The Accident

by Chris Pavone

  Lesson being that you never know when crazy is going to show up, and there’s no real way to protect yourself. So it wasn’t really an actionable lesson, so much as simply the revelation of an unpleasant fact of life for anyone who’s in the business of making other people’s dreams come true, or dashing them.

  “How can I help you, Mister … I didn’t catch your name?”

  “You can call me Joseph Lyons. Joe.”

  “What does that mean? Is that your name?”

  “No, not really.” The guy smiled. “Mr. Fielder, someday soon—in the next few weeks, maybe, or within a few months—a manuscript will find its way to you. It may even arrive as an exclusive. This manuscript will be about Charlie Wolfe. It will—that is, the manuscript will—”

  Jeff appreciated the clarification of the pronoun’s antecedent. But this whole thing was making him tingle with fear.

  “—purport to be a revelatory, er, bombshell. It may be a full biography of the man’s life, or it may have a more limited scope. That aspect of the project isn’t completely clear to us, at the moment.”

  “Who’s us?”

  The man ignored the question. “What is clear is that this manuscript will claim that Mr. Wolfe did something, or some things, horrible. Unseemly. Perhaps illegal.” He shrugged. “Who knows.”

  The bartender stopped by, and this man ordered another beer, a pause in his story, looking around appreciatively. “This is a good place,” he said.

  “Yes,” Jeffrey agreed. “There’s a lot of liquor.”

  “Ha! Quoting Hemingway!” The bartender deposited the fresh glass, and this man picked it up, raised it toward Jeff. “Nicely done, Mr. Fielder. Nicely done.” He took a sip. The bartender retreated.

  “But what this manuscript will be, in fact, is a hoax. It’s being fabricated right now by a Danish freelancer, for the purposes of scandalizing Mr. Wolfe, collapsing the stock price of Wolfe Worldwide Media, leading to a hostile takeover of the company, and hundreds of millions—or even billions—in profit.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “Because I do.”

  Jeff snorted.

  The man nodded his acceptance of Jeff’s dubiousness. “You, Jeffrey Fielder, Brown Class of ’91, have a checking account at the JP Morgan Chase bank with slightly more than four hundred dollars in it, and revolving debt totaling slightly less than twelve thousand dollars. You live in an apartment 4A in Chinatown with an area of six hundred square feet. The last time you left the United States was two years ago, on a somewhat trumped-up business trip to London. Your favored Internet pornography website is the oldie but goodie, youporn.com.”

  Jeff cowered at this bit of humiliating invasiveness. “What do you want from me?”

  “I have a proposition for you, Mr. Fielder.”

  “A proposition?”

  “Here it is: do everything in your power to convince the literary agent, to convince your publisher, to convince everybody, that you want to acquire this, publish it.”

  That sounded like what he’d want to do anyway.

  “You want the agent to not submit it to other publishers. You want it to be exclusively with you, permanently with you. So that you can destroy it.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You will physically destroy any hard copies. Shred them, burn them, whatever.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “If the manuscript is e-mailed to you, you’ll delete the file. If it somehow ends up on other people’s computers—which you should do everything you can to prevent—use this.” The man reached into his jacket pocket, removed a thumb drive and a business card. “Plug the stick into any USB port, leave it there for five seconds, then remove it. All the files will be corrupted, the system will crash, the computer will be electronic scrap.”

  The man placed the small device and the card on the bar. “If you run into difficulties, if something goes wrong, or if anything happens whatsoever, you call me.”

  “Anything like what?”

  “Any thing anything. The agent gets an offer. Or the author contacts you. Or strange men—that is, as strange as me, or stranger—come knocking on your door.” The man tapped the card. “That’s my phone number. Keep it safe.”

  Jeff looked down. “And?”

  “And what?”

  “And why should I do this? Just because you know I’m broke? Everyone knows I’m broke. I haven’t committed any crime; you have nothing on me. And frankly it sort of sounds like you’re full of shit.”

