Empire of Lies (16 page)

"When atheist Communism threatened to take over the world, we stood beside Christian America to defeat the atheists. Those atheists have been swallowed up by hell as they deserved." He said all this in a pleasant tone of voice, the voice of a cherubic man of wisdom making all things clear. "Now that atheism is no more, we must have a Holy War to decide the question: Which God will rule? The West's God of materialism and selfishness and licentiousness—or the true God, Allah, His name be praised?"

At the time, I just snorted and started changing channels apathetically. Buy this car. Eat this burger. Take this pill to give you an erection. Call your doctor if your erection lasts more than four hours. Blah, blah, blah.

I did pause a moment when I saw Angelica Eden. The actress, remember. The raven-haired siren who seemed to have stolen wispy Todd Bingham away from sweet-faced, and possibly pregnant, Juliette Lovesey. All of which seemed to be their way of publicizing their new movie,
The End of Civilization as We Know It.
The first film ever in holographic Real 3-D.

"I mean, look, I believe in love, you know," she was saying. "But not this idea that you're with one person till you die. I think anyone should be able to be with anyone they want to. It's really no one's business, after all."

She was wearing a black dress with a hemline that rose to the top of her thighs and a neckline that plunged nearly to the hem. She was sitting in a director's chair, smiling over at the smiling bee-stung lips of our old friend Sally Sterling. When she crossed her creamy white legs, I felt it flow through me like liquid electricity.

"Tell us about the new movie," Sally said.

"It's called
The End of Civilization as We Know It,"
said Angelica large-breastedly. "Because the filmmakers really believe that it's civilization as we know it that's causing all these wars all over the place. And since we're the most so-called 'civilized' country in the world, obviously we're really the ones who are most to blame."

Man,
I thought,
look at the tits on this woman!
And have I mentioned her lips? Wonderful lips, lush, scarlet. Never mind calling your doctor. Those lips looked like they could make a four-hour erection last about thirty seconds.

I drank more wine. I changed the channel and then changed the channel again, then again. Tipsy, lonely, horny, I caught myself searching for one of those late-night porno movies so I could really make a night of it.

As it turned out, I couldn't find anything quite that exciting. In fact, on all those millions of channels, I couldn't find anything
worth watching at all. So I switched to
the
TiVo screen, to its list of prerecorded programs. And whoa!, for a second there, I felt a little amygdaloid jolt of coincidence and meaning—did I ever! Because what name was up there on the screen? That's right. Patrick Piersall! Then, oh yeah, I remembered—I'd programmed him into the machine myself.

I pressed the button to open his file. The TiVo had recorded another episode of
The Universal
and—oh, look!—there was that new reality crime show he'd been touting on the talk circuit the other evening.
Patrick Piersalls True Crime America!
I started it playing.

At first, there was just a lot of noise and graphics. Police sirens screaming, thumping music. Cop cars and grocery holdups and murder victims on stretchers flashing by in a strobic montage. Then, like a prison door slamming shut, the title card whomped down over the screen:
Patrick Piersall's True Crime America!
And then there was Piersall in the flesh—in a lot of flesh. The lithe unitarded Augustus Kane we remembered from last night was gone—way gone. In his place once again stood today's pudgy, haggard little man, his red-veined, swollen-nosed alcoholic's face capped with a toupee that made him look as if a flying squirrel had been shot out of the sky and landed dead on his scalp.

He came walking toward us portentously down a residential street in Your Town, My Town, Anytown USA. He looked at us straight in the kisser and quirked an Augustus Kane eyebrow at us. It was sad: an ironic gesture without the old irony, a meaningless habit now. Meaningless, too, was that old hesitant, syncopated speaking rhythm of his. It still made him sound as if he were plucking each word from the Tree of Wisdom, but he couldn't have been, because this is what he said:

"A quiet street. A row of houses on well-tended lawns. Happy families leading respectable lives. This is the America we like to
believe in. But for the police—and for the victims of crime—the reality is very different."

"Blaaa-laaaa-laaaa-laaaaggh," I said, holding my wineglass upside down over my head and shaking it to make the last drop fall onto my tongue.

