The Agency

by Ally O'Brien

  My dear Tom,

  I love it! You are so inventive. If this manuscript does not make you the next star in children’s writing, then something is surely wrong with the world. I’m honored that you chose me to be your first reader. I really believe you have created the kind of lush, charming universe that children will find irresistible. How exciting this all is! I am hugely proud of you!

  With warmest wishes,

  Dorothy

  Maybe Dorothy didn’t write this. Maybe it was a fake. But I didn’t think so. This was exactly the kind of note she would write. Of course, I wasn’t going to give Milton the satisfaction of saying so.

  “Interesting,” I said.

  “I thought so. I’m sure you’re also aware that Dorothy mentions my father in the acknowledgments in The Bamboo Garden.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you see that we have a problem.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t. From what I hear, your father wrote Gothic tales for young adults. Ghost stories. You won’t find any ghosts in Dorothy’s books. Just pandas and poachers. The fact that Dorothy may have read an unpublished manuscript that your father wrote years ago is meaningless.”

  Milton got a tiny smile on his face, and he laughed, not in a nice way. “There’s more,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  He pulled another sheet from the manila folder and handed it to me. This page was also photocopied, and the original was smudged and difficult to read. The typing on the page was faint and old.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “The first page of my father’s manuscript.”

  I studied it, and I didn’t like what I saw. The title read, “Butterball’s Village.” The author’s name was Tom Milton. The first page included the header for the first chapter, which was: “Black and White and Red All Over.”

  I quickly scanned the rest of the double-spaced page. There were only a few paragraphs, but it was obvious that Dorothy and I had big problems. I tried to keep my reaction off my face, but Milton was a lawyer, and I’m sure he could spot my dismay. Butterball, of course, is the hero of Dorothy’s series. The mayor of the panda village, or what Dorothy calls the Bamboo Garden. The first chapter of the first book sets the tone for the entire series—sweet, funny, with a serious message underneath. It’s a lovely little fable about Butterball and the flowering of the bamboo, which leaves the community struggling to find enough food. It sounds dark, but in Dorothy’s hands, it’s not. Kids learn about leadership. Conservation. Working together. When I first read it, I knew she had created something special.

  Or maybe it was Tom Milton who had created something special.

  The page in my hand used different language and a different style. I could practically recite the first page of Dorothy’s book from memory, and this was not at all like her work. But that made it even worse. David Milton hadn’t simply taken Dorothy’s book and retyped it and changed a few words. If this was a forgery, it was subtle and effective, because it was in fact so different from Dorothy’s novel. But the heart of it was the same. The same characters. The same setting. The same action. The same names. If it was real, then Dorothy’s book was plagiarism of the first order.

  This was a disaster in the making.

  “Now you see the problem,” Milton said, smirking.

  “One page?”

  “I have the rest of the manuscript, too. My father wrote a novella. Around twenty thousand words. Dorothy obviously took it and expanded it, but anyone can see that the kernel of the entire series was my father’s. He created it. He created the characters, the plot, the setting. The idea was his. After my father died, Dorothy took it for herself.”

  “I’ll need to see the entire manuscript.”

  “In due time.”

  “Exactly what are you looking for?” I asked.

  Milton reached behind himself and extracted a copy of the American edition of The Bamboo Garden from the bookshelf. He opened it and turned the pages delicately. “My father would be very pleased to know that his work has been embraced by so many children. That was what he always wanted, but success was elusive, not through any fault of his own. Obviously, I would like to see him get the public recognition he deserves, even posthumously.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  Milton closed the book and put his hand over the cover. “However, I am cognizant of the fact that this revelation would be extremely embarrassing to Dorothy. I have to weigh the pros and cons. On one hand, I want my father to receive credit for having created a series that has garnered worldwide acclaim. On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to make it impossible for the series to continue by leaving Dorothy disgraced by these revelations. That would be unfair to the children who love my father’s creations.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning perhaps we can negotiate a financial settlement that will honor my father’s work without sacrificing Dorothy’s reputation. That’s certainly my goal. However, if we can’t do so, then I’m afraid we face a messy and protracted court battle, charges played out in the press, all those ugly things we both want to avoid. And the end result will still be a large financial settlement but without the confidentiality and discretion. I fear that Dorothy would be ruined, and I really would hate to see that.”

