The Ghost (4 page)

The trouble is, once you start thinking about a thing, you can’t always make yourself stop. Most of the cars waiting to board the ferry had their engines running so the drivers could use their heaters in the cold, and I found myself checking for a tan-colored Ford Escape SUV. Then, when I actually got on the boat, and climbed the clanging metal stairwell to the passenger deck, I wondered whether this was the way McAra had come. I told myself to leave it, that I was working myself up for nothing. But I suppose that ghosts and ghostwriters go naturally together. I sat in the fuggy passenger cabin and studied the plain, honest faces of my fellow travelers, and then, as the boat shuddered and cast off from the terminal, I folded my paper and went out onto the open top deck.

It’s amazing how cold and darkness conspire to alter everything. The Martha’s Vineyard ferry on a summer’s evening I imagine must be delightful. There’s a big stripy funnel straight out of a storybook, and rows of blue plastic seats facing outward, running the length of the deck, where families no doubt sit in their shorts and T-shirts, the teenagers looking bored, the dads jumping about with excitement. But on this January night the deck was deserted, and the north wind blowing down from Cape Cod sliced through my jacket and shirt and chilled my skin to gooseflesh. The lights of Woods Hole slipped away. We passed a marker buoy at the entrance to the channel swinging frantically this way and that as if trying to free itself from some underwater monster. Its bell tolled in time with the waves like a funeral chime and the spray flew as vile as witch’s spit.

I jammed my hands in my pockets, hunched my shoulders up around my neck, and crossed unsteadily to the starboard side. The handrail was only waist-high, and for the first time I appreciated how easily McAra might have gone over. I actually had to brace myself to keep from slipping. Rick was right. The line between accident and suicide isn’t always clearly defined. You could kill yourself without ever really making up your mind. The mere act of leaning out too far and imagining what it might be like could tip you over. You’d hit that heaving icy black water with a smack that would take you ten feet under, and by the time you came up the ship might be a hundred yards away. I hoped McAra had absorbed enough booze to blunt the horror, but I doubted if there was a drunk in the world who wouldn’t be sobered by total immersion in a sea only half a degree above freezing.

And nobody would have heard him fall! That was the other thing. The weather wasn’t nearly as bad as it had been three weeks earlier, and yet, as I glanced around, I could see not a soul on deck. I really started shivering then; my teeth were chattering like some fairground clockwork novelty.

I went down to the bar for a drink.

WE ROUNDED THE WEST
Chop Lighthouse and came into the ferry terminal at Vineyard Haven just before seven, docking with a rattle of chains and a thump that almost sent me flying down the stairs. I hadn’t been expecting a welcoming committee, which was fine, because I didn’t get one, just an elderly local taxi driver holding a torn-out page from a notebook on which my name was misspelled. As he heaved my suitcase into the back, the wind lifted a big sheet of clear plastic and sent it twisting and flapping over the ice sheets in the car park. The sky was packed white with stars.

I’d bought a guidebook to the island, so I had a vague idea of what I was in for. In summer the population is a hundred thousand, but when the vacationers have closed up their holiday homes and migrated west for the winter, it drops to fifteen thousand. These are the hardy, insular natives, the folks who call the mainland “America.” There are a couple of highways, one set of traffic lights, and dozens of long sandy tracks leading to places with names like Squibnocket Pond and Jobs Neck Cove. My driver didn’t utter a word the whole journey, just scrutinized me in the mirror. As my eyes met his rheumy glance for the twentieth time, I wondered if there was a reason why he resented picking me up. Perhaps I was keeping him from something. It was hard to imagine what. The streets around the ferry terminal were mostly deserted, and once we were out of Vineyard Haven and onto the main highway, there was nothing to see but darkness.

By then I’d been traveling for seventeen hours. I didn’t know where I was, or what landscape I was passing through, or even where I was going. All attempts at conversation had failed. I could see nothing except my reflection in the cold darkness of the window. I felt as though I’d come to the edge of the earth, like some seventeenth-century English explorer who was about to have his first encounter with the native Wampanoags. I gave a noisy yawn and quickly clamped the back of my hand to my mouth.

