Potboiler Read online

  He left four days later, taking with him the annotated copy of Shade of the Colossus. He did not mention to Carlotta that he was borrowing it, and had he been pressed for an explanation, he could not have supplied one. Perhaps something about the barn compelled him to steal books.

  His flight landed in time for him to catch a late dinner. He directed the taxi to his neighborhood sushi bar. He ordered without consulting the menu, laid the novel flat on the table, and started to read. A twenty-five-year-old work of failure seemed like an odd place to look for inspiration, but who knew? Obviously Bill had seen value in it.

  Much of the book was flawed. Pfefferkorn could accept that now. He spared a thought for his first editor, a motherly woman who had since passed away. She had tried to get him to inject more humor. He had resisted, and eventually he had worn her down. He remembered her telling him, in a heated moment, that he was the most stubborn person she’d ever met. The word she used was “mulish.” He smiled. I’ve changed, Madelaine, he thought. I’ve grown old.

  For all its youthful excesses, though, Pfefferkorn thought it a worthy piece of art. There were passages of authentic beauty. He had chosen to mask the story’s autobiographical roots by making the protagonist a painter rather than a writer. The final third described the protagonist’s return home following his first successful exhibition. His father, the old tyrant, has fallen into a coma, and it is the son who makes the decision to withdraw life support. It remains ambiguous whether this is an act of mercy or one of vengeance. What is evident is that the power to carry it out has been made possible by his art. The closing paragraphs suggest that his next step is to attain the moral strength to focus that power.

  Pfefferkorn poked at his red-bean ice cream, wondering if there was some way to convert the book into a blockbuster. He could make the father a gangster, and the son the policeman assigned to take him down. Father versus son, blood ties leading to spilled blood. It sounded promising. Certainly he needed to get something on paper, and fast. His agent had been leaving him voicemails in a tone of barely contained hysteria. Pfefferkorn had not called him back. Nor had he acknowledged the half-dozen e-mails from his editor. His current editor was young, scarcely older than Pfefferkorn’s daughter, and while he tended to be deferential, it was clear that his patience was all but gone. He had hitched himself to Pfefferkorn’s star and now he stood in danger of being brought crashing to earth. Again, Pfefferkorn sympathized. Lots of people depended on him. His daughter did. Paul did. He depended on him, if he hoped to continue flying across the country every few weeks. The future looked bleak. His ice cream had turned to a gloppy mauve puddle. Pfefferkorn asked for the check. The tip he left was smaller than usual.

  39.

  “Well? What do you think?”

  “I think it’s very nice.”

  “Oh, Daddy. That’s the best you can do?”

  They were standing in the dining room of the gigantic house Pfefferkorn’s daughter wanted to buy. The real estate agent had stepped outside to take a call.

  “What did she mean by that,” Pfefferkorn asked, “‘Great bones’?”

  “It means it has a lot of potential,” Pfefferkorn’s daughter said.

  “What’s wrong with it the way it is?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with it, but it’s somebody else’s taste. That’s the way it always is. There’s always going to be some work.”

  Pfefferkorn, a lifelong renter, wondered where his daughter had learned these things. “If you say so.”

  “I’m thinking we could knock out this wall. You know, like an open kitchen. Don’t you think it would be fantastic for parties? Of course, we’ll need to change the countertops.”

  “Of course.”

  “So you like it.”

  “I like that it makes you happy,” he said.

  “It does. It really does. Can’t you see us raising a family here?”

  It was the first time she had ever spoken of children. He had always made a point of saying nothing. The choice was hers. Hearing her raise the subject on her own filled him with an indescribable mix of emotions.

  “I think it’s a lovely house,” he said.

  “Me too,” his daughter said.

  “And,” he said, his head tingling with the excitement of a man about to push in all his chips, “I want to give it to you.”

  His daughter’s eyes widened. “Daddy. That’s not why I—”

  “I know,” he said.

  “But we can’t—I mean, Paul won’t allow it.”

  “That’s your job,” he said. “You work on him.”

  “Daddy. You really mean it?”

  He nodded.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, oh, oh.”

  “Sweetheart. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “I’m just so happy.” She put her arms around him. “Thank you.”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you so much.”

  “Of course,” he said again, less confidently this time. “Eh. Sweetheart?”

  “Yes, Daddy?”

  “I forgot to ask about the price.”

  She named a number.

  “Mm,” he said.

  “Trust me, it’s a steal, even at asking.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  She released him. “You don’t have to do this.”

  “I want to.”

  She embraced him again. “I love you so, so much.”

  Pfefferkorn tried to remember what he was due to be paid for the delivery and acceptance of his next novel. He tried to calculate whether it would be enough to pay for the entire house or whether they would need to take out a mortgage. He didn’t know the first thing about real estate finance. Whatever the case was, he couldn’t afford anything unless he turned in a book. The present word count stood at ninety-nine, including the title and dedication pages. He wondered if making an outlandish offer was his subconscious’s way of motivating him to get to work. Or perhaps he could not bear to see his daughter disappointed. With the wedding, he had set a high standard, one he now felt compelled to meet and exceed. He pulled away so she wouldn’t feel his heart starting to pound.

