Before the Fall Read online

  “Krista,” said David.

  “He tapped people’s phones,” she said.

  The words hung there, a crisis point, but not yet a full-blown crisis.

  “People,” David echoed cautiously, the word bitter on his tongue.

  Krista looked at Bill.

  “Bill has this guy,” she said.

  “Namor,” said Bill. “You remember Namor. Former Navy SEAL, former Pentagon intel.”

  David shook his head. In the last few years Bill had taken to surrounding himself with a bunch of Gordon Liddy kooks.

  “Sure you do,” Bill said. “Well, we’re drinking one night. This is maybe a year ago. And we’re talking about Moskewitz, you remember the congressman who liked smelling black girls’ feet? Well, Namor is laughing and he says wouldn’t it be great if we had those phone calls on tape? Broadcast gold, right? A Jewish congressman telling some black chick how he wants to smell her feet? And so I say, yes, that would be good. And whatever, we order couple more seven-and-sevens and Namor says, You know…”

  Bill paused for dramatic effect. He couldn’t help it. It was in his nature to perform.

  “…You know…it’s not hard. This is Namor. In fact, he says, it’s a fucking cinch. Because everything goes through a server. Everyone has email, cell phones. They’ve got voice mail passwords and text messaging user names. And that shit is all accessible. It’s crackable. Hell, if you know somebody’s phone number you can just clone their phone, so every time they get a call…”

  “No,” said David, feeling a hot flush climb up his spine from his asshole.

  “Whatever,” said Bill. “It’s two guys in a bar at one in the morning. It’s just bullshit cocksmanship. But then he said, pick a name. Somebody whose phone calls you want to hear. So I say, Obama. And he says, That’s the White House. Not possible. Pick somebody else. Lower down. So I say, Kellerman—you know, that piece-of-shit liberal reactionary on CNN. And he says Done.”

  David found himself in his chair, though he couldn’t remember sitting. And Krista was looking at him like, It gets worse.

  “Bill,” said David, shaking his head, his hands up. “Stop. I can’t hear this. You should be talking to a lawyer.”

  “That’s what I told him,” said Krista.

  Cunningham waved them off like they were a couple of Pakistani orphans at an Islamabad bazaar.

  “I didn’t do anything,” he said. “Picked a name. And who cares anyway? We’re two drunks at a bar. So I go home, forget about the whole thing. A week later, Namor comes to the office. He wants to show me something. So we go into my office and he takes out a Zip drive, puts it in my computer. It’s got all these audio files on it. Fucking Kellerman, right? Talking to his mother, his dry cleaner. But also to his producer about cutting some bits from a story to make it skew a different way.”

  David felt a moment of vertigo.

  “Is that how you…” he said.

  “Shit yes. We found the original footage and ran the piece. You loved that story.”

  David was standing again, fists clenched.

  “When I thought it was journalism,” he said. “Not…”

  Bill laughed, shaking his head with wonder at his own inventiveness.

  “I gotta play these tapes for you. It’s classic.”

  David came around the desk.

  “Stop talking.”

  “Where are you going?” Bill asked.

  “Don’t say another fucking word to anyone,” David told him, “either of you,” and walked out of his office.

  Lydia was at her desk.

  “I’ve got Sellers on line two,” she said.

  David didn’t stop, didn’t turn. He walked through rows of cubicles, sweat dripping down his sides. This could be the end of them. He knew it in his bones, didn’t even have to hear the rest of the story.

  “Move,” he yelled at a group of crew cuts in short-sleeved shirts. They scattered like rabbits.

  Mind racing, David reached the elevator bank, pushed the button, then, without waiting, kicked open the door to the stairs, went down a floor. He stalked the halls like a spree killer with an assault rifle, found Liebling in the conference room, sitting with sixteen other lawyers.

  “Out,” said David. “Everybody.”

  They scrambled, these nameless suits with their law degrees, the door hitting the last one on the heels. Sitting there, Don Liebling had a bemused look on his face. He was their in-house counsel, mid-fifties and Pilates fit.

  “Jesus, Bateman,” he said.

