Gideon (16 page)

Carl stared at Bartholomew disbelievingly. He realized he was shaking now, so he took a deep breath to calm himself down.

“Look,” he said slowly, “I don’t even know how to respond to you. Everything in that letter is true. Maggie Peterson hired me to ghostwrite a book called
Gideon
. She said it was your biggest book of the year. A million-copy first printing.” He snapped his fingers. “Okay, okay, how about this? She told me it was going to launch a new imprint, it was the key book for … for … Quadrangle! That’s the imprint. Quadrangle. How would I know about that if she didn’t tell me?”

“It’s a good question,” Bartholomew said. “But I’m afraid even
I
don’t know about it. We don’t have an imprint called Quadrangle. And we don’t have any plans to start one.”

Carl was sweating now. Profusely. The back of his shirt was wet, and he could feel a swirl of hair starting to stick to his forehead. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse. Unsteady. He didn’t know what the hell was happening to him. “It was in your catalogue,” he said. “I saw it in your catalogue.”

“Is that right?”

Bartholomew reached below the table and brought up his briefcase. He snapped it open, reached inside, and pulled out the Apex summer catalogue.

Carl lunged at the publisher, making a grab for the booklet, nearly causing Bartholomew to topple over backward in his chair.

“That’s it,” he said. “She showed this to me. In her apartment. You don’t think
Gideon
exists? Then what the hell’s it doing with a two-page spread right in the middle of your own goddamn catalogue?”

With that, Carl opened the booklet to the
Gideon
spread and held it up for Bartholomew to see. When there was only silence, he brought the catalogue down and turned it around. He stared at the spread in the middle. A spread announcing the publication of a new novel by a British thriller writer.

Carl gaped in disbelief, stunned and shaken.

“No
Gideon
,” Bartholomew said.

“Goddamn it!” Carl exploded in a sudden rage. He stood up, knocking his chair over, oblivious to the stares of the other diners. “What the hell are you doing to me? Tell me the truth! Tell me the truth or I swear to God I’ll … I’ll …” He was too angry, confused, and frustrated to finish the sentence. He reached for Bartholomew’s shoulder as if to shake the truth out of him, but the frightened publisher ducked away and Carl’s fingernails scratched his throat. Bartholomew put his hand to his neck. A trickle of blood dripped onto his collar.

Carl could hear his heart pounding in his chest.

“She bought my novel,” he whispered. “She hired me to write
Gideon
.”

“A book conveniently sold by a dead agent and just as conveniently brought by a dead editor. A
secret
book, which no one but you knows about.” Bartholomew stared straight at him. “If you make any move whatsoever to pursue this insane claim of yours,” he warned, now bristling with blatant hostility, “you’ll find yourself on the receiving end of a fraud claim. Our lawyers don’t settle nuisance suits. They fight back.”

Carl closed his eyes. He felt as if the world were melting before him.

He glanced around the room. There was no sound throughout the restaurant. Carl faced Bartholomew, took a deep breath. Bartholomew relaxed as he saw the tension leave Carl’s face. Then Carl bent down slightly, just enough to wrap his fingers under the edge of the table. With one quick flip, he turned the table on its side. Plates and silverware went flying and glasses spilled onto the carpeted floor. Everyone in the restaurant seemed frozen until the Maître d’ reached for the telephone by the front door. Carl heard the words, “Get me the police, please. Seventeenth precinct.”

Carl stared down into Bartholomew’s eyes. He was startled to realize that the look he saw there was one of pity. The publisher spoke softly to him now. “Betty Slater was your agent, wasn’t she?” When Carl nodded numbly, Bartholomew continued. His tone had changed completely. It was as if they were in his office, having an after-work brandy and reminiscing. “Betty and I went back a long way. She told me about you, I remember that now. She used to get excited about real talent, even after all these years, and she said you were one of the ones with real talent. I don’t like to see this happening to a talented young man; they’re already too few and far between. Are you on drugs? Is that what it is? Because if it is, we can get you help. You can get back to your novel, back to the kind of work you should be doing. And if you do a good job, we can even talk about some kind of advance.

“I don’t want money,” Carl whispered. “I swear. I just want to know what to do.”

