The Man Who Narrates Himself

"There are people who want to be loved, and people who want to be believed. The second kind are the more dangerous, because they will accept fear instead."

By two in the morning, the only lit window on Ninth Avenue belonged to a diner called the Starlite, and the only customers in it were the Vances.

They had taken a booth at the back, under a framed photograph of a Greek island that had never, as far as Lauren could tell, been visited by anyone who worked there. The upholstery was cracked red vinyl. The coffee, arriving in thick white mugs, was bitter as a grudge. A waitress in her sixties with hennaed hair and a name tag that said ROSA had filled the cups twice without being asked and then, looking from one tired face to the other, had brought a plate of pancakes to the table and set it down between them.

"I didn't order those," said Ethan.

"Nobody does." Rosa put a hand on her hip. "You both look like you were hit by a truck and then reversed over. Eat. It's on the house."

She went away. Ethan stared at the pancakes.

They were golden-brown, slightly lopsided, with a square of butter melting in the center, and a small pitcher of syrup beside them, and he looked at them for such a long, odd moment that Lauren set down her fork.

"What is it?"

"Nothing." He picked up the pitcher. "Only... more than pancakes is not a number."

She said nothing. There was nothing in her chest at that moment but a dull ache, like a bruise pressed with a thumb. After a while she cut a piece with the side of her fork and put it in her mouth, and it was warm and sweet and ordinary, and for a moment she felt her eyes burn, and she bent her head and ate until it passed.

They had spent the evening in a room at the Pennsylvania Hotel that smelled of radiator dust and last year's cigarette. Danny had called three times from Boston. He had found the Pryce marriage license. He had found Nathan Pryce's architecture firm in Brooklyn, where a receptionist had told him, with some embarrassment, that Mr. Pryce had been on an unpaid leave of absence since the third of September and that nobody knew when he was coming back. He had found the penthouse sale, in June, for a sum that made Lauren put down her pencil. He had found, in a Brooklyn court record, a petition for a restraining order filed by Sophia Lindqvist in 2019 against a reader who had sent her forty-one letters in green ink. Everyone, he said, in tones of respectful awe, seemed to have an opinion about her and nobody seemed to know her.

"Nobody knows her," said Lauren aloud, "because she doesn't let them."

"She let him," said Ethan.

He had been silent so long that she had almost forgotten the thought. Now he put down his fork, and slid his phone out of his pocket, and set it face-up between the plates. On the screen, a small gray icon showed a microphone.

"I have been listening to the podcast," he said. "All night. On the train, in the hotel. I know it's masochism. But I wanted to hear how he talks."

…

It was called The Table.

Eleven million downloads a month, Danny had said, which made it larger than most national radio shows, and it was nothing at all like a show. There was no host. There was no music. There was only a man's voice, quiet and cultivated and faintly amused, speaking in the dark.

Ethan pressed the screen. In the empty diner, over the hum of the refrigerator, a voice began.

"...and so I want you to imagine a kitchen at the end of a long day. Not a restaurant kitchen. I mean the kind of kitchen that one has in one's own house, at the hour when everyone else has gone to bed. A single lamp. A pot cooling on the stove. Do you feel it? That peculiar tenderness that we have for objects that have served us and are now at rest? Most people think I am describing a murder. I am not. I am describing a meal."

Lauren, to her own surprise, found that she had leaned forward.

It was a lovely voice. That was the unnerving thing. It had the warm, unhurried, slightly breathy quality of a man reading aloud to a sleeping child. It had no hint of menace in it, no showmanship, and not one false note. When he paused, the pauses were exactly the length of a breath.

"I'm often asked, by people who write to me, whether I regret it. And I want to tell you that I find the question curious. Regret is a lens that people use to look at a thing after they have decided it was a mistake. But I did not decide that. I merely observed that the world has a rule, and that the rule was not a law of nature. It was a courtesy. And I was curious about what lay beneath the courtesy."

Ethan touched the screen, and the voice stopped.

In the silence the neon sign outside buzzed, and a bus hissed past on the avenue, and the whole length of the diner seemed to hold its breath.

"Did you hear it?" asked Ethan.

"I heard a man who has been talking about this for seven years."

"No. Listen again." He rewound a few seconds. "...I did not decide that. I merely observed that the world has a rule." "He said I merely observed. He said the world has a rule. Do you hear what is absent?"

"The girl."

"Yes. She is not in it anywhere. Not her name, or her face, or the fact that she was nineteen. He did not say I took a life. He said I was curious. He tells it as a story about the shape of his own mind, and everyone else in it, Mingyu, the police, the judge, his own mother, is only weather." Ethan looked at her. "I have profiled thirty-one men like this, Laurie, in my years at Quantico. Ten of them I sat with. And I can tell you that there is one sentence they will all avoid, even the vain ones, even the ones who boast. They will say what they did, and why, and how it felt. But they never speak about the moment when the other person became real."

"And he never does."

"Not once in seven years. I listened to forty-six hours." He rubbed his eyes. "He doesn't say her name. He says the girl. Or my guest. Once, in an interview in April, he said the evening. As if it were a play."

Lauren reached across the table and turned the phone around so that the screen faced her. There was a still photograph of the podcast logo, a plain white plate on a black ground, and below it, a line of comments, scrolling endlessly, fed by strangers.

His voice is so soothing.

I know it's wrong but I can't stop listening.

He just wanted to understand something, you know? We all want to understand something.

Who wouldn't be curious.

She read twenty of them, then forty. They did not sound like monsters. They sounded like her colleagues, her neighbors, the kind clerk at the pharmacy. They sounded like her. And a thing went through her, a long slow shiver that began at the base of the spine and spread out to her arms, that had nothing to do with fear and a great deal to do with recognition.

