The Professor of Truth (3 page)

His name was Nilsen. He’d had the grace at least to step aside and let me open my own door and go in first, and I’d turned and told him that if he was coming in he should introduce himself first. “Ted Nilsen,” he said. I put the “Ted” to the back of my mind at once. I didn’t want to be on first-name terms. I wanted some distance between us.

Nilsen looked around the kitchen but he didn’t speak. He waited. I thought it likely that he had spent many hours of his life not speaking, waiting. In that respect, we were alike. Our feet pooled snowmelt on the linoleum.

“You telephoned,” I said.

“Yes, I did.”

“To see if I was here.”

“That’s right.”

“You can’t have been far away.”

“No, not far.”

He wasn’t too voluble. Just when I felt that I would have to say something else, Nilsen spoke again.

“I was out at the University this morning.”

“You wouldn’t have found me there. I’m on sabbatical.”

“I know that.” He was a man, I sensed, whose whole existence focused on knowing things about other people. “I had a look around, but they were closing the campus. Because of the weather.” He said this as if it were just the prissy kind of attitude you’d expect. “I got the last bus back into town and had a look around there instead. Then I came to see you.”

Another pause. Then, “A town like this, you get a sense of continuity from the buildings. I went into that old church up by the castle. That must be, what, four hundred years old?”

“More,” I said. Then, like a grudging tour guide, I added, “The nave dates from the fifteenth century.”

“Another world,” Nilsen said. He glanced up, as if he were seeing not the clothes pulley but ecclesiastical arches. “I spent some time in that church. It was very quiet. You know the thing I like? When you’re in a place like that, you’re on your own but you’re not alone. You hear occasional footsteps, maybe a hushed conversation, disembodied voices, you’re aware of somebody else in a pew, head bowed, praying. Shared solitude. I like that.”

I poured the coffee. We both took it black, no sugar. I didn’t offer lunch. I didn’t so much as break open a packet of biscuits.

“Although in fact I was alone,” Nilsen said. “Just pushed the door and went in and had the place to myself.”

“Can we get to the point?” I said.

The dark eyes looked out from under the long forehead. It was like being watched from some shaded observation post. He said—and it wasn’t clear if he was answering or ignoring my question—“It’s important to experience moments of quiet intensity. It helps to clarify things.”

Perhaps he wanted to be asked what things. If so, I disappointed him. But probably he didn’t need any prompting. He was going to have his say anyway.

“The point,” he said. “Okay, let’s get to it.”

The bony fingers of his right hand made a claw round his coffee cup. He seemed somewhat fascinated that the fingers belonged to him. He did not drink from the cup. He said, “Are you ready to meet your maker?”

Whatever I was expecting, it was not this. The simmering anger I’d felt outside rose to the boil. I stood up.

“I don’t know who you are,” I said, “but I seem to have mistaken you for someone else. If all you’re here for is to try to convert me or save me or whatever it is you people do, then you needn’t bother finishing your coffee.”

Nilsen was not in the least perturbed. “I’m not a missionary,” he said.

“You can get the hell out, in fact.”

“It was a question, that’s all. Just give me an answer.”

The dark eyes stared. It was possible that I had let a madman into my kitchen. I wanted Nilsen to leave. I certainly did not intend to humour him. Yet I found I could not deny him what he wanted.

“I don’t believe I have a maker,” I said. “But if I’m wrong and there is one, then, yes, I’m ready. There are a few things I’d have to say to him.” And, thinking it would annoy him, I added, “Or her.”

“Sit down,” Nilsen said. He made me feel like a fractious guest in my own house. “I’m trying to give you some context,” he said. “The thing is, I
am
ready for my maker. We’ve got a contract, him and me. He’s going to take me to him, but first I’ve got to straighten a few things out.”

“Oh for God’s sake!” I said. If he heard this as a profanity, if it offended him, he didn’t show it. That face didn’t show much in the way of emotion. For a man who’d found Jesus—I presumed that was the particular maker to whom he referred—he didn’t seem filled with joy and gratitude.

“I’m dying,” he said.

“We’re all dying,” I retorted. I was still standing. Out of nowhere a wave of something—not sympathy but perhaps grief or bitterness or exhaustion—washed through me. This happened, still, after twenty-one years. To cover myself I went to the window, as if to check the weather. Snow was falling again, lightly whitening the cleared path. “Tell me something I don’t know,” I said.

