The Accident

by Chris Pavone

  He attended the annual Thursday supper at his mother’s house in Brooklyn, the whole big hodgepodge of extended family and friends, now mostly people who could only be characterized as old, people who’d once held him as a baby, far-left-wing people who looked at that grown-up baby with the unmistakable disenchantment that accompanies shattered illusions, not just in a person, but in the unremitting disappointments of their historical materialism, embodied by him.

  On Friday and Saturday he attended hastily scheduled medical consultations, sitting around in bland waiting rooms, inoffensive nonrepresentational art in aluminum frames, three-month-old magazines, tissue boxes. By Sunday he was nearly delirious from exhaustion, a long weekend of mostly sleepless hotel-suite nights, staring out the enormous picture window at the deep dark of the vast park, rooting around in the cluttered little minibar-fridge, taking brief unsatisfying strolls through the hall’s humming fluorescence to the hulking, groaning ice machine.

  He took a long Sunday walk, and paid a rare visit to his ex-wife. She was the first person he told. Then Amtrak back to Washington, the train pulling into stations and occasionally sitting there, actionless, waiting for the timetable to catch up to the reality, the emergency lights glowing green in the aisle, like a runway, guiding passengers to the bathroom, to the bar car, to the exit, with the whir of the circulation fans blowing too hard and unevenly, something caught in a duct, the bathroom door sliding open and clicking closed as a drunk disheveled man emptied himself from either end. A young woman was talking low-volume nonstop into her phone, next to a college kid with his chin on his chest and a variety of textbooks strewn around in pretend studiousness, in front of a West Indian couple, the man’s mouth filled with gold teeth.

  He was surrounded by all these strangers, alone with his regrets. Despite having been raised to disdain money, he’d made a lot of decisions in his life based on its pursuit. He’d started making those decisions way back in college, and had continued throughout the quarter-century since, as if on capitalist autopilot. For a while he told himself that he was merely professionally ambitious, not money-hungry greedy, and it’s hard to disentangle success from wealth. Each is a measure of the other, inseparable.

  The train traveled in fits and starts down the spine of New Jersey, passengers boarding and disembarking at Newark and Trenton and Philadelphia, at surprisingly slummy Dover and relentlessly bleak Baltimore, at the big parking lot of BWI and finally abundantly gentrified Union Station, Washington, DC.

  He arrived at the offices just after dinnertime. From down on the street, he could see that the lights were on in Charlie’s corner. He headed straight to his own big office, the opposite corner from Charlie’s, with his luggage in tow. It was unusual but hardly unheard-of for someone like him to arrive at this hour, at the close of a holiday weekend, distracted by everything that would need to be accomplished tomorrow, starting tonight, everyone wearing khakis and polo shirts and running shoes, eyeglasses instead of contact lenses, the commonplace camaraderie of Sunday colleagues.

  He poured himself a glass of Scotch, strong and smoky, practically thick. He started working, automatically, mindlessly refreshing his heavy tumbler, getting uncharacteristically and unintentionally drunk. And increasingly maudlin, staring at his computer screen, at his face reflected back at him, reflecting on all the things he had lost in his life, and would never have the opportunity to regain.

  Sometime about nine he looked up to see his boss filling his doorway, a tall square-shouldered silhouette. “What’s going on?” Glancing at the bottle, the glass, the red puffy eyes. “You okay?”

  “Oh, you know.” He fingered his glass, not trying to hide it, or downplay it. Admitting it, emphasizing it. “Thanksgiving.”

  Charlie Wolfe took a step into the room, backlit, his face unreadable. “Are you drunk?”

  “My mother? She hates me. My ex-wife … doesn’t exactly love me. My kid?” He shrugged, took a swig of booze, fighting back tears, then planted the heavy glass back on the tabletop with a thud, louder than he intended.

  His relationship with Charlie had been deteriorating, as long relationships have a tendency to do. During their years building Wolfe Worldwide Media, the author had learned some things about his friend that he didn’t much like, in addition to the unappealing things he’d known for decades, not to mention some not entirely pleasant things about himself. And then a few months earlier, after the disaster in Finland, they’d had that atrocious conversation. And the deterioration accelerated, unsurprisingly.

