The Clue Board

Off-topic: "Fake-or-Real Index, Week 3 (a very scientific scale)" (posted by m_aurelius_jr, 7:30 PM)

cold_open_77 · 7:41 PM · 96 likes: Wait, you have a spreadsheet? Respect.

mothlight · 7:50 PM · 77 likes: Give Exterminators a 5. He's never wrong. That's the tell.

m_aurelius_jr · 7:58 PM · 120 likes: Scale: 1 = Halloween costume. 5 = call the cops. Exterminators currently averages 2.6. Do not @ me.

A_Cole_Case · 8:14 PM · 31 likes: I'd argue the average masks a trend. Request raw data.

On Saturday evening the four of them met at a pizza place called Sal's on Third Avenue, which had a red awning, eight tables, a jukebox that played nothing but Sinatra, and a man at the counter who threw the dough in the air so close to the ceiling fan that every time he did it the whole room winced.

They had taken the booth in the back. Marcus had brought the black notebook, and Priya had brought her laptop and a sweatshirt that said UNIVERSITY OF SOMEWHERE ELSE, and Noah had brought nothing at all, except the quiet look of a man who has agreed to come and intends to be pleasant about it. Asher arrived last, ten minutes late and out of breath, with a manila folder of his own printed pages under his arm, and found that they had already ordered.

"We got you a slice with mushrooms," said Priya. "Don't make a face. You always make a face."

"I'm not making a face."

"You're making a face internally."

He sat down. The booth smelled of oregano and hot cheese, and the table between them was covered with paper plates and glasses of orange soda and the black notebook, which lay open to a double-page spread of Marcus's neat grid. Down the left column ran forty-two lines of post titles. Across the top, in a different pen, Marcus had written five categories: Pose, Prose, Pictures, Pattern, Panic.

"Okay, new system," said Marcus, with enormous gravity. "We stopped scoring each post. Scoring each post was giving us noise. Now we score the account. Each account gets a mark out of five on each of the five Ps, and at the end we know who the real danger is, and who's just a guy with a camera."

"Who's the real danger?" asked Priya.

"Statistically? Cold_open. He says 'whoa' too much. It's a cover."

"He's twenty-two."

"That's what he wants you to think."

Priya laughed so hard that she had to put her slice down. Noah smiled and picked a mushroom off his crust. And Asher, who had not quite caught the joke and was still arranging his folder, smiled too, a beat late, as he always did, and then put in with great seriousness, "I think you're underweighting prose. The forum is a text-based environment. Prose should count double."

"Prose should count double," Marcus repeated, writing it down. "Counsel makes a motion."

"Counsel makes a good motion," said Noah, and nudged him.

It was, Asher thought, a lovely evening.

He had spent the week preparing for it, in the way that other men prepare for a promotion. On Thursday he had handed Hargrove the two pages on Pelham, and Hargrove had read them standing, with the pen in his fingers, and had said "Fine," which Asher had carried around for the rest of the day like a medal. And every night after that, from nine until one, he had sat on the edge of the bed with the laptop and the printer he had borrowed from the landlady downstairs, and had gone back through the whole history of the account called Exterminators, from the first comment to the last, and sorted it, and tabulated it, and bound it. It had been the happiest work of his life. Nobody had asked for it. Nobody had told him to stop. At one in the morning on Friday, with the printer clattering in the hall and the landlady's cat watching him from the stairs, he had stapled the last copy and sat for a moment with the warm pages in his lap, and felt the whole strength of his mind gathered in one place, as he had never felt it at the firm.

The only thing that troubled him was how to present it. He had decided, after some reflection, to be modest.

…

They went through the accounts one by one. It took an hour, and a second pitcher of soda, and the pizza man came out twice from behind the counter to ask if they wanted anything else, and went back looking puzzled each time, because the four of them were leaning over a notebook so intently that he took them for students preparing for an exam.

Marcus scored the cheerful ones. Priya scored the ones that seemed to her suspicious, in a spirit of pure mischief. Noah offered little, but when he spoke it was usually a single sentence and a correct one, and he would lean back and take a sip of soda and let the others argue about it. And at last, when the others had been dealt with, Marcus put down the pen and said, "Okay. The big one," and the table was quiet for a moment, as at a séance.

"Exterminators," said Priya.

"The man himself. What's his score?"

"Pose, five," said Noah.

"Prose, five," said Asher.

"Pattern, three? He's consistent, but it's a consistent style, not necessarily a consistent anything else." Priya squinted at the screen. "Pictures, I don't know. He never posts a real picture. Just that mask. I'd give him a two. Panic, one, because he never panics, and Panic is for the people who freak out."

"You can't score him one on Panic," said Marcus. "That's the most panicked thing about him. A man who never panics is a man with a lot to be calm about."

"That's not a rule."

