No Harm Can Come to a Good Man

by James Smythe

  Tonight, Jessie finishes her two slices of pepperoni pizza (which is so greasy that there’s an exact shadow of the slices in yellow butter on the cardboard of the box) and then stands by the plants out the front of the building and has a cigarette. She doesn’t use the smoking terrace with the rest of them. She tried electrics, but it wasn’t the same, so switched to low-carcinogens instead. She likes the pause it gives her: a chance to get away from everybody else. Her ex-boyfriend told her that she could get that same pause just by standing outside and not smoking, but he didn’t get it. It’s not the same. She watches the steam from the manholes and the street down the way, where cop cars are waiting around the bottom end of Times Square, four of them up on the sidewalk. The cops are standing next to them with coffees, waiting to be called. That’s what happens at this time of night, she thinks. Everybody is waiting for something to happen. It rained earlier, and the streets are still glazed in that way they get, reflecting the lights of the signs and billboards. She thinks how much better this always looks in postcards and photographs. She finishes the cigarette and flicks the butt into one of the grilles at the side of the street. She’s gotten good with her aim, now: first time, every time.

  Back at her desk, she has two new emails. The first is from one of her colleagues, gently flirting with her. They’ve had this back and forth for a while now, each nudging the other into making a move that is, apparently, never going to actually happen. It began with them hoping to find out if the other was a nice person, then digging to see if they were into each other, and now it’s the dance. They circle, neither of them willing to make the move. They see each other around the office, at the printers or whatever, and the talk becomes stilted, and they can stand next to each other by the coffee machine and barely say a word, emailing as soon as they get back to their desks and acting like the clumsy near-conversation about coffee pods (or whatever) had never actually happened. Jessie’s nearly bored with it. The flirting is rote now.

  The other email comes from a gibberish name, a series of numbers and letters. She’s seen them before, because they’re how people like to send confidential information: sign up for some disposable email account, designed to be untraceable. All the rage when you’re breaking non-disclose agreements. Most sources run it through a proxy as well, to mask their IP address. It’s information that’s often barely useable, but people don’t even contemplate that there might need to be a chain of evidence, or a verifiable source at the other end of a leak. There’s no accountability if the sender pretends that they don’t exist, simply because nothing can be proven. Jessie knows things that she believes to be true – sometimes celebrity scuttle and tittle-tattle, but sometimes bigger information, about governments and multi-national corporations – that have never made it to print or screen, simply because there wasn’t anybody willing to go on record. She knows things that would ruin lives and make careers. Still. She opens this new email and reads it, expecting the same.

  Please find attached the result of a ClearVista FutureVision report.

  Nothing more, nothing less; no name, no source. Jessie’s frustrated, because that means this could be nothing. It could be a hoax, whatever it is. She clicks to download the video and goes for another cigarette. It’s stopped raining, at least; and the sun is starting to come up somewhere in the vague distance, which means the city has started to wake up. The cops that were waiting for something have all moved on, and there’s this brief period of quiet before the real storm begins and the city does as it does every single day.

  The file has opened itself by the time she returns, and she sits down and presses play. She watches the characters be drawn in. She recognizes Laurence Walker, but his face is different than she’s ever seen it, his eyes almost glitching, his face frozen; and his wife and daughters are with him, terrified of him, she’s sure, and there’s a gun in the Senator’s hand. She watches it again before she calls her boss, waking her up. She sounds angry, but Jessie doesn’t care. This isn’t the sort of news you wait on. Jessie plays it over and over while she waits for her to come in, and she gets a crowd around her desk, and starts charging staffers with amassing information for the story that’s going to run alongside this video. They need a background package on Walker, every bit of video that they can find on him, anything that they can claw together. Do they know anybody who would make a good talking head on this, anybody that they can get to the studio on short notice? Jessie takes charge.

  When her boss arrives she takes her to a conference room alone and she plays it to her on the big screen. Her boss sits forward in her chair for the whole thirty seconds or whatever it is, and she doesn’t show a single emotion. When it’s done, she plays it again.

  ‘We need to clear this with legal,’ she says.

  ‘We can’t just run it?’

  ‘We can. We ran Homme’s. This is fair game. But I want us airtight. You’ve got the story in hand?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jessie says.

  ‘Okay. Get some of the ad team on the job of selling space. Let them know what we’ve got; show them, but only them. Tell them to not tell the buyers too much, but we can inflate this, I’m sure. Get audio working on this as well, see if they can’t clean up the noise in the background. Otherwise we go out muted. Don’t want people to think that this is broken.’ She presses play again. They can’t stop watching it. ‘You just got sent this out of the blue?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jessie says.

  ‘That’s what happens when you build contacts; build a reputation,’ she says. ‘You get to this stage and people want to share secrets with you. Good work.’ She leaves Jessie in the boardroom, the video playing on the screen. The girls look so terrified, Jessie thinks. She hopes that they’re okay, and that they’re safe, because their lives are about to change.

