The Accident

by Chris Pavone

  She pulls the door shut. “Penn Station please.”

  “You got it chief.”

  She scrolls through the address book on her phone, chooses a contact, hits Call.

  “Isabel! What a surprise!”

  “Hi Dean. You in town? At your normal spot?”

  “I am.”

  “May I come talk to you, for a few minutes?”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake, Isabel. Are they asking for their money back? Because I thought—”

  “Can you see me?”

  A pause. “Of course. Always.”

  She hangs up as the car is pulling to the curb. She tosses a ten into the front seat and ejects herself into another dense crowd, swarming in and out of the hideous train station that’s burrowed under the unfortunate monstrosity of Madison Square Garden. She swipes her MetroCard, dashes up the stairs to the platform as an uptown express is pulling in. She hops onto the sparsely populated car, in the one situation when she’d prefer it to be packed to the gills, sardines, body odor and bad breath, the stench of McDonald’s, tinny treble leaking out of headphones, bicycles and strollers and backpacks and skateboards, too many people with too much stuff in too small a space.

  But today it’s just herself and a dozen others. An overweight Italian-looking guy wearing sweats and sneakers and a Mets T-shirt, gold necklaces and bracelets, reading the sports section of the Daily News, gives Isabel the up-and-down, and nods appreciatively, as if the sommelier just presented him with a taste of nice Barolo. Everyone else ignores her, and one another.

  Isabel doesn’t ride the subway a lot, but it’s often enough that she carries a fare card. For a few years she’d sworn off subways and buses entirely, making a statement of it, if to no one other than herself. That was back when she started at ATM, when she finally got her first taste of living beyond paycheck-to-paycheck, with enough extra income to dispose of it with a weekly cleaning lady, and proper vacations in real hotels without agonizing over the cost of every poolside drink, and erasing her price-sensitivity on toiletries and groceries. Enough to take taxis instead of the dark, smelly, crowded subway. She had risen above the subway.

  It took a few years to change her mind about public transportation, among other similar choices. She stopped trying to appear to have more money than she did, and started aiming for the opposite.

  The subway pulls into Times Square, the doors open. Isabel steps onto the platform, then hops back into the car. Then as the doors are closing, she jumps out again.

  She hurries up the stairs and across the mezzanine and down the stairs again to the downtown platform, a local arriving on the outside track. She boards this train, takes a seat on the hard gray plastic. She feels the vibration thrumming her thighs, the regular rhythm, thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump.

  Despite the adrenaline, she feels exhausted, spent. She could go to sleep right here, like tens of thousands of people do every day. Simply close her eyes for a second, let her neck relax, head lolling to one side or the other or straight down, chin on chest, dribbling drool here on the Seventh Avenue IRT …

  But she stands, and exits to another platform under another neighborhood, then the Greenwich Village sidewalk, striding to the curb, her arm aloft again, beckoning another taxi to a screeching halt, another destination, another ten-dollar bill tossed across another bulletproof divide.

  She looks through the Chevy windows, left and right, front and back. No, she thinks: there’s no way anyone could’ve followed her.

  Isabel discharges herself onto a cobblestoned street in the Meatpacking District, another bustling rebranded neighborhood. This area hasn’t changed its name, but it has almost entirely relinquished its raison d’être, as well as the rough trade in transvestite prostitutes that accompanied the stinking bloody eponymous business.

  A man holds open the discreetly labeled door to a private club, and she enters the cool dark lobby. A stunning girl at reception directs Isabel to the roof, and after the elevator she reemerges into the bright sunlight, a bar and couches and coffee tables, a decorative restaurant under giant canvas umbrellas, a small blue swimming pool occupied by a half-dozen model types. Isabel scans nearly the full 360 degrees before she spies the person she’s looking for, sprawled on a chaise in the far corner of poolside.

  She makes her way around the perimeter of chairs, sunglasses and towels and bikinis and biceps, magazines and newspapers, books and tablets, cigarettes and wineglasses and tall beady bottles of sparkling water. What are all these people doing here, in the middle of a workday? This isn’t LA or Miami; people are supposed to work in New York City.

