Potboiler Read online

  Pfefferkorn despaired.

  49.

  “Poor Arthur.”

  No sooner had he gotten on the phone with Carlotta than he realized he’d made a mistake. He had called seeking solace, but how could she give it to him when he couldn’t tell her the truth? Instead, her sympathy came off as grating.

  “Bill always got like this right before a book came out. Like something terrible could happen.”

  Pfefferkorn said nothing.

  “You’re two of a kind,” Carlotta said.

  “You think?”

  “Sometimes I do, yes.”

  “Am I a good lover?” Pfefferkorn asked.

  “What kind of a question is that?”

  “Am I?”

  “Of course you are. You’re wonderful.”

  “I’ve had to shake off a lot of rust.”

  “If so, I never noticed.”

  “Am I as good as Bill?”

  “Arthur. Please.”

  “I won’t be offended if you say him. It’s only natural. He had more time to learn what you like.”

  “I like you.”

  “Be honest,” he said. “I can handle it.”

  “It’s a ridiculous question and I’m not going to answer it.”

  “I’m afraid you just did.”

  “I did no such thing. I refused to answer a ridiculous question. That’s all.”

  There was a silence.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve been under a lot of strain.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’m sure it’ll be a smashing success.”

  That was precisely what he was afraid of. He wondered how Bill coped. Presumably it got easier with each go-around. Also, the chain of events was elaborate enough to make his contribution appear relatively minor and therefore forgivable. He wasn’t pushing a button or pulling a trigger. He was publishing a book.

  “Are you excited for tour?” she asked.

  “I’m looking forward to seeing you,” he said.

  “I’m bringing a big crowd to the reading.”

  He felt a frisson of dread. He preferred to keep her away from anything at all having to do with the book. He didn’t want her tainted. “I thought you had a tango session that night.”

  “I canceled it.”

  “You shouldn’t,” he said.

  “Arthur, don’t be absurd. I can dance whenever I want.”

  “But it makes you so happy.”

  “I’d much rather see you.”

  “Please,” he said. “It’ll make me nervous if you’re there.”

  “Oh, stop.”

  “I’m serious,” he said. “Don’t come.”

  The words came out harsher than he had intended, and he hastened to clarify. “I’m sorry. But it really will trip me up.”

  “Well, we don’t want that, do we.”

  “Please don’t,” he said. “Not tonight.”

  She sighed. “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Never mind that. Let’s plan to meet afterward. Pick someplace relaxing. Will you do that for me, please?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Travel safely,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “Arthur?” She paused. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  He hung up and paced around his apartment. It was eleven p.m. In ten hours the first bookstores would open and Blood Night would be unleashed upon the world. He had stock signings all the next day and his first reading at seven-thirty. He had a grueling three weeks ahead of him. He needed to rest. But there was no way he was getting any sleep, not tonight. He turned on the television. He watched the first twenty seconds of a special report about the Zlabian crisis before switching the television off and getting up to pace once more.

  The aspect of Pfefferkorn’s new reality to which he had devoted the least amount of attention was the implications it held for his past. He had been strenuously ignoring that line of thinking, afraid of where it might lead. Whole swaths of his identity had been formed in reaction to Bill. He had defined himself as a writer unwilling to sacrifice art for the sake of material gain: the anti-Bill. But it made no sense trying to be the opposite of something that did not exist, and it devastated him to grasp that he had spent his life wrestling a phantom.

  And in the final analysis, how worthwhile had that struggle been? Where had it gotten him? Certainly he hadn’t distinguished himself through his writing. What made him so different from Bill, other than his own, mulish insistence that they were different? What if he, not Bill, had been the one recruited for clandestine activities? Would he be the one married to Carlotta? Would he have a daughter? Would he even be alive right now? The fabric of the universe had been irreparably shredded, and through the holes he saw new worlds, some tantalizing, some terrifying beyond belief.

