John Verdon

her wedding day.” He was about to say how she was killed, describe the peculiar details, but realized that would be a mistake.

Madeleine nodded almost imperceptibly.

“You all right?” he asked.

“I’d been wondering how long it would take.”

“How long …?”

“For you to find another … situation that required your attention.”

“All I’m going to do is talk to her.”

“Right. And then, after a nice long talk, you’ll conclude that there’s nothing especially interesting about a woman being killed on her wedding day, and you’ll yawn and walk away. Is that the way you see it?”

His voice tightened reflexively. “I don’t know enough yet to see it in any particular way.”

She gave him her patented skeptical smile. “I have to go,” she said. Then, seeming to notice the question in his eyes, she added, “The clinic, remember? See you back here tonight.” And she was gone.

At first he just stared at the empty doorway. Then he thought he should go after her, started to do so, got as far as the middle of the kitchen, stopped, and wondered what he would say, had no idea, thought he should go after her anyway, went out the side door by the garden. But by the time he got around to the front of the house, her car was halfway down the rough little farm lane that bisected the low pasture. He wondered if she saw him in her rearview mirror, wondered if it made a difference that he’d come out after her.

Wishful thinking. The universal anodyne.

He stood in the matted, drought-wilted grass and watched her car disappear behind the barn onto the narrow town road. His feet were cold. He looked down and discovered he had come outside in his socks, which were now absorbing the morning dew. As he turned to go back into the house, a movement by the barn caught his eye.

A lone coyote had emerged from the woods and was loping across the clearing between the barn and the pond. Partway across, the animal stopped, turning its head toward Gurney, and studied him for a long ten seconds. It was an intelligent look, thought Gurney. A look of pure, unemotional calculation.

“Grow up, assholes,” she said calmly. “What I mean is, you have to let them see something real in you. Something they can feel, that they know in their gut is true. It can’t all be bullshit.”

Gurney felt a pleasant rush of excitement—his reaction whenever he recognized a star student in one of his classes. It was an experience that reinforced his decision to participate as a guest lecturer in these seminars.

“ ‘It can’t all be bullshit,’ ” he repeated, in a voice loud enough for everyone to hear. “Absolutely true. Authentic emotion—credible passion—is essential to effective deception. Your undercover persona must be based on a real emotional piece of yourself. Otherwise it’s all posing, all imitation, all fake, all bullshit. And superficial bullshit rarely works. Superficial bullshit gets undercover people killed.”

It was a famous scene from a famous movie, but as Gurney scanned the faces in the room, he saw no sign that anyone recognized it. In the scene, an older man is interrogating a younger man.

The young man is eager to work for the Irgun, a radical organization fighting to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine at the end of World War II. He presents himself boastfully as a demolitions expert, seasoned in combat, who acquired his expertise with dynamite by fighting the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. He claims that after killing many Nazis he was captured and imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was assigned to a routine cleaning job.

The older man wants to know more. He asks him several specific questions about his story, the camp, his duties.

The young man’s version of events begins to fall apart when the interrogator reveals that there was no dynamite available in the Warsaw Ghetto. As his heroic narrative crumbles, he’s forced to admit that he learned what he knows about dynamite from his real job in the camp, which was blasting holes in the ground big enough to hold the thousands of bodies of his fellow prisoners, being killed each day in the gas chambers. Beyond that, the older man makes him admit, even more degradingly, that his other job was picking the gold fillings out of the mouths of the corpses. And finally, collapsing in tears of rage and shame, the young man admits that his captors repeatedly raped him.

The raw truth is exposed—along with his desperation to redeem himself. The scene concludes with his induction into the Irgun.

Gurney switched off the tape player.

“It’s funny,” said the only black woman. “He starts out by telling lies about himself to get what he wants, but he ends up getting it—getting into the Irgun—by finally telling the truth. By the way, what the hell is the Irgun?”

That got the biggest laugh of the day.

Okay,” said Gurney. “Let’s stop there and take a closer look. The naïve young guy wants to get into the organization. He tells a lot of lies to make himself look good. The smart old guy sees through it, calls him on his bullshit, drags the truth out of him. And it just so happens that the awfulness of the truth makes the kid an ideal psychological candidate for the fanatical Irgun. So they let him join. Is that a fair summary of what we just saw?”

There were various nods and grunts of agreement, some more cautious than others.

“Anyone think that’s not what we saw?”

Saying this, Gurney realized that he’d grown up in an era when “a break” automatically meant a cigarette break.

Gurney took a deep breath, extended his arms above his head, and stretched his back slowly from side to side. His introductory segment had created more muscle tension than he’d realized.

seemed to give her the nudge she needed. “I’m not saying that’s not what I saw. It’s a movie, I know, and in the movie what you said is probably true. But if that was real—you know, a real interview video—it might not be true.”

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?” someone whispered, not quite softly enough.

“I’ll tell you what the fuck it’s supposed to mean,” she said, sparking to the challenge. “It means there’s no proof at all that the old guy actually got to the truth. So the young guy breaks down and cries and says he got fucked in the ass, excuse my language. ‘Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, I’m no big hero after all, just a pathetic little pussycat that gave the Nazis blow jobs.’ So how do we know that story isn’t just more bullshit? Maybe the pussycat is smarter than he looks.”

Christ, thought Gurney, she did it again. He decided to step into the speculative silence that followed her impressive exposition. “Which brings us to the question we started with,” he said. “Why do we believe what we believe? As this perceptive officer here just pointed out, the interrogator in that scene may not have gotten to the truth at all. The question is, what made him think that he did?”

This new twist produced a number of reactions.

“Sometimes your gut tells you what’s what, you know?”

“Maybe the breakdown the kid had looked legit to him. Maybe you had to be there, catch the attitude.”

“Real world, the interrogator would know more stuff than he’s putting on the table. Could be the kid’s confession squares with some of that stuff, confirms it.”

A guy at the far end of the second row, with a fire-hydrant neck emerging from a black T-shirt, along with densely tattooed Popeye forearms, a shaved head, and tiny eyes—eyes that looked like they were being forced shut by the muscles in his cheeks—raised his hand. The fingers were curled almost into a fist. The voice was slow, deliberate, thoughtful. “You asking, do we sometimes believe what we want to believe?”

“That’s pretty much what I’m asking,” said Gurney. “What do you think?”

The squinty eyes opened a little. “I think that’s … right. That’s human nature.” He cleared his throat. “I’ll speak for myself. I’ve made mistakes because of that … factor. Not because I so much want to believe good things about people. I’ve been on the job awhile, don’t have a lot of illusions about people’s motives, what they’re willing to do.” He bared his teeth in apparent revulsion at some passing image. “I’ve seen my share of hideous shit. Lot of people in this room have seen the same shit. What I’m saying, though, is that sometimes I get an idea about the way something is, and I may not even know how much I want that idea to be right. Like, I know what went down, or I know exactly how some scumbag thinks. I know why he did what he did. Except sometimes—not often, but definitely sometimes—I don’t know shit, I just think I do. In fact, I’m positive I do. It’s like an occupational hazard.” He fell silent, gave the impression that he was considering the bleak implications of what he’d said.

Once again, for perhaps the thousandth time in his life, Gurney was reminded that his first impressions were not especially reliable.