The Accident

by Chris Pavone

  And then.

  She stops at the final photo, spotlit, a small black-and-white in the center of an expanse of stark-white matting. A little boy, laughing on a rocky beach, running out of the gentle surf, wearing water wings. Isabel reaches her hand to her lips, plants a kiss on her fingers, and transfers the kiss to the little boy. As she does every morning.

  Isabel continues to the bathroom, unbuttoning her flannel top as she walks, untying the drawstring of the pajama bottoms, which crumple as she releases the knot. She pushes her panties down and steps out of them, leaving a small, tight puddle of cotton on the floor.

  The hot shower punishes her tense, tired shoulders. Steam billows in thick bursts, pulled out the bathroom door, spilling into the dressing area, the bedroom. The water fills her ears, drowning out any sounds of the television, of the world. If there’s anything else in her apartment making noise, she can’t hear it.

  What exactly is she going to do with this manuscript? She shakes water out of her hair, licks her top lip, shifts her hands, her feet, her weight, standing under the stream, distracted and disarmed, distressed. It all beats down on her, the shower stream and the manuscript and the boy and the past, and the old guilt plus the new guilt, and the new earth-shattering truths, and fear for her career and maybe, now, fear for her life.

  She slips into a soft, thick white bathrobe, towel-dries her hair. She sweeps her hand across the steamed-up glass, and examines her tired eyes, bagged and bloodshot, wrinkled at the corners. The bathroom’s high-wattage lighting isn’t doing her any favors this morning. She had long ago become accustomed to not sleeping well, for a variety of reasons. But with each passing year, it has become harder and harder to hide the physical evidence of sleeplessness.

  From the other room, she can hear the irrelevant prattle of the so-called news, the piddling dramas of box-office grosses, petty marital indiscretions, celebrity substance abuse. Steam recolonizes the mirror, and she watches big thick drops of condensation streak down from the top beveled edge of the glass, cutting narrow paths of clarity through the fog, thin clear lines in which she can glimpse her reflection …

  Something is different, and a jolt of nervous electricity shoots through her, a flash of an image, Hitchcockian terror. Something in that slim clear streak has changed. The light has shifted, there’s now a darkness, a shadow—

  But it’s nothing, she sees, just the reflection of the bedroom TV, more footage of yesterday’s international news, today. Today she has to consider the news in a whole new light. Now and forevermore.

  She gets dressed, a sleek navy skirt suit over a crisp white blouse, low heels. The type of office attire for someone who wants to look good, without particularly caring about being fashionable. She blow-dries, brushes her shoulder-length blonde hair, applies makeup. Sets contacts into her hazel eyes. She assesses herself—tired-looking, inarguably middle-aged—in the full-length mirror, and sighs, disappointed. Three hours of sleep pushes the limit of what makeup can accomplish.

  She stares again at the bottom of The Accident’s covering page: Author contact 40004026@worldmail.net. She types another e-mail—she’s already sent two of these, in the past twelve hours. “I finished. How can we talk?” Hits Send. She again receives the frustrating bounce-back message: an unrecognized address.

  That doesn’t make any sense. Who would go to the trouble of writing such a manuscript and then not be reachable? So she’ll keep trying, willing herself to believe that it’s some technical problem, something that’ll eventually get resolved. She stares at her laptop, the gradations of gray of the various windows on the screen, the silver frame of the device itself. The little black circle at the top, the pinhole camera, that she never uses, never even considers.

  She could burn the manuscript right now, in the fireplace, using the long fancy fireplace matches that her penny-pinching aunt sent as a housewarming. She could pretend she never read the submission, never received it. Forget about it.

  Or she could go to the authorities, explain what happened, let them handle it. Which authorities? Certainly not the CIA. The FBI?

  Or she could take this to the news media—the New York Times, CNN. Or even Wolfe, for that matter; that could be interesting.

  Or she could call the president; she could try to call the president. She spends a minute wondering whether it’s possible that she, a well-known literary agent at a famous agency, could get the president of the United States on the telephone. No.

