Summit (10 page)

The man was wearing a Yankees cap, a University of Guelph sweatshirt, one gold earring, and wraparound sunglasses. Long blond hair spilled out from beneath the cap; a fuzzy blond mustache perched on his upper lip. