by Chris Pavone
“I think so, yes. I hope so. But honestly?”
“No, Charlie, please lie to me.”
“Honestly Hayden, I just don’t know.”
Hayden took a sip of the Burgundy, trying to remain calm. This was very bad news. He couldn’t help chasing the worst-case scenarios through the corridors of his imagination, and a number of them led through his safe-deposit box in Basel.
Over the years Hayden had used more than a dozen miniature tape recorders, growing smaller and more discreet with each generation, and eventually giving way to the infinitely inconspicuous digital models. Then he procrastinated for a few years before undertaking the considerable and tedious task of transferring all the old analog tapes to digital storage, on CDs. And then more recently from CDs to flash drives. Ever smaller, more easily duplicated, effortlessly transmitted, with increasingly complex and tiresome security.
Or maybe the security isn’t really more complex, but Hayden has simply reached that fulcrum of age when all technological advances are the opposite of welcome.
Safe deposit boxes in Swiss banks have, thankfully, been relatively unchanged for the past forty years. Now all his life-insurance recordings sit on a single flash drive, so he no longer needs as big a metal drawer. Then again, he keeps a lot more cash in there than he used to.
CHAPTER 50
That was nice, she said. A dagger thrust into his stomach, then twisted: nice. That’s what you say after twenty years of marriage, not after your first time.
“Are you still thinking that we just wait?” Jeff pulls his boxer shorts over his ankles, facing away from Isabel now. He glances down at his penis, sticky and limp and faintly preposterous.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m beginning to wonder if we have to go public, somehow. Have a press conference, maybe. Try to have a press conference. Or just present ourselves to NBC or CNN or something, walk into an office and tell our story …”
Yes. This is what people like them would do, in this type of situation. “That sort of makes sense. Doesn’t it?” He settles back into bed beside her, but they’re not touching.
“I’m worried that going public only keeps us alive tomorrow. Then what, Jeffrey? Do we enter the witness protection program? Are we even witnesses to anything? Can we trust the people who are supposed to protect us?”
Jeff doesn’t answer.
“This is one of the most powerful men in America,” she continues. “And he’s intertwined with the CIA, operating illegally. They’ll kill us. No”—shaking her head—“the only way television works is if the author is on it, or someone else with firsthand knowledge. And obviously if the author wanted to do this on TV, he wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of writing the manuscript. He wouldn’t still be hiding. He’d just go on TV.”
The idea of the author hangs in the air between them, uncomfortably.
Jeff fidgets with his hands. He knows he needs to try harder to conceal the deep simmering resentment that accompanies his long-unrequited love, the festering heart sore caused by rejection, indifference, tepid affection. Because now, as ever, he’s sure that Isabel doesn’t love him. She had a need and he was at hand, so they’re in bed. He’s like a fast-food hamburger, not a four-star meal: in a pinch, he suffices. He’s a nice hamburger.
“Why do you think he doesn’t do that? Just go on television?”
Isabel lets out a dismissive snort. “He knows the limitations of TV. Knows there’s no way to tell a complex story like this on cable news, which would just reduce everything to a one-ring circus about the single most lurid detail. He wants the audience to understand more. Plus I’m sure he wants the permanence of a book, the validation, the legitimacy conferred by having it out there in the physical world, in stores and libraries, on people’s shelves and in their laps and coffee tables. There are still some stories that warrant a book. This is one of them.”
“You awake?”
“Mmmmmmm.” The halfway hum between awake and asleep.
“Can’t sleep,” he whispers. There’s too much buzzing around his brain, in bed with this woman after so many years, hiding in this house with this manuscript downstairs, with men with guns out there, maybe looking for him. “Going downstairs.”
“Mmm.”
Jeff walks down the long hall, the stairs. He closes the door to the stairs, a quiet buffer from Isabel. He doesn’t want to wake her.
He switches on the first light he can find by touch, on an end table, a bulbous ceramic thing with a pull chain, a twenty-five-watt bulb, ambered by a parchment shade. Deep shadows creep from every corner, behind every object.
