by Noah Hawley
“Scott,” they shout.
“I’m sorry,” says Scott, “I can tell I’m not giving you what you want.”
“Scott,” says Vanessa. “This is from Bill Cunningham directly. Why were you on that plane?”
“You mean, in a cosmic sense, or—”
“How did you end up on the plane?” she says, correcting herself.
“Maggie invited me.”
“Maggie is Margaret Bateman, wife of David.”
“Yes.”
“And were you having an affair with her, with Mrs. Bateman?”
Scott frowns.
“Like a sexual affair?”
“Yes. Just as you are now having an affair with Ms. Mueller, whose father donates millions to liberal causes.”
“Is that a real question?”
“People have a right to the truth.”
“Just because I’ve been inside her house, you’re saying I’ve had—that she and I have had sex. This is your Einstein conclusion.”
“Isn’t it true that you wooed your way onto that plane?”
“In order to what—crash into the sea and have to swim ten miles to shore with a busted shoulder?”
He feels no anger, just bafflement at the line of questioning.
“Isn’t it true the FBI has questioned you multiple times?”
“Does two count as multiple?”
“Why are you in hiding?”
“You say in hiding like I’m John Dillinger. I’m a private citizen, living his life in private.”
“You didn’t go home after the crash. Why not?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Maybe you feel you’ve got something to hide.”
“Staying out of sight is not the same thing as hiding,” says Scott. “I miss my dog. That’s for sure.”
“Tell us about the paintings. Is it true the FBI has seized them?”
“No. Not that I—they’re just pictures. A man stands in a shed on an island. Who knows why he paints what he paints? He feels like his life is a disaster. Maybe that’s where it starts. With irony. But then—he sees something greater there, a key maybe to understanding. Is this—? Am I answering your—”
“Is it true you painted a plane crash?”
“Yes. That’s one of the—it feels like, to me, I mean, we’re all gonna die. That’s—biology. All animals—but we’re the only ones that—know. And yet we—somehow we manage to put this profound knowledge into some kind of a box. We know, but at the same time we don’t. And yet in these moments of mass death—a ferry sinks, a plane crashes—we are brought face-to-face with the truth. We too will die one day, and for reasons that have nothing to do with us, our hopes and dreams. One day you get on a bus to go to work and there’s a bomb. Or you go to Walmart looking for savings on Black Friday and get crushed by a mob. So—what started as irony—my life, the disaster—opened a door.”
He chews his lip.
“But the man in the shed is still just a man in a shed, you know?”
Vanessa touches the plastic in her ear.
“Bill would like to invite you to come to the studio for a one-on-one interview.”
“That’s nice of him,” says Scott. “I think. Except the look on your face doesn’t seem like you’re being nice. More like the police.”
“People are dead, Mr. Burroughs,” she says. “Do you really think now is the time for nice?”
“Now more than ever,” he tells her, then turns and walks away.
It takes a few blocks, but eventually they stop following him. He tries to walk normally, aware of himself both as a body in space and time, and as an image viewed by thousands (millions?). He takes Bleecker to Seventh Avenue and jumps in a cab. He is thinking about how they found him—a man in a locked apartment with no cell phone. Layla says she didn’t talk, and he has no reason to doubt her. A woman with a billion dollars doesn’t lie unless she wants to, and from the way she acted it seemed like Layla liked having Scott as her own little secret. And Magnus, well, Magnus lies about a lot of things, but this doesn’t feel like one of them. Unless they gave him money, but then why did Magnus end their phone call by hitting Scott up for a hundred bucks?
The universe is the universe, he thinks. I suppose it is enough to know there is a reason without having to know what it is. Some new kind of satellite maybe? Software that burrows into our bones while we sleep? Yesterday’s science fiction becomes today’s IPO.