  “Charlie, what we’ve been doing …?” He shook his head.

  Even back at the start, the author had always had misgivings about their niche—deprofessionalizing the news-gathering media, and deobjectifying the news itself. It seems so obvious, even banal, now. But back when they started in the nineties, the news was dominated by the nightly broadcasts on the three networks, delivered by ten-million-dollar-per-year anchors wearing suit and tie and scrupulously sculpted hair, or by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and Time and Newsweek and the Associated Press and UPI, ponderously reporting on the impenetrable nuances of ethnic conflict in the Balkans. The news was a vast apparatus of careerists—producers and editors, publishers and reporters—with degrees in broadcasting and journalism, and internships and entry-level jobs and promotions, and associations and awards, and rules and standards. A profession, populated by professionals. Quaint.

  Wolfe Worldwide Media’s implicit mission was to de-news the news, to legitimize sensationalism. They launched one website at a time, country by country, in Europe, where web development and usage weren’t as advanced, and competition for capital and clicks and advertisers not as fierce. They instituted a system of news-gathering by amateurs who had no legal relationship or responsibility to the publishers, with a content bias toward gossip and innuendo, voyeurism and scandal, openly espousing unabashedly partisan rhetoric. Not aiming to deliver the objective so-called news to the entirety of the potential audience, but rather providing a subjective current-affairs-based entertainment to a much more finite audience. An audience that was much more easily identifiable and targetable, with a much clearer set of appropriate advertisers and sponsors.

  This was not the news, in the traditional sense of fact-obsessed and double-sourced reportage. It was something sort of new, at a moment before camera phones and social media and news aggregators and streaming video, when things could still be new. When people were still as a rule willing to wait a week for a fresh edition to hit the newsstands so they could read about celebrity divorces. Though of course they were very excited to not have to wait a week. To not have to wait at all.

  “If this is our legacy, Charlie?” The author looked down again to the warm glowing amber in his heavy etched-glass tumbler, and again considered telling a particular truth for the first time in his life.

  But when he looked up, Charlie Wolfe was turning, and walking away, and then was gone. The life-defining decision was made for him, by Charlie, not for the first time. And the truth just hung in the air, unspoken and silent, yet immense.

  For a few minutes after Charlie left, the author sat motionless in his dim, cavernous office, lit by only the computer’s glow and the cone of light from the small desk lamp. Then he stood up, a bit shaky. He crossed to the far side of the room, to the wall with the built-in file cabinets, in deep shadow. He was plastered. So it took a few awkward stabs in the drunken dark before he managed to insert the key into the lock of the secure drawers.

  He could’ve turned on the overhead lights, but didn’t want to.

  He pulled open the bottom left drawer, the least accessible, least used. He removed the rubber-banded manila folders from their hanging green hammocks.

  They’d had an earnest, reasoned discussion about writing a full-length book, as opposed to giving short interviews for broadcast and periodical and web. Their business was bite-size infotainment, and they knew what could and couldn’t be accomplished this way. It’s easy to quick
ly assassinate a character; it takes much longer to build one.

  The author opened his weekend bag, and pushed aside his socks and boxers and jeans, his Dopp kit and his laptop, to make room for the files.

  Then he staggered down the hall and around the corner, and pressed the unlock button to release the glass double-doors, through the lobby and past security and out onto the dark deserted downtown DC streets, trudging through the cold two miles home to Georgetown, alone with this new secret, layered atop the old secrets, pondering a life that had been defined by secrets.

  CHAPTER 11

  Bradford McNally examines his CFO’s worn, grimy, ill-fitting plaid suit. The frayed collar of his not-particularly-white shirt, and the slouched-down lint-speckled black socks, and the exposed expanse of pale, hairy, flabby calf, and the unshined, scuffed, fashion-reverse shoes. The moist, shiny bald spot in the middle of his head, and the stubbly hollow on his neck where his razor failed to shave, beneath the nearly nonexistent chin.

