Who Gets to Use the Active Voice

The bar was in Dorchester, on a block where a Vietnamese restaurant and a Cape Verdean barbershop bracketed a place that had no sign out front, only a Harpoon IPA neon in the window that buzzed at a frequency you felt in your back teeth. Le Carré had chosen it. He had a gift for finding establishments that looked like they existed primarily to discourage visitors — places where the decor communicated, in the institutional language he loved, that your comfort was not the priority.

He was drinking Scotch, neat, in a glass that might once have been part of a set. Lehane was drinking a Sam Adams, because Lehane drinks Sam Adams in places like this, in the same way that certain men in certain neighborhoods go to certain bars: not for the beer but for the fact of the going. I had water. I was nervous. I am always nervous in these conversations, but this time more so, because I had the sense — which I could not yet articulate — that both of these men were going to ask me for something I didn’t know how to give.

“The problem,” le Carré said, and he said it the way he begins everything, as though the problem were a memo that had been circulated through several departments before arriving at the table, “the problem is that crime fiction believes it is about the criminal act. It isn’t. It never has been. The act is simply the pressure that reveals the fault lines in the institution. What matters is the institution.”

“Bullshit,” Lehane said. He didn’t say it angrily. He said it the way someone from Dorchester says bullshit — almost affectionately, the way you’d correct a friend who’s started believing his own press. “The institution is a building. The people inside the building — that’s your story. A guy in a housing project in Charlestown doesn’t give a damn about institutional fault lines. He gives a damn about his buddy who’s in trouble, or his kid who’s running with the wrong crew, or the fact that the corner he grew up on now has a yoga studio.”

“I’m not disagreeing with you,” le Carré said.

“You are disagreeing with me. You just don’t want to be vulgar about it.”

Le Carré smiled. It was a narrow smile, the kind of smile that had survived decades of committee meetings and professional betrayals and still managed to communicate, in its careful way, genuine amusement. “Shall I be vulgar about it, then? Your people — your working-class Bostonians, your men from the projects — they are magnificent on the page. They bleed. They grieve. But they are often permitted to understand their suffering only at the personal level. The cop betrays his friend. The friend betrays his neighborhood. It remains intimate. What I want — what I have always wanted — is to show that the betrayal was authored somewhere else. That the institution created the conditions for the betrayal, and then sent a man from the institution to investigate it, and that man, by the act of investigating, becomes complicit in the system that produced the crime.”

“So your investigator is dirty,” Lehane said.

“My investigator is clean. That’s worse.”

This stopped Lehane. He took a drink. I could see him turning it over — the idea that cleanliness, within a corrupt system, was its own form of corruption.

“Go on,” Lehane said.

“The man from internal affairs,” le Carré said. “He is the institution’s instrument. He follows procedure. He reads the files. He documents everything in the passive voice, because the passive voice is how institutions speak when they want to describe events without admitting that anyone caused them. Evidence was accessed. Discrepancies were observed. Beautiful sentences. Morally empty ones. He is excellent at his job, and his excellence is what makes him dangerous, because his excellence is in the service of a system that investigates corruption in order to contain it — not to address it. To manage the damage. To produce a report that can be filed.”

“And he knows this?” I asked.

Le Carré looked at me. His eyes had that quality — weary but precise, the eyes of a man who has spent a lifetime reading documents that lie and people who tell the truth in ways designed to be misunderstood. “That is the question, isn’t it. Does he know it? At what point does the functionary understand that his function is not justice but maintenance?”

“I think he knows,” Lehane said. “He’s known for years. But knowing and doing something about it are two different neighborhoods.”

“That’s good,” I said. “That’s —”

“Don’t compliment me. Tell me what you think.”

I thought. I took a drink of water. Outside, the February dark had settled into the kind of cold that doesn’t announce itself, that just waits for you in the parking lot.

“I think the investigator has something in his past,” I said. “Something that makes the investigation personal, even though it’s supposed to be institutional. And I think the person he’s investigating is someone he grew up with.”

“Childhood friends,” Lehane said. He said it flatly, the way you state a fact that has weight. “Boys from the same project.”

“Three of them,” le Carré said.

We both looked at him.

“It must be three. Two creates a binary — loyalty or betrayal, clean or dirty. Three creates a geometry. One is the investigator. One is the investigated. And the third is gone. Dead, perhaps. Or vanished. But the third’s absence is what activates the story. The third is the ghost in the system.”

“Rio,” Lehane said, and for a moment I thought he was naming a place, but then I understood he was already naming a person. “Kid named Rio. Dead at forty-one. Heart attack. Nothing dramatic, nothing criminal. Just a heart that stopped. And that’s the thing that makes it unbearable, right? He doesn’t get a cop funeral or a gangster funeral or a meaningful death. He gets a Costco parking lot.”

