A Dangerous Fiction

by Barbara Rogan

  “What?” he said blankly. “Oh, right. Sorry; go without me.”

  The smile faded fast. “You’re kidding.”

  Boys can be so dense, I thought, and pointed to the door. “Go. You have plans. This can wait till tomorrow.”

  “No, it can’t.” He looked back at Chloe. “See you tomorrow, OK?”

  “Whatever.” She backed out, not before casting me a look I can only call lethal.

  Poor child, I thought. She really had it bad if she saw me as her rival. But Chloe would have to learn to deal with her little crush if our intern became a staffer.

  “You were saying, Jo?” he said.

  “I could use a good assistant. Lorna’s wonderful, but she’s strictly secretarial.”

  “You’re offering me the job?”

  “I am.”

  His face shone. “I accept.”

  “Hang on, we haven’t talked about salary yet, or what you’ll be doing.”

  “Whatever it is,” Jean-Paul said, “I’ll take it.”

  Chapter 6

  The next day Max drove up to Westchester to visit Molly. That evening, with no further sign of Sam Spade and with many exhortations to contact him immediately if anything happened, he flew home. We followed his orders like good little soldiers. The office door was kept locked; visitors and deliverymen had to buzz to get in, and with Lorna on the gate I could not have felt safer. We all changed our computer passwords. Max had said to use random digits and letters, but I knew I’d never remember such a password, so I changed mine from Hugo’s birth date, which was ludicrously obvious, to a date that was equally meaningful but only to me: 7/10/1996, the day we met.

  I changed my schedule, too. Instead of running in the park, I ran on a treadmill with a manuscript propped up in front of me. I went to work late, came home early, caught up on reading. Life in the agency returned more or less to normal. On Wednesday I e-mailed the Keyshawn Grimes novel to Marisa Deighton at Doubleday; she sent back a lovely note thanking me and promising a quick read. On Thursday, I received an unexpected offer on a book, a combination memoir and how-to book on dog training. I don’t normally handle either genre, but this one came with a unique voice and a story worth telling. The author, Gordon Hayes, was an ex-Marine and former monk who now bred and trained protection dogs. The journey of a man with such an eccentric résumé was a big part of the story. Everyone liked the book, but no one had a clue how to market it, and after twenty rejections I’d nearly given up hope. Now I got to do my favorite part of my job: I called my client and told him we had an offer.

  On Friday, Teddy Pendragon called the office. I’d finally read his Vanity Fair profile the night before, lying in the big brass bed that I’d shared with Hugo and had been unable to fully colonize in the three years since his death (even if I managed to fall asleep in the middle, I invariably woke up hugging the left edge). Molly had called the piece flattering and it was, in a smarmy sort of way. Teddy wrote almost worshipfully of Hugo’s work, which he’d discovered as a precocious, lonely adolescent, the age when we are most susceptible to seductive voices. In the piece, he idolized Hugo and romanticized me, quoting writers I’d worked with and altogether portraying me in such a flattering light that the cynic in me wondered if he hadn’t written it with a biography of Hugo in mind. Still, it was a promising start, if start there must be.

  To Lorna’s surprise, I took his call.

  “I read it,” I said. “I liked it; how could I not?”

  “I’m relieved to hear it,” Teddy said, and he did sound relieved.

  “Molly thinks I should cooperate with you on a bio.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I won’t lie. It feels like a damned intrusion. But I’m convinced that if it’s not you, it’ll be someone . . . else.”

  Someone worse, I meant, and he seemed to know it, for his dulcet voice hardened to the consistency of cold maple syrup. “I gather you’ve heard about Gloria Vogel’s little project?”

  “Never happen,” I snapped. “No one who knew Hugo would give her the time of day. It’s a pipe dream.”

  “Of course,” he said soothingly, but I felt, as he surely did, a sudden, slight pitch in the balance of power. He knew why I needed him, and that gave him leverage.

  “I’m prepared to move ahead with this,” I said. “You could have your agent talk to Random.” That was clumsy. I was a lot more interested in having the book sale announced than actually facilitating its writing, and Teddy would know that.

