Empire of Lies

by Andrew Klavan

  Then four cops swarmed over him and wrestled him to the ground.

  Under the Influence

  I went on staring openmouthed at the television as they showed the video again and again. And again. Not to mention again. As if urging us to drain the drama of the moment down to its dregs, a magic elixir of vicarious life to warm us in our lassitude. Even when the newswoman came back on, they split the screen and kept running and rerunning the video to the right of her. The newswoman—a smart-eyed street reporter with brown hair and white-coffee skin—talked for a few moments into her hand mike on one side of the screen while Piersall confronted the cops again and again on the other. Then the newswoman was replaced by a head shot of Piersall in his prime. It was a nice effect. There he was to the left as we knew him best, chisel-featured and coiffed, with the silver shoulders and sparkly collar of his space admiral's unitard just visible at the bottom of the picture. Meanwhile, on the right, where the video kept replaying, there he was as a fat crazy man screaming in the middle of the street until the four officers tackled him, shoved his face into the pavement, wrenched his arms behind his back, and slapped the cuffs on. The two sides of the screen formed a sort of living mug shot, only instead of showing the suspect full-face and profile, they showed him past and present. Handsome TV star here, drunken has-been nutcase under arrest over there. A nice effect, as I say. It's a very pleasant sensation to watch a successful person fall from grace.

  Anyway, here's what had happened to the poor bastard—here's what the newswoman told us, I mean, while, oh look! they ran the video of Piersall's violent arrest three more times.

  The day after having his True Crime America show canceled during its first broadcast, Piersall, according to police and eyewitnesses, stormed into the cable network's Manhattan headquarters just north of Times Square. Witnesses described him as "drunk and irate." Barging into the office of network president Cole Hondler, he brandished a .38 caliber revolver.

  "There were women screaming, people diving under desks. It was terrifying," said one young doofus whose clueless face was captioned cable network office worker.

  "According to Hondler," the newswoman said, "Piersall demanded that the network give him airtime to tell what he called 'his side of the story.'"

  When Hondler tried to calm Piersall down, the former Augustus Kane waved the pistol around some more, then staggered out of the room. Hondler had his assistant call 911.

  Outside the network, on Broadway, Piersall's silver BMW Z4 was illegally parked in a loading zone. He stumbled to it and plunked himself behind the wheel. One witness claimed she heard him say he was headed for the FBI field office in Federal Plaza. In any case, he ripped away southward jig-time. Ram the force field full speed. If those Borgons escape, the galaxy is done for.

  It was late afternoon, but still before the evening rush. Traffic is always jammed up tight on that little island, but there was some movement to be found at this hour on the Great White Way. Piersall screeched away from the curb with the hot 3.0-liter, 255-horsepower engine tanked and cranked. Police said he managed to work the Z4 up to 50 miles per hour, oozing through the narrow gaps between the vans and taxis funneling into Times Square. The police were after him almost at once. The chase was on.

  Nowadays it seems even the most minor celebrity can't go to the bathroom without video footage of the event getting beamed into our homes on TV or over the Internet, and yet, miraculous to relate, there was not one single frame of Patrick Piersall and his silver Z4 weaving and tacking through the pulsing core of Manhattan. It must've been a sight to see, too: the sports car jamming under the thirty-yard-high billboard of a woman in her bra and panties and screaming past the four-thousand-square-foot television screen showing some comedian or other laughing through his humongous white teeth. But the best our news crew could do was some stock footage of Times Square with its towering, spotlit nakedness and neon. We viewers had to desperately spur our atrophied imaginations in order to envision the rest.

  Back to our story, though. Piersall never slowed. He raced through red lights and green alike, leaving a trail of chaotic intersections in his wake. Only the traffic congealing around Herald Square got the best of him. At one point, in fact, the traffic got so bad that a pair of pursuing officers actually got out of their cruisers and darted past the George M. Cohan statue shoulder to shoulder, trying to catch up to the Beamer on foot. At the last moment, though, the sea of yellow cabs in front of Macy's window parted, and Piersall and his Z4 darted out of reach of the law again.