“In Quincy,” I added.

Lehane shot me a look. “You’ve been to Quincy?”

“No.”

“Then trust me. Quincy.”

Le Carré was watching both of us. He had his glass between his hands, turning it slowly, the Scotch catching what light there was in that dim bar. “The dead friend is essential because he represents the possibility that was foreclosed. He wanted to confess. To go to the police and say: when I was twelve, I found a dead girl. I did nothing. He wanted to break the silence. And one of the other two — the one who became a police lieutenant — talked him out of it.”

“Danny,” Lehane said.

“Danny,” le Carré agreed. “Danny who is now stealing from his own evidence room. Not for profit. Not for greed. For reasons that even Danny can barely articulate, though they are perfectly clear to anyone who understands the psychology of institutional men who have been carrying an unacknowledged weight for thirty years.”

“He wants to get caught,” I said.

“He wants to be found,” le Carré corrected. “There is a distinction, and the distinction matters. Getting caught implies that the system worked — that the institution functioned correctly and identified the breach. Being found implies something more intimate. Someone saw him. Not the crime. Him.”

Lehane was quiet for a while. He peeled the label on his beer, which is a thing men do in bars when they are thinking about something that sits in their chest rather than their head.

“My problem with this,” Lehane said, “is that it’s too clean.”

“Too clean?” Le Carré raised an eyebrow.

“Your version. The institutional version. The mole hunt, the bureaucratic procedure, the committee rooms and passive voice. It’s beautiful — I mean that, it genuinely is — but it’s a clock. Everything interlocks. Everything has a function. And real neighborhoods don’t work like that. In the projects, there’s no mole hunt. There’s a kid who saw something he shouldn’t have seen at twelve and now he’s forty-two and it lives in him like a bone that didn’t set right. He doesn’t think about it in terms of institutional complicity. He thinks about it at two in the morning when he can’t sleep.”

“I don’t think these are incompatible,” I ventured.

“Didn’t say they were incompatible. Said one is cleaner than the other. David’s version—” He gestured at le Carré. “—gives you the architecture. The mole hunt, the investigation, the beautiful machinery of people betraying systems that betrayed them first. Mine gives you the kitchen. The basement with the finished carpet and the Bruins on TV and a guy pouring Jameson — the cheap bottle, not the gift bottle — because he’s about to tell you the worst thing he’s ever done.”

“And you think the kitchen matters more than the architecture?”

“I think people live in kitchens. They work in architecture.”

Le Carré set down his glass. “I will give you the kitchen,” he said, and there was something in his voice — a concession that cost him, the sound of a man who has spent his career perfecting the architecture and is now being told, not unkindly, that the architecture is insufficient. “But I will not give up the passive voice.”

“Why not?”

“Because the passive voice is the story. The passive voice is how institutions commit violence without leaving fingerprints. Evidence was accessed. Discrepancies were observed. A pattern consistent with systematic diversion was identified. Every one of those sentences is a lie — not factually, but morally. They describe events that were caused by specific human beings, and they erase those human beings from the sentence. The investigator writes in the passive voice because the institution requires it. And at the end — at the end, if the story works — he must choose whether to continue writing in the passive voice or to switch to the active. We found her. We closed the door. That is the choice. That is the entire story. Who gets to use the active voice, and what it costs them.”

Silence at the table. Lehane finished his beer. I felt something click into place — not a plot, not a structure, but an understanding of what this story was actually about, underneath the investigation and the housing project and the dead girl in the basement.

“The girl,” I said. “Maura. Do we ever learn what happened to her? Who killed her?”

“No,” they said simultaneously, and then looked at each other — le Carré with surprise, Lehane with a grim half-smile.

“We agree on something,” Lehane said.

“Apparently.”

“The girl stays unsolved,” Lehane said. “Because this isn’t her story. It’s their story — the three boys who found her and walked away. If we solve her murder, we turn it into a mystery. We make it about closure. And there is no closure. There is never closure. Closure is something institutions invented so they could file things.”

“Closure is an administrative category,” le Carré said. “It has no human equivalent.”

I wanted to push back on this. Something in me — the part that wants stories to resolve, that wants the dead to be accounted for — recoiled at leaving Maura Keville as a footnote in someone else’s moral education. But I could feel that both of them were right, or right enough, and that the discomfort I felt was probably the discomfort the reader should feel.

“What about Danny’s wife?” I said. “Christine. There’s a woman in that house who knows something is wrong and —”

“She makes good coffee,” Lehane said. “That’s what Danny says about her, and it’s the cruelest thing in the story, because it’s a man reducing his wife to a domestic function so he doesn’t have to think about what he’s doing to her. Christine exists in the story the way wives exist in the lives of institutional men — at the periphery, asking who’s on the phone, being told nobody, go back to sleep.”