  He didn’t say, “Not so fast.” He wasn’t that crass. But I heard it in his voice nonetheless. “I think it would be a good idea if you and I talked a little more first. Why don’t I take you to lunch one day and we’ll put our heads together?”

  I had no lunches free for weeks, so we made it for dinner the following Tuesday. I spent much of the intervening weekend fretting about it, trying to decide what I’d give him and what I wouldn’t. Then something happened that put Teddy Pendragon right out of my mind.

  • • •

  Sunday night I went out with some friends from Paris, the Lepetits. Valerie was a painter, originally from Chicago, and her husband, Yves, was a jazz pianist. Hugo and I met them soon after we moved to Paris, in a jazz club on the Rue des Lombards. They were sitting at the table next to ours, and we couldn’t help noticing them, for they were an odd-looking couple: a stunning black woman nearly six feet tall and a diminutive white man some twenty years her senior. Midway through the set, Yves was called up onstage and introduced; then he sat in on a couple of songs. After the set, Hugo struck up a conversation. They knew Hugo’s work, of course, and admired it. Before long we were sitting at the same table, chatting like old friends. Hugo and Yves bonded over the music they both loved, while Val and I found common ground as Americans in Paris, both married to older men. After that we met often and grew close, even vacationing together several times in the south of France. For Hugo’s birthday, I commissioned a portrait of him from Val; it still hangs in his study. When Hugo died in Paris of a sudden massive heart attack, I would have been lost without Val and Yves, who saw to all the arrangements. When I decided to sell the Paris apartment, they handled that, too. We hadn’t met since Hugo’s memorial service in Paris, and I’d missed them badly.

  They were already seated when I arrived at the restaurant on West Fourth, and a great chord of gladness sounded in me when Val saw me and waved exuberantly. I blew past the maître d’ in my hurry to reach them. Yves kissed me on both cheeks, then Val enveloped me in a good old American hug.

  After dinner and a couple of bottles of wine, we went on to the Blue Note and the Vanguard. We drank some more, and in between sets talked about Paris and the old days with Hugo. Yves’s English was weak, so we spoke in French. When he left us to talk to a musician he knew, Val slid over till her thigh touched mine.

  “Dear Jo,” she said, switching to English, “I feel so close to you.”

  “You are close to me.”

  “I’ve thought of you so often. I always meant to call.”

  “You should have.”

  “You didn’t. And I was so afraid you were upset with me.”

  “Why would I be?” I asked, surprised.

  “You know.”

  “I don’t.”

  “That night at the hospital . . .”

  All at once I realized what she was talking about. Hugo had been stricken at around eleven p.m., on his way home from a movie theater. I hadn’t gone, which is something I’ll always regret, but it was one of those noisy American films based on comic books that I loathed and he loved. The first I knew of his collapse was a call from the emergency room of the Hôpital Européen Georges-Pompidou. I grabbed a taxi and offered the driver double the fare if he could make the hospital in ten minutes. He did it. I paid, jumped out, and was approaching the door to the ER when it opened and Val emerged.

&n
bsp; We exchanged a few quick words. She’d brought in a neighbor who cut herself on a carving knife. I told her about the hospital’s call. “They wouldn’t say what’s wrong with him,” I said.

  “I’m sure it’s nothing,” she replied. “You know men.” I must have expected her to turn around and walk back inside with me, because I was surprised when she didn’t. But the incident was so thoroughly eclipsed by the disastrous news to come that I’d forgotten it until this moment.

  “That was nothing,” I said. “You couldn’t have known. I can’t believe you worried over that.”

  Val hugged me with one arm. She smelled of paint and French perfume. “I’m so glad. You know I loved you both. Hell, I owe my career to your husband!”

  “You do?”

  Her eyes brimmed with whiskey tears. “Before I met you two, I was struggling to show my work, let alone sell it. Then you commissioned that portrait, and when it was done, Hugo made a point of showing it to his friend Henri Roux, who has galleries in Paris and New York. Henri loved it and he came to see more. That’s how I got my first solo show.”

