The Salinger Contract

by Adam Langer

  As the last day of the month approached, Conner didn’t know whether the fact he hadn’t yet heard from Dex was good or bad news. If all went according to plan, he might not hear from Dex at all, he told himself. Dex would try to enter the bank when midnight struck on the twenty-ninth and the first Conner would learn of him would be when he saw his picture on the front page of the Morning Call.

  By February 28, Conner still hadn’t heard a word. He slept fitfully, had trouble eating, left half-finished plates and bowls of food in the kitchen sink, drank Campbell’s soups straight out of the can. He tried to read but couldn’t focus. He tried turning on the TV but couldn’t follow any program, not even sports. He wanted to take a ride, but he worried about getting into an accident. He wanted to talk to somebody but knew he wouldn’t take out his phone to make any call until 11:45 p.m., when he would warn Lyle Evans.

  Well after night had fallen, the air was cold and damp by the Delaware River. Conner sat outside on the bench, shivering beneath a black, star-filled sky. He was occupying himself by wondering what would happen after it was all over, for he knew this ordeal would soon end. Someday he would be with his wife and son and they would be able to look back on all this. Would they stay here in this house or would they move far away—maybe to Monroeville, Alabama, or to Cornish, New Hampshire, or even to Mexico City, where B. Traven had fled? J. D. Salinger was dead, God rest his phony old soul. Maybe there was still a nice empty home in Cornish available for a decent price.

  Conner lost himself in these reveries, these lovely fantasies of what his life could and might very well soon become. He felt intoxicated by possibilities when he heard a car approaching his house. He looked at his phone to check the time—it was nearly half past eleven.

  Conner made his way to the top of the path. The driveway was dusted with snow. Conner didn’t see a car, but his porch light was on and a set of footsteps led up his front walkway to his mailbox. In that mailbox, illuminated by the porch light, was an envelope. Conner took the envelope, ripped it open, and unfolded a letter—“Conner, I’ve read your manuscript and we need to discuss revisions as soon as possible. Cordially, Dex.”

  Conner looked up from the letter and noticed that his front door was open a crack and there seemed to be a light on inside.

  42

  Everything inside Conner was telling him to get the hell out, and yet he moved forward. Everything inside Conner was telling him something was going wrong, and yet he tried to act as if the plan were proceeding as it should have. He pushed his front door open all the way and walked through his hallway toward his kitchen, where the fluorescent light was on over the sink. Standing at the counter, drinking water from a black mug, was Pavel. He looked the same as he always did—a husky man in his late fifties in a heavy old sports coat—and yet for those first moments standing before Pavel, Conner couldn’t rid himself of the odd sensation that Pavel belonged in this kitchen, while he did not.

  “How the hell did you get in here?” Conner asked.

  Pavel shrugged. “Doors, locks, thees is not so difficult.” Pavel finished his water, then placed the mug down in the sink. “So, Conner, are you ready to go?”

  “Where?” Conner looked down at the time on his phone—only a few more minutes remained before he was supposed to call Lyle Evans.

  “A ride,” said Pavel. “Dex is in the car outside.”

  Conner told himself to play it cool, yet was gripped by foreboding and despair. “The first time I met Dex, we walked, remember?” he said. “You remember what he said? He said if he were in my position, he wouldn’t get into a car with a stranger.”

  “Yes, but we are not so much strangers anymore, Conner,” said Pavel. Conner wondered if Pavel knew what awful things were going to happen next, and if by calling him Conner, Pavel was trying to reassure or warn him.

  “What if I tell you no?” Conner asked.

  Pavel tilted his head from one side to the other, bit his lower lip, inhaled then let the breath out in a loud sigh.

  “So,” said Conner. “That’s the way it is?”

  “I am afraid thees is true,” said Pavel.

  “He says he wants to talk about revisions,” said Conner.

  “Reveesions, yes. Thees is what he wants to discuss.”

  “Do you know what those might be?”