  But more and more cop cars were pouring into the pursuit with each passing moment. By the time our hero reached City Hall, he was hemmed in on every side. A wall of cruisers blocked his path south and east. The park stopped him to the west. And City Hall's concrete security bunkers sealed him off northward. Swerving to avoid a collision with any or all of them, Piersall ran the sports car up on the sidewalk as pedestrians hurled themselves over park benches to get out of the way. A moment later, the actor spilled out of the driver's door and started raving and waving his hands in the air, whereupon ... well, let's cut to the videotape.

  Which they did—again—concluding the story now with astatement from a "cable-network spokesman." The newswoman read the words as they appeared in white letters on one side of the screen.

  "All of us at the network are deeply saddened by today's events. Patrick Piersall is a fine actor and an important part of television history. His presence at our network will be missed. We wish him the very best as he attempts to rehabilitate himself."

  To this, the newswoman added, "The network says Piersall's series True Crime America was canceled due to low ratings and content some viewers found offensive. I'm Amy Lopez—City News."

  With that—guess what—they played the video of Piersall's arrest again. Except this time, they had the audio turned up higher. They let it run on after the newswoman's sign-off so we could hear Piersall's drunken shouts more clearly, the curse words bleeped out:

  "Let me through, you [bleeps]! You stinking [bleep]ing [bleeps]! Call the FBI! I demand to see the FBI! Listen to me! Let me the [bleep] through! It's an emergency! I'm a...[bleep]ing TV ... personality! I have friends! I'm somebody. I've got to get to the FBI!"

  But his words were nearly drowned out by the cops who were simultaneously screaming, "Where's the gun, [bleep]er? Give us the [bleeping] gun! Give us the [bleep]ing rod! Now! [Bleep]ing now!" and so on, until—seeing his empty hands waving in the air, I guess—one of them shouted, "[Bleep,] let's just [bleep]ing do it!" and they rushed him.

  The report concluded with video of Piersall being frog-marched to a waiting cruiser. This was a portion of the arrest that hadn't been shown before, or perhaps had been shown before I tuned in.

  The people who had scattered off the sidewalk at the sight of the oncoming BMW regrouped to gawk at this part of the show. Their faces ringed the scene as the cops led Piersall away, their features fixed in various expressions of amusement or fascination or apathy—just as if they were watching it as I was, at home, on their sofas, on TV.

  And at the center of them was Piersall. The amateur cameraman had gotten in close to him now, very close. The cameraman's hands were obviously shaking in his excitement and the lens was sent wild a few times by the jostling crowd. All the same, what with his zoom and everything, he was taping so tightly that we could make out individual burst blood vessels in Piersall's nose and chart the course of the sweat along the furrows of his brow and cheeks.

  The actor had that baffled, hectic look that seems to be a standard fashion accessory for Drunks Being Led Away by the Police. His eyes shifted back and forth, the only active part of his otherwise passive body. And he was talking, still talking, in a strange murmuring tone that seemed at once automatic and urgent, as if he had repeated his warning so many times it had grown meaningless to him, but he knew he had to repeat it yet again until someone listened to him. It was a tone I knew, a tone I remembered, a tone I'd heard for years from my crazy mother.


  "You'll find out," he said breathlessly. "You'll find out. Whether you listen or not. Doesn't matter. Hope it's not too late. Too late. You wouldn't listen. Wouldn't listen to Casey Diggs. Wouldn't listen to me. But you'll see. Diggs was right. It's true. It's all true. All of it."

  I sat up straight on the sofa, the remote control gripped tight in my hand. I leaned forward, staring at the screen, at the dazed, wild face of Patrick Piersall.

  Now one cop put a hand on top of the actor's head and folded him into the backseat of the cruiser. For another moment, you could still hear Piersall muttering, "It's all true. It's all real. It's all happening."

  Then the cruiser's door slammed shut. The story was over.

  THURSDAY

  The Amoeba

  They arraigned Piersall the next morning at Manhattan Criminal Court. I was there.