“Sorry,” I said to the disembodied eyes in the rearview mirror. “Where I come from it’s after midnight.”

He shook his head. At first I couldn’t make out whether he was sympathetic or disapproving; then I realized he was trying to tell me it was no use talking to him: he was deaf. I went back to staring out the window.

After a while we came to a crossroads and turned left into what I guessed must be Edgartown, a settlement of white clapboard houses with white picket fences, small gardens, and verandas, lit by ornate Victorian street lamps. Nine out of ten were dark, but in the few windows that shone with yellow light I glimpsed oil paintings of sailing ships and whiskered ancestors. At the bottom of the hill, past the Old Whaling Church, a big misty moon cast a silvery light over shingled roofs and silhouetted the masts in the harbor. Curls of wood smoke rose from a couple of chimneys. I felt as though I was driving onto a film set for
Moby-Dick
. The headlights picked out a sign to the Chappaquiddick ferry, and not long after that we pulled up outside the Lighthouse View Hotel.

Again, I could picture the scene in summer: buckets and spades and fishing nets piled up on the veranda, rope sandals left by the door, a dusting of white sand trailed up from the beach, that kind of thing. But out of season the big old wooden hotel creaked and banged in the wind like a sailing boat stuck on a reef. I suppose the management must have been waiting till spring to strip the blistered paintwork and wash the crust of salt off the windows. The sea was pounding away nearby in the darkness. I stood with my suitcase on the wooden deck and watched the lights of the taxi disappear around the corner with something close to nostalgia.

Inside the lobby, a girl dressed up as a Victorian maid with a white lace mobcap handed me a message from Lang’s office. I would be picked up at ten the next morning and should bring my passport to show to security. I was starting to feel like a man on a mystery tour: as soon as I reached one location, I was given a fresh set of instructions to proceed to the next. The hotel was empty, the restaurant dark. I was told I could have my choice of rooms, so I picked one on the second floor with a desk I could work at and photographs of Old Edgartown on the wall: John Coffin House, circa 1890; the whale ship
Splendid
at Osborn wharf, circa 1870. After the receptionist had gone, I put my laptop, list of questions, and the stories I had torn out of the Sunday newspapers on the desk and then stretched out on the bed.

I fell asleep at once and didn’t wake until two in the morning, when my body clock, still on London time, went off like Big Ben. I spent ten minutes searching for a minibar before realizing there wasn’t one. On impulse, I called Kate’s home number in London. What exactly I was going to say to her I had no idea. In any case there was no answer. I meant to hang up but instead found myself rambling to her answering machine. She must have left for work very early. Either that, or she hadn’t come home the night before. That was something to think about, and I duly thought about it. The fact that I had no one to blame but myself didn’t make me feel any better. I took a shower and afterward I got back into bed, turned off the lamp, and pulled the damp sheets up under my chin. Every few seconds the slow pulse of the lighthouse filled the room with a faint red glow. I must have lain there for hours, eyes wide open, fully awake and yet disembodied, and in this way passed my first night on Martha’s Vineyard.

THE LANDSCAPE THAT DISSOLVED
out of the dawn the next morning was flat and alluvial. Across the road beneath my window was a creek, then reed beds, and beyond those a beach and the sea. A pretty Victorian lighthouse with a bell-shaped roof and a wrought-iron balcony looked across the straits to a long, low spit of land about a mile away. That, I realized, must be Chappaquiddick. A squadron of hundreds of tiny white seabirds, in a formation as tight as a school of fish, soared and flicked and dived above the shallow waves.