  “You realize we need to do a lot of research on this issue,” I said, which is what you say when you have no idea what to say. “I’ll be hiring the finest copyright attorney in New York.”

  “No doubt.”

  “Do you have any other evidence to support the validity of this manuscript? Copies of submissions to publishers? Agent queries? Rejection letters?” I wasn’t sure what I would do if he said yes. “Let’s leave all that for the lawyers, shall we? I’ll give you and Dorothy some time to think about this. But not much time. My father’s recognition is already long overdue. If I feel this negotiation is dragging out unnecessarily, then I may have to sit down and have a long chat with The New York Times.”

  “I’ll be in touch,” I said.

  “I’m sure you will. In the meantime, you may want to start gathering financial records. They’ll all be discoverable, you realize. And I’ll want to know the status of any pending contracts.”

  “As you said, we’ll leave that to the lawyers,” I replied. Pending contracts? That made me suspicious.

  “Are you going back to London today?” Milton asked.

  “Yes, I have a flight tonight.”

  “Well, take a little more reading material with you,” he told me, extracting several more pages from the dreaded manila folder on his desk. “Here’s the rest of the first chapter of the manuscript. I think much of it will sound familiar.”

  I took the pages without looking at them and slid them into my purse.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Milton.”

  “Good-bye, Ms. Drake.”

  We shook hands. I’d like to say I gave him a firm, confident grip, like someone who saw through his little game and was prepared to body slam him to the mat. But I didn’t. The fact is, I had a hard time not peeing on the carpet as I left.

  22

  I SPENT THE REST OF THE DAY wandering through Central Park with my cell phone turned off. I arrived at JFK three hours early and almost missed my flight because I fell asleep at the gate. No one nudged me when the plane started boarding. Maybe they figured I was dead. When I finally dragged myself on the plane, I fell asleep again, which almost never happens. When I woke up, we were out over the middle of the Atlantic, the droning hum of the plane’s engine in my ears. I wondered if anyone would mind if I popped open the door and jumped out.

  The pages from Tom Milton’s supposed manuscript were still in my purse. I hadn’t looked at them yet, and I really didn’t want to. I was worried they would be just as convincing as what I had already seen. I actually had a glimmer of doubt that this wasn’t just a confidence game.

  Dorothy, Dorothy, what did you do?

  It’s amazing how your mood can swing from peaks to valleys in the blink of an ey
e. The whole Tom Cruise thing at the Waverly left me feeling on top of the world. Then I met David Milton, and I crashed. It didn’t help that I was riding on fumes with no energy other than a guilty, satisfied, postsex high. I was now feeling bleak about my prospects. Cruise would never read the book. Milton would tie me up in knots for months. How do you launch your own agency with your most important client in the midst of a career-threatening scandal?

  Maybe that was the point. Or maybe I’m letting my ego carry me away. Not everything is about me. Just most things.

  Rather than think about stolen pandas, I thought about Evan. It was silly to feel that I was cheating on Darcy, who was already cheating on Cosima by cheating with me. Darcy had his chance. If he had so much as looked at me at the funeral, or sent me a message after our latest rendezvous, I would have kept my knees shut. Or at least I would have put up more of a fight. However, the reality is that Evan makes me weak in a way that few men do. I loathe him, and yet I can’t stay away from him. I don’t want a relationship with him, but if he comes to London, God knows I’ll sleep with him again. I’ll protest that I won’t, and I’ll tell him to go to hell, even as I start getting the two of us undressed. That’s just how it goes between him and me.