He looks around in the soft light. He thought he’d left his bag here, on this couch. But it’s not there. He panics, eyes darting frantically. The panic lasts for only a second because there it is, on the floor, leaning up against the wall. Safe and sound.
Jeff opens the bag, removes the stack of paper, too thick for one hand, nearly a full ream. He deposits the manuscript on the glass-topped coffee table facing the floral-upholstered armchair with the small ottoman, in front of the fireplace. A nice place to read.
He takes two steps across the oval hooked rug, concentric elongated circles in blues and greens and dingy whites. He picks up the bulky fire screen, almost too heavy to lift with one hand, and moves it to the side. He crumples a few sheets of newspaper into the fireplace, atop the thin film of dust and ash, some shards of partially incinerated wood. He settles a fire-starter brick onto the newspaper, and a couple of small split logs on top. He slides open the long, slender box of wooden matches, and removes one, rough-hewn and splintering, its flammable phosphorous splashed onto its tip unevenly, wantonly. He strikes this messy match, and he stoops down, and he tucks the stick under the newsprint. The fire ignites.
Jeff wonders if this is how selling out always happens, for everyone, a clear-cut trade-off of integrity for success. He’d always assumed that the sellout was something that happens slowly, gradually, a long-term erosion of willpower, a chiseling-away at idealism, until you get to a point where the decision doesn’t even seem like a decision anymore, it’s just the thing that you do, and you don’t even realize that it’s selling out.
But no, here it is, upon him, different from what he imagined, as so many important things seem to end up being. Here it’s one fell swoop at a moment of weakness. His company is about to go under, and he knows he will not be one of the first of the newly unemployed to find a job. He’s saving his skin. It’s so trite.
It’s now clear to him that the most heinous part of selling out is that you betray someone’s trust. The trust of a friend, a family member, a colleague. Or even just your own trust of yourself, your self-respect. You do something, embrace something, believe something you know you should not. You do something you know isn’t right, isn’t what you intended to do. Isn’t who you wanted to be.
What do you get in return? It’s always the same, he imagines: you get success. It may come dressed in different costumes, but it’s probably always a similar calculation, for everyone, weighing the desire for some success against the cost of betraying someone’s trust.
Maybe everyone thinks the same thing: If it’s not me who makes this bargain, who betrays this trust, it’ll just be someone else who makes the sellout, someone else who benefits. There is always someone willing to take the bribe, the bait, the opportunity to run the division, the corporation, the world. There is always someone.
Should that person be me? That’s the question.
Jeff turns around, looks at the incendiary manuscript. He picks up the top inch. He turns back to the fireplace, and scatters the paper on the small smoldering fire. He blows softly at the gathering flames, and waits for them to catch, engulfing the pages from the bottom. By the light of its own flame, he rereads the top page before it curls and shrivels, then disappears.
He kneels there, feeding small stacks of paper into the growing conflagration, watching the manuscript burn, until every last page is up in smoke.
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br /> In the dim light by the front door, he kneels and opens her bag. At first glance he doesn’t see it. So he looks more carefully, and removes the large items, and still doesn’t see any thick stack of letter-size paper. It isn’t there.
Jeff rises, stands in the foyer, stares into the living room at the licking flickering flames, thinking back through the past hours, driving, shopping at the farmstand, arriving to the house, reading while Isabel prepared dinner in the kitchen, eating on the veranda. Then kissing, and walking upstairs, bed, sex, talking, that phone call.
Then he came back down here, and he burned his copy of the manuscript.
But he can’t remember the last time he saw her copy. Did she leave it in the car? Ditch it at the gas station? Did she hide it somewhere in this house? Where would she have had the opportunity …?
He turns on the kitchen light. He starts opening cupboards, and then drawers, one by one, as quietly as possible. There are a lot of places to hide something, in a kitchen. He looks on top of the glass-fronted hutch, and in the cabinet beneath the sink. In the oven. In the dishwasher. In the walk-in pantry and the tiny whitewashed washroom.
And when he eventually finds it, he grins.
The moon is casting dim shadows from the trees on the lawn that sweeps down to the rocky bluff, and the moonlight’s reflection is shimmering in the Sound, and he can barely see the lights of Connecticut twinkling in a low line across the water. Off to the east, away from the moonlight, the sky is filled with stars.
