The Ghost (3 page)

“I’ll give you a call when we’ve settled the deal,” said Rick.

“Make them howl,” I told him, squeezing his shoulder.

Maddox laughed. “Hey! Remember!” he called as Quigley showed me out of the door. He struck his big fist against his blue-suited chest. “Heart!”

As we went down in the lift, Quigley stared at the ceiling. “Was it my imagination, or did I just get fired in there?”

“They wouldn’t let you go, Roy,” I said with all the sincerity I could muster, which wasn’t much. “You’re the only one left who can remember what publishing used to be like.”

“‘Let you go,’” he said bitterly. “Yes, that’s the modern euphemism, isn’t it? As if it’s a favor. You’re clinging to the edge of a cliff and someone says, ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry, we’re going to have to let you go.’”

A couple on their lunch break got in at the fourth floor and Quigley was silent until they got off to go to the restaurant on the second. When the doors closed, he said, “There’s something not right about this project.”

“Me, you mean?”

“No. Before you.” He frowned. “I can’t quite put my finger on it. The way no one’s allowed to see anything, for a start. And that fellow Kroll makes me shiver. And poor old Mike McAra, of course. I met him when we signed the deal two years ago. He didn’t strike me as the suicidal type. Rather the reverse. He was the sort who specializes in making other people want to kill themselves, if you know what I mean.”

“Hard?”

“Hard, yes. Lang would be smiling away, and there would be this thug next to him with eyes like a snake’s. I suppose you’ve got to have someone like that when you’re in Lang’s position.”

We reached the ground floor and stepped out into the lobby. “You can pick up a taxi round the corner,” said Quigley, and for that one small, mean gesture—leaving me to walk in the rain rather than calling me a cab on the company’s account—I hoped he’d rot. “Tell me,” he said suddenly, “when did it become fashionable to be stupid? That’s the thing I really don’t understand. The Cult of the Idiot. The Elevation of the Moron. Our two biggest-selling novelists—the actress with the tits and that ex-army psycho—have never written a word of fiction. Did you know that?”

“You’re talking like an old man, Roy,” I told him. “People have been complaining that standards are slipping ever since Shakespeare started writing comedies.”

“Yes, but now it’s really happened, hasn’t it? It was never like this before.”

I knew he was trying to goad me—the ghostwriter to the stars off to produce the memoirs of an ex–prime minister—but I was too full of myself to care. I wished him well in his retirement and set off across the lobby swinging that damned yellow plastic bag.

IT MUST HAVE TAKEN
me half an hour to find a ride back into town. I had only a very hazy idea of where I was. The roads were wide, the houses small. There was a steady, freezing drizzle. My arm was aching from carrying Kroll’s manuscript. Judging by the weight, I reckoned it must have been close on a thousand pages. Who was his client? Tolstoy? Eventually I stopped at a bus shelter in front of a greengrocer’s and a funeral parlor. Wedged into its metal frame was the card of a minicab firm.

The journey home took almost an hour and I had plenty of time to take out the manuscript and study it. The book was called
One Out of Many
. It was the memoir of some ancient U.S. senator, famous only for having kept on breathing for about a hundred and fifty years. By any normal measure of tedium it was off the scale—up, up, and away, beyond boring into some oxygen-starved stratosphere of utter nullity. The car was overheated and smelled of stale takeaways. I began to feel nauseous. I put the manuscript back into the bag and wound down the window. The fare was forty pounds.

I had just paid the driver and was crossing the pavement toward my flat, head down into the rain, searching for my keys, when I felt someone touch me lightly on the shoulder. I turned and walked into a wall, or was hit by a truck—that was the feeling—some great iron force slammed into me, and I fell backward, into the grip of a second man. (I was told afterward there were two of them, both in their twenties. One had been hanging round the entrance to the basement flat, the other appeared from nowhere and grabbed me from behind.) I crumpled, felt the gritty wet stone of the gutter against my cheek, and gasped and sucked and cried like a baby. My fingers must have clasped the plastic bag with involuntary tightness, because I was conscious, through this much greater pain, of a smaller and sharper one—a flute in the symphony—as a foot trod on my hand, and something was torn away.