  Or she could do what she knows she should, and wants to, do: get this published, quickly and quietly to protect herself, waiting for the inevitable ubiquity of the publicity—the public-ness of this book’s story, the weight of its accusations—to protect her. She can’t be arrested—or killed—in front of the whole world. Can she?

  Isabel picks up her phone, and plucks a cigarette from the silver box atop the marble mantel, under her one and only piece of fine art, hanging where everyone positions their nicest framed thing. She walks out to her terrace and lights the cigarette, inhales deeply, expels smoke into the sky. She leans on the parapet and stares out at the dark, sinister-looking greens and blacks of Central Park, across to the skyline of Fifth Avenue, to the azure sky and the fiery orange ball rising in the northeast. It’s a spectacular view from up here, on her plant-filled terrace jutting out from her professionally decorated apartment, swathed in calming neutral tones. It certainly looks like a nice life that she has.

  She knows that she is the obvious—the inevitable—literary agent for this project. And there’s also one very obvious acquiring editor for the manuscript, a close friend who never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like, no matter how ludicrous, no matter what level of lunatic the author. He used to have impressive success with this type of book, even by some of his less rational authors; there’s apparently a good-size book-buying audience out there that inhabits a space beyond the margins of sane discourse. He’ll be motivated to publish another. Especially this one, about these people.

  Isabel tries to fight off the fear that wells up inside her again. She takes a final drag of her cigarette, knocks the glowing ember off the butt, then flicks the relatively harmless fiberglass filter out into the air above Central Park West, where it seems to hover for a split-second, Wile E. Coyote-like, before falling, fluttering out of sight.

  She scrolls through her phone’s address book, finds the number, and hits Call.

  CHAPTER 2

  Hayden slips the bookmark into the Icelandic primer. He places the thick volume atop his spiral notebook, a short stack next to a taller stack of reference works, some newish vinyl-covered handbooks, some tattered paperbacks in various states of falling-apartness, held together by duct tape or masking tape, or bound by sturdy rubber bands. These references are increasingly available electronically, but Hayden still prefers to hold a physical book in his hands, to run his eye across the tops of pages, down the columns, searching for a word, an image, a fact. The effort, he thinks, reinforces the learning. He’s old enough to recognize that there’s a finite universe of information he’s going to be able to absorb in the remainder of his life; he wants to learn all of it properly.

  He drops to the floor, does fifty push-ups, fifty sit-ups; his late-morning mini-workout. He buttons a French cuff shirt over his undershirt, affixes his enamel cufflinks, knots his heavy paisley tie. Slips into his sport jacket, glances at himself in the mirror. Adjusts his pocket square.

  It was during his first posting overseas that he started wearing pocket squares, plain white linen handkerchiefs. He’d wanted to look like a young ambitious conformist American functionary, the type of guy who would proceed immediately from Groton to Harvard to Europe and always carry a white handkerchief, neatly squared-off, in the breast pocket of his suit jacket. He’s surprised at how many of those decisions made back then, at a time when adulthood seemed to stretch ahead indefinitely, turned out to be untemporary. Careers and hobbies, spouses or lack thereof, political beliefs and literary preferences, hairsty
les and pocket squares.

  The sun is streaming through the French doors, casting brilliant white light across the whitewashed floors, the white brick walls, the white upholstery, the occasional piece of unavoidable Danish teak. In the kitchen it’s even brighter because of the reflections from the appliances. The brightness is almost blinding.

  The elaborately carved front door is covered in hundreds of years’ worth of uncountable coats of paint, scraped and chipped and deeply gouged, revealing an undercoat of pale green here, a dark blue there. He removes a matchbook from his pocket, tears out a paper match, inserts it between door and jamb, one match-length above a long gash in the wood.

