by Chris Pavone
He waits another minute. His breathing has slowed to nearly normal, and he can feel sweat cooling on his back, his chest, his lightweight T-shirt moist and heavy. He’s almost ready to move, to hop the low fence that separates the yards, to climb the fire escape, to fold himself through his bedroom window …
He walks across the yard, head swiveling left and right, back behind him. He climbs the ladder, hand over hand, up the exterior of the painted brick building to the fourth floor, high above these postage-stamp lawns in northern Switzerland.
He peers through his bedroom window. He can see an empty slice of living room, an angled view on the front door. Nothing looks out of the ordinary. But then again, there’s not much he can see.
As a rule he leaves this window unlocked, willing to sacrifice one bit of security for another, in this exact situation, right now. He’s not terribly afraid of getting burgled in Zurich; what he’s afraid of is getting apprehended by the CIA.
He applies pressure with the heels of both palms, pushing up on the old wood, the frame beginning to slide.
That’s when he notices the front door opening.
It was after midnight, and nearly all the other tables were empty, the kitchen closed, the restaurant winding down another busy night. The woman leaned back in her dining chair, and the author leaned toward her, anxious to hear what she had to say, desperate to not miss it.
A pair of waiters shared a joke at the service station, while on the other side of the room two busboys stood wearily, dead on their feet. The bartender was sliding a fresh drink across the bar, with a sly smile, to a woman who’d already slid off her stool at least once. The maître d’ was reading the Post from the back page forward. The music was louder than expected from a place this expensive, and it was Led Zeppelin, of all goddamned things.
And this woman was staring at Charlie. “Yes,” she said, “I know who you are.”
And Charlie was staring back at her, steely jawed, his whole body tensed, coiled.
And the author’s heart was beating so fast he thought he’d croak, right then and there, pitching forward onto the starched white tablecloth. He was holding his breath, running out of oxygen.
And then she said, “You’re on television, aren’t you?”
She’d had no idea whatsoever what was on the line, that night. She didn’t know that their first meeting in the bar had been staged; didn’t know that Charlie’s arrival to the restaurant had been orchestrated; didn’t know that the two men were on the edge of their seats, two unintentional murderers who were toying with the idea of the premeditated crime, against her. She didn’t know any of this, back then. Though now she most certainly did.
As it turned out, it wasn’t from Ithaca fifteen years earlier that she recognized Charlie. She knew his face from his on-air appearances. The domestic news station was just about to launch, and Charlie was already well known in media circles. Now he was on the verge of being famous to the world at large, and it was apparently this woman’s job to be familiar with this ever shifting population. “People on the precipice of fame,” she said, “are my business.”
So she was not a witness. There was no witness.
The author’s relief was immense, an ecstatic relief, incomparable to any mere orgasm. He immediately invited the woman to a second date, the following week.
He scampers down the fire-escape stairs, grateful for the foamy rubber soles of his shoes, nearly soundless on the sturdy framework. He lands on the brick path, retraces his steps through the yards, the alley, running again down the middle of the leafy street, his pace quicker than before, faster than he’ll be able to maintain, fighting the urge to turn around, to look for pursuers. Innocent joggers don’t check to see who’s behind them. He needs to look like an innocent jogger.
He rejoins the stream of exercisers in the thin park along the lake, the sweat-drenched joggers, the middle-agers with their hiking poles, the beefy cyclists with spiky hair in full regalia of garish Lycra straining against sausages both consumed and concealed, interspersed with the business-attired on touring bikes and on foot, heading downtown.
He turns round the busy bend of Bellevueplatz to cross the river mouth at Quaibrücke, running out of steam, slowing down, panting. When he enters the Bürkliterrasse garden he stops, as if this is his purposeful destination, the end point of a planned route. He puts his right foot up on the edge of a bench, leans forward for a calf stretch, looking back in the direction from whence he came, scanning the crowds. He switches legs, looks in the other direction, while reviewing a mental checklist of his backup plan. His alternative backup plan.
He starts walking through Belvoir on the west side of the lake, the mirror image of his neighborhood, the two areas facing each other across the water. He turns a corner and passes through a modern matte metal gate and continues around the side of the contemporary glass-and-steel building, on a paved path lined with high healthy shrubs. He kneels at the base of the third bush, reaches in to find the knobby trunk, strains his hand around the trunk.
He extracts his arm from the foliage, looks at his palm, holding the small metal hide-a-key box. He slides it open and removes two keys. One of them unlocks the rough-hewn slab of the building’s front door, and he walks through the airy lobby, up one flight of stairs to Apartment 4, a sans-serif brushed-steel numeral floating above the ebonized wood.
He leans against the door, straining his hearing, to try to pick up any sounds within the apartment.
Nothing.
He’s standing in front of Vanessa’s apartment, the sexy management consultant he’d met in the park and then picked up in the Widder for that threesome, who’s game for the occasional date, a casual dinner and a satisfying fuck, a quick congenial breakfast before work.
After one of these nights he’d managed to steal her keys, copy them, and return them a few hours later, standing in the lobby of her office building, with apologies; he’d picked up the wrong set on his way out the door. They shook hands when they parted.