  High atop a shelf in his closet was a box containing old snapshots he had never found the time to organize. Desperate for evidence of an independent self, he hauled it down and dumped it out on the floor. He knelt and grabbed the topmost photo: a black-and-white image of a much younger him hunched over a desk at the university literary magazine. A plaque read

  ARTHUR S. PFEFFERKORN, DICTATOR-IN-CHIEF

  —a gag presented to him by Bill in honor of his managerial style. Where, Pfefferkorn wondered, had he gotten the idea that he had an artistic birthright? His mother had never finished high school. His father never read anything more sophisticated than the racing form. He himself had not been a studious child, preferring to listen to baseball games on the radio or to sneak cigarettes from his father’s coat pocket. When had the transformation occurred? How had he become who he had become? He used to think he knew, but now everything seemed up for grabs. He picked up another photo and was startled to see himself mouth-kissing his daughter. But it was not his daughter. It was his dead ex-wife. The resemblance that so often annoyed him here verged on pornographic. He hurriedly turned the snapshot over. His ex-wife would be in lots of these photos, if not most. It gave him pause. How much of those years did he want to revisit? He remembered the day she called to tell him she was dying. I want to see her. It was an extraordinary demand to make of a seven-year-old girl who hadn’t seen her mother in three years. To bring her into that room, with its tubes and its smells . . . But he couldn’t rightly say no. A mother was a mother. His daughter had refused to come, though, and Pfefferkorn’s ex-wife had called to scream at him. You’re poisoning her against me. He tried to reason with her but it was no use. A month later, she was gone.

  He picked up another photo.

  There they were: he and Bill, Piazza Navona, their shadows humpbacked by large canvas rucksacks. The summer after graduation they had wandered across Europe. In those days a rail pass cost eighty-five dollars. Bill paid for those as well as for their airfare, using money he’d gotten from his grandparents as a graduation gift. Pfefferkorn had always intended to reimburse him. He never had. He wondered about the real origins of Bill’s “graduation gift.” Grandparents? Or the Boys? Was Bill working for them as early as then? Pfefferkorn could never know. He felt doubt beginning to hollow out his memories. He remembered a night in a Berlin hostel (it was West Berlin back then), opening his eyes to catch a glimpse of Bill leaving the room at two in the morning. The next day Bill pled insomnia. I went for a walk. Pfefferkorn remembered it and doubted. Berlin, of all places—and like that, his happy memories of the city caved in on themselves. He doubled over as though gutshot. It hurt to breathe. Eventually he rose to his hands and knees and reached for another photo. Their high school prom. He saw the ruffled cuffs and the powder-blue tuxedos and their shining red faces. But he doubted. He doubted all of it. The memory imploded. He reached for another and the same thing happened. And another and again. P
iece by piece his history disappeared. The cursing parakeet they kept in the apartment. Bill’s green Camaro. The canoe trip with their young wives. The first time Bill held Pfefferkorn’s daughter. He knew he should stop. He was destroying himself. He could not stop, not until the sun came up. He had gone through the whole box and his life lay in shambles. He had thought himself done with grief, yet here he was, sobbing again. Not for the death of a friend but for the death of a friendship. He wept for the friend he never had.

  50.

  The book tour for Blood Night was bigger and fancier than that for Blood Eyes. He went to more cities. He flew first class. He stayed in swanky hotels, one of which celebrated his arrival with flowers, fruit, and a quarter-scale replica of the novel rendered in chocolate and icing. He used his cell phone to take a picture.

  One thing that had not changed from the first tour was the roster of media escorts who met him along the way. These were amiable, attractive women between the ages of thirty-five and sixty who loved to read. At each airport one would be waiting outside the baggage claim, holding a copy of his book. She would smile and say how nice it was to see him again. She would spend the morning shuttling him around to local bookstores to sign stock. Over lunch she would make a fuss over photos of Pfefferkorn’s daughter in her wedding gown. More stock signings were followed by a two-hour break at the hotel so Pfefferkorn could shower and shave. In the evening the media escort would pick him up and drive him to his reading. The next morning she would show up before dawn to get him to his next flight. These women made an otherwise dreary routine more humane, and Pfefferkorn was grateful for them all.