I went downstairs and ordered a huge breakfast. From the little shop next to reception I bought a copy of the
New York Times
. The story I was looking for was entombed deep in the world news section and then reinterred to ensure maximum obscurity far down the page:

I read it through three times. It didn’t seem to add up to much. Or did it? It was hard to tell anymore. One’s moral bearings were no longer as fixed as they used to be. Methods my father’s generation would have considered beyond the pale, even when fighting the Nazis—torture, for example—were now apparently acceptable civilized behavior. I decided that the ten percent of the population who worry about these things would be appalled by the report, assuming they ever managed to locate it; the remaining ninety would probably just shrug. We had been told that the free world was taking a walk on the dark side. What did people expect?

I had a couple of hours to kill before the car was due to collect me, so I took a walk over the wooden bridge to the lighthouse and then strolled into Edgartown. In daylight it seemed even emptier than it had the previous night. Squirrels chased undisturbed along the sidewalks and scampered up into the trees. I must have passed two dozen of those picturesque nineteenth-century whaling captains’ houses, and it didn’t look as if one was occupied. The widow’s walks on the fronts and sides were deserted. No black-shawled women stared mournfully out to sea, waiting for their menfolk to come home—presumably because the menfolk were all on Wall Street. The restaurants were closed, the little boutiques and galleries stripped bare of stock. I had wanted to buy a windproof jacket but there was no place open. The windows were filled with dust and the husks of insects. “Thanks for a great season!!!” read the cards. “See you in the spring!”

It was the same in the harbor. The primary colors of the port were gray and white—gray sea, white sky, gray shingle roofs, white clapboard walls, bare white flagpoles, jetties weathered blue-gray and green-gray, on which perched matching gray-and-white gulls. It was as if Martha Stewart had color coordinated the whole place, Man and Nature. Even the sun, now hovering discreetly over Chappaquiddick, had the good taste to shine pale white.

I put my hand up to shield my eyes and squinted at the distant strand of beach with its isolated holiday houses. That was where Senator Edward Kennedy’s career had taken its disastrous wrong turn. According to my book, the whole of Martha’s Vineyard had been a summer playground for the Kennedys, who liked to sail over for the day from Hyannisport. There was a story of how Jack, when he was president, had wanted to moor his boat at the private jetty of the Edgartown Yacht Club but had decided to sail away when he saw the massed ranks of the members, Republicans to a man, lined up with their arms folded, watching him, daring him to land. It was the summer before he was shot.

The few yachts moored now were shrouded for winter. The only movement was a solitary fishing boat with an outboard motor heading for the lobster traps. I sat for a while on a bench and waited to see if anything would happen. Gulls swooped and cried. On a nearby yacht the wind rattled the cables against a metal mast. There was hammering in the distance as property was renovated for the summer. An old guy walked a dog. Apart from that, nothing occurred in almost an hour that could possibly have distracted an author from his work. It was a nonwriter’s idea of a writer’s paradise. I could see why McAra might have gone insane.

IT WAS MY OLD
friend the deaf taxi driver who picked me up from the hotel later that morning. Because I’d been booked into a hotel in Edgartown, I’d naturally assumed that Rhinehart’s property must be somewhere in the port itself. There were some big houses overlooking the harbor, with gardens sloping down to private moorings, that looked to me to be ideal billionaire real estate—which shows how ignorant I was about what serious wealth can buy. Instead, we drove out of town for about ten minutes, following signs to West Tisbury, into flat, thickly wooded country, and then, before I’d even noticed a gap in the trees, swung left down an unmade, sandy track.

Until that moment I was unfamiliar with scrub oak. Maybe it looks good in full leaf. But in winter I doubt if nature has a more depressing vista to offer in its entire flora department than mile after mile of those twisted, dwarfish, ash-colored trees. A few curled brown leaves were the only evidence they might once have been alive. We rocked and bounced down a narrow forest road for almost three miles and the only creature we saw was a run-over skunk, until at last we came to a closed gate, and there materialized from this petrified wilderness a man carrying a clipboard and wearing the unmistakable dark Crombie overcoat and polished black oxfords of a British plainclothes copper.

