Noah's Turn (11 page)

Noah showered and shaved. He wasn't sure what to wear. What do you wear to a police interview? Should he wear his suit and tie? Respectable businessmen wear suits every day. But if he told the police what he did for a living, which was almost certain to come up, and of his present unemployed circumstance, they may wonder why he wore a suit. Was he trying to impress them? Was he trying to throw them off? His other clothes were, under the close examination he had never given them before, too shabby and made him look, in this context, like a possible criminal. He decided on his suit pants and a crisp white shirt, no tie. In the mirror he looked unlike himself, as if he were in costume. This gave him an odd kind of confidence to play a role.

Riding the subway to the police station, Noah thought how this interview was so much bigger than anything anyone he sat with on the train would ever know. He wasn't like a person who had just been told by his doctor that he had a terrible disease. He wasn't like the guy sitting across from him, who very easily could have just received the bad news. The guy was
around fifty and wasn't reading or looking at anything or carrying anything, just sitting there with a dead expression, rocking back and forth with the motion of the train as if his body had given up hope. Noah had, as the saying goes, been given the ball, and how well he played the police would determine his future. He had never before been a player when the stakes were so high.

“There are two cameras, one behind me, and one behind you,” Detective Hopwood said, pointing at the cameras on the walls just below the ceiling. “We tape all our interviews, so don't think this is anything out of the ordinary. I'm going to get myself a coffee. Can I get you one too?”

“No, thanks. I'm fine,” Noah said as Hopwood left him sitting alone on one of the two hard chairs. He was sitting on a chair that he was certain had been sat on by innumerable criminals, and he wondered whether the coffee routine was a standard test and whether Hopwood was watching him on a monitor in another room, looking for some kind of body language that might give him away. He tried to behave normally and quickly realized that there is no such thing. He looked at his right hand resting on the table in front of him and
started to drum his fingers, and then, thinking that this might look theatrical, something someone might do in a movie, he stopped and folded his arms, still looking at the tabletop. He then thought that Hopwood had pointed out the cameras, and that any normal person would feel odd sitting alone with that knowledge and would likely look up at them, so he looked at the camera in front of him and had turned in his chair to look at the camera behind him when Hopwood returned.

“That one gets a wide shot of the whole room and this one is a tighter shot of you. They're for recording everyone we talk to. It's easier and more thorough than notes. I hope you don't feel like you're a suspect.”

“No, no,” Noah replied. He could feel the sweat begin to dribble from under his arms. “I've never done anything like this, but I have some idea of the procedure. I'm a writer on a police TV show.”

“I know the show. I've seen your name on the credits.”

Hopwood didn't say whether he liked the show or not. What if he hated it? What if he had seen some of the episodes Noah had written that attacked the police?

“I'm not on the show anymore. Also, cop shows aren't my thing. It was just a living.” Noah used the informal “cop” rather than the more formal “police,”
which he thought would signal to Hopwood that they were both on the same side.

“We have Mr. McEwen's voice mail. You called him twice the night he was murdered.”

Hopwood stopped without asking a direct question and Noah didn't know whether to answer or not. He thought that interrogations, in part, came down to punctuation, and there was no question mark at the end of Hopwood's remark. Was this bad English, or was it bait?

“Yes, I called him.”

“Why?”

With this unadorned, single word, it was now clear to Noah that Hopwood had been bullshitting him. Hopwood had dropped his easy-going approach, which had both him and Noah on the same side, and revealed his real intention. Noah now knew he was a suspect.

“I wanted to tell him I was at the gym. We had arranged to play squash at eight and I was supposed to meet him there around 7:45 so he could get me in. I'm not a member. I have been, but I let my membership lapse. When Patrick didn't arrive on time, I talked the student attendant into letting me go in and change and wait for him on the court. They usually don't allow that,
but it was eight and the gym closes at nine and I guess she figured no one else was going to take the court at that hour.”

“You made another call.”