  “I never knew that,” I said.

  “No one knew. It was just Hugo being kind.”

  How typical of Hugo to do a good deed secretly. Strange, though, that he hadn’t told me, for there were no secrets between us. Maybe he had said something and I’d forgotten.

  Yves returned to us then, and we switched back to French. Val ordered another bottle, but I’d had enough. By the time I got home it was past two. I took a couple of aspirin to stave off a hangover and fell into bed.

  I jerked awake to full daylight. The phone shrilled. I ignored it. Damn thing kept ringing.

  Finally I picked up. Groggily: “Hullo?”

  “Jo?” It was Lorna. I heard office noises in the background, but her voice was hushed. “Are you OK?”

  I sat up too quickly and winced. Preemptive aspirin doesn’t always work. I rubbed my temples. “What time is it?”

  “Ten.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Did something happen I don’t know about with Nancy Kurlin’s book?”

  “No, why?”

  “Did you sell TV rights to the Gordon Hayes book?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Jo,” she said, “you’d better get in here.”

  • • •

  The smell smacked me in the face the moment I opened the office door. For a moment I was back in the funeral parlor, sitting in state beside Hugo’s coffin with the suffocating stench of lilies all around me; but this was a different room full of flowers and gaping faces. Jean-Paul and Chloe were huddled around Lorna’s desk. I got the sense of excited speech that had ceased the moment I walked in. There was a crystal vase full of red roses on Lorna’s desk, a spray of irises on Jean-Paul’s, two more bouquets and a bottle of Champagne on the credenza. I plucked the card from the roses. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” it exclaimed, and it was signed “N.” I looked at Lorna.

  “Nancy Kurlin,” she said. “I checked with the florist.”

  The card on the irises was from Jenny Freund, whose first novel I’d been unable to place. “Bless you, Jo. I can’t tell you what this means to me.” The Champagne came from Milo Sanders, whose fascinating biography of Bob Dylan ought to have sold and would have, if another one hadn’t just been made into a PBS series. His note said, “To the world’s greatest agent, with boundless gratitude.”

  I couldn’t speak. Writers often send flowers and little gifts as thank-yous, but there was no reason for any of these particular writers to be thanking me. Something burned in the pit of my stomach, and my limbs felt weightless. I didn’t quite know what was happening yet, but I knew it was bad.

  “There’s more,” Lorna said, breaking the long silence. “Check your messages.”

  Harriet stepped out of her office as I passed; her English complexion had lost the peaches and was all cream. She regarded me without a word. I went into my room and shut the door. The light on my phone was blinking and the counter showed six messages. I hit PLAY.

  “Jo, it’s Marty. My God, I can’t believe it. Steven Spielberg? Call me—this is unbelievable—we have to celebrate!”

  The next one was hard to make out because of the crying. “It’s Edwina. Jo, you can’t imagine what this means to me. I’d pretty much given up hope. God bless you, Jo.”

  I couldn’t listen to any more. My head was pounding and there was an ominous churning in my gut. Except for a ringing phone, quickly stilled, the silence outside my door was deafening. Now I knew the shape of this disaster, but I didn’t yet know its scope; indeed I felt unequal to knowing.

  I am a coward. I admit it. When the ER doctor came out to tell me about Hugo, he’d hesitated for a moment before speaking. That momentary pause and the look in his eyes revealed all; yet he, determined to break the news gently, listed all the steps they’d taken to save my husband before admitting they had failed. And I let him stall. That is the point: I let him. I even interrupted with a cogent-sounding question or two, because I couldn’t bear to hear the words I knew were coming.

  Now the message light blinked on and on, and I buried my face in my hands. I’m not sure how long I would have stayed like that if my secretary hadn’t come in. She stood before my desk until I was forced to look up.

  Lorna is not an expressive girl. Molly once said, unkindly but accurately, that she has as much affect as her computer. But I hardly knew her now. Her back was straight, sallow cheeks pink with indignation, bovine eyes gleaming behind their glasses.

  “How are you?” she asked.