“I have cancer,” Nilsen said. “So I am dying in a certain way and at a certain rate.”

I turned to face him. “That has nothing to do with me.”

“Yes it does,” he said, and with a skeletal index finger he pointed very firmly at the other chair. Again I could not resist. I sat down. Nilsen had my attention. I thought, I’ll give him five minutes.

“It doesn’t make me unique,” Nilsen said. “I know that. There are millions of us. But when some doctor tells you your days are, literally, numbered, you start counting. And you weigh up a lot of stuff. First off you weigh up the chances. Maybe you bitch about the bad hand you’ve been dealt. Me, I never smoked, never drank to excess, ate well, kept fit—so why me? You chase that one around for a day or two, and then you quit. That’s all past, and there’s no profit in it. Then you think about the time you have left. You make a list of things you want to do while you still can. I started to do that and then I threw the list away. I didn’t need a list. Anything I could put on it would be nothing to what I’m going to experience. I’ve got the keys to the kingdom. But like I said, God has a contract with me, so I need to make everything straight before I stand before him. I need to settle my debts. I’ve been doing my rounds.”

“Then you do have a list,” I said. “A different one.”

Nilsen sipped from his cup. “Good coffee,” he said. It sounded genuine. That a man in Nilsen’s situation should still appreciate the insignificant things of life did not surprise me. I had my own “situation,” took my own momentary pleasure in tastes, smells, sounds. Maybe that is the most delight there can be—swift, sensual, small—when the roof of your world has fallen in. The difference with Nilsen was that he saw a ladder to some other place ascending from the
wreckage, and from the way he was talking celestial light was shining down through the hole. Whereas when I tasted good coffee, that was all I experienced.

“What kind of cancer?” I asked.

“Does it matter?” There was a brief defensiveness in his voice, then it resumed its controlled calmness. “Let’s say it’s the kind that kills you.”

This sounded evasive and I did not like it. I had had my fill of evasion over the years.

“Maybe your maker will pull off a miracle,” I said.

“He already has,” Nilsen said, “but not in the way you mean. I’ve had the treatment, the chemo, all of that. That’s over. The miracle is that he has promised to save me in the next life.”

The flat, matter-of-fact way he made this statement was striking. In it was neither sanctimonious whine nor eager, preacherly insistence that I join him on the salvation road. He seemed entirely rational about something entirely irrational.

“This,” he said, glancing around the room, “all this, is just a prelude.”

I picked my next words with care. “I’ve been told a lot of things,” I said, “which turned out not to be true.”

“It’s why I’m here.”

“That were downright lies, in fact.”

“I understand.”

“Would you take off your hat, please?”

He frowned. “Would I what?”

“Listen to me,” I said. “A total stranger appears. He may have some information for me, or he may not. How would I
know? He tells me he’s dying. How would I know? I’m asking you to take off your hat.”

“That won’t prove anything.”

“Perhaps not,” I said. “Nevertheless …”

Nilsen sighed, then bared his head with a single sweep of one hand. Soft white hair sprouted in uneven patches from his pitted scalp. Until that moment I had not noticed how sparse the eyebrows were. “Satisfied?” Nilsen said, and replaced the hat. He sounded almost hurt that I had doubted him. For a moment I felt that I had the advantage.

“I don’t recall your name,” I said. “I sat through the trial, I’ve read the documents, the newspaper articles, the books—thousands of pages—but I’ve never seen your name in them. Now you turn up, after all this time, and the only reason you can be here is because you have something to tell me about the bombing. That is the reason, isn’t it?”

Nilsen inclined his head about a millimetre.

“Why should I believe you know any more about it than I do?”

“You don’t recall my name because it isn’t there,” he said. “If you mean ‘Ted Nilsen,’ that is. Even if you don’t …”

Perhaps I was in the presence of a phantom. People see something and then, afterwards, they are not quite sure what. Maybe they haven’t seen anything. When he was gone and I had washed up his coffee cup, maybe I too would wonder if I’d imagined him. But it also occurred to me that a man who went unrecorded in his line of work—I had no doubt that he worked in intelligence—might be one in possession of the facts that had eluded me for so long,
facts that had never been in the rooms I had been in, or not at the same time anyway.

