The Salinger Contract

by Adam Langer

  “Oh, he will, will he?” Conner asked.

  “Yes, he will,” Pavel said. “Tonight, in fact.” And after Conner asked him what Dex’s rush was, Pavel smiled slightly. “This is because you are leaving on the seven forty-five a.m. flight for LaGuardia, are you not? There would not be time tomorrow, would there?”

  “Seven forty-five?” Conner’s voice wavered.

  “United Airlines, Flight 110, to be exact,” said Pavel. “This is true, yes?”

  Conner got up from the signing table and, as he did, Pavel added, “Or, Dex could meet you at your hotel. You’re staying at the Drake, this is also true?” Conner said nothing. He maintained his silence when Pavel added that Dex would be happy to meet either in the hotel’s Coq d’Or cocktail lounge or in the Palm Court.

  “Or,” Pavel added with a sly smile, “if you prefer, the two of you can meet in the Author’s Suite, Room 813, is it not?”

  “How do you know all that?” Conner asked, but before Pavel could respond, Conner decided he didn’t want to hear the answer. He headed for the door. His Spidey sense was tingling big-time, he said. Conner reached the front door of Borders in time to hear Pavel tell the bookstore manager, “I will take the rest of these. And I would like to have them delivered to Six Hundred and Eighty North Lake Shore Drive.” When Conner looked back, he saw that Pavel was buying every one of his books and taking out a phone to make a call.

  9

  Conner stepped out of Borders and flagged down a cab. He didn’t have much of a plan in mind other than to return to his hotel, pick up his suitcase, and check out. He didn’t understand how Pavel had known where he was staying and what his travel plans were. Maybe Pavel was a friend of his editor, or maybe he worked for a publisher from the former Eastern Bloc, one as yet unschooled in Western codes of conduct. But Conner didn’t want to stick around to find out. When he had worked as a crime reporter, he had no fears of interviewing gangbangers, of flashing press credentials at the wardens of Rikers Island, of hanging around precinct station houses well past midnight, then walking all the way home—in fact, he had met Angie at the Twenty-Fourth Precinct headquarters on 100th Street, and they routinely walked home to her mother and aunt’s apartment in Hamilton Heights, where she continued to live until she and Conner got married. But now that he was a husband and father, he preferred to let his characters take risks while he enjoyed cups of hot tea and mugs of home-brewed beer on the back deck of his house in the Pokes.

  Traffic was heavy on Diversey Avenue. The Margot Hetley reading had just let out, and all the tweens and Goth kids who had been waiting for Hetley to sign books were pouring onto the streets; they were heading for the bus stops and elevated train stations, forming a flash mob as they threw “vampard” signs at one another and roughly shoved passersby while Hetley’s limo sped away from the store. Conner exited Borders before Pavel, but by the time his taxi managed to make an illegal U-turn to start heading south toward his hotel, he could see that Pavel was getting into a cab too. At that moment, Conner felt an urge to say all the things detectives say to taxi drivers in other genre novelists’ books, but rarely said in his own: “Step on it, Driver,” and “Lose that tail.” But he just gazed silently out the window at the boats on Lake Michigan, the cars speeding along Lake Shore Drive; he looked west toward the Lincoln Park Zoo—an immense black emptiness beyond the rippling Lincoln Park Lagoon; he could imagine that lone coyote howling upon his slab of gray rock. He looked through the back window of the cab, trying to see if he could spot Pavel’s taxi, but there were at least a dozen cabs and it was impossible to say which one might have been his.

  When Conner got back to the hotel, he greeted the doormen and security guards loudly—he wanted them to know who he was and to remember him in case anything happened to him. He had never had these sorts of morbid, nervous thoughts before he became a parent. He zipped up the blue-carpeted steps, taking them two at a time. He greeted businesspeople heading to the cocktail lounge, tourists clutching bags from the Apple Store, tuxedoed and evening-gowned couples en route to rehearsal dinners. At the hotel’s front desk, he told the clerk, an officious young man of about twenty-five with a pencil-thin mustache, affecting some sort of English accent, that he wanted to check out early.

  “Certainly, Mr. Joyce.” The man typed on his computer to pull up Conner’s bill. “Oh,” he said. “Some men were looking for you before.”

