Another Kingdom

by Andrew Klavan

  Someone shut off the alarm. The quiet was almost as deafening as the bell.

  “I’m not the bad guy,” I told the plainclothesman over my shoulder. “The bad guy’s dead.”

  He spun me back and looked me in the eye—a significant look, I thought, but I couldn’t guess at the significance of it. Not then.

  “You have the right to remain silent,” he told me in a loud, clear voice.

  I took the hint.

  THE COPS DROVE me to a brick box of a police station somewhere in Hollywood. Two patrolmen hurried me through cramped hallways hung with fliers and bustling with detectives and uniforms. They hustled me into an interrogation room, a cramped cube of a place crowded with a long linoleum-topped table and a few plastic chairs. It looked like a broom closet they’d refitted for the purpose. One patrolman pushed me down into one of the chairs. He took off my cuffs. I rubbed my sore wrists.

  The patrolmen left. Then my old pals Detectives Graciano and Lord came in.

  I wasn’t happy to see them. I remembered the way Lord had stonewalled me when I called her for help. I felt pretty sure now they were Orosgo’s toadies, just like my brother and my parents were.

  They stood over me, the short, blocky man and the large, oval-faced woman side by side. They looked down at me with sleepy, cynical, accusatory eyes.

  A video camera hung in a corner of the ceiling. I couldn’t help but notice it was unplugged. So it was just Graciano and Lord and me. No one else was watching.

  “So why’d you kill him?” Graciano said casually, as if by way of making conversation.

  I raised an eyebrow at him. “You’ve got to be kidding me, right?” He didn’t answer. He wasn’t kidding. “Half the mall saw him chasing me with a gun. There must be security cameras all over the place. There must be videos from every angle.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” he answered stolidly. “A place like that. You’d think there would be witnesses and videos and all that shit.”

  “Are you telling me there’s not?”

  “Just humor us, Lively, would you?” said Lord in her trademark impassive voice. “Just tell us what happened in your own words.”

  What was I supposed to say? I had lied to them before, back in the hospital. To protect Riley, I had left Serge Orosgo out of the story, just as my brother, Rich, had told me to. I could stick to that lie, if I wanted. It would be the easiest course. I could just repeat that Sera had come after me because I’d seen him murder Gunther. It would hang together with what I’d told them already.

  But why should I lie? They’d already proved they were prepared to let me die no matter what I said. What worse could they do to me if I told the truth? Maybe if I showed them I was willing to name Orosgo, they’d be a little slower to mess with me. Maybe they’d realize I was dangerous to them alive, and that it would look bad if I turned up dead. Maybe.

  Or maybe I just wanted to show them I wasn’t afraid of them. Maybe I was just tired of being afraid.

  So this time, I gave it to them straight, the whole story. How I was looking for the book, Another Kingdom. How Sera and the bald thug had broken in and shot Sean Gunther dead. I told them all about Orosgo: the mad billionaire descending in his helicopter, and the way I punched Sera in the face, and the crazy dinner on the patio, all of it. Well, almost all of it. I didn’t tell them about Galiana. At one point, I rubbed my mouth wearily and, with my hand right beneath my nose, I thought I could smell the scent of Lady Betheray still on me. I thought of her where I’d left her, back in the castle, bravely leading the way to the tower room despite the guards everywhere. I didn’t mention any of that either. I didn’t want to give them an excuse to toss me into a madhouse somewhere and throw away the key.

  When I was done talking, the tiny interrogation room was silent. The silence went on for a long time, so long it was unnerving. All the while, Lord and Graciano stood right where they were, right over me, looking down at me with those sleepy, cynical, accusatory stares.

  At long last, Graciano said, “Uh huh.” And then he repeated, “So why’d you kill him?”

  I stared at him. “What?”

  “Sera. Serafim …” He craned his neck to glance at Lord’s notebook as if he needed to read the name. “Moran … Morana. Sera Morana. Why’d you kill him?”

  “Are you joking?” I asked him.

  “You think a dead man is a joke?” said Graciano. He turned to Lord. “Do you think a dead man is a joke, Detective?”