  It helped matters that they could be genuinely optimistic: every event was packed. Publishers bemoaned the fact that fewer and fewer people read fiction, while those who did got older and older. Within a few years, they predicted, there would be no market left. Seeing his various and sundry fans, Pfefferkorn decided things couldn’t possibly be as bad as all that.

  He took questions.

  “What inspired this book?”

  Pfefferkorn said it had just come to him one day.

  “Do you do a lot of research?”

  As little as he could get away with, he answered.

  “What’s next for Harry Shagreen?”

  Pfefferkorn said he didn’t want to spoil the surprise.

  Every night he returned to his suite drained. He ordered room service, changed into a bathrobe, and girded himself for the most harrowing part of his day: reading the newspaper.

  Boston, Providence, Miami, Washington, D.C., Charlotte, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Albuquerque passed without incident. He began to wonder if he had made a mistake. Maybe it wasn’t Zlabia he was in charge of. He flew to Denver. His daughter called to say they were getting their dining room set delivered. She thanked him and mentioned that the pillows she had custom-ordered for the den ended up costing more than expected. He invited her to put the difference on his credit card. She thanked him again and told him to keep out of trouble. “That’s me,” he said, running his finger down the column headed International News in Brief. “Mr. Trouble.” He flew to Phoenix. The owner of the mystery and thriller specialty store was a delightfully wry woman who took him to a Polynesian restaurant. He remained morose throughout the meal, glancing over her shoulder whenever she took a sip of her mai tai. Above the bar was a television tuned to a cable news channel. He was waiting for a graphic that said BREAKING NEWS. He flew to Houston. The manager of the independent bookstore presented him with a logo mug and what he called “the sickest but best book of the year.” It was a how-to called Kid-A-Gami: 99 Fun Shapes to Fold Your Infant Into. Pfefferkorn put it in his carry-on for on his flight to Seattle but did not take it out. Instead he scoured three different papers. He had stopped looking exclusively for articles about Zlabia. Every piece of bad news made for a potential indictment. A dam burst in India, leaving sixty thousand people homeless. His doing? The Middle East convulsed and sparked. Him? The rebel forces closing in on a South American capital, the millions of anonymous Africans dying by the hour—any of it could be him. It then occurred to him that he was delegating an unjustified degree of authority (and responsibility) to himself. He wasn’t “in charge of” squat. He was no Dick Stapp. He was no Harry Shagreen. He was a flunky, a pawn—making his complicity even more debasing. He flew to Portland. His media escort took him for the best donuts in town. In nineteen days of travel he had yet to hear about a catastrophe he did not feel culpable for. But he would never know. Whatever the event was, it might have already taken place. It might also take place in a month, a year, two years, ten. He flew to San Francisco. The bookstore owner was a kindly older man with a fondness for opera. It was raining, warm summer rain, and the inside of the store smelled like shoe leather. A slovenly fellow with a beard like a mop asked him to address the presence of Marxist themes in his writing. He returned to his hotel. He dined alone. He went upstairs, put on a bathrobe, and stretched out on the bed. He scanned the laminated channel guide. There were multiple news stations. He turned on the television and watched baseball until he fell asleep.

  51.

  Dragomir Zhulk, the prime minister of West Zlabia, was dead. He had been killed by a sniper’s bullet while walking to work. While most security analysts presumed that his death was retaliation for the attempted assassination of Kliment Thithyich, others believed that the killers belonged to a splinter group within Zhulk’s own party. The splinter group itself had released a statement blaming the Americans. The secretary of state refused to dignify this accusation with a response, reiterating instead his country’s support for East Zlabia (“our longtime and historical ally”) and cautioning that the use of force by either side could be considered cause for intervention. The Russians had released a statement denouncing “these acts of terroristic aggression.” The Swedes had convened a fact-finding committee. The Chinese had taken advantage of the momentary distraction to execute a jailed dissident. A prominent French intellectual had written that the situation “inarguably supplied a manifest example of the shortcomings of reactionary identity politics as applied to the realpolitik of statecraft during a post-structural epoch.” It was front-page news.

