Killing Plato

time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time. Here’s to them.”

— James Ellroy, American Tabloid

FORTY NINE

The fall term at the university began in September, but it began without me. That was an arrangement agreeable all around. I didn’t feel a great deal like teaching and the university didn’t feel a great deal like employing a professor whose face had been in half the newspapers in the world after shooting a man to death during the murder of Plato Karsarkis’ wife and her security guards.

As one might expect in Thailand the separation was accomplished with massive amounts of face-saving on all sides. I asked the university for a leave of absence based on a detailed account of the injuries I suffered in the attack in Phuket, and the university granted me a leave of absence based on its deeply sympathetic feelings for me and its sincere hope I would return to my post at an early date.

Both statements were, of course, utter crap. After the kind of publicity I’d had, a Thai university wouldn’t have touched me with a rubber-insulated cattle prod. And for my part, the bullet wounds had healed completely within a few weeks following my return to Bangkok. It was the invisible wounds that caused all the pain after that.

I thought of Anita constantly: where she was now, and what she was doing. Over and over I summoned up a picture of her and each time it opened in my mind like an image projected on a screen. I would lean toward it, studying the detail, tracing its edges, looking for whatever it was I had not seen there before; but I could not find it. There was nothing that I had not seen there before. That was the part that really frightened me, of course. Even now, even knowing the truth of it now, I still could not see anything I had not seen there before.

It was not until after the school term had actually begun that I started to think about what I was going to do with myself. I had no claem' sses to teach and perhaps I never would again, but at the very least I had none for a while. I had resigned all of my corporate directorships as well and the consulting work I sometimes did had dried up of its own accord. When people hire a lawyer for a matter that they need handled discreetly, on the whole they prefer to hire someone whose public profile is discreet as well. That pretty much ruled me out now.

For what was probably the first time in my entire adult life I had no obligations at all. That was when I discovered something that a whole lot of other people no doubt already knew. When you find yourself at loose ends, you spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about lunch. I ended up reading a lot, which I didn’t mind, but with Anita gone the apartment was still and depressing and I started spending more and more time every day trying to think of some place to go just to get out of it.

One night in early November, I was at home eating a tuna sandwich and watching CNN when I heard a report that Plato Karsarkis’ daughter Zoe had died of leukemia in New York. On impulse, I had thrown a few things into a bag that very night, taken a cab to the airport the next morning, and flown to New York for her funeral.

Even now, I’m not sure exactly why I did that. Maybe it just seemed like a convenient excuse to spend some time under what might be a kinder sky. I could hardly claim I was doing it for Zoe. I had never even met her. And I sure as hell wasn’t doing it for Plato Karsarkis.

The plain fact was that I had thought about Karsarkis as little as possible since his plane had smashed into that grove of rubber trees in Phuket, and I had not thought at all about what he had told me in my hospital room that morning before it happened. I hadn’t listened to the tapes he had given me. Never even considered it. I had tucked all three of them away in a bottom drawer of my desk together with the transcripts of the email intercepts Kate had given me, and I had not taken them out or even thought about them since I had put them in there. I’m sure a psychiatrist could have come up with a term for how I had managed to bury the whole subject so completely, maybe even why, but I didn’t much want to know what it was. I already knew far more than I wanted to know about far too many things.

Karsarkis had claimed that my old Georgetown roommate, Billy Redwine, now counsel to the president, was on those tapes. If he was, and if — as Karsarkis claimed — Billy’s voice was recognizable talking to Cynthia Kim about components used in the Bali bombings having originated from a covert National Security Council operation, then the White House would be in very deep shit. At least it would be if the tapes ever became public.

I really had no doubt what Karsarkis had told me about the content of the tapes was true. That was precisely why he had wanted me as his point man in pitching for a pardon in the first place. Pardon applications were filed with the White House counsel’s office. If I had filed Karsarkis’ pardon application with Billy Redwine, he would have guessed immediately that Karsarkis had, as they say, an ace in the hole-and that his old Georgetown roommate was threatening him with what was nothing short of extortion.

The Thai Airlines flight left Bangkok at dinner time and took me nonstop to Los Angeles. I grabbed a shower and a few hours’ sleep at a Hilton on Century Boulevard, then I took the hotel shuttle back to the airport and caught an early morning American Airlines flight to New York.

From thirty-five thousand feet the western half of the United States has always seemed lunar to me: unidentifiable rings that look like craters, ranges of mountains that appear impassable, anAwesd a latticework of thin white lines scratched into the reddish-brown earth. I drank black coffee and watched Nevada become Utah, and I thought about the people who two centuries before had worked their way westward over that very landscape on horseback or even on foot. If they had realized what they were getting into, if they could have seen the place whole from thirty-five thousand feet like I could now, I was willing to bet they would have said to hell with this and just stayed home.

But they couldn’t see what they were getting into, of course, so they just kept going. Like the rest of us did when we were digging a hole for ourselves, they moved forward step by step, no single step seeming all that important, but the sum of all those steps propelling them into the heart of a wasteland so terrifying that surely they would have turned and fled if they could have seen it for what it really was.

I was still trying to decide what to make of that dazzling insight when jet lag took me and I fell into a deep if short-lived sleep.

FIFTY

Zoe’s funeral was at a Catholic church on Eighty-Third Street near Park. Predictably it drew a crowd of television and newspaper photographers, but there were actually fewer lenses poking at Zoe’s small, rose-covered coffin than I had expected. I gathered, in death, Plato Karsarkis was already on the inevitable slide to becoming nothing more than yesterday’s news. Another year and he would be in somebody’s whatever-happened-to column.

Karsarkis’ ex-wife, Zoe’s mother, was both younger and more striking than I had expected. She was tall and very thin, and her blonde hair was twisted up into what I think women call a French braid. A black Chanel suit set off her pale skin and her blue eyes looked both warm and guarded at the same time.

When the brief ceremony ended, she stood and crossed herself, and then while we all waited respectfully in silence she left the church alone by the center aisle. Strangely, just as she passed me she turned her head slightly and caught my eye. Normally I would have looked away, but she didn’t, so I didn’t either.

For a moment it seemed almost as if she was going to stop and say something to me, although I couldn’t imagine what it would be. She didn’t stop, of course, but stranger still, she tilted her head slightly in my direction as she moved past and appeared to mouth something that looked to me exactly like thank you. Then she continued out of the church onto Eighty-Third Street. By the time I had made my own way outside, she was gone.

I had no idea at all what that could have been about, or even if I might have imagined the whole thing. No idea at all.

Back at the hotel that night I ordered a burger and a beer from room service and I watched Monday Night