The Accident

by Chris Pavone

  “Yeah … doctor’s appointment, errands … Is that still okay?”

  “Sure, fine.” Though it doesn’t sound like it. “See you tomorrow.”

  Alexis takes a deep breath, overwhelmed by all the lies she just told.

  She retrieves her handbag from the bedside. Spencer is still snoring, oblivious. She rummages around for the British woman’s card—her name is apparently Camilla—and turns it over to the scrawled cell number. Sometimes, Alexis’s job seems like an endless series of humiliating calls. She takes a deep, steadying breath, and places yet another one.

  CHAPTER 5

  The video on the screen is surprisingly sharp, a close-up of a woman who seems to be staring directly at him. He can’t see her hands, but he knows they’re down there somewhere, typing and clicking and scrolling. All he can see is her face, framed by blonde hair, shorter than it used to be, but still elegant, in an effortless-looking way that he knows requires considerable effort.

  Suddenly the image goes black as the woman folds shut her laptop; he does too. He’d watched her for too long, and now he’s running late. He grabs his small duffel and leaves the apartment and tosses the bag onto the passenger seat of the little two-seater Audi. When he’d arrived in Zurich, he’d discovered it was surprisingly challenging to lease a car without a prohibitive level of credit reports and identity checks; if there’s one thing that can be said about the Swiss, it’s that they’re sticklers. So it was simpler and safer to buy the damn thing. And because he couldn’t imagine that he’d own this new car for more than a few months, or that he’d ever have a backseat passenger, he chose a sleek fast car with no backseat, just like any other well-off bachelor would.

  He guns the engine, and speeds through the tidy streets of lakeside Seefeld, big tall nineteenth-century houses and stout little twentieth-century apartment buildings, well-pruned trees and carefully tended gardens, and the predictable assortment of boutiques and banks and restaurants and bars on a main European drag such as Seefeldstrasse, in a neighborhood called the Gold Coast, in a city like Zurich.

  This car handles well on the climbing and dipping curves, and he allows himself to have fun with it, driving much faster here in the Alpine foothills than he ever would, back home. He’ll probably never drive in America again. Can’t imagine he’ll ever be there again. By all accounts, he’s already dead.

  I.

  He can’t stop obsessing over that missed pronoun. He’d been so careful, so rigorous, about everything. About the Piper crash and the little motorboat and the international flights. He’d been meticulous about passports and money, about hair and eyes and clothing and shoes, about surgeries and recoveries. He’d made logistically complex arrangements in America, in Denmark and Germany and Switzerland, in Mexico. He’d plotted out precise and possibly futile contingency plans that involved France, Italy, Kenya, and Indonesia.

  Maybe it was a subliminal slip. Maybe what he really wants is to get caught.

  Twenty minutes out of the city, he turns the car between two tall stone pillars, onto a long straight driveway cut through the dense forest. He slows as he approaches a towering wrought-iron gate, stops the car at the security hut.

  “Guten Tag, Herr Carner.” He has been using an alias. “Welcome back,” the security guard says, and opens the gate.

  He presses his foot down on the accelerator, speeding toward the imposing half-timbered chalet looming at the end of the dark, shadowy drive.

  CHAPTER 6

  Hayden crosses the windswept bridge over the long, shallow lake, Peblinge Sø, back into the bustling downtown district, making his way through the crowded shopping streets to an elegant café at a sharply angled multi-street intersection. Blocking the door are a pair of American tourists—a man his age, with the type of woman you’d expect—consulting a guidebook. Both of them are wearing shorts and polo shirts, white sneakers with athletic socks. Outfits that Hayden simply can’t abide.

  “Undskyld mig,” he says, not wanting to give these buffoons the satisfaction of being addressed in their own language.

  “Oh, excuse me,” the woman says, smiling.

  Hayden steps inside, and there she is. The hostess here is the most beautiful human being he’s ever seen in his life, a perfect specimen of blonde-haired blue-eyed young loveliness. She’s been here every weekday for years; she’s the reason Hayden frequents this café whenever he comes to Copenhagen.

