Sam shrugged.
“I don’t understand what you’re asking me.”
“Sure you do. I’m asking you why he picked you. Come on, Sam. What kind of Web site are we talking about here?”
“I told you. Just an actors’ bulletin board.”
“What kind of actors?”
Sam sighed, squirmed in his chair, looked up at the ceiling for divine guidance, maybe.
“I heard about it from another actor, okay-this new Web site that helps actors, you know, who need a little extra cash…”
“Yeah?”
“Actors who are willing to act in nontraditional formats.”
“Nontraditional formats. Is that what you call it?”
“What’s he talking about?” Trudy didn’t get it; maybe she’d had to swallow a lot in this relationship, but she couldn’t digest this. Not yet.
“Tell her, Sam. Say it.”
“Well, you know…”
I said it for him. “Cons. For enough money you loaned yourself out for con jobs. That’s the only kind of acting that would pay five thousand dollars for one morning, isn’t it?”
Sam didn’t answer me. He didn’t have to.
A chill was slowly working its way up my spine, one vertebra at a time.
I turned to Trudy.
“I would watch your back if I were you.”
When Sam looked up at me with a suddenly queasy expression, I said: “The man who paid you. He might not like the fact that you’re walking around. Not anymore. Okay?”
THAT SHOCK OF RECOGNITION.
Confronted with something half-familiar and half-remembered.
A group of desperate Hollywood actors selling themselves to the Russian mob for cons.
Remember?
One of my stories.
Only it was one of those stories.
Currently featured on a certain online Web site courtesy of a great American newspaper that I’d almost brought to its knees.
Fodder from Valle’s prodigious canon of deceit.
Dramatically constructed. Exquisitely detailed. Rigorously recounted.
But not true.
Not true.
Not one single fucking word of it.
TWENTY-NINE
I can hear helicopters outside my motel room.
They sound military. If I had to guess, I’d say Black Hawks, buzzing low in formation, out on a search-and-destroy.
My first instinct is to hide, to dive under the bed and stay put until they pass.
I can’t move. I am frozen stiff. I am stuck in quicksand.
Then I wake up.
My TV’s on. It’s 4 a.m. They’re showing a movie about Vietnam. Bursts of napalm and the rat-a-tat of hopped-up machine gunners as thatch-hatted villagers run for their lives.
Okay, no helicopters.
Still, it reminds me.
They’re looking for me.
I have a deadline.
I am writing as fast as I can.
I am.
I’ll get no extensions. Either I’ll make it, or I won’t.
I’d say the odds are fifty-fifty. No better than that.
I’ve taken to peeking out the window to see if that man is there.
The one Luiza said asked about me.
When I asked her what he looked like, she shrugged and made a distasteful face.
I asked her what he wanted to know.
How long you be here, Luiza said.
Did you tell him?
She shook her head. I say I no know.
That’s it?
He ask what you look like.
Okay, fine. Did you tell him what I look like?
Yes.
Luiza remembered he had a badge.
She didn’t know if it was a policeman’s badge or a dogcatcher’s.
Only that she was afraid of them. Badges.
There was Immigration, after all.
Which is why I don’t 100 percent trust her. I can’t.
They can do things to an illegal. She’d confided in me when she understood I didn’t care and couldn’t hurt her. Her torturous journey up the Central American isthmus and across the Rio Grande at the mercy of a nineteen-year-old coyote high on mesquite. The paper mill that will supply you with a very legitimate-looking license. Not to someone from the INS, though. No. Not to them.
And I’m at a crucial part of the story-the crux of it.
You can sense it, can’t you?
You’re sitting there connecting the dots like I did. I need to present it to you this way, chronologically, so you can follow along and see the way it unfolded, piece by piece. So in the end, you’ll believe. As much as you distrust the messenger, you’ll believe the message.
You’ll know what to do.
THIRTY
When I reported back to work at the Littleton Journal, Hinch was at the hospital with his wife.
Norma appeared to have been crying.
“It’s touch and go,” she said.
Nate didn’t look all that happy himself. He’d received a Dear John letter from Rina-or, more accurately, a Dear John text message, modern times being what they are-and was sulking at his desk in the back.
The overall mood was somber and restrained.
Hinch had left me the usual number of local stories that needed to be written up. I zipped through them like a driver focused solely on his end destination, following the street signs by rote. The Littleton Street Fair was kicking off next week. The Lone Star Rodeo, featuring a women’s bronco-busting tournament, was coming to town. A meeting of the California Historical Society was going to be held at the Littleton Library.
I finished in record time. I patted Nate the Skate on the back and told him to hang in there. I brought Norma a cup of coffee and told her to keep the faith.
Then I disappeared into the microfilm.
I was falling down a rabbit hole and I wanted to see where I’d land.
I was going forward by going back.
To the place I’d visited before when I’d first been hired, when I perused the local history like a traveler scanning the guidebook of a forthcoming destination. When I nosed around town and asked people for their memories. No matter where I seemed to go-up and down the PCH, twenty miles outside town, or through the looking glass-I kept coming back to it.
It had been waiting for me all along.
1954.
The Aurora Dam Flood.
The death of Littleton Flats.
THIRTY-ONE
They were listening to Eddie Fisher and Rosemary Clooney on the radio.
Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes…
They went to the Odeon on Sixth and Main to see Brando play an ex-boxer with a conscience.
They read dispatches from Seoul in the Littleton Journal. The Korean War had just ended-the full dress rehearsal for that Asian land war still to come. They perused the back pages for the baseball box scores as the New York Giants surged to the National League pennant.
Those who owned General Electric TVs chose between two major heavyweight bouts that year-Marciano versus Ezzard Charles, or Army versus McCarthy.
It hadn’t been a good year for Tail-Gunner Joe.
America liked Ike, but it wasn’t so sure about Joe anymore, the rabid Red-baiter who’d sworn on a stack of Bibles that there was a Red under every bed. Or at least, inside every department of the U.S. government. The incredible irony of his bellicose claims was still years from exposure-that lying-through-his-teeth Joe, this cheap opportunist whose name became synonymous with undeserved character assassination, was more or less on the money. There were Communists scattered throughout the U.S. government-Senator McCarthy just didn’t know it.
What he did know, or was at least beginning to catch a dangerous whiff of, was his own political mortality. He’d gotten angry at the U.S. Army because they wouldn’t give an exemption to his favorite hatchet man. Suddenly, the army was riddled with Communists, too. They held a public hearing on the matter-where Joe questioned the loyalty of an aide to the army’s chief counsel, Joseph Welch, where Welch uttered the now-famous line asking the senator if he had no sense of decency, and where the relatively newfangled medium of TV caught every mesmerizing, career-dooming moment of it. By the time the hearings ended, McCarthy was a power broker in name only. His bullying and general ugliness of character had been exposed for all TV-owning Americans to see. He was political toast.