Love and Other Lies

by Ben McPherson

  Still up?

  She said something to Pavel, busied herself with her phone. My phone vibrated.

  Julie’s mum says hi.

  What was she doing?

  Pavel looked disheveled and unwashed in his pressed black shirt. There was a fresh glass of beer in front of each of them, and beside each beer a shot glass. Pavel was leaning forward; he seemed to be spitting words at my daughter. Vee was looking evenly at this man, head close to his, perfectly unafraid. Even as the anger spiked in me I felt a strange stab of pride.

  My little girl. Holding her own.

  As I turned left along the second side of the bar a woman barged into me. Beer spilled down my shirt and onto my leg. The woman did not stop.

  People milled in both directions. I turned to look at my daughter, and as I did, Vee picked up her shot glass, drank it down, watching Pavel all the while. I saw how she winced, though she hid it well. I looked about. No one but Pavel was paying Vee any mind. Except for me, of course, and she had not yet seen me.

  Vee set the glass down on the table, said something to Pavel.

  “Excuse me,” I said. A group of women smiled amiably at me, though they carried on blocking my way.

  “I need to get past,” I said.

  The women smiled. They stayed where they were.

  I began moving women out of the way, guiding them by their shoulders, anxious not to be seen as rough or inappropriate, but still the women smiled. The last of the group, a dark-haired woman in a laced fitted top, stood in front of me, right arm on the pillar at the corner of the bar, made a play of refusing to let me pass.

  “Please,” I said.

  “So polite,” she said. “Would you like to drink beer with me, Mr. Englishman?”

  I looked across at Pavel. He was speaking animatedly. He had not yet seen me.

  “Scottish,” I said, “and in other circumstances this would be fun.”

  “What is it about this that isn’t funny?” said the woman, a look of mock-disappointment on her face.

  I pointed. “That’s my daughter. She’s fifteen. That man has bought her alcohol.”

  “Oh.” The playfulness dissipated. She stepped out of the way, put a hand on my shoulder. “Do you want me to call the police?” she whispered as I passed.

  “I’ve got this. But thanks.”

  I rounded the bar, walked straight up to the booth, stood staring down at Vee. “Because they got it excluded,” she was saying, “or ruled inadmissible, or something. You know this.”

  Pavel leaned closer in. Had they really not seen me?

  “Find someone who DVRed it,” he was saying. “This is not my responsibility, Viktoria.”

  “Pavel,” I said.

  “What do you want?” He said it calmly, but his eyes darted toward the exit. In Vee’s eyes I saw horror. She was calculating fast, looking for the words that would defuse the situation.

  “Vee,” I said. “Go and wait outside.”

  She wanted to say something. She stopped herself. She stood up. I stepped out of her way. From the corner of the bar the woman watched. Vee began to pass me. She made to say something. I shook my head.

  “Stand outside,” I said. “Do not speak to anyone.”

  I slid into the booth opposite Pavel.

  “I’m going to go,” he said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He began to get up.

  I put a hand on his shoulder. “There’s a camera, Pavel.”

  Pavel looked up at the security camera in the corner. “And?”

  “And I told that woman not to call the police.” Pavel looked over toward the bar. The dark-haired woman was watching our exchange, concerned. “But we both know what she and the camera saw.”

  He looked at the drinks in front of him. He looked at the camera. He slumped down into his seat.

  I watched as Vee made her way through the bar, saw her tapping gently on people’s shoulders, making herself as small as possible, slipping through gaps between bodies. The dark-haired woman moved out of the way, put a hand on Vee’s shoulder, guided her past her friends at the bar.

  I said, “What did Vee want?”

  “Proof that her sister is alive. Which you know I don’t have.”

  “And you arranged to meet her here?”

  “And then you come, and you threaten me that I will lose my pilot’s license. That’s what you’re implying, isn’t it?”

  “Pavel, she is fifteen. You knew that.”

  He stared sullenly at me. He had the look of a man who had been drinking steadily for hours. Matte shadows were forming around the armpits and the neck of his neatly pressed shirt.