  This city in general is filled with fantastic-looking people—men and women, old and young, babies and children. The whole city is like a living breathing meta-gallery, an art installation of unfathomable scale. And this hostess, Sweet Jesus, she’s heartbreaking.

  She smiles warmly, leads him through the dining room. And it’s not just that the girl is spectacular looking. There’s something beyond mere genetics about it, about people here: they look you straight in the eye, and offer a large smile. Not the phony I’m-trying-to-sell-you-something smile that you tend to get everywhere in America, but a genuine invitation to friendliness and openness and happiness. Especially at this time of year, early summer, when you have to make a concerted effort to see a dark sky: the sun rises before anyone in their right mind is awake, and sets well after most people are asleep.

  The waiter—like the hostess, surreally good-looking—delivers the coffee to Hayden’s corner table, the china Royal Copenhagen, the white tulips in an Alvar Aalto vase, the burnished silver Georg Jensen, the linen crisp and cool and sharply folded, everything arranged just so. No Styrofoam cups here.

  His phone vibrates, a call from New York. “Yes,” he answers.

  “Something you need to hear. I think you’ll want to wear an earpiece. You’ll be listening to recordings of three separate telephone conversations.”

  Hayden connects the headphones, puts the tiny speakers into his ears. He watches the hostess at her station near the door, fiddling with a pen, twirling the thing in her fingers. His contentment is quickly washed away as he listens, lips pursed in what he hopes appears to be concentration, but is furor, barely contained. A string of profanities—fuck damn shit, that fucking fucker—ricochets around his brain while his face presents nothing more than a thoughtful man, thinking. Hayden doesn’t curse out loud, ever. But in his brain he swears like a sailor. An angry drunken broke sailor who just stumbled upon his girlfriend cheating on him. With his best friend.

  Fuck.

  This isn’t the way it was supposed to happen. He should’ve had at least a day to prepare. He was expecting the delivery to happen via e-mail, which is why he has a tech monitoring the literary agent’s e-mail, opening every attachment, as well as the whole surveillance operation here in Copenhagen. Ensuring that whenever it was that the literary agent received the e-mail with the manuscript attached, Hayden would be alerted, and his whole team would spring into action. Because e-mail, he assumed—he was positive—was the only delivery method that could possibly make sense in this situation. But apparently he was mistaken.

  The recordings end.

  “The first conversation is between the agent and someone named Jeffrey Fiel—”

  “I know who that is,” Hayden interrupts. “And that second call, it’s between the agent and her assistant?”

  “Yes.”

  “And who is that in the third call, with the assistant?” Hayden is trying to stay calm, but this operation is all of a sudden threatening to come crashing down around him, dragging under his career in the wreckage. “The woman with the London accent?”

  “Her name is Camilla Glyndon-Browning. She works at a publishing house called McNally & Sons. Her job title is director of subsidiary rights. I don’t know what that means. Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  This is an unmitigated disaster. He saw this coming, fifteen years ago. He knew there’d be a price to pay, sooner or later. And here’s the bill, finally come due. He’s quite certain there will be other installments.

  “Anyway,” the man in New York continues, not expecting any further cla
rification from his boss. Hayden doesn’t provide unnecessary operational information. “It doesn’t sound like the Browning woman knows anything. But the girl, obviously, does. And she seems to be lying about not having a copy of the manuscript.”

  “Yes,” Hayden agrees. Photocopies could be a tremendous problem; every copy will need to be accounted for. He turns his eyes to the window, looks out at the midday busy-ness of Indre By, the heart of old Copenhagen. “Retrieve the assistant’s copy of the manuscript asap.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Make no attempt to hide the retrieval. It should be clear to the assistant that someone burgled her apartment, and that only the manuscript was taken. And it should be clear to the agent that photocopies will not be tolerated.”

  “Understood. Speaking of which: after these conversations, the agent left home, and stopped at a copy shop. I’m sending that video through to you now.”