  The man nodded. “That’s fair. You want to know what’s in it for you. Besides the heartfelt but silent thanks of an ignorantly grateful nation.”

  “I do.”

  “Okay, here’s what I promise you, Jeffrey Fielder: Once this manuscript has been successfully eradicated from the face of the earth, Charlie Wolfe will call you, out of the blue. He’ll tell you that he admires your track record, your principles. He’ll ask if you’re interested in publishing his own memoir.”

  Jeff raised his eyebrows.

  “Editors who acquire and edit these types of books, by people like Mr. Wolfe, they’re well treated in your business, aren’t they? They ought to be. These books generate tremendous amounts of revenue. I’d think that the people who pull in that revenue are rewarded. That’s capitalism, right?”

  The man leaned toward Jeff. “This is the book that will make you a star, Mr. Fielder. An invaluable asset. A well-compensated one, with job security. A rarity in today’s precarious economic environment. You’re how old?”

  Jeff couldn’t help but notice another solo man walk into the bar, out of the rain. Jeff wondered if this new arrival were connected; he kept his eye on the new guy as he settled at the other end of the room.

  “You know how old I am.”

  “That’s true. I do.”

  “So you’re bribing me?”

  “Bribe is not an attractive word, is it? And I don’t think it’s the operative concept here.”

  Book editors receive a lot of bizarre propositions. But this had been, by far, the bizarrest.

  “And what if I say no?”

  “We both know that no isn’t a viable option for you.” The man took another sip of his beer.

  “The hoax will never be successfully perpetrated, Mr. Fielder. With or without you. It will be stopped, with arrests and jail if necessary. Perhaps worse.”

  “Worse?”

  “There is no upside to attempting to publish it. There’s only upside in preventing the publication. You might as well take advantage of the upside.”

  The man beckoned the bartender. “I’ll settle up, please. And I’ll take care of my friend too.” The man peeled off two twenties.

  Jeff stared into the top of his pint glass, the foam dissipated, now just a flat nut-brown surface.

  “This is not so bad, is it, Mr. Fielder?”

  Jeff didn’t answer. In the overall scheme of sellouts, this certainly wasn’t as bad as he could’ve imagined. But it was also not exactly what he had planned as a career-advancement maneuver. Though in fact he had no specific plans in that regard.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” the man said, rising from his stool. “There’s another reason why you’ll want to accept my proposition. The most compelling reason.” The man leaned in toward Jeff, the smells of a sandalwood cologne and caramely ale. “Because if you fail to comply”—he leaned in closer—“I will kill you.”

  “I thought we had an agreement.” That same man is now backlit by the glow of the low fire. Jeff’s copy of the manuscript is completely incinerated atop the smoldering logs, flames licking from beneath. “Did I misunderstand?”

  Jeff can’t quite find his voice.

  “You were meant to call me. If you did something like, say, flee from town. Weren’t you, Mr. Fielder?”

  Jeff swallows, then says, “She threw my phone into the East River.”

  The man chuckles.

  “What was I supposed to do?”

  “I guess not let h
er wasn’t an option?”

  “No, it wasn’t. And by the way”—gathering indignation—“can you get that fucking gun off my head?”

  The man in front of him nods; the one behind lowers the weapon. Jeff takes a nearly comical breath of relief.

  “What are you doing here?” Jeff asks.

  “We’re finding you. And her. Is she upstairs? Asleep?”

  “What do you want from her?”

  The man reaches into the waistband of his pants, and pulls out his own gun.

  “Come on, Mr. Fielder, don’t be disingenuous. You know what I want.”

  CHAPTER 51

  The author climbs back onto the toilet lid, and finishes opening the air duct. He reaches into the dark cavity, where he has stowed a backup set of his most crucial go-supplies, for the unfortunate contingency that just came to pass: his cover is blown, and he can’t get into his apartment.

