to reach the top as soon as possible. It seemed to him he had an assignation with a woman who might leave. He had something most glorious to dedicate to her. It was urgent that she not leave. Or die — that was it. She might die before he made it to the top. She wasn’t even there but she might die before he got there. Even though he hadn’t asked her to come and visit him, he hated her for not coming. Hated her and needed her and hated her and needed her. Everything was effect now, nothing cause. He had a dim recollection of having been a lucky person. Surely it was lucky that she’d survived her cancer treatments. She could still receive his dedication, if only he could make it to the top in time.

At the summit was a mirador with a rough-hewn bench. The pinnacles on the far side of the valley were aflame with the setting sun, but already this side of the valley was in shadow. The edge of the cliff was rounded and slippery with sandstone gravel. Below was a drop of several hundred meters, vertical bare rock with a few hardy epiphytes clinging to it.

Tom came huffing up the trail, his face red, his shirt blotched with sweat. “You’re a fitter man than I,” he said, dropping onto the bench.

“The view is worth it, don’t you think?”

Tom dutifully raised his head to take in the view. Multiple flocks of parakeets were screeching in the valley. But the beauty of the red rock and green foliage and blue sky was only an idea. The world, its being, every atom of it, was a horror.

When Tom had caught his breath, Andreas turned to him and opened his mouth. He would have liked to say Everything is a horror to me. Won’t you be my friend again? But instead a voice said, “By the way? I saw your daughter naked.”

Tom’s eyes narrowed.

He would have liked to say You won’t believe this, but I loved her. “I told her to strip, and she stripped for me. Her body is exquisite.”

“Shut up,” Tom said.

I hardly knew her, but I loved her. I loved you, too. “I had my tongue in her pussy. It was very nice. Very lecker, to use the apt German word. She liked it, too.”

Tom lurched to his feet. “Shut the fuck up! What is wrong with you?”

Won’t you please help me?

“She didn’t do anything you didn’t want to do yourself. The only difference is that she did it.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Somebody please help me. Mother, please help me.

“Were you thinking of me when you butt-raped your Anabel?”

Tom grabbed him by the collar. He seemed very close to striking a blow.

“I thought Pip might enjoy that little scene. That’s why I sent her your document. Just now, while you were taking your nap. I included the password.”

Tom tightened his grip on the collar. Someone took hold of his wrists.

“Don’t strangle me. There are better ways to do this. Ways you can get away with.”

Tom let go of the collar. “What are you doing?”

Someone went closer to the edge of the pinnacle. “I’m saying you can push me.”

Tom stared at him.

I’m unbearably sad about this.

“I polluted your daughter. Just because she was your daughter, just for the fun of it. She said it was the best ever. I’m not making this up. It’s all factual truth — she’ll admit it if you ask her. And then I sent her your document, to make sure she knows how filthy she is. Didn’t you promise to destroy me if I did that? If I were you, I’d kill me.”

Tom looked afraid now, not angry.

Please help me. Not that anyone ever did.

“Sit down on the ground, so you don’t fall. And then give me a hard push with your feet. Doesn’t that sound good to you? Especially if I — here.” Someone took a pen out of his pocket. “I’ll write a note absolving you of responsibility. I’ll write it on my arm. Here, see, I’m writing it on my arm.”

The writing, on sweat-dampened skin, and with hairs interfering, went slowly, but his hand was firm. The text was complete in his head without his having thought of it.

YOU KNOW ME TO BE HONEST. NO THREAT COULD COMPEL ME TO WRITE UNTRUTH. I CONFESS TO THE MURDER OF HORST WERNER KLEINHOLZ IN NOVEMBER 1987. I AM SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE ACT I COMMITTED TODAY. ANDREAS WOLF

Someone showed the words to Tom, who was sitting on the bench now, his head in his hands.

“This should suffice, don’t you think? The confession itself provides the motive. If need be, you can corroborate the confession. But I don’t think anyone will question it.” Someone extended a hand to Tom. “Will you do it?”

“No.”

“I’m asking you as a friend. Do I have to beg?”

Tom shook his head.

“Do I have to drag you along with me?”

“No.”

“Don’t lie to me, Tom. You know what it’s like to want to kill someone.”

“The difference is I didn’t do it.”

“But now you can. You want to. At least admit you want to.”

“No. You’re psychotic, and you can’t see it because you’re psychotic. You need to—”

The sound of Tom’s voice stopped. It was curious and abrupt. Tom’s mouth was still moving, and there was still the distant rush of water, the screeching of parakeets. Only human speech had ceased to be audible. It was very disorienting and had to be the Killer’s work somehow. But someone was the Killer. Had the Killer always been deaf to speech?

In the mysterious selective silence, he wandered away from Tom, out to the edge of the cliff. He heard a scrabble of feet on gravel and looked back to see Tom standing up, gesturing to him, apparently shouting. He turned back to the precipice and looked down at the tropical treetops, the large shards of fallen rock, the green surf of undergrowth crashing against them. When they began to drift slowly closer, and then moved rapidly closer, and more rapidly yet, he kept his eyes open wide, because he was honest with himself. In the instant before it was over and pure nothing, he heard all the human voices in the world.