The email that Pip Tyler then sent him, out of the blue, intensified his sense of reprieve. In reality, she was nothing like the figure from his vengeful imaginings. She was young-sounding, intelligent, amusingly reckless. The humor and hostility of her emails were a balm to his nerves. How sick of sycophancy he’d become since he succumbed to paranoia! How refreshing it was to be called out on his dishonesty! As he found himself warming to Pip’s emails, he imagined an escape route that the Killer had failed to foresee, a providential loophole: what if he could reveal to a woman, piece by piece, the complete picture of his depravity? And what if she liked him anyway?
Inconveniently, principal photography had commenced in Buenos Aires, and Toni Field had fallen for him hard. He appreciated, for the first time, the travails of male porn stars and the utility of Viagra. As if it weren’t bad enough that Toni was nearly his age and was portraying his mother, he couldn’t stop mentally comparing her with Pip Tyler. And yet, for any number of strategic reasons, not least to keep the leading actress happy, it was vital that he seem gratified by the affair. During his days in Argentina, and even more so after he’d returned to Bolivia and met Pip, he engaged in grueling Toni management. If it hadn’t been so inconvenient, it would have been hilarious how much like his mother Toni became before he managed to be rid of her.
He fell in love with Pip. There was no other way to describe it. His motives initially were nothing if not vile, and the dark part of his brain never stopped whirring with calculation, but real love couldn’t be willed. Yes, he did his manipulative best to create a bond of trust with her, he confessed to the murder, he persuaded her to spy for him. But when, at the Cortez, to his amazement and delight, she let him undress her, he wasn’t thinking about her father; he was simply grateful for the sweet good girl she was. Grateful that she’d lured him into her room even though he’d confessed to the murder; grateful that she wasn’t repelled when he told her what he wanted to do to her. And when she then chastely declined to go further, there was, to be sure, a moment when he felt like strangling her. But it was only a moment.
He began to think she was the woman he’d waited all his life for. The hope she gave him was sweeter than the hope Annagret had once given him, because he’d already showed Pip more of his real self than he ever showed Annagret, and because, twenty-five years earlier, when he’d hoped that Annagret could save him, he hadn’t even been aware of the Killer he needed to be saved from. Now he knew what the stakes were. They had nothing to do with Tom Aberant. At stake was the possibility that he might not have to be alone with the Killer. That he could finally have what he’d sought, unrealistically, in Annagret. A life with a young, bright, kindhearted woman who had a sense of humor and accepted him as he was and was nothing like his mother. Might it be possible, now that he was well into his fifties, to settle down with a woman without becoming bored? All the good luck he’d ever had was like nothing compared to the luck of spontaneously loving the person he’d intended to abuse for sick reasons. He daydreamed of marrying her on a sunny morning in the goat pasture.
But then the providential loophole closed. Almost as soon as she seemed to have fallen for him, hardly a week after he’d received her burning look, he found himself in a room at the Cortez where, from the very first moment, nothing felt right. He couldn’t understand why she didn’t want to be there, but she obviously didn’t. He tried this, he tried that. Clumsily, feelingly. Nothing worked. She didn’t like him. She didn’t want to be there. But the way it felt to him was that the Killer didn’t like her, didn’t want her to be there; that it was the Killer who’d made him make the mistake of rushing her back to a hotel room before she really loved him, because the Killer was afraid of her.
Left by himself, kneeling on the floor, he didn’t weep with disappointed love. He didn’t weep at all. Three months of love evaporated in an instant. He’d been struggling to climb out of an abyss on a rope that she was holding, and as soon as he’d climbed close enough for her to see his face, she’d recoiled in disgust and let go of the rope. What you felt for the woman who did that to you wasn’t love.
He trashed the hotel room. For some minutes, many minutes, he was both the Killer and the person enraged with the Killer for depriving him of love. He hurled food against the wall, broke dishes, ripped the blanket and sheets off the bed, upended the mattress, and hammered a wooden chair on the floor until its legs broke. He’d clung to his hope until the moment she shut the door behind her. Only then had he seen that she was as bad as her father—too pure for the likes of Andreas Wolf. She was a sanctimonious little cunt of a nobody. He trashed the hotel room to vent his rage at having hoped better of her. Hope was the cheat that had prevented him from ordering her to fuck him (she would have done it! she’d said so!) until it was too late. He’d risked all and got nothing.
That he didn’t physically harm himself that day or night, beyond bruising his knuckles by punching a wall, was owing to an idea that came to him after his rage had passed. It occurred to him that he still possessed a piece of information known to no one else, and that he might use this datum to revenge himself on Pip and Tom simultaneously. Although he hadn’t poked the girl himself, conceivably Tom still could. The possibility was no less delicious for being remote. And then let Tom try being sanctimonious with him. Then let Pip try to say she wasn’t sorry she’d rejected him.
