The Professor of Truth Read online

  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.”

  There was a strange mix of naivety and cynicism, softness and hardness, in the way he spoke. I am innocent, it seemed to suggest, but don’t even think of messing with me. Out of that blue sky. I watched him watching it all again, the first impact and explosion, the billowing black plume, the second plane roaring in, angled, slamming through the second tower. How would such a man react? The detail of the little umbrellas must surely be false. I couldn’t picture Nilsen half-cut and helpless in a deckchair. Stunned, maybe; shocked, yes—how could you not be shocked? But already, before the mighty pillars crashed, he’d be starting to calculate who could have done this thing and how, he’d be unpacking the sharp-edged possibilities and likely responses even as he wondered perhaps—with beguiling innocence—“Why do they hate us so much?”

  I thought of my colleague Jim Collins—an unpretentious Welshman who couldn’t care less if you had a PhD or not—and how he’d once answered a visiting professor from Virginia who had posed that question, some months into the occupation of Iraq. “Why does half the world hate us so much?” “Because you have to ask,” Jim Collins had said, and the visiting professor had looked puzzled, thinking maybe Jim was making some kind of joke, but he wasn’t.

  Nilsen was retired by 9/11, he’d said. Out. But did you ever really get out?

  I thought, when did we give up saying 11/9? Was it out of courtesy—it was their atrocity, after all—or carelessness? Or was it envy?

  And Jim Collins had followed up, “But look on the bright side, the other half wants to be you.” And this time everybody, including—a little nervously—our visitor, had laughed.

  “They say everything changed that day,” Nilsen said. “Well, in a way I can buy that. But all that really changed was the scale. We were already at war, had been for years. Most people didn’t know it. But I did, and you did. Didn’t we?”

  “I never thought I was at war with anyone,” I said. “I don’t buy that, as a matter of fact. If I buy that it means I’ve bought a lot of other crap from your easy-fit good-and-evil T-shirt store. Which I haven’t.”

  It didn’t sound as cutting as I intended. It sounded a little childish. Nilsen, expressionless, said, “Didn’t I say you were obstinate?”

  “I am what I am,” I said. “I don’t care what you call it.”

  “Call it a compliment.”

  Silence fell between us for a few seconds. Then Nilsen spoke again.

  “Twenty-one years ago. You went down there almost at once. How long were you there?”

  “Seven days,” I said, “or eight. I have never been quite sure.”

  “You got there when?”

  “The day after it happened.” I didn’t intend to elaborate, but what was to be gained by holding back? “I spent the first days talking to people, being talked to, not really believing any of it even though it was right there in front of me. The waiting was terrible. I was waiting to be summoned, to be told they’d found my family. Then I was summoned, and there had been nothing to wait for after all, and I had to leave.”

  “I remember an overwhelming need for action,” Nilsen said. “Physical exertion. Thinking came later. There was a bunch of us. We were desperate to make sense of what had happened but that was going to take time and care and procedure and before we could get to that there was this other thing. I arrived the third day. So I was with you in a way, alongside of you, though back then I had no idea who you were, didn’t know your name as yet. Maybe we went past each other. I was there for a purpose—a different purpose from yours—but for an hour, maybe two, all I could do was go from one piece of wreckage to the next, one dead person to the next. I was pumped. Everything in my training told me to slow down, to assess methodically, but I couldn’t. I was striding, not pausing at all. It was all I could do not to break into a run. I needed to sweat. Now what was that about?”

  “What was your purpose?” I asked.

  “My view, it was the body telling the mind, you’re not ready to deal with this yet, let me take over for a while.” He spoke as if he had not heard my question, but I knew he had. “They already had great areas of the countryside cordoned off. Obviously they were trying to keep people out, minimise contamination of the evidence, but it made things difficult. You know this. There were journalists, relatives like you—people with legitimate reasons for being there, but who might step in the wrong places, compromise the scene. We didn’t know what kind of scene, crime or accident. There were hundreds of police, soldiers, volunteers, sweeping and tagging. And then there were the others, the trophy hunters, who had nothing to do with it except they wanted to grab themselves a piece of the fuselage, somebody’s shirt or sock or something. So later they could say, ‘Guess what this is.’ Ghouls. It still makes me mad to think of them.”

  I wondered if they trained people like Nilsen to use phrases like “minimise contamination” and “compromise the scene,” or if it just came naturally after a while. And I was thinking that much of what he said could be heard two ways. “Made things difficult,” for example. “Step in the wrong places”: what exactly did that mean? And the word “ghouls” raised in my mind an image of old hags in shawls cutting the buttons off dead soldiers on Napoleonic battlefields: did it generate something similar for Nilsen? And would it madden him further if he knew of the small thing I had done on one of those days, I did not know which, before I left?

