The woman who’s appeared a few steps down from the landing wears a long loose-fitting black garment, some kind of sweater, apparently, although it’s almost like a cape, the way it drapes around her thin shoulders, hanging down with ragged majesty onto the unswept concrete landing.
The apartment block where Crane lived is organized around a flat stone courtyard, gray steps leading up to each individual unit, cement catwalks between the doors, like a motel. A poky little capture observes from above the doorway, green light blinking. After two minutes of knocking and trying to see in through the small smudged window, Ms. Paige and I have just about satisfied ourselves that there is no one home, and I have concluded it’s time to force my way in. I’ve been in the Service for nineteen years, but I was regular police once upon a time. I know how to get in when I need to.
But here instead is this funny old lady, grinning up at us impishly in her black caul of a sweater, wearing a lot of clunky jewelry, with her skinny arms crossed over her chest.
“Nope,” I tell her. “Not friends. I’m Mr. Ratesic, and I’m with the Speculative Service, and this is Ms. Paige. A dolphin is a mammal.”
“So’s a bat but not so is a bee. I’m Dolly Aster. I live downstairs.” I tip my pinhole and she smiles impishly, interest flashing in her milky eyes. Her hair is wild, curly and gray. “Don’t know that I’ve seen a pair of you before. I thought you people traveled alone. Like wolves.”
“No, ma’am,” I say. “Not wolves.”
“I said like wolves, young man. It’s a figure of speech. Do you people do figures of speech, or is an idiom considered a species of lie?”
“Idioms don’t register as falsehoods, ma’am,” says Paige, quickly and authoritatively, giving out the Basic Law like she’s one of the recordings made for schoolchildren. “Given that their intention and literal meaning can be gleaned from context and familiarity. They’re like humorous remarks in that regard.”
“Well aren’t you sharp,” says Aster, her devilish grin broadening. “Sharp as a box of tacks.”
Unlike Renner, back at the mansion, unlike most people, Ms. Aster seems to show no sign of intimidation or nervousness in the presence of the Speculative Service. To the contrary, she’s fascinated, inching up the stairwell with one old hand clutching the banister, licking her lips. “The Speculative Service on my humble stairwell in a fearsome little pack.” Her small features narrow to a fascinated point, savoring the mysterious syllables of the occupation. “And to what do I owe the pleasure?”
“We’re here about your tenant, Mose Crane.”
“What did he do?” she says. “He murder someone?”
“No,” I say, thinking, Interesting assumption. “No, ma’am. He’s dead.”
“Murdered?”
I’m about to say no, and I find that I can’t do it. My throat refuses to form the word, my instinct refuses to certify it as part of what’s So. So I merely smile, dance sideways around the question. “We are hoping to take a look at his apartment. Hoping you can help us out with that.”
I’m digging her, this old lady—she has a tough sinewy look about her, like an old snake, not dangerous but built to navigate danger. She hands me her Day Book and I hand her mine, and I stamp hers and she stamps mine, and then she does the same with Paige.
“So. What’s it like,” she asks Paige, “enforcing a world of absolute truth?”
“I don’t know,” says Paige, deadpan. “It’s my first day.”
Ms. Aster likes that a lot. She laughs, loud and cackling, hands on her hips, and gives me a wink. “You better watch out for this one, young man. Watch out!”
I raise my eyebrows, give her a tight smile, indulging the joke, but Aster’s joke has got it wrong—dead wrong, 180 degrees in the wrong—which she’s old enough to know. I do not believe and have never believed that our mission is to enforce a world of absolute truth. If such a world could be built we would have long ago built it already.
People are going to lie: they want to—they need to. Lying is born into the species. You know this is true as well as I do. There is something perfect in a lie, something seductive, addictive; telling a lie is like licking sugar off a spoon. I mean, think of children, think of how children lie all the time. We have imaginary friends, we blame our misbehavior on our playmates or our siblings, we claim not yet to have had dessert so we can cadge a second cookie. Me and Charlie used to have contests, as a matter of fact, two brothers each trying to slip a fake fact under the other one’s radar: “I beat up a kid at school”; “I saw that dog, the neighbor’s dog, jump over a fence”; “I’m the fastest runner in my class—”
You go back far enough in history, ancient history, and you find a time when people were never taught to grow out of it, when every adult lied all the time, when people lied for no reason or for the most selfish possible reasons, for political effect or personal gain. They lied and they didn’t just lie; they built around themselves whole carapaces of alternate truth in which to live like beetles. They built realities and sheltered inside them. This is how it was, this is how it is known to have been, and all the details of that old dead world are known to us in our bones but hidden from view, true and permanent but not accessible, not part of our vernacular.
It was the world. It was this world but it was another world and it’s gone. We are what’s left. The calamity of the past is not true because it is unknown: we do not know what happened or how it happened or why it happened—and therefore it is by definition not true. There could only be hypotheses, and hypotheses
