The Accident

by Chris Pavone

  “I’ll let the content speak for itself. Everything else is hearsay. Bullshit.”

  He grins at this.

  “But I will tell you this, Darling: the project is yours, exclusively.” Isabel sports her own little smile, a purposefully disingenuous-looking one. Pretending to be an agent who’s pretending to be hard-selling. “For forty-eight hours.”

  “That’s mighty generous of you. May I ask why?”

  “Because I love you. Obviously.”

  “And?”

  “Are you suggesting that I don’t love you?”

  “What are you looking for, Sunshine? I assume you have a number in mind. As compensation for the luxury of an exclusive submission.”

  “You’re asking what it’s worth?”

  “I guess I am.”

  “Eight figures.”

  Jeffrey can’t help but laugh, then realizes she’s serious. “What are you, out of your mind?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  “I’ve known this was coming, Sunshine, for a long time. But I have to admit, now that it’s here, I’m still sort of surprised.” He shakes his head. “Which is too bad. Because, you know, I’ve always hoped that one day we’d settle down, you and I. Exchange artisan-forged rings. Buy a drafty little farmhouse and some foul-smelling, disagreeable livestock.”

  He’s joking, sort of. Actually, she’s pretty sure that he’s pretending to be joking.

  “But not if you’re going to be insane.”

  “I didn’t say that’s what I’m asking. But that is, I’m certain, what it’s worth.”

  “Plus,” he continues, “and I’m telling you this as a friend—and you know I love you dearly—you look like crap. If you’re going to be showing up in restaurants at eight in the morning, asking for ten-plus million dollars, you’re going to have to …” He gestures in her general direction. “You’re going to have to look less like shit. Or, you’re going to have to be naked and performing, you know … sexual acts. Dealer’s choice. But you can’t be fully clothed and looking like shit and asking for eight figures.”

  “You’re not looking so hot yourself. Drink too much last night? Again?”

  “No, thank you, I believe I drank just the right amount. And you? Did you sleep at all?”

  “Not much. Listen, Jeffrey,” she plants her elbows on the table, leans in. “This is serious.”

  “What is?”

  “This whole thing is. Not a game. Don’t spread the manuscript around your office. You can tell people what it is, obviously. But don’t distribute copies to the whole world; in fact, don’t copy it at all. Don’t tell anyone who absolutely doesn’t need to know.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will,” she says. She suddenly feels her energy fading, precipitously. “Listen, I have to go. And you should get started reading.” She stands, leans in to kiss his cheek. “Forty-eight hours.”

  She turns away, takes a step.

  “Hey,” he says.

  She turns back.

  “Why me?”

  “Because I can trust you. Can’t I?”

  “Of course.”

  “But remember, keep it quiet.”

  “Why? I don’t under—”

  “Because it’s dangerous, Jeffrey.”

  “But why?”

  “Because it’s about some incredibly bad things.”

  “Done by?”

  She stares at him. “One of the most powerful, well-known people in the world. Media mogul, is the phrase used.”

  Isabel can see the color drain from Jeffrey’s face. Then he cracks a forced smile. “So Oprah does, after all, have bodies buried in the basement?”

  “No,” she says, “Charlie Wolfe does.”

  Isabel decides to leave him there, excited, curious, motivated. She makes her way back through the tightly packed tables, pausing to let waiters and waitresses scurry past. The smell of bacon wafts up from a table, and she inhales deeply, savoring something she forbids herself from eating more than once a month.

  In the tight space between tables, a man in a gray suit brushes against her, too closely, and she feels uneasy. She thinks for a second that her pocket may have just been picked. She pats herself down with quick sweeps, and realizes that there’s nothing in her pockets to pick; in fact, her pockets are still sewn shut, just as manufactured in whatever Southeast Asian sweatshop. She looks inside her black leather handbag, and sees the wallet, the phone, the keys. There’s nothing important that could be missing.

  Isabel continues on unsteady feet to the front door, to the sidewalk. She lights a cigarette, the smoke flooding her lungs, the nicotine rushing into her bloodstream. She’d tried Wellbutrin and Xanax; she’d used patches and gum. In the end, the only thing that made her quit successfully was being pregnant.