He was an invisible man and now he’s not. What matters is that he runs toward something and not away. Sitting in the back of a cab, Scott pictures the boy eating cereal in front of the television late at night—unable to sleep—watching a dog drawn from the letters d-o-g talk to a cat drawn from the letters c-a-t. If only real life were that simple, where everyone we met and every place we went was fashioned from the pure essence of its identity. Where you looked at a man and saw the letters f-r-i-e-n-d, and looked at a woman and saw the word w-i-f-e.
The screen is on in the cab, playing clips from late-night television. Scott reaches forward and turns it off.
Chapter 31
Gil Baruch
June 5, 1967–August 26, 2015
There were legends about him, stories, but more than stories. Theories might be a better word. Gil Baruch, forty-eight, Israeli expat. (Though one of the theories was that he owned a home on the razor’s edge of the West Bank, an edge he himself had forged single-handedly from Palestinian land, driving up one day in an old jeep and setting up his tent, enduring the stares and taunts of the Palestinians. Rumors he had chopped the wood himself, poured the foundation, a rifle strap over his chest. That the first house had been torched by an angry mob, and Gil—rather than using his prodigious sniper skills or hand-to-hand prowess—had simply watched and waited, and when the crowd dispersed he urinated his disdain into the ashes and started again.)
That he was the son of Israeli royalty, no one disputed, his father, Lev Baruch, being the trusted right hand of Moshe Dayan, renowned military leader, mastermind of the Six Day War. They say Gil’s father was there in 1941 when a Vichy sniper put a bullet through the left lens of Dayan’s binoculars, that it was Gil’s father who cleaned out the glass and shrapnel and stayed with Dayan for hours until they could be evacuated.
They said Gil was born on the first day of the Six Day War, that his birth coincided with the opening shot down to the second. Here was a child forged in war from the loins of a military hero, born of cannon recoil. Not to mention, people said, that his mother was the favorite granddaughter of Golda Meir, the only woman tough enough to forge an entire nation inside the belly of an Arab state.
But then there were others who said Gil’s mother was just a milliner’s daughter from Kiev, a pretty girl with a wandering eye who never left Jerusalem. This is the nature of legend. There’s always someone lurking in the shadows, trying to poke holes. What’s undisputed is that his oldest brother, Eli, was killed in Lebanon in 1982, and that both his younger brothers, Jay and Ben, were killed in the Gaza Strip during the Second Intifada—Jay annihilated by a land mine and Ben in an ambush. And that Gil lost his only sister in childbirth. This was part of the legend, that Gil was a man surrounded by death, that everyone close to him died sooner rather than later, and yet Gil prevailed. He was rumored to have been shot six times before turning thirty, to have survived a knife attack in Belgium, and to have shielded himself from an explosion in Florence by hiding in the belly of a cast-iron tub. Snipers had targeted him and missed. Bounties on his head, too numerous to list, went perpetually uncollected.
Gil Baruch was an iron nail in a burning building, left gleaming in the ashes after everything else had been destroyed.
And yet all that death and sorrow hadn’t gone unnoticed. There was a biblical quality to the travails of Gil Baruch. Even in Jewish terms his suffering was exceptional. Men would clap him on the back in bars and buy him drinks, and then remove themselves to a safe distance. Women laid themselves at his feet, as they would on the tracks of
a train, hoping that in the collision of bodies they would be annihilated. Crazy women with fiery tempers and bountiful G-spots. Depressive women, fighters, biters, poets. Gil ignored them all. At his core he knew that what he needed in his life was less drama, not more.
And yet the legends prevailed. During his tour in private security, he had bedded some of the most beautiful women in the world, models, princesses, movie stars. There was a theory, prominent in the 1990s, that he had taken Angelina Jolie’s virginity. He had the olive skin, hawk nose, and heavy brow of a great romantic. He was a man with scars, both physical and emotional, scars he carried without complaint or remark, a taciturn man with a glint of the ironic in his eyes (as if deep down he knew he was the butt of a cosmic joke), a man who carried weapons and slept with a gun under his pillow, his finger on the trigger.
They said a man had not yet been born that Gil Baruch could not best. He was an immortal who could only be killed by an act of God.
