by Chris Pavone
Dan has been pontificating for thirty minutes now, his leg jiggling under the table; he’s one of those inveterate leg-jigglers. Jeff wants to fasten the damn thing in place with a nail gun.
“What’s the single story that can be told by only one person in the world—you?”
At this, Jeff looks up from his food, stares into the distance. Who’s the one most likely author in the world for The Accident? Every legitimate news outlet in America—as well as plenty of nonlegit ones—has poked and prodded through Charlie Wolfe’s past, interviewing ex-girlfriends and schoolmates and law-school classmates, colleagues and rivals, friends and foes. The author of The Accident would have called the same sources who’d been called before, by people from the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, from CNN and ABC and FOX, from Salon and the Huffington Post … Sooner or later, all these sources would’ve stopped confirming credentials. So if someone called who wasn’t who he was pretending to be, these sources wouldn’t even notice, much less do anything about it.
And whoever wrote The Accident would’ve had access that none of the other journalists ever had. He would’ve unearthed some game-changing secrets, and for some reason would’ve held on to those secrets until now … Why? Who?
Jeff feels his phone vibrating in his pocket. He hates answering in the middle of meals, or meetings, but because of the manuscript he’s afraid to miss calls—from Isabel, or from Brad, or from who knows. Plus he could really use a break from this blowhard.
“Oh go ahead,” Dan says, eagerly retrieving his own device from the clip on his belt. “I should check e-mail.”
Jeff excuses himself, stands, looks at the phone as he walks away from the table. “Hey,” he says. It was Isabel’s name on the small screen. “I’m at lun—”
“I need to see you.”
“Everything okay?”
“When will you be finished?”
“Um, I don’t know. Twenty minutes?”
“Then you’re going back to the office?”
“Yes. Isabel, is everything okay?”
“No … listen … I’ll meet you at your office in a half-hour. Okay?”
Jeff has a premonition of a tidal wave sneaking up behind him, a hundred-foot-high wall of water moving at fifty miles per hour.
On Bleecker Street Jeff notices Naomi Berger leaning against a lamppost, seemingly staring off into nothingness under a towering London planetree. They exchange quick cheek kisses, but they don’t hug; they’re business acquaintances, not friends.
“I hope you’re not waiting for Borders to come by,” Jeff says, “make you an offer for the store. You know they went out of business, right?”
She laughs, in that way that people laugh when something isn’t funny. “Having a book party tonight,” she says. “Waiting for the wine guy to return. He got chased around the corner by a traffic cop.” She waves her arm in the direction of a meter maid who’s sauntering up the shady street, window-shopping amid striped awnings and plate-glass windows and young women walking in and out of boutiques, carrying sturdy shopping bags with braided-rope handles. “They’re donating the wine, and I don’t want their delivery guy to get a parking ticket to boot. That would make me just too damned unappealing, don’t you think?”
Jeff has sympathy for Naomi, and her bookshop, one of the better respected independents in town, among a dwindling population. It must be difficult for her to remain solvent, and it’s a crucial business for the publishing community, for Jeff’s livelihood. Neighborhood bookstores aren’t merely places for customers to purchase products from retailers; they’re where readers discover authors, where kids discover reading. Discoverability is what keeps the book business alive.
“Nothing could make you unappealing, Naomi Berger. Everyone loves you.”
He thinks he sees her blush under all those freckles. She turns her eyes down to the sidewalk, but doesn’t say anything. Sometime about a decade ago, Naomi had popped up in front of Jeff at a party, late at night, all smiles and laughs and even a wink. After a flirty five-minute conversation, it was clear to Jeff that this woman was angling for intimacy. He quickly pecked her on the cheek and fled. Jeff was not in the habit of forgoing flings, but he knew that Naomi was close friends with Isabel.
“Well, nice to see you,” he says. “Have a good party.”