  It was a hell of a strange feeling. It was as if I'd stepped right into the giant TV screen: got up off the sofa, put my foot through the screen's liquefying glass and whirlpooled into the reality beyond like some character in a kids' sci-fi movie. I had parked my red Mustang in a lot on Chambers Street and walked to the courthouse. The route took me right past the spot where Piersall had been arrested the night before. I say "right past it" with a sort of awestruck emphasis because I'd been shown the damned video of the scene so many times that the location was blazoned on my imagination like some famous site—the Alamo, say, or the White House, some site where history had happened. The sparse grass of City Hall Park, the grimy white of the security bunkers, even the very gray of the street pavement seemed charged with last night's events, as if a roly-poly has-been of a second-rate TV actor being carted off to the drunk tank where he belonged were the stuff of song and story.

  Beyond, down the street, was the court building, 100 Centre Street, a bold, imposing ziggurat looming against the turbulent autumn sky. As I came near, I saw a mob of between fifty and a hundred cameramen and reporters already gathered out in front, waiting for the disgraced space admiral to arrive. It was cold and growing colder. There was a damp, chill wind coiling off the harbor, cramming through the concrete corridors of Wall Street and bursting in staggered gusts over the open plaza. The reporters' coats and jackets and skirts blew around them, and their hair blew. I saw a print guy with his hands shoved deep in his leather bomber jacket, his chin pressed into his necktie. I saw a radio guy, thick as an Irish thug, hunched and shivering, clutching his heavy mike like a hammer. The TV reporters stood out from the others, their faces all made up for the lights, shiny and plastic as kewpie dolls. They looked colder than the others, too, because they were dressed lighter for the cameras, the girls in skirts, the guys in sports jackets. As my eye picked them out, I spotted Amy Lopez, the very same smart-eyed newswoman who had shared the screen with the Piersall video last night. She stood rigid, gripping her microphone down by her side, bouncing on the toes of her high-heeled shoes to keep her blood moving. Stray brown hairs blew onto her forehead. She scraped them off with a couple of fingernails as her keen eyes scanned the streets to the north. Now and again, she touched a hand to her ear, and I knew someone was speaking to her through an earpiece, keeping her up to date on Piersall's progress downtown from the Tombs, the city jail where he'd been kept overnight.

  I had an unaccustomed fluttery feeling in my belly. I felt out of my element, on the spot. It had been a long time since I'd been a reporter and there were probably twenty-five-year-old punks in this crowd who had covered more big stories in the last month than I had in my whole career. I wasn't sure I could compete with them. And I had to. I had to get through them and reach Piersall myself.

  That was my plan. Well, I had to do something, and that was all I could think of. If Piersall had information about Casey Diggs's death, maybe he could help me. Maybe we could help each other. Maybe together we could get the police to believe us.

  And yes, for the record, I'd tried to call his lawyers. I got through to a bored secretary who sounded as if she'd taken a hundred calls about Piersall in the last half hour and would take a hundred more in the next. "He'll get back to you," she told me. But I knew he never would.

  I neared the crowd of milling reporters. The Lopez girl was at the edge of the group, standing off to herself. Since she'd been on my TV last night, alone with me in my television room, I felt I knew her somehow. I felt maybe she would help me negotiate my way to Piersall's side so I could hand him the note I held folded in my jacket pocket. I approached her.

  "You guys waiting for Piersall?" I asked.

  She turned and looked at me like a dead fish looking at another dead fish. Her glance took in my sneakers, my jeans, my red windbreaker over my black sweatshirt. "You press?" she asked suspiciously.

  I nodded. "Out of town," I lied.

  "What, like, some blog?" She said the word with a snort and a sneer of disdain.

  "A newspaper."

  "Ever cover a celebrity perp walk before?"

  I tried to think if I ever had. I hadn't. "No."

  The girl put her tongue in her cheek. She considered my face—my honest, open, still-boyish face. Disdain gave way to amusement and pity. "Well, put your cup on, farmboy. It's a 24/7 cycle around here, and we're feeding the beast."

  I did my best not to look as humiliated as I felt. Man, I thought bitterly, this dame was a lot sweeter on TV—though come to think of it, she wasn't all that sweet on TV, either.

  "I didn't realize Piersall was this big a celebrity," I said.

  Amy shrugged. "He is now. It's a good story. It's a big beast." Then she shot her elbow into my solar plexus as hard as she could.

