The Placebo Effect (6 page)

“Thanks,” Decker said, pocketing the cash. “Your applicant isn't telling the truth. He's not an idiot, so he's trying to cleverly not tell the truth, but clearly he's not telling the truth. He could be lying, prevaricating, equivocating, paltering or just plain old fibbing. I really couldn't tell you which. What I know is when people tell the truth—and he isn't.”

“How do you know that—something he did or the way he spoke or moved or what?”

Ah, that television stuff about fingers twitching and eye movements betraying a liar. Decker liked the actor on that show, Tim Roth. Thought he was an amazing talent. But the show was based on a bogus premise. Yes, a person can learn, with years and years of practice, to piece together the physical manifestations of those who might be lying, but it's far more art than science, and the margin of error even for those who are really good at it is way too high for it to be of any real use. Humans are just too damned varied in their response to any given stimulus. And the kinesics notion of establishing a baseline of behaviour simply has too many assumptions in it to be reliable. Kinesics is just good guessing, period. But the TV show was fun—voodoo hoodoo—but fun.

“My job's done here,” Decker said as he headed toward the door. But at the door—for no particular reason; just a moment of ego burst—he stopped and said, “And so's your interviewer, by the way. Not telling the truth, that is.”

Decker did what he thought of as “escaping” from the Orlando office tower by heading to the basement and exiting through a crash door. Outside he took the USB key from his digital recorder, put it in a preaddressed and stamped envelope and popped it into a U.S. Mail box. Then, as Eddie had instructed, he took three different cabs and just made his flight. It would get him to Dallas, where he'd grab his flight to Pittsburgh.

He'd directed plays in the regional theatres of the American South, and he was a fan of southern writers. The South seemed to be, in its own way, in touch with an “otherness” that Decker recognized, so he found himself anxious to watch the magic of the South just beyond the plexiglass window of this three-seat-across puddle jumper.

The engine roared as the plane bounced into flight, although it never bothered to break the cloud cover.

And the magic of the South did come into view—the land lost its green as the plane scudded westward and the white beaches of the Florida Panhandle painter-taped the coast. Industrial patches sprouted by the water—petroleum and its invariable partner, pharmaceuticals.

Then the mighty Mississippi River segued into hundreds of snakelets heading home—to the sea. A sudden mist along the Gulf obscured the division between land and sea and then, before the modern, haunted pall of Dallas, ancient myths loose their emanations and dragged you inland toward the Deep South. An old land in a new world, where corpses lie in shallow graves—and never get to tell their tales. Beyond it the new Industrial South beckoned—telling you to forget the old and embrace the new—but its argument is not convincing. The shining towers of the insurance industry only distract from the underworld, the real Deep South, where ancient, ivory-white bones poke through the ground in winter rains.

Decker watched, knowing there was something important here, something he needed to understand—to be able to understand himself.

As Decker settled back to watch the Mississippi, Henry-Clay Yolles tracked his every move. From what he thought of as his “big chair” he watched the replay of the interview on one screen and read Decker's response on another. He thought,
Very impressive, Mr. Decker Roberts, very impressive indeed.

MIKE WASN'T SURE IT HAD BEEN DECKER IN THE FRUIT SHOP
. Things were getting mixed up—off balance—in his head. Now he was standing on another manhole cover staring at a lamppost—or that's what it looked like to anyone who was passing by. Some sad misbegotten man, crying his eyes out under a lamppost on Annette Street in the Junction in West Toronto.

That's what it looked like from outside.

From inside Mike saw the boy struggling against the rope. Reaching up and trying to relieve the tension on his neck—to stop himself from strangling.

Then the boy turned toward him and held out his hand. Mike saw the fingernails—the boy's fingernails—the painted fingernails and his face.

He stepped back then he heard the gurgle.
Death really does have a rattle
, he thought. Then he looked around him. Across the way the old library. Beside it the Masonic Temple. Down the block the old Heintzman House, but here the lamppost from which a fourteen-year-old boy had hung by the neck until death.

There was always evil around the portals. Mike knew that. And churches nearby trying to fend it off. But the evil was winning—Mike could feel it. He needed to find Decker and warn him, or else he could be hung from a lamppost like that poor boy had been more than a hundred years ago.

DECKER SAT IN AN INTERNET CAFÉ—PLACES HE ALWAYS
thought of as al-Qaeda cafés—just down the road from the Pittsburgh Public Theater, and tried to recall what play he had directed there; something by Christopher Durang or maybe it was Joe Orton, he couldn't remember. Back then he was directing six or seven plays a year—often reading the script for the first time on the plane the day before rehearsals started.

Decker always liked Pittsburgh. He admired the people who had toughed it out after the big steel mills closed down. Those who remained loved their hometown and the surrounding countryside. And they'd made themselves a clean, smart little city.

He checked his watch; he still had more than half an hour to kill before his second of three truth-telling sessions.

He looked up—nothing but potential terrorist operatives and teenagers playing games their folks wouldn't let them play at home. Fine.

His fingers opened the synaesthetes web site as if they were leading and Decker was just along for the ride. He entered the chat room—and lurked. For a moment the screen was blank then a video popped up. A young monk stood, back to the camera, in a perfectly cylindrical, domed building. The young man tilted his head back and sang a pure note up into the dome. Nothing happened for a second, then a cascading ring of echoes one after the other came down toward him. Before the first reached him he sang a second note, this one a third higher than the first, followed quickly by a third note a fifth higher than the first. Then he
opened his arms and whole chords of music—in echo—wrapped around him.

Decker stood, amazed, because he thought, just for a moment, that the young monk, bathed in the chords of the oddly familiar liturgical music, rose off the floor and floated in midair.