  David paced.

  “Cunningham,” was all he could say for a moment.

  “Shit,” said Liebling. “What did that wet dick do now?”

  “I only heard some of it,” David said. “I cut him off before I could become an accessory after the fact.”

  Liebling frowned.

  “Tell me there isn’t a dead hooker in a hotel room somewhere.”

  “I wish,” David said. “A dead hooker would be easy compared to this.”

  Looking up, he saw an airplane high above the Empire State Building. For a moment his need to be on it, going somewhere, anywhere, was overwhelming. He dropped into a leather chair, ran his hand through his hair.

  “The fucktard tapped Kellerman’s phone. Probably others. I got the feeling he was going to start listing victims, like a serial killer, so I left.”

  Liebling smoothed his tie.

  “When you say tapped his phone…”

  “He has a guy. Some intel consultant who said he could get Bill access to anybody’s email or phone.”

  “Jesus.”

  David leaned back in the chair and looked up at the ceiling.

  “You have to talk to him.”

  Liebling nodded.

  “He needs his own lawyer,” he said. “I think he uses Franken. I’ll call.”

  David tapped his fingers on the tabletop. He felt old.

  “I mean, what if it was congressmen or senators?” he asked. “My God. It’s bad enough he’s spying on the competition.”

  Liebling thought about that. David closed his eyes and pictured Rachel and JJ digging holes in the backyard, planting old-world apple trees. He should have taken the month off, should be there with them right now, flip-flops on, a Bloody Mary in hand, laughing every time his son said, What’s up, chicken butt?

  “Could this sink us?” he asked, eyes still shut.

  Liebling equivocated with his head.

  “It sinks him. That’s for sure.”

  “But it hurts us?”

  “Without a doubt,” said Liebling. “A thing like this. There could be congressional hearings. At the very least you’ve got the FBI up your ass for two years. They’ll talk about pulling our broadcast license.”

  David thought about this.

  “Do I resign?”

  “Why? You didn’t know anything. Did you?”

  “It doesn’t matter. A thing like this. If I didn’t know, I should have.”

  He shook his head.

  “Fucking Bill.”

  But it wasn’t Bill’s fault, thought David. It was his. Cunningham was David’s gift to the world, the angry white man people invited into their living rooms to call bullshit at the world, to rail against a system that robbed us of everything we felt we deserved—the third-world countries that were taking our jobs. The politicians who were raising our taxes. Bill Cunningham, Mr. Straight Talk, Mr. Divine Righteousness, who sat in our living rooms and shared our pain, who told us what we wanted to hear, which was that the reason we were losing out in life was not that we were losers, but that someone was reaching into our pockets, our companies, our country and taking what was rightfully ours.

  Bill Cunningham was the voice of ALC News and he had gone insane. He was Kurtz in the jungle, and David should have realized, should have pulled him back, but the ratings were too good, and the shots Bill was taking at the enemy were direct hits. They were the number one network, and that meant everything. Was Bill a diva? Absolutely.
But divas can be handled. Lunatics on the other hand…

  “I’ve gotta call Roger,” he said, meaning the billionaire. Meaning his boss. The boss.

  “And say what?” said Liebling.

  “That this thing is coming. That it’s out there, and he should get ready. You need to find Bill and pull him into a room and beat him with a sock full of oranges. Get Franken here. Get the truth, and then protect us from it.”

  “Does he go on tonight?”

  David thought about this.

  “No. He’s sick. He has the flu.”

  “He won’t like that.”

  “Tell him the alternative is he goes to jail or we break his kneecaps. Call Hancock. We put it out there this morning that Bill’s sick. On Monday we run a Best Of week. I don’t want this guy on my air again.”

  “He won’t go quietly.”

  “No,” said David. “He won’t.”