  He pulls out another doctored passport, with which he’ll be able to cross borders, and a rolled-up rubber-banded wad of cash, with which he’ll be able to accomplish many other things. To buy a new identity, to live somewhere else, as someone else.

  But he won’t have a copy of his manuscript, trapped on the hard drive of his computer, which is already in the hands of his pursuers, whoever they might be, perhaps at this very minute trying to hack the laptop’s security system, his encrypted files. Fortunately they will fail. After ten seconds of trying to start the system without the proper authentication, the hard drive will self-destruct, completely wiped out, unrecoverable.

  And he won’t be able to continue with his treatments, his visits to the plastic surgeon. But that’s okay; there’s not really anything left to accomplish there. Just the peace of mind that comes from visiting the man who reconfigured your fingerprints, and the other man who reconstructed parts of your face, so he can tell you that you look all right; good, even. That reassurance has been nice. But it’s something the author can live without.

  He catches a glimpse of himself in Vanessa’s mirror, this new version of himself. The swelling and discoloration are entirely gone; it’d be impossible to notice the incision marks unless you knew exactly where to look, and what to look for. No one would ever glance at this face and say that it has been surgically altered. And in fact it’s not terribly dissimilar to his old face—a different point to the chin, a new dimple, a slight slant to the eyes. Definitely enough to confound facial-recognition software. But not so much that he’d need to spend six months wrapped in bandages.

  Now after nearly a year of living with one medical challenge or another, he’s finally free. His first challenge, when he’d made his decision after that horrible conversation with Charlie, was to become someone who looked like he might be dying. So he started taking CNS stimulants, suppressing his appetite, losing a pound per week for the entire season, enough to loosen up the collars of his shirts, the waists of his pants. At the end there, he even bought a few shirts that were one neck size too big, an extra half inch that really made him look like he was swimming in the broadcloth cotton. Combined with three months of avoiding the sunshine, of poor sleep and weight loss and daily doses of speed, he succeeded in looking like crap. Like a dying man.

  And then once he arrived in Zurich, there was the plastic surgery on his face, and the procedures to alter his fingerprints, and the ensuing recoveries, with antibiotics and painkillers, with a variety of muscular and skin treatments.

  Will his pursuers ever find that old Schloss, tucked away in the mountain forest? They will assume the author is here in Switzerland for alternative cancer treatments, so they’ll travel from facility to facility accompanied by Swiss police, brandishing government IDs, demanding confidential patient records. They wouldn’t expect that he’d be here for plastic surgery, not a guy who’s dying of cancer. So they will not find anything.

  But if they come across Vanessa? That will be a problem. They will create a sketch. Then they will find footage from some camera somewhere, an image of a visage that matches. “Yes, that’s him,” the South African will say in her beautiful Boer accent. But this face will not match the face of David Miller. Will they know definitively that it was him in this apartment, killing this other man?

  If they do find Vanessa they will also find that the face she describes matches the face that lives in the top-floor apartment on the other side of the lake, with the self-destructing computer and the paucity of personal belongings. Then they will indeed know what he now looks like, or close enough. And they will have a set of his new fingerprints. All this surgery, for naught.

  He’ll have to disappear again, farther away, into a less searchable environment. He’ll use his squirreled-away millions to make his way to a beach in East Africa, or maybe the South Pacific; he has specific plans for both, and will try the former until it doesn’t seem safe, at which point he’ll move on to the latter. He’ll drink fresh coconut milk and eat grilled fish and pay for the companionship of exotic erotic young women, while he waits for his manuscript to be published, for his venality to be revealed to the world, and for his ex-friend to be vilified, perhaps arrested, convicted.

  It’s a good thing he finished the manuscript when he did. He now has to hope that Isabel is taking it dead-seriously, and attending to it urgently. She’ll no doubt submit it to her on-again-off-again paramour Jeffrey Fielder, who has probably blabbed about it to half of New York, to reporters and scouts and producers, the heft of the truth of the thing creating its own momentum, its inevitability, as it travels through media circles on its way to publication, not just in the print sense of the word, but in the public sense. Publication.