“That I can tell you,” Bartholomew said. He turned toward the grand staircase at the front of the room. The Maître d’ hung up the phone and nodded. “You can leave.”

Two waiters were now moving toward him, a young one and an older one with a mustache, and Carl made his move. He lunged to the left, avoiding the sudden grab of the younger waiter. He knew he wasn’t going to be able to out-muscle the one with the mustache, so he took two quick steps back, rocked forward, and jumped.

Carl thought the man would duck, would just get the hell out of the way, but no, he held his ground and braced for the impact. Hurtling through the air, Carl felt his knee crash hard into the mustached waiter’s jaw, and his sense was that the man went down, out cold, but Carl never looked back. He raced down the marble steps that led to the ground floor and made a break for the door. The Maître d’, in no mood to tangle with a hard-charging maniac, made only a halfhearted attempt to trip him, but Carl easily shoved him out of the way. The coat check woman, his last remaining hurtle, was only too happy to let him pass, and he ran though the revolving door, out onto the sidewalk, and then straight into the street. A taxi slammed on its brakes and honked its horn. Carl vaguely heard someone swearing at him. And now a different voice was yelling at him. A cop.

Carl ran across Park Avenue, dodging the traffic. Sweat was pouring down his neck now. His shirt was sopping wet and stuck to his back. There was more yelling. And then he just turned and sprinted away.

Eventually the yelling stopped.

And, sometime soon after that, so did Carl.

* * *

Many blocks from the Four Seasons, on Fifty-fourth and Ninth Avenue, there was a small French-style bistro. Carl found an empty stool at the bar and ordered a calvados, a double, his voice sounding hollow in his ears. He sat there drinking and trying to make sense of what was happening to him. Trying to understand. Harry Wagner had asked him if he knew what he was mixed up in.

Clearly, he did not.

He didn’t know a fucking thing.

Maggie had definitely hired him. She had paid him. So how could there be no trace of any of it? Who was the strange, semiliterate woman whose diary he’d spent these last weeks poring over? Who had been supplying him with all the other notes, documents, and background information? Who was the boy who’d coldly and brutally murdered his own unfortunate baby brother? Who was the inside source, Gideon? Why had Gideon leaked the material to Maggie? What was he hoping to gain? And who the hell was Harry Wagner? What was
he
hoping to gain?

It was in the middle of his third double calvados that it occurred to Carl for the first time: Was Maggie’s murder connected to the book? Harry hadn’t shown up that day. Had
he
murdered Maggie? Or were the two things totally unrelated? Was he starting to become paranoid? Was he as crazy as Bartholomew clearly thought he was?

Questions. He had tons of them. But what he didn’t have were answers.

He paid for his drinks and wandered east and then north toward Central Park. At a pay phone he stopped to call Toni. He thought maybe she’d come and get drunk with him, then they could go home and spend the next tree days in bed. Three days? Hell, three months. But his luck was consistent. Her phone machine told him she was out at an audition, that he could leave a message after the beep and she’d get back to him as soon as possible.

He left a message, saying he was sorry he missed hear and he was even sorrier that his whole life was falling apart. He said that if she got home before he did, to wait for him so they could have diner. Or just talk. Or … He hung up in the middle of his own message when he realized he was starting to sound like a lunatic.

Eventually he found himself back on the Upper East Side, in front of Maggie’s apartment, where he had waited for her that day two weeks ago.

It had been one of the best days in his life.

It was a day he now wished had never occurred.

It was nearly five when Carl got home. He climbed the stairs to his floor and started to unlock the door to his apartment. Only there was no point in doing that. There was no point at all.

Carl stood in the doorway, frozen. The door was already open. The door frame had been splintered by a pry bar, the lock shattered.

Carl shoved the door open and charged into the room.

His apartment was in ruins. Everything he owned in the world had been ripped to shreds.

His clothing. His books. The contents of his desk drawers. His bed. Even his heavy bag. All of it was slashed and torn and heaped on the floor. It looked as though a hurricane had struck in the middle of an earthquake.

Slowly, numbly, he made his way through the devastation that had been his life. He had to reach his desk. He had to know.

His notepads were gone. His floppy disks were gone. His computer was no longer a computer. It was nothing more than a heap of spare parts. Whoever had been there had dismantled the damned thing, circuit plate by circuit plate. The hard drive was a shell. They had removed its memory.