  “Not me,” said Lord. “Not my kind of humor.”

  “Yeah, I’m missing the laugh factor here, too, Austin. I gotta be honest with you, bud,” Graciano said. He had that whole fake-friendly cop thing going on.

  “He was coming after me with a pistol,” I answered. “Everyone saw it.”

  “Yeah, you said,” said Graciano.

  “Because of the magic billionaire,” said Lord as she jotted something down in her notebook.

  “What magic billionaire? I didn’t say anything about magic.”

  “Well, I just figured he was magic because he appeared out of nowhere,” she said. “He wasn’t there when you told the story before, now suddenly—poof—there he is. That sounds pretty magical to me. Doesn’t that sound magical to you?” she asked Graciano.

  “I’m personally amazed,” he answered.

  “This is crap,” I said. “He shot up the store. Everyone saw him.”

  “I didn’t see him,” said Lord.

  “We want to believe you, Austin,” said Graciano in the same fake-friendly tone. “No, really, we do. You say a billionaire philanthropist landed in a helicopter and you had dinner with him on his terrace and then he sent this assassin Sera after you.”

  “I don’t know if Orosgo sent him. I think Sera came after me because I punched him,” I said.

  “Right, you punched him. A … what’d you call yourself? A story …”

  “A story analyst.”

  “A story analyst, right. And you punched an assassin after he killed the author but before the billionaire landed in his helicopter.” Graciano and Lord exchanged an expressionless glance. Then they both looked back at me. “Of course we want to believe that, Austin,” Graciano said. “It’s a good story. Hell, I wish real life were actually that entertaining.”

  I saw how this was going. I gave them a full-fledged sneer, my teeth showing.

  “The problem is, we’ve been doing some research,” Graciano went on. “And this guy? This Serafim guy? He’s not an assassin, Austin.”

  “He’s good people,” said Lord.

  I sighed. There wasn’t much point in answering. I could see that now.

  “Well, he was good people before you knocked him off that walkway,” Graciano said. “After that, he was dead people.”

  “He didn’t work for Serge Orosgo either,” said Lord, looking up from her pad to regard me with half-lidded eyes. “You know what he did for a living, Austin? He ran a literacy program for disadvantaged kids.”

  I actually laughed out loud. “I’ll bet he did.”

  “He did,” said Graciano. “No connection with Orosgo at all.”

  “Serge Orosgo hasn’t even been in this country for the past three months,” said Lord. “He’s been at his mansion in Curacao the whole time.”

  “He has his headquarters there,” said Graciano. “He stays there a certain portion of the year so he doesn’t have to pay taxes.”

  I nodded. I was still sneering.

  “What do you say to that, Austin?” Graciano asked me.

  “What do you say to that?” asked Lord.

  They both waited for an answer.

  I gave it to them, right through my sneer. “You called Orosgo magic because he appeared out of nowhere.”

  “That’s right,” said Lord.

  “That’s right,” said Graciano.

  “Because I didn’t mention him to you before today and then today I did.”

  “That’s right,” said Lord.

  “So if
I didn’t mention him before, how come you found out where he was staying? The whole thing about Curacao and his taxes and whether Sera worked for him. Why would you research that? How could you know to do that? That sounds kind of like magic to me.”

  The next few moments were … I guess uncomfortable would be the word. Graciano and Lord kept looking down at me, and it’s not that their expressions changed exactly, but something changed, something turned those blank stares from sleepy and cynical to angry and threatening. When Graciano spoke again, there was none of that fake cop friendliness in his voice anymore. Not in his voice, and not in his face either. There was nothing in his face but pure viper-eyed Mean.

  “We’re just telling you how it is,” he said. “We’re just telling you how it’s going to be.”

  I looked at him. He looked at me. And I wondered: Was it possible? Could Orosgo really wangle all this? Change the records? Eliminate the eyewitnesses? Erase the security footage? Make it look like I’d murdered Sera for no good reason? Could he really be that powerful? The idea made my stomach churn.

