Part 8 (2/2)

”All that time, when I was talking to you about Lila, and about my family, you were using me. I considered you a friend, you considered me a source.”

”It wasn't like that,” he said, turning his whole body to face me. ”People know Lila's name. Twenty years later, they're still talking about her. They love her. If it weren't for the book, she'd just be another dead girl.”

”They don't love her,” I said. ”They're fascinated by her. To them, she's just a corpse somebody found in the woods, a catharsis. Anyone who reads that book feels relieved that it wasn't their daughter or girlfriend or sister. It's someone else's tragedy. Your readers can enjoy the spectacle, but they don't have to pay a price.”

”You're wrong,” he said, shaking his head. ”That's not how it is at all.”

I could tell that he believed what he was saying. He really believed he had turned Lila into some sort of cult heroine. In his version of the story, he'd done little wrong.

Twenty-one.

AT TWO IN THE MORNING THORPE AND I were sitting at the large gla.s.s-top table, facing each other over a half-eaten pizza and a near-empty bottle of wine. He'd insisted on feeding me, and the only thing he could find to cook was a frozen spinach and artichoke pizza from Trader Joe's. I was surprised how good it tasted, and how hungry I was. The wine was delicious, a 2003 pinot. I tasted raspberries and smoke, and poured myself a second gla.s.s. Thorpe was on his third.

I was all talked out, and yet I hadn't gotten any answers. Every time I tried to steer the conversation in the direction of Peter McConnell, he steered it back to something else. We talked about a recent trip he'd taken to Lisbon, an angry letter he'd received from the now ex-wife who was immortalized in Second Time's a Charm, and an early photograph by the Hungarian photographer Martin Munkacsi which he had recently acquired at considerable cost. I'd seen Munkacsi's spare, beautiful black-and-white photographs at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art a couple of years before. The exhibit had featured famous portraits of American celebrities, aerial photos of female pilots, and the well-known ”Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika.” But the photograph Thorpe had purchased was from the early 1920s, when Munkacsi was at the very beginning of his career.

”Do you know Munkacsi's story?” Thorpe asked, lifting his gla.s.s.

”Didn't he take some iconic photo of Fred Astaire?”

”Yes, but what's really interesting is what came before all that, before he fled Hitler and moved to New York, back when he was completely unknown. One day Munkacsi was walking along with his camera when he came upon a street fight. He started taking pictures. By the end of the brawl, someone was dead. Munkacsi's photographs were used in court to clear the accused-this was what launched his career. I've managed to get my hands on one of these photographs of the brawl. It's being s.h.i.+pped from a gallery in Budapest next month. It will go right there, above the fireplace.”

I imagined the image of a b.l.o.o.d.y street fight hanging above Thorpe's mantel, hovering over the room. What kind of man would want to gaze, every day, at a portrait of a murder-in-action?

”Lucky man,” I said.

”I know. You should have seen me at the gallery, trying to talk the owner into parting with it. He was determined to only sell to a Hungarian. I was speaking through an interpreter, to whom I'd promised a handsome commission, and it turns out he did more than translate. He apparently made up some elaborate story about my ancestral connection to the Hapsburgs.”

”I wasn't talking about you,” I said.

”Pardon?”

”When I said 'lucky man,' I was referring to the man who was cleared of committing the crime.”

”Oh,” Thorpe said, ”of course.”

It was late, and I was afraid of leaving without getting what I'd come for. As a night owl, I was always aware of the coming daylight, could sense the minutes ticking away. All of my best conversations with Henry had occurred in the middle of the night. Sunrise had a way of putting an end to intimacy; the vulnerabilities men displayed in the middle of the night seemed to disappear with the moon and stars.

Thorpe picked up his knife and began cutting his pizza into small bites. I'd forgotten his annoying habit of treating his food like he was dissecting it.

”There's something I wanted to ask you about.”

”How does anyone live without Trader Joe's?” Thorpe said. ”I'd go hungry if it weren't for their frozen food aisle. Did I ever tell you I met Joe Coulombe once? At a fund-raising soiree for the LA Opera. He's a big opera fan.”

”Peter McConnell,” I said.

Thorpe peeled an artichoke off the pizza and ate it slowly, gazing intently at his plate. If I didn't know him so well, I would have thought he hadn't heard me. ”Trader Joe's didn't get really huge until it was bought out in 1979 by one of the German brothers who own Aldi. People still think there's a California guy named Joe in a floral s.h.i.+rt and Panama hat running the whole show.”

I was determined not to give up. ”Did Peter McConnell do it?”

Thorpe blotted his lips with a napkin. ”You read the book. You know my theory.”

”I'm not asking about your theory. I'm asking whether he did it.”

”Off the record?”

”Sure,” I said. ”Who am I going to tell, anyway?”

”He had opportunity. He had motive. Most of the circ.u.mstantial evidence certainly pointed in his direction.”

”Most?”

”In any case like this, there are shades of doubt.”

I poured the last of the wine into his gla.s.s. ”When you wrote the book,” I continued carefully, ”were you doubtful?”

”Any rational person, given the facts, would experience an element of doubt. That's unavoidable.”

”But in the book, you made it sound as though it had to be him.”

Thorpe picked up his gla.s.s. ”It did.”

”Why?”

”Because if anyone else did it, it would have just been another sordid murder for the police ticker, suitable for nothing more than an item in the newspaper. But if McConnell did it, it was a great story-a young, beautiful math prodigy, murdered by her married lover, who knew that he would never be as brilliant a mathematician as she was.” His voice had become slightly unsteady from the wine, and a shadow of stubble had reappeared on his head. ”At the end of the day, everyone wants to be taken away by a great story. Everyone wants to read about people they're unlikely to meet in real life. From the moment I stumbled upon McConnell, I knew he was the character I'd been looking for, the one who had eluded me in all my previous attempts to write a novel.”

”But your book wasn't a novel.”

”Nonetheless, I had to think like a novelist. If I'd approached it as a straightforward piece of journalism, I never would have found the heart of the story.”

”What if the character in your book is nothing like the actual man? What if McConnell didn't do it?”

”One can't rule out the possibility.”

”You don't care that you might have ruined an innocent man's life?”

”It's a stretch to call him innocent,” Thorpe said. ”Let's suppose for a moment that he didn't kill Lila; he would still be guilty of having an extramarital affair, and of using your sister to further his ambition of proving the Goldbach Conjecture.”

”When a book is labeled nonfiction, people expect to read the truth.”

”Remember what Oscar Wilde said in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray: 'There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well-written or badly written.' Hopefully, mine was well-written and provided some pleasure. I was only trying to tell a good story. And the deeper I got into the book, the more clear it became to me that there could be only one ending. Once I understood what it was, writing the story was like following a map.”

Thorpe leaned back. ”Listen, I was thinking maybe we could get together soon. I'm doing a signing at Books Inc. in Opera Plaza on Sat.u.r.day. We could have lunch in the neighborhood afterward.”

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