A Dangerous Fiction

by Barbara Rogan

  And even as I thought this, I felt it: a concentrated beam of malevolence, directed at me, hidden amid that mass of admiring gazes.

  I am not a fanciful person. I don’t see ghosts, I don’t have visions, I don’t believe in angels. Clarity, not imagination, is my forte. So it was strange to feel so convinced of something for which I had no evidence at all; and yet that was what I felt, as clearly as one hears a single flat voice in a choir.

  After the lecture came the Q and A, all the usual questions until the last one: “What if you know the perfect agent for your work and you can’t get her to pay attention?”

  A shiver ran through me. That deep voice was infused with an intensity tinged with hostility. The room fell silent; people craned in their seats, seeking the speaker. I searched too, for I’d recognized the voice, but I could not distinguish its owner.

  “You move on,” I said.

  • • •

  At lunch I sat at a presenters’ table beside Sikha Mehruta, the writer whose acquaintance I’d intended to make during the conference. She was a striking woman of about forty, with a regal bearing and long black hair gathered in a bun at the base of her neck. Her first novel had won the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, and her second, which came out a few months ago, was even better. I introduced myself and told her how much I’d enjoyed them both. We talked for a while, then Max joined us and the conversation turned general. I was content. One day, not too long from now, Sikha would discover what I already knew, that her agent, Percy Ailes, planned to retire at year’s end; and then perhaps she’d think of me.

  I was busy for the rest of the afternoon—the conference was lavish with amenities but not the time to enjoy them—and it was growing dark by the time I made my way back to my casita. I poured a glass of the manager’s wine and took it and the conference folder out to the patio. Santa Fe was hotter than I’d expected in June, but a fresh breeze had come up, and the mingled scent of sage and lavender was delicious.

  I settled in to read the synopses of the four writers I’d be meeting tomorrow. The first was another zombie mash-up, yesterday’s news. The second was a Harry Potter clone. So many of the proposals we see are poor imitations of successful books that I should be inured by now. Instead it seemed as if the more I saw, the more they irritated me, the way exposure to allergens can trigger the development of allergies. Some degree of imitation can’t be helped. How many tough private eyes were spawned by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler? Generations of them: the DNA of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe is in the genes of contemporary detectives whose authors never even read their stories. But this proposal was outright theft, set in New England but otherwise lifted lock, stock, and broomstick from Rowling’s original.

  Sighing, I refilled my wineglass and turned to the next synopsis.

  An artist, famous but long past his prime, meets a beautiful young woman named Clio who becomes his model, his muse, his lover, and his wife. The artist is inspired to a final, frenzied burst of wild creativity, doing his best work before dying suddenly. Devastated, the young widow buries herself in the anonymity of New York City. One day she is sitting in a diner when a thin man with haunted eyes walks in carrying a canvas. “I’m starving,” he tells the owner, whose name is Gus. “I will trade you this painting for a bowl of beef stew.” “Get outta here,” growls Gus, not an art lover.

  As the thin man trudges past, Clio glimpses his painting of a clown so sad it brings tears to her own eyes. She knows genius when she sees it, and she’s seeing it now. “Wait!” she cries, but the artist has already left. She throws some money onto the table and chases down the painter, who can’t believe that this beautiful woman is talking to him.

  “Are there more?” she demands, pointing at his painting.

  “Many more,” he replies morosely. “A lot of good they do me.”

  “Show me!” she exclaims.

  He takes her home to his studio. There are paintings everywhere. When he ran out of canvas, he used the walls. There is genius in every stroke, yet something is missing. The painter watches as Clio moves from one painting to the next, and suddenly he sees what is missing.

  “I need to paint you,” he blurts out.

  She turns and gazes deeply into his intense eyes. “Yes,” she murmurs. “I see that.”

  He shoves a pile of canvases off a divan and covers it with a red silk cover. “Take your clothes off,” he demands. He can hardly believe his own words, but he knows it’s right, and so does she. She undresses without embarrassment in front of him. She has a body like Madonna’s in “Body of Evidence.”

  “How do you want me?” she asks.

  “Let me count the ways,” he thinks to himself. He arranges her on her back, arms flung over her head, one leg bent, heel resting on the couch, the other trailing off it. He stands at his easel and starts to paint, but his hands are shaking so bad he can barely hold the brush.

  She sees what is happening. “Come here,” she beckons. He crosses to her side like a man walking in his sleep. She reaches out with greedy abandon, pulling his clothes off impatiently, and gasps when his throbbing manhood stands revealed.

  “My God,” she cries, “you’re even bigger than—”

  These are the last words she speaks before his lips close on hers. They make brilliant, passionate love for hours before he rises to paint her portrait as she lies in exhausted sleep. When he finishes, he steps back and sees the best work he has ever done. At long last, the artist has found his muse.

  With a shaking hand, I turned back to the first page and read the title: THE HAND-ME-DOWN MUSE, a novel by Sam Spade.

  • • •

  I didn’t see Max until dinner, where we were seated at separate tables. When I spotted his bald head glistening under the lights, I went over and put my mouth by his ear. “Buy you a drink later, big guy?”