  Chapter 8

  Injuries

  At night, when Scott dreams, he dreams of the shark, sleek-muscled and greedy. He wakes thirsty. The hospital is an ecosystem of beeps and hums. Outside, the sun is just coming up. He looks over at the boy, still asleep. The television is on at low volume, white noise haunting their sleep. The screen is split into fifths, a news crawl snaking across the floor. Onscreen, the search for survivors continues. It appears the navy has brought in divers and deep-sea submersibles to try to find the underwater wreckage, to recover the bodies of the dead. Scott watches as men in black wet suits step from the deck of a Coast Guard cutter and vanish into the sea.

  “They’re calling it an accident,” Bill Cunningham is saying from the screen’s largest box, a tall man with dramatic hair, thumbing his suspenders. “But you and I know—there are no accidents. Planes don’t just fall out the sky, the same way that our president didn’t just forget that Congress was on vacation when he made that hack Rodriguez a judge.”

  Cunningham is smoky-eyed, his tie askew. He has been on the air for nine hours now delivering a marathon eulogy for his dead leader.

  “The David Bateman I knew,” he says, “—my boss, my friend—couldn’t be killed by mechanical failure or pilot error. He was an avenging angel. An American hero. And this reporter believes that what we’re talking about here is nothing less than an act of terrorism, if not by foreign nationals, then by certain elements of the liberal media. Planes don’t just crash, people. This was sabotage. This was a shoulder-fired rocket from a speedboat. This was a jihadi in a suicide vest on board the aircraft, possibly one of the crew. Murder, my friends, by the enemies of freedom. Nine dead, including a nine-year-old girl. Nine. A girl who had already suffered tragedy in her life. A girl I held in my arms at birth, whose diaper I changed. We should be fueling up the fighter jets. SEAL teams should be jumping from high-altitude planes and sharking up from submarines. A great patriot is dead, the godfather of freedom in the West. And we will get to the bottom of things.”

  Scott turns down the volume. The boy stirs but does not wake. In sleep he is not yet an orphan. In sleep his parents are still alive, his sister. They kiss him on the cheeks and tickle his ribs. In sleep it is last week and he is running through the sand, holding a squirmy green crab by the claw. He is drinking orange soda through a straw and eating curly fries, his brown hair bleached by the sun, freckles splashed across his face. And when he wakes up there will be that moment when all the dreams are real, when the love he carries up with him is enough to keep the truth at bay, but then the moment will end. The boy will see Scott’s face, or a nurse will come in, and just like that he will be an orphan again. This time forever.

  Scott turns and looks out the window. They are meant to be discharged today, Scott and the boy, expelled from the looped loudspeaker of hospital life, BP checked every half hour, temperature taken, meals delivered. The boy’s aunt and uncle arrived last night, red-eyed and somber. The aunt is Maggie’s younger sister, Eleanor. She sleeps now in a hard-backed chair beside the boy’s bed. Eleanor is in her early thirties and pretty, a massage therapist from Croton-on-Hudson, Westchester. Her husband, the boy’s uncle, is a writer, squirrelly about eye contact, the kind of knucklehead who grows a beard in summer. Scott doesn’t have a good feeling about him.

  It has been thirty-two hours since the crash, a heartbeat and a lifetime. Scott has yet to bathe, his skin still salty from the sea. His left arm is in a sling. He has no ID, no pants. And yet, despite this, his idea is still to head into the city later as planned. There are meetings on the books. Career connections to be made. Scott’s friend Magnus has offered to drive out to Montauk and get him. Lying there, Scott thinks it will be good to see him, a friendly face. They are not close really, he and Magnus, nothing like brothers, more like drinking buddies, but Magnus is both unflappable and relentlessly positive, which is why Scott thought to call him last night. It was essential that he avoid talking to anyone who might cry. Keep things casual. That was his goal. In fact, after he’d finished telling Magnus—who didn’t own a TV—what had happened, Magnus said weird, and then suggested they should grab a beer.

  Looking over, Scott sees that the boy is awake now, staring at him unblinking.

  “Hey, buddy,” says Scott quietly, so as not to wake the aunt. “You sleep okay?”

  The boy nods.

  “Want me to put on some cartoons?”

  Another nod. Scott finds the remote, turns channels until he finds something animated.

  “Sponge Bob?” Scott asks.

