The Accident

by Chris Pavone

  “And your, ah, appetite?”

  “I’m eating fine.”

  “I am referring to another appetite.” The good doctor always seems inappropriately interested in his patient’s sex life, despite its apparent irrelevance to the medical issues at hand.

  “Oh. That comes and goes. It exists.”

  The doctor nods approvingly.

  It was on one of his first jogs that he’d met Vanessa, both of them stretching their hamstrings on an unseasonably warm March morning. At that point he’d been in Switzerland for three months, carefully sequestered in his friendless little bubble of a life, a paranoid hermit. He was having stirrings, feeling the weight of loneliness, and perhaps getting sloppy because of it. They had a brief conversation, then ran their separate ways. At the time, he was still wearing some bandages.

  When the last of the wrappings finally came off he’d started going out, by himself. He bought a few Saturday nights’ worth of opera tickets, even though he’d never enjoyed all that Italian screaming. But the opera house was just up the street, and he suspected it was an okay thing to do alone. Put on a suit and tie, stand on the balcony during intermission, struggle to stay awake for Act III.

  The cinema, too, on the far side of the opera’s Platz, with assigned seating, and an inexplicable intermission in the middle of the film, everyone strolling out to the lobby for a Coke and a pee. He’d buy cookies from the Sicilian guys’ lavish selection at their giant table there in the middle of all the tram stops, and nibble from his pocket.

  In late April, when the weather turned, he started going to cafés, once in a while. Mostly the terrace of the Terrasse, a few minutes from home, always packed with bankers and consultants in suits and heels, ties and scarves. But he was still self-conscious, scarred, and scared of talking to women.

  Then downstairs at the Widder one night, he ran into that jogger from the quai again. He bought a bottle of Champagne for her table of English-speaking women. He himself took only a couple of sips, but the three women drank with reckless abandon. He would, he realized, gladly sleep with any of the three; he ordered a second bottle. At midnight one of the women left, then he couldn’t quite figure out how to move things along—it was late, and he was tired—with either of the remaining two, other than to propose the thing that he suddenly couldn’t stop thinking about, not for ten seconds at a stretch, a new obsession.

  Unable to resist, he somehow mustered the courage to ask, “Could I interest you ladies in joining me in bed?”

  Their jaws dropped in unison. Then the redheaded Irishwoman, with a husband who was out of the country, asked, “Both of us?”

  After squealing and blushing and grabbing each other’s arms, the women retreated to the loo to discuss in private. They returned coyly silent, making him suffer a long wait for an answer. Then Vanessa, the South African jogger, drained her glass, leaned toward him, and said, “All right then. Let’s have a go.”

  Fifteen minutes later the three of them were naked, in bed. His first and probably last ménage-à-trois.

  After that he began to ease back into something of a social life, saying hello to strangers, making small talk at cafés. He could now claim to have a few friends, albeit in the limited way that friendships can exist when one person is lying about absolutely everything, right down to his name.

  It’s easy to be pseudonymous when you’re an expat, and nobody knows you. It’s effortless to be anonymous. But it’s not fun.

  Now, despite the barriers of his wholesale dishonesties, he has something to do, with someone else, once in a while. This isn’t a full life he’s leading, by any stretch of the imagination. But neither is it the opposite.

  And until a few days ago he was working every day, frantic, as authors can become, to finish a manuscript, to progress to the next stage. He had always been one of those people who don’t forget much, even when he wasn’t paying particularly close attention while the information was incoming. So over the years he’d managed to absorb a solid understanding of the book business. He knows enough to be able to imagine the entire process for another author, a normal author, in a normal situation. Sitting there at home, all his hopes and dreams pinned on the manuscript, while the submissions are made to acquisition editors at a dozen publishing houses, waiting for responses—enthusiasm, skepticism, offers, rejections, maybe an auction, frenetic bidding, items in gossip columns and industry magazines.

  Then the editing, the dust jacket design, the publicity campaign, the launch party. The newspaper reviews and the morning-show appearances and the bookstore events and the radio interviews, the rapid climb up the bestseller lists …

  That’s how it could work, for someone with his type of story to tell, but without his reason for telling it.

  “You are recovering quite well, Herr Carner,” the doctor smiles. “Quite well. The incisions are almost completely disappeared, and everything is normal. I will see you again in two weeks. But there is nothing you should worry about.”

  CHAPTER 21

  “I think he may have sent me a manuscript,” Isabel says. “An exposé of Charlie Wolfe’s career.”

  Dean raises his eyebrows. “Damaging?”

  “More than you can imagine. There’s something horrible—unforgivable—in his youth. And then some startling revelations about his business. Startling, and illegal.”

  “Is the manuscript in your bag, right now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you give me a copy?”

  “I can’t,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugs, understanding. But he had to ask. “Is it true?”

  “I don’t know, for certain. But yes, I think so.”

  “Why do you think that?”

  Isabel looks around the rooftop deck, for potential eavesdroppers. She leans in close to Dean, smells the smoke and the wine on his breath. “Because someone,” she whispers, “just murdered my assistant.”