The slipcovered chair is deep and soft and enveloping, and Jeff sinks low, lower, his feet resting on the ticking-stripe cushion of the ottoman. He hears the creaking of the old wide-planked floorboards upstairs. The squeal of pipes and the distant vibration of running water, the click and hum of the pump in the cellar turning on, running, then a special type of quiet when it stops. Two-foot waves thrum the beach softly, regularly, an acoustic guitar strumming rhythm. He can smell a whiff of salt, carried on a gust of cool breeze.
He’s falling asleep, aware of the dreaminess of his thoughts, the surreal images marching through his brain, like troops trudging through an occupied city. He recognizes these thoughts as dreams; he knows that he’s dreaming. But he’s also not asleep, not totally; he’s still aware of the real world, of real sounds, real sensations. Or at least he thinks he is.
And then he knows he is, because it’s a real sound that pulls him into full consciousness, out of the half-asleep dream state: it’s a creak from the front of the house, from downstairs not up-, made by something or someone who’s not Isabel. It’s the creak of the front door halfway through its arc.
Jeff’s eyes flash open, but otherwise he doesn’t move. This is real; there’s someone in the house.
He stays frozen, slouched low in the deep chair, his eyes darting. He’s not sure if he can be seen from behind; he may be sunk low enough in the chair to be invisible. Then again, he may not be low enough.
Jeff hears a creak on the floorboards behind him. Another.
He’s been holding his breath too long, so he exhales slowly, silently, then inhales just as slowly, straining to be still, to be quiet, to be invisible.
And then a small tinny clang, a little piece of metal landing on the wooden floor. His bathroom sink’s washer, falling out of his pocket.
Damn.
It’s only a second later that he feels a thing touch his temple. For an instant he’s not completely positive, but then all doubt is erased that the thing is a gun when a man says, “Don’t move a muscle.”
This doesn’t make any sense, Jeff thinks. This isn’t part of the plan. There aren’t supposed to be any guns aimed in his direction. An idea scampers through his brain that he should try to explain to this man, but worries that his explanation may not do anything other than get him shot.
While the man holds a gun to Jeff’s head, a second man appears in front of him. A familiar man. Someone Jeff saw once before, months earlier.
He has always frequented a bar around the corner. In the nineties it was Max Fish across from his apartment on the Lower East Side, as well as the Irish pub O’Flaherty’s around the block from his office in Times Square. When he briefly lived uptown, the challenge was to find a place on Amsterdam that wasn’t perpetually mobbed with drunk ex-frat boys and sorority girls. And when he started spending a lot of his life on Union Square, he struggled to choose a bar that didn’t explode with happy-hour revelry every evening.
Because what he’s always looking for is elusive: a comfortable place that’s neither prohibitively crowded nor depressingly empty. A clientele older than college kids and twenty-something binge drinkers, but younger than the hardcore geezers who hunch over their Manhattans and Racing Forms in old-man bars. He wants a ballgame playing on one television in the corner, but not twenty big screens broadcasting the entire league’s play. A decent selection of whiskey, without paying eighteen dollars per glass. A kitchen that can produce an acceptable burger, but not a fussy unaffordable patty made with braised short rib or stuffed with foie gras.
What Jeff wants is a place to work after work hours, to bridge the lonely distance between office and bed. In the twenty-plus years that he has lived in New York City, he has cohabitated with another human being for a total of only five; there was a one-year roommate at the get-go, and then a long-term girlfriend in his late twenties, and later a short-term wife. But for the other years he’s been solitary, like so many New Yorkers, eating dinner at bars, ordering in Chinese to consume on the couch, turning on the bedside reading lamp at two a.m. without worrying about waking anyone.
This he thinks is the secret to New York City’s vast productivity: everyone works all the time to avoid facing their loneliness.
