There are two gravediggers, waiting. They’re both rail thin, bareheaded, in long black coats, like ragged Speculators moonlighting in a workman’s trade. They are leaning on their shovels, waiting to finalize the transaction by heaping dirt onto the box when all of this talking is done. One smokes mutely, looking up at the fingers of the trees, while the other leans on his shovel handle, reading the Authority. Then he looks up at me, and nudges the other man.
The second one nods. He has a page of Authority in his pocket—the afternoon edition. Authority updated. He unfolds the page, scans it quickly, runs one dirty finger along it, and then they begin to murmur to each other, the two gravediggers.
My gut was right. I know it instantly. My gut was on target, and the world is righting itself. It’s happening now.
A black car pulls up to the outskirts, and three men get out, two from the front seat and two from the rear. One walks in front and the other two follow, moving quickly toward me across the muddy ground. The two in the back are regular policemen. I watch them come. Rain trickles down the side of my face. I have the avid attention of the gravediggers now, and of the rest of the funeral crowd: all of Aysa’s look-alikes, older and younger, looking sidelong at my approaching visitors.
I detach myself from the crowd. Push my wet pinhole down onto my hair.
“Mr. Alvaro?”
“Mr. Ratesic.”
My boss stops before me but does not put his hand out. His own pinhole is pushed down over his eyes, and when he pushes it up his eyes are unfamiliar. Troubled. Baffled. Distressed. But his voice does not waver.
“I need you to come with me.”
“What are you talking about?” I rub my hand through my beard. “What for?”
I glance back at the grave. The machine is really whirring now, the low hum of the machine that will bear Aysa into the ground.
“Laszlo. You gotta come with me right now.”
“Tell me what’s going on, Alvaro.”
“It’s the captures, Laszlo.”
“What captures?”
The humming behind me stops. The operation is complete. She’s in the ground. The gravediggers step forward but they don’t start shoveling. They’re listening to us.
“From your raid last night. You and—” He points behind me, toward the ground. “You and the kid. The house on Mulholland. We have the stretches.”
The full truth of this arrives all at once.
I stare at Alvaro and he stares at me, but it’s not him I’m seeing. I’m seeing the house. I’m seeing the driveway, dead captures looking up from the pavers, dead captures in the palm trees.
If what Alvaro is saying is true—and of course it is, it has to be, how can it be otherwise—then those captures weren’t dead. They weren’t dummies. Petras’s house wasn’t off the Record at all.
“It’s five o’clock,” says someone from over by the burial ground, and then suddenly everybody is saying it. “It’s five o’clock.” “It’s just turned five.” “It’s an hour since four.” Truth filling up the funeral yard.
Alvaro just waits, pointing to his car.
“Like I said, Laszlo. You gotta come with me.”
My gut was right. I’m no hero.
The truth is a bulwark, until it’s not anymore. Until it crumbles beneath your feet, slips out from under you, throws you sideways like seismological activity buried deep within a hillside.
On the thirtieth floor of the Service building, all the screens are showing the same thing. There is one stretch being played, but all the monitors are linked, and it’s playing on everybody’s desk. Everybody looks up when I come in, and then they go back to staring at their monitors.
Watching Paige and myself tiptoe as a team across the lawn on Mulholland Drive, very late last night, very early this morning. We creep together.
I watch the whole thing, beginning to end. I am conscious of everybody watching the stretch—all of them, Burlington and Carson, Cullers, Alvaro with his arms crossed. Everybody watching me watching myself, watching me lead Aysa to her doom. Watching me make the worst mistake anyone has ever made. Everybody is here. Everybody understands how bad this is. Nobody can understand what I did, but everybody understands what I’ve done.
Everybody is here, except for Arlo. Where is Arlo?
On the screen I crouch and point to the capture embedded among the footlights that line the driveway.
“Here,” I watch myself say, on the screen. “Look.”
“Fuck’s sake,” somebody mutters in the still air of the room. “For fuck’s sake.”
I command the stretch to go back, ten seconds back, and watch us again, me and Aysa doing our thing. It’s a nice clean stretch, multiple angles, a good tapestry. We walk together across the lawn, crouch again to the capture, and again I listen to myself explaining to Aysa that it’s dead, a dummy, that it’s not recording.
We pause at the doorway, listen to the bark of the dog. A moment’s hesitation, and we proceed around to the back.
And now here I am, accusing Laura Petras, Our Acknowledged Expert on the Enforcement of the Laws, of having torn out the roots of the captures in her own home, of having participated in a conspiracy against the security of the Golden State, an assault on the Objectively So. And here is Petras, stunned and horrified, telling me I’m wrong, telling me it’s a mistake, and here I am insisting, because she was lying—I saw that she was lying—except the captures have it. It’s all on the Record.
“Laszlo—” Alvaro puts a hand on my shoulder, but I shake him off.
On the stretch, the gunfire begins. We duck behind the table. Aysa leaps, the knife plunges into her stomach, and I say “Stop” to the screen and it stops.
Silence in the room. Cullers breathes out the words “Oh, Laz,” just like that. “Oh.”
I turn to Alvaro.
“How…”
I’m asking him the question that I know he can’t answer. I take back “How…” I swallow “How…” Instead I say, “What