  Graciano was about to speak again, but I never found out what he was going to say. Because just then the door opened—flew—shot—banged open not like someone was just coming in but like someone was coming in with purpose, purpose and anger, like someone had said to himself, That’s it. I’ve heard enough! and stormed through the door so fast and hard it flew and shot and banged.

  It was my brother, Rich. He charged into the little room—and my mother and father were right behind him.

  AT THE EXACT same moment, Detectives Graciano and Lord turned, presenting their profiles to me. They turned in unison, one motion together, stiffly, briskly. Like robots who had just received a wireless signal: Turn. Or like figures on a clock whose time to turn had come. As my brother and parents crowded the tiny room, the detectives marched out—first Graciano, then Lord—and were gone.

  Thoughts whisked and ricocheted through my overloaded brain. Rich and my parents had been listening to the whole interrogation. The whole interrogation was a charade put on for them. Not a charade, a test. To see whether I was committed to protecting Serge Orosgo even when the heat was on. It was a test, and I had failed it big time.

  I didn’t know these things, I just thought them. The thoughts just came to me. Maybe they were wrong.

  My family, meanwhile, arrayed themselves around the room. My mother sat in the plastic chair across the table from me. She looked so thin and angular, I thought if she turned sideways, she would disappear. My willowy father began to drift about the tiny space like a dandelion seed on the summer breezes. He paused to examine the unplugged video camera on the wall, standing beneath it with his hands behind his back, looking up at it from one angle then another as if it were some ancient tablet thick with runes. Rich, the one substantial figure among them with his broad shoulders and three-piece suit and his great blond Viking beard, was leaning in a corner, watching me wearily as if my mischief had worn him plumb out.

  I looked at them, one and then the next and then the next. And yes, my mind once again returned to that childhood memory: myself on the floor telling stories with figures. Lost in that stillness of delight and creation that was, I suspected now, my natural refuge from them, from this, from the truth of who my people were. As my thoughts swirled in my brain, so my emotions seemed to swirl in the heart of me, swirl together into some fathomless concoction of anger and disgust and grief—and more grief going deep into the fabric of my flesh and viscera. Was there any part of my life that was not a lie? I wondered. All this time, I had been worried that my adventures in Galiana had been a sickness and delusion. But really, wasn’t it this, this other life, my real life, my childhood, my family, my upbringing—wasn’t it all this that had been the delusion? In some ways, it seemed to me just then, Galiana was more real than reality.

  “Well, you’re getting yourself an awful lot of attention these days, aren’t you?” said my mom with a disdainful little sniff.

  “I’m being set up,” I told her quietly. But I didn’t have to tell her, did I? She knew. They all knew.

  “Oh!” said mom, rolling her eyes. “Please don’t be so melodramatic, sweetheart. It can’t be good for you.”

  “Or for anyone,” my father murmured, still studying the camera on the wall.

  “They want to charge me with murder.”

  “No one wants anything of the kind,” Mom said. “Do they, Richard?”

  I looked at my brother—really looked at him for the first time since he’d come in—and he met my eyes. There was honesty in that exchange of glances at least, not like with my parents. He knew I knew, and I knew he knew I knew.

  “Yeah, Rich, let’s have it,” I said to him. “What does he want? Your boy, your boss, your hero, Orosgo. What does he want from me?”

  It was my mother who answered, though all the while Rich and I kept our gazes locked together, as if our mother’s voice ran between us like a wall and we were looking over it at one another. “He wants to make the world a better place,” she said. “Is that some sort of sin in your religion, dear? He wants to change the way people think. He wants to change the way people are, always fighting and oppressing each other, one better than the next, richer than the next, stronger than the next and keeping the other down.”

  As before when I heard of Orosgo’s fantasies, what came into my mind was Eastrim, its heretics in cages, its guards with spears, its mobs crying for blood. I had already seen Orosgo’s utopia, and it didn’t work.

  “He believes the world can be a better place than that, Austin,” she went on. “If you believe in something so much finer, well, I for one would certainly like to know what it is.”

  There it was again, that question, the question I’d asked myself in Shadow Wood before the throne of Tauratanio, the question Rich had asked me in my hospital room. What did I believe?