  “Men?” Conner asked.

  “Two of them. They left this.” The man produced a note written on watermarked, ivory-laid stationery. On it, in exquisite handwriting: “Mr. Joyce, I’m downstairs at the Coq d’Or Lounge. Regards, Dex.”

  Conner gave the note back to the desk clerk. He passed the man a twenty-dollar bill, and asked him if he could arrange to have a bellhop take his suitcases down to the lobby.

  “Are you sure there’s nothing wrong?” the man asked. Conner looked down to the main entrance of the hotel and saw Pavel approaching the revolving doors. Conner headed downstairs. He made his way to the first door he could find, which led to the men’s room.

  Conner scrubbed his face, using a white washcloth from a small wicker basket by the sink. Was he overreacting? What was there to be frightened of? An Eastern European man had bought a bunch of his books and asked to introduce him to a friend. Sure, something about the man seemed sinister, but no one had threatened him. Perhaps this Pavel and his friend Dex, whom Conner imagined as a bald-pated Russian mobster who dabbled in the black market—maybe something to do with uranium rods—didn’t understand that you didn’t randomly approach authors, buy all their books, and demand special meetings. Perhaps Dex was just uncommonly rich and didn’t think the usual protocols applied to him. Perhaps the usual protocols were stupid. Conner was continuing to work through scenarios when he looked in the mirror and saw the door to the bathroom opening. Pavel was entering.

  To his left, Conner espied another door. On it was a brass plaque engraved, to coq d’or lounge. His face not yet dry, Conner made his way to that door and entered.

  10

  I knew the Coq d’Or well. When he was still alive, my father was a fan of the place—at least, that’s what my mother told me. When he was in town on business, he drank there, entertained friends, and, on one fateful evening, met a young cocktail waitress and invited her up to his suite, where I was conceived. After I graduated college and moved out of my mom’s apartment, I wrote short stories in the Coq d’Or, hoping to connect with some aspect of my past, but also because it was an atmospheric joint with excellent soups and the best club sandwich in Chicago. The waitstaff knew rich people tended to be eccentric; even if you dressed poorly and didn’t look like you had much dough, they didn’t hassle you about sticking around all night.

  But to Conner, stepping into the Coq d’Or was like stepping into a world he had only read about in books, or perhaps seen in movies about ad execs in the early 1960s. The place was a piano bar populated largely by well-heeled, martini-swilling tourists and the occasional regular from Chicago’s Gold Coast aristocracy, some of whom owned apartments in the Drake, many of whom were alcoholics; some of the men were accompanied by high-dollar escorts; some of them paid their bills with Drake Hotel credit cards, a perk offered to hotel regulars. There were white tablecloths, maroon leather booths, a long oaken bar behind which a white-clad bartender operated a cocktail shaker. In the air was the scent of lobster and clam chowder. On the night Conner entered the bar, a tuxedoed pianist was playing “Stardust” and doing a surprisingly good job of it. In another era, Conner would have expected to see women smoking long cigarettes and men puffing on stogies, but what Conner actually saw was a man he immediately knew was Dex Dunford.

  “Was that his real name?” I asked Conner.

  “I doubt it,” he said.

  The man was sitting alone at a table with copies of Ice Locker, Devil Shotgun, and Conner’s other three novels placed atop it. Clad in a dark-blue, pinstrip
ed suit with a pale-blue pocket square, he looked dapper, even debonair. As he sipped his Rob Roy dry on the rocks with a twist, he could have been nominated for “America’s Best Dressed Executive” during a time when people were still nominated for such titles. Dex was a small man—slim, yet authoritative. His hair was full and white, and upon first viewing him, Conner couldn’t decide whether he looked more like a fifty-year-old man from another decade or a well-preserved seventy-five from the present one. Propped up against the wall behind Dex was a hand-carved walking stick with the face of a yellow-eyed falcon for a handle.

  “What would you care to drink, Mr. Joyce?” Dex asked. His accent sounded vaguely British, but that seemed more a function of class than geography; he spoke with what passed for a generic, wealthy cadence, favored by actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood, such as Clifton Webb or Ray Collins; he didn’t pronounce the r’s at the ends of his words.