  The boy nods again. He hasn’t spoken a word since yesterday afternoon. In the first few hours after they reached shore it was possible to get a few words out of him, how he was feeling, if he needed anything. But then, like a wound swelling shut, he stopped speaking. And now he is mute.

  Scott spies a box of powdery rubber exam gloves on the table. As the boy watches, he pulls one out.

  “Uh-oh,” he says, then quietly fakes the big buildup to a sneeze. With the achoo he hangs the glove from his left nostril. The boy smiles.

  The aunt wakes, stretches. She is a beautiful woman with a blunt bang haircut, like a person who makes up for driving an expensive car by never washing it. Scott watches her face as she regains full consciousness, as she realizes where she is and what has happened. For a moment he sees her threaten to collapse under the weight of it, but then she sees the boy and forces a smile.

  “Hey,” she says, smoothing the hair back from his face.

  She looks up at the TV, and then at Scott.

  “Morning,” he says.

  She brushes her own hair off her face, checks to make sure her clothes are on properly.

  “Sorry,” she says. “I guess I fell asleep.”

  It doesn’t feel like a comment that deserves a response, so Scott just nods. Eleanor looks around.

  “Have you seen…Doug? My husband?”

  “I think he went to get some coffee,” Scott tells her.

  “Good,” she says, looking relieved. “That’s good.”

  “You two been married a long time?” Scott asks her.

  “No. Just, uh, seventy-one days.”

  “But who’s counting,” says Scott.

  Eleanor flushes.

  “He’s a sweet guy,” she says. “I think he’s just a little overwhelmed right now.”

  Scott glances at the boy, who has stopped watching the TV and is studying Scott and his aunt. The idea that Doug is overwhelmed given what they’ve been through is mystifying.

  “Did the boy’s father have any family?” Scott asks. “Your brother-in-law?”

  “David?” she says. “No. I mean, his parents are dead, and he’s, I mean I guess he was an only child.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “My, uh, mom is still around. She lives in Portland. I think she’s flying in today.”

  Scott nods.

  “And you guys live in Woodstock?”

  “Croton,” she says. “It’s about forty minutes outside the city.”

  Scott thinks about this, a sma
ll house in a wooded glen, easy chairs on a porch. It could be good for the boy. Then again, it could be disastrous, the isolation of the woods, the glowering drunken writer, like Jack Nicholson in the winter mountains.

  “Has he ever been there?” Scott asks, nodding toward the boy.

  She purses her lips.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, “but why are you asking me all these questions?”

  “Well,” says Scott, “I guess I’m just curious as to what’s going to happen to him now. I’m invested, you could say.”

  Eleanor nods. She looks scared, not of Scott, but of life, what her life is about to become.

  “We’ll be fine,” she says, rubbing the boy’s head. “Right?”

  He doesn’t answer, his eyes focused on Scott. There is a challenge in them, a plea. Scott blinks first, then turns and looks out the window. Doug comes in. He’s holding a cup of coffee and wearing a misbuttoned cardigan over a checked lumberjack shirt. Seeing him, Eleanor looks relieved.

  “Is that for me?” she asks, pointing.

  For a moment Doug looks confused, then he realizes she means the coffee.

  “Uh, sure,” he says, and hands it to her. Scott can tell from the way she holds it that the cup is almost empty. He sees her face get sad. Doug comes around the boy’s bed and stands near his wife. Scott can smell alcohol on his clothes.

  “How’s the patient?” Doug asks.

  “He’s good,” says Eleanor. “Got some sleep.”

  Studying Doug’s back, Scott wonders how much money the boy stands to inherit from his parents. Five million? Fifty? His father ran a TV empire and flew in private planes. There will be riches, real estate. Sniffling, Doug hikes up his pants with both hands. He pulls a small toy car from his pocket. It still has the price tag on it.

  “Here you go, slugger,” he says. “Got this for you.”

  There are a lot of sharks in the sea, thinks Scott, watching the boy take the car.

  Dr. Glabman enters, eyeglasses perched on top of his head. He has a bright-yellow banana sticking out of his lab coat pocket.