I wound down my window and handed him my passport. His big, sullen face was brick colored in the cold, his ears terra-cotta: not a policeman happy with his lot. He looked as if he’d been assigned to guard one of the Queen’s granddaughters in the Caribbean for a fortnight, only to find himself diverted here at the last minute. He scowled as he checked my name against the list on his clipboard, wiped a big drop of clear moisture from the end of his nose, and walked around inspecting the taxi. I could hear surf performing its continuous, rolling somersault on a beach somewhere. He returned and gave me back my passport, and said—or at least I thought he said: he muttered it under his breath—“Welcome to the madhouse.”

I felt a sudden twist of nerves, which I hope I concealed, because the first appearance of a ghost is important. I try never to show anxiety. I strive always to look professional. It’s dress code: chameleon. Whatever I think the client is likely to be wearing, I endeavor to wear the same. For a footballer, I might put on a pair of trainers; for a pop singer, a leather jacket. For my first-ever meeting with a former prime minister, I had decided against a suit—too formal: I would have looked like his lawyer or accountant—and selected instead a pale blue shirt, a conservative striped tie, a sports jacket, and gray trousers. My hair was neatly brushed, my teeth cleaned and flossed, my deodorant rolled on. I was as ready as I would ever be.
The madhouse?
Did he really say that? I looked back at the policeman, but he had moved out of sight.

The gate swung clear, the track curved, and a few moments later I had my first glimpse of the Rhinehart compound: four wooden cube-shaped buildings—a garage, a storeroom, and two cottages for the staff—and up ahead the house itself. It was only two stories high but as wide as a stately home, with a long, low roof and a pair of big square brick chimneys of the sort you might see in a crematorium. The rest of the building was made entirely of wood, but although it was new it had already weathered to a silvery-gray, like garden furniture left out for a year. The windows on this side were as tall and thin as gun slits, and what with these, and the grayness, and the blockhouses farther back, and the encircling forest, and the sentry at the gate, it all somehow resembled a holiday home designed by Albert Speer; the Wolf’s Lair came to mind.

Even before we drew up, the front door opened and another police guard—white shirt, black tie, zippered gray jacket—welcomed me unsmilingly into the hall. He quickly searched my shoulder bag while I glanced around. I’d met plenty of rich people in the course of my work, but I don’t think I’d ever been inside a billionaire’s house before. There were rows of African masks on the smooth white walls and lighted display cabinets filled with wood carvings and primitive pottery of crude figures with giant phalluses and torpedo breasts—the sort of thing a naughty child might do while the teacher’s back was turned. It was entirely lacking in any kind of skill or beauty or aesthetic merit. (The first Mrs. Rhinehart, I discovered afterward, was on the board of the Museum of Modern Art. The second was a Bollywood actress, fifty years his junior, whom Rhinehart had been advised by his bankers to marry in order to break into the Indian market.)

From somewhere inside the house I heard a woman with a British accent shouting, “This is absolutely bloody
ridiculous
!” A door slammed and then an elegant blonde in a dark blue jacket and skirt, carrying a black-and-red hardcover notebook, came clicking down the corridor on high heels.

“Amelia Bly,” she said with a fixed smile. She was probably forty-five but at a distance could have passed for ten years younger. She had beautiful large, clear blue eyes but wore too much makeup, as if she worked at a cosmetics counter in a department store and had been obliged to demonstrate all the products at once. She exuded a sweetly opulent smell of perfume. I presumed she was the spokeswoman mentioned in that morning’s
Times
. “Adam’s in New York, unfortunately, and won’t be back till later this afternoon.”

“Actually, forget I said that: it’s
fucking
ridiculous!” shouted the unseen woman.

Amelia expanded her smile a fraction, creating tiny fissures in her smooth pink cheeks.

“Oh, dear. I’m so sorry. I’m afraid poor Ruth’s having ‘one of those days.’”

Ruth.
The name resonated briefly like a warning drumbeat or the clatter of a thrown spear among the African tribal art. It had never occurred to me that Lang’s wife might be here. I had assumed she would be at home in London. She was famous for her independence, among other things.