  Conner didn’t answer Dex’s question. He wasn’t sure he would be drinking anything at all.

  “Please, sit,” Dex said. “What harm could possibly come to you by merely sitting down for a drink?”

  Conner didn’t immediately answer. “Well, I suppose you’re right, after all,” said Dex. “Why, all sorts of harm could come to you. After all, we’ve never met. I do feel I know you, though, Mr. Joyce.” He said he was a fan of Conner’s work. He had read all the Cole Padgett books. He liked the new one, Ice Locker, he said, and thought it was one of Conner’s better works. He said he always loved his attention to detail, the specificity of Conner’s locations. “But it’s hard for any writer to outdo his first success,” Dex said.

  Conner began to relax. He was familiar with this sort of conversation; it was the same sort he had with the people who attended his book readings or interviewed him on public radio shows.

  “Are you in the business?” he asked.

  “Which?”

  “Publishing.”

  “Not exactly,” Dex said. “I collect.”

  Conner took the seat across from Dex, and when a waiter asked if Conner would be eating or drinking anything, Conner agreed to take a glass of ice water.

  “A collector,” Conner said. “You mean first editions?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” said Dex. He asked Conner how Ice Locker had been selling, and when Conner muttered something about how it was too early to know, Dex asked if the book was doing any better business than his last two novels had. Dex assured Conner that he wasn’t trying to pry; he was genuinely concerned because he understood how hard it was for writers to maintain their careers.

  “You shouldn’t take it personally,” Dex said. “My last two authors took it personally, even though I assured them they shouldn’t.”

  “Authors?” Conner asked. “Didn’t you say you didn’t work in publishing?”

  “That’s true,” said Dex. “I did say that, sir.”

  “What business are you in?”

  “I believe we’re getting ahead of ourselves.” Dex motioned to the waiter and summoned another Rob Roy for himself.

  Time passed, perhaps an hour. The pianist finished his set with a medley of Cole Porter tunes, then made his way to the bar, where a martini and a girlfriend in a black sequined gown awaited him. Men who had entered with escorts left with those escorts, presumably en route to one of the hotel suites that was far better appointed than the Author’s Suite. Although Conner couldn’t say he was beginning to feel comfortable around Dex, he did sense, as long as he remained in this bar, no harm would come to him. The rest of the evening seemed clear. Once he left the Coq d’Or, he would get his bags from the porter, grab a cab, and head to the Hilton at O’Hare.

  When Dex was done with his third Rob Roy, he made a writing-in-the-air gesture to the waiter. He paid his tab, then put his palms down on the table.

  “So, Mr. Joyce,” he said. “Are you ready?”

  “Ready for what?”

  “For me to show you something,” said Dex. “But I’m afraid that you’ll have to come with me to see it.”

  Conner’s Spidey sense began to tingle again. “Why can’t you just tell me about it?” he asked.

  “Because, my friend,” said Dex, “you won’t believe a word of what I tell you until I show you.” He reached into an inside pocket of his suit jacket and withdrew an envelope.

  11

  The envelope was plain white. Inside were two items. The first was a calling card upon which was written in embossed gold script—“Dex Dunford, Collector of First Editions, 680 N. Lake Shore Drive.” There was no phone number or e-mail address.

  “This is you?” Conner asked.

  “It is.” Dex pointed to the address. “And that’s where you and I will be going.”

  Conner took out the second item—a personal check made out to Conner Joyce for $10,000. The handwriting was loopy, exquisite, drawn with a fountain pen.

  “And what’s this supposed to be?” Conner asked.

  “A down payment,” said Dex.

  “For what?”

  “Nothing the least bit sordid, I can assure you. Nothing that would endanger or compromise you in the slightest. But again, before we reach my apartment, there is no point in telling you anything further, for I can assure you that you won’t believe me.”

  “How am I supposed to know I’ll make it back in one piece?” Conner asked.

  “I would assume that my word as a gentleman would suffice,” said Dex. “But since it rarely does these days, you may do this: Take note of the address on my calling card. You may leave the card with the desk clerk upstairs. Tell him if you’re not back in ninety minutes to call the police and direct them to my address.”

