The Accident

by Chris Pavone

  “Well?”

  The big man shifts in his seat, leans toward Brad. “A year ago, Charlie Wolfe started puttin’ out feelers, quietly, about runnin’ for Senate. Did you catch wind of this?”

  Brad shakes his head. This isn’t the type of gossip that reaches him; nor would he pay attention if it did.

  “As part of his strategy, Wolfe had begun the process of writin’ a book, a memoir, with prescriptive elements—you know, the same bullshit everyone writes when they run for office. An excuse to be on the Today show and Face the Nation, profiles in Newsweek and the Journal”—waving a hand at the cast-aside newspaper.

  “Aren’t those books how you make your living, Trey?”

  “Well that doesn’t mean I like ’em, now does it?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Early on, Wolfe himself came to see me about the book, lookin’ for advice; I knew his father, who sent him my way. Charlie was writin’ with his lieutenant, who was doin’ most-a the heavy liftin’, and all the actual typin’. I put together a quickie collaboration agreement for them. They worked on this project for a couple-three months, somethin’ like that. Then the coauthor? He up and killed himself.”

  “You’re saying this is the submission we received?” Brad can’t quite wrap his mind around this. “You’re saying that Charlie Wolfe himself is the author?”

  “Well, author is somethin’ of a misnomer in this situation. I’m sayin’ that most of the information in this book came from Charlie Wolfe. But some of the story—I imagine there are damagin’ aspects to it—was filled in by someone else. Perhaps invented by someone else.”

  “Who?”

  “The same person who was workin’ on the book to begin with. His college friend, his chief strategist, and his coauthor, all rolled into one tidy package.”

  “That’s Dave Miller.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “But Dave Miller is dead.” Brad realizes he’s on the edge of his seat, about to pitch forward onto the rug, which is the size of a basketball court. Maybe bigger. He forces himself to lean back in his chair. “He faked his suicide?”

  “That’s certainly possible.”

  Brad rolls this around in his brain, staring across the room toward immense windows, tremendous sheets of streakless glass set into gleaming polished brass. “So you’re saying that when Miller found out he had terminal cancer, he had some sort of crisis of conscience, or … or whatever, and decided he wanted to finish this book project. To get the full Charlie Wolfe story into the world.”

  Freeley drains the last of his drink, says nothing.

  “But he couldn’t just sit there in his living room in Washington, typing away on a computer. Because if Wolfe has skeletons in his closet, he’d never let Miller do this. In fact, he’d make extra-sure that this was exactly what Miller wasn’t doing. Wolfe would do what …? He’d have Miller’s phones bugged, computer hacked, house monitored …”

  The waiter arrives, and replaces Freeley’s empty glass with a fresh full one.

  “And if there’s anyone in the world who would know how Wolfe would react, and what he would do to quash the book, it’s Miller. But still Miller wanted to—needed to—publish it. So he faked his suicide. He disappeared somewhere with the old research material, and spent a half-year—is that how long ago he supposedly died?—to finish writing the book.”

  Freeley takes a sip of his amber liquid, plunks his heavy glass down onto the thick coaster on the thin tabletop.

  “That’s an awful lot of trouble to go to, for a man on his deathbed. Why would he?”

  Freeley still doesn’t say anything. He wants Brad to figure out the same thing he figured out, in the same way, without any help. Freeley wants the confirmation that this is the inevitable interpretation.

  “Because Wolfe did something truly horrible,” Brad concludes. “That’s the only way this makes sense. There’s something in Wolfe’s past that’ll absolutely ruin him. Ruin other people too. And that’s what’s in the book.”

  Brad thinks Freeley nods, or maybe it’s just the motion of chewing nuts.

  “And of course Wolfe is certainly aware of his own past, and of the danger. So he’d do anything—anything—to prevent this.” Now it all makes total sense. “Listen, Trey: somebody strange came to see me too. Possibly the same guy who came to see you.”

  The lawyer looks up.

  “It was a few months ago. And the guy claimed to be NSA, but I had no way of knowing if that was true. Anyway, he told me that if we received a submission like this—a biography of Wolfe, one that contained bombshell revelations—then it’d be a fake. A hoax, being perpetrated for the purpose of orchestrating a hostile corporate takeover.”