  This guy is repulsive, sprawled in the worn leather club chair, a sheaf of papers in his fat lap, the top page defaced with violent red scrawls. “The bottom line,” Seth says, wheezing slightly, filling the air with too much of his unappealing presence, “is ten million.”

  “What?”

  “Ten and a half, actually.”

  “Beyond budget?” Brad knew that the number would be approaching this, but he thought it’d be less. Six, seven million. Something with one fewer digit. “Ten million dollars?”

  “And a half,” Seth corrects. “In excess of all current projections. And the Wolfe buyout offer drops by a quarter-million every week. But you know that.”

  Now Brad contemplates his money guy not just with disgust, but with something that could accurately be described as violent loathing.

  Brad doesn’t pretend to be any type of financial genius. But even he knows that there are two fundamental ways to solve any type of money problem: one is to get more of it coming in, the other is to have less of it going out. Going out, there’s nothing they can do—no salaries to cut, no production costs to shave, no publicity campaigns to be shortchanged—to close a gap this wide. And receivable, they have no books hitting the marketplace with the potential to become the types of blockbusters that could generate revenue of this magnitude.

  There’s only one way to come up with this type of additional cash: acquire a massively important manuscript right now, publish it quickly, and pray that whatever the book is about, Americans care immensely. They have a half-year. Enough time, barely.

  But that scenario is highly unlikely, and Brad needs to face reality. He must sell the company, to the only party that has expressed interest in buying. The predatory conglomerate Wolfe Worldwide Media.

  How the hell did he become the person making this type of decision? Has it really been a quarter-century since he was a ski instructor in Utah, leading a wake-and-bake lifestyle? Now he’s apparently the father of two children who are on summer break from college. Private college.

  Brad tunes back into the present. His CFO has launched into a familiar refrain, an anti-intellectual, anti-artistic attack on their business. Originality and voice and blah-blah don’t mean a thing when you’re trying to sell books. Prizes and reviews don’t pay the rent. Never have, never will. Topicality. Personality. That’s what sells books. Always has. Always will.

  Brad stares out the window, at the bustling park across the street. There’s no doubt that he should’ve gotten high before work today. He runs his hand through his thick salt-and-pepper hair, meticulously maintained with biweekly visits to his barber, one of a seemingly infinite supply of guys in New York City named Sal who cut hair.

  “Mr. McNally?” His secretary Lorraine is standing in the doorway, peering over her confrontational eyeglasses, rectangular frames in lime green and magenta, frames that scream, something unpleasant. “Jeff Fielder is asking for five minutes?”

  Brad glances at the CFO.

  “That’s fine,” Seth says, “I gotta piss anyway.” He heaves himself out of the chair, nearly toppling backward before regaining his balance.

  Jeff and Seth nod as they pass each other; neither is a fan of the other.

  “I have something,” Fielder says, wielding a sheaf of paper, looking hopeful.

  Brad gestures at the chair opposite his desk. All the editors come to his office on a regular basis, clutching a project they want to acquire, some proposal or manuscript that’s important or lyrical or un-putdownable. Fielder doesn’t come as frequently as he used to, and he’s no longer as passionate when he does. He’s now tentative, easily talked out of things, which Brad does mostly to see what projects his editors cannot be talked out of. Those are the ones that he gives them permission to make offers on, to acquire, to publish: the things they won’t be talked out of. The books that can be argued for, successfully.

  Whatever fate befalls McNally & Sons, Inc., most of the editors will be fine. But probably not Fielder. He’s a senior editor in his mid-forties who used to be at the top of the game, with bestsellers and prize-winners and positive postmortem P&Ls. But when his wife left him, it all seemed to come crumbling down around him. It doesn’t take long for an editor to cool off. For agents to scratch you off their submission lists. For sales executives to stop believing in your enthusiasm; to stop believing in you.

  Which means that now Fielder’s career track has a foreseeable end, and it might be right up ahead, at the next round of layoffs, or a buyout, or whatever event makes a publisher take a hard look at his list of editors, and say—probably without much handwringing—“It looks like we’ll have to get rid of Fielder.”