  “Okay.” Hayden stares out the window, chasing a conundrum in his mind: If the agent received the manuscript, that means the manuscript is finished. But if the manuscript is finished, then why is the researcher still working all day, every day? Surely after completing a book and sending it off, he would take a break …

  Plus, the agent received a hard copy. But Grundtvig has had a constant tail, and he didn’t mail a big package containing a hard copy …

  This doesn’t make sense.

  Regardless of the supply-side uncertainties, Hayden now needs to shift his focus to managing the demand side. “Okay,” he says again. “I’ll be in New York”—he glances at his watch—“I’ll be there today, late afternoon. I’ll confirm.”

  Back to New York. He was just there a few months ago, for a week, a long series of hopefully persuasive meetings with publishers and editors-in-chief, the people who run the large publishing outfits. He’s about to find out how persuasive he actually was.

  Hayden ends the call, and opens up the e-mail with the video attachment, a low-quality surveillance camera mounted above the door of a grungy copy shop. He watches the interaction, the transaction, his eyes narrowing as he tries to make sense of this five-minute silent movie, a bit unclear there at the end, but then he figures it out.

  CHAPTER 7

  Isabel climbs out of the subway, gets her bearings. Across the street, a woman is loading groceries into a gleaming SUV with an East Hampton parking permit in the window and a toddler buckled into the backseat, wearing workout gear, Pilate’d and ponytailed and firm upper-armed. Another hyper-fit representative of the urban gentry, driving a moor-conquering truck.

  That, Isabel thinks, used to be me. Sort of. One of the flock of women who stream into luxurious gyms immediately after school drop-off, nine a.m. classes in Studio A, followed by bottled water and decaf skim lattes. The Exercising Class.

  Isabel walks a long block down Broadway, the early-morning world of Hispanic guys hosing down sidewalks, Twiggy-skinny girls walking minuscule dogs on whisper-thin leashes, scraggly-haired Japanese guys smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. Taxis and Town Cars flying down the street, one after another, shuttling Uptowners to the Financial District.

  Her fatigue has created a sort of buzzing behind her temples, a background to the foreground of each of her steps, which she seems to hear not only in her ears but also in her chest, in her stomach, in the vibrations in her elbows as each footfall lands. She can’t tell if she’s walking slowly or quickly, normally or abnormally.

  She freezes on Broadway, aghast, about to step on a cat-size rat, lying belly-up in the middle of the sidewalk, in a pool of bright red blood; it must have just died. She feels a wave of nausea, with nothing but coffee and cigarette fumes in her stomach. She shivers, then continues walking down the street, one foot in front of the other.

  The red awning beckons, the windows are warmly aglow, like a crackling fire in the gloomy hearth of sooty SoHo. A re-creation of a Parisian brasserie that’s so well executed that it has been copied in Paris.

  Isabel examines her reflection in one of these large windows. She pulls her hair back over her ear, and straightens her collar, and smooths the wrinkles out of her tight—too?—skirt. Here in the vague blur of a plate-glass window, she looks okay. It’s only up close, well-lit, that the truth reveals itself.

  She wends her way through the crowded room, past the Times and Journals and Le Mondes scattered across tables, past tall men in dark suits and beautiful women in dark glasses. She arrives at the banquettes along the east wall, and reaches into her bag, and removes a thick stack of paper.

  Thud.

  Jeffrey jumps in his seat, looks up from his haphazardly folded newspaper, looks down again at the stack of manuscript that just landed on the tabletop. “Sunshine,” he says, smiling, “good day.” He tries to stand up, but he’s trapped under the lip of the table, so manages only to get into an uncomfortable-looking half-crouch, limbs fluttering.

  “Oh sit down.”

  He sinks back onto the leather bench with a shrug.

  Isabel drops her oversize tote, her manuscript bag, now a few pounds lighter, onto the floor. She glances around the restaurant, sees some familiar faces, a few casual acquaintances, and one very young, ambitious, and aggressively cleavaged colleague—rival, more accurately—named Courtney, a faithful soldier in the formidable army of fashionable females, girls with long bouncy layered blown-out hair and meticulously applied makeup, painstakingly accessorized wardrobes that are constantly updated, not just seasonally but monthly or even weekly, operating according to the precept that you should always wear the most expensive, most current item—jacket, handbag, haircut—that you can afford, or that you can pretend to afford.