It was a relief to stop fighting the Killer and submit to the evil of his idea; it turned him on so much that he went to the spot on the floor where Pip had stood naked and used the panties she’d left behind to milk himself, three times, of the substance he hadn’t spent in her; it got him through the long night. Early in the morning, he went to several ATMs and withdrew enough cash from the Project’s account to cover the damage he’d done to the room. He showered and shaved and was waiting in the lobby when Pedro arrived to take him to the airport. Katya’s plane was fifteen minutes early. She came through the customs gate wearing a Chanel or Chanel-like suit, wheeling a brocade-fabric suitcase and carrying an old-fashioned briefcase with a shoulder strap, moving more stiffly than she used to, looking older, definitely, and wearing a wig of less wonderful redness, but still lovely from a distance. Andreas pushed through the crowd to greet her. He put his arms around her, and she rested her head on his breast. The first thing he said was “I love you.”
“You always have,” she said.
* * *
It ought to have felt good to be walking up the road to meet Tom Aberant, stretching muscles stiff from a week of inactivity. Down in the meadow by the river rapids, by the tumble of wet boulders, a large woodpecker was drumming on a hollow tree. A buzzard eagle soared past the vertical face of a red pinnacle. Warm late-morning air currents were stirring the woods along the road, creating a tapestry of light and shadow so fine-grained and chaotic in its shiftings that no computer on earth could have modeled it. Nature even on the most local of scales made a mockery of information technology. Even augmented by tech, the human brain was paltry, infinitesimal, in comparison to the universe. And yet it ought to have felt good to have a brain and be walking on a sunny morning in Bolivia. The woods were unfathomably complex, but they didn’t know it. Matter was information, information matter, and only in the brain did matter organize itself sufficiently to be aware of itself; only in the brain could the information of which the world consisted manipulate itself. The human brain was a very special case. He ought to have felt grateful for the privilege of having had one, of having played his small part in being’s knowledge of itself. But something was very wrong with his particular brain. It now seemed able to know only the emptiness and pointlessness of being.
A week had passed since the spyware in Denver had stopped functioning. He could have had Chen uninstall it after Pip asked him to, and he might have escaped detection if he’d acted quickly, but Pip’s final text to him had made him so anxious he could hardly breathe, let alone communicate with Chen. I want to delete all that and have a life here: somewhere inside him
his love and hope for her had persisted, in fragmentary form, until he read those words of hers. Now he felt nothing but pain and fear. Didn’t care if he ever saw her again, didn’t care what she or anyone else thought of him. Nothing that anyone did anywhere made any difference to him now.
Or almost nothing. In London, his mother had survived her cancer treatments and was recovering well. If he could have done anything, during the days that he’d been lying in his room, he would have asked her to come and visit him again. She’d always liked everything about him. She, the world’s shittiest mother, was the best mother in the world for him. Lying there in bed, he would have accepted love and care from her on whatever terms she offered. Indeed, this seemed almost to be the essence of his condition.
He was approaching the concrete bridge over the river, trudging in one of Pedro’s tire tracks to avoid the mud from the previous night’s rain, when he heard the Land Cruiser downshifting around the bend in front of him. The one good thing that could be said about his condition was that the Land Cruiser’s approach wasn’t making him more anxious. He was already at maximal anxiety. The worst Tom could do to him was kill him.
But this thought, the idea of being killed by Tom, was like the prospect of rain in a desert. Not a relief in itself but a reason to keep moving forward. Death by any means would put an end to his throttling fear of it; the precise means should have been a matter of indifference. But to be killer and killed was arguably the closest form of human intimacy. In a sense, he’d been more intimate with Horst Kleinholz than he’d been with any other person since he’d left his mother’s womb. And to die knowing that Tom, too, was capable of killing—to exit the world feeling he hadn’t been so alone in it after all—seemed like a kind of intimacy as well.
Food for thought. He picked up his pace a little; he raised his head and squared his shoulders. With every step he took, an increment of time passed. Knowing that the number of steps remaining to him was countably small made the pain of taking them more bearable. When the Land Cruiser came around the bend, he smiled at the sight of his old friend.
“Tom,” he said warmly, extending a hand through the passenger-side window.
Tom frowned at the hand more in surprise, it seemed, than anger. He was wearing the khaki shirt of a gringo journalist. Andreas had seen recent pictures of him, but in person the fact of his physical alteration, his thickness, his baldness, brought home how many years had passed.
“Oh, come on. Shake it.”
Tom shook it without looking at him.
“Why don’t you get out and walk with me? Pedro can go ahead with your things.”
Tom got out of the vehicle and put on sunglasses.
“It’s great to see you,” Andreas said. “Thanks for coming.”
“I didn’t do it as a favor.”