  Freeley chews on this. “And this man, what did he want from you?”

  “He was telling me—he was ordering me—to contact him if we received this.”

  “And have you?”

  “Not yet. I called you. What are my options, Trey?”

  “Options?” Freeley rummages around in the nut bowl, digging for something, finds it. “You don’t have any options, McNally.” He pops another cashew.

  “But what about the First Amendment? What about freedom of the press? What about an informed citizenry being the only true repository of the public will?”

  Freeley snorts. “This isn’t civics class, McNally. And you’re not a crusader, or a revolutionary. You’re a book publisher, McNally. A businessman.”

  Brad shifts in his chair.

  “And maybe,” the lawyer continues, “the manuscript is a hoax.” He leans forward, rests his elbows on his haunches. “Maybe this is another failure of imagination, on our part … I mean, a fake biography would be sorta genius, wouldn’t it?”

  “Whose side are you on, Trey?”

  “Ha! Side?! I’m not on anyone’s side. I don’t have skin in this game, McNally. And you need to remember that neither do you.” Freeley leans back in his chair, satisfied with his own certainty.

  “Trey?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you have any idea what’s in the book?”

  “No, McNally, and I don’t care to. Neither should you.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Isabel walks past the cashier and around the fast-food counter, the stench of nitrates laying siege to her nostrils, hot dogs rotating on their bed of steel rods. The bathroom is incomprehensibly large, room for three or even four times the number of facilities, and reeks of industrial-grade cleaner. She relieves herself, and washes her hands, and splashes water on her face. She smooths her hair, and stares into the mirror. She wonders, again, if this is going to work. And what’s going to happen if it doesn’t.

  Isabel plucks a few paper towels. Picks her bag off the floor, walks to an uncluttered corner of the restroom. She wipes down the floor with the towels, then carefully upends the contents of her bag onto this cleanish surface. She sorts through everything, all the familiar items, the compact and wallet and lipsticks and business-card case and sunglasses and other whatnots. The rubber-band-bound manuscript. All this stuff is definitely hers; nothing unfamiliar.

  She takes the empty bag itself in hand, the crumpled pile of black leather and steel studs and zippers and clasps, with a designer’s nameplate riveted to the side. A conspicuously expensive bag, the shackles of a peculiar form of slavery. She loathes the impulse that made her buy it, another lemming at a boutique, casually sliding her credit card onto the gleaming counter as if a sixteen-hundred-dollar handbag were just another daily purchase, a dozen eggs, a bottle of shampoo.

  She runs her hand along the surface of the bag, her fingertips rubbing one leather plane, another, another. Along the seams, across the bottom. She doesn’t feel anything strange, doesn’t see anything abnormal.

  And then finally she does, a stud of a different size, in the wrong spot. She folds the leather over itself and brings it closer to her face and glances down at this thing. It isn’t a stud at all, but a different type of little metal disk. Sh
e pinches it between two fingertips, and pulls, and the small rivet-like shape slides out smoothly. She turns it over, examines the sharp pin that affixed this thing that’s not hers to the thing that is.

  This is it, the tracking device. This is what had been attached to her bag at the restaurant, way back at breakfast, when that man brushed past her. This is how she was followed, when it was impossible to have been followed.

  She puts the device back on the floor. Uses her toe to push the little thing into the gray grout at the corner where the white wall tile meets the taupe vinyl flooring, exactly where something like this would fall if it somehow detached from her bag, and got kicked into a corner inadvertently by someone who never felt the little piece of metal touch her toe.

  So now Jeffrey’s compromised cell phone is in the East River, and his bugged pen is probably in the pocket of some tourist from the Empire State Building. Isabel’s cell is in that woman’s green bag, and this little device here is lying in a film of disinfectant on a gas-station restroom floor. They should now be completely free of surveillance. Electronic surveillance, that is.

  And with the purchase of the gas using someone else’s credit card, it will appear that Isabel is running from the city and trying to hide, but failing. Whoever is tracking her will still think—will still be certain—that her destination is her client Judy’s beach house in Amagansett.