  “What was your purpose?” I asked again.

  Again he ignored me. He seemed very sure that he could. “But they couldn’t contain all that vast space,” he said. “A space the size of London. The debris was spread over many, many square miles. You know this. There was the main impact and then there was the rest of it. Bodies and baggage and chunks of airplane scattered across fields and forests and parks and streets. I remember a woman caught in a tree, still in her seat. A boy, eleven, twelve maybe, who looked like he’d just fallen asleep where he lay, next to somebody’s car. How much of all that did you see?”

  “Enough.”

  “The smell of aviation fuel. I thought I’d never get it out of my mouth. They were tagging the victims, doctors were checking the injuries, certifying the deaths, the police were marking the exact locations where the victims were found. They stuck markers in the ground with labels on them that fluttered in the breeze like little flags. A
lot of bodies fell on the golf course. It was like someone had picked up all the holes from three courses and scattered them over the fairway, a body beside each pin. There were craters where the bodies hit. You wouldn’t think a human body could make such a deep imprint in the earth. Broken, half-naked. I’ve heard a lot lately about dying with dignity. Counsellor talk. Those people weren’t left with any dignity. Then the teams with the body bags moved in.”

  He stopped speaking and I thought maybe the pain had come back but he seemed only to be remembering. The way the brain runs silent footage that can never be cut or wiped. Recollection—an apposite word in the context. In this, at least, Nilsen was as haunted as I was.

  And, like me, he didn’t seem to have had much patience with counselling.

  “I have to tell you,” he said, “that great respect was shown. There was a deep sorrow in those workers, and they did what they had to do with gentleness and care.”

  “No, you don’t have to tell me,” I replied. “My difficulties were never with the people on the ground, the ones clearing up. Never. That was the worst job in the world. My difficulties have always been with people like you.”

  He gave the faintest of nods, an acknowledgement of some kind. Then he went on.

  “From the passenger manifest they had the names of the dead, but the bodies still had to be identified. You know how it was. They moved them to the temporary mortuary in that high-school gym. It depended on the condition of the victim—whether a relative would be asked to do the identification. If the injuries were too severe, identification was done by other means, dental or medical records. None of this could happen quickly. Thankfully the weather was cold. Your case turned out to be different of course.”

  “Yes.”

  “I remember you saying once it was like losing them twice, and not being able to say goodbye either time. Isn’t that what you said?”

  “You seem to know.”

  “You wrote about it later, or were interviewed, one or the other. You were quoted anyway. And you said for a long time you were numb and then the numbness went and you felt the loss all over again. It was important to feel it, you said. It was what drove you on. I understood that when I read it. All of us on the investigation, we were in the biggest event of our professional lives, and we had to get a result. Accumulating facts wasn’t going to be enough. We had to get inside what had happened. I recognised you. You were a kindred spirit.”

  “That was before I gave you any trouble,” I said, wanting to quash any notion of kinship between us.

  “I used to like trouble,” he said. “Life didn’t seem much without it.”

  3

  ’D GONE BY TRAIN AND THEN BY BUS AND WAS THERE twenty hours after it happened. I could not have stayed away. Outside the bus station I asked someone where the local tourist office was, and was told that if it was a room I was looking for, I was out of luck. All accommodation for miles around was already booked out by journalists and film crews. I stood in the middle of the pavement clutching my overnight bag, and did not know what to do next.

  The faces of everybody going by looked like the faces of people one might see leaving or entering a hospital. An old woman with white hair passed me, glancing at me as if I too were a hospital visitor or patient, dreading disaster or having had it confirmed. I saw a café and managed to find a seat and order a coffee.

  A few minutes later I became conscious of someone sitting across the table from me—the woman with the white hair. She was small and bright-eyed, in a hefty tweed coat.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked. It was not an accusation. “Have you lost someone?” Her hand shook my arm gently as if to waken me.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “Yes, I think so. My wife and child.”

  “And you’re waiting for news,” the woman said. She might have been sixty or eighty, my mother or my grandmother.

  “I’ve had the news,” I said. “I’m just waiting.”

  The import of those three words struck home. That was exactly what I was doing. I was a man waiting at some gate for two people who were never going to come through it. I already understood this. I was a man in arrivals holding up their names or their photos but they would not arrive and eventually there would be nobody else coming through and I would have to go away alone. The brutality of this realisation brought a sob from my throat and tears from my eyes. I did not expect the sob, nor could I stop the tears. This would be the pattern for months to come but I was not yet prepared for these moments, let alone used to the pattern, which anyway would never be so regular that it could be called a pattern.