“I’m sure not. And yet—shall we walk?”
They walked, and he decided to plunge right in. The abatement of his mental pain was so liberating that he had the sense of being on the losing side in the final minutes of extra time—throw every man forward, anything goes. “Belated congratulations,” he said, “on having a daughter.”
Tom still hadn’t looked at him.
“I’ve known about her for more than a year,” Andreas said. “I suppose the honorable thing would have been to inform you right away.”
“And Brutus is an honorable man.”
“Well, I apologize. She’s impressive in many ways.”
“How did you find her?”
“Photo recognition. The software is so primitive, it had no business working. But, as you know, things have a way of working out for me.”
“You get away with murder.”
“Exactly!” He felt out of his body, weirdly buoyant. Tom truly was the only person in the world he had no secrets from. “You’ve done pretty well for yourself, too. Great story on the missing nuke. Do you have it up yet?”
“It’s been up for a week.”
“I gave it to you as a present. We should have been collaborating all along.”
On a giddy impulse, he punched Tom’s arm. He prattled away, proudly explicating the features of Los Volcanes, as he led Tom across the pasture and around to the main building’s veranda. His father, Katya’s husband, hadn’t lived to see what he’d built with the gift of freedom he’d given him, but if he’d lived, and had come to Los Volcanes, Andreas might have been similarly giddy with him, similarly performative, enumerating his achievements while knowing that nothing could change his father’s damning judgment of him.
On the veranda, Teresa brought them beer. A few stingless bees were hovering. Tom had been paternally silent for some minutes.
“So, what brings you to Bolivia?” Andreas said.
“You mean, apart from you hacking into my computers?” Tom’s voice sounded choked with self-control. “Apart from you messing with the head of a young woman who happens to be my daughter?”
“Admittedly a dark picture,” Andreas said. “But am I allowed to point out that no harm has come of any of that, and that you were the one who started it?”
Tom turned to him in disbelief. “I started it?”
“We had a dinner date. Do you remember? In Berlin. You never showed up.”
“That’s why you did this to me?”
“I thought we were friends.”
“Given what you’re saying, can you blame me for not wanting to be?”
“Well, at any rate, the score is even now. I’m willing to start over, clean slate. I’m sure we have some new leaks that would interest you.”
“That’s not why I came here.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“I came here,” Tom said, not looking at him, “to threaten you. I will do a story on you. I will write it myself. And I will take the police to the grave site.”
The harshness in his voice was understandable, and yet it hurt Andreas. It seemed like a failure of Tom’s imagination to be unmoved by what he’d implicitly confessed—that he’d liked Tom more than Tom had liked him, and that his mental health was less than tiptop.
“Fine, then,” he said. “You came here to threaten me. I presume there’s an or else?”
“It’s simple,” Tom said. “Two simple things. First, you never communicate with my daughter again, ever, under any circumstances. And second, you digitally shred everything you took from my computers. You keep no copies and you never speak of anything you saw there. If you do all that, I’ll keep my mouth shut.”
Andreas nodded. The Tom he remembered from Berlin had been softer and more forgiving, more motherly. His sternness now was making Andreas feel like a bad little boy.
“I’ll do whatever you say,” he said.
“Good. We’re done, then.”
“If that’s all you wanted, you could have just called me.”
“I believe this merited face time.”
He wondered what it might be that Tom was so intent on having shredded. He hadn’t actually looked at much of what he’d stolen. Once he’d ascertained that Leila Helou wasn’t pursuing a vendetta against him, he’d lost interest in the spyware, and for the past few weeks he’d been too disabled by fear and pain to be curious about the dirt he might have found on Tom’s home computer.
“I don’t care what you know about me,” Tom said, as if reading his thought. “But I do care what Pip knows. If she finds anything out from you, I will destroy you.”
“I take it you haven’t mentioned that you’re her father.”
“I’d rather she not know. I’d rather she not know about the money, either.”
“You don’t want your own daughter to know she has a billion dollars coming to her.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“She’s a sensible girl. I don’t think the money would ruin her.”
“I’m not going to interfere with Anabel. And you’re not going to, either.”
“So you care more about your ex-wife than you do about your daughter. I guess I shouldn’t be s
urprised. You were the same way in Berlin.”
“It’s just the way it is.”
“And where does that leave your girlfriend? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“It has nothing to do with Leila.”
“Presumably you’ve told her who Pip is?”
“Yep.”
“Quite a shock, I’d guess.”
Tom turned and gave him a smile. It took Andreas a moment to recognize the cruelty in it. “You want to know something?” Tom said. “It’s been good for me and Leila. This famous sunlight of yours. It’s been good for us.”
Andreas closed his eyes. Creating darkness was that simple. He mentally sank into it, wishing it were a deeper darkness. “Say more,” he murmured.
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