  Pavel frowned and shook his head. “Dex has his own opinions,” he said. “Mine are not so important.”

  “You read this one too?”

  “I enjoyed the manuscript, Conner,” said Pavel. “I thought it was quite well done. Perhaps the characters could have been better developed, but the crime was clever, and as always, the details were quite convincing. But this is only my own personal opinion. It does not impact on anything. Come, let us go to the car.”

  43

  A black Crown Victoria was parked in Conner’s driveway, motor running, Dex at the wheel. Dex wore a chalky gray suit and a lavender pocket square that somehow managed to contrast well with his shimmering, indigo tie. Conner got into the back of the car and looked at the digital readout on his phone, which matched the time on the dashboard clock. It was a quarter to midnight—no way to call Lyle Evans now.

  “So, these revisions?” he asked as Dex steered the car off Conner’s property, heading toward Interstate 80. “You didn’t ask for any revisions the first time around.”

  “Yes, that’s true.” Dex said. “But you must understand that’s unusual. With some of my authors, we’ve had to send the manuscript back and forth a dozen times before we got it right.”

  “What about Salinger?” asked Conner.

  “Him especially,” he said. “Very sloppy. I probably let him get away with too much. With you, we got it right the first time. And in this case, I’d say you’re almost there; the revisions I’m talking about are quite minor.”

  “Just minor changes?” asked Conner. “Why do you even bother me about minor changes? Why don’t you just make the revisions yourself?”

  “But that’s not the agreement, Conner,” said Dex. “You are the writer. This is your work.”

  Conner let out a short, thin breath. From the backseat, he looked out through the windshield. The snow was slanting down as Dex pressed on the gas pedal and merged onto the highway, heading east toward New York City. He drove in the right lane, windshield wipers going fast. The highway seemed empty; save for a truck here or there, everyone heading to the city had already made it there. The three men watched the road. For some time, nobody spoke.

  “All right,” Conner finally said. “What do you need me to do?”

  “Well, here’s the difficulty.” Dex steered the Crown Vic using only two fingers on his right hand, apparently unconcerned by the weather. “I truly am fond of the setup you wrote,” he said. “And I do like all the detail. You’re very good at that, but you already know that. I like the business about leap years too. I found all that quite original. I think once you switch the characters around a bit, you’ll really have something that we’ll be able to use.”

  “Switch characters?” asked Conner. “What does that mean?”

  Dex signaled a turn. Conner had expected they might be driving all the way to New York, but now Dex was turning off at the first exit, heading for East Stroudsburg.

  “You see, I like the story of the bank teller, Rosie Figueroa,” Dex said. “You really captured the way she spoke; but there’s something about her that doesn’t quite add up. I think you rushed the writing of the story too much. All that business about her ex-husband using her to do a bank job—it’s all so convenient and convoluted. I just didn’t buy it. I didn’t really think Rosie would marry somebody like that, not the way you wrote her. And, even if she had, I didn’t believe a character like that ex-husband of hers would be clever enough to come up with the sort of scheme he does. He seemed too simple to know so much about computer systems and video security, and certainly t
oo simple to conceive of a crime of that nature. To tell you the truth, Conner, the crime would seem so much more convincing if it were committed by someone like …” Dex’s voice trailed off.

  “Someone like who?” Conner asked.

  “Someone like you, Conner.” Dex stopped the car.

  The Crown Victoria was now stopped in front of the East Stroudsburg Credit Union. No other car was parked on the street. There were no police cars in sight. The bank looked dark; the only lights emanated from the security booth, where Lyle Evans’s face was illuminated in the flashes of video monitors. Conner looked at the clock on the dashboard. It was 11:59 p.m. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  Dex put the car in park and turned back to face Conner. “It is one minute to midnight,” he said. “When sixty seconds pass, it will be February 29. Leap year, you remember. The security systems in the bank will go down; that’s what you wrote. They will have ten minutes to recalibrate; that’s what you wrote too. For that amount of time, the bank will be ‘essentially unguarded.’ All you have to do is ‘take care of the guard.’ Isn’t that right? Isn’t it as simple as that?”