  Isabel has known for hours that she was being tracked. She made a show of being elusive, in order to make the next elusion successful. Or at least to appear to be successful. It is not a straightforward cat-and-mouse situation.

  She walks back through the convenience store, grabs a couple of things without particularly thinking, pays in cash, pretends to notice the security camera and quickly turns away, hiding her face from the lens.

  She returns to the gassed-up Mercedes, clutching a Diet Coke and a bag of pretzels, slipping the new pack of cigarettes into her sanitized handbag.

  Jeffrey pulls out of the service station, onto a quiet exurban road that suddenly turns into a cluttered commercial stretch. Isabel notices the sign for an outlet mall, and something occurs to her. “Pull in here,” she says.

  “We’re going shopping?”

  They hustle into a chain store, men’s clothing on one side, women’s on the other. “Choose new pants and shirt,” she says. “Meet me at the register.”

  When their transaction is finished—cash, again—she leads Jeffrey back out to the endless stretch of glass-fronted storefronts, finds restrooms in a brightly lit hall with vending machines and water fountains. “Go change,” she says. “Throw your old clothes in the garbage.”

  He raises his eyebrows.

  “There could be tracking devices on them. Or transmitting. Or whatever. Just do it.”

  On the road again, speeding alongside expanses of sod, the flat emerald tracts presided over by massive irrigation sprinklers, looking like the landing apparatuses of UFOs. They drive past fields of corn and potatoes, plant nurseries and paddock fencing, the small nylon flags on the greens of golf courses, flapping in the breeze. White-clapboard churches, tall and tight and towering into the bright blue sky. Farmstands boasting local produce, homemade pie, on hand-painted signs.

  The road curves and dips and rolls under a leafy canopy, then emerges into the open, with fields and sky on either side. There are now more grapevines than anything, with signs every few miles to TURN HERE for a winery, a tasting room, a vineyard. They catch their first sight of the water, along a rocky-sandy strip of a beach. Then the road leaves the shoreline again, through woods and a hodgepodge of houses, vinyl-sided split-levels and modest little Capes and ill-proportioned contemporaries, then a cluster of Victorians in a dense village, then all at once the trees and houses fall away and there’s water everywhere, left and right, sailboats and whitecaps and long stretches of pebbly beach.

  She glances over and catches Jeffrey eyeing her, and gives him a coy little smile. He looks sheepish and returns his attention to the road, accelerating across the wind-whipped causeway, speeding toward the end of the continent. Isabel tries to lose herself in the scenery, the idea of being here, out of the city, surrounded by blues and greens, water and sand, grass and trees, alongside this man who loves her, this man she might love.

  An escape from life, an escape from reality. But not even that: this is just the fantasy of an escape, a fleeting self-delusion. She manages to get a second’s relaxation out of it, maybe two, before the reality of this flight crashes to the forefront of her mind, like a desperate junky bursting into a twenty-four-hour convenience store at two a.m., waving a gun in a shaking hand.

  “Turn left up here.”

  Jeffrey leans forward, over the wheel. “Where?”

  “There, that little clearing.”

  He turns the car onto the gravel, nuzzling the front fender against a weathered chain hanging from chunky wooden posts. Isabel climbs out of the car, unhooks the chain, lets it fall. She waves Jeff through, then replaces the chain and climbs back into the passenger seat. This is their second stop in five minutes; the first was to buy vegetables at a farmstand. Dinner.

  Jeffrey drives slowly, bumping over the narrow rutted dirt path through thick vine-choked woods, climbing a slight grade, occasionally a glimpse of open farmland through the trees. They come to a circular drive surrounding a stand of trees, a shingled house bordered by tall grasses.

  They get out of the car, walk to the side of the house, where it becomes clear that they’re atop a towering bluff, a steep drop of fifty feet—more?—down to a rocky beach, slate-blue water, a sliver of land on the horizon.

  “Nice place,” Jeffrey says. “What’s that land over there?”

  “Connecticut.”

  “Aren’t the Hamptons on the Atlantic?”