"This is the poison," she said slowly. "It isn't the crime. It's that he's made it sound like something you might have thought of yourself."

"Yes." Ethan's face was pale. "That is what he is selling. It is the only thing he has ever sold. A door, in the back of the mind, which one is invited to peer through. Not to go through it. Merely to look."

"And the book?"

"The book is the door with a lock on it, and a key given to the reader. That is how you get eleven million people to open it." He picked up his mug, and found it empty, and put it down. "I would have liked to find him ugly. I would have liked to find him a coward or a sadist, someone with a smell of the pit about him. But he is simply an intelligent person who has decided that he is exempt."

…

At a quarter past three they called Clifford Ames.

It was Lauren's idea, and Ethan said it was a poor one, and she placed the call anyway from the booth, with her phone on speaker beside the ketchup. A recorded voice asked her to leave a message. She left one. She said who she was, and that she wished to arrange a short interview with Mr. Desmond Hale in connection with an ongoing inquiry into a missing person. She did not say that the missing person was a young woman who had worked for the ghostwriter of his book. She did not say that she had smelled something sweet in a white room.

Ames called back in four minutes.

It was the voice of an older man, dry and precise and unbothered by the hour, with a faint nasal edge that might have come from New England or from the law. "Captain Vance," he said. "Forgive the lateness of my reply. I keep irregular hours. Mr. Hale is, as you may know, subject to a number of agreements regarding his contact with law enforcement. May I ask the nature of the connection?"

"A young woman named Jiang Yingying worked as an intern at his publisher over the summer. She has not been seen since the fifth of August."

"I'm sorry to hear it." He did not sound sorry. He sounded like a man reading a menu. "Mr. Hale has never met a Miss Jiang. He has met no one from his publisher but Ms. Lindqvist and, once, Mrs. Doyle. I am quite sure of this. His household keeps a visitors' book."

"May I see the visitors' book?"

"You may request it, through the proper channels. The proper channels are, I am afraid, quite lengthy. And they pass through the Office of the Senator."

"Mr. Ames."

"Captain." The dry voice softened slightly, like a cracker in tea. "Let me be frank, as one professional to another. I have represented the Hale family for thirty years. In that time I have seen four attempts by various police agencies to establish a connection between my client and some unfortunate young person. In each case, the connection did not exist. In each case, the agency's name did not survive the year. I say this not as a threat but as a courtesy, so that you may spare yourself the experience."

"I'm grateful for the courtesy."

"I thought you might be." A pause. "I hear that you were with Ms. Lindqvist this afternoon."

The pancake in Lauren's mouth turned to wool.

She did not look at Ethan. She did not look at the phone. She kept her eyes on the framed island on the wall, with its blue, impossible, unvisited water, and she heard herself say in a perfectly even voice, "Is that so?"

"A doorman talks to a doorman. It's a small world, at the top of it." And the voice, faintly, amused, concluded, "Good night, Captain Vance. Do give my regards to your brother. I hear he makes an excellent omelette."

The line went dead.

For a long moment neither of them spoke. The refrigerator hummed. The waitress in the corner turned a page of her magazine.

"They know where we've been," said Ethan quietly. "They know who I am."

"It was a courtesy."

"It was a hand on the back of the neck." He pushed the pancakes away. "Laurie, the doorman told the lawyer. The lawyer told us he knew. Why? Not to frighten us. Frightened people do not tell you they are frightened. He told us to show that there is a line between that building and Westport that does not go through the post."

"A line between Sophia and the Hales."

"A direct line. She called him, within an hour of our leaving. Or somebody did." He lifted his eyes. "And I would very much like to know what it was they said."

…

At four, the diner emptied, and Rosa turned the sign.

They sat on a little longer in the booth with the lights going off in sections around them, bank by bank, and the street turning from black to charcoal in the window. Lauren held her mug in both hands. She thought of the way Ray had looked, sitting on the edge of her desk in April, with the sleeves of the gray cardigan pushed to his elbows, and the sheepish smile of a man who has eaten the last of the cake. I intend to be the first.

She had wanted to tell him not to say it. She had wanted to tell him that she did not want promises made on her account.

"Is it Sophia, or Hale?" she said. "Where does it end? I keep wanting it to be one of them. If it is Hale, then she is only a frightened woman who has been dragged through his dirt. If it is Sophia..."

"If it is Sophia?"

"Then I do not understand what happened to her." She heard her voice go thin. "I sat in that room and I looked at her, and I could not find it. I could not find the thing. Every other time, with every other one, there's been a place where you look, and the face goes still, and you see the other thing looking out. I did not see it. I only saw a tired woman who was frightened of me, and frightened of her own refrigerator."

Ethan was quiet. Outside, a street cleaner went by in a long hissing wash of light.

"Do you know what he said to me, Laurie?" he asked at last. "In the sea. The man on the ship. When he had the knife. He said that the difference between a monster and a man is only a matter of how long you have been hungry."

"Ethan."

"It's a fine line, you see. And I think I have stood on one side of it long enough to know that most people do not." He gave her a faint, tired smile. "I do not believe that Sophia Lindqvist is Hale. I think she is something harder. I think she is someone who went into that glass house with her eyes open. I think, God help her, that she liked it. And I do not think she knows yet what she liked."

The sky outside was paling. A thin gray light slid in at the glass and lay along the table and caught on the syrup in the little pitcher, and turned it for a moment to amber.

Lauren set down her mug. "Then we had better find out," she said, "before she does."