  The old woman wiped her own eyes. I saw her hand on my arm.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said. “I have nowhere to stay.”

  She said, “Finish your coffee and come with me.” I did as I was told, and allowed her to lead me, away from the town centre, up a hill of old stone cottages and through an iron gate into her own home. There was a spare bedroom. In the tiny sitting room she lit the gas fire. She made tea and I drank it but couldn’t face anything to eat. Her name was Mrs Hastie.

  “You stay here as long as you need to,” she said. “Come in and go out whenever you like. I never lock the door.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “It’s a dreadful business,” she said. “A dreadful business.” The way she said it, did she know, before the thing was a day old, did she know in her old bones, despite the caveats and cautions on the news bulletins, that the crash had not been caused by bad weather or mechanical failure but by some calculated, deliberate act of human hand? Of course she did. I did. We all did.

  I was exhausted from lack of sleep the night before, but now at least I had somewhere to collapse when I could no longer stand. I went back into the town. It was crowded with people, many of them in some uniform or other if they were not from the media. Everywhere I met shock, sympathy and offers of help. Anger, too, though the anger was not directed at me. The police had set up an emergency information centre and I went there, registering my name and other details, such as they were (this was long before the ubiquity of mobile phones, emails and laptops), but not gaining much new information. Relatives of other passengers arrived. Some of them wanted to share their grief and frustration and fear but I couldn’t do any sharing. I returned to Mrs Hastie’s, fell asleep, woke to watch the news on her television. I ate but did not taste the food she prepared. She was a kindly woman, with an instinct for knowing when to speak, when to stay silent. She did not ask questions, and I was grateful for that.

  Over the next few days I read every newspaper I could find; sat for hours in the café; stood on the edge of the field where the nose of the aircraft lay like a fish head with men crawling over it like yellow flies; looked into one half-vanished street and then turned away, because there was the greatest devastation, a deep blackened trench where the main part of the plane had hit and gone up in a fireball, taking several houses with it. I did not then know, but suspected, that I was looking into the extinguished funeral pyre of my family. I went back to Mrs Hastie’s to sleep for a fitful hour, returned to the café, read the same news in different shapes. I used Mrs Hastie’s phone to make calls to my parents and sister, to Emily’s parents in America, to Jim Collins. I tried to give Mrs Hastie money for the calls but she refused, with something close to violence, to take so much as a penny. I checked in regularly with the police, anxious for the moment when I would be called to the school gymnasium. But the call did not come. I was drowning in the intense activity going on all around me, in my own inability to act, in the huge media presence, in the kindness of the local people. Everything smelled and tasted of burning. I retreated again to Mrs Hastie’s but her gas fire began to nauseate me. Her spare bedroom was a kind of sanctuary but it too became oppressive. I thought, I will go mad if I stay in. But if I go out, I go out into another madness.

  I went out.

  When air traffic control lost contact with the plane it was flying in a north by n
orthwesterly direction at 31,000 feet. A lot of experts had been found and placed in front of TV cameras to give their opinions on what had happened. There had been no Mayday call, nothing at all from the pilots. One second the aircraft was there, the next it was gone, its single radar echo multiplying, scattering and fading on the monitors. The wide dispersal of wreckage on the ground indicated that the plane had come apart at a great height. The general consensus was that, whatever had caused the catastrophe, it would have taken about a minute for the largest pieces of the plane to reach the ground. Passengers and crew, if not strapped in seats or otherwise attached to the fuselage, might have plummeted through the night for two minutes, perhaps a little longer. They would have fallen with everything else, suitcases, handbags, blankets, the paraphernalia of air travel, a precipitation of human lives and possessions. That terrible downpour filled my head. Day and night, it never ceased.

  In a newsagent’s I found a battered Ordnance Survey map of the area, missing half its cover, and bought it. Then I went back to the field where the dead nose lay. I had been told that the bodies of the pilots had remained in the cockpit for two days, while men peered in and gingerly worked around them, assessing their last actions—what switches they had switched, whether they had had time to fit oxygen masks. I had also heard that the cockpit voice recorder had been discovered in a nearby field. Official-looking people came and went. I watched, and whenever I got the opportunity I asked—could I speak to someone who knew about the physics of trajectory and descent? I didn’t put it like that. I said, “Is there someone who can tell me how an aeroplane falls out of the sky?” Eventually a man with little round glasses, curly hair and a beard was pointed out to me. “He’s your man.”