  “Sure thing.” He looked at me. “What’s wrong? It’s not Molly, is it?”

  I could have kissed him for that. Nine writers out of ten, sensing something amiss, would have asked first about their book deals.

  “It’s not Molly,” I said.

  We cut out early and ended up in the bar of La Fonda on the plaza. It was Saturday night and the place was jumping, but blessedly not with writers. Up front a first-class bluegrass band was playing. Max commandeered a booth in the back. It was the perfect spot: we could hear each other just fine, but no one else could overhear. Over drinks I told him about Sam Spade, starting with the ambush outside my office and ending with the synopsis, which I handed to him.

  Max put on a pair of glasses and held the pages close to the candle on our table. The band broke into “Blue Ridge Mountain Blues” and I couldn’t keep from tapping my feet. It was a song I heard a lot growing up, and though I had no nostalgia for those times, I never held it against the music. The second scotch was kicking in.

  “How do you know it’s the guy from outside your office?” he asked, handing back the pages.

  “I called him Sam Spade, because of his fedora and trench coat. He must have adopted it as a pseudonym.”

  “When was the first encounter?”

  “Ten days ago.”

  “And Jean-Paul ran him off. Was that before or after he asked for a job?”

  “The same day. Right after.” A moment passed. “Don’t be ridiculous, Max!”

  “I’m just saying. The kid gets to play the hero and clinches the job.”

  “No way. He’s a good kid. Besides, Sam Spade’s here, he followed me.”

  Max nodded. “What do you make of him, based on those pages?”

  I hadn’t expected the question but didn’t have to stop and think. “He’s no writer, that’s for sure. He’s never published, but my guess is he’s tried and been roundly rejected; hence his search for the missing element, his muse. He’s not illiterate, probably even college-educated, but he thinks in clichés
and his aesthetic is totally hackneyed: the sad-clown paintings and that tacky Madonna reference. And he’s nuts, of course. Grandiose and delusional.”

  “Would you know him if you saw him?”

  “No. I never really saw his face. The night he waylaid me, it was raining and he wore a trench coat and a fedora tilted down over his face, Bogart-style. That’s why I called him Sam Spade. But I’m scheduled to meet him tomorrow, to discuss this dreck.”

  “If he shows. Guy strikes me as the shy type.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that. “You’re the profiler; what do you make of him? Do I need to worry?”

  “You? You’re golden.” Max leaned back, hands clasped behind his neck. “Boyo needs to worry.”

  Chapter 5

  On Sunday, Max arranged for hotel security to place several people in the conference room where presenters met one-on-one with attendees, while he himself lurked behind a screen in one corner of the room. Sam Spade was the fourth and last of my scheduled appointments.

  He never showed.

  On Monday, Max flew back to New York with me. There was no talking him out of it. The strange thing was that, having convinced him to take my stalker seriously, I now found myself incapable of doing so. It wasn’t as if this were the first I’d ever dealt with. Hugo had attracted a whole following. Fans and aspiring writers used to send letters, hang around the building, or leave manuscripts with the doorman. Women, too, called the apartment, demanding to talk to Hugo, refusing to leave messages. Some were so persistent that I was finally forced to change our number. Especially when he was writing, my husband relied on me to protect his privacy, and I felt a . . . I won’t say “sacred duty,” for that sounds slavish, but an absolute imperative to do so. People had no consideration and would disturb him day and night if I didn’t intervene. I’d dealt with his stalkers as efficiently as a farmwife deals with flies. Why should Sam Spade be any different?

  From Kennedy we taxied into Manhattan, weaving through rush-hour traffic. The sky was pewter-colored, and the air smelled of rain and exhaust. I opened my window to the polyglot babel, horns, sirens, rumble, and clatter that was home for me. It was nearly six by the time we reached my office, but everyone was there, gathered around the conference table. Harriet looked pointedly at her watch as we entered. Jean-Paul brought in an extra chair for Max, who sat beside me at the head of the table. Lorna, as usual, anchored the foot with her trusty steno pad at the ready. They must have ordered in Chinese; my office smelled of fried rice.

  Max filled them in on the events in Santa Fe, then handed around copies of Sam Spade’s novel summary. We’d argued about this on the plane, and I lost. It would be as obvious to them as it was to me that the muse in Spade’s story was a stand-in for me, with the author cast in the role of Well-Hung Starving Artist. It disgusted me to be the object of this perv’s sexual fantasies, and I felt that letting my colleagues read his story would diminish me in their eyes. But Max said that someone in the office must have read some pages of the manuscript when Spade originally submitted it, and the summary might ring a bell.

  Chloe, the first to finish, pushed the pages away with the tip of one finger. “This is so creepy. Who is this guy?”

  “At the very least,” Max said, “he’s someone with boundary issues and a fixation on getting Jo as his agent.”

  “Not just as his agent!” Jean-Paul said. His face was bright red.

  “Right,” Max said calmly. “Which is why we need to figure out who he is.”

  “Then it’s a shame you didn’t check with the conference organizers,” Harriet said. “He must have been registered.”

