Time is the Fire

by Connie Willis

  I did. The introduction was by Roy Hoopes, and it was not only a Penguin edition, but one that had been out of print for at least twenty years. Even if Ariaura’s researcher had bothered to check out Cain, it would hardly be this edition.

  And the introduction was full of stuff about Cain that was perfect—the fact that everyone who knew him called him Jamie, the fact that he’d spent a summer in a tuberculosis sanitarium and that he hated Baltimore, Mencken’s favorite place.

  Some of the information was in the Mencken books—Mencken’s introducing him to Alfred A. Knopf, who’d published that first collection, the Sun connection, their rivalry over movie star Aileen Pringle.

  But most of the facts in the introduction weren’t, and they were exactly the kind of thing a friend would know. And Ariaura wouldn’t, because they were details about Cain’s life, not Mencken’s. Even a mastermind wouldn’t have memorized every detail of Cain’s life or those of Mencken’s other famous friends. If there wasn’t anything here I could use, there might be something in Dreiser’s biography, or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s. Or Lillian Gish’s.

  But there was plenty here, like the fact that James M. Cain’s brother Boydie had died in a tragic accident after the Armistice, and his statement that all his writing was modeled on Alice in Wonderland. That was something no one would ever guess from reading Cain’s books, which were all full of crimes and murderers and beautiful, calculating women who seduced the hero into helping her with a scam and then turned out to be working a scam of her own.

  Not exactly the kind of thing Ariaura would read, and definitely the kind of thing Mencken would have. He’d bought The Baby in the Icebox for The American Mercury and told Cain it was one of the best things he’d ever written. Which meant it would make a perfect source for a question, and I knew just what to ask. To anyone who hadn’t heard of the story, the question wouldn’t even make sense. Only somebody who’d read the story would know the answer. Like Mencken.

  And if Ariaura knew it, I’d—what? Believe she was actually channeling Mencken?

  Right. And Charles Fred was really talking to the dead and Uri Geller was really bending spoons. It was a trick, that was all. She had a photographic memory, or somebody was feeding her the answers.

  Feeding her the answers.

  I thought suddenly of Kildy saying, “Who was Sue Hicks?”—of her insisting I go with her to see Ariaura—of her saying, “But why would Ariaura channel a spirit who yells at her audiences?”

  I looked down at the orange and yellow paperback in my hand. “A beautiful, calculating woman who seduces the hero into helping her with a scam,” I murmured, and thought about Ariaura’s movie-star-handsome ushers and about scantily clad Victorian spirits and about Sir William Crookes.

  Sex. Get the chump emotionally involved and he won’t see the wires. It was the oldest trick in the book.

  I’d said Ariaura wasn’t smart enough to pull off such a complicated scam, and she wasn’t. But Kildy was. So you get her on the inside where she can see the shelf full of Mencken books, where she can hear the chump mutter, “Where the hell is Mencken when we need him?” You get the chump to trust her, and if he falls in love with her, so much the better. It’ll keep him off balance and he won’t get suspicious.

  And it all fit. It was Kildy who’d set up the contact—I never did channelers, and Kildy knew that. It was Kildy who’d said we couldn’t go incognito, Kildy who’d said to bring the Sony, knowing it would be confiscated, Kildy who’d taken a taxi to the seminar instead of coming in her Jaguar so she’d be at the office when Ariaura came roaring in.

  But she’d gotten the whole thing on tape. And she hadn’t had any idea who the spirit was. I was the one who’d figured out it was Mencken.

  With Kildy feeding me clues from the seminar she’d gone to before, and I only had her word that Ariaura had channeled him that time. And that it had happened in Berkeley and Seattle. And that the tapes had been edited.

  And she was the one who’d kept telling me it was really Mencken, the one who’d come up with the idea of asking him questions that would prove it—questions I’d conveniently told her the answers to—the one who’d suggested a friend of hers go to the seminar and videotape it, a videotape I’d never seen. I wondered if it—or Riata—even existed.

  The whole thing, from beginning to end, had been a setup.

