“Not that we know of.” Lorna edged toward the door, relieved, I suppose, that I hadn’t actually dissolved into a puddle.
“And get rid of those flowers,” I called after her.
Chapter 7
I Skyped Max. It was early morning in L.A. and he was at his desk, dressed for work in jeans and a graphic tee with a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge on it. Behind him I could just make out a large picture window with a view of Benedict Canyon. His and Barry’s house was a graceful concoction of iron, cement, and glass, cantilevered over the cliff at an angle that defied God and gravity.
I’d set up my computer at the head of the conference table, where I usually sat. Harriet, Chloe, Jean-Paul, and Lorna sat in a semicircle around me, close together so Max could see us all.
I filled him in. When I finished, there was a long silence. Max looked like he’d broken a tooth.
“We need those e-mails,” he said at last.
“I know,” I said. “As soon as we get off I’m going to start making those calls.”
“Forward me the one you got right away.”
“That’s it?” Jean-Paul burst out. “You want to look at e-mails? We’ve got to stop this bastard!”
“Which bastard is that?” asked Max, as calm as Jean-Paul was agitated.
“The stalker, of course; Sam Spade, who else?”
“Did he sign that e-mail?”
“He didn’t have to,” I said. “It’s obvious from the content. ‘Can you hear me now?’ That’s been his demand from the start. I have to hear him. I have to pay attention.”
Max’s face was inscrutable. “So it seems. Lorna, did you pull together that submission log?”
“It’s done,” she said. “You want me to e-mail it?”
“Hold on to it. I’m flying in.”
“Absolutely not,” I said firmly, for I’d expected this and was prepared. “You have a book tour starting in three days. You have a million things on your plate. I can handle this.”
And Harriet for once backed me up. “That’s a very kind offer, Max, but at this point, Jo clearly needs to go to the police. I only wish she’d done it sooner.”
“She is going to the police,” Max said. “And I’m going with her.”
“I don’t need you to hold my hand,” I said.
“Too late, doll. You hired me.”
“For five bucks!”
“And I’m going to earn every penny. Jean-Paul?”
Jean-Paul straightened, nearly saluted. “Sir?”
“You’ll see Jo safely home tonight.”
“Yes, sir!”
“At ease, soldier,” Chloe muttered.
After Max logged off, I moved to the head of the table. “We have to assume that this guy has hacked into our computer files and e-mail accounts; I don’t see how else he could have learned enough to pull this off. For the time being, we’re going to have to avoid using e-mail. Harriet, I suggest you and Chloe go through your contact list and let everyone know that until further notice, any communications from us will be by phone or messenger.” Harriet nodded. I went on. “Lorna and Jean-Paul, you can divide up my contacts and do the same. If any more phony offers turn up, pass those calls to me. I’m going to ask you all not to talk about what’s happened. Clients who were victimized will have to be told the whole story, of course, but I’ll make those calls. The others need only be told that our e-mail’s been hacked. The longer we can keep the whole story quiet, the better.”
The young ’uns nodded solemnly, but Harriet arched an eyebrow. She knew as well as I did that it couldn’t be for long. Too many clients had been duped; God knew how many people they’d already talked to.
Chloe hugged herself. “This whole thing is so . . . I mean, cue the spooky music, right?” Jean-Paul put a hand on her shoulder and she shot him an upward glance. I wondered what would happen if Harriet left me. Would Chloe go with her, or would she stay?
“Buck up,” Harriet said reprovingly. “Look at Jo: cool as the proverbial cucumber.”
“Just numb,” I said. “Wait till I start making the calls.” One more thing remained to be said, though I feared the consequences. “This is going to get ugly, guys. It’s already ugly. If any of you feel it would be better to disassociate yourself from the agency, I will be very sorry, but I’ll understand and accept it.”
Four faces stared back at me. No one spoke. Outside, a phone rang twice and stopped, shunted to voice mail.
“You don’t have to answer now,” I said. “You can see me later if you—”
“How can you even ask that?” Jean-Paul said, his dark eyes blazing.