  On the small table next to Dean is a frosty bucket, with the telltale silver foil of a Champagne bottle peeking out from the ice water, and a used ashtray with a packet of cigarettes and a silver lighter, and a phone, and a couple of half-full flutes, one with a lipstick smudge. There’s a lithe woman half his age in the next chair, just a few square inches of Lycra removed from naked.

  “Isabel, hello.” Dean stands, proffering a cheek kiss, leaning close to let his hair-tufted chest brush against her. Dean goes to great pains to paint himself as an action hero sort of character, tattooed and scarred and ropy-muscled, unfiltered cigarettes and excessive quantities of liquor and drugs, a shameless womanizer. “Great to see you. This”—gesturing at his companion—“is Betsy.”

  “My name’s Brecka,” the girl says with a scowl. She doesn’t hold out her hand, or move from her prone position.

  “Really?” Dean asks. “Brecka? That’s a name?”

  The girl exhales a plume of smoke in his general direction.

  “Are you absolutely sure?”

  She stares at him.

  “Oops. Apologies.” Dean mugs at Isabel, shrugs. “Just the same, Brecka, give us a minute, will you? Isn’t that friend of yours Laura over there at the bar?”

  “Her name”—the girl stands—“is Laurel.”

  “Yeah, well.” Dean pats the girl’s rear, shooing her away while copping a feel. Multitasking.

  Isabel takes Brecka’s place on the chaise, but leaves her feet on the floor. She feels ludicrous up here in her business attire, amid all these bathing suits. Like walking into the lobby of a five-star hotel wearing sweats, but the opposite.

  Dean removes his sunglasses, revealing a black eye.

  “Jesus,” Isabel says, her heart falling into the pit of her stomach. Is Dean involved too? “What happened to you?”

  “Oh this?” He points at his swollen blue-black flesh. “It’s nothing.”

  “Come on.”

  “You know about my anti-Hummer, er, crusade?”

  Dean has a tendency, when plastered, to walk around the city leaving windshield notes, Hummers are for douchebags, a word that he thinks is the all-time greatest linguistic innovation.

  “Well, one of the douchebags caught me in the act. He was with his posse, a whole douchemobile worth. I didn’t stand a chance. But I don’t regret it one fucking bit.” He picks up the wine bottle. “So. It’s a rare pleasure for my esteemed literary agent to hunt me down in the middle of a workday.” He holds the bottle by its neck, tilts it toward Isabel. “Or, rather, weekday.”

  “No thanks.” She too removes her sunglasses, in the shade of the umbrella, and places them on the table.

  “Especially,” he continues, “considering that I’m now—what is it?—ten months late with my manuscript delivery?”

  “Two years.”

  “Mmm.” He takes a deep drag of his cigarette. “As I think we both know, I’m going to finish that book … Let’s see, right: the day after never. And yet here I am, whiling away another day with sparkling wine and unfiltered cigarettes and underage women.” He taps one out of the pack, lights it.

  “How do you earn a living, Dean?”

  “Earn? A living? You know damn well that I don’t do any such thing.”

  Dean is one of those fearless journalists who specialize in dangerous places, batting around Bosnia and the Sudan, Afghan
istan and Syria. Through the unpredictable alchemy of the book-publishing process—an inexact mix of sales-force enthusiasm and word-of-mouth industry buzz, of long-lead magazine coverage and full-length newspaper reviews and weekly-magazine squibs—Dean’s most recent book, about an obscure corner of the Afghan war, achieved the much pursued status as being the nonfiction book of the year: international editions in thirty languages, and audio books and e-books and paperbacks, and a fast-track film from a major studio with first-name-recognized leads, and then movie-tie-in editions … Royalties are flowing in from dozens of accounts on six continents. And in the meantime a prominent magazine hired Dean as a contributing editor, providing him with a business card and a monthly stipend in exchange for a commitment to supplying five thousand words per year, which as a rule he does in one fell swoop after returning from some war-torn hellhole, a cocaine-fueled stream-of-consciousness dump of experiential prose, unconventionally punctuated and ridden with misspellings and grammatical errors. But there are editors to fix that; it’s what editors are for. The rules of stylistic consistency are beneath Dean. Hobgoblin of little minds.