“If this is a bad time—” I said.

“No, no. She definitely wants to meet you. Come and have a cup of coffee. I’ll fetch her. How’s the hotel?” she added over her shoulder. “Quiet?”

“As the grave.”

I retrieved my bag from the Special Branch man and followed Amelia into the interior of the house, trailing in her cloud of scent. She had very nice legs, I noticed; her thighs swished nylon as she walked. She showed me into a room full of cream leather furniture, poured me some coffee from a jug in the corner, then disappeared. I stood for a while at the French windows with my mug, looking out over the back of the property. There were no flower beds—presumably nothing delicate would grow in this desolate spot—just a big lawn that expired about a hundred yards away into sickly brown undergrowth. Beyond that was a pond, as smooth as a sheet of steel under an immense aluminum sky. To the left, the land rose slightly to the dunes that marked the edge of the beach. I couldn’t hear the ocean: the glass doors were too thick—bullet-proof, I later discovered.

An urgent burst of Morse from the passage signaled the return of Amelia Bly.

“I’m so sorry. I’m afraid Ruth’s a little busy at the moment. She sends her apologies. She’ll catch you later.” Amelia’s smile had hardened somewhat. It looked as natural as her nail polish. “So, if you’ve finished your coffee, I’ll show you where we work.”

She insisted that I go first up the stairs.

The house, she explained, was arranged so that all the bedrooms were on the ground floor, with the living space above, and the moment we ascended into the huge open sitting room, I understood why. The wall facing the coast was made entirely of glass. There was nothing man-made within sight, just ocean, pond, and sky. It was primordial: a scene unchanged for ten thousand years. The soundproofed glass and under-floor heating created the effect of a luxurious time capsule that had been propelled back to the Neolithic age.

“Quite a place,” I said. “Don’t you get lonely at night?”

“We’re in here,” said Amelia, opening a door.

I followed her into a big study, adjoining the sitting room, which was presumably where Marty Rhinehart worked on holiday. There was a similar view from here, except that this angle favored the ocean more than the pond. The shelves were full of books on German military history, their swastikaed spines whitened by exposure to the sun and the salt air. There were two desks: a little one in the corner at which a secretary sat typing at a computer, and a larger one, entirely clear except for a photograph of a powerboat and a model of a yacht. The sour old skeleton that was Marty Rhinehart crouched over the wheel of his boat—living disproof of the old adage that you can’t be too thin or too rich.

“We’re a small team,” said Amelia. “Myself, Alice here”—the girl in the corner looked up—“and Lucy, who’s with Adam in New York. Jeff the driver’s also in New York—he’ll be bringing the car back this afternoon. Six protection officers from the UK—three here and three with Adam at the moment. We badly need another pair of hands, if only to handle the media, but Adam can’t bring himself to replace Mike. They were together so long.”

“And how long have you been with him?”

“Eight years. I worked in Downing Street. I’m on attachment from the Cabinet Office.”

“Poor Cabinet Office.”

She flashed her nail-polish smile. “It’s my husband I miss the most.”

“You’re married? I notice you’re not wearing a ring.”

“I can’t, sadly. It’s far too large. It bleeps when I go through airport security.”

“Ah.” We understood one another perfectly.

“The Rhineharts also have a live-in Vietnamese couple, but they’re so discreet you’ll hardly notice them. She looks after the house and he does the garden. Dep and Duc.”

“Which is which?”

“Duc is the man. Obviously.”

She produced a key from the pocket of her well-cut jacket and unlocked a big gunmetal filing cabinet, from which she withdrew a box file.

“This is not to be removed from this room,” she said, laying it on the desk. “It is not to be copied. You can make notes, but I must remind you that you’ve signed a confidentiality agreement. You have six hours to read it before Adam gets in from New York. I’ll have a sandwich sent up to you for lunch. Alice, come on. We don’t want to cause him any distractions, do we?”