  The street is leafy, sun-dappled, birdsongy. Hayden’s bicycle leans amid dozens of others in the jumbled rack on the wide sidewalk, a few blocks from the queen’s palace in Amalienborg. He hops on, pedals gently through quiet streets, to the staid brick building on Kronprinsessegade that houses the David Collection, one of the premier resources on the Continent for his new hobby, Islamic art. He spends a half-hour examining the Middle Age artifacts of the Spanish emirate, from a time when Cordoba was the largest city in Western Europe. Cordoba, of all places.

  Hayden Gray is, after all, a cultural attaché. He has a large luxurious office three hundred miles to the south, in the American Embassy in Pariser Platz, next to the Brandenburg Gate. He still makes his permanent home in Munich, but his new job responsibilities require regular appearances in Berlin, and a legitimate office there. Of course Berlin has always been a fascination for Hayden, indeed for anyone in his line of work. Los Angeles has the film business, and Paris has fashion; Berlin is for espionage. But it’s not a particularly attractive city, and the appealing things about it—a vibrant youth culture, a practically developing-world level of inexpensiveness, and the limitless energy of its nightlife—are not compelling assets for him. So he’d rather not live there.

  Back on the bicycle, alongside the lush greenery of the King’s Garden, across the bridge, and into Nørrebro, the midday street life a mixture of young native artistic types and recent immigrants, alternative bars alongside kebab joints that double as social clubs. He locks the bike just as the rain begins, quick spatters and then within seconds full-on.

  Hayden rushes to push the glossy door, climbs a long steep flight of stairs, and enters an apartment, high-ceilinged and large-windowed, but shabby, and nearly empty. The place where he’s been sleeping for the past couple of nights is a long-term lease—a quarter-century long, in fact—on the other side of downtown Copenhagen. But this one on Nørrebrogade was hastily arranged a week ago by the woman who’s sitting at the window now, a pair of binoculars in her hands.

  “Hello,” she says, without turning. She can see him in the window’s reflection.

  “Anything?”

  “No. Bore. Dom.”

  Hayden joins her at the window, looks past the immense streetlight suspended by wires above the boulevard, across to the storefront on the ground level, to the apartment above it.

  She gives him the once-over. “Nice tie,” she says. “You have anything interesting for me today?”

  “Always. Let’s see … Ah, here’s a good one: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the same day.”

  “You mean the same date?”

  “I mean they died on the same exact day. And that day was July Fourth. In 1826.”

  She turns to him. “That’s not true.”

  “Oh, but it is.”

  “Huh. I give that a 9.”

  “What do I need to get a 10?”

  “I’ll know it when I hear it.” She turns back to the window, resumes her vigil.

  He removes his horn-rimmed glasses, uses his Irish linen pocket square to wipe them clean. He holds his glasses up to the light, gazes through the lenses to double-check their clarity. “This is taking a long time,” he says. Sympathetically, he hopes.

  “This is taking forever.”

  Hayden knows that she wants to go home, to Paris. Back to her husband, her children, her perfect apartment in St-Germain-des-Prés. She has been traipsing around Europe for a month now, looking for one person. One elusive, clever, dangerous man.

  “Tell me why it has to be me who’s here?”

  He watches a beautiful woman in the street pedaling slowly through the rain, one hand on the handlebars while the other holds a large umbrella, covering not only herself but also the big wooden bucket in front that contains three small children wearing raincoats with matching hats.

  “I mean,” she continues, “it’s not as if I speak Danish, or know Copenhagen well. I don’t have any special knowledge about whoever that guy is.”

  In the window across the street, the scraggly man sits at his desk, turned as always in profile. Jens Grundtvig, part-time student, part-time writer, and nearly-full-time stoner, is sometimes typing on his computer, sometimes just moving his mouse around, researching, and sometimes is on the telephone, gathering quotes, checking facts. Grundtvig seems to be putting a fact-checking polish on another man’s project, and Hayden’s task is to find that other man. After three months, Jens Grundtvig of Copenhagen is Hayden’s only substantive lead.