  Conner gazed blankly at Dex, whose eyes looked as pale and unsympathetic as the yellow eyes of the falcon on his walking stick.

  “I do not like being fucked with,” Dex said. “And I have told you I do not like being lied to any more than you or your wife do. You have ten minutes to do everything you wrote in your novel. If what you wrote was true, then you won’t have any difficulty.” He turned to Pavel. “Hand Mr. Joyce your gun,” he said.

  Pavel reached into a shoulder holster and withdrew the weapon that he had handed to Conner back at the Coq d’Or Lounge, the weapon J. D. Salinger once held, the weapon Norman Mailer once fired at Dex’s wall. Pavel pressed the gun into Conner’s hand, then stepped out of the car and opened the back door.

  Conner looked at the clock. It was now midnight. He got out of the car, holding the gun.

  “Ten minutes,” Dex repeated. “Go.”

  44

  Conner stood on the sidewalk, midway between Dex’s Crown Vic and the front door of the bank. He looked at the car. Pavel was standing by the curb, leaning against the car, watching. Inside the bank, Conner could see Lyle Evans at the video monitors. Evans was beginning to stand up and walk to the front door. The security guard was holding a gun in one hand; in the other, he held a bound manuscript.

  Conner looked to the bank, then to the car, then to the bank again. He looked up and down the snowy sidewalks and streets. He weighed his options. He weighed the gun. His aim would have to be dead-on—first Dex, then Pavel, and all that before Evans got to the door. That was the choice a Conner Joyce character would have made, not the one he wanted to make, but the choice destiny had forced upon him. He cocked the weapon, took a breath, and aimed. But fuck, no, he couldn’t. He threw the gun to the ground and ran up Courtland Street. He heard tires spinning in the snow, the screech of a car lurching forward, heard the door to the bank open, heard a gunshot crack through the air. He kept running.

  The one advantage of having done so much research about East Stroudsburg while writing Leap of Fate was that Conner now truly knew these streets—he knew the alcoves and doorways in the alley behind the Pocono Cinema; he knew each storefront insurance company and travel agency. He knew the curves and drops of Route 209, knew the crisscrossed pathways that led to the quad on the campus of East Stroudsburg University. He knew which classroom buildings were open after dark. The one disadvantage of having written all these details was that now Dex and Pavel knew them too. He may have been the cartographer, but Dex and Pavel had the map. Wherever Conner ran, he saw the approaching headlights of that black Crown Victoria; whenever he stopped to crouch in an alley or behind a Dumpster, he heard two sets of footsteps coming toward him. Moments after he had run inside the Foreign Languages Building of ESU, he heard the front door creaking open. And so he ran again.

  He ran over slick white sidewalks and streets, around the gravestones in the Stroud Cemetery. And yet as he ran, questions remained—where could he go; what could he do? His plan was shot. Dex and Pavel were after him, and he didn’t know which was more frightening—what would happen if he got away or what would happen if he didn’t. He should have fired that gun when he had the chance. He would have done it if he had been a different sort of person; he would have done it if he had been a character he was writing in a novel, where he could eliminate all the anxious adjectives and adverbs he felt—“Cole Padgett fired the weapon. Two bodies were lying on the sidewalk. Dead. But that was OK, because Cole Padgett had no other choice. And now it was time for Cole Padgett to move on.”