“Very good,” Noah said with a bit of a laugh. He wanted to compliment Hopwood but it came out as clumsy and condescending and Noah could hear it echo in the room. Did he just reveal that he was capable of setting up an alibi? He lowered his voice and took a deep breath, shaking his head as if to ponder the horrors that are possible in civilized society. “This is an incredibly horrible and gruesome thing.” He was expecting Hopwood to agree, but he said nothing. Had he changed gears too quickly? Had a large chunk of scenery crashed to the stage in mid-performance? Was this the way he would have written the scene in one of his cop episodes if his character was in fact guilty? “I called Patrick from the court about fifteen minutes later, since he still hadn't shown up. I guessed he had forgotten or something more important had come up. I didn't want him to worry about not making it. So I called to tell him I was hitting the ball around by myself, and if he couldn't make it, no sweat. I hit the ball around for another few minutes then changed and walked home. I don't get uptight about those things.”

“What things?”

“About people missing appointments. You can't take that personally. You have to be reasonable.”

“You had a fight with a student at …” Hopwood checked his notes. “… McEwen's book launch. This was an event to …” He again scanned his notes. Noah helped him out.

“… launch a newly published book. It's for friends of the author and the people who published the book and others in the literary community as well as people the writer and publisher might want to suck up to.” Noah chuckled at his last remark. Hopwood didn't. “That's an inside thing,” Noah said. “The literati—it's a bitchy business.” Noah wondered if this sounded gay. Would Hopwood now consider the possibility that both he and McEwen were in the closet and having an affair that had soured? This had been a plot point on an episode of his cop show, and now this scene was also beginning to sound scripted to Noah. If it was a script, he and Hopwood were actors, and the actors know the ending. Sweat from under his arms continued to stream down his sides.

“‘Bitchy business,' meaning …?” Hopwood asked.

“Meaning there's a lot of competition.”

“Got it,” Hopwood said with a smile.

Suddenly, and simply from this turn of the phrase “Got it,” Noah had the sense that he and Hopwood got each other. He now felt he shouldn't have jumped to the conclusion that he was a suspect. Hopwood's earlier abrupt question may have been nothing more than his need to get through the drudgery of a day's work.

Noah relaxed back in his chair as much as was possible with the kind of chair made to put people on edge.

“Can you tell me about the fight?”

“At the book launch?”

“Was there another fight?” Hopwood asked without any irony.

“No, no.” Just as quickly as he had relaxed, Noah realized that Hopwood wasn't a friend but was looking for any misstep or inconsistency and he shouldn't get drawn into a relationship with him that went beyond cop and suspect. Anything else could only work against him. That was the real game and Noah understood he mustn't forget it. He now had no friends. That was the rule he had to follow. “The kid was drunk and wanted to disrupt things. He was pissed off about how McEwen had treated him in a class. He was out of control. When I tried to shut him up, he kind of came at me. I'd also had a few. I pushed him back and he fell into the water. I
wouldn't have called it a major battle. I just didn't want to see McEwen's night ruined.”

Noah guessed Hopwood had known about the fight from one of the smokers who had witnessed it. The cops probably had the student he pushed into the water pretty high up on their suspect list. Maybe even alone on their list. Noah was certain that his own actions at the book launch had convinced Hopwood that he was not a suspect, in fact the opposite: he was a close friend who would defend McEwen's reputation with his fists.

When the interview was over, Noah stood to leave. “I sweat,” he said.

“What?” Hopwood replied, genuinely uncertain of what he meant.

“Under my arms,” Noah said, indicating how wet his shirt was and feeling he had to explain it.

“I didn't notice.” Hopwood smiled.

Noah had opened up a small can of worms, but one he felt had to be explained. “I walked here, and when I come inside an air-conditioned building from the heat, I have the kind of physiognomy that sweats.” Noah wanted to stop talking and get out, but it wasn't his nature. “I'm a big sweater, always have been.”

“Doesn't physiognomy refer to the face?” Hopwood asked as he moved to the door.