And yet what else can one call a plane crash, except the fist of God sent to punish the bold?
* * *
He had been with the family for four years, joining their detail when Rachel was five. It had been three years since the kidnapping, three years since David and Maggie felt the cold chill of discovery—an empty crib, an open window—in the middle black of night. Gil slept in what old-world architects would have called the maid’s quarters—a monk’s cell behind the laundry room in the city, and a larger room facing the driveway on the Vineyard estate. Depending on the current threat level—ascertained from email analysis, as well as conversations with foreign and domestic analysts, both private and in the government, based on the melange of extremist threats and the controversial nature of current ALC network programs—Gil’s support team grew and shrank, numbering at one point after the 2006 Iraq surge a dozen men with Tasers and automatic weapons. But, baseline, there were always three. A trinity of eyes watching, calculating, coiled, and ready to act.
Their travel was planned in the home office, always in consultation with the on-site team. Commercial flights were no longer optimal, nor was public transportation, although Gil indulged David’s desire to ride the subway to the office a few times a month, but never in any kind of pattern, a day chosen at random, and on those days they first sent a decoy in the town car, exiting the building dressed in David’s clothes, head down, hurried out by his team and stuffed into the backseat.
On the subway, Gil stood far enough from David to let him feel like a man of the people, but close enough to intervene if outside agents chose to strike. He stood with his thumb resting on the hilt of a curved folding blade, hidden on his belt. A blade so sharp it could cut paper and was rumored to be poisoned with the venom of the molten brown recluse. There was a small semiautomatic pistol tucked somewhere undetectable, one David had seen his body man pull once without seeming to move. A homeless man charged them screaming outside the Time Warner building, holding some kind of pipe, and David took a fast step back, looking to his aide. One minute Gil’s hand was empty. The next he held a snub-nosed Glock, which he produced from the ether like a magician revealing a dull and scarred coin.
Gil liked the rocking of the subway, the corner shriek of metal on metal. He had a deep-marrow certainty that his life would not end underground. It was an instinct he had learned to trust. Not that he feared death. There were so many people he had lost, so many familiar faces now waiting for him on the other side—if there was another side, and not just tar-black silence. But even that didn’t sound bad, an end to the Sisyphean immensity of life. At least the eternal question would be answered, once and for all.
The Torah, it should be noted, makes no clear reference to the afterlife whatsoever.
As he did every morning, Gil rose before dawn. It was the fourth Sunday in August, the family’s last on the Vineyard. They had been invited to Camp David for the Labor Day weekend, and Gil had spent much of yesterday coordinating security with the Secret Service. He spoke four languages, Hebrew, English, Arabic, and German, joking that it was important for a Jew to know the language of his enemies, so he could tell when they were plotting against him.
This joke, of course, was lost on most listeners. It was the look on his face when he told it, like a mourner at a funeral.
The first thing Gil did after he rose was change his status to active. He did it instantly, the moment his eyes opened. At most, he slept four hours a night, waiting an hour or two after the family went to sleep, and rising an hour or two before they woke. He liked that quiet time when the lights were out, sitting in the kitchen, listening to the mechanical hum of the appliances, the trigger click of the HVAC as it engaged to cool or heat the house. He was a master of immobility, having sat still—the legend went—for five days straight on a Gaza roof, deep inside enemy territory, his Barrett M82 balanced on metal legs, waiting for a high-value target to emerge from an apartment complex, the threat of discovery by Palestinian forces a constant.
Compared with that, sitting in the air-conditioned, luxury kitchen of a multimillionaire’s estate was like an ocean cruise. He sat with a thermos of green tea (no one ever saw him make it), eyes closed, listening. As opposed to the domestic craziness of the waking day, the night sounds of a house—even a big one like this—were consistent and predictable. The house was wired, of course, sensors on all the windows and doors, motion detectors, cameras. But that was technology, and technology could be tricked, disabled. Gil Baruch was old school, a sensualist. Some said he wore a garrote for a belt, but no one had ever seen the proof.