"Welcome to
Patrick Piersall's True Crime America
..." said Patrick Piersall.

" 'The only job I could get,'" I muttered back.

"...where we're going to explore the sudden violence, the agony, and the mystery that lurk behind these seemingly respectable facades. Tonight," he went on—and now a fresh batch of crime-related images flashed in epilepsy-inducing fashion across the huge screen—"we're going to delve into the heart of an unsolved mystery, as we examine ... the disappearance of university student Casey Diggs."

Then—like the rolling pictures on a slot machine finally ringing up a jackpot—the flashing graphics ended with a photograph of Casey Diggs.

And I whispered, "Wha-a-at?"

My hand—the hand holding the wineglass—dropped limply into my lap. My mouth hung open in drunken surprise. Sitting slightly tilted over, I blinked one long time, then stretched my eyes wide to get a better look at the young man on the gigantic screen in front of me.

It was a family snapshot, probably. A color snapshot taken in the woods, most likely at his parents' cabin or on vacation somewhere. It showed this Casey Diggs from the hips up, standing next to the trunk of an old car. Smiling at the camera. Lifting a soda can in salute. Enlarged to that size, it was a bit unfocused, but just a bit. You could make out the details well enough.

He was tall. He had narrow shoulders, but a bit of flab pushing against his T-shirt at the beltline. He had short blond hair and
hazel eyes behind rimless glasses. He had a pale, round, almost-featureless face. I mean, talk about a white man! He could've been the product of a night of love between a loaf of Wonder Bread and a bowl of Cream of Wheat. And there on his shirt—hanging around his neck and lying on his port-colored T-shirt above the raised crest of Sacred Heart High School—was a leather lanyard with one of those iron nails dangling from it, those passion nails that Christians took to wearing after they saw the film
The Passion of the Christ.

"That's him!" I murmured.

And I admit now, I was a little drunk. Sitting slouched and woozy on the couch, my head in a fog. Still—still—it was—I was sure of it—it was him.

It was the boy Serena saw knifed to death in the Great Swamp.

He was exactly as she described him. It was as if I'd seen him myself, as if I'd been there in The Den the night that he and Serena met. It was like a bell of recognition ringing in my brain.

"Casey Diggs vanished from his apartment six weeks ago," said Patrick Piersall. "Was he a troubled youth who ran away to find himself? Or was he the victim of a terrorist conspiracy ... and murder?"

"Good God," I whispered.

And the words of my mother's notebook came back to me and I thought:
It's all true. It's all real. It all happened.

Danger music. Images flashed on the screen again like memories of a lifetime in the mind of a dying man. Faces screaming in protest, a domed building on a university campus, a seedy railroad flat with a soiled futon open on the floor. Then the music faded to the volume of footsteps creeping up behind you. And there—once more—was Patrick Piersall. Well, it was his True Crime America, after all.

"Casey Diggs came to Manhattan full of hope and promise, eager to begin his university career. With a 4.1 high-school GPA, he already seemed well on his way to realizing his dream of becoming a journalist."

Then there was a lot of ya-ya-ya about his childhood. Son of two Philadelphia lawyers. Educated at fine private schools. Spent a couple of summers building classrooms and houses with church groups in Kenya and Louisiana. Became a committed Christian and even wrestled with the idea of becoming a minister. In the end, he decided journalism was his vocation. He was delighted when he was accepted into a university known for one of the finest journalism departments in the country.

"But only three short months after school began," Patrick Piersall intoned, "Casey's dreams—and his life—began to unravel."

Cut to commercials. But hey, this was a recording—no need to watch that crap now. I pressed the fast forward button on the remote. Ads for laundry detergent, more of those erection pills,
and an extremely fast automobile of some sort raced past in a single blur: Take-your-hard-on-for-a-drive-in-whites-that-are-really-white! Then the story of Casey Diggs continued.

Casey arrived at school in Manhattan. He applied for a position at the student newspaper, the
Clarion.
He was told that, because he was a freshman, he would have to prove himself as a stringer before being taken on staff. His first opportunity: a demonstration near the campus, students calling for the university to remove all its investments from Israel.