Chloe nodded fervently. “It’s insulting.”
I looked at Harriet, to whom my words had been primarily addressed.
“Not to worry, Jo,” she said. “We’ll see you through this.” Though hardly open-ended, this commitment was more than I had hoped for, and I knew Harriet was as good as her word. I gave her a grateful nod. Only Lorna had not yet spoken, and I hardly felt she needed to. But the others all turned to her expectantly.
“Me?” she said, looking surprised. “I’m not going anywhere.”
• • •
And then there was nothing standing between me and the phone. I asked Lorna to reschedule my appointments for the day and closeted myself in my office.
The twelve victims were a mixed bunch, weighted toward fiction, as my list was. It included first-timers and old hands, midlist and bestselling writers, male and female. Some of my favorite clients were on the list, though Sam Spade could hardly have known that. Or maybe he did; he’d certainly figured out the best way to strike at me.
Publishing is a big, tough business, and a writer’s agent is all that stands between him and the machine. So great is the dependence of writers on their literary agents that a reciprocal response is all but inevitable. Even those writers who are decades older than me became my children, to be guided, encouraged, and protected. I had many clients, and there were days when I felt like a mother bird with far too many hungry chicks. But nothing in my working life was sweeter than delivering good news, and nothing hurt more than disappointing them.
I started with Gordon Hayes, my ex-Marine, ex-monk dog trainer. There was no Animal Planet deal, but I had just sold his book, so he’d have something to fall back on. Besides, he was a gentle, taciturn man; with him there’d be no tears.
He answered his phone on the first ring. I heard dogs barking in the background.
“Jo Donovan,” he said, “you are rapidly becoming one of my all-time favorite people.”
“Not for long,” I said, and broke the news.
When I finished, he asked, “Was it just me, or were there others?”
“At least a dozen.”
“Who the hell would do that to you?”
“Me?” I said, startled. “It’s not about me. I’m just so sorry about your disappointment.”
“Of course it’s about you. Do you have any idea who’s behind it?”
With a dozen difficult calls yet to make, I didn’t want to get into details. I asked him to forward the e-mail he’d received and tried to get off. But Gordon kept asking questions, and his normally soft voice went so alpha-dog that I couldn’t refuse. I told him about the stalker and Max and the police and my protective staff.
“It’s not enough,” he said. “I can help with that, at least. Will you be in your office tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow we’re seeing the police. But Gordon, please don’t—”
“The day after, then. I’ll call.” And he hung up on my protestations.
I put the phone down and looked at it. That hadn’t gone at all as I’d anticipated. Most writers are egoists, even the most charming of them. They need to be, to survive in this business. I’d expected anger. I hadn’t expected it to be on my behalf.
T
he next call was tougher. Edwina Lavelle wept buckets, while I writhed in sympathetic agony. Her first novel was a beautifully written story about a family of Haitian immigrants living in Brooklyn. When I offered to represent her, I’d known plenty of editors who might take a chance on a talented newcomer, despite what they might see as limited demographic appeal. But that was before the economy crashed. Now half those editors were gone, and the rest were in no position to stick their necks out.
I told Edwina, by way of consolation, that she was one of a dozen clients who’d been victimized, but that only seemed to upset her more. In between sobs, she read me the phony e-mail she’d received. “Betsy Miller from Knopf called—said she can’t get your book out of her mind, so decided to make offer after all. $80,000 advance. More info to come. Congrats, Jo.”
If it hadn’t been so tragic, I’d have laughed. The scenario was absurd. For one thing, editors, like agents, don’t look back. They might agonize over a submission, debate its merits and salability, but once they make the decision to pass, it is full speed ahead and on to the next. For another thing, no editor these days would pay $80,000 for a small first novel. This one had already made the rounds without attracting an offer.
But Edwina didn’t know that. Edwina must have thought she’d hit the lottery.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I know how devastating this must be.”
“It’s not that. I’m proud of my book even if it never gets published. I’m proud you liked it enough to take it on. But when I think about you sitting there, having to make twelve calls like this one . . .” Her voice broke again.