It was a normal lonely evening when Jeff headed to the old bar up on Eighteenth Street, leaving the office in the dark wet cold of early-winter seven p.m., red taillights faced off against white headlights on Park Avenue South, selfish suit-wearing jackasses whose golf umbrellas dominated the entire width of sidewalks, women in short skirts and tall heels trying to hail cabs on every corner, the welcoming glow from shops and restaurants and bars and lounges, customers rushing in and staggering out.
As he turned off the avenue a gust of crosstown wind ballooned his little five-dollar umbrella, snapping a few aluminum ribs. Although the wind was strong, the rain was light, which made his cheap umbrella more trouble than it was worth; he tossed it in the wire-mesh can on the corner, and hustled down the block protected by only his waxy raincoat.
Jeff hung the heavy damp jacket on a peg by the door of the pub. He loves this coat—it’s comfortable and warm, it’s waterproof and dries quickly, it has good pockets in the right places, it fits over a sport jacket—but at the same time he hates its ubiquity, its association with a uniform for a team he’s not on.
He took a seat on a wooden stool at the far end of the bar, with an empty spot between himself and a pair of unappealing thirty-something women. One gave him a quick once-over, batting over-mascara’d eyelashes over a pink drink in a V-shaped glass, which was not the thing to order in this bar. This was a beer place.
He turned away, unpacked a short stack of proposals from his satchel, his Sheaffer fountain pen from his flannel jacket. He ordered a first pint of ale; he’d order a second with food. He read the covering letters of a few proposals, pitches from agents about why this, that, and the other project should exist in the world, how respected So-and-So is, what a hot topic such-and-such is. Guaranteed publicity. Can’t-miss special-sales opportunities. Superlatives and exaggerations and misrepresentations and at least one outright falsification.
A man took the stool next to Jeff, ordered a Belgian ale. Jeff looked up at the sound of the man’s voice, urbane and upper-class, out of place in this downtown pub. A voice that belonged in Bemelmans Bar, or maybe the Union Club, visiting from Boston, or from the 1920s.
The two sat in companionable silence for a few minutes while the Knicks quickly went down 12–3, and the bartender
busied himself mixing new drinks for the women, then filling a tray of beer glasses for a large group at a table, before heading to the far end of the bar to chat with a better-looking, younger pair of women.
That’s when the man said, “You’re Jeffrey Fielder, aren’t you?”
Jeff turned to face this stranger. Somewhere between mid-fifties and late-sixties; tall and fit, schoolboy spectacles and neatly combed gray hair, well-dressed, maybe too, with a peacocky pocket square poking out of his tailored sport jacket. The type of man you see in expensive uptown restaurants, or boardrooms. Not that Jeff had ever been in a boardroom. Or even really knew what a boardroom was. But the guy didn’t look like the type of person who hung around a place like this.
“Do we know each other?” Jeff tried to muster a smile, pushing through the vague discomfort of a mid-forties man with a mediocre memory and a long history of inebriation, confronted with this type of situation. He’d met plenty of people who he later couldn’t remember. Especially men. He forgot dozens, maybe hundreds, of men per year. Forgetting men was practically his hobby.
“No.” The man shook his head. “You don’t know me.”
Jeff raised his eyebrows, asking for an explanation.
“I’m a sort of, I guess you’d call it an enthusiast about book publishing.”
Was this guy a stalker? A frustrated failed novelist, looking for a way to get published? “Uh-huh.” Or a rejected writer, looking for revenge?
“I’ve been studying the book business recently, learning about the process. Agents, editors, writers. Contracts, royalties, legal issues. Libel and such.”
Jeff was now fully turned in his barstool, facing this guy. He certainly didn’t look threatening, nor was he behaving in a scary fashion; he looked like an art dealer, is what he looked like. But this was definitely a creepy conversation.
Jeff had been stalked once, by the writer of a book proposal who had come to the office with her ineffective agent for a meet-and-greet. Then Jeff had declined to make an offer on the project, as had apparently every other editor during multiple rounds of submissions, and the writer eventually resorted to alternative methods of trying to sell her project. Which included stalking and then propositioning Jeff—boldly and explicitly and not exactly quietly—and after he refused she called his home and nevertheless told his wife that he had not refused, unleashing a whole shitstorm from which his marriage never recovered.