  But then, after everything, she couldn’t help but start up again. At first it was just a single cigarette per day, or two. Then it became a few, and within months she was back to pack-a-day. Over the past couple of years, she’s tried to quit a few times, but not seriously. She anticipates—she accepts—failure. Because she doesn’t want to quit, not really. She wants instead to try, and fail.

  She’s the last of her friends who still smokes, which makes her feel like a polio victim in the early 1950s, having just missed the invention of the vaccine. A relic of a different era.

  She takes another drag, and glances in the restaurant window, and sees Jeffrey hunkered down above the manuscript.

  The generic-looking man in the standard-issue gray suit ambles through the dining room, drops his bag in a chair. “Excuse me,” he says, leaning over Jeff’s table, “may I borrow your pen for a moment?” The man points at the Sheaffer on the tabletop.

  Jeff glances down. “Sure.”

  “I’ll be right back.” The man picks up the pen, walks to another table.

  Jeff returns his attention to the stack of paper in front of him, to the manuscript that he hopes—that he knows—is the thing he’s been waiting for. Now that it’s here, something this big, he’s worried, unconfident. He hasn’t had something this important since that Pulitzer winner a half-decade ago. He’s out of practice, afraid of how to handle it, how to present it to his boss, his colleagues. Of how to manage Isabel, and her expectations, and timetable. Afraid of other editors to whom she might submit it, afraid of a bidding war, an auction, a humiliating defeat. Afraid of other, less easily identifiable issues, prickling his psyche. Afraid of the decisions he will face. The decisions he will make.

  When the man returns, leaving the pen on the table and saying “Many thanks,” Jeff barely glances up, lost in thought. He never imagined this manuscript would actually happen.

  The unmemorable man retreats, replaced by the sexy waitress in her white shirt and black apron. What is it about women in servile uniforms? “More coffee?”

  Jeff looks up at the waitress, past her, to the table where the man should be. But there’s no one there. Jeff looks down at his empty cup. “Yes, thank you.” This is going to be a long day. He flips to the middle of the manuscript, and starts reading.

  The Accident Page 202

  Before long Wolfe Worldwide Media was operating two dozen news websites across Europe, and buying up stakes in newspapers and television stations. They had begun the process of launching the American cable news network, whose awareness-building publicity blitz entailed giving countless interviews with other media, reporting on itself, the media’s favorite topic.

  During one of these interviews, Charlie was asked if there had been any particular event that triggered his reform, the total transformation of his lifestyle that began the summer after his junior year in college. He gave up alcohol and drugs entirely. He dedicated himself to studies, and his spare time to volunteer work. Almost overnight, he evolved from a singularly irresponsible, selfish, substance-abusing teenager into an extraordinarily serious, sober, and earnest young adult.

  “No,” he said, with a relaxed, easy smile spreading across his
face, maintaining unflinching eye contact with the camera. “I just thought it was time to grow up.”

  CHAPTER 8

  “Come on, come on, come on.” Alexis tugs on Spencer’s arm. “Please.” After she’d hung up with Isabel, she’d thought, what the hell, the damage was already done. No further harm in a good-morning quickie. “Dude,” she’d said to Spencer, slipping under the sheets. “Wake up.”

  But that was more than an hour ago—it wasn’t that quick, when all was said and done—and now he won’t get up. She studies this man lounging in her bed, the pretentious, obnoxious, but good-looking and undeniably talented writer—a tech blogger now, submitting short stories and working on a screenplay—she’d met a few months ago, at a party in a Bushwick loft to which she was dragged by a hyperactively social, unfailingly upbeat publicist she knew from a publishing house—assistants like Alexis aren’t on guest lists; they’re the hangers-on, the plus-ones—after they’d had an insanely unaffordable round of drinks at one of those Midtown hotel bars populated mostly by forty-something men wearing a strict uniform of bespoke suits with working buttonholes at the cuffs.