  And I had never tumbled to it. Because I’d been too busy looking at her legs and her honey-colored hair and that smile. Just like Crookes.

  I don’t believe it, I thought. Not Kildy, who’d worked side by side with me for nearly a year, who’d stolen chicken guts and pretended to be hypnotized and let Jean-Pierre cleanse her aura, who’d come to work for me in the first place because she hated scam artists like Ariaura.

  Right. Who’d come to work for a two-bit magazine when she could have been getting five million a movie and dating Viggo Mortensen. Who’d been willing to give up premieres and summers in Tahiti and deep massages for me. Skeptics’ Rule Number Two: If it seems too good to be true, it is. And how often have you said she’s a good actress?

  No, I thought, every bone in my body rebelling. It can’t be true.

  And that’s what the chump always says, isn’t it, even when he’s faced with the evidence? “I don’t believe it. She wouldn’t do that to me.”

  And that was the whole point—to get you to trust her, to make you believe she was on your side. Otherwise you’d have insisted on checking those tapes of Ariaura’s seminars for yourself to see if they’d been edited, you’d have demanded independently verifiable evidence that Ariaura had really canceled those seminars and asked about a psychiatrist.

  Independently verifiable evidence. That’s what I needed, and I knew exactly where to look.

  “My mother took me to Lucius Windfire’s luminescence reading,” Kildy had said, and I had the guest lists for those readings. They were part of the court records, and I’d gotten them when I’d done the story on his arrest. Kildy had come to see me on May tenth and he’d only had two seminars that month.

  I called up the lists for both seminars and for the two before that and typed in Kildy’s name.

  Nothing.

  She said she went with her mother, I thought, and typed her mom’s name in. Nothing. And nothing when I printed out the lists and went through them by hand, nothing when I went through the lists for March and April. And June. And no ten-thousand-dollar donation on any of Windfire, Inc.’s financial statements.

  Half an hour later Kildy showed up smiling, beautiful, full of news. “Ariaura’s canceled all the private sessions she scheduled and the rest of her tour.”

  She leaned over my shoulder to look at what I was doing. “Did you come up with a foolproof question for Mencken?”

  “No,” I said, sliding The Baby in the Icebox under a file folder and sticking them both in a drawer. “I came up with a theory about what’s going on, though.”

  “Really?” she said.

  “Really. You know, one of my big problems all along has been Ariaura. She’s just not smart enough to have come up with all this—the ‘aught-four’ thing, the not being able to read, the going to see a psychiatrist. Which either meant she was actually channeling Mencken, or there was some other factor. And I think I’ve got it figured out.”

  “You have?”

  “Yeah. Tell me what you think of this: Ariaura wants to be big. Not just seven-hundred-and-fifty-a-pop seminars and sixty-dollar videotapes, but Oprah, the Today show, Larry King, the whole works. But to do that it’s not enough to have audiences who believe her. She needs to have somebody with credibility say she’s for real, a scientist, say, or a professional skeptic.”

  “Like you,” she said cautiously.

  “Like me. Only I don’t believe in astral spirits. Or channelers. And I certainly wouldn’t fall for the spirit of an ancient priest of Atlantis. It’s going to have to be somebody a charlatan would never dream of channeling, somebody who’ll say what I want to hear. And
somebody I know a lot about so I’ll recognize the clues being fed to me, somebody custom-tailored for me.”

  “Like H. L. Mencken,” Kildy said. “But how would she have known you were a fan of Mencken’s?”

  “She didn’t have to,” I said. “That was her partner’s job.”

  “Her part—”

  “Partner, sidekick, shill, whatever you want to call it. Somebody I’d trust when she said it was important to go see some channeler.”

  “Let me get this straight,” she said. “You think I went to Ariaura’s seminar and her imitation of Isus was so impressive I immediately became a Believer with a capital B and fell in with her nefarious scheme, whatever it is?”

  “No,” I said. “I think you were in it with her from the beginning, from the very first day you came to work for me.”