Jeff continues up the street, around a corner, and walks five steps past the hardware store before he remembers the washer in his pocket that needs replacing. Perhaps if he behaves as if his normal life is ongoing, then maybe it will be. He pauses on the sidewalk for a second, but decides it’s more important—much more important—to solve his career problem, to deal with this manuscript, than to solve his plumbing problem. He needs to return to the office. So he keeps walking for another few steps before he admits that now that it’s on his mind, he should just stop for a minute and buy this goddamned little thing.
He turns around, retraces his steps while fingering the corroded ring of metal in his pocket. A vaguely familiar man is approaching, but doesn’t make eye contact, and continues past on the sidewalk, staring straight ahead.
Jeff feels his stomach fall away, his body flooding with panic.
He walks into the small cluttered shop, his brain clamoring at this development, and absentmindedly spends forty cents on two washers.
He takes out his phone, dials the number. When the man answers, Jeff asks, without preamble, “Are you having me followed?”
There’s a lot of static on the line, but no voice. Jeff thinks the call may have been dropped, so he takes the device from his ear, looks at the screen, then hears “No” from the little speaker. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m pretty sure I just saw a man on the sidewalk who was in a restaurant with me this morning.”
The man doesn’t respond. “I know exactly where you are, without following you.”
Jeff looks up at the streetscape, the humongous brownstone Italianate houses, the smaller red-brick Federal ones, the awninged doormanned apartment buildings. “This guy is not one of yours?”
Even through the thick static, Jeff can hear the man sigh. “I’m afraid not.”
“What should I do?”
“Be careful.”
He stops in a café, orders a coffee, struggling to distribute the weight of the bag that’s tugging his shoulder, heavy from the manuscript plus the unwieldy bound galleys that Dan foisted upon him, advance reader’s editions of books that Jeff absolutely does not intend to read. Fuck it, he thinks. He takes the paper-bound galleys out of his bag and deposits them on the café’s counter, now communal reading material along with various sections of more than one newspaper, and a few magazines, and the ubiquitous flyers for a guitar teacher.
He negotiates his café exit at the same time as the entrance of a woman pushing a stroller, a whimpering infant strapped inside. This woman is clearly at the very end of her rope, tear tracks down her cheeks, haggard and disheveled, wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt splattered with spit-up, the odor of baby powder trying to mask something funkier. Jeff holds the door for her, and she manages to project thank-you into the raise of her eyebrows. But no small act of kindness is going to make a dent in this woman’s despair, not today.
Jeff takes a sip through the sip-top, scalds his tongue.
He glances up and down the street, looking again for that familiar man, or anyone else who might be following him. He walks the width of the sidewalk, and steps to the curb, down into the gutter, to cross the street.
In the middle of the street, his bag strap slips off his shoulder, and yanks his arm downward, sloshing hot coffee out of the cup onto the back of his hand. He mutters “Fuck” and looks down at his hand, then up again at a growling sound coming from his left, a car tearing up the street, accelerating as it approaches.
CHAPTER 23
Camilla starts reading while the car is pulling away from the curb. She reads through the stop-and-go traffic of the surface streets, then throu
gh the clogged Holland Tunnel, which usually seems too long—can the Hudson River really be this wide?—but today she doesn’t notice. She reads as the Town Car hums over the gritty black ironworks of the Pulaski Skyway, skimming over the New Jersey swamps, skirting the ominous idea of downtown Newark.
She is still engrossed as the car comes to a stop. The driver leans back to hand her the paperwork. “Miss?”
Camilla looks up. “Oh! So sorry.” She takes the little clipboard, signs the voucher. She tucks the manuscript into her tote and climbs out onto the well-policed curb in front of the terminal. She looks around at the passengers in ticketing: the run-of-the-mill business travelers, the college students, the tourists—a normal assortment—who are complemented by passengers bound for both Tel Aviv and Mumbai, with clusters of Hassidim and Hindus in dueling observant-religious garb, strewn around the vast hall. It looks as if the extras for two different period movies have both been called to the same soundstage, milling around, trying to figure out who’s responsible for the mix-up.