"It's a rule now."

They argued about it cheerfully. And Asher, who until then had held back, with his hands folded on the manila folder, finally unfolded them and set the folder in the middle of the table.

"I've been working on something," he said.

"Oh no," said Marcus. "Here comes the footnote."

"It isn't a footnote. It's a profile."

He opened the folder with a certain ceremony. Inside were eleven pages, printed in black, bound by a single staple, and across the top of the first page was a title in bold: EXTERMINATORS: Preliminary Observations. There were three tables. There was a graph of the hours at which the account had posted, drawn in blue ink. There was a bulleted list of fourteen items, headed Likely Occupation, of which the first was Government/State (self-reported), and the second Senior, probably supervisory, and the third Writes like someone accustomed to being obeyed.

The others looked at one another.

"You made a graph," said Priya, very softly, with wonder.

"It's not a graph, it's a distribution." Asher turned the page. "Look. This is the part that matters. I went back through the three weeks of timestamps, every comment, and sorted by hour. Nothing before nine at night. Almost nothing on weekday mornings. And if you look at this, here, between six and nine, there's a trough. Total silence. Even on days when he's posted twice before six. Seven o'clock exactly, nothing."

"So he's busy at dinner," said Noah.

"Exactly. He's busy at dinner. So he eats at a regular hour, with someone." Asher tapped the graph. "A man alone doesn't go silent at seven. A man alone eats in front of the screen. This is someone with a table to sit at. Which means a household, which means a family. A wife. Perhaps children."

"That's a lot to get from a trough," said Priya.

"It's pattern recognition. It's what the field does."

"What field?" said Marcus.

"Law," said Asher, with dignity. "Evidence. You collect the small details that don't seem to matter, and you let them add up."

He talked for another eight minutes. He did it with a kind of ardor, with his fork in the air, explaining the difference between direct and circumstantial inference and the use of timestamps in a famous embezzlement case, and the others, who had been listening with open affection, gradually began to listen with a little less, and then to look at the pizza. It was the sort of thing that happens at a party when the host starts to sing. No one wanted to stop him. No one wanted to be the one to say.

It was Noah who did it, finally, with a smile.

"Asher. Do you want to eat your slice? It's cold."

"I'm explaining..."

"I know. It's really good. It's just a little cold."

"Right," said Asher, and looked down at the slice, which had congealed to a gray rubber, and laughed. "Sorry. I get carried away."

"You do," said Priya, and gave his arm a squeeze. "It's why we like you."

He took it as the compliment it almost was. He did not see Noah glance at her, or the look that passed between them, which was fond and apologetic and tired, the look of two people who have decided that it is simply kinder to say nothing. He folded his pages back into the folder. He ate the cold slice, with relish, in four bites.

…

At ten past nine they stood outside on the pavement under the red awning, zipping their jackets.

It had begun to rain a little, thin and cold, and the neon sign above them made the wet street into a long blur of pink. Marcus put the notebook under his coat. Noah had his hands in his pockets, and his shoulders drawn up around his ears, and Priya was wrapping a scarf twice around her neck and complaining about the weather in a cheerful run.

"Okay, last question," she said. "For the notebook. And I want a serious answer, Counselor."

"Go ahead," said Asher.

"Suppose it's real." She held up a hand to ward off the interruption. "Don't say it's not. Suppose. He's what you've built. Eleven pages. A man with a family, and a government job, and a fondness for rules. What do you think he does?"

Asher considered it, standing under the awning with his folder against his chest. The rain ticked on the canvas overhead. He thought of the gray overcoat he had imagined, and the steady voice, and the careful courtesy, the gaps in the procedure. He thought of the sentence that had gone through him like warm water on the night of the worst day. He thought of all the offices he had ever seen, and the men who sat in the corner ones.

"A director," he said. "Of something. The head of some office. Not a policeman and not a politician. The kind of man nobody suspects, because he's too tidy." He smiled at the thought. "The kind who gets a plaque."

"A plaque," said Marcus. "I like that. I'm writing it down."

"A man with a plaque," said Noah, quietly.

He did not laugh, and neither did the others, and for a moment the four of them stood in the pink rain and the sentence hung there between them, and then Priya shivered and said she was freezing, and Marcus said that the last bus was at ten, and they said good night in the usual way, with a lot of waving.

Asher walked home alone along Third Avenue, under a street lamp that buzzed, past the bakery with its metal shutters down and the closed bank and the bus shelter where a woman in a hospital smock sat with her eyes shut and her head against the glass. He was happy. He kept thinking, as he walked, of the graph, and the trough at seven o'clock, a silence like a table laid for a family, and the more he thought of it the more it seemed to him that he had found something. He walked a little faster. He felt, though he could not have explained it, like a man who has just opened a door in a house he has lived in all his life, and found behind it a staircase going down.