With precise deliberate movements, Arlo picks up the forged file and then he picks up the real one—and yet another file is revealed. This is how I do it, of course, how he taught me to do it, lining up the paper, getting everything in order, revealing one fact at a time. And this new file is the same again, the same CSE a third time through: “The Death of Mr. Charles Ratesic of the Speculative Service.”
I look at Arlo. I look at the file. I open it.
Murder again. The text and the pictures together tell the story: Charlie, incapacitated and vulnerable, is defenseless against the stealthy approach of the monster… except the monster is Arlo. It is Arlo Vasouvian who lurks at the bedside, Arlo Vasouvian who crouches, and then Arlo Vasouvian with the dials in his hands.
Memories drop out of my head. The truth reverses itself, scrambles and reforms. I pick up my gun again. Arlo leans back and stares at me, not like a friend now. Like a scientist, examining, considering. I raise the gun and he does not flinch. Around us hangs the solemn stillness of the Record.
“That file is the real one,” I say.
“Yes.”
“You killed Charlie.”
“I did.” Arlo, blood-splattered, gentle-eyed, stares back at me evenly. “That’s correct. That is accurate. To the extent that that word owns a definition.” The three blue files are still on the desk, and now, as he talks, Arlo shifts them around, places a palm down on one and moves it in an idle circle, then does the same with the others, rearranging and rearranging their places, shuffling and reshuffling their order. “He was good at his job. Very good. I never thought—” He shakes his head in wonderment. “Never for a moment did I think that his undercover operation would be a success, but as you know, it was. With long effort and clever skill he destroyed nearly all we had built, and he had found nearly every member of our Golden State. As it was constituted, I should say, at that time. I could not let him find me too. He was, as you know, a very talented man.”
“Arlo Vasouvian,” I say, summoning the voice I need, “you are under arrest.”
“No,” he says, “I’m not.”
“You just confessed. It’s all—” I look around the room, gesturing up at the captures. “It’s all on the Record.”
“Oh, right. The Record. Inviolable. Impregnable.” He sighs. “You’re not listening, Mr. Ratesic. Or you’re listening but wishing not to hear.” His hands pause in their endless rotations. He picks the file that was on the top, flips it open. It’s me, in the photograph, me crouched to the dials.
“But that’s not—”
“Real!” He stands abruptly and snarls, contorted with contempt. “Would you stop it? Would you stop? With ‘real’ and ‘not real,’ ‘fake’ and ‘not fake,’ ‘true’ and ‘not true.’ Stop!” He sweeps all three files from the desk and rushes out of the room.
I chase him. He is moving quicker than I’ve ever seen him, flying from narrow hallway to narrow hallway in the weak light. I follow his footfalls, follow his thin shadow. At the stairway shaft he turns and snarls, holding all the files up, clutching them to his chest like a shield.
“Do you know why they built the Record underground?”
There is a true answer to that question, as true as two and two, and I give it automatically: “Because there is infinite room for expansion.”
“No. Bullshit! It’s a metaphor. Everything is a fucking metaphor.” He holds the files out, over the side of the railing. A couple of pages slide out of the files, flap and flutter out into the empty air of the stairwell. “They built it belowground so everyone could walk around feeling like the truth was beneath their feet. You see? We—we here, I mean—we in this dumb and blinded land, we live our lives believing that beneath us there is foundation. That there is something there. Permanence. A record. ‘The Record.’” He puts the phrase in sneering quotes. “But it’s not so!” He flings one of the files downward, one of the three official versions of “The Death of Mr. Charles Ratesic of the Speculative Service.” I watch it as it flies and flutters and falls, spilling end over end into the descending darkness of the empty stairwell.
“Under us is nothing, Laszlo. Dear Laz. Nothing.”
“And so what—what—” Fury of my own is rising. My body is trembling. My face bends into a snarl. “You want what? Nothing? You think it would be better to have no truth at all?”
“No. No, poor Laszlo. Dear Laz. Laszlo, my love.” He lets go another of the files and it flaps open, empties as it falls, its two wings bending upward like a bird’s. “Letting go of the fantasy of objective and provable truth would not be better or worse. It would be accepting reality and figuring out what to do next.”
There is only one of the three files left now. He holds it up. “Shall we open it, Laszlo? Shall we see what’s left? See what the truth ended up being?”
I don’t take the bait. I have taken too much bait, been too easily led. “You are under arrest, Arlo Vasouvian.”
“You’re not going to arrest me,” he says. “I already told you that. You will let me go, or you will shoot me dead.”
“How do you know?”
He smiles sadly, looks across the darkness. “I am only speculating.”
I’m not going to shoot him. I won’t shoot him. I won’t do that. I can’t. But I step toward him with the gun still raised, reaching for the cuffs on my belt. I am going to do this correctly. I will take him in. He will confess. The truth will be rebuilt. There must be a mechanism to do that. There must be a form that can be filled out, a process that can be initiated, to reconstitute that file, reinstitute the truth, remake reality as it was. There will be a way.
“It was her idea, you know,” says Arlo, as if something has just occurred to him. “To use you in this way. Once we had concluded that starting again with Off Record houses was too simple, too literal, too small. Once we had decided we needed to achieve something larger—to send a shiver through the bulwark, as they say. I needed someone to make that happen. It was her idea. This marvel of string pulling that brought you along.”
I stop. “Her”: Silvie? “Her”: Tester? Her—
He is watching me. Narrow-eyed, examining. Watching my face as this miserable new truth breaks through. “Ms. Paige.”
“Yes, Laszlo. Aysa is ours. She was always ours. Her parents were ours and so was she.”
I close my eyes. No more. I can’t take any more.
“I had told her all about you,” he says, “during her training. I told her all about brave Charlie’s poor kid brother who never measured up. This sad unfortunate younger brother, who doted upon and resented heroic Charlie in equal parts. And Aysa thought—it’s really quite remarkable—Aysa thought, well goodness. Perhaps this younger brother will be eager to finish what his brother began. How hungry he must be for his own moment in the sun. In the good and golden sun.”
I am shaking my head. I am back in the house on Mulholland, side by side with my junior partner, the two of us in silent wonder at the lies to which we were bearing witness, and not just witnessing but feeling, and not just feeling but seeing.
“But she saw them just like I did,” I tell Arlo. “She saw Petras’s lies and denials. The same as I did, she saw them.”
“You saw her say she felt Petras lying. You saw her say she saw it.”