I waited for Nilsen to continue. He was staring at me but not really at me, and just as I realised that his voice hadn’t so much trailed off as ground to a halt he emitted a small sound, neither a grunt nor a squeak but somewhere in between, and seemed to freeze up entirely. Shock was on his face and I wondered if that was how someone looked just after they’d been shot but before they knew what had happened.

“Are you in pain?”

He gasped. “I have something to take,” he said. “Some water …” He was not able to complete the sentence.

I went to the sink and filled a glass from the cold tap. The snow was thick again, piling up on the outside sill. I took the water to him, and he reached for his coat, brought a foil pack from one of its pockets and broke out a capsule. He swallowed. We let some minutes pass, and the muscles around his mouth began to relax.

“Prayer is good,” he said, “but the drugs are sometimes better. Quicker, anyway. Prayer takes a little time.”

He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. If the pain was still there he seemed to have control of it. “You know what defines us?” he said. “Extremes. Not daily normality. What is that? It’s nothing. What defines us is the edge. Extreme pain. Extreme weather. Floods and fires and hurricanes.” He nodded at the window. “Snow and ice. Acts of extreme violence. These things make you conscious of yourself. You only realise what it is to be alive when death is howling at you.”

There was more urgency in his voice, and less of a drawl. Maybe it was the drug kicking in.

“Then God takes you home,” I said, “and all is well. Is he one of your extremes?”

“God? Aha.” Nilsen said this as if I’d been trying to catch him out and might have succeeded had he not been cleverer than I. He drank some coffee. “Tell me, were you even alive before the bomb went off?” he said. “I mean, really alive?”

The anger surged again inside me. “Yes I was,” I said. “You can keep death and pain. I was alive every day and I knew it. I was in love with my wife and I adored my beautiful daughter.”

“Extreme love,” he said. “That’s another one. And before that?”

“You don’t give up, do you?”

“Haven’t yet. Never gave up on nothing yet.”

His five minutes were over. Not that he knew it.

“What about you?” he said. “You don’t give up either, do you?” And, after a pause, “I have brought you something.”

I thought I would give him another five.

“You’ve always interested me,” Nilsen said. “You were an awkward fit. You were assessed as not having any allegiance.”

“Allegiance?” I could equally well have challenged the word “interested” or the word “assessed,” but they surprised me less.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he went on. “Your first allegiance
was to your loved ones, we all understood that. But beyond that. Beyond country, even. What was your philosophy, your world view? When you started making a fuss”—he saw me bridle again and made a small concessionary gesture with the palm of one hand—“when you gave us trouble with your questions, it wasn’t clear what boundaries you recognised, or if you recognised any. It wasn’t clear where you would stop. You could have been a unifying force, someone who spoke for all the victims’ families. You bridged the Atlantic with your loss. But you were obstinate. You weren’t prepared to shut up. Not so long ago that enraged me. Who was this guy? Did he think he was smarter than we were? But now, you know what, I respect it. I admire you. In your shoes I would have been the same. I see that now.”

I did not want his respect or his admiration.

“The only thing I’ve ever felt an allegiance to,” I said, “is the truth.”

“That’s a slippery substance, truth,” Nilsen said.

“Not where you’re going.”

For the first time since he’d appeared in the street, for all I knew for the first time that day, he smiled, his lips pulling back like a dog’s. He had bad, uneven, un-American teeth; discoloured, as though he’d once smoked heavily. But he’d said he never had. Maybe it was the disease, eating at his gums, leaving his teeth like a rickety picket fence in need of paint. The smile lasted only a second or two. Then he laughed, a short hacking rasp.

“Not where I’m going,” he repeated. “You’re right. Only one truth where I’m going.”

He added, as if he’d had to be reminded, “That’s why I’m here.”

I waited. What were a few more seconds after twenty-one years?

“I’ve been carrying this stuff around awhile,” he said. “As long as you have, although not in the same way, I admit. But you know, for a lot of us this wasn’t just about finding out who planted the bomb. Maybe it was to begin with, but then it became something else. More than just the job. We didn’t just
want
to solve the case. We
needed
to solve it. There’s an investment. I’m not talking budgets here, I’m talking emotional capital, mental capital. The bigger the crime, the bigger the investment. And they don’t come any bigger than this one.” He paused. “Well, not until 9/11 they didn’t. 9/11 put everything else in the shade. But I was out by then. Retired. I was sitting on the porch sucking cocktails with little umbrellas in them when those planes came in out of that blue sky.”