  He takes a deep drag of his Player’s Plain. It was the most available cigarette in Pakistan when Dean lived there in the 1990s, and he never gave it up, despite increasing challenges to procurement. “So: to what do I owe this very special pleasure?”

  “Dean, you were nosing around DC when David Miller killed himself, right?”

  One of the benefits of working in the publishing world is that Isabel knows—or can easily access—at least one expert in practically any subject. Geopolitics, pediatric medicine, Spanish cooking, whatever. The leading lights in every field write books about their areas of expertise; even the leading experts in the field of writing books write books about writing books. And all experts have literary agents.

  Dean, an expert in the duplicities of politics, exhales a cloud of smoke, but doesn’t say anything.

  “Were there any rumors?” she asks. “Rumors wouldn’t have reached me, you know.”

  Dean stares at her, clearly debating whether to engage in this subject, and to what extent. “Yeah,” he says, resigned. “Of course there were rumors.”

  “Rumors that he was murdered?”

  “Ah, yeah. Inevitable, the rumors. Important man, suddenly no longer alive.”

  “And?”

  He shakes his head dismissively. “There was nothing to it.”

  “Were there suspects? A motive?”

  “No, not really. And honestly the murder possibility wasn’t the most compelling, ah, alternative explanation for his disappearance.”

  “Which was?”

  “Which was that Miller’s death”—Dean turns his head more directly toward Isabel, strains his neck in her direction—“was a hoax.”

  This is what Isabel had been expecting to hear; this is the idea that she’d been unable to suppress since she began reading the manuscript yesterday.

  She takes one of Dean’s cigarettes, lights it. She coughs, the unfiltered too untamed for her lungs.

  “Was there any evidence?”

  “A few days after his disappearance into the Atlantic, someone who looked a lot like Miller arrived in Brussels on a flight that originated in the Bahamas. Different name on his passport, of course. A passport that turned out to be stolen from someone who lives in DC and works in the Administration.”

  “And then?”

  “Unfortunately—or is it really unfortunate? Who’s to say?—the trail ended there, in the Brussels airport. But Brussels is a gateway to anywhere. By connecting flight, by train, by car. It’s a very convenient place to arrive, if what you’re planning is to end up somewhere else.”

  Isabel takes another drag, much less harsh than the first. That seems to be how it is with things that are bad for you.

  “Are you certain you don’t want any Champagne? You look like you could use something.”

  “Did anyone look into this, Dean? Did you?”

  He nods. “Found nothing, nowhere.”

  “What about alternative cancer-treatment centers?”

  “Oh, Isabel, is it really as bad as all that?” Dean looks down at his cigarette. “It’s true that I can’t quite seem to shake this cough—”

  “I’m not talking about you.”

  “I know what you’re talking about. Of course I investigated the medical angle. Miller definitely consulted with a variety of doctors, as well as with a number of his colleagues. He contacted cancer-treatment centers in different parts of the world. I wasn’t able to get any hard information about recommendations or possible treatments or anything specific; medical professionals tend to take patient confidentiality rather seriously, everywhere. But yeah, I investigated this angle thoroughly. And I found nothing.

  “As you know, Miller was—is?—rich. And smart. A rich and smart man can easily buy himself a new identity, in a well-protected hiding spot. And he can stay safely hidden for a very, very long time.”

  He leans toward Isabel. “Especially if he’s scared.”

  CHAPTER 20

  The author walks into one of the large front-facing rooms of the sturdy old Schloss. This would’ve been a bedroom, back when the building was a residence. All these rooms retain their eighteenth-century character, person-size fireplaces and Persian rugs, heavy wooden furniture and ornately framed oil paintings on the walls. It’s the back of the building that’s twenty-first-century, brushed steel and gleaming veneers, bright flat shadowless lighting systems and a mesmerizing array of cutting-edge medical technology.

  He settles into a creaky leather armchair facing the big mahogany desk, and catches a glimpse of himself in a gilt-edged mirror, nearly unrecognizable, an entirely different person here in Zurich than he’d been in Washington.

  When he’d arrived in Europe in the early winter he’d had no belongings, no luggage. Lost by the airline, is what he claimed to the thoroughly uninterested clerk at the grubby hotel near the Bruxelles-Midi station.