  I’d be the last to tell you I didn’t enjoy it. I did. I also know that I slept with Evan out of anger. I was angry at myself for letting my emotions carry me away with Darcy and angry at Darcy for treating my emotions as if they didn’t exist. If I was nothing but meaningless sex to him, well, I could have meaningless sex, too. Meaningless, really great sex.

  Anyway, going out with Evan gave me a chance to meet Cruise. To hand him Singularity personally. Okay, I know it will probably go nowhere, but a girl can dream. It’s not like I’m looking to sleep with him or marry him or bear his love child. All I want is a film deal. That’s not asking so much, is it?

  Somewhere south of Iceland, I decided I couldn’t put it off any longer, so I took the chapter that David Milton had given me out of my purse. I quashed all my doubts and told myself that Dorothy might be scattered and infuriating at times, but she was a sweet soul and a terrific writer, and it was inconceivable to me that she had deliberately stolen another man’s idea. David Milton could sugarcoat it, but if his father’s manuscript was genuine, then Dorothy set out to steal that book for herself, with malice aforethought, and she was still covering it up now. It wasn’t the kind of thing that would slip your mind or happen by accident. Oh my goodness, I wrote a book about a lost girl, a tin man, a scarecrow, and a lion, and now I find out some man named Baum did the same thing! I don’t think so. If she did it, she did it as an out-and-out thief. And that’s not Dorothy.

  So it’s a fake. It has to be a fake. The question is how to prove it.

  I drank wine as I read the chapter, and I ordered more wine from the flight attendant when I was done. Then I read it again, looking for obvious flaws and not finding any. When you think about it, how do you prove a negative? If someone types a manuscript and claims that he wrote it before you did, how do you prove him wrong just by reading the text? Answer—you don’t. You prove it through the laborious process of unearthing notes and gathering depositions and weathering nasty media articles that call you a cheat. It’s slow, it’s expensive. Most authors don’t keep research notes on paper anymore. They toss early drafts. They clean out their files. They keep their ideas to themselves until they’re done. What counts is the final electronic version, but by then, who’s to say exactly where you got all those words?

  David Milton was no fool. He knew all that.

  I bet he really was going through old boxes in his attic when he found samples of his father’s writing. And the note from Dorothy? I bet that’s genuine, too. If you’re a lawyer with a hunger for a big score, your mind starts working. You’ve got a note from a multimillionaire author. Your father is gone. Years have passed. No one would expect you to have electronic records from back then, so all you really need to make your case is a manuscript. One copy you can pass off as the real thing.

  I wondered if he really did find his father’s book. If he did, he probably burned it. Or hid it away where it would never see the light of day. Then he faced the challenge of creating a new manuscript, something that would stand up to the scrutiny of experts, something that would convince a jury. Or maybe he just figured it needed to be convincing enough to scare Dorothy into settling.

  And, yes, it was convincing.

  From the photocopy, I could tell that it looked old. The manuscript was printed on what appeared to be an old dot-matrix printer with an ink cartridge that smeared and stuttered and made the text hard to read. It was probably printed on yellowed paper that had been sitting in the attic for years, too. It looked like the kind of draft copy an author would have kept some twenty years ago. Smart. If the package feels authentic, what’s inside must be genuine, too.

  I wondered how Milton had gone about creating the manuscript itself. I didn’t think he was the one who wrote it. You’d have to be a writer to pull off something like that. A ghost. Someone who’s used to writing in someone else’s style and can shed skins like a chameleon. Maybe a talented but unsuccessful novelist who was willing to sell his soul to get a percentage of the fortune that Milton promised would be coming their way. It’s not an easy job. You have to make it close but not too close. You have to make it sound like the other stories that Tom Milton wrote, so anyone who read it would believe it was by the same hand. You have to deconstruct what Dorothy did and rebuild it as an earlier, rougher draft. Definitely not easy. Milton needed someone who knew what he was doing and had no integrity at all.