Noah honestly didn't know the answer, and he suspected Hopwood could be right and that he had been beaten at this semantic game by a cop.

“Maybe it does. Good call,” Noah said as if they had been in competition and Hopwood had won. This was exactly the relationship Noah didn't want. He didn't want to start a cat-and-mouse game and have Hopwood thinking about him.

“Here's my card.” Hopwood handed him a business card and Noah thought how things have changed, how everyone now wanted to be in business. Noah could imagine Hopwood saying, “I'm in the murder business.”

“Call that number if anything else comes to mind or you hear anything we might be interested in.”

“For sure,” Noah said. “It was nice meeting you.”

Hopwood didn't reply. They each went their own way.

By the time he was on the street, Noah was convinced that the worst Hopwood could think of him was that
he was intellectually competitive and slightly insecure, which was a much better impression than that of a machete-wielding madman.

The day was bright and warm, and Noah felt like walking. He wanted to see how his new relationship with the world felt. The people he used to envy—the businessmen with their attaché cases, the businesswomen in their heels, all of whom before had moved with a purpose that he couldn't understand—now appeared different to Noah. Now they appeared like robots moving on defined tracks, repeating their plotted routes day after day for no other reason than that they had done it the day before. None of them would change the world. All were what used to be called Spear Carriers in his drama club at college. Noah had been a Spear Carrier in
Julius Caesar.
He had had no lines. He had watched from his background mark on the stage as Ian Frazer played Brutus and then, in the years after, read in the business section of his newspaper how Frazer moved up the corporate ladder to head one of the top four banks in the country. Now, walking the streets, Noah felt he was no longer a Spear Carrier. He was different from every person he passed. He was a Brutus in a real drama. He had, in his mind, taken on Shakespearian
proportions. He was a warrior in his own war. Why did he have to go by other people's definition of war? After all, one person's warrior is another person's terrorist, he thought. Everyone defines war to suit his or her own needs. Fighter pilots who dropped their bombs on Iraq were “heroes.” Iraqis who blew up transports with roadside bombs were “terrorists.” It had been this way since the beginning of human history. Why couldn't he be an “assassin” rather than a “murderer”? Why couldn't he define
his
war? His war wasn't with one of the tyrants of the twenty-first century, but with the century's false gods. His was a war over their degradation of the culture. And why was culture any less important or less coveted than land or gold or oil? Why did war have to be a world war, or a war between countries or a civil war? Noah had decided to go to war alone and with his act define his place in the world.

E
very morning now when he woke up and before opening his eyes, Noah's first thought was “I am a killer, I am an assassin. There is no turning back, no denying it.” His old life paled in the face of what he now was. His petty vanities, his useless competitiveness, his deluded ambition to make it in a world he held in contempt, his exaggerations about what he knew, his lies about what he had read, his failure to give attribution for ideas he had read but spouted as if they were his own, and for every one of these weaknesses, his guilt—
that most corrupt and corrosive method of payment for our transgressions
—all of it had been left so far behind it was hardly visible in the killer's rearview mirror. All of it had withered away. The word
wither
reminded him of Marx and
Engels and their idea that in the ideal communist world, the state would wither away. The people would see the light in the soul of pure communism, and the rules and laws that had established it would no longer be necessary. And Noah thought that everything false about him, everything that had defined him in the past would, through his act, wither away and he would become only who he was, the killer, the assassin. He opened his eyes and remembered a quote he had written down years ago and taped to his wall of ideas. Hoping he hadn't destroyed it in one of his attacks to eliminate his past, he got out of bed and flipped through the papers still tacked up, some of which had, over time, been buried under others. He found it. There was no attribution and he couldn't remember where it came from: “Although your life is made up of thousands of days and incidents, they can all be reduced to one moment, the moment when you know who you are, when you see yourself face to face. When Judas kissed Jesus he felt at that moment that he was a traitor, that to be a traitor was his destiny, and that he was being loyal to that evil destiny.”