“That’s not enough,” I said.

“It’s not enough,” Lehane agreed. “But it’s accurate. And sometimes accuracy is more important than enough.”

Le Carré nodded. “The wife in the background, asking questions that go unanswered — that is the domestic expression of the same institutional silence. Danny manages information at home the same way he manages it at the station. He parcels it through channels. He controls what she knows. He is, in his marriage, precisely the bureaucrat he is at work.”

“And Flood?” I asked. “The investigator. What does it cost him?”

Lehane leaned forward. “It costs him the thing he’s best at. Watching. Standing apart and noticing. That’s been his identity since he was eight years old in that courtyard — the kid who watches. Professional Standards is the perfect job for a watcher. You observe, you document, you don’t get involved. But this investigation — this one forces him to stop watching and act. And the moment he acts, the moment he picks up the phone and says I’m writing it all down, Building 7 and everything — he loses the one thing that’s kept him safe for thirty years.”

“His distance,” I said.

“His distance. His ability to be in the room without being of the room. That’s gone. The moment he puts a subject in those sentences — we found her, we closed the door — he’s inside the story. He’s a participant. And the watcher cannot survive becoming a participant.”

“Can’t survive how?” le Carré asked. He was genuinely curious now, leaning forward over his Scotch. “Do you mean professionally? Personally?”

“Both. Either. I don’t know that the distinction matters for a man like Flood. His profession is his personality. He became a watcher for the institution because he was already a watcher by temperament. Take away the institution and you still have the watcher. Put the watcher inside his own story and you have — what? A man sitting in a parked car at midnight, composing a report in his head that he may or may not have the courage to write in the morning.”

“I want him to write it,” I said. “I want the story to end with him deciding to use the active voice.”

“Deciding and doing are different neighborhoods,” Lehane said again.

“He decides,” le Carré said. “He sits in the car and he decides. Whether he follows through — that belongs to the morning. And we will not write the morning.”

“We never write the morning,” Lehane said. “Not in this kind of story. The morning is where hope lives, and hope is a genre we don’t work in.”

I sat with that. The bar was emptying. The Harpoon neon buzzed. Somewhere in the kitchen, someone was running water and the pipes rattled in the walls, the plumbing of an old building communicating its complaints through the only language available to it.

“One more thing,” le Carré said. He was putting on his coat — a dark wool thing, beautifully cut, the kind of coat that communicates both taste and the expectation that you will spend a great deal of time outdoors in unpleasant weather. “The channel.”

“What about it?”

“The title implies dredging. Dragging the channel — it’s a police procedure, yes? When they search a body of water for evidence. For a body.”

“They drag the channel,” Lehane said. “Hooks and chains. Takes hours. Takes days sometimes. Most of the time you find shopping carts and tires.”

“But the metaphor,” le Carré said. “The investigator is dragging the channel. He is pulling things up from the silt — evidence, memory, the dead girl, the dead friend, the living friend who wanted to be found. The channel is not the harbor. The channel is the thirty years between twelve and forty-two. And what has accumulated in that channel is everything that was too heavy to carry and too shameful to put down.”

“Silt,” Lehane said. “You gather facts the way silt gathers. Slowly. Until the channel is reshaped by what it carries.”

“That’s not bad,” le Carré said.

“Don’t compliment me. Tell me what you think.”

Le Carré laughed — actually laughed, a brief sharp sound that seemed to surprise even him, as though laughter were a declassified document he’d forgotten he had access to.

“I think,” he said, buttoning his coat, “that we have given this young person enough rope to do something interesting or to hang themselves. Both outcomes have merit.”

He left. Lehane stayed for another beer. I stayed because leaving felt like a decision I wasn’t ready to make.

“He’s right about the passive voice,” Lehane said, after a while. “I hate that he’s right, but he is. The passive voice is the real villain of this thing. Not Danny. Not the dead girl’s killer. The grammar itself. The institutional grammar that lets you describe a thing without taking responsibility for it.”

“And the active voice is the answer?”

“The active voice is the cost. I don’t know if it’s the answer. I don’t know if this kind of story gets an answer.” He finished his beer. He stood. He put a twenty on the bar, which was too much for what he’d had but was the right amount for the bartender, and that distinction — between what something costs and what it’s worth — felt like it belonged somewhere in the story, though I couldn’t yet say where.

“Write it honest,” Lehane said. “Don’t let it be neat.”

He left. I sat in the bar alone with the buzzing neon and the rattling pipes and the sense that I had been given two contradictory sets of instructions, each delivered with absolute conviction, and that the story would live or die in the space between them.