  In the shadows of a stone mausoleum, Conner crouched down and pulled out his phone to call Angie. He felt thankful to hear her voice mail. He told her everything that happened, told her every detail he could remember as if this might be the last chance for her to hear the story, every detail he had left out when he had tried to tell her the story before. He called back every time he had used up his allotted minutes. When he was done, Angie’s voice mailbox was full and he was running again, along streets he had crossed before, over sidewalks where he saw familiar shoe prints. He ran over tire tracks that Dex’s car had made. He didn’t want to go home—he wouldn’t be safe there—but he couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. He’d get Angie’s motorcycle, ride it into the city, turn himself in. “I’m the guy people’re looking for, and here’s the flash drive to prove it.” He wished he could be Cole Padgett, a man who rarely feared taking a chance. He wished he could be Steve McQueen—McQueen on a Suzuki with Devil Shotgun exhaust pipes could outrace any geezer in a Crown Vic. But sadly, he wasn’t fictional and he had never been as good on that bike as Angie was.

  On the way to Route 611, he stopped to catch his breath at a bus shelter. Taped to the glass was a faded and crinkled flyer advertising Trailways service to Port Authority in New York City. He took note of the bus station address, then started running again.

  The Delaware Water Gap station was all but empty and the heat didn’t seem to be working. Conner could see his wispy breaths materializing then dissipating before him. The ticket kiosks and snack counter were shuttered. The last bus of the night had already left and there wasn’t another scheduled to depart until 4:15 in the morning; but there was a guard on duty, sitting at his security station—a wooden stand that looked like a dais. The guard was wearing a heavy black parka, hood up, and a green New York Jets knit hat. Conner asked him if it would be all right if he waited there until the bus came.

  “It’s all right with me if it’s all right with you,” the guard said.

  Conner wished he could sleep. Instead, he remained in the pew nearest the security station. He kept focused on the front door, waiting to see if Dex and Pavel were coming. He didn’t know what he would do if he saw them—run like hell or instruct the security guard to draw his gun. But after he caught sight of the Crown Vic, which slowed as it came into his view, Pavel and Dex did not emerge from the vehicle; they just drove off. When the Trailways bus pulled up at the station and Conner walked outside to board it, he didn’t see any sign of Dex’s car.

  45

  The sun had not yet risen when the Trailways bus merged onto the interstate. Conner had feared Pavel would already be on board, or that he or Dex would get on the bus at the Panther Valley stop, but no one got on there. And though highway traffic got a bit heavier as the bus exited onto I-95 and approached the Lincoln Tunnel, Conner didn’t notice any cars that looked familiar.

  Conner hadn’t packed for this trip. Somewhere in the Poconos was a house full of his belongings. Somewhere in the city he was approaching, he had a wife and son, assuming they were still OK. In libraries across America and in the few bookstores that remained in the country, there were copies of books he had written, stories of imaginary lives he had led. In a private library in Chicago, there was the only copy of a book called The Embargoed Manusc
ript. And in a black Crown Victoria, or in the hands of a bank security guard in the Poconos, was a manuscript called Leap of Fate. But as he rode on that Trailways bus, all he had were the clothes he was wearing, a wallet with credit cards, fifty bucks and some spare change, and a flash drive that hadn’t been his in the first place. And on West 100th Street at the Twenty-Fourth Precinct, where he went to turn himself in, that was all he had to deliver to Desk Sergeant Mitch Gales, an amiable, potbellied man who looked as if he were approaching retirement age and seemed as if he would have preferred if Conner hadn’t shown up at all. The man was watching SportsCenter and eating chili out of a Styrofoam bowl. Conner remembered Gales from when Angie had worked there, but Gales gave no indication of remembering him.

  “Help ya, buddy?” Gales asked.

  “I’ve got something people are looking for,” Conner said, and handed him the flash drive.

  The Twenty-Fourth Precinct didn’t have much of a lockup, just a bench and a toilet in a room with white-tiled walls and a cracked cement floor lit by fluorescents, whose glare was reflected by the white walls. Conner was the only person in the cell, so there was little to distract him from his doubts and fears, both of which kept growing with every passing moment. He hadn’t been in church since his son’s baptism, but he prayed hard in that cell, promised to dedicate his life to performing good acts if only Angie and Atticus could stay safe. He offered to give up the hope of seeing them again, if that’s what it would take to protect them.