She arrives at the gate an hour before departure. Peers into her tote at the three-ring binder filled with supporting material for McNally’s next-spring list. Camilla is always living six to twelve months in the future, in the space occupied by next Christmas, next New-Year-New-You promotion, next Mother’s Day, next summer-beach-read roundup. After a decade of living in next year, and the following year, Camilla has lost the ability to keep reliable track of when exactly it is, right now.
None of the books on next spring’s list, in that binder, will be worth anything to anyone in Hollywood. So they’re not worth anything to her. Instead she pulls out the anonymous manuscript again.
This is the part of her job she loves, the part she’ll miss: sitting in an airport or a bar or at her desk, one of the first readers of a not-yet-published manuscript, just a bunch of loose letter-size pages in her hands, which less than a year later will be typeset and printed and trimmed and bound, shipped in sturdy little manageable-size cartons around the country—around the world—and shelved in thousands of stores, in bookstores and big-box mega-marts and gift shops, on new-release tables and in window displays, on bestseller lists in dozens of languages.
And it all begins here, one person at a time reading something that can’t be put down. In the past year, Camilla began reading hundreds of manuscripts; she looked at hundreds of page 1’s. For at least half of those manuscripts, though, she never got to page 2.
When her boarding group is called, Camilla is on page 109. As the plane pulls away from the gate, her eyes are racing down page 138. At liftoff she’s on 145, and she holds her breath and feels a shiver run down her spine, and she knows that this is it.
This is how it happens: you spend your life reading, reading, and reading more, waiting, waiting, and waiting for something to be incredible. Each manuscript you start could be it, but thousands upon thousands aren’t. And then one day, always hoped-for but never expected, there it is.
The Accident Page 143
When he finally stopped throwing up, Charlie plopped down onto the tarmac. He sat there in the drizzle, shaking his head in disbelief. “Fuck.” He wiped his chin with the back of his hand, cleaning away his vomit. “What happened, exactly?”
Dave turned away from the car and looked at his friend. “Don’t you remember?”
“Not entirely.”
“What? What do you remember?”
Charlie shook his head.
“Do you remember being back at the bar?”
“Yes.”
“What, exactly?”
“I remember a lot, up until I went to the bathroom … Then I couldn’t find you guys. I went upstairs and there you were, and some girl was talking to me but I was too drunk … So I left her, I went to sit down …”
Charlie put his head in his hands. “And I remember driving …” He started sobbing. “And then everything went black.… And then I killed her.”
Neither boy said anything for a minute. Then Dave said, “Yes. It looks like you did.”
Charlie wiped tears away from both cheeks, snuffled. He stood. He glanced around, then back at Dave. “We have to get out of here.”
Charlie walked to the front of the car, examined the grille, squatted down and looked at the undercarriage. He turned to the side of the road, looked at the heavy brush and trees. “We can … Let’s get her … let’s hide her.”
The Accident Page 144
“What?”
“We have to get out of here, Dave. But first we have to get her out of sight. In there.” Charlie put his hand on Dave’s shoulder. “We have to get her body into the brush.”
“Why?”
“Goddamnit, Dave, we don’t have time to debate this. Just help me.”
“What are you talking about?”
Charlie looked Dave in the eye, searching. “You know what we have to do.”
“We’re going to hide the body and run away?”
“We don’t have a choice. I’m not going to jail for this.”
Dave opened his mouth slightly, but then shut his lips, clamped his jaw. He nodded.
Charlie knelt and grabbed the girl’s ankles. Dave clutched the wrists. Together they dragged her body, with her rear end scraping across the tarmac and then the weedy grass at the edge of the road.
Upon closer examination the first layer of brush wasn’t that heavy, certainly not dense enough to hide a body. They’d have to go into the dark underbrush, where it looked like after a few feet the land might drop off. Perhaps there was a ravine or something back there, the reason that the road curved, following the path of water. Maybe there was even a gorge, deep and untraveled.
