The Professor of Truth Read Online Free PDF Page A

went past each other. I was there for a purpose—a different purposefrom yours—but for an hour, maybe two, all I could do was go from one piece of wreckage to the next, one dead person to the next. I was pumped. Everything in my training told me to slow down, to assess methodically, but I couldn’t. I was striding, not pausing at all. It was all I could do not to break into a run. I needed to sweat. Now what was that about?”
    “What was your purpose?” I asked.
    “My view, it was the body telling the mind, you’re not ready to deal with this yet, let me take over for a while.” He spoke as if he had not heard my question, but I knew he had. “They already had great areas of the countryside cordoned off. Obviously they were trying to keep people out, minimise contamination of the evidence, but it made things difficult. You know this. There were journalists, relatives like you—people with legitimate reasons for being there, but who might step in the wrong places, compromise the scene. We didn’t know what kind of scene, crime or accident. There were hundreds of police, soldiers, volunteers, sweeping and tagging. And then there were the others, the trophy hunters, who had nothing to do with it except they wanted to grab themselves a piece of the fuselage, somebody’s shirt or sock or something. So later they could say, ‘Guess what this is.’ Ghouls. It still makes me mad to think of them.”
    I wondered if they trained people like Nilsen to use phrases like “minimise contamination” and “compromise the scene,” or if it just came naturally after a while. And I was thinking that much of what he said could be heard two ways. “Made things difficult,” for example. “Step in the wrong places”: what exactly did that mean? And the word“ghouls” raised in my mind an image of old hags in shawls cutting the buttons off dead soldiers on Napoleonic battlefields: did it generate something similar for Nilsen? And would it madden him further if he knew of the small thing I had done on one of those days, I did not know which, before I left?
    “What was your purpose?” I asked again.
    Again he ignored me. He seemed very sure that he could. “But they couldn’t contain all that vast space,” he said. “A space the size of London. The debris was spread over many, many square miles. You know this. There was the main impact and then there was the rest of it. Bodies and baggage and chunks of airplane scattered across fields and forests and parks and streets. I remember a woman caught in a tree, still in her seat. A boy, eleven, twelve maybe, who looked like he’d just fallen asleep where he lay, next to somebody’s car. How much of all that did you see?”
    “Enough.”
    “The smell of aviation fuel. I thought I’d never get it out of my mouth. They were tagging the victims, doctors were checking the injuries, certifying the deaths, the police were marking the exact locations where the victims were found. They stuck markers in the ground with labels on them that fluttered in the breeze like little flags. A lot of bodies fell on the golf course. It was like someone had picked up all the holes from three courses and scattered them over the fairway, a body beside each pin. There were craters where the bodies hit. You wouldn’t think a human body could make such a deep imprint in the earth. Broken, half-naked. I’veheard a lot lately about dying with dignity. Counsellor talk. Those people weren’t left with any dignity. Then the teams with the body bags moved in.”
    He stopped speaking and I thought maybe the pain had come back but he seemed only to be remembering. The way the brain runs silent footage that can never be cut or wiped. Recollection—an apposite word in the context. In this, at least, Nilsen was as haunted as I was.
    And, like me, he didn’t seem to have had much patience with counselling.
    “I have to tell you,” he said, “that great respect was shown. There was a deep sorrow in those