Surely one of the most inadequate words in the English language is “winded,” suggestive as it is of something light and fleeting—a graze, perhaps, or a touch of breathlessness. But I hadn’t been winded. I had been whumped and whacked and semiasphyxiated, knocked to the ground, and humiliated. My solar plexus felt as though it had been stuck with a knife. Sobbing for air, I was convinced I had been stabbed. I was aware of people taking my arms and pulling me up into a sitting position. I was propped against a tree, its hard bark jabbing into my spine, and when at last I managed to gulp some oxygen into my lungs, I immediately started blindly patting my stomach, feeling for the gaping wound I knew must be there, imagining my intestines strewn around me. But when I inspected my moist fingers for blood, there was only dirty London rainwater. It must have taken a minute for me to realize that I wasn’t going to die—that I was, essentially, intact—and then all I wanted was to get away from these good-hearted folk who had gathered around me and were producing mobile phones and asking me about calling the police and an ambulance.

The thrill of having to wait ten hours to be examined in casualty, followed by half a day spent hanging around the local police station to make a statement, was enough to propel me out of the gutter, up the stairs, and into my flat. I locked the door, peeled off my outer clothes, and went and lay on the sofa, trembling. I didn’t move for perhaps an hour, as the cold shadows of that January afternoon gradually gathered in the room. Then I went into the kitchen and was sick in the sink, after which I poured myself a very large whiskey.

I could feel myself moving now out of shock and into euphoria. Indeed, with a little alcohol inside me I felt positively merry. I checked my inside jacket pocket and then my wrist: I still had my wallet and my watch. The only thing that had gone was the yellow plastic bag containing Senator Alzheimer’s memoirs. I laughed out loud as I pictured the thieves running down Ladbroke Grove and stopping in some alleyway to check their haul:
“My advice to any young person seeking to enter public life today…”
It wasn’t until I’d had another drink that I realized this could be awkward. Old Alzheimer might not mean anything to me, but Sidney Kroll might view matters differently.

I took out his card. Sidney L. Kroll of Brinkerhof Lombardi Kroll, attorneys, M Street, Washington, DC. After thinking about it for ten minutes or so, I went back and sat on the sofa and called his cell phone. He answered on the second ring: “Sid Kroll.”

I could tell by his inflection he was smiling.

“Sidney,” I said, trying to sound natural using his first name, “you’ll never guess what’s happened.”

“Some guys just stole my manuscript?”

For a moment I couldn’t speak. “My God,” I said, “is there nothing you don’t know?”

“What?” His tone changed abruptly. “Jesus, I was kidding. Is that
really
what happened? Are you okay? Where are you now?”

I explained what had happened. He said not to worry. The manuscript was
totally
unimportant. He’d given it to me only because he thought it might be of interest to me in a professional capacity. He’d get another sent over. What was I going to do? Was I going to call the police? I said I would if he wanted, but as far as I was concerned bringing in the police was generally more trouble than it was worth. I preferred to view the episode as just another round on the gaudy carousel of urban life: “You know,
que sera, sera
, bombed one day, mugged the next.”

He agreed. “It was a real pleasure to meet with you today. It’s great that you’re on board. Cheerio,” he said, just before he hung up, and there was that little smile in his voice again.
Cheerio
.

I went into the bathroom and opened my shirt. A livid red horizontal mark was branded into my flesh, just above my stomach and below my rib cage. I stood in front of the mirror for a better look. It was three inches long and half an inch wide, and curiously sharp edged. That wasn’t caused by flesh and bone, I thought. I’d say that was a knuckle-duster. That looked
professional
. I started to feel strange again and went back to the sofa.

When the phone rang, it was Rick, to tell me the deal was done. “What’s up?” he said, interrupting himself. “You don’t sound right.”

“I just got mugged.”

“No!”

Once more I described what had happened. Rick made appropriately sympathetic noises, but the moment he learned I was well enough to work, the anxiety left his voice. As soon as he could, he brought the conversation round to what really interested him.

“So you’re still fine to fly to the States on Sunday?”

“Of course. I’m just a bit shocked, that’s all.”

“Okay, well, here’s another shock for you. For one month’s work, on a manuscript that’s supposedly already written, Rhinehart Inc. are willing to pay you two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, plus expenses.”

“What?”

If I hadn’t already been sitting on the sofa I would have fallen onto it. They say every man has his price. A quarter of a million dollars for four weeks’ work was roughly ten times mine.

“That’s fifty thousand dollars paid weekly for the next four weeks,” said Rick, “plus a bonus of fifty if you get the job done on time. They’ll take care of airfares and accommodation.
And
you’ll get a collaborator credit.”