  But, hey, he lives in New York. No problem.

  We could subpoena bank records to see if Milton made a payoff, but I had a feeling he was too smart to be caught that way. I also wondered if we could subpoena his telephone records and find calls back and forth between him and Saleema. This had her fingerprints all over it. Not that I’d ever be able to prove it.

  I knew who I needed to call. My father. If you’re on the losing end of a campaign of dirty tricks, the best person to ask for advice is someone who’s spent his whole life in politics. Dad has seen it all. Sex scandals. Money scandals. Vice, betrayal, perjury, deception, everything you’d expect from our governing bodies. He is the ultimate insider and the ultimate cynic, but as a result, he knows everyone and trusts no one. If I turn him loose on David Milton, he’ll find something. I hate to ask him for help, though, because every meeting with my father is a chance to review the laundry list of my failures and disappointments. He does it so smoothly that you don’t feel like shit until later, but when it hits you just how badly you’ve turned out, you wind up eating chocolate for a week.

  I decided to call him anyway.

  That was the first item on my mental to-do list as I got off the plane at Heathrow. Emma tells me I’m in a world of my own sometimes, thinking about what I have to do. I would have to check in with Oliver Howard and tell him about Cruise and Singularity. Neither Oliver nor I is particularly religious, but if we both start praying, perhaps it will help. I also have to give Dorothy an update about David Milton, which won’t be much of an update, because the only things I know now are things I wish I didn’t know at all. I have to talk to my accountant. My lawyer. People I hate talking to unless I’m broke or under arrest, and, who knows, by next week I may be both.

  I also have to decide if I’m going to pull the trigger. Leave the agency.

  So really, there wasn’t much at all on my mind as I retrieved my bags and took the green line at customs. All I was expecting was a typical drizzly London morning, take a shower, go to the office, make some calls, do my thing.

  Then I saw a face in the waiting crowd, and I told myself I really needed to stop making jokes, even in my head, because lately, they’ve had a way of coming true. First the corset and heels thing with Lowell. And now the idea of being arrested. The face I saw belonged to Nicholas Hadley, the detective with the gray beard and the muddy Burb
erry. He saw me and pushed his way toward me, and I knew the day wasn’t going to go as I had hoped.

  “You really didn’t need to come all this way to greet me, Inspector,” I told him sweetly. “I was just going to hop the Piccadilly Line into the city.” I gave him my most winning smile, which wasn’t returned.

  “I need to ask you some questions, Ms. Drake,” Hadley replied.

  “About what?”

  People really do say stupid things like that. About what? Oh, hell, maybe he wants to talk about the weather.

  “About you and Lowell Bardwright,” he said.

  “I think we’ve already talked about that, haven’t we?”

  “Something else has come up,” Hadley told me.

  “Such as?”

  “Such as your fingerprints. In Mr. Bardwright’s apartment.”

  III

  23

  I’M HOOKED ON TV cop shows. I make sure my DVR never misses CSI or any of the eighteen million variations of Law & Order. So after years of watching Lenny Briscoe and Ed Green and Ray Curtis (thump, thump goes my heart), I know that the police like psychological warfare. You know, good cop, bad cop—that sort of thing. Lie to a suspect. Make friends with a suspect. And sooner or later, the bad guys break down and sob and confess.

  For me, it started with coffee. Really bad coffee. I’m sort of a coffee snob about my Caffè Nero dark roast, and the toilet water that Nicholas Hadley poured in a white paper cup made me want to tell him I shot Kennedy. Hadley drank two cups himself without flinching.

  At least he didn’t put me in a windowless room with a bare bulb dangling over my head. We sat in his office, which had a door and a window and a thousand file folders on his desk. The walls were littered with terrorist alerts and pictures of his wife and two kids. His wife didn’t look like any of the terrorist photos. I’m not sure about his oldest kid.