  “Oh fuck.” Dean squares his jaw and narrows his eyes to small severe slits. “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Are they here, now? Have you been followed?”

  “I took, um, evasive maneuvers. Listen, Dean, I don’t know what to do. Any suggestions?”

  He lights another cigarette, his brow furrowed. “You’re not safe with the police, or any part of the government.”

  “I agree.”

  “The American government, that is.” He exhales. “What would you think about presenting yourself to a foreign embassy? I have some connections. I could escort you.”

  “What could they do?”

  “Keep you safe.”

  “Could they? For how long? A week? A year?” She stares at her client, her old friend. Wondering how much she can trust even him. “I need to get out of town.”

  “Yeah, that’s probably a good idea. Where would you go?”

  “Not sure. Maybe a client’s beach house, out east.”

  Dean nods, stubs out his cigarette studiously, staring into the ashtray. “Southampton?”

  Isabel swallows, disappointed in this question. Why does Dean care what town she’s going to? Mere curiosity?

  “No,” she says, without supplying an alternative. “But don’t be surprised if I eventually take you up on that embassy offer.”

  She steps off the curb, onto the cobblestones, taking care to keep her heels out of the deep crevasses between the blocks. She picks her way slowly across the street, and is relieved to alight on the opposite curb. Such a small accomplishment, crossing the street.

  Her phone rings again. The office, again. Rather, the ex-office. She ignores it, again.

  She keeps walking inland, toward the meat of Manhattan, away from the river. Lost in thought, weighing her options, plotting her course of action. She steps into a small triangular park with a fountain in the middle, office workers with lunch in their laps, sandwiches and wraps, smoothies and soups, sitting on green benches in dappled sunlight, everyone wearing sunglasses—

  D
amn. She left her sunglasses next to Dean’s ice bucket. She stops. Should she go back and collect them? Waste of time? But what is she on her way to do? Anything?

  She turns around, and walks through the wrought-iron gates, out onto the sidewalk of Eighth Avenue. Just in time to see a white Toyota across the avenue, pulling away from the curb. The same beat-up sedan from Hell’s Kitchen, with the same two guys in front, wearing sunglasses, rigidly not looking in her direction.

  She makes it a block, maybe two, and staggers into a coffee shop, a studiously shabby room filled with mismatched overstuffed furniture and scruffy denim-clad men, working on Macs. She holds out money to pay for coffee, and notices that her hand is trembling. She puts the bills on the counter, covered with her clenched fist.

  How can this be? How could anyone have followed her? In a car? When she’d ridden on two different underground trains, going in two different directions?

  Isabel carries her coffee to the rear corner, a good vantage on the room, on the front door. She collapses into a wing chair, drops her handbag onto the floor beside her. It seems like forever since she sat in that other restaurant, way back at breakfast with Jeffrey, and dropped the heavy manuscript bag to the floor. The restaurant where that man brushed against her, making her nervous, when she was on her way out.

  She looks down at the floor, at the crumpled black-leather pile of her bag containing her mobile phone, and she thinks she understands.

  The Accident Page 142

  Dave walked around to the rear of the car slowly, tentatively, not looking forward to what he would discover back there. The girl’s legs were emerging from under the trunk, jutting out at unnatural angles.

  Charlie followed a moment behind, his eyes averted. Then he mustered his courage, took a deep breath, and leaned down to get a look. Her skull had split open, spilling its contents all over the dark wet pavement. That’s when Charlie threw up, quick and violent and uncontrolled, onto the blacktop, again and again, loudly and painfully, doubled-over, clutching his wrenching gut.

  It was drizzling and would end up raining all through the night. Charlie’s vomit would be swept away by the downpour, borne into the drainage swale at the side of the road, along with the girl’s blood and brains. All visible traces of the event would be washed away.

  There was still plenty of retrievable evidence. Not just on a microscopic level, but footprints, crushed branches, fabric fibers, and tire treads for anyone who knew where to look. But no one knew.

  CHAPTER 22

  Jeff is devouring the pages, one after the other, his eyes racing down the lines, turning a new page every thirty seconds, his fingers always on the corner of a piece of paper, ready to turn. Twenty years after graduation, his most practical take-away skill from his Ivy League B.A. seems to be this: the ability to digest reading material very quickly. For an editor whose main job is to grasp the general idea of thousands of pages every week, this means the difference between occasionally getting a full night’s sleep, and never.

  Jeff fiddles with his Sheaffer as he reads, spinning the silver cylinder in his fingers, clockwise, counterclockwise, flipping it around, upside-down. His phone starts beeping at him, an alarm, time to go.

  He can’t let the manuscript lie on his desk, unattended, when he leaves the building; he shouldn’t have left it to go to the editorial meeting an hour ago. Or for that matter to the toilet. So now he shoves the thick stack of paper into his leather satchel, and heads out for today’s agent lunch.

  Jeff eats with a rotating cast of hundreds of literary agents, three or four days per week, forty-five weeks out of the year, year after year after year. The four most beautiful words in his life are “your lunch date canceled.” But there’s a complicated calculus to cancellation, a combination of factors including your date’s relative power plus possible pending business plus past projects and past lunch cancellations, then minus grudges and resentments and sometimes the weather and, of course, plain old dislike.