  It was quite a different selection of men out in the Brooklyn ex-slum, feral beards and architectural mustaches, tattoos and piercings, engineer’s boots and clunky key chains dangling from the belt loops. Another type of uniform, perhaps even more complex and studiously maintained than the one in Midtown, just not as expensive.

  She glances again at her handheld screen, the blurry digital line between personal and professional. Facebook won’t be a problem; only a few people liked Alexis’s status update, and Isabel isn’t especially engaged with Facebook anyway; she’s a weekend lurker. But Twitter, that’s a whole different story. Almost everyone at ATM is tweeting and retweeting constantly. Isabel isn’t one of them, thank God, but still she’s going to hear about it. In the kitchen, or the ladies’ room, or in a conference room waiting for a meeting to start, someone will turn to Isabel, and making conversation will ask, “So whatever happened to that anonymous submission that Alexis was loving? You sign that up?”

  And then Alexis will be fully fucked.

  She tugs Spencer’s arm, trying to actually drag him out of bed. “Please.” He has broken up with Alexis more than once. As it happens, they are at the moment broken-up.

  He finally rises, starts pulling on his paint-spattered jeans and concert T-shirt, a New Wave show that took place in the East Village a few years before the guy was born.

  First item today will be a long, punishing, atoning workout. It’s time for her to start getting ready for this year’s marathon; she’s a little behind schedule, slower than usual to recognize that winter ended and it was time to start outdoor running again. Then a doctor’s appointment, then a wax, a mani-pedi. And finally some unglamorous shopping—running shoes, underwear, toiletries, groceries. Not exactly the Sex and the City retail fantasy.

  Nor was her weekend, spent immersed in that damn manuscript instead of the beach-and-binge-drinking lifestyle of one of her six allotted weekends in Southampton, a summer rental she’s sharing with at least two dozen friends, acquaintances, and strangers; the list of who’s entitled to what bed on what weekends looks like the org chart for a Fortune 500 corporation. But while everyone else tanned and partied, Alexis sat on peeling white wicker in the shade of the sagging back porch, turning manuscript pages in her lap, swatting away mosquitoes.

  But once again, this will be another author and project she will not get a chance to represent, yanked out from under her, at dawn.

  Her gym bag is now packed, except for reading material. She looks at her little leather Luddite notebook, re-reads her scant editorial notes on The Accident; there’s practically nothing she thinks should be changed about the manuscript. Then she glances at the compulsively maintained Excel spreadsheet in which she keeps track of her reading. She runs her eyes across row #709, whose column A reads ANONYMOUS, column B THE ACCIDENT. She auto-sums the 2:15 and 5:15 and 4:30 and 3:30 and … she spent more than fifteen hours reading this photocopy that she denied having, because of the impure motive that led her to make the copy in the first place: the hope that it could be hers, and hers alone.

  She wakes up her Kindle and opens a newly imported file, a submission from a friend of one of Isabel’s notably unprofitable clients. Alexis reads the first page—not bad. She learned the hard way to always read the opening page before committing any further time to anything; you can learn a lot on first pages about the many different ways that a manuscript can be awful. But this page 1 is not, so this is what she’ll read on the elliptical machine. Or something else. She has three dozen submissions loaded onto the device.

  She played it wrong with The Accident. She was too impatient, too gregarious, too reckless. She needs to buckle down, to get serious, to continue to pay her dues. She’s only twenty-five years old. Even if there are other twenty-five-year-olds who’ve risen above her current station, they’re the exception, not the rule. Her own time will come. But that time is not now.

  Finally Spencer is dressed. Alexis pulls him out the door before he has a chance to dawdle, ask for coffee, whatever.

  They step out onto the Hell’s Kitchen sidewalk. A delivery truck rumbles past, drowning out all other sounds. A taxi screeches to a stop. A small army of Hispanic contractors, all wearing tan work boots and jeans, loiters in front of a newly converted manufacturing building, waiting for the strike of 8:59 a.m., when they’ll be allowed to access the unit, to begin their noisy messy undocumented day of sanding floors and plastering ceilings and installing sound-dampening double-pane windows to three-million-dollar lofts.