"What he saw at that demonstration," said Patrick Piersall, "changed his life."

Music. Angry faces. Signs with slogans. A banner:
STUDENTS FOR JUSTICE.

They were a strange coalition, these Students for Justice: on the one hand, radical leftists who believed in atheistic socialism, multiculturalism, and gender neutrality; on the other, radical Muslims who believed in theocracy, sharia law, and bagging their women in burqas. You wouldn't think they could agree on anything, would you? Well, you'd be wrong. They were together in this at least: They hated the Jews. Oh, and they hated America, too. Oh, yeah, and they were absolutely certain the one secretly controlled the other.

Here was Students for Justice Vice President Ahmed Ali during the demonstration, standing at the podium, hammering his fist against the air. There was his recorded voice accompanying the photo, and the sound of the cheering crowd. "Israel is the source of all the violence in the Middle East. How could there be violence in Islam if it weren't for the Zionists? Islam means peace!"

And here, too, was assistant English Professor Willis Freed-good at the same podium. "Look at the names in the present U.S. administration. Look at the Weintraubs and the Weinbergs and the
Schwartzes. It's pretty clear who is forcing America to support the Zionist entity!" More cheering. Protest signs waving in air.

Cut to Casey's roommate, Brent Withers. Kind of a stick insect of a guy with an adenoidal voice. He spoke carefully. "As far as I know, as far as Casey told me, he didn't write his story with a political agenda or anything. At that point, I think he just wanted to make sure to get his facts straight, you know. He wanted to impress the editor so he could get a job on the newspaper."

So Casey wrote his story. He reported the speeches: Ali's and Freedgood's and several others by students and faculty both. And then he reported what happened to Vanessa Gerston.

Vanessa Gerston was a nineteen-year-old student passing by the demonstration on her way to class. She heard Freedgood's speech. She was shocked. She surprised herself by shouting at him, "But that's just bigotry! That's just anti-Semitism!"

Here was the girl herself on
True Crime America,
describing what happened next.

"As soon as I started shouting, I was suddenly surrounded by maybe five or six guys," she said. She was a plain, dark, fat-faced young woman with curly black hair. "They came in really close to me. They backed me up against this wall. And they started screaming right in my face. I was literally terrified."

"What did they scream at you?" asked Patrick Piersall, his flushed, desiccated features pressing in toward her.

"They called me a Jewish bitch. And they said—" Vanessa hesitated. Her lower lip trembled as her eyes filled. "They said I was a Jewish whore who should be raped so I could be taught a lesson." She fought down the tremor. She tried to laugh it off. "Which is almost funny, you know? Because I'm Episcopalian."

"Did you report this to the police?" Patrick Piersall asked her.

"There were two policemen standing right there!" Vanessa shot back. "I said to them, 'Aren't you going to do anything?' They told me, 'We don't want this to get out of hand.' That's what they said. Those were their exact words. But then they kind of looked at each other, and they sort of cleared a way for me. I just ran out of there as fast as I could."

Casey reported all this. He quoted the speeches word for word. He described the assault on the coed start to finish. The story ran on page three of the
Clarion
the next day. There was the issue now, flashed up on the screen with words circled in the text:
MUSLIMS. SOCIALISTS. JEWS.

The reaction on campus was swift and violent. A montage:

Newspaper boxes smashed.

Newspapers burning in wastebaskets with angry students gathered around.

Protesters outside the
Clarion's
office. Raised fists, bared teeth, angry signs:

RACISM!

ISLAMO-PHOBIA!

FASCIST PIGS!

WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED BY NAZI CLARION.

Professor Freedgood accused the
Clarion
of violating the university's code forbidding hate speech against minorities—Muslims, in this case. Multiculturalists throughout the various humanities departments accused the paper of misrepresenting the understandable rage of the oppressed Palestinian people. Leftists—who made up 85 percent of the faculty—simply called the story "reactionary."

So far, this was all contained within the university. It wasn't reported in the local media. There was nothing on TV about it. Nothing in the papers. But then...