  Today’s date, Dan, is insufferable, but the guy outranks Jeff on anyone’s measure of importance in the publishing firmament. So on this clear bright day, Jeff can’t cancel.

  Jeff hustles through the halls, over the well-worn and tattered carpets, past the mismatched furniture, the ailing photocopy machines and printers that are wedged into spaces that are too awkward for desks, past the never-quite-clean-smelling kitchen—today it’s the perpetual aroma of microwave popcorn, mingling with someone’s ill-advised leftover curry—and through reception, and lunges into the closing elevator, which he realizes with a sinking heart is not as empty as he’d thought.

  “Hi,” Rana says to him, softly, uncomfortably.

  “Oh, hi.”

  Rana is an extravagantly talented junior-ish designer—not a kid, and definitely not a real grown-up, but something in between—who seems able to nail everything on the first try. Not just the dust jackets for hardbacks or the covers for paperbacks, but also promotional bookmarks and one-sheets and web banner ads and all the other detritus that’s constantly thrown at designers by marketing, publicity, and sales, an endless array of tactics trying to differentiate one new book from the tens of thousands of others published every year.

  Jeff had a one-night-stand with Rana a few months ago. It was one of those maudlin going-away nights, a farewell party for an ancient sales rep who’d been on the road during the Nixon Administration. After three or four or five rounds, a half-dozen of the unmarrieds—though not all of these people single, precisely—moved from the quiet up-market going-away pub to a loud down-market getting-drunk one. There were greasy burgers, and ultimately an offer to share a taxi, and then backseat groping, and superfluous vodka-rocks in her tiny apartment …

  The elevator doors open, releasing them both from the special hell of sharing an elevator with an ill-advised sexual partner, into the cramped, unattended lobby, then the bright sunshine.

  “Well,” Rana says, “that sure was fun. Bye.”

  Jeff can’t think of anything clever to say before the girl walks away. He stares after her for a few seconds, feeling sorry, though he’s not sure about what, exactly.

  Then he too starts walking through Union Square’s riot of exuberant youth—the summer-school students from NYU and the New School and Parsons, the high-school kids cutting classes, the young underemployed adults and disheveled grad-school matriculants, the street artists and musicians and dancers and chess players, banging on their clocks and checking out the girls who walk by, and dog owners at the dog run, checking out one another. In the playground, bordered by a parking lot of imported strollers, the benches are occupied by groups of well-off-looking white parents alternating with clusters of nannies arranged by their lands of origin—South America, Tibet, the Caribbean—watching their charges with widely varying levels of vigilance. To the east, a decidedly shiftier element dominates, drug dealers and users, crazies shouting profanities, wild-eyed shirtless men tossing garbage into the grass. Skateboarders perform recklessly along the southern steps, where beat cops maintain a lax distance, not incentivized to intervene in any mere misdemeanors. They’re here for the felonies.

  Jeff walks away from the park, into tree-lined Greenwich Village, trudging through the quiet streets at a steady pace, losing himself in The Accident. He can’t help but plot out ways to improve the manuscript, crafting the editorial letter in his mind: passages that should be shortened, or deleted entirely; redundancies to be tightened; vocabulary choices that are used repeatedly, ill-advisedly; staccato sentences that ought to be lengthened, and unwieldy run-ons that should be subdivided into more manageable lengths. There are elements of the end of the story, he expects, that might be teased earlier, maybe cutting in a different timeline to the otherwise straight chronology. In many books, there are things that should be said at the beginning, about the end. And vice versa.

  Can this book actually be true? Completely true? And should its veracity—or lack of—influence his behavior? If some of it is true, how much? And if
it’s a decent amount that’s true—if any of the important events did indeed happen—then does it matter if some of it is untrue, or exaggerated? What’s the core essence of the story …?

  And is Isabel serious about ten-plus million dollars? In that case—in any case—will Bradford be willing—will Brad be eager—to acquire it? Every month the rumors get more insistent, the chatter gets louder, about a sellout to one of the multinationals. It has become practically deafening, and some speculation even made it into Publishers Weekly. Will Brad want to gamble big money while his company is being yanked from under him? Will he want to gamble big money because his company is being yanked? Being bought by Wolfe Worldwide Media, of all the goddamned outfits in the world?

  And will this manuscript bring an end to the recent unsuccessful interlude in Jeff’s career? The part where he has sat in ed-board meetings, not paying any attention, nor being paid any attention?

  Jeff has an ex-wife on the other side of the continent. He has arthritis in both knees, and wiry gray hairs growing out of his ears, and a prostate that’s beginning to worry him. But he still manages to think of his life as something that’s just getting underway; he’s still willing to believe that he’s on the upslope.

  And, of course, can he really pursue this manuscript? Or will he have to destroy it?

  “Again and again, I find myself telling these guys”—all Dan’s clients are apparently guys—“that if anyone else can write the book, you shouldn’t. The first step is to ask: What’s the one book in the world you’re best qualified to write?”