lawfully wedded husband, her son’s father. A con man at the very least and, for all she knows, accessory to murder.
ACROSS TOWN in another holding facility, his betrayer slips off again tonight, away from the government, his employers turned captors, into his nightly search party for the woman who turned Douglas Pavlicek into a radical. She has a different name now, he’s sure. She might be far away in another country, deep into a sequel life he can’t imagine. Forgiveness is more than he can ask her, more than he’ll ever give himself. He deserves much worse than what the Freddies have handed him—seven years in a medium-security prison, eligible for parole in two. But there’s something he needs to tell her. This is how it happened. This is how things went down. She’ll hear about what he did. She’ll know the worst, and she’ll despise him. Nothing he can ever say will change that. But she’ll wonder why, and the wonder will cause her pain. Pain he might change into something better.
His cell is a cinder-block cube coated in rubbery green paint, much like the fake cell he lived in for a week at the age of nineteen. The narrow confinement frees him to travel. He shuts his eyes and goes after her, as he does every night. The film is never more than dim and her features vague. He has forgotten even those things about her face that used to make him feel like he could suck in air and with a lazy sigh breathe out eternity. But tonight he can almost see her, not as she must look now, but as she was. This is how it happened, he says. He was betrayed—never mind by whom. Ambushed. And by the time the feds swooped in and took him, he was already lost.
His interrogators were kind. There was David, an older guy who looked like Douggie’s grandfather. And a thoughtful woman named Anne, who dressed in gray skirt-suits and took notes, trying to understand. They told him it was all over, that his handwritten memoir gave them all they needed to put him and all his friends away forever. Just a matter of clearing up a few details.
You’ve got nothing. I was writing a novel. It all came from my own damn head.
They said his novel contained information about crimes that was never public. They said they already knew about his friends. Dossiers on all of them. They only wanted him to corroborate, and it would go much easier on Douglas if he helped.
Help? That’s some Judas shit, man. It just slipped out of him. One word too many.
He tells Mimi about the mistake. She seems to hear, even to flinch a little, although her face with its punji scar is turned away. He explains how he held out for days, how he told the agents to send him away forever—he wasn’t naming any names. He tells her how his questioners brought out the photos. The eeriest things: like home movie stills, grainy shots of events where no one had a camera. The events themselves he remembered well, especially the venues where he got beaten up. Lots of the pictures featured him. He’d forgotten how young he was, once. How naïve and volatile.
You know, he told his questioners, I’m much cuter than I ever look.
Anne smiled and noted something down. You see? David told him. We have them all. We don’t need anything from you. But cooperation could greatly reduce the charges against you. That was when Douglas began to realize that hiring his own lawyer might not be the same as an admission of guilt. Of course, hiring anybody for anything would require a lot more than the twelve hundred and thirty dollars he could lay his hands on.
There was a problem with the pictures. They included people he’d never seen. There was a problem with the list of fires they wanted him to admit to. He’d never heard of half of them. Then the two agents began to ask who was who. Which one is Mulberry? Which one is Watchman? Which one is Maple? Is this her?
They were bluffing. Writing their own novel.
For two days, they held him in a place that looked like a dorm at a bankrupt Serbian college. He stuck to his silence. Then they told him what he was facing: domestic terrorism—attempting to influence the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion—punishable under the Terrorist Penalties Enhancement Act, the apparatus of a