“On the title page?”

“Do me a favor! In the acknowledgments. But it’ll still be noticed in the trade press. I’ll see to that. Although for now your involvement is strictly confidential. They were very firm about that.” I could hear him chuckling down the phone and imagined him tilting back in his chair. “Oh, yes, a whole new wide world is opening up for you, my boy!”

He was right there.

AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT
109 was due to leave Heathrow for Boston at ten-thirty on Sunday morning. Rhinehart biked round a one-way business-class ticket on Saturday afternoon, along with a contract and the privacy agreement. I had to sign both while the messenger waited. I trusted Rick to have got the contract straight and didn’t even bother to read it; the nondisclosure undertaking I scanned quickly in the hall. It’s almost funny in retrospect:
“I shall treat all confidential information as being strictly private and confidential, and shall take all steps necessary to prevent it from being disclosed or made public to any third party or relevant person…I shall not use or disclose or permit the disclosure by any person of the confidential information for the benefit of any third party…Neither I nor the relevant persons shall by any means copy or part with possession of the whole or any part of the confidential information without prior permission of the Owner…”
I signed without a qualm.

I’ve always liked to be able to disappear quickly. It used to take me about five minutes to put my London life into cold storage. All my bills were paid by direct debit. There were no deliveries to cancel—no milk, no papers. My cleaner, whom I hardly ever saw in any case, would look in twice a week and retrieve all the mail from downstairs. I had cleared my desk of work. I had no appointments. My neighbors I had never spoken to. Kate had likely gone for good. Most of my friends had long since entered the kingdom of family life, from whose distant shores, in my experience, no traveler e’er returned. My parents were dead. I had no siblings. I could have died myself and, as far as the world was concerned, my life would have gone on as normal. I packed one suitcase with a week’s change of clothes, a sweater, and a spare pair of shoes. I put my laptop and mini–disk recorder into my shoulder bag. I would use the hotel laundry. Anything else I needed I would buy on arrival.

I spent the rest of the day and all that evening up in my study, reading through my books on Adam Lang and making a list of questions. I don’t want to sound too Jekyll and Hyde about this, but as the day faded—as the lights came up in the big tower blocks across the railway marshaling yard, and the red, white, and green stars winked and fell toward the airport—I could feel myself beginning to get into Lang’s skin. He was a few years older, but apart from that our backgrounds were similar. The resemblances hadn’t struck me before: an only child, born in the Midlands, educated at the local grammar school, a degree from Cambridge, a passion for student drama, a complete lack of interest in student politics.

I went back to look at the photographs.
“Lang’s hysterical performance as a chicken in charge of a battery farm for humans at the 1972 Cambridge Footlights Revue earned him plaudits.”
I could imagine us both chasing the same girls, taking a bad show to the Edinburgh Fringe in the back of some beat-up Volkswagen van, sharing digs, getting stoned. And yet somehow, metaphorically speaking, I had stayed a chicken, while he had gone on to become prime minister. This was the point at which my normal powers of empathy deserted me, for there seemed nothing in his first twenty-five years that could explain his second. But there would be time enough, I reasoned, to find his voice.

I double-locked the door before I went to bed that night and dreamed I was following Adam Lang through a maze of rainy, redbrick streets. When I got into a minicab and the driver turned round to ask me where I wanted to go, he had McAra’s lugubrious face.

HEATHROW THE NEXT MORNING
looked like one of those bad science fiction movies “set in the near future” after the security forces have taken over the state. Two armored personnel carriers were parked outside the terminal. A dozen men with Rambo machine guns and bad haircuts patrolled inside. Vast lines of passengers queued to be frisked and X-rayed, carrying their shoes in one hand and their pathetic toiletries in a clear plastic bag in the other. Travel is sold as freedom, but we were about as free as lab rats. This is how they’ll manage the next holocaust, I thought, as I shuffled forward in my stockinged feet: they’ll simply issue us with air tickets and we’ll do whatever we’re told.

Once I was through security, I headed across the fragrant halls of duty-free toward the American Airlines lounge, intent only on a courtesy cup of coffee and the Sunday morning sports pages. A satellite news channel was burbling away in the corner. No one was watching. I fixed myself a double espresso and was just turning to the football reports in one of the tabloids when I heard the words “Adam Lang.” Three days earlier, like everyone else in the lounge, I would have taken no notice, but now it was if my own name was being called out. I went and stood in front of the screen and tried to make sense of the story.