  The author arranged for the security detail to protect Isabel for six months. Round-the-clock surveillance, teams of ex-Marines, following her in-person, and using cell-phone-tower triangulation of her mobile’s location as backup. Following her through the streets of Manhattan, on subways and taxis, in offices and restaurants, keeping track of Isabel Reed, and keeping her alive.

  Maybe the author will call her, from a pay phone in a thatched hut somewhere on the other side of the world. He hasn’t spoken to Isabel in a while.

  It’s remotely possible that the local authorities won’t connect this murder with that fugitive. One is a local violent crime, the other an international hoax. So it’s worth him going to the trouble to obfuscate the line between the two, to try to keep the Americans out of the investigation, to try to keep his identity concealed.

  He finds a rag under the sink and sprays it with ammonium chloride solution. He wipes down the apartment, wearing yellow rubber gloves that are too small, cleaning every surface he can remember touching, not just this morning but last Thursday, the week prior, whenever before. Refrigerator and trashcan and coffee press, doorknobs and light switches and drawer pulls, the dangling plastic end to the cord for the thin aluminum blinds.

  He steps over the dead naked Frenchman again and again as he crosses the apartment to clean, trying not to look down at the man’s open unstaring eyes. He doesn’t have the heart to touch those eyes, to close them.

  He washes the candlestick and the screwdriver, and places both in a shopping bag, along with his running clothes and shoes. He’ll dispose of the weapons as soon as he can, but far enough away from this apartment to make them unlikely to find, difficult to connect to this crime.

  In a kitchen drawer he finds the key to her car, a BMW apparently. He hopes this car is parked in an intuitive place; they’ve never discussed parking, or a car. But sure enough there’s one in the corner of a dark low-ceilinged garage that chirps a cheerful response to the remote key, one of a half-dozen BMWs amid twenty cars.

  The streets in this residential neighborhood are just as quiet as those in his own, and he has to restrain himself from speeding through the leafy traffic-free lanes, around the soft curves, up the incline, out of town.

  It is 9:49 in the morning. Vanessa will not be home any earlier than 6:00, so he has eight hours before she comes home to discover her dead lov
er, her stolen car. The author will drive south, up and over the mountains; anyone would assume he would take the quicker escapes north to Germany or east to France. He will use local roads, avoiding any potential roadblocks and speed cameras on the highway. Then at Lucerne, when he doesn’t have a choice, he’ll get on the 2; there aren’t multiple options for driving over the Alps.

  He should be in Milan by 3:00. He’ll abandon the car in a public garage a mile from the train station, then walk to the stazione centrale and board the high-speed train to Salerno. By the time Vanessa reports her car stolen—if she even notices, tonight, that her car is gone—he will be on the overnight ferry to Palermo, the most third-worldy city in Western Europe, stray dogs and Gypsy panhandlers and downtown lots filled with rubble. Tomorrow morning he’ll cross the Wild West Sicilian countryside, ragged and sere and sparsely populated, to Catania, the incoming port for most of the illicit drugs in Europe, a porous point of departure for someone like him, a discreet American with wads of cash who’s looking for nothing more than a quiet crossing to Tunisia, carrying no contraband whatsoever.

  Lost in these plans, he doesn’t notice the car accelerating behind him until it’s right up on his tail, hugging a long wide curve in the narrow road, and his attention is drawn to his rearview, to—fuck—the flashing swirling lights of the police cruiser that’s a couple of car lengths behind.

  “Come on,” he’d said, a quarter-century ago. “Stop. The fucking. Car.”

  The old Jaguar convertible was still nosing forward in first gear, and Charlie was gripping the wheel tightly with both hands. Dave was shuffling backward, the bumper bumping into his knees. “Charlie, stop the car!”