  “No,” he said, “I do not think I can allow you to threaten me like this.”

  “No one is threatening you.” I took out my phone, opened the video still of the boat. He sat forward, instantly alert.

  “Where did you get this?”

  “Anonymous source.”

  “You mean police.” A statement, not a question.

  “What happened to that boat?”

  He exhaled heavily. “I can’t help you.”

  “You can,” I said. “You won’t.”

  “Cal,” he said. “You do not wish to put your children’s lives in danger. Do not pursue this material.”

  Vee was standing on the far side of the street, tiny and humiliated, fingers worrying at the hem of her dress. I crossed the street. As I approached her she held up her phone with the texts I had sent. “Who were you even going to show these to? The police? Mum? Oh, look, honey, our daughter’s a liar.” Her makeup was smeared. She had been crying.

  “I’m not building a case against you, Vee. We’ll both delete the texts from our phones and we’ll call that the end of it.”

  She looked at me, surprise in her eyes. “You’re not going to show her?”

  “Look, I’ve been fifteen, and your mum’s been fifteen, and I guess we all had a traumatic day. But promise me you’ll stop trying to investigate this, and that you’ll stay away from that man. He’s damaged, and he’s unstable.”

  “The police are doing nothing.”

  “I swear to you that I will hold the police to account for Licia’s disappearance. But you have to stop pursuing Pavel.”

  “Because you think he could hurt us?”

  I said nothing. Some instinct told me that what Pavel had told me was right, that to investigate too closely would be to put us in danger.

  When we got in, Elsa’s new gray bag was standing in the middle of the hallway. Such an odd statement for her to make: so rigid; so colorless; so determinedly practical. Vee noticed me looking, gave a little mock-frown.

  “Do you think if you open it all her secrets will fly out?”

  “Bed, Vee.”

  “I’m pushing my luck now, aren’t I?”

  “Bed, love.”

  She threw her arms around my neck and hugged me very tight, then walked quietly away, as if embarrassed by the show of emotion.

  Twenty-Seven

  The next morning the bag was still standing there.

  I could hear Elsa in the kitchen making breakfast, cooing to Franklin. I could hear Franklin cooing in reply.

  I crouched down, slipped the clasp. Inside was a black leather wallet. In the wallet were a credit card and a pistol license dated 1998. No cash.

  Some slight shift in the balance of the light. I looked up. Vee was standing in the doorway of her room. Our eyes met. Three hours’ sleep and a quick shower, but she looked better; held together by nervous energy. There was something adult and appraising in her gaze. “Where is she?” she said.

  “Making breakfast.”

  I slipped the license into the wallet, and the wallet into the bag.

  Vee’s eyes flashed toward the kitchen, then to me. “Dad, no one is that tidy.”

  “Have you been going through your mother’s things?”

  She gave a little scoffing sound, made a backing-off gesture with her hands. “You’re the one with your h
ands in your wife’s bag. But sure, make me the bad guy.”

  I considered this. I stood up. “I’m sorry.”

  “You know I won’t tell her,” she said.

  “You can tell her if you like,” I said.

  “But I won’t.”

  A moment of complicity, strange after all that had happened. We were smiling at each other, sharing in this small betrayal.

  “Just so you know,” said Vee, “I’m an empiricist, not a fascist.”

  I frowned. “What?”

  “I base my beliefs on the facts in front of me.”

  I smiled, but Vee was serious.

  “Racial hierarchies are based on emotion. I thought about this a lot. They’re not rational.”

  “Tell your mother. She’ll be delighted. Come on let’s eat.”

  Elsa was standing by the table, reading from the court schedule. There was something too perfect, too staged in the arrangement of her limbs, and I wondered for a moment if she had heard us in the hall.

  “I’m going to sit today out,” she said.

  Vee stared. “Why, Mum?”

  Elsa picked up the sheet of paper from the table. “‘Today the court will examine the beliefs of the accused, in connection with the psychiatric report compiled by Doctor Blah, blah blah blah professor emeritus of the University of Meh.’ I’m translating. You get the gist.”