To begin with, it didn’t seem that important. It sounded like old news. Four British citizens had been picked up in Pakistan a few years back—“kidnapped by the CIA,” according to their lawyer—taken to a secret military installation in eastern Europe, and tortured. One had died under interrogation, the other three had been imprisoned in Guantánamo. The new twist, apparently, was that a Sunday paper had obtained a leaked Ministry of Defence document that seemed to suggest that Lang had ordered a Special Air Services unit to seize the men and hand them over to the CIA. Various expressions of outrage followed, from a human rights lawyer and a spokesman for the Pakistani government. File footage showed Lang wearing a garland of flowers round his neck on a visit to Pakistan while he was prime minister. A spokeswoman for Lang was quoted as saying the former prime minister knew nothing of the reports and was refusing to comment. The British government had consistently rejected demands to hold an inquiry. The program moved on to the weather, and that was it.

I glanced around the lounge. Nobody else had stirred. Yet for some reason I felt as if someone had just run an ice pack down my spine. I pulled out my cell phone and called Rick. I couldn’t remember whether he had gone back to America or not. It turned out he was sitting about a mile away, in the British Airways lounge, waiting to board his flight to New York.

“Did you just see the news?” I asked him.

Unlike me, I knew Rick was a news addict.

“The Lang story? Sure.”

“D’you think there’s anything in it?”

“How the hell do I know? Who cares if there is? At least it’s keeping his name on the front pages.”

“D’you think I should ask him about it?”

“Who gives a shit?” Down the line I heard a loudspeaker announcement howling in the background. “They’re calling my flight. I got to go.”

“Just before you do,” I said quickly, “can I run something past you? When I was mugged on Friday, somehow it didn’t make much sense, the way they left my wallet and only ran off with a manuscript. But looking at this news—well, I was just wondering—you don’t think they thought I was carrying Lang’s memoirs?”

“But how’d they know that?” said Rick in a puzzled voice. “You’d only just met Maddox and Kroll. I was still negotiating the deal.”

“Well, maybe someone was watching the publishers’ offices and then followed me when I left. It
was
a bright yellow plastic bag, Rick. I might as well have been carrying a flare.” And then another thought came to me, so alarming I didn’t know where to begin. “While you’re on, what do you know about Sidney Kroll?”

“Young Sid?” Rick gave a chuckle of admiration. “My, but he’s a piece of work, isn’t he? He’s going to put honest crooks like me out of business. He cuts his deals for a flat fee rather than commission, and you won’t find an ex-president or a cabinet member who doesn’t want him on their team. Why?”

“It’s not possible, is it,” I said hesitantly, voicing the thought more or less as it developed, “that he gave me that manuscript because he thought—if anyone was watching—he thought it would look as though I was leaving the building carrying Adam Lang’s book?”

“Why the hell would he do that?”

“I don’t know. For the fun of it? To see what would happen?”

“To see if you’d get mugged?”

“Okay, all right, it sounds mad, but just think it through for a minute. Why are the publishers so paranoid about this manuscript? Even Quigley hasn’t been allowed to see it. Why won’t they let it out of America? Maybe it’s because they think someone over here is desperate to get hold of it.”

“So?”

“So perhaps Kroll was using me as bait—sort of a tethered goat—to test who was after it, find out how far they’d be willing to go.”

Even as the words were leaving my mouth I knew I was sounding ridiculous.

“But Lang’s book is a boring crock of shit!” said Rick. “The only people they want to keep it away from at this point are their shareholders!
That’s
why it’s under wraps.”

I was starting to feel a fool. I would have let the subject go, but Rick was enjoying himself too much.

“‘A tethered goat’!” I could have heard his shout of laughter from the other terminal even without the phone. “Let me get this straight. According to your theory, someone must have known Kroll was in town, known where he was Friday morning, known what he’d come to discuss—”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s leave it.”

“—
known
he might just give Lang’s manuscript to a new ghost, known who you were when you came out of the meeting, known where you lived. Because you said they were waiting for you, didn’t you? Wow. This must’ve been some operation. Too big for a newspaper. This must’ve been a
government
—”

“Forget it,” I said, finally managing to cut him off. “You’d better catch your flight.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Well, you have a safe trip. Get some sleep on the plane. You’re sounding weird. Let’s talk next week. And don’t worry about it.” He rang off.

