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.