So what else was there? I tried going to a psychiatrist. He listened to me talk for fifteen minutes, then wrote me a prescription for pills-some of those anti-depression pills I'd seen advertised on TV. I was so dejected at that point I actually filled the prescription. But I never took them. Listen, to each his own. For all I know, you could pop a couple of those suckers and spend the rest of your days dancing in the sun. But the way I saw it, my problem wasn't chemical, it was spiritual. The spirit has to have its journey, has to go through its stations, you know; that's how it's shaped finally into a soul. I took the pills down to the lake and hurled them in.
Now I guess you may say to me: Well, that's all very well and good, but what if you can't make it through the stations of the spirit, what if the journey's too much for you? What if you get so depressed you go out and buy a rope and hang yourself? And I guess I would answer you: Them's the breaks, pal. There's no freedom without the possibility of failure. And I'm not afraid to die.
I thought about it a lot, in fact: killing myself, I mean. I took long drives to deserted country lanes, parked in the grass by the roadside, and thought about ways to do it. After months of considering various methods, I settled on a gun as the surest and quickest. I even began shopping around for a gun and had my eye on an elegant little Beretta 9mm. With that, I figured, if I decided to live, I would still have something for home protection.
So it went, through Christmas, into January, February, March. And all in spite of the fact that most of my worst fears of what would happen in the aftermath of The End of Civilization never actually materialized. For instance, I had worried quite a lot early on that I might have to go to jail for what I did to Rashid or at least stand trial for it. I had worried that I might even still be a suspect in Anne Smith's death. For weeks I had bouts of paranoia during which I imagined that all the details of my sordid earlier life would somehow become news and so become known to my children and my neighbors on the Hill. Even the idea that my children and neighbors would hear about Rashid-how I had taped him up and gagged him and shattered his knees with a hammer to make him talk-haunted and sickened me and kept me awake at night.
But none of the things I worried about happened. What happened instead was this:
I was questioned for nearly a week after the explosion. Police officers, FBI agents, spies, lawyers, people who for all I know were just dropping by to deliver Chinese food-everyone seemed to want to hear my story. As I had with Detective Curtis, I stuck to the truth with all of them no matter how awful or embarrassing it was. I told the tale day after day, again and again and again.
Then, after I don't know how long, Detective Curtis himself showed up. I was relaxing between interrogations in a pleasant room on one of the upper floors of One Police Plaza. It was a conference room, with a long table and a wall of windows looking out at the big white clouds over the Brooklyn Bridge. I was sitting at the head of the table, swiveling in a chair, reading about the explosion in the Times. There were the usual angry and fretful stories asking the usual angry and fretful questions that arise after such an incident: How had the terrorists infiltrated security? Where had they gotten the C4? Which conservative politician was to blame? Which American policy had driven the murderers to act? And how could anyone call Christianity a tolerant religion after the Crusades? And so on. There was even a piece demanding to know how Patrick Piersall had gotten into the building with a gun. I knew the answer to that one: celebrity. He'd wangled a ticket to the show from his manager, then found a die-hard Universal fan among the guards, one of those guys who attends Universal conventions dressed up as a Borgon in his spare time. He'd convinced the guard to let him in early so he could tour the theater, and made sure the idiot neglected to put him through the metal detector. Piersall was clever, I'll say that for him. It was a good thing he was on our side.
I was still paging my way through the stories when the door opened and in came Curtis.
His tough brown face went wide with a shockingly friendly smile. It didn't suit him. It looked foreign to his features. Even as I stood up to meet him, even as he swung his hand to me for a friendly shake, I could see in his eyes that he was the same, that he discounted any illusion of decency in me or in anyone. I was just another squirrelly felon who hadn't been caught out yet, that's all. He knew a lot about people, Curtis did, but all of it was bad.
He gestured me back into my chair and sat in a chair beside me. He laid a manila folder on the table between us, but he never opened it. He just liked them, I guess, those folders. He always seemed to have one around.
He pointed casually to the Times open on the table in front of me. "So? What do you think of the coverage?"
I shrugged. "Seems like you haven't told them much yet."
"Not too much. They just get it wrong anyway."
"I notice, for instance, you haven't told them about Rashid." That was foremost in my mind. I figured once the press found out he was involved, the whole incident would become public start to finish.
"Well, we will," Curtis said. "We're going to tell them today."
"All right."
"We're going to tell them Rashid is gone."
My reaction must have looked comical, a comical imitation of surprise. I bolted straight up in my chair, opened my mouth wide, blinked my eyes. "Gone? What do you mean?"
"I mean gone," said Curtis, smiling again beneath those suspicious eyes. "We've searched his office, his apartment, his weekend place: no sign of him."
"But he was in his office. That's impossible. How could he get away? He couldn't walk."
Curtis seemed to consider it. "I don't know. Maybe he had some help. Maybe you didn't hurt him as badly as you thought you did."
I added a few moments of comical sputtering to my ridiculous facial expression. "I… I…"
"Anyway…" Curtis slid the folder off the tabletop into his hand and rose from his chair. I was too flummoxed to stand up myself. I just sat there, staring up at him. "We're gonna tell the media we suspect he may have been smuggled out of the country by his masters and possibly executed for betraying the Wall Street operation. That's it. Anything else you want to tell them is up to you. It's a free country."
He was at the door before I managed to say, "Is that really what you think happened? You think someone smuggled him out of the country?"
Curtis snorted. It was quite a sound. It was hard and mirthless, and yet it registered a deep, genuine amusement of a kind I don't really like to think about. It made my balls tighten and go cold. For a moment, after the door shut behind him, I just sat where I was, swiveling slightly, trying to think. I thought: I'm free then. They're not going to prosecute me. I'm free. But I didn't feel free or, if I did, I didn't feel much joy about it. I just kept thinking about that sound, Curtis's short, snorting laugh. A deep feeling of pity welled up in me-pity for Rashid-and maybe a sense of awe and terror, too. I did not think he had left the country. And I did not think his life was going to be very pleasant from now on, or that it would be pleasant ever again until its end.
So the rest of the story-the story of how I tortured a university professor on what was essentially a hunch-never came out-not until now, at least; not until I told it here. In fact, after that week or so of questioning, the law was more-or-less done with me.
The media, on the other hand-they were a different story altogether.
At first, they treated me as a hero-a second-string hero maybe, next to the celebrity, next to Patrick Piersall, but a hero still. The newspaper writers and TV and radio commentators compared me to characters in movies, guys who hunt down the truth when the authorities suspect them or won't believe them, who stop the killers in the nick of time, and so on. Some of the praise started to sound pretty overheated, even to me.