Chapter 7 - Where the Truth Lies

IN HILLMAN’S LAW LIBRARY, I slowly closed the ring binder as if irrevocably shutting the door behind a departing dinner guest who’d stayed until one A.M. when everyone else had been decent enough to leave by eleven.^I

Very well. I’d faced the Beast, my hands tied to the sacrificial stake of a legal stipulation, and lived. Lanny wasn’t King Kong or Dracula, neither as warmhearted as the mammal nor as cold-blooded as the undead. Now there was one overwhelming question in my mind, and as John Hillman reentered the room without knocking, I realized he was the person on the premises most likely to have the answer.

“Miss O’Connor, your time is up. You’ll forgive me if I…” He moved to the binder and quickly leafed through the pages, making sure none was missing. He then nodded toward Naomi, who indicated that I should put my hands above my head as before. I saw Hillman unconsciously lick his lips. It was one thing to tolerate the liberties Naomi was apparently at liberty to take with me, but I did not want to supply Hillman with any images to carry home to his master bathroom for masturbatory purposes. I asked if he’d mind turning his back. He humored me with a patronizing shrug.

In addition to Naomi’s laying on of hands, a second disquieting sensation was creeping over me, and it concerned what I’d just read. It was not merely the sense that “something was wrong with this picture.” No, it was more as if I’d been asked to detect what was wrong with this picture and suddenly noticed that this picture was tattooed on the back of a corpse.

As Naomi lumbered out of the library, Hillman must have noticed the dazed expression on my face and asked if something was the matter.

I sat down again and responded, “I think I don’t know why Lanny Morris let me read what I’ve just read. As self-portraits go, he doesn’t exactly come off as—I mean, have you read this?” I asked, gesturing to the binder.

He nodded. “It’s pretty pungent, I concede. Lacking in pretense, to say the very least.”

I sputtered, “Why would he ever want anyone to see this side of him?”

He took a Sobranie cigarette from a teakwood box on the library table. “I have my own theories, but of course I’d only be guessing.” I gave Hillman the same eager and attentive look that had signaled my availability to male professors in college. He ventured professorially, “I think it was Jack Kerouac who once said that every person had within himself one great book.”

I shrugged. “Trouble is, Jack Kerouac went and wrote more than one book.”

He smiled. “I may have meant Jack London. I myself…” He lit the black paper tube of Balkan tobacco. “Suffice it to say that while many people announce their intention to write their memoirs, few get beyond typing the dedication. I suspect my client wanted you to understand, firsthand, that he is in fact completing a book that will serve not only as his autobiography but also as the definitive account of the shared careers of Collins and Morris. You’ve now ‘heard’ Lanny’s writing voice, to use your own profession’s jargon. Call it what you will—”

“Deplorably narcissistic, obscenely chauvinistic?”

He waved my words away, leaving behind a wraith of blue smoke. “Such a book, this raw, this honest, would make your own attempted effort… Well, there’ve been some very nice translations of the Bible over the centuries, but they’d run a poor second in public interest to, say, the discovery of the actual stone tablets upon which God inscribed the Ten Commandments. Don’t you think?”

I told him that from what I’d just read, the only thing Lanny’s chapter had in common with the Ten Commandments was that the latter could not be found anywhere within the former.

He picked up the ring binder in a protective, motherly way and commented indignantly, “As it happens, I think my client is thoughtfully trying to save you a lot of work and grief in aid of a doomed cause.” As he walked me to the door, toward which I hadn’t been heading, he asked, “Ever hear of a man named Roald Amundsen?”

I knew the name but couldn’t remember how, and I admitted as much.

He nodded me out of the library and into the hall. “In 1911, a British explorer named Robert Falcon Scott set out with a small expedition intending to be the first man to reach the South Pole. He and his team faced unimaginable hardship. When they finally reached their goal, they discovered that a Norwegian explorer named Amundsen had gotten there five weeks earlier. All their sacrifice and suffering had been made meaningless. On their return journey, Scott and all his companions died.” Hillman smiled. “I think—this is nothing but conjecture on my part—I think my client wanted you to understand that he is, in effect, Amundsen. That he’s already reached the South Pole in both the living and the telling of his own story. I think he wanted to spare you an effort as pointless as Scott’s, one that staggered its way toward a cold and lonely death.”

1. I. It would indeed be an impressive feat if I’d been able to memorize the pages by Lanny Morris from which I’ve just quoted in full. Obviously, since I first read these pages in Hillman’s office, I’ve had access to and have acquired the rights to quote from them here.