Vanessa tends to leave home by 7:45 a.m., at her desk by 8:15 latest. It’s now 8:22. He slides that duplicate key into the lock, turns, clicks. The door swings open, heavy and smooth and silent on its well-oiled hinges. His eyes dart around the kitchen, dining alcove, living room, large window to a leafy yard, coffee table, wineglasses. Plural.
And a pair of men’s shoes.
CHAPTER 45
Brad tries for the second time in ten minutes, but again his call is immediately connected to voice mail, Hi this is Jeff—
He puts down the phone without leaving a message, and unpauses the music, halfway through what he still thinks of as the second side of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, even though he replaced his vinyl version with this CD … When was it? Twenty-five years ago?
He stares out the window of his home office tucked into what was built as a maid’s room, back in the days when everyone here on Park Avenue had a live-in maid. It’s a small room, big enough for only a loveseat and a few bookshelves and a desk with a banker’s lamp and a comfortable chair, a casement window that faces the courtyard, and the windows of dozens of other maid’s rooms and kitchens and bathrooms and the landings of the stairwells where the teenagers and some of the more desperate stay-at-home moms sneak cigarettes.
Brad had thought he’d been around long enough to see every circumstance in the book-publishing business present itself. He has seen surprise bestsellers come out of nowhere while supposedly guaranteed hits bombed, abysmally. He has encountered ecstatic authors and belligerent authors and authors who summarily broke contracts or initiated lawsuits or committed suicide or simply flipped out. He has seen books with signatures bound upside down, books distributed with the author’s name misspelled on the dust jacket, books missing their final crucial pages or cataloging-in-publication data, books with factual inaccuracies and libelous misstatements and egregious errors of judgment and taste.
But he’s never seen this before. He looks down
at the manuscript, at his salvation or his ruin, so often intertwined. Glances at his scratch pad, the calculations of the revenue that could be generated by publishing The Accident.
They should be able to charge twice as much for this book, goddamnit. For any book. Over the two-plus-decades that Brad has worked in this business, the prices of all consumer goods have climbed steadily—movie tickets doubled, a dozen eggs up about 250 percent, gasoline nearly 300 percent. But in 1991 a typical new hardcover retailed for $22. And today? Up to only $26. An 18 percent increase. No wonder his publishing house—hell, the whole publishing industry—is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.
He pushes the window all the way open. He peers down, around, looking to see if anyone noticed his window open. He opens his middle desk drawer and removes a small leather jewelry box, bought in a flea market twenty years ago. He digs the box’s tiny key out from the bottom of a silver bowl that holds loose change. He opens the box, and peers inside.
Brad pays himself an annual salary of a nice round $500,000, the same amount that the firm has budgeted for the publisher position for a decade now. Putting two kids through college—after a combined thirty years’ worth of private-school tuition—while still keeping Manhattan bedrooms available to them, a half-million per year doesn’t make you rich. It barely suffices.
Now it appears that he will never earn more, and quite possibly less, and perhaps even nothing. Luckily when the kids had both moved up to middle school Lucy returned to work, seamlessly sliding back into her job as a schoolteacher. This year her seventy-some-odd-thousand-dollar-per-year salary, after taxes, does not quite cover the maintenance costs of the apartment. But Brad is beginning to suspect that next year her income—and especially her iron-clad health insurance, union-procured and -guaranteed—will come in handy, when McNally & Sons—one of the last remaining independent publishers of any size—will have been sold, and he, the chief executive who presided over its demise, will have been put out to pasture. It’s not just Jeffrey Fielder who’s staring down the barrel of involuntary retirement.
Brad extracts two baggies from the green leather box. He removes a pipe from one, a pinch of marijuana from the other.
Will anyone ever hire him, ever again? A fifty-something ex-publisher? Or is this the last year of his life that he’ll have a regular full-time job? Is this his last month coming to work?
Wow, he thinks: the finish line certainly snuck up on me.
He leans on his windowsill, ignites the pipe, and inhales deeply. He holds the smoke in his lungs for a five count, then exhales, into the shared space of the courtyard.
Ahhhh.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Brad.” His wife is standing in the doorway, hand on hip. He didn’t even hear the door open, what with the David Bowie. “With the kids in the house?”
He opens his mouth to respond, but nothing comes out.
Lucy shakes her head in disgust. “Milo still needs a walk,” she says, and closes the door behind her.
He returns to his desk, his dilemma, his decision. He has been agonizing about this all day, and all night.
On the one hand, Brad is convinced that whatever damaging revelations are in this manuscript will be absolutely true, and that the thing should be published, and that this greedy unethical bastard should be exposed, while at the same time rescuing McNally & Sons from bankruptcy or takeover, plus saving his own career and livelihood. There’s a lot of upside.
On the other hand, it’s possible that the federal agent—if that’s indeed what that Joseph Lyons guy really is—was telling the truth. That the manuscript is a hoax, perpetrated for the purpose of stock manipulation, hostile takeover, with millions—billions?—of dollars at stake. Lord knows people have done far worse, for far less.