  “Meh,” said Franklin from his highchair. “Mmmmeh.”

  Vee took the piece of paper from Elsa’s hand, scanned it, put it down. I simply stared at my wife.

  “Don’t look at me with concern, Cal. What happens inside those men’s heads is irrelevant to me. It’s what they did that counts.”

  “And it’s not that I disagree with you.”

  “Then don’t.”

  Only Franklin seemed truly happy this morning, though the day was just as bright and the birds sang just as loudly.

  “Do you have to be crazy to plan the murder of children? This is the question that the Garden Island courtroom will consider today. Paul Andersen and his brother John admit that they set out to do exactly that last year on Midsummer’s Eve, when they murdered ninety-one people in cold blood, eighty-seven of them minors. In front of the court are two competing psychiatric reports, which draw two chillingly different conclusions.”

  I paused. Through the window of my office I could see our upstairs neighbor, standing on the path, peering in. I looked at the telephone on the desk in front of me, at the headphone lead connecting me to the phone. I picked up the phone, stood up, walked toward the window.

  Carly’s voice in my ears, comforting and professional. “Cal, talk us quickly through those conclusions.”

  “The first report states the brothers were in the grip of a psychotic break, suffering paranoid delusions about a Muslim invasion, after a year spent in near-isolation in a rented worker’s cottage, in which the police found two gaming consoles, countless cigarette butts, mounds of used chewing tobacco, and not a lot else. That’s both men. Suffering the same delusions. Your listeners won’t be surprised to learn that the judges asked for a second opinion.”

  The neighbor was waving and smiling. I smiled up at her, then twisted the handle on the blind. The neighbor’s expression changed to one of surprise as the dark bands obliterated her shape.

  “Now walk us through that second opinion, would you, Cal?”

  I turned, sat on the edge of my desk. “The second report concludes that the Garden Island murders were the result of meticulous planning. It points out that the isolation was self-imposed, and that the men spent that year alone together educating themselves in bomb-making, studying and rehearsing firearms techniques, only coming into the city sporadically, to pick up girls and visit their mother. In other words, these men were not delusional. They were bad and not mad.”

  “Now, Cal, as many of our listeners know, you lost a daughter in these savage attacks.”

  “That is correct.” I could hear the catch in my own voice, wondered if Carly could hear it too.

  “And your interpretation of the evidence?”

  “I’m not a psychiatrist.”

  “But I’m asking you as the father of Licia Curtis, who disappeared that fateful day on Garden Island. You spent yesterday observing the Andersen brothers in court.”

  I thought about the men, about how they had watched my younger daughter, enjoying her distress. When I spoke I had to choke back my anger.

  “Those men . . . they planned the murder of our children. They killed with ruthless efficiency. Now they are exploiting the trial to spread their poison to a wider audience. These men are not insane. Evil would be a better word.”

  I changed my son’s diaper, dressed him for kindergarten, placed him in his rocker chair. Elsa was still packing his lunch. And when she sent me to the bedroom to fetch her phone I realized she had left it unlocked. I stood looking at the phone where it lay on the bed. I picked it up. The thought of what I was about to do worried at the edges of my conscience. My finger hovered over the lock button. But before I locked the phone and returned it to Elsa in the kitchen I enabled location sharing.

  “All good?” I said as I passed it to her.

  “Brown goat’s cheese sandwich.” She handed me the lunch box. “Cucumber chunk, tomato chunk, banana chunk, chocolate chunk, satsuma.”

  “Modern Norway in a lunch box.” I bent down to the rocker chair, picked Franklin up with my spare arm. Elsa sent me a neutral half smile.

  We were brisk and efficient. We did not hug. Second day of the trial, and already we were coming apart.

  At the kindergarten I met Tvist. He had delivered Josi, was placing her lunch box into the plastic crate by the door to the kitchen. I lifted Franklin, my hands in his armpits, lowered him into his Crocs. “One foot,” I said. “And the other foot.”