  At the corner she stops. “So,” she says.

  In the ATM office, only three of the assistants are men, and at least one of them is gay, probably two. The third is on every level unacceptable. So Alexis needed to seek out broader dating horizons—perhaps not dating; whatever this is—often in Brooklyn, where most people her age live, unrelenting boosters of their adopted borough, disdainful of Manhattan. But Alexis’s vision of herself has always been in Manhattan, walking to work at a literary agency or a publishing house, surrounded by the throbbing, insistent life in the center of the city.

  “This is where we part?” Spencer asks.

  She nods.

  “That was killer.” She knows he means the sex. Their conversation last night was nil, and this morning’s consisted almost entirely of her trying to get him the hell out of her apartment.

  She’s beginning to suspect that Spencer doesn’t actually like her all that much. And she has to admit that the feeling is rather mutual. Maybe she should stop sleeping with him. “I’ll give you a call.”

  “That’d be awesome,” he says, without meaning it. For Spencer everything and everyone is awesome and killer, or, when he’s feeling retro-ironic, groovy and neat. It drives her bananas. “We’ll hang.”

  “Mmm,” she says, and turns and walks away, past the Korean deli, where the cute Mexican kid is swabbing the sidewalk with an eye-burning bleach solution. “Morning, Miss,” he says.

  His familiarity makes her realize—damn—that in her haste to get rid of Spencer, to get out of her little hovel, she forgot her wallet. She needs her ID for the gym. There’s a new morning-front-desk guy, a prissy officious little twit who she knows will not let her in without the damn card.

  Alexis takes a step off the concrete curb and down onto the blacktop pavement, distracted. She takes another step, then another. She hears a car screeching, and she turns to face a black sedan—

  The Mexican kid yells, “Cuidado! Cuidado!”

  But she’s frozen, unable to move, staring at the oncoming grille.

  “Miss?” The boy is holding her arm, as well as his mop. “Miss? You okay?” She nods.

  “The fuck ya thinkin’?” It’s the driver of the sedan, his window rolled down, yelling at her. “Ya know what a red light means? Do. Not. Walk. The fuck?” He asks, and clearly wants an answer; this is not rhetorical. “The
fuck?” He shakes his head in disgust, and pulls away.

  She stands, trembling, electrified with fright. She retraces the long half-block back to her building, shakily. Opens the front door to the standard-issue tenement, red brick and dirty limestone and rusty fire escapes. She walks down the short, dim hallway. Inserts the key to her apartment door, the worst unit in the building—1F, first-floor front, two steps below grade, facing garbage cans.

  Alexis pushes open the door, steps inside, shuts the door behind her. She turns away from her door, into her apartment—

  A man is standing on the far side of the room, holding the manuscript. Caught in the act, surprised, yet moving very quickly, while Alexis remains frozen, again.

  CHAPTER 9

  “Is your car handy?” Hayden opens the closet, takes out a small suitcase, places it on the bed.

  “Yes,” Kate answers, turning from the window, surprised. She didn’t expect to see him again today.

  “Good.” He opens the top drawer of the bureau, filled with her under-things. He should have known better. Should have opened a lower, non-underwear drawer. “Um …” He beckons Kate. “Could you, uh, help me pack?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “We need to wind down this operation.”

  “By wind down, you mean terminate? Immediately?”

  “This instant.”

  She sweeps up bras and panties and socks in her forearms, dumps them into the bag. She seems out of joint.

  “Don’t worry, Kate. You did good.” Hayden gathers up a small stack of her jeans and T-shirts, neatly folded. “This development has nothing to do with you. But something else has happened.”

  She doesn’t say anything while she gathers another armful, sweaters and outerwear, and transfers the pile to the leather and canvas bag, a piece of quietly elegant luggage that Hayden suspects cost at least a thousand euros, tactile evidence that she has a lot of money to spend on luggage, and on vacations, and in fact on whatever the hell she wants. He resents it, a bit; she works for him, after all.