I stood there holding my silent phone. It was true. I was sounding weird. I went into the men’s room. The bruise where I’d been punched on Friday had ripened, turned black and purple, and was fringed with yellow, like some exploding supernova beamed back by the Hubble Telescope.

A short time later they announced that the Boston flight was boarding, and once we were in the air my nerves steadied. I love that moment when a drab gray landscape flickers out of sight beneath you, and the plane tunnels up through the cloud to burst into the sunshine. Who can be depressed at ten thousand feet when the sun is shining and the other poor saps are still stuck on the ground? I had a drink. I watched a movie. I dozed for a while. But I must admit I also scoured that business-class cabin for every Sunday newspaper I could find, ignored the sports pages for once, and read all that had been written about Adam Lang and those four suspected terrorists.

WE MADE OUR FINAL
approach to Logan Airport at one in the afternoon, local time.

As we came in low over Boston Harbor, the sun we had been chasing all day seemed to travel over the water alongside us, striking the downtown skyscrapers one after the other: erupting columns of white and blue, gold and silver, a fireworks display in glass and steel. O my America, I thought, my new-found-land—my land where the book market is five times the size of the United Kingdom’s—shine thy light on me! As I queued for immigration I was practically humming “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Even the guy from the Department of Homeland Security—embodying the rule that the folksier an institution’s name, the more Stalinist its function—couldn’t dent my optimism. He sat frowning behind his glass screen at the very notion of anyone flying three thousand miles to spend a month on Martha’s Vineyard in midwinter. When he discovered I was a writer he couldn’t have treated me with greater suspicion if I had been wearing an orange jumpsuit.

“What kind of books you write?”

“Autobiographies.”

This obviously baffled him. He suspected mockery but wasn’t quite sure. “Autobiographies, huh? Don’t you have to be famous to do that?”

“Not anymore.”

He stared hard at me, then slowly shook his head, like a weary St. Peter at the pearly gates, confronted by yet another sinner trying to wheedle his way into paradise. “Not anymore,” he repeated, with an expression of infinite distaste. He picked up his metal stamp and punched it twice. He let me in for thirty days.

When I was through immigration, I turned on my phone. It showed a welcoming message from Lang’s personal assistant, someone named Amelia Bly, apologizing for not providing a driver to collect me from the airport. Instead she suggested I take a bus to the ferry terminal at Woods Hole and promised a car would meet me when I landed at Martha’s Vineyard. I bought the
New York Times
and the
Boston Globe
and checked them while I waited for the bus to leave to see if they had the Lang story, but either it had broken too late for them or they weren’t interested.

The bus was almost empty, and I sat up front near the driver as we pushed south through the tangle of freeways, out of the city, and into open country. It was a few degrees below freezing and the sky was clear, but there had been snow not long before. It was piled in banks next to the road and clung to the higher branches in the forests that stretched away on either side in great rolling waves of white and green. New England is basically Old England on steroids—wider roads, bigger woods, larger spaces; even the sky seemed huge and glossy. I had a pleasing sense of gaining time, imagining a gloomy, wet Sunday night in London, in contrast to this sparkling afternoon winterland. But gradually it began to darken here as well. I guess it must have been almost six when we reached Woods Hole and pulled up at the ferry terminal, and by then there were a moon and stars.

Oddly enough, it wasn’t until I saw the sign for the ferry that I remembered to spare a thought for McAra. Not surprisingly, the dead-man’s-shoes aspect of the assignment wasn’t one I cared to dwell on, especially after my mugging. But as I wheeled my suitcase into the ticket office to pay my fare, and then stepped back out again into the bitter wind, it was only too easy to imagine my predecessor going through similar motions a mere three weeks earlier. He had been drunk, of course, which I wasn’t. I looked around. There were several bars just across the car park. Perhaps he had gone into one of those? I wouldn’t have minded a drink myself. But then I might sit on exactly the same bar stool as he had, and that would be ghoulish, I thought, like taking one of those tours of murder scenes in Hollywood. Instead I joined the passenger queue and tried to read the
Times
Sunday magazine, turning to the wall for protection from the wind. There was a wooden board with painted lettering:
CURRENT NATIONWIDE THREAT LEVEL IS ELEVATED
. I could smell the sea but it was too dark to see it.