  Amit wakes with the sunlight on his face. He didn’t close the curtains last night, and it’s still far too early to be awake. He gets out of bed and shuts them and he thinks about going back to sleep for a while. It’s going to be a long day – a long week, month, year – and he knows it. He strips, having slept the first stretch in his suit, and gets into bed, and his phone rings as he lies down. It’s Hershel’s number.

  ‘Dude,’ Hershel says, ‘you have to hear this.’

  ‘What?’ Amit yawns. He’s done with the panic over this. Suddenly, in the fug of wanting to sleep, the video seems almost mundane to him.

  ‘That click at the end? And the water noise, that static noise? You know those?’ He doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘So the guys I know, who work at Sound City, they did some work on this for me. You know Sound City?’

  ‘Sure,’ Amit says, not knowing what Sound City is, and barely caring. He wants Hershel to get to the point.

  ‘They ripped the audio, did some editing to it. Tweaked it. Anyway, listen to this.’ The phone rustles as Thom holds it close to speakers, and then presses play. There’s the familiar rush of water, only then he starts to make out noise. It’s not water: it’s people. It’s the shouting of a crowd, and then the click in the audio, that final sound, is suddenly clear. It’s a bang; a gunshot.

  Jessie goes to the coffee machine and gets herself a triple espresso, biting back the taste as she pours it down her throat. She takes a headache pill and she starts to write the lead-in. An email pings in from her boss, telling her they’re live in five, asking if she’s heard back from the sound guys yet. She calls them and they tell her what they’ve found. They boosted the mid-range or something that she doesn’t give a damn about. They can hear noises but the only one that’s clear is the sound of a gunshot at the very end of the video.

  ‘Maybe we should give the Walkers a chance to know we’re going to broadcast this?’ she asks. ‘Give him a chance to response first?’

  ‘No time.’ Her boss tells her that it’s airing; that she’s got to get the brief ready. She types quickly and tries not to be distracted by the video, and she’s still typing as she hears the newsreader start to read her words, and they flash a B
reaking banner over the screen, and they tell viewers of a nervous disposition that they may want to avert their eyes, but knowing full well that they won’t.

  Amit is standing in the queue for the coffee shop when his phone starts going in his pocket. It beeps and rings, every type of alert going off at once. Tweets and emails and Facebook, even though he hasn’t used it in forever, and then text messages and calls, all in the moment it takes for him to order and apologize to the barista. The other customers look at him as if he’s a menace and he ducks outside to one of the tables. He pulls the phone from his jacket and reads the notifications, but they’re coming in as fast as he can read them, pushing the rest off the screen. He gets glimpses: Laurence; Senator Walker; all over the TV; check the blogs; have you seen this?; did this just happen?; did you know about this? He runs back to his apartment, switches on the set in the corner of the room, grabs his laptop, and he’s inundated. He switches through the news channels, and then he sees it: the video he’s done nothing but think about for days now; that should never have leaked, that was never going to be made public.

  He picks up the phone and calls Laurence, but it goes straight to his voicemail. He tries the house and Deanna, but it’s the same. He flicks the channels in a cycle, one right through to one again. Every newsreader is the same: each saying that the footage prediction is a representation of what could happen. They’re showing Homme’s footage as well, to give it context, and then they’re insinuating things that they cannot say. They discuss the audio and what the sound – unmistakably a gunshot, played loud, slowed down, clear as day – might mean within the context of the rest of the video. Media teams on the ground have verified – cue shaky hand-held footage through the front windows of the Walker house – that the Walker family are currently at home. They have been asked for comment but, so far, have declined.

  Amit splits his screen into all the major news outlets, and he opens his feeds in his phone’s browser, and all the information is the same: the same headlines, or variations on the same theme. Every single one of them is talking about Laurence Walker – and all in the worst possible way.

  PART TWO

  10

  Deanna pulls the batteries from the back of the phone handset and unplugs it from the wall, then goes around the house doing the same to all of the others. She bundles up the handsets, wrapping the wires around them, and takes a fabric tote bag from the cupboard under the stairs to put them all in. She already has the cellphones on the side, their numbers disconnected. New numbers will be sent to them, so the handsets have to wait until then. It’s amazing, she thinks, how willing some of their friends have been to give them up, to sell them out to people who only want to cause them pain. She puts the bag into one of the kitchen cupboards, tucked behind pots and pans. The room is dark, because she has dimmed the windows as much as possible, and pulled every other blind or curtain in the house and they’re trying to keep the lights off. Another of Amit’s tips, coming out when they’re in desperate need of council; don’t let them see anything you’re doing and they might get bored. If they see lights going on and off, they’ll count that as activity. He cites Nixon and the hordes following him post-Watergate; and Clinton, after his own scandal. Deanna pleaded that this was very different – that nobody in her family had done anything wrong – but he shrugged.

  ‘That’s not how they’ll see it,’ he told her.

  So now, with the rest of the house asleep, Deanna works. She sees this as something akin to a cleansing; she wants to cut back anything that might give the outside world a way into their shell. Lane was on Tumblr the night before, posting up song lyrics that pointedly referred to their situation, and her posts were re-blogged hundreds of times within minutes, shared and thrown around as if they carried a meaning far beyond that which they did. Those lyrics ended up on the news as the poetic musings of Walker’s daughter. Every political journalist and blogger is watching them, desperate for any new nugget of information. Amit told them that their phones were likely hacked, which was the last straw for Deanna.