It was a moment before I could speak. “Come on, Edwina, don’t worry about me. I’m a tough old bird.”
“Not old, and not so tough, either. Jo, baby, tell me: what can I do to help?”
And so it went on every call. Hurt though they were, and bitterly disappointed, none of my clients blamed me. For some reason this made me feel guiltier, though I knew I was as much a victim as they.
After the fourth or fifth call, I took a break, went online, and pulled up the e-mails my writers had forwarded. The sender clearly knew what manuscripts each of them had in play, as well as the authors’ sales histories, for the offers he’d come up with, unlikely as I knew them to be, were just plausible enough to pass muster with writers who lived on hope anyway. Gordon Hayes had been told that Animal Planet had offered $75,000 for the television rights to his book, My Life in Dogs. Nancy Kurlin was a midlist novelist with declining sales whose last book hadn’t sold at all. Her e-mail said that Viking was launching a new line of women’s fiction and they wanted her book to inaugurate the series. Poor Marty Gillman was told we’d received an offer from DreamWorks for his upcoming thriller, and that Steven Spielberg himself was interested in directing.
The cruelest hoax of all was played on the client I loved the most. Alice Duckworth, a dear old friend of Hugo’s, took me under her wing when Hugo and I first married. She was old enough to be my grandmother, yet we became fast friends, both of us being at loose ends: she because she’d just been widowed and I because Hugo was immersed in a new book. Alice was also a writer, much acclaimed for her first novel, published when she was only twenty-two. I’d read it as a girl; it was that book that first inspired in me the determination to live in New York. Despite critical praise, none of Alice’s subsequent books sold as well as that first one, and of course she paid dearly for that. By the time she came to me for representation, she hadn’t published in ten years, although she’d kept on writing, and her old books were long out of print.
I’d managed to sell her latest novel to Pellucid Press, who owed me for Rowena, but was unable to persuade them to put any juice behind it. It was slated to come out in a month with a tiny print run and no publicity budget. Alice, no neophyte, was rightly concerned for her book’s prospects.
“Dear Alice,” the e-mail said. “Great news! NYT committed to a front-page review. Pellucid’s going back for second printing. They want to reissue your entire backlist in a uniform trade edition. Congrats—this is long overdue. xoxo, Jo.”
I was reading that e-mail when Lorna walked in and caught me without my game face on. She stopped short halfway across the room. “Jo?”
I passed a hand over my face. “What now?”
“I’m sending out for sandwiches. What’ll you have?”
“Nothing, thanks.”
“You have to eat.”
I could see by the flat-footed way she stood there that it was no use arguing, and anyway, I knew she was right. Part of getting through things, I’d learned, was eating even when you didn’t want to.
“Soup,” I said. “Beef barley. Lunch is on me today. Take it out of petty cash.”
“I brought mine. I’ll tell the others.” Then she left, easing the door shut behind her the way one does in a sickroom.
• • •
Sometime after six I got off the last call. Jean-Paul had waited, and we rode the elevator down together. My head was throbbing, and I had it in mind to walk home through the park, since I had an escort. It was a warm evening, and the sky between the buildings was streaked with pink. The sidewalk was mobbed, workers pouring out of office buildings into eddies of shoppers and tourists. We wove into the southbound stream, and it came to me suddenly that Sam Spade could be out there, watching. No sooner did the thought occur than it morphed into a certainty. Of course he was watching. Seeing my reaction would be half the fun. I stopped in my tracks. Jean-Paul was carried onward a few yards before he managed to get back to me.
“What is it?” he asked.
“He’s here,” I said.
His head whipped around. “Where? Did you see him?”
Ahead of us, a lone man peered into the window of a jewelry shop. Across the street, a crowd of people waited at the bus stop. He could be any of a dozen men standing there; and since he could be any of them, he was all of them.
“I wouldn’t know him if he was right in front of me,” I said. “I just feel it.”