  She really was a good actress. The expression in those beautiful blue eyes looked exactly like stunned hurt. “You believe I set you up,” she said wonderingly.

  I shook my head. “I’m a skeptic, remember? I deal in independently verifiable evidence. Like this,” I said, and handed her Lucius Windfire’s attendance list.

  She looked at it in silence.

  “Your whole story about how you found out about me was a fake, wasn’t it? You didn’t look up ‘debunkers’ in the phone book, did you? You didn’t go see a luminescence therapist with your mother?”

  “No.”

  No.

  I hadn’t realized till she admitted it how much I had been counting on her saying, “There must be some mistake, I was there,” on her having some excuse, no matter how phony: “Did I say the fourteenth? I meant the twentieth,” or “My publicist got the tickets for us. It would be in her name.” Anything. Even flinging the list dramatically at me and sobbing, “I can’t believe you don’t trust me.”

  But she just stood there, looking at the incriminating list and then at me, not a tantrum or a tear in sight.

  “You concocted the whole story,” I said finally.

  “Yes.”

  I waited for her to say, “It’s not the way it looks, Rob, I can explain,” but she didn’t say that, either. She handed the list back to me and picked up her cell phone and her bag, fishing for her keys and then slinging her bag over her shoulder as casually as if she were on her way to go cover a new moon ceremony or a tarot reading, and left.

  And this was the place in the story where the private eye takes a bottle of Scotch out of his bottom drawer, pours himself a nice stiff drink, and congratulates himself on his narrow escape.

  I’d almost been made a royal chump of, and Mencken (the real one, not the imitation Kildy and Ariaura had tried to pass off as him) would never have forgiven me.

  So good riddance. And what I needed to do now was write up the whole sorry scam as a lesson to other skeptics for the next issue.

  But I sat there a good fifteen minutes, thinking about Kildy and her exit, and knowing that, in spite of its offhandedness, I was never going to see her again.

  What I need is a miracle.

  —INHERIT THE WIND

  I told you I’d make a lousy psychic. The next morning Kildy walked in carrying an armload of papers and file folders. She dumped them in front of me on my desk, picked up my phone, and began punching in numbers.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing? And what’s all this?” I said, gesturing at the stack of papers.

  “Independently verifiable evidence,” she said, still punching in numbers, and put the phone to her ear. “Hello, this is Kildy Ross. I need to speak to Ariaura.” There was a pause. “She’s not taking calls? All right, tell her I’m at the Jaundiced Eye office, and I need to speak to her as soon as possible. Tell her it’s urgent. Thank you.” She hung up.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing, calling Ariaura on my phone?” I said.

  “I wasn’t,” she said. “I was calling Mencken.” She pulled a file out of the middle of the stack. “I’m sorry it took me so long. Getting Ariaura’s phone records was harder than I thought.”

  “Ariaura’s phone records?”

  “Yeah. Going back four years,” she said, pulling a file folder out of the middle of the stack and handing it to me.

  I opened it up. “How did you get her phone records?”

  “I know this computer guy at Pixar. We should do an issue on how easy it is to get hold of private information and how mediums are using it to convince their people they’re talking to their dead relatives,” she said, fishing through the stack for another folder.

  “And here are my phone records.” She handed it to me. “The cell’s on top, and then my home number and my car phone. And my mom’s. And my publicist’s cell phone.”

  “Your publicist’s cell—?”

  She nodded. “In case you think I used her phone to call Ariaura. She doesn’t have a regular phone, just a cell. And here are my dad’s and my stepmother’s. I can get my other stepmothers’, too, but it’ll take a couple more days, and Ariaura’s big seminar is tonight.”

  She handed me more files. “This is a list of all my trips—airline tickets, hotel bills, rental car records. Credit card bills, with annotations,” she said, and went over to her tote bag and pulled out three fat Italian-leather notebooks with a bunch of Post-its sticking out the sides. “These are my day planners, with notes as to what the abbreviations mean, and my publicist’s log.”

  “And this is supposed to prove you were at Lucius Windfire’s luminescence reading with your mother?”