And with it all trace of what he had been writing.

All record of
Gideon
was gone. Erased.

Carl stood there, unable to move, staring at the desk. That stupid cigar of Wagner’s lay there, untouched in its wrapper. It was the only thing in the whole place that was intact. That and the book of matches he’d left him. Carl picked up both items and stuck them in the inside pocket of his blazer, a lame but instinctive attempt to salvage something from the rubble.

Do you know what you’re mixed up in?
Harry had said to him.

He did not.

All he knew was that they had succeeded in scaring the shit out of him, and it was now time to call the police.

He dialed 911. The put him in touch with the nearest precinct house. The desk sergeant was brusque and impersonal but switched him to another officer, Sergeant Judy O’Roarke, who was very patient and professional.

“How may I help you?” she asked.

“I’m not sure exactly,” Carl said slowly. “I think I may know something about a murder.”

“May I have your name, please?” the sergeant asked.

“Carl Granville,” he said, and as he began to speak, the words came out faster and faster. He was almost helpless to stop them. “Something every weird is going on. I’m a writer. First my editor was murdered. Then my publisher didn’t even know who the hell I was. Now my apartment’s been broken into and ransacked. All my disks are gone. My computer is toast. My—”

“Slow down, Mr. Granville,” O’Roarke said soothingly. “Please try to take it easy. Let’s go one step at a time, okay?”

Carl took a deep breath. “Right,” he said. “Okay.”

“Now. You say your editor was murdered?”

“Last night. In her apartment. Her name was Maggie Peterson.”

The sergeant was silent a moment. “Why, yes. Of course. And you say you know something about it?”

“No. Yes. I don’t
know
what I know. I was working on a project for her. A book. And I just got home to find my apartment broken into. It’s not an ordinary break-in, either. They didn’t take my TV or my stereo or anything. What they took was anything that had to do with our project.”

“Where do you live, Mr. Granville?”

Carl gave her his address.

“Okay, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to lock your door—”

“I can’t. The lock’s no longer functioning.”

“Then just stay put. Don’t move. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes, okay?”

“Okay. Fine. Thank you.”

“No problem. Just wait right there.”

* * *

Payton got there in five minutes, belching sourly from the corned beef on rye he’d been inhaling over at the Blarney Stone on Broadway and Ninety-fifth Street when the call came through. It had been a big mistake, no question. He should have ordered the tuna. Except Payton hated tuna. He was a man, not a house cat. So he’d ordered the corned beef. And now it lay there in his stomach like wet cement.

As he approached the brownstone on 103rd, Payton flicked his cigarette into the gutter and gobbled a couple of antacid tablets, the kind that were supposed to work instantly. They did shit instantly. He probably had an ulcer, but he hadn’t gone to the doctor to find out. He didn’t want to find out. He didn’t want to know what his blood pressure was or if his cholesterol was high or if he was a prime candidate for a fucking heart attack in the middle of the night. He didn’t have to be told that he was out of breath all the time, overweight, sluggish, out of shape. He also didn’t have to be told that women got busy looking somewhere else when they saw him coming. Payton knew all those things. Not that he’d ever been one of those tall, trim glamor boys. He was a short, stockily built bull with thick, curly black hair and an oily, pitted complexion. His arthritic left knee ached most of the time, as did his lower back, and his flat feet throbbed
all
of the time.

Aw, what the fuck
, he thought.
Overall, not bad for a sixty-year-old
.

Except in another two months and three days, he would turn forty.

He lit another cigarette, his twentieth of the day, crumpled the empty pack in his meaty fist, and tossed it onto the sidewalk. A pair of gangbangers eased on by him in a shiny, chrome-emblazoned black Jeep Cherokee, acting like they owned the whole damn block, their rap music blaring out of a pair of stereo speakers, each of which had to be the size of an Amana sixteen-cubic-foot no-frost. That drum-beat practically shook the buildings, thudding like some kind of primitive jungle rhythm. The two jigs glared at him as they drove by, their chins thrust defiantly into the air, their gold glinting in the sunlight. Payton glared right back at them, his jaw muscles tightening, his hands itching to take them down, to teach them some respect, to show them who really owned these streets.