Jean-Paul opened his mouth and closed it without speaking. Poor kid, I thought, for this he deferred Harvard Law? From our little cove by the building, I looked out at the great mass of pedestrians moving in sync, like shoals of fish. One step at a time, I told myself, but I couldn’t take the step.
“Maybe a taxi after all,” I said. “Do you think you could grab one?”
“It’s one of my greatest talents,” he said and proved it.
In the cab, I couldn’t help checking behind us. No one seemed to be following us, though I could hardly tell; the traffic was so slow he could be trailing us on foot.
Or waiting outside my home. I had a good look around before stepping out of the cab. There were plenty of people, but no one seemed to be loitering. Jean-Paul got out with me. “I’ll just go up with you, make sure everything’s cool.”
I didn’t argue. Logically I knew there was no way anyone could get past the doorman. But that Sam Spade creep had penetrated so deeply into my life that suddenly no place felt safe.
I collected my mail, then we took the elevator up. The apartment was dark and still; I’d rushed out that morning without opening the blinds. From the entrance hall I turned left toward the living room and turned on the overhead light.
Jean-Paul whistled. “Wow! My whole apartment would fit in here.”
“My first place was like that. They called it a studio, but it was the size of a dog kennel.” The home Hugo had given me was on the opposite end of the scale, a three-bedroom, two-bath, fifth-floor apartment in a prewar brick building on the corner of Seventy-Ninth and Central Park West that he’d purchased when he was flush with movie money. Jean-Paul followed me through the dining room into the kitchen, which we’d redone, updating the cabinets and fixtures but keeping the old subway tiles, the year before Hugo died. It was dark. I switched on the light, sensed sudden movement, and turned in time
to see something small and dark scuttle under the stove. Shrieking, I jumped backward into Jean-Paul. His arms closed around me. My whole body was shaking, and my heart was beating so fast I could feel it. I hate roaches. My kitchen is immaculate, never a crumb left out; I have a weekly cleaning woman, and an exterminator comes bimonthly, and yet it still isn’t enough. You can’t keep the bastards out.
“Easy, Jo,” Jean-Paul said. “It’s just a little bug.”
“I hate roaches.”
“Strange, most New Yorkers love them.”
I laughed. Jean-Paul’s arms were still around me and it felt good, too good. I moved away. We checked the rest of the apartment and found no bogeymen lurking. Back in the living room, Jean-Paul seemed in no hurry to leave. I offered him a drink.
“Whatever you’re having,” he said.
There was a small bar in the bookcase. I poured two whiskeys neat, because I wasn’t going back into my kitchen until the exterminator came, and handed one to the kid. I sat on one of two facing sofas flanking the fireplace while Jean-Paul wandered around the room, examining the photos on the wall and the mantelpiece. “You guys knew everyone, didn’t you?”
“Hugo did.”
“Bit daunting, really.”
“Daunting?”
“All the pictures.” He blushed. “I mean, if you ever had a guy up here or something.”
I managed not to laugh. “I suppose it would be.”
He flung himself onto the facing sofa, legs splayed, arms stretched out over the backrest, taking up as much room as three women would. “I like this one,” he said, picking up the silver-framed wedding photo from the side table. Hugo and I stood arm in arm on the steps of City Hall; behind us and two steps above, Molly, our inadvertent matchmaker, gazed down at us like a proud but wary fairy godmother. I wore an ivory silk suit she’d bought me that morning, urging me all the while to reconsider. You want to sleep with him, kiddo, be my guest, but don’t sacrifice your whole life! I was too happy to take offense and anyway could only laugh at such absurdity. Molly might as well have accused Cinderella of sacrificing herself to her prince. In the picture I looked every inch the radiant bride, while Hugo was gray-bearded and distinguished, authorial in a tweed jacket. It was, oddly enough, my dream wedding. The girls I grew up with had envisioned huge white weddings with bridesmaids, tiered cakes, wedding bands, and bouquets, but my fantasies had always been of a ceremony at New York’s City Hall, followed by drinks in a tavern with rowdy bohemian friends. And that is exactly what I got, which so rarely happens in real life.
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