  The irritating girl is meeting with a bright young editor who seems to be everywhere, all of a sudden. People who Isabel thinks of as assistants seem to have “senior” in their job titles, and books on bestseller lists. Meanwhile Isabel’s own cohort is receding from the front lines, chucking it all to go make goat cheese in Vermont, or disappearing for a few weeks during the worst of the chemo. Isabel has been startled by the vicissitudes of middle age.

  The editor waves at Isabel, while Courtney raises a perfectly plucked eyebrow, and flips her hair—she’s an incessant hair-flipper—but doesn’t alter the set of her mouth, the plastered-on toothy smile, one of those Midwestern mouths whose repose is a severe frown, but it’s a repose that’s rarely allowed to show itself in public, beaten out like left-handedness in a midcentury Catholic school, so the world sees only the forced smile, the dimples, the ingratiating lie of limitless positivity.

  “Who’s that?” Jeffrey asks.

  “You don’t know her?”

  He shakes his head.

  “She’s no one.” Isabel sure as hell isn’t going to be the one to tell him. “Some junior something or other, in my office.”

  “Looks familiar.”

  “You mean she looks hot?”

  “Well …” He tries to fight off a smile, unsuccessfully. “But that’s not why I asked.”

  “Uh-huh,” she says, throwing some scorn at him. He blushes, as he always does when any remotely carnal subject arises, usually brought up by Isabel. Under oath and the penalty of death, she’d have to admit that she does this purposefully, as a test, double-checking that Jeffrey still carries his long-lit torch for her, a perpetual crush that serves as her sexual security blanket. There have been moments in her life when she could’ve returned the sentiment, and not just those two nights, separated by a decade, when they kissed. But there had always been some barrier in the way: her marriage, or his, or other lesser but still important relationships.

  Today, though, they’re both single. And today, after all she learned last night, she feels an additional tenderness toward him, a gratitude for his constancy, his honesty. Jeffrey has loved her for twenty years, and everyone knows it; there are times when that means the world to her. There are times when she loves him.

  Jeffrey is one of those men who seem to get better-looking with age—the salt-and-peppe
r hair, the crinkly eyes, the laugh lines, all make him more appealing every year. This doesn’t really happen for women, Isabel thinks.

  “I’ll be right back with your coffees.”

  Isabel watches the waitress leave, her youthfully skinny little ass retreating across the room in a pencil-thin black skirt and a prim white apron. Isabel turns to Jeffrey, who has noticed the same thing, but probably with a sentiment that’s not bitterness. He has always had a wandering eye, frequently met, a good-looking charming man in an industry predominantly populated by women.

  She sees him glance down at the title page to read The Accident, by Anonymous. Lower on the page, there’s the shadow of disappeared content where Isabel taped over the author’s e-mail address and hand-wrote her own contact information, before she handed the stack of paper to the scrawny pallid clerk at the twenty-four-hour copy-shop/postal-center, around the corner from her apartment. There’s a lot you can accomplish in New York City, at all hours, in stuffy fluorescent-lit rooms manned by disaffected overeducated underemployed young adults, rooms that almost always have security cameras mounted where they can film the entire room, as much to monitor the clerks as any potential crooks.

  “So.” Jeffrey taps the stack of paper with the fountain pen he’s always carrying around. “What is it?”

  She pauses before answering, “The biggest bombshell you’ll ever read.”

  Jeffrey nods, waiting for more, seemingly not getting it. “You’re not going to explain?”

  “You want a pitch?”

  “I guess so.”

  This is how it’s normally done: the agent pitches a project to the editor; the editor reads the material—a proposal, or sample chapters, or a whole manuscript; then the editor either makes an offer for publication, or declines to.

  But apparently that’s not exactly how it’s going to work this time. Isabel shakes her head.

  “Anything?”