After they’d gone, I sat down in the leather swivel chair, took out my laptop, switched it on, and created a document titled “Lang ms.” Then I loosened my tie and unfastened my wristwatch and laid it on the desk beside the file. For a few moments I allowed myself to swing back and forth in Rhinehart’s chair, savoring the ocean view and the general sensation of being world dictator. Then I flipped open the lid of the file, pulled out the manuscript, and started to read.

ALL GOOD BOOKS ARE
different but all bad books are exactly the same. I know this to be a fact because in my line of work I read a lot of bad books—books so bad they aren’t even published, which is quite a feat, when you consider what is published.

And what they all have in common, these bad books, be they novels or memoirs, is this: they don’t ring true. I’m not saying that a good book
is
true necessarily, just that it
feels
true for the time you’re reading it. A publishing friend of mine calls it the seaplane test, after a movie he once saw about people in the City of London that opened with the hero arriving for work in a seaplane he landed on the Thames. From then on, my friend said, there was no point in watching.

Adam Lang’s memoir failed the seaplane test.

It wasn’t that the facts in it were wrong—I wasn’t in a position to judge at that stage—it was rather that the whole book somehow felt false, as if there was a hollow at its center. It consisted of sixteen chapters, arranged chronologically: “Early Years,” “Into Politics,” “Challenge for the Leadership,” “Changing the Party,” “Victory at the Polls,” “Reforming Government,” “Northern Ireland,” “Europe,” “The Special Relationship,” “Second Term,” “The Challenge of Terror,” “The War on Terror,” “Sticking the Course,” “Never Surrender,” “Time to Go,” and “A Future of Hope.” Each chapter was between ten and twenty thousand words long and hadn’t been written so much as cobbled together from speeches, official minutes, communiqués, memoranda, interview transcripts, office diaries, party manifestos, and newspaper articles. Occasionally, Lang permitted himself a private emotion
(“I was overjoyed when our third child was born”)
or a personal observation
(“the American president was much taller than I had expected”)
or a sharp remark
(“as foreign secretary, Richard Rycart often seemed to prefer presenting the foreigners’ case to Britain rather than the other way round”)
but not very often, and not to any great effect. And where was his wife? She was barely mentioned.

“A crock of shit,” Rick had called it. But actually this was worse. Shit, to quote Gore Vidal, has its own integrity. This was a crock of nothing. It was strictly accurate and yet overall it was a lie—it had to be, I thought. No human being could pass through life and feel so little. Especially Adam Lang, whose political stock-in-trade was emotional empathy. I skipped ahead to the chapter called “The War on Terror.” If there was going to be anything to interest American readers it must surely be here. I skimmed it, searching for words like “rendition,” “torture,” “CIA.” I found nothing, and certainly no mention of Operation Tempest. What about the war in the Middle East? Surely some mild criticism here of the U.S. president, or the defense secretary, or the secretary of state; some hint of betrayal or letdown; some behind-the-scenes scoop or previously classified document? No. Nowhere. Nothing. I took a gulp, literally and metaphorically, and began reading again from the top.

At some point the secretary, Alice, must have brought me in a tuna sandwich and a bottle of mineral water, because later in the afternoon I noticed them at the end of the desk. But I was too busy to stop, and besides I wasn’t hungry. In fact, I was beginning to feel nauseous as I shuffled those sixteen chapters, scanning the sheer white cliff face of featureless prose for any tiny handhold of interest I could cling to. No wonder McAra had thrown himself off the Martha’s Vineyard ferry. No wonder Maddox and Kroll had flown to London to try to rescue the project. No wonder they were paying me fifty thousand dollars a week. All these seemingly bizarre events were rendered entirely logical by the direness of the manuscript. And now it would be
my
reputation that would come spiraling down, strapped into the backseat of Adam Lang’s kamikaze seaplane. I would be the one pointed out at publishing parties—assuming I was ever invited to another publishing party—as the ghost who had collaborated on the biggest flop in publishing history. In a sudden shaft of paranoid insight, I fancied I saw my real role in the operation: designated fall guy.