  I'm not sure she meant to do that. I'm not sure she didn't mean it, either. But the cops had just shown up, and the paddy wagon was right behind them. The crowd of reporters had erupted into motion and she—elbows flying—went charging into the thick of it.

  A double line of patrolmen pushed into the mob, forcing a corridor through the crush. The reporters reacted instantly, surging back against the line of cops. They all wanted the same thing: to get to the front. The cameramen wanted to take their pictures there. The radio guys wanted to record their sound. The TV personalities wanted to be seen on the video shouting their questions. And the print guys—well, they weren't just going to be pushed out of the way. They all shoved forward together, congealing into one living force, a great plasmic creature with a single mindless mind, a single mindless purpose: to get to the front, to get close to the disgraced celebrity.

  That was my purpose, too. Amy's elbow to my breadbasket got me off to a slow start just as it propelled her into the heart of the seething mass and out of sight. Taken completely by surprise, I caught the blow full force on the soft spot. I bent forward, grunting the air out of my lungs. At the same time, I was pressed from behind by a phalanx of technos hoisting mikes on booms like lances. They shoved me to the edge of the boiling, amoebic soup, and I was sucked in. The next moment I was part of it, spun round and drawn forward and pushed back all at the same time.

  I got hit again. Another elbow, in the side of the head this time, and this time from a radio guy with a lot more meat on him than Amy had. Angry, I shoved him back with both hands. It barely budged him—there was no place for him to go. He grunted a curse at me through gritted teeth. I shouted a curse back at him. A woman tried to snake her way under my arm, deeper into the churning plasma. Angry now, I grabbed her by the shoulder and dragged her out of my way. I began fighting, elbowing, shoving, driving, like everyone else, toward the front.

  The corrections van pulled up fast. It stopped hard at the corridor's opening. Two corrections officers leapt out of the front seats. The back of the van opened and two more jumped out there.

  The thrashing of the media amoeba became more crazed and urgent. Then Piersall appeared and the jellylike mob roiled and surged with a force and frenzy I could barely believe.

  I was deep in the gelatinous flow, struggling against it even as I helped create it. Between heads and over shoulders, I
caught tidal glimpses of the action at the front. Two COs helped Patrick Piersall down from the back of the van. His hands were cuffed behind him. His suntanned face, suddenly so shockingly present in the flesh, was set in that wry insouciant smile people wear when they're trying to rise above their shame. Two tidy men in suits, both carrying briefcases—his lawyers—stepped down gingerly after him. These five—Piersall, the COs at his elbows, the lawyers at his back—formed the core of the parade. Two more COs strode ahead of them, two fell in behind. They marched into the corridor between the cops, between the crush of journalists, and headed swiftly for the courthouse doors.

  The mindless mind of the amoebic press had a mindless voice now too, a choral cry of male and female tones, of high and low. It shouted what were phrased as questions but uttered as commands, without that uptick at the end that questions have, with only the coughing bark of the imperative.

  "Why was your show canceled." Tell me.

  "What did you say to Cole Hondler." Tell me now.

  "What are you going to plead." Say something.

  "Do you think your TV career is over." Fill my airtime. Fill my computer screen. Feed my gobby substance with your shame!

  The shouts were coming from all around me, mingled with grunts and curses in the swirling turmoil. Up front, the parade with Piersall at its center was passing swiftly up the corridor. A few seconds more and they would be at the courthouse, inside it, out of reach. Desperate to get to them before they were gone, I struggled toward the police line with fresh force. I set my hands against another man's shoulder. I shoved at him, trying to compress him into a smaller space so I could squeeze past. The man rounded on me with the face of a devil, contorted with anger, eyes afire.

  "Get your hands off me or I'll kill you," he said.

  I got past him, tumbling deeper into the mass.

  Then—the next moment—I was jostled hard from the right. I stumbled. The plasma of the media creature began closing over me. I felt the bodies of men pressing in on me as I nearly lost my footing, felt the comfortless closeness of women as the hurly-burly nearly bore me down. I smelled their aftershave and their perfume. I saw their twisted features above me, their bared teeth, their eyes both bright and dead. Jutted microphones shot past my cheek like bullets. Elbows knocked and clocked me from every side.