“We have to go farther,” Charlie said. He pushed his way through the thicket, which after a few feet opened up into a moss-floored clearing, and then a few steps later there was indeed a steep drop. It was too dark to see the bottom.
The Accident Page 145
“Okay,” Charlie said. They both took a final sidestep to the edge. “On three.”
The two boys looked at each other, a quick painful glance.
Charlie counted one, and they swung her outward. Two, and they swung her back. Three, swinging her out over the empty space, letting go, and then the lifeless body was flying through the air, and then they heard the sound of branches cracking and crunching, thuds and crushing and sliding, dirt and pebbles tumbling.
And then it was silent in the still night, but for the sickening sounds reverberating in their memories.
CHAPTER 24
“Two problems,” the man says, without any pleasantries. “First is that the young woman—the assistant—had to be, ah …”
Hayden covers his eyes with the hand that isn’t holding the satellite phone. He’s strapped onto a bench on a military transport that took off from northeastern Germany, a quick helicopter ride from Copenhagen across the Baltic to the airfield near the Polish border. This will be a long flight to New York, with no doubt a long night on the other end.
“What happened?”
“She returned home unexpectedly while the item was being recovered.”
“Unexpectedly.” Hayden never kidded himself that there’d be no collateral damage, no civilians harmed. But he wasn’t expecting it this early, so far removed from the primary players. This doesn’t bode well. “What does that mean?”
Silence.
“Does that mean there was no lookout?” He presses his fingers into his brow, trying to massage away the pain of this bad news. “No backup?”
“Yes sir. That’s what it means.”
“I see. And the item?”
“Retrieved. Will be waiting for you upon arrival.”
Whew. At least there was that. “Okay. You said there were two problems.”
“That subsidiary-rights director at the publishing house? Camilla Glyndon-Browning? She’s on a flight to LAX. As far as we can tell, her first order of business is to meet with a film producer named Stan Balzer. The agenda of this me
eting?”
“No.”
“I’m sorry, yes. We were able to intercept her confirmation phone call, through sheer luck: she happened to be within range of the editor’s transmitter.”
“So the editor gave Glyndon-Browning a copy?” That wouldn’t make sense.
“Actually, it seems like she might’ve stolen it.”
“Oh for the love of God.” Do people in publishing houses really steal things from each other?
“What do you want to do about this situation, sir?”
Hayden allows his head to fall back, stretching his neck muscles. “Do we know what Glyndon-Browning is doing, after she deplanes? I mean in terms of transport? Hotel?”
“Yes. We’ve located her rental-car reservation, and she’s booked into a small hotel in Beverly Hills.”
“And do we know what she looks like? What she’s wearing? Et cetera?”
“Affirmative.”
“Do we have someone on the ground in LA? To take care of this?”
“We have Cooper.”
Cooper; that’s too bad. The guy is dumb as a rock. Hayden’s mind runs rapidly through the alternatives. Or, rather, through the possible excuses to reject the only viable alternative. But he comes up blank. “That meeting can’t happen,” he concludes. “And that copy of the item must be retrieved. And destroyed. The woman too.”
“Yes sir.” A pause. “Lethal finding?”
This is not how it’s supposed to go, not at all. But the situation could spiral out of control, quickly. There’s no telling what other producers the woman may have lined up to pitch. One day, two days, and there would be nothing left Hayden could do to contain the manuscript. It would be out there, there would be a book deal or a film deal or both, the deal or deals would be reported same-day on some industry online gossip mill, and then picked up overnight and run in a New York tabloid in the morning, and by midday the online Times and AP would have run it, by afternoon it’d be on CNN and CNBC, and the major networks at the 6:30 broadcasts, all within twenty-four to thirty-six hours of this moment, this decision, right now, if he doesn’t give the instruction for some dimwitted goon to murder a poor civilian.