  Pfefferkorn felt frayed. He was having a hard time keeping track of all the players. Worst of all—or best, he couldn’t decide—nobody had discerned the truth, which was that Dragomir Zhulk had been killed by a thriller that had just that morning hit number one on the best-seller list.

  “Morning,” his media escort said. “Coffee?”

  Pfefferkorn gratefully accepted the proffered cup and climbed into the waiting car.

  An hour later he was sitting in the first-class lounge with the obituaries spread out before him, staring at the grainy image of the man he had murdered. Dragomir Ilyiukh Zhulk was wiry and bald, with small black eyes set behind efficient-looking steel-rimmed glasses. An engineer by training, he had studied in Moscow, returning to his homeland to help build West Zlabia’s nuclear power plant, for many years the world’s smallest working reactor, until an accident forced it to close. He had climbed the Party ladder, becoming first minister of atomic research, then minister of science, then deputy prime minister, and finally prime minister, a title he had held for eleven years. He was widely regarded as an unrepentant ideologue, a man for whom the fall of the Berlin Wall had proven only that the Russians were not fit to inherit the Marxist-Leninist mantle, and whose greatest vice, if it could be called that, was a passion for Zlabian poetry. He lived monkishly, shunning the large security force favored by his East Zlabian counterpart, a decision that had proven costly. His first marriage, to a schoolteacher, had ended with her death. Five years ago he had remarried, this time to his housekeeper. He left no children.

  The flight to Los Angeles was called. Pfefferkorn walked to the jetway, discarding the paper in the trash.

  52.

  His Los Angeles readi
ng was on the small side—a blessing in disguise, as Pfefferkorn wanted to get it over with as fast as humanly possible. Afterward, his media escort drove him to the restaurant Carlotta had picked out. He went straight to the bar to order a stiff drink. The television was tuned to images from the Zlabian front. Troops marched. Mini-tanks rolled. A commentator in a corner box was explaining that no fence separated East and West Zlabia, only an eight-inch-high concrete median strip running down the middle of Gyeznyuiy Boulevard. “You have to remember,” he said eagerly, “this is a conflict that has been raging in one form or another for four-hundred-plus years. Ethnically speaking, they’re one people.” The byline identified him as G. Stanley Hurwitz, Ph.D., author of A Brief History of the Zlabian Conflict. He appeared exhilarated by the carnage, as though he had been waiting all his life for his moment to shine. The anchor kept trying to cut him off but he went right on talking, citing lengthy passages of some little-known Zlabian poem that was apparently the source of all the fighting. Pfefferkorn asked the bartender to change the channel. The bartender found a baseball game. At the end of the inning, Pfefferkorn checked his watch. Even for Carlotta, thirty minutes was unusually late. He draped his jacket over the bar stool and stepped outside. Her home phone rang and rang. Her cell phone went straight to voicemail. He returned to the bar and asked for a third drink. He nursed it as long as he could bear before trying Carlotta again. There was still no answer. By this time he had been waiting for more than an hour. He paid his tab, apologized to the maître d’, and asked him to call a cab.

  53.

  Pfefferkorn stood at the mouth of the driveway to the de Vallée mansion. The gate was open. In all his visits he had never once seen it left that way. He leaned forward, his hands on his hips, and started to hike up. The driveway was steep. He began to pant and sweat. Why had he told the cabbie he would walk the rest of the way? Perhaps it was his mind’s way of slowing him down. Perhaps he already knew he did not want to know what awaited him. As he climbed higher, the thrum of the boulevard died away. All those trees and hedges and gates and heavy clay walls were there to maintain privacy and quiet. But they had another consequence. They ensured that nobody on the outside would hear you scream.