  Rich and I continued to look at each other across the wall of my mother’s voice.

  Without turning from him, I answered her. “I believe that people should be left the hell alone, Mother. That’s what I believe. To hell with Orosgo. To hell with all of you.”

  “A very nice way to speak to your family,” my mother said.

  “Let wisdom reign, and each man go his way,” I said.

  Rich winced.

  “Wisdom!” my mother said with a sophisticated little snort. “What’s wisdom, I wonder?”

  “Ay, there’s the rub,” murmured my father, studying the camera.

  My brother only heaved a deep sigh so that his big shoulders lifted and fell.

  “Here’s the thing,” he said. “A man is dead. You killed him, Aus.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Well, it’s a problem.”

  “Oh, fuck you, Rich,” I said.

  “A very nice way to speak to your own brother,” said my mother.

  “Adorable,” my father muttered archly.

  “I’m just saying,” said Rich. “I’m just telling you. It’s a problem—if you make it a problem.”

  “He was trying to kill me. I killed him first.”

  “Sure. But if you get charged with murder … Well, by the time you prove that, what’s left of your reputation? Or your Hollywood career? Or your savings, for that matter?”

  “If you have any savings,” muttered my father. He was wandering away from the camera now.

  “It’s funny how this perfect Age of Orosgo involves so much extortion and murder,” I said. “It’s almost like it’s the same as the age we live in now.”

  “He doesn’t want to extort you,” said Rich with some frustration. “He doesn’t want to murder you.”

  “Well, that’s nice, I guess. What does he want? That’s what I was asking in the first place.”

  “He wants …” Rich searched the air for the answer. “He wants you on his team, man. Our team. He wants to be your friend, Austin.”

  “There. Is that so terrible?” my mother asked.

  “Mm, very t
errible, terribly terrible,” said dear old Dad. Now he was studying the tiles on the wall. They were grimy tiles, once white. There was nothing to study on them, but he studied them anyway, his nose up close.

  “He wants you to be part of the family,” said Rich, with a gesture of his head at Mom and Dad. “Really. No matter what you think of him, that’s the kind of guy he is.”

  I snorted. I couldn’t meet his eyes anymore. I couldn’t stand it. I looked away.

  Rich wouldn’t have it. He pushed off the wall and came to me. He leaned on the table. Hung down over me so that when I turned back to him, his big features and his big beard filled my vision, his hot breath washed over my face.

  “I’m serious, Austin,” he said. “This is serious. This is your life. You know? Your only life. What do you want it to be like? That’s the question. You want your life to be about making movies? Orosgo owns a movie studio. The people who choose the projects and give them the what-do-you-call-it, the green light—they work for him. The journalists who’ll interview you and give you publicity and write the movie reviews—they work for him. He can even make audiences turn up and love you, if it comes to that. All the best people know Orosgo, Austin. All the movie stars. All the important ones. All the important writers and directors and the big faces that talk on TV. All the people who can make your life happen and not happen, who can make it a success or one long slog of frustration and humiliation and failure and pain. Watch them. Listen to them. They all think what he thinks; they all say what he says. Are you gonna be the only one who disagrees? What do you think that’s gonna be like? There it is. All right? Good life, bad life, brother. That’s the choice you’ve got. You don’t want to think about making the world a better place? Fine. But at least think about making your own world better. Okay? It’s grown-up time, Austin, that’s all. Good life, bad life. Time to choose.”

  You know what surprised me most about this? I’ll tell you. What surprised me most was how hard the choice was. I mean, it’s not like I didn’t understand what was going on here. Of course I did. How many times had I seen this scene in the movies, or read it in books? The bad guy tries to bribe the hero. Tries to buy off his integrity, his honesty, his courage, the whole deal. And what happens? The hero won’t surrender, right? He says go to hell, bad guy. Sure he does. That’s what makes him the hero. And that’s what I wanted to be too: a hero. Like in the movies, in the books. Like in my own daydreams. Isn’t everyone a hero in his own daydreams?