  “Foo,” said Franklin excitedly. “Foo!”

  “I enjoyed your piece today.”

  I looked up, wary.

  No edge to Tvist’s smile. “You are right,” he said. “Of course those men are sane.”

  I bent down. “Franklin,” I said, “go and play.” Franklin, suspicious in his dungarees and his Crocs, threw his arms tightly around my thigh.

  “Separation anxiety,” said Tvist.

  I lifted Franklin up, stood facing Tvist. “Is that all?”

  “I’m not sure I understand.” He knew what I was saying—of course he knew—but he kept his gaze level and his smile polite.

  “Hei, Franklin!”

  In my arms I felt Franklin kicking, stretching away from me. I turned to see Leni walking toward us. Franklin was making little oh oh sounds, kicking happily. I kissed him on the forehead and passed him over.

  “Hey, Leni,” I said.

  Leni smiled. “Hi, Cal. Hei, Ephraim.” She knelt, picked up Josi in her free arm, and carried the children into the Red Room, knocking the door shut with her thigh.

  “Perhaps I will see you in court today,” said Tvist. He turned. He was ending the conversation.

  I caught the door as it swung shut behind him, followed him out along the path. As he reached the gate I touched his shoulder and he turned.

  “You lied to me. About the Post-it note. And I know there’s more.”

  “Is there?”

  “Maybe your problem isn’t police incompetence? Maybe it’s active corruption?”

  “How would one even prove such a thing?” For a moment he looked almost amused, though I could feel the underlying anger. “Why are you pursuing a narrative that is harmful to the police, and harmful to our country?”

  “Are you telling me not to make an enemy of you?”

  “That’s one interpretation, isn’t it?”

  There was an analytical coldness to him now, a hardness in his quick black irises. Then he was smiling. “If only ethics did not prevent us from taking a beer together.”

  “A beer?”

  “I am certain this could be cleared up over a beer.”

  He walked toward
a gray Tesla SUV, lifted the gull-wing door on the driver’s side, sat down. The door closed. The car moved silently off.

  In the courtroom I chose seats toward the right-hand wall, placed myself on Vee’s left. If the men made eye contact with her I would lean in to block it. But today they sat slouched in their chairs, paying us no mind. Every now and then one turned to the other and made some kind of joke. They would smirk, then turn to face the glass wall, glaring out at the public.

  I took out my phone, unlocked it, opened Find My Family. I looked about me.

  Vee was staring at the screen of her own phone. She caught me looking and held it out to me. I placed my phone facedown on my thigh and took Vee’s.

  REMEMBER: THIS IS WHAT THE #ANTIFASCIST #FIGHTBACK LOOKS LIKE

  That same image of Licia, the gun braced in her hands.

  “Pretty cool,” said Vee, taking her phone. “Don’t you think?” She flicked into Instagram and began to write.

  I turned my own phone over. There was Elsa on the street outside our apartment block. A flashing orange dot.

  Vee leaned toward me. I shielded the phone with my hand.

  “Which one would you drop, Dad?” she whispered. “If you had a Glock?”

  “Vee, you can’t talk like that here.”

  Vee rolled her eyes, turned to face the men.

  I looked at my phone screen. Elsa was on the move.

  Vee leaned in again. I shielded the screen.

  “Just because we’re ‘pacifists’ doesn’t mean you can’t answer the question. Say you have one gun and one bullet, which one would you drop?”

  I looked about me. No one had heard her. But still. “That’s not why we’re here. We’re here to learn.”

  Vee rolled her eyes, faced forward, made a play of listening.

  I watched my screen for a while, tilting it so Vee could not see. I assumed at first that Elsa was heading for the mall, but she took a road that led into town, walking swiftly.

  “Dad,” said Vee. “Put that away.”

  “Sorry.” I turned my phone facedown. I sat forward, tried to listen. The absent father; the abusive, neglectful mother; the social work reports recommending removal of the boys: there was nothing here that we did not already know; all those markers that so many killers share, but which do not in themselves make a killer.