The truth was, when Gil was a child, he and his father fought all the time, about everything. Gil was the middle child, and by the time he was born the paterfamilias was already well on his way to drinking himself to death. Which he did, in 1991, when cirrhosis became heart failure and heart failure became silence.
And then, according to the Torah, Gil’s father ceased to be. Which was just fine with Gil, who sat now in the air-conditioned kitchen and listened to the barely audible hush of the surf as it pounded the beach outside.
The security logs from that Sunday are unremarkable. The husband (Condor) stayed home (read newspaper 8:10 am–9:45, napped in upstairs guest room 12:45–1:55, made and received several phone calls 2:15–3:45, prepared and cooked supper 4:30–5:40 pm). The wife (Falcon) went to the farmers market, accompanied by Rachel and a body man, Avraham. The boy played in his room and had a soccer lesson. He napped from eleven thirty to one. Anyone looking back at the log later, trying to piece together a mystery, would find nothing but times and dry entries. It was a lazy Sunday. What made it meaningful were not the facts or details, but the imperceptibles. Inner life. The smell of the beach grass and the feel of sand on a bathroom floor when changing out of a swimsuit.
The heat of American summer.
Line ten of the log read simply: 10:22 Condor ate second breakfast. It couldn’t capture the perfect toasting of the onion bagel or the saltiness of the fish in contrast with the thickness of cream cheese. It was time lost in a book—a journey of imagination, transportation—which to others simply looks like sitting or lying stomach-down on the rug in front of a summertime fire, legs bent at the knees, up ninety degrees, kicking absently, feet languid in the air.
To be a body man did not mean being in a state of constant alarm. In fact it was the opposite. One had to be open to changes in the way things were—receptive to subtle shifts, understanding that the frog was killed not by being dropped into boiling water, but by being boiled slowly, one degree at a time. The best body men understood this. They knew that the job required a kind of tense passivity, mind and body in tune with all five senses. If you thought about it, private security was just another form of Buddhism, tai chi. To live in the moment, fluidly, thinking of nothing more than where you are and what exists around you. Bodies in space and time moving along a prescribed arc. Shadow and light. Positive and negative space.
In living this way, a sense of anticipation can evolve, the voodoo pre-kno
wledge that the wards you are watching are going to do or say something expectable. By being one with the universe you become the universe, and in this way you know how the rain will fall, the way cut grass will blow in fixed starts in a summer wind. You know when Condor and Falcon are about to fight, when the girl, Rachel (Robin), is getting bored, and when the boy, JJ (Sparrow), has missed his nap and is going to melt down.
You know when the man in the crowd is going to take one step too close, when the autograph fan is, instead, looking to serve legal papers. You know when to slow down on a yellow light and when to take the next elevator.
These are not things you have feelings about. They are simply things that are.
Falcon was up first, in her robe, carrying Sparrow. The machine had already made coffee. It ran on a timer. Robin came down next. She went straight to the living room and put on cartoons. Condor was up last, an hour later, shuffling in with the newspaper, thumbs digging into the blue Sunday plastic bag. Gil lurked, staying out of the way, eyes on the periphery, hugging the shadows.
After breakfast he approached Condor.
“Mr. Bateman,” he said. “Okay if I brief you now?”
Condor looked up over his reading glasses.
“Should I be worried?”
“No, sir, just an overview for the week.”
Condor nodded, stood. He knew Gil didn’t like to talk shop in casual settings. They went into the parlor. It was lined with books that Condor had actually read. Old maps lined the walls, photos of Condor with notable global figures—Nelson Mandela, Vladimir Putin, John McCain, the actor Clint Eastwood. There was an autographed baseball in a glass case on the desk. Chris Chambliss’s tenth-inning blast from that game, because who in the tristate area didn’t remember the way the stands emptied onto the field, the way Chambliss had to push and twist through civilian lunatics to round the bases—did he even touch home plate?