  As for the check, Dex said he would advise Conner to keep it in his wallet. For, though he had dealt with this particular desk clerk many times over the years for transactions such as the one he would soon be proposing, ten thousand dollars posed too great a challenge to trust any man with.

  “Apparently, you’ve plotted out everything,” Conner said.

  “I have,” said Dex. “In fact, I’ve even thought of one other thing that might make you feel safer.”

  “What’s that?”

  Dex reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and touched the speed-dial icon.

  “Pavel?” Dex said into the phone. “Please join us.”

  Dex pocketed the phone. “You’ve already met my bodyguard, yes?” he asked Conner.

  “Why do you need a bodyguard?” Conner asked.

  Dex smiled. “For a man of my wealth, lifestyle, and history the question should be, ‘Why do you need only one?’”

  Pavel entered the Coq d’Or, then sat at the only unoccupied seat at Conner and Dex’s table. He reeked of cheap aftershave, the sort found on sale in jugs at airport duty-free shops. “Yes, Mr. Dunford?” Pavel asked with slight amusement. But he seemed to know why he had been called. He was already reaching inside his tight, tweed jacket when Dex told him, “Please give Mr. Joyce your gun.”

  “Of course.” Pavel placed a snub-nosed .45 on the white tablecloth before him.

  The piano was closed, but the pianist was still drinking at the bar with his sequined girlfriend; the bartender was polishing glasses with a rag; the waiters were gathered around the bar, watching a Formula 1 race on a mounted television; most of the tables were empty, and yet Conner was wondering who might be watching, who else might catch a glimpse of this gun. What had the gun been used for? he wondered. What would he risk by holding it? By putting his fingerprints on it?

  Dex jutted his chin toward the weapon. “The characters in your books seem to know how to use one, but do you?” he asked.

  “I do, actually.”

  “Well,” said Dex, “then you will be able to tell from its weight that it is loaded. Now, put it in your pocket.”

  Conner weighed his suspicions against his curio
sity. The offer of ten thousand dollars had the effect of overruling his suspicions. The money would come in handy, whatever Dex was planning. No matter what happened, when he arrived home and Angie asked how the tour had gone, he would have a story to tell and a check to deposit—if the check was good, of course.

  Conner put the gun in a jacket pocket, and Dex handed him a black-and-gold fountain pen and a sheet of stationery with his Lake Shore Drive address embossed upon it.

  “What’s this for?” Conner asked.

  “For the note you’ll be leaving with the desk clerk. It’s a good pen. You may keep it. When you return to the hotel in an hour and a half’s time, you may keep the ten thousand dollars, regardless of whether you agree to my proposal or not. Are we ready?”

  Dex and Pavel stood, then Conner followed suit. As the men exited the Coq d’Or where Dex had left a $50 tip on the table, Conner headed toward the blue-carpeted steps that led to the main lobby of the hotel while Dex and Pavel made their way to the front door. When Conner reached the desk clerk, he scribbled a note—“I will be traveling with Dex Dunford to 680 N. Lake Shore Drive. If I am not back in ninety minutes, call the police immediately, and send them to this address.”

  He handed the note to the desk clerk, then noticed a house phone on the desk in front of him. His own phone was almost out of juice, so he asked the clerk if he could make a call.

  12

  That was when I called you the first time last night, buddy,” Conner told me.

  Here by the Hilton pool in West Lafayette, Indiana, the temperature had already climbed ten degrees since we had arrived and we were reclining upon a pair of white, plastic lawn chairs, drinking Diet Pepsi. Conner was lying directly in the sunlight, while I lay in the shade cast by a gray Hilton umbrella that had once been white.

  I felt somewhat sorry that I hadn’t been able to talk to Conner the previous night, but I wasn’t sure what useful advice I could have given him anyway. Never would I have joined some mysterious gentleman and his gun-toting Eastern European henchman on that fateful journey to 680 N. Lake Shore Drive. I’m not a risk-taker, would no more get in a car with a stranger at age forty than I would have at age four. At the same time, I had full confidence in Conner’s ability to survive, and no matter what the danger, I knew I would have wanted to hear the story.