  She can’t tell if he’s being genuine or facetious. “Did you notice us driving through any towns called Hampton? Westhampton, Southampton, Bridgehampton?” This is one of those things assumed by New Yorkers of a certain type: that everyone is familiar with the geography of the South Fork of Long Island.

  “What do I know from the Hamptons? I thought we were taking a shortcut. The back roads. Whatever.”

  She shakes her head.

  “But isn’t Judy’s house in the Hamptons?”

  “It is. But we’re not going there: that’s where I want people to think we’re going. I want them to follow us to Judy’s house. But we’re nowhere near there.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you want them—whoever they are—to go to Judy’s house?”

  “Because her place is next door to a movie star’s house with head-of-state-level security. If anyone unsavory shows up there, taking unsavory action, there’ll be a full-out war.”

  Isabel rummages around a large terra-cotta planter filled with lavender, digs out a set of keys on a hardware-store ring. She unlocks the front door, large and heavy and inset with panels of stained glass, a loud creak as it swings open.

  She drops her bag in the foyer and walks into the large living room with the view of the water, shimmering in the late-afternoon light. The beadboard walls offer a very different view, of hundreds of black-and-white photos of every size and shape and type, from tiny Polaroids up through poster-size prints. Each and every one of people.

  “So whose house is this?”

  “Naomi’s.”

  “Ah.” Jeffrey nods. “I ran into her just this afternoon.” Everyone in New York book publishing knows—or knows of—the owner of the independent bookstore in Greenwich Village, in whose front room many a first novelist had their first readings.

  Jeffrey examines the wall. “What’s with all the photos? This sort of looks like the work of a serial killer. I didn’t realize Naomi was nuts.”

  “These are Naomi’s friends. Her life. These are all people who’ve visited this house over the past decade. This had been her parents’ house; the bookstore was theirs too.” Isabel scans the wall. “Naomi lov
es film, of every sort. She used to be a filmmaker.” She locates the picture she’s looking for, a glossy eight-by-ten at eye height. “Look.” She points. “We spent a long weekend here.”

  She watches Jeffrey lean in to get a better look, Isabel with her son and ex-husband. She looked so much younger back then; so much happier. But it wasn’t that long ago.

  “It was our last vacation.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Naomi needs to use both hands to carry the giant bottle of donated Italian white, pouring sloppy splashes into flimsy cups. The bookstore plays host to some glass-stemware parties, and some plastic-cup parties; this is one of the latter.

  The author finished his reading and Q&A a half-hour earlier, but he’s still seated at the small table in the back room, inscribing books and chatting with his friends, who like him are in their late twenties, nearly all the men wearing plaid or porkpies with tight blue jeans rolled at the cuff. The women all seem to have glittering little studs in their nostrils, and ironic eyeglasses or haircuts, or both.

  Naomi squeezes the author’s shoulder as she walks by, a more intimate gesture than their relationship warrants. But her business is cultivating intimacy with authors, as well as with editors and publishers, publicists and sponsors—the jug wine has been donated, as has the cheap cheese—and bloggers and newspapers, and the community board and the principals of the local elementary schools, and anyone else who can help a bookshop maintain its presence as a neighborhood institution, a cultural center, a community resource.

  She walks out the French doors and down the few steps into the backyard, which had always been a neglected overgrown haven for rats and pigeons during the decades that her parents owned the shop. They’d started the radical left-wing bookstore back in the early seventies, when such an enterprise constituted a viable retail segment, bizarrely. Over the years Berger’s Books transformed into a general bookstore, reflecting the evolution of the Village itself, from a low-rent haven for artists and writers and musicians and intellectuals, then to the epicenter of East Coast gay life, then to an enclave for yuppies who preferred their gentrification with a whiff of bohemian, and most recently the realignment that accompanied an influx of the downright rich and famous, refugees from Beverly Hills and the Upper East Side who pay five million for one-bedroom penthouses. Bleecker Street was once littered with cluttered little shops selling beat-up antiques and used vinyl and secondhand books and novelty condoms. Now it is almost exclusively high-end fashion.