  “No, Rob, I told you, I lied about the seminar,” she said, looking earnestly through the stack, folder by folder. “These are to prove I didn’t call Ariaura, that she didn’t call me, that I wasn’t in Seattle or Eugene or any of the other cities she was in, and I never went to Salem.”

  She pulled a folder out of the pile and began handing items to me. “Here’s the program for Yogi Magaputra’s matinee performance for May nineteenth. I couldn’t find the ticket stubs and I didn’t buy the tickets, the studio did, but here’s a receipt for the champagne cocktail I had at intermission. See? It’s got the date and it was at the Roosevelt, and here’s a schedule of Magaputra’s performances, showing he was at the Roosevelt on that day. And a flyer for the next session they gave out as we left.”

  I had one of those flyers in my file on mediums, and I was pretty sure I’d been at that séance. I’d gone to three, working on a piece on his use of funeral home records to obtain information on his victims’ dead relatives. I’d never published it—he’d been arrested on tax evasion charges before I finished it. I looked questioningly at Kildy.

  “I was there researching a movie I was thinking about doing,” Kildy said, “a comedy about a medium. It was called Medium Rare. Here’s the screenplay.”

  She handed me a thick bound manuscript. “I wouldn’t read the whole thing. It’s terrible. Anyway, I saw you there, talking to this guy with hair transplants—”

  Magaputra’s personal manager, who I’d suspected was feeding him info from the audience. I’d been trying to see if I could spot his concealed mike.

  “I saw you talking to him, and I thought you looked—”

  “Gullible?”

  Her jaw tightened. “No. Interesting. Cute. Not the kind of guy I expected to see at one of the yogi’s séances. I asked who you were, and somebody said you were a professional skeptic, and I thought, Well, thank goodness! Magaputra was patently fake, and everyone was buying it, lock, stock, and barrel.”

  “Including your mother,” I said.

  “No, I made that up, too. My mother’s even more of a skeptic than I am, especially after being married to my father. She’s partly why I was interested—she’s always after me to date guys from outside the movie business—so I bought a copy of The Jaundiced Eye and got your address and came to see you.”

  “And lied.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It was a dumb thing to do. I knew it as soon as you started talking about how you shouldn’t take anything anyone tells
you on faith and how important independently verifiable evidence is, but I was afraid if I told you I was doing research for a movie you wouldn’t want me tagging along, and if I told you I was attracted to you, you wouldn’t believe me. You’d think it was a reality show or some kind of Hollywood fad thing everybody was doing right then, like opening a boutique or knitting or checking into Betty Ford.”

  “And you fully intended to tell me,” I said, “you were just waiting for the right moment. In fact, you were all set to when Ariaura came along—”

  “You don’t have to be sarcastic,” she said. “I thought if I went to work for you and you got to know me, you might stop thinking of me as a movie star and ask me out—”

  “And incidentally pick up some good acting tips for your medium movie.”

  “Yes,” she said angrily. “If you want to know the truth, I also thought if I kept going to those stupid past-life regression sessions and covens and soul retrieval circles, I might get over the stupid crush I had on you, but the better I got to know you, the worse it got.”

  She looked up at me. “I know you don’t believe me, but I didn’t set you up. I’d never seen Ariaura before I went to that first seminar with my publicist, and I’m not in any kind of scam with her. And that story I told you the first day is the only thing I’ve ever lied to you about. Everything else I told you—about hating psychics and Ben Affleck and wanting to get out of the movie business and wanting to help you debunk charlatans and loathing the idea of ending up in rehab or in The Hulk IV—was true.”

  She rummaged in the pile and pulled out an olive-green-covered script. “They really did offer me the part.”

  “Of the Hulk?”

  “No,” she said and held the script out to me. “Of the love interest.”

  She looked up at me with those blue eyes of hers, and if anything had ever been too good to be true, it was Kildy, standing there with that bilious green script and the office’s fluorescent light on her golden hair. I had always wondered how all those chumps sitting around séance tables and squatting on lilac-colored cushions could believe such obvious nonsense. Well, now I knew.