Decker looked around. One strange creature had turned toward him, then shrugged and returned to his screen.

Decker sat and punched in his tertiary code, which led him to what he thought of as a small side room off the main chat room, what Eddie called their “blocked” room. He signed in again and sent the electronic tone that would summon his friend.

In under a minute Eddie's unique script bibbled across the bottom of the blank page:
If you're asking why your son needs the money, don't! I've already told you that Seth swore me to secrecy. And I won't betray that trust and you know I won't, so don't ask me to. How was Orlando?

Decker was tempted to walk away but typed:
Fine.

Pittsburgh, Cleveland then home—piece of a cakewalk.

Decker could sense Eddie smiling as he unapologetically mixed metaphors.
Yeah
, he wrote.

You're not using your own computer. Why?

Cause.

With all you have to say you should write a blog.

True
, Decker typed, then hit the disconnect button, paid for his time and left the café.

His second truth-telling session was in a nondescript office tower downtown. He scouted the back of the building and found a side exit through the ground floor's janitorial station. Then he established that there were U.S. Mail slots on every fourth floor.

He took the elevator up to the forty-second floor, identified himself as David Rose to the attractive older woman there. She handed him a file and indicated that he should follow her.

They entered a small room with an industrial table, a monitor and a set of headphones.

“I need to be able to see,” he said.

She parted the curtain on the wall and there was a clear glass pane.

“One-way mirror?”

“Yes.”

“Russian?” he asked her.

“Kazakhstani, but my Russian is very good—I'll translate for you if it's necessary.”

Soon the light in the next room came on, and a young pale-faced man entered and took a seat at a long table. He fidgeted.

“Sergei Lomotov. He plays for the Penguins,” the woman beside him said.

Okay, Decker thought. Russian hockey player, a left-winger if his memory served him. He looked to her. “What's your name?” Decker asked.

“Luska.”

“Okay. Luska, who else is—” But before he could finish his question the door of the other room opened and two men in grey suits entered. They were followed by a guy Decker recognized as the Pittsburgh Penguins general manager—a classic Canadian prairie-hardened man. Then in came an older man who sat beside the hockey player and patted his hand. European, Decker thought. “His translator?” he asked Luska.

She nodded.

“And them?” Decker asked indicating the two guys in grey suits.

“Investigators.”

Okay, Decker thought.

The opening set of questions to the young Russian hockey player were just basic data: place of birth, schooling, early hockey experience, and his time with Moscow Dynamo. He answered all of them truthfully.

Luska's fingers flew across her computer keyboard, transcribing the dialogue word for word.

Decker looked out the window to clear his head. Below them
was the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers. Three Rivers Stadium used to be there—now there's PNC Park. What's a PNC anyways?

Then one of the investigators asked if the kid knew a man named Boris Barionofky.

The young player dodged. He was truthful but circumspect.

Suddenly the interrogators' questions began to come more quickly, often not waiting for the translator to complete his response. Without any segue, the nature of the questions changed.

Way more accusatory.

“How many times have you met Boris Barionofky?”

“When was the last time you met him?”

“Who else was in the room with you two?”

“What exactly was discussed?”

“Has he contacted you since you came to America?”

“When was that?”

“Did you meet or speak on the phone?”

The translator pleaded with them to give Sergei a chance to answer the questions. The head investigator turned on him. “Keep your fucking mouth shut. Sergei understands English well enough to answer our damned questions. Don't you, Sergei?”

The boy looked around wildly, clearly trying to find a place of safety in this cage of lions.

Then the interrogator tossed three photographs onto the table.

Luska reached into a folder and handed copies of the same three pictures to Decker.

Each clearly showed the young hockey player with a barrel-chested middle-aged man.

The hockey player suddenly stood and shouted something in Russian.

Decker turned to Luska, “My sister is…”

“Sick. He said, ‘My sister is sick and needs help.'”

Then there was a moment of silence in the room.

The general manager swore softly. The interrogators looked at each other, then left the room.

Decker turned to Luska. “Give me your transcription.” She did. “Come back in ten minutes.”

She got up and left the room. Decker quickly read through the transcript and underlined the truths. The others he noted were some sort of lies. Probably just equivocations he thought, but it wasn't his job to decide.

He opened the door and called for Luska. He handed her the transcription and explained what his notations meant. She thanked him and handed him a thick envelope—$11,290.

Decker stuffed the envelope with the money into his shoulder bag and headed toward the elevator, but when Luska turned away from him he ducked down the escape stairway, went through the crash door on the thirty-sixth floor and was about to deposit his self-addressed envelope with the USB key for this interview into the U.S. Mail slot there when he thought better of it and pocketed the thing. He raced down the remaining thirty-six flights. After switching cabs three times he got to the Pittsburgh International Airport in beautiful downtown Coraopolis, PA.

Henry-Clay wanted to clap his fat little hands, but he thought the better of it. He clicked off the images on the flat-screen TVs mounted on his office wall and said to the air, “Even when he doesn't speak the language. Even then he knows a truth from a lie.” Henry-Clay flicked off the video player and threw his copy of Decker's annotated transcript toward the circular wastebasket against the wall. It hit the far side and rimmed out. He rolled his office chair over, grabbed the transcript, dunked it, raised his arms, and announced, “Three-pointer!”

Then Henry-Clay punched a button on his console. “When's he getting to Cleveland?”

AFTER A HALF-HOUR FLIGHT HIS PLANE TOUCHED DOWN
, and twenty minutes after that, Decker entered the main offices of the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
and approached the front desk. “You have a package for David Gerts.”

The security guard asked for ID.

Decker showed him his fake David Gerts driving license and took the package.