magazine we could get our hands on.
'Here he goes,' she said
Hoffman stood up at the center of the big table, dressed in a mocha suit, white shirt and yellow tie.
A banner at his back.
He talked, paused for applause, smiled.
The banner said: PACIFIC RIM PROGRESS: A NEW DAWN.
Another one-liner. Laughter.
He continued talking and smiling and pausing for applause.
Then he stopped and only smiled.
Something changed in his eyes. A shutter-snap flicker of confusion.
If I hadn't been looking for it, I probably wouldn't have noticed.
If I hadn't been looking for it, I wouldn't have been tuned to C-Span.
The camera left him and swung to the back of the room.
A tall, gaunt old man in a brand-new charcoal-gray suit walked toward the front.
Next to him walked a woman I'd known first as Jo Picker, then as Jane Bendig, official-looking in a navy-blue suit and high-necked white blouse. For the last three days she'd worked nearly twenty-four hours a day. The easy part: using Tom Creedman's computer to send bogus messages by e-mail. The hard part: convincing Moreland he could redeem himself.
The doctors and psychologists at the medical center had helped some. Examining the kids with care and compassion, assuring the old man they were clinicians, not technocrats.
Jane shared her grief with him, talked numbers, morality, absolution.
Eventually, she just wore him down.
Now he walked ahead of her.
Behind the two of them, six men in blue suits flanked a massive black thing, like pallbearers.
Black thing with legs, a shuffling variant of the circus horse.
Stirring and confusion at the other tables, too.
Moreland and Jo kept marching. The black cloth seemed to float in midair.
Some men next to Hoffman began to move, but other men stopped them.
Zoom on Hoffman's face, still smiling.
He mouthed something- an order- to a man standing behind him, but the man had been restrained.
Moreland reached Hoffman.
Hoffman started to speak, smiled instead.
Someone shouted, 'What's going on?' and that seemed to shake Hoffman out of it.
'I'm sorry, ladies and gentlemen, this man's quite disturbed and he's been harassing me for quite a-'
The men in blue suits flicked their wrists, and the black cloth seemed to fly away.
Six soft, misshapen people stood there, hands at their sides, placid as milk-sated babies. Ruined skin highlighted mercilessly by the chandelier. The doctors at the medical center had established that only UV was a threat. The black sheet protecting them from the stares of gawkers.
Gasps from the room.
The blind one began bouncing and waving his hands, staring up at the light with empty sockets.
'My God!' said someone.
A glass dropped on the granite and shattered.
Two blue-suited men took hold of Hoffman's arms.
Moreland said, 'My name is Woodrow Wilson Moreland. I'm a doctor. I have a story to tell.'
Hoffman stopped smiling.
40
A few days later, on the plane back to L.A., it hit me.
First-class flight, seats like club chairs, the Defense Department's generosity allowing Spike's crate a seat of its own.
Dinner had been salmon stuffed with sole mousse. I'd indulged in half a bottle of Chablis and fallen asleep. Robin had finished only a third of a glass, but she'd drifted off too. Now her head was heavy on my blanketed shoulder.
Sweet sleep, but I came out of it thinking about Haygood- who he'd been as a child. Was there a mother out there who'd mourn him?
Stupid thoughts, but inevitable. I tried to shake myself out of it, thinking of the good I'd been part of.
Ben freed. Some limited hope for Aruk.
The 'kids' liberated and well cared for.
Moreland hospitalized, too, and evaluated. No Alzheimer's, no obscure neurological disease, just an exhausted old man.
I'd visited him an hour before we left. He hadn't told Pam or Dennis yet.
Holding back. His entire life, after the paradise needle, a struggle against impulse.
Heroism thrust upon him, he'd reinvented himself.
A thirty-year transformation, from a cruel womanizer to the patron saint of Aruk.
But yet he felt guilty.
Other sins?
Things for which there was no atonement?
As I'd left his hospital room, he'd called out, 'Time deceives.'
The same thing he'd told me as he bled on the white couch.
Another confession?
Cold hands… still afraid.
A long silence before he'd closed his eyes and mumbled.
Offering himself to me- defenses down, his world unraveling.
The first time, I'd comforted him instead of pursuing it. The second time, I'd just kept walking.
Not wanting to know?
Time's deceit.
His unique
Telling me about cannibal cargo cults because he suspected AnneMarie's death had been part of a money- driven conspiracy.
Recounting the nuclear blast because he'd been part of another technological horror.
Discussing Joseph Cristobal's vision and 'A. Tutalo' because he yearned to unload the secret of his kids.
And something else.
The first case he'd discussed with me, moments after we'd met.
Discussing in great detail, but unable to locate the file.
Because there'd never been a file?
A 'lovely lady… sweet nature… clean habits.' Thirty years old, her mother was morose…
Abused and humiliated by a philandering husband- forced to watch him make love to another woman.
The husband dead, years later. Eaten away by lung cancer.
A ravaged chest…