But if the manuscript is true, and Wolfe is in cahoots with black ops of the CIA, then Brad himself could be facing arrest on trumped-up charges, shipped out to Guantánamo. Or simply shot.
He refires his pipe, inhales deeply, exhales slowly.
He picks up his cell phone, and places yet another call that goes through to voice mail. But this time he leaves a message: “Hi Freeley, McNally here. I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I’ve decided to go through with it. To try to publish this thing, as instantly as possible.” Even the phrase instant book makes him tingle. “Please call back to discuss how I should proceed. Thanks.”
He places the phone on the mahogany blotter of his boyhood desk, and listens to the lounge-singery “Rock and Roll Suicide,” the end of the album. Then, with the music over, he can hear that Milo the poodle is scampering around the apartment, having heard his name a few minutes earlier, ready for his nighttime perambulation.
Brad hefts his body out of his creaky chair, and puts on his ratty old canvas jacket, its pockets filled with plastic bags and loose change, with ticket stubs and dry-cleaning slips and grocery receipts, a permanent collection of crap that he totes around the neighborhood in this garment that he has owned for thirty-four years.
The agreeable poodle trots in front of Brad down the short hall, and waits at the elevator with his snout pressed up against the seam between the two doors, resolute to be the first to get through any passage, anywhere, anytime.
In the lobby they run into Mr. Benning from 7B, a prissy little sweater-wearing man dragging a prissy little sweater-wearing dog, some type of miniature terrier, excessively groomed, who snarls at Milo, who has the good sense to ignore it.
“That’s a good boy,” Brad mutters, as the dog immediately pulls the leash and Brad to the curb, and pees against a discarded Twix wrapper. Anything will do. “A good boy and a handsome boy. And good-looking. That’s right.” Nonsense. The dog stares at him, expressive eyebrows asking, Can we go? I smell something good over there. Can we go now? Over there?
Brad continues walking Milo along the quiet street, the dog sniffing and turning, intently assessing the aromas of his world.
This will be exciting, Brad thinks. The most exciting, most meaningful thing he’s ever done—will ever do—in his career. In his life. But it can’t be exciting unless there’s at least a little danger.
He hears two car doors close in near-perfect unison, from somewhere behind him, a quick thump-thump. He notices that the dog stops sniffing at the fire hydrant, spins around on his leash, looking up. Brad chuckles at his dog, the ten thousandth nervous laugh of his life, a half-century’s worth of filling uneasy silences with the sound, with the idea, of cheer.
Brad follows the dog’s attention, still smiling as he turns, still smiling as he hears the pop-pop, still smiling as he feels the sudden bewildering heat spreading through his chest.
CHAPTER 46
“The name is Naomi Berger … Yes, I’m sure there’s surveillance on her line … Why? Because she owns a radical bookshop in New York City … Of course, take all the time you need.”
Hayden returns his attention to the manuscript in his lap, sitting in the little boat that’s bobbing in the moonlit water, gentle waves lapping at the hull. He reads a couple of pages, then the tech comes back on the line.
“Good …” Hayden pokes the bud farther into his ear. “Okay, go ahead.” He listens to the recorded phone conversation, uploaded from a federal database, between Isabel Reed and her friend Naomi Berger. Then he ends that call.
He nods at Tyler, who’s at the helm. “Let’s go.”
Tyler opens the throttle again, and the boat rips through the water, as Hayden returns to the manuscript, comparing this book’s version of events with his own recollections.
“Why are we outside?” Charlie asked. “Have you noticed that it’s, um, raining?”
Hayden took a few steps before answering. “Rain? This isn’t rain. You’re simply not accustomed to London weather.”
He used the tip of his full-length black umbrella to punctuate every other step. He’d been living in England for the better part of a year, and had grown accustomed to always carrying an umbrella. As well as to the continual state of m
ourning for Princess Diana.
“This is mist, Charlie. Rain is something quite different.”
“Be that as it may.”
“We’re outside, Charlie, because it’s impossible to bug outside, in the wide-open. It’s impossible for there to be a little transmitter tucked under the table, or a camera in the wall. It’s impossible for someone to be sneaking around in the room behind us.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And in order to achieve this level of security from undesirable surveillance, we sometimes must tolerate a certain amount of mist.”
They continued in silence for a half-minute on the lakeside path in St. James’s Park, toward the hulking behemoth of Buckingham Palace.
“So have you considered my proposal?”
The park was exploding with spring bulbs, bright bursts of color popping out of all that green, beneath all the dark damp gray.
“I have, Charlie. I have.”
“And?”
“Well, I’ll tell you.” Hayden stopped walking, turned toward his anxious young companion. “There’s a presidential candidate in Italy for whom we don’t care.”
Charlie tilted his head to the side.
“He has in the past strayed outside of his marriage. We don’t know for certain if he’s currently, um, wandering. But even if not, we doubt it would be difficult to arrange.”
Charlie tilted his head to the other side. Hayden wondered if one side was for listening, the other for thinking. Hayden wasn’t immensely impressed with young Mr. Wolfe’s intellect, but the guy had somehow managed to accomplish things that seemed to be rather difficult to accomplish.
“Are you telling me to entrap this guy, then expose him?”