  For a few days he walked the damp cold streets of the big Belgian city, buying a whole new wardrobe a few items at a time, paying cash for skinny suits and slim-fitting shirts to replace those formless sack suits of DC, American clothing designed to hide the pear shape of the typical American man. He bought snug shoes, the types of footwear you really don’t find on men’s feet in the USA. He was trying to look like someone who belonged in Europe, who lived here, maybe even was from here. Not an American on the run.

  But his first order of business had been to trudge through the narrow medieval streets around the spectacular Grand-Place—gift shops and chocolatiers, unruly school trips and the inevitable Japanese tour groups—looking for a busy barbershop that cycles through men at a production-line pace, quick clips and close shaves, snip-snip buzz-buzz. He found the right sort of busy anonymous shop in a covered arcade near the Bourse, and had his dark curls shorn down to a tight crew cut. He’d also stopped shaving a few days before his fateful Piper flight, and after a week this purposeful neglect had blossomed into a short beard.

  He visited an Internet café that also sent and received snail mail from all over the globe, and picked up a package that he’d mailed to himself from a similar outfit in DC.

  He bought thin angular eyeglasses and acquired tinted contacts to hide the bright blue of his eyes, the first thing anyone ever noticed about him, the most important detail to disguise. But he didn’t start wearing these contacts until he’d rented a car and driven out of Belgium and across northern Germany to Berlin, where a new identity—Stuart Carner—was waiting for him courtesy of a Russian forger and twenty thousand euros cash, a disappointingly thin stack of banknotes, forty pieces of purple paper.

  He didn’t care for the name Stuart, but it was better than Stu; there’d been a jackass Stu in college who had permanently tainted the name.

  Herr Stuart Carner was his second new identity. The first had been the passport of a Treasury wonk who was the author’s virtual doppelganger; for the past f
ew years, people were constantly remarking that the resemblance between the two men was uncanny. And everyone who knew this glorified accountant also knew that the guy never, ever left DC, much less America, except for a famously disastrous trip to Cancún a few years earlier. He was unlikely to miss his passport.

  It hadn’t been much trouble to find someone willing to break into the guy’s apartment; the hard part had been convincing the burglar not to steal anything besides the passport.

  So then in Berlin those striking blue eyes became black, cloaked in mourning. He’d also lost fifteen pounds over the preceding few months. Now with the short hair and the dark eyes and the glasses, the skinny suits and pointy shoes, he was nearly unrecognizable, to the naked eye. But he’d still be plenty identifiable, with facial-recognition software, not to mention his fingerprints.

  With his new appearance and fictitious identity and his two new suitcases filled with his new wardrobe, he boarded an Air Berlin flight, the stewardesses wearing kinky red leather gloves with black palms, bound for the large Zurich airport and a reservation in a business hotel near the Paradeplatz, a convenient base to explore, to find a place to live, to drive out to this converted old estate up in the hills, this unobtrusive medical complex, which was the primary reason to come to the quiet tidy little city in the first place.

  He hears someone enter the room behind him, and a hand squeezes his shoulder as the doctor comes into peripheral view. The tall German settles behind the desk, opens the file, turns a page, turns to the front again.

  “So, Herr Carner, how are you feeling?”

  “In general I feel good.”

  “Exercising?”

  “Yes.” He’d taken up running, for the first time in his life. His apartment is a block from the lakeside’s park and its pleasant path along the quai, packed with people on a sunny warm day like today, but deserted in the usual drizzle of Europe in winter and spring.

  “I run now, almost every day.” Working his way up to respectable distances. And finally able to feel reasonably comfortable wearing headphones while running out in public, overcoming a paranoia that dated back to junior high, when the Walkman was first invented, and his grandparents had given him one for his thirteenth birthday, but two weeks later he was mugged while wearing it, unable to hear the thugs coming up behind him, and they took the Sony as well as the folded-up dollar in his pocket, on his way to Gino’s to buy a pizza-soda-ice lunch special for fifty cents, plus a pack of baseball cards from the candy store whose primary business was dime, nickel, and trey bags of low-quality marijuana. Brooklyn in the early eighties.