  “Daddy? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You look a little green,” she said. “Do you want to sit down?”

  He shook his head. He managed to produce a smile. “Question for you,” he said.

  “Yes, Daddy?”

  “When I’m old and pissing my pants, where’s my room going to be?”

  “Stop.”

  “Oh, I get it. You’re going to put me in a home.”

  “Daddy. Stop.”

  “Never mind, then.”

  40.

  Pfefferkorn’s success had at once heightened and undercut his stature as a professor. On the one hand, demand for his creative writing classes had grown, with long waiting lists established. With so large a pool available to him, he had the ability to control the composition of the class. However, he tended—stupidly, he thought—to admit a disproportionate number of literary types. These were the very students who tended to be snobbish about his work, comporting themselves with disdain, as though he could not possibly teach them about real literature when he had made a fortune writing trash. Even his good reviews provided grounds for scorn, signaling the death of critical integrity. The fact that his first novel had been literary fiction did not impress anyone. Nobody had heard of it. Pfefferkorn often wondered if he ought to go back to shepherding fragile young women.

  The story under discussion that morning centered on an old man nearing the end of his life. He was tending his garden, oblivious to how its flourishing mocked his own senescence. The old man then watched a film in which the growth of flowers was shown, sped up, so that they went from seedling to full bloom to wilting to de
ad, all in a matter of seconds. This sequence was described in minute detail. The story ended with a cryptic fragment of dialogue.

  The author was a twenty-year-old boy named Benjamin who came to class dressed in a homburg. His grasp of the aging process was limited to lurid descriptions of the male body in decay, although Pfefferkorn did acknowledge that the young man wrote with impressive confidence about urogenital problems and arthritis. Still, in Pfefferkorn’s opinion, the story lacked emotional insight. Indeed, it made no attempt whatsoever to penetrate the old man’s psyche at all. It was as if the author had laid the character on a slab and left him there. When Pfefferkorn attempted to raise this critique he met a blistering counterattack, not only from Benjamin but from a host of like-minded supporters. They argued that Pfefferkorn’s understanding of character was antiquated. They abhorred writers who overexplained. Pfefferkorn defended himself by citing avant-garde and postmodern writers whom he enjoyed, stating that even these seemingly stone-faced works had at their center a moist, beating core of humanity. “That is total bullshit,” Benjamin said. “We’re all robots,” a hard young woman named Gretchen said. Pfefferkorn asked her to explain what she meant by that. “I mean we’re all robots,” she said. Heads nodded. Pfefferkorn was confused. “You can’t all be robots,” he said, not knowing what argument he was making or why he was making it. These students did not speak the same language as he did. He was tired, too, having slept badly for several months running. His doctor had prescribed him a sedative, but so far it had proved ineffective, lulling him to the cusp of sleep but not beyond, so that he spent his waking hours in a fog. He saw himself through his students’ eyes and he saw weakness. “I am not a robot,” he repeated firmly. “How do you know?” Gretchen said. “Because I’m not,” Pfefferkorn said. “Yes,” she said, “but how do you know?” “I’m human,” Pfefferkorn said. “If you cut me, I bleed.” “If you cut me,” she said, “I bleed motor oil.” This was agreed upon by several of the students to be very funny. Pfefferkorn, feeling the beginnings of a migraine, was glad when the hour was up.

  That evening he sat at his desk with two large piles in front of him. One was a long-neglected stack of mail. The other was made up of hundreds of stories his students had written over the years. He had always kept copies on the off chance that one of them became famous and the story turned out to be valuable. That was not his present purpose in browsing. Rather, he was trying to find something he could use. A recent Herculean effort had pushed the word count to one hundred ninety-eight, but he still hadn’t gotten past the second page. Perhaps somewhere in this yellowing tower of mediocrity was the key to kickstarting his creativity. He told himself he wouldn’t steal anything word for word. That wasn’t his style. All he needed was to get the juices flowing.

  Four hours and two hundred pages later, he put his head in his hands. He was headed for the rocks.

  He turned his attention to the mail. Most of it was junk. There were bills, many of them overdue. His agent had sent royalty statements, along with a few medium-sized checks—nothing to sneeze at, but nothing that would cover a large suburban house, either. A padded envelope contained paperbacks of the Zlabian edition of Blood Eyes, all but one of which he planned to get rid of. Already his new office was overrun with author’s copies. He crumpled a circular and spied an envelope addressed to him in a large, shaky hand. It was postmarked several weeks prior. There was a return address but no name. He opened it. Inside were several folded pages and a note written on heavy-stock cardboard.

  Pfefferkorn shuddered as he remembered Bill’s agent with the huge, veiny head. There was no phone number on the note. Nor had Savory indicated when to come. Was Pfefferkorn supposed to show up at the return address at a time of his choosing? How would Savory know he was coming? It was an altogether bizarre—and officious—way to schedule a meeting. Schmuck, Pfefferkorn thought. He had no intention of honoring the request until he unfolded the enclosed pages. Then he understood immediately.

