Page 28 of The Lie Maker

“That’s what I’ll write,” Lana said.

“Thank you.”

And then she sneezed. She’d held it off as long as she could.

“Bless you,” Zack said.

She took a tissue from her purse and wiped her nose before thanking the man for his time. He got to his feet and turned around to head for the open bay, where two of his colleagues were waiting. They put their arms around his shoulders and walked him back into the building.

This will not end well, Lana thought.

Sixteen

Jack

I hadn’t been given a whole lot to go on. My first subject, according to what Gwen had told me, was male, white, and forty years old.

Where to begin? What kind of life did I want to create for him? And not knowing what he did now—was he a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker? What if, by chance, I gave him a background that was too similar to his real one? No, that seemed unlikely, against the odds.

Anyway, before I began to consider so much as this man’s favorite color or snack, I had to prepare my workstation, also known as my kitchen table. Gwen had sprung for an extra laptop, a base model, that I could use solely for the profiles, and leave unconnected to the internet. When I had something to show her, I could run a cable from it to my printer and arrange a meeting to hand over the material. My other laptop could sit on the table, available for research.

Just as I did at the beginning of any project (we writers have our rituals), I went to a nearby office supply store and loaded up on fine-point pens, spiral notebooks, printer cartridges, paper, sticky notes, and coffee pods for my Keurig, the one and only decadent appliance I owned.

I didn’t know where they were going to place this witness, but I supposed that didn’t matter. Where was a good place for him to have come from? Someplace in upstate New York, perhaps. Albany, or Rochester, or maybe start him off farther west, in Buffalo. A Buffalo suburb. Cheektowaga or Lackawanna, maybe Niagara Falls.

I liked Niagara Falls. That was a place almost everyone had been to, and even if they hadn’t, they knew about it. It was a place you could say you hailed from, even describe with some confidence, without ever having seen it. Was our guy born there? Did he go to school there?

This was where the other laptop came in handy. I googled the names of schools in the Niagara Falls area. There was a Niagara Falls High School, a Madonna High School. I liked that second one. Easy to remember. What kind of student was he? What clubs did he belong to? I made him a member of the basketball team. And then, to show that he wasn’t a total jock, had him join the chess club.

What did our guy’s parents do? His mother didn’t have a job outside the home, and his dad worked for... okay, they were only a few miles from the Canadian border, so he was a border guard, customs agent, whatever. I gave him an older brother. Much older. Ten years. The way our guy figured it, his parents were done having kids, and then, whoops, a little surprise. Big age difference, so the brothers were never that close. By the time our witness was starting grade school and still playing with Tonka trucks in his sandbox, his older brother was getting his driver’s license and trying to be the first among his friends to lose his virginity.

Made a note: Need good story about the first time our guy gets laid.

Once I’d scribbled down a few things, I typed them onto the screen. I dreamed up childhood friends for our guy. Since I knew his age, I looked up popular TV shows that would have been on when he was nine, ten years old. Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Batman: The Animated Series, and the Tim Allen sitcom Home Improvement would very likely have been shows he would have loved. Who knew, maybe my guy really did love those shows.

A couple of times, Lana called to check on my progress.

“How’s the speechifying coming?” she asked playfully.

If she wanted to believe I was writing speeches for some politician that was fine with me.

“Just great,” I said. “Putting the finishing touches to the governor declaring war on Rhode Island.”

“It’s about time,” she said. “They’ve been getting away with shit for too long.”

I spent five days creating a life for my relocated witness. I hooked the laptop to the printer and found I had twenty double-spaced pages for my new employer’s consideration.

I called Gwen. “Got something,” I said.

“Put it in an envelope and I’ll send someone around to get it later today.”

Two hours later, I got a call on the phone Gwen gave me, but this was the first time it came from a number other than hers.

“Out front,” a man said.

I already had the papers tucked into a nine-by-twelve manila envelope and written “Gwen” on the front with one of my new pens. I added “For Your Eyes Only” beneath her name.

When I came out the front of the building, there was a black van with heavily tinted windows at the curb. A guy who looked like an extra from a Martin Scorsese movie—stocky, broad shouldered, buzz cut—got out.