  Someone like Jeff Fielder probably won’t recover from something like that. He may never get another job as a book editor, ever again. Brad wonders if Fielder knows what a precarious position he’s in; surprisingly, people frequently don’t. Brad is more than a little worried that he himself is in the same type of tenuous situation.

  “Tell me what you have, Jeff.”

  The editor takes a deep breath. “It’s a book about Charlie Wolfe,” he says. “An exposé.”

  Oh God, Brad thinks, leaning back in his chair. He certainly didn’t expect Fielder to be the one. He’s shocked. But now upon closer thought, it’s obvious.

  “I don’t yet know what bombshells, exactly,” Fielder continues. “But the agent seems to think the revelations are, um, newsworthy. And she is—or might be, I’m not sure—looking for an eight-figure advance.”

  Brad almost falls out of his chair. “You’re kidding.”

  Fielder shakes his head.

  “Who’s the author?”

  “It’s anonymous.”

  “Who do you think is the author?”

  “No idea,” Fielder says, but Brad can see in the guy’s face that this is not particularly true. Maybe there’s a good reason for the lie. If this book is what Brad suspects it is.

  “Who’s the agent?”

  “Isabel Reed.”

  Of course.

  “And for forty-eight hours,” Fielder continues, “I have it exclusively.”

  “What? Why?”

  Brad can see that Jeff is getting nervous with this conversation, the challenges in Brad’s questions. Everyone has seen this type of thing time and again, in meetings: you come into the room wanting something, maybe even needing it, and at first everyone is neutral. But then someone turns against you and nay-says, and next thing you know the surrounding personnel fall like dominoes: first one person says it sounds dubious, then another chimes in, and by the third person—this can be thirty seconds into a conversation—they’re heaping insults upon injuries, eventually even mocking and ridiculing you for bringing your crappy desire into this room, maybe even turning hostile, resentful for wasting their time and energy, belittling, humiliating, until you retreat like a beaten dog to hide under a car.

  “She knows I’m interested in this type of thing.” Fielder shrugs. “She knows you’re motivated.”

&nb
sp; The two men stare at each other across the desk.

  “Here.” Fielder lays a small stack of paper on an already covered surface. Brad doesn’t keep a neat desk. “A sample, from the beginning.” Fielder stands.

  “Okay, I’ll take a look asap. End of day latest.”

  “Thanks.” Fielder turns, walks away, then turns back. “Brad, I’ve never been a boy who cries wolf.”

  “Yes, Jeff, I know.”

  “But I’m pretty sure about this.” He smiles uncomfortably. “So: wolf.”

  This is one of those moments that defines you as a publisher. Hell, as a person. Do you put yourself—your career, maybe your life—on the line, to do what’s right? Rather, what you think is right? Or do you follow the rules, stay safe, protect yourself and your family? Isn’t that a different type of doing what’s right?

  Brad watches Fielder retreat as Seth returns, and blah-blah-blahs some more before departing with his sheaf of bad news and his medley of bad clothing.

  Brad sinks lower in his chair, loses himself in thought. His brief reverie is broken by a rapping on his door, and he looks up to see Camilla being ushered in by his unfailingly grumpy and disdainful secretary, Lorraine, who’s sneering at the curvy, hyper-sexual director of subsidiary rights. Lorraine seems to hate almost everyone in this office, with the exception of those who fawn over her, willing to play the hackneyed game of pretending that it’s the boss’s secretary who really runs the show. Camilla isn’t one of those; Camilla doesn’t get along all that well with women.

  They’d had a thing, Brad and Camilla, a few years ago. Ignited one long boozy week at the Frankfurt International Book Fair, and burning for a couple of hotel-room months in New York, then fizzling before anyone found out, before anyone was hurt. Brad was left with the distinct feeling that he hadn’t been the first married man with whom Camilla dallied, and wouldn’t be the last. But she had been his one and only extramarital affair, and it wrecked him. He doesn’t intend to do it again. Then again, he didn’t plan on it the first time.