  ‘You’ll hear a click,’ he said, ‘on the home line. A subtle ticking when you start speaking. Or, on your cellphones, it’s messages. They’ll listen in, get into your mailbox. Safest bet is to switch off your answering machines and shut the phones down.’ So Deanna’s done everything that she can. She’s kept her computer running (having run her antivirus to check for Trojans or whatever else people might have been using to spy on them), but the other computers and tablets have gone into the bag. Alyx used to tweet high-scores from the games that she was playing; even those would be guzzled up now. She can imagine it. In this time of crisis, the Walker family has got the time to be playing games.

  She peeks out of the hole in the middle of the front door, a fish-eye lens view of the vans parked outside, trying to cram themselves into the spaces between driveways. They’re pulled in at curious angles to allow access to their doors, half-parked on the sidewalk. Some of the crews are standing around talking, waiting for one of the Walkers to stick their head outside and offer to give an interview. Deanna imagines it; they will ask what she thinks of this all, and she will say, Well, we’re stars. She’ll beg for a reality TV show. She’ll do her best fuck-off smile.

  But still, they want answers. That’s what the news says: that there must be something to this. They have experts on their shows, statisticians: nobody from ClearVista, admittedly, but others in the field. The guy who first predicted that Obama would be president a couple of terms back, he’s the gold standard, and he’s paraded on every show, telling every single host the same story about how this could have happened. He talks about the glorification of the science, but that the facts – the raw data – they cannot be cheated. ClearVista’s algorithm is accurate, he says. It’s as close to a digital truth as we’re liable to get.

  Deanna has one cellphone still going, a disposable one that Amit brought around for them late yesterday. He had to fight through the reporters and cameras to get into the house, and when he did they ripped his suit, tearing a pocket from it in the crush. Laurence told him that he was to stay in their house; of course he was to stay with them. No arguments. Deanna didn’t want him there, because he represented something to her. He was the beginning of a downward slope. Still, he gave them a phone that nobody had the number to, what he called a burner, designed to be thrown away when it was done with. Deanna calls Alyx’s school and she explains who she is. The woman at the other end is silent.

  ‘Alyx won’t be in today,’ Deanna says.

  ‘Is everything okay?’ the receptionist asks. Her tone is immediately one of shock, of slight panic. It’s almost conspiratorial. Tell me if you’re in trouble and I’ll help you.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Deanna says. ‘Honestly, it’s fine.’ Whatever happens, both women know this to be a lie: one because she can see the TV crews outside her house when she looks; the other because she’s watching it on her own television. Deanna goes back to the fish-eye spyhole and peers through again, and she sees the reporters amassing, somebody having done a coffee run. They stand around in small groups and talk, nodding their heads in agreement over something. They aren’t leaving any time soon.

  She turns on the television, muting it. Subtitles spring up along the bottom of the screen. She doesn’t want Alyx to hear anything bad, anything that might scare her, so she tries to keep that stuff locked down. Last night, one of the more overtly right-wing shows said that perhaps they should be being harder on Laurence. Perhaps there’s something we don’t know; something in his past.

  ‘ClearVista does this. Like they say, the numbers don’t lie. Maybe they know something that we don’t, and Laurence Walker … Maybe he’s not the man that Americans thought he was.’ It was throwaway, a cursory glance of a phrase that was left hanging as soon as it was said, none of the other hosts responding, but Deanna felt something inside her: wanting to defend him, but not knowing if she could.

  On one of the channels they are still showing snippets of
the video. Most of them are not, because they have had complaints; about the imagery, which isn’t graphic, but is so suggestive. It’s almost salacious, therefore, for the ones who are still showing it. The ones who have stuck to their guns seem almost obsessed. It’s become a mission for them, to get to the bottom of it.

  She hears Alyx pad down the stairs and then come into the kitchen, rubbing at her eyes.

  ‘You hungry, Pumpkin?’ Deanna asks. Alyx nods, still in her pyjamas. She yawns and climbs onto her stool, and then looks up at the TV screen. Deanna flicks it over.

  ‘Was that us?’ the little girl asks.

  ‘No,’ Deanna says. ‘Just somebody who looks like us.’ She puts Pop-Tarts into the toaster and pours a glass of juice. ‘Drink your drink,’ she says.

  When Laurence finally comes downstairs, he’s dressed in a shirt and trousers. The shirt is hanging off him – she doesn’t know how it’s possible, that he could look this much thinner only a few days after she last saw him in clothes like this, that they could look even more like rags draped over a coat-hanger frame – but he’s done his best. He’s shaved his face, tidied himself up and combed his hair. Amit is with him, standing behind him on the stairs as he calls to Deanna. She leaves Alyx watching cartoons and takes the remote with her so that she can’t switch over and catch anything of what’s going on.

  ‘I’m going to talk to them,’ her husband says. ‘We’ve spoken about this,’ he looks at Amit, ‘and we think it’s a good idea.’