  41.

  Lucian Savory’s office was downtown, not far from Pfefferkorn’s agent’s office. The next day Pfefferkorn stepped from the bus and was pummeled by a blast of wind, funneled through a chasm of high-rises. He hurried into the lobby, locating Savory’s name on the directory and taking the elevator to the penthouse.

  No other tenants shared the floor, leading Pfefferkorn to expect a suite of offices, fronted by a secretary or three. He was surprised to be met at the door by Savory himself.

  “About fucking time,” Savory said. “Come in.”

  Pfefferkorn stepped into an enormous room, perfectly beige and almost as bare. Two beige chairs stood on opposite sides of a beige desk. A bank of beige file cabinets ran the length of one beige wall. The color scheme gave him the sensation of being smothered in putty.

  “I would’ve called first,” Pfefferkorn said, “but you didn’t leave a number.”

  “I don’t have a number,” Savory said. He looked exactly as he had at the funeral. Pfefferkorn assumed that someone at such an advanced age would show greater daily wear and tear. But Savory was like a living fossil. He shuffled behind the desk and sat down. “I take it you finally decided to wise up.”

  “You didn’t give me much choice.”

  Savory smiled.

  Pfefferkorn sat down. He took out the pages and flattened them on the desk. The first page read

  SHADOWGAME

  a novel of suspense

  William de Vallée

  “Some of your edits were decent,” Savory said. “I’ll grant you that much.”

  “Thanks,” Pfefferkorn said.

  “Nice title.”

  “It was your idea.”

  “Still, you had the good sense to use it.”

  Pfefferkorn said nothing.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t know?” Savory said.

  “I thought I had the only copy.”

  “What the hell gave you that impression?”

  “Carlotta told me he never showed his unfinished work.”

  “Not to her, maybe. And then you went ahead and used my title? It’s like you were screaming for my attention.”

  Pfefferkorn shrugged. “Maybe I was.”

  “Oh,” Savory said, “I see. It was a cry for help. You wanted to get caught.”

  “Sure,” Pfefferkorn said.

  “Some sort of deep-rooted Freudian thing. ‘Spank me.’”

  “Could be.”

  “That’s one theory,” Savory said. “I have my own, though. Want to hear it? Here goes. You didn’t bother to take any of that into account because you’re a lazy, greedy son of a bitch with poor executive function.”

  There was a silence.

  “That’s possible,” Pfefferkorn said.

  Savory slapped the desk. “Well, we’ll never know.”

  Pfefferkorn looked at him. “What do you want from me.”

  Savory cackled. “Perfect.”

  “What is.”

  “I was taking bets with myself whether it would be that or ‘Why are you doing this to me.’”

  “I don’t see why we have to drag it out. Just tell me how much you want and I’ll tell you if I can afford it. Otherwise we have nothing to talk about.”

  “Au contraire,” Savory said.

  42.

  “A spy?”

  “Not quite,” Savory said, “but for simplicity’s sake, we can call it that.”

  “But that’s ludicrous,” Pfefferkorn said.

  “Says you.”

  “I’ve known Bill since I was eleven.”

  “And therefore.”

  “He wasn’t a spy.”

  “Since you seem intent on picking nits, fine: he wasn’t a spy. He was a courier.”

  “He was a writer,” Pfefferkorn said. “He wrote thrillers.”

  “
The man never published a single thing of his own invention,” Savory said. “We gave it all to him. William de Vallée was a perfect fraud, and by that I mean in creating his cover, we all did a perfect job, including Bill. He was a major asset, the result of thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars. You can’t imagine how disappointed we were to lose him.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Pfefferkorn said.

  “Every Dick Stapp novel has contained encrypted directives for operatives embedded in hostile territories where standard means of transmission have proven too difficult.”

  “I still have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Code,” Savory said.

  “Code?”

  “Code.”

  “Bill wrote in code.”

  “I told you, he didn’t write anything. The Boys did.”

  “What boys.”

  “The Boys. Capital B.”

  “Who’re they.”

  “That’s not important.”

  “They’re not important but they get a capital B?”

  “All information will be given on a need-to-know basis.”

  “And I don’t need to know.”

  “Bingo.”

  There was a silence. Pfefferkorn looked up at the ceiling.

  “What,” Savory said.

  “Where are the cameras.”

  “There aren’t any.”

  Pfefferkorn stood. “When does the TV crew jump out?”

  “Sit down.”

  Pfefferkorn walked around the room. “Ha ha,” he said to the walls. “Very funny.”

  “We have a lot to discuss, Artie. Sit down. Or don’t, I don’t care. But time’s a-wasting.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  Savory shrugged.

  “I don’t believe any of it,” Pfefferkorn said. “How can that make sense? Delivering secret messages out in the open. It’s preposterous.”

  “That makes it all the more difficult to detect. Try sending an e-mail to North Korea and see how far you get. But a top-notch thriller penetrates like nobody’s business. He wasn’t the only one, mind you. Most blockbuster American novelists are on our payroll. Anything with embossed foil letters, that’s us.”