  I was used to her patronizing tone, but Max, who wasn’t, answered coolly. “Sam Spade was a walk-in registrant. He paid cash and registered with a nonexistent New York City address and phone number. If he was staying at the hotel, it wasn’t under that name. But I doubt he was; the hotel had been booked up for months.”

  “So how do we find him?” Jean-Paul asked.

  “Well, the guy claims he submitted a manuscript to the office and it was rejected. We can assume this happened not long ago, say within the last six months. Someone in this office read his submission. Did anything sound familiar in the pages you just read? Either the content or the voice?”

  They all shook their heads except Lorna, who never read.

  “Do you keep track of all submissions?” Max asked.

  She looked up from her pad. “I do that.”

  “Even rejections?”

  “Every submission, with the date received, who read it, how and when we responded.”

  “Excellent,” Max said. “I’d like a copy of that log.”

  “It’s confidential,” she said repressively, with that mulish look she got whenever anyone trampled on her secretarial turf.

  “Max has appointed himself our chief of security,” I said.

  “He appointed himself?”

  I frowned at her, but Max laughed and said, “No, she’s right. Jo, give me a dollar.”

  I looked in my wallet and, finding no singles, handed him a five.

  “Even better,” he said. “No one should say I work cheap. Now we’re official. All right, Lorna?”

  “No problem.”

  “Is there some reason,” Jean-Paul cut in, “why Jo shouldn’t go straight to the police and get a restraining order?”

  “Against whom?” Max said.

  “Let them find out! He’s stalking her; that’s got to be illegal.”

  “Unless bad writing is a crime, and writing as bad as his should be, nothing Sam Spade has done so far is actionable. And we want to keep it that way, which means that apart from IDing this guy, our goal is to prevent another approach. We need to make Jo impossible to reach.”

  “He’ll never get past me, I can tell you that!” Lorna said stoutly. She had forsaken her notebook for once and was gaping at Max. It wasn’t a good look for her, not that she’d care. Ever since she’d come to us, I’d been trying tactfully to get Lorna to do something about her appearance. She had lovely skin and youth to offset those extra pounds, but she hid her face behind thick glasses and mousy brown bangs and her body in shapeless corduroy slacks and calf-length skirts. For her birthday I’d taken her shopping at Bloomingdale’s and bought her two charming outfits, youthful but professional, perfect for work. She’d thanked me earnestly and repeatedly, but what she did with them I don’t know; she certainly never wore them to the office.

  She was an exasperating child, but I could have hugged her now. I could have hugged them all, even Harriet, who despite her supercilious tone was gazing at me with concern. It moved me to see it, and it opened my eyes.

  I grew up without a family. My parents died when I was three; I have no memories of them. My mother’s mother took me in. She was a God-fearing woman with a heart of carbolic acid who knew her duty and set about it grimly. I got a cot, secondhand clothes, enough food to survive, and nothing else: not a kind look, not a hug, not a word of praise, even though for years until I wised up I nearly killed myself trying. Luckily for me I found other sources of approval and a way out. I graduated high school at seventeen with a full scholarship to Vassar in my pocket, and once I left, I never went back.

  When I married Hugo, he became my family. He was my father, my mother, my husband, and my child. His death left me orphaned anew, widowed, bereft in every possible way. I thought I was down for the count. And yet here I was three years later, still kicking. As I looked around at the room, I realized that somehow this agency had become my home, these people my family.

  The panic I’d felt in Santa Fe had evaporated completely. Sam Spade was no threat to me; he was barely a nuisance. I tried to explain this. Everyone listened politely. Then they turned back to Max, and Harriet spoke for them all. “Tell us what to do.”

  Max ran through a litany of security measures, most of which I’
d already heard on the plane, while Lorna’s pen flew furiously over her pad. All calls were to be screened, all doors kept locked, all computer passwords changed. He was meeting the head of building security that evening, while I was delegated to brief the doormen in my apartment house. “Most important,” Max said sternly, turning to me, “you need to vary your schedule. No more runs around the reservoir, for the interim, anyway. Work at home more; come into the office at odd hours. Don’t be predictable.”

  Just past Max’s shoulder, Hugo gazed at me from his portrait, smiling slightly as if to say, So much fuss, my dear!

  “Is all this really necessary, Max?” I said. “Isn’t it overkill?”

  “Think of it as an ounce of prevention,” he said. “Stalkers can be incredibly persistent; that’s what makes them stalkers. Trust me, you’d rather have bedbugs in your apartment than one of these bastards fixated on you.”

  A few minutes later, the meeting ended and Max took off. I asked Jean-Paul to stay for a moment. He took the seat beside mine, and I looked at him with a pleasure akin to that aroused by a beautiful Greek sculpture. Sitting so close, I had to resist the temptation to run my hands through his black curls. It wasn’t a sexual impulse. In museums, too, I had a hard time keeping my hands to myself. For his part, Jean-Paul seemed to avoid looking directly at me. The charm I’d seen him display toward others was eclipsed in my presence by an awkwardness I could only attribute to my being his boss.

  “I’ve thought about what you asked me,” I said. “If you’re still interested—”

  My door opened, and Chloe’s smiling face peered around it. “Ready?” she asked Jean-Paul.