  “Bad. But not as bad as my poor clients are going to be.”

  She came around to my side of the desk, and for one awful moment I thought she was going to embrace me. Instead, she opened the bottom drawer where I keep a bottle of Johnnie Walker and a couple of shot glasses for celebrations. She filled one glass to the rim and placed it in my hand.

  “Lorna, it’s not even noon.”

  “You’ve had a shock.”

  I downed half the shot in a gulp and felt its warmth spread through my body. That felt good, so I finished it off. Liquid courage. There’s a reason clichés become clichés.

  “Sit,” I said to Lorna, still hovering about me. “Did you listen to the messages?”

  She took the client’s seat and glanced at the blinking light on my phone. “You didn’t?”

  “Just the first few. What’s happened, Lorna? Can you explain it to me?”

  “E-mails,” she said. “Sent over the weekend. Each with some kind of offer, apparently. Each signed by you.”

  “How? Someone hacked into our e-mail?”

  “I don’t know. They weren’t sent from any of our e-mail accounts. I checked everyone’s sent mail.”

  “Have we seen any of these e-mails?”

  “Not the ones our clients got. I couldn’t ask them to forward them without saying more than I thought I should. But there’s one addressed to you, too. Check your personal inbox.”

  I grabbed the mouse and logged into my e-mail account. There were a dozen new messages. I scrolled down the list of senders until I came to one named “JDonovan.”

  “That one,” Lorna said, startling me. She was behind me now, looking over my shoulder.

  I opened the e-mail. “Can you hear me now?” it said. No salutation, and no signature; but in my head I heard the words in Sam Spade’s voice.

  I looked longingly at the Leibovitz portrait of Hugo on the opposite wall. If he were alive, none of this would have happened. I’d been safe with him, for the first and only time in my life. “Does Molly know?” I asked; I don’t know why.

  “We haven’t told anyone. Jean-Paul wanted to call Max, but I said to wait for you.”

  My lips felt numb and my fingers were icy. I wanted another drink, but
I knew that would be a mistake. After Hugo died, I’d tried drinking myself to sleep every night. Whatever worked, I’d thought. In India, they give widows opium. I got pretty good at solitary drinking, but I quit when Molly took me into the agency and I had to get up mornings. Hadn’t missed it, till now.

  The phone rang and Lorna picked up. “Hamish Donovan Literary Agency.” She listened for a moment. “No, sorry, still out. She’s got meetings all morning. I’ll tell her you called. . . . No, I don’t know anything about it. . . . I will.” She hung up and looked at me. “Gordon Hayes. Wants to talk to you about the Animal Planet deal.”

  “What Animal Planet—oh God. This is a nightmare.” Slowly, so slowly, it was starting to sink in. I’d known from the first how devastating this disappointment was going to be to my writers. Now I began to realize what it could do to the agency. The victimized clients would blame me. I could lose them all. I could lose Harriet, too. Ever since Molly retired, that tie had been fraying; this could sever it entirely.

  I felt assaulted, violated, too shocked even for anger, though that would surely come. But Lorna was looking at me anxiously, and I felt the weight of the silence outside my door. Later, safe in my empty apartment, I would howl and curse and lick my wounds, but right now someone had to deal with this mess, and there was nobody else.

  I braced myself. “How many?”

  “Based on the gifts, the voice mail, and this morning’s calls, twelve.” Lorna hesitated. “Twelve we know of.”

  Of course; there could be others who hadn’t checked in yet. Part of me wanted to curl up in a ball under my desk. Another part of me smacked that part in the face and told it to buck up. Step by step, I told myself. That’s how I got through Hugo’s funeral, and if I could get through that, I could get through anything.

  “I need a list of the twelve clients, with phone numbers. Then a full client list, also with phone numbers.”

  “I thought you might.” She pointed to a file on my desk.

  “You’re a godsend. Ask the others to stay in the office and say nothing to anybody. I’ll see everyone in a little while, including Harriet. Max may want to talk to them, too.” A thought struck me. “Were any of Harriet’s clients involved?”