  “Because I trust your instincts,” Hayden says. “And to paraphrase Proust: you, Dear, are the charming gardener who makes my soul blossom.”

  She snorts. She knows that this is fractionally true, but predominantly bullshit, and that Hayden is not going to tell her the whole truth. She accepts being in the dark; it’s part of their arrangement.

  That truth is complicated, as always. And the truth is that this operation is entirely black, absolutely no record of it anywhere. The expenses for the entire team—the woman here in this apartment, the two men stationed at either end of this block, the other two who are off-duty—are funded out of a Swiss account. They’re all under-the-counter, off-the-books freelancers.

  “You’re a hero,” Hayden says, patting her shoulder.

  “That’s what I keep telling my husband,” she says. “But he doesn’t believe me.”

  “A hero, Kate, and a martyr.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The ringing phone, the sound of dread, of slept-through appointments or horrible news, snatching Jeff Fielder from the tenuous embrace of fitful sleep.

  He squints around the small cluttered bedroom for the offending device. Books and papers and magazines are stacked everywhere—on the desk, the bureau, the end tables, even on much of the wide-planked wooden floor. A nearly empty bottle of bourbon sits on the warped, dented floor—did he have any of that last night, when he got home?—next to his ex-wife’s second novel, the one she wrote after she left not only Jeff but also her magazine job and New York City for Los Angeles, where TV people had become interested in the magazine story she’d written about their falling-apart marriage, before Jeff was even aware it was falling apart.

  He has begun to dip in and out of the book, mostly when he’s substantially drunk. Sara is, he has to admit, a pretty good writer. But for obvious reasons he loathes her book.

  Jeff reaches for something black and shiny, in the process knocking over a precarious tower of paper that’s resting in the seat of a black Windsor chair, only to discover that the thing he has retrieved is an eyeglass case, not a phone.

  Another ring tears through his ears, his brain. He catches a glimpse of flickering red light, from there on the floor, yes, that must be the phone, under that bound galley …

  “Hello?” The two syllables come out as an amphibian croak, from a mouth filled with the dry, puffy cotton of last night’s booze.

  “Jeffrey?”

  At the sound of her voice, he sits up too fast, and his head spins. Despite himself, despite everything, his heart quickens every time he hears Isabel’s voice on the telephone. “Ungh.”

  “You okay?”

  “Mmmmm,” he says, a noncommittal noise. He glances to the dawn-gray window. “Isn’t it a little early?”

  “Don’t whine at me,” Isabel says.

  Jeff ca
n’t tell if the edge in her voice is playful or annoyed. “And don’t be pissed at me,” he says. “Who woke up whom?”

  She snickers; he knows it’s at his whom. There can be a lot of meaning, in a little snigger, between people with a long history.

  “Listen,” she says, softer, “I’m doing you a favor, Mr. Whom.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Meet me for breakfast.”

  “Sure. I’ll be there in three, four minutes.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Isabel. It’s … what time is it, anyway?”

  “Six-twenty. I’ve got something for you.”

  “Okay. But couldn’t this wait until, you know, I’m in the office? Or at least awake?”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s big.”

  “You mean long? You know I don’t—”

  “No, you idiot. I mean”—a silent beat—“it’s huge.”

  Over the years, Jeff has heard some of Isabel’s pitches that were cynical, and a few that were transparently panicked. But most were earnest, and none was a lie.

  “What is it?” He’s fully awake now, and his head is no longer spinning. Pounding, yes, but he’s not dizzy.

  Maybe this is it, the book he’s been waiting for. The thing that every editor wakes up for, comes to work for, loses sleep for. The book that changes your career. Your life. As opposed to all the middling, inconsequential manuscripts and proposals that are now sitting on his desk, and in his satchel, and on his bookshelves, and in his e-reader, and even on this goddamned telephone. There are dozens of proposed books in his life, all in various stages of being considered. Or rejected. Or halfheartedly pursued. Or studiously ignored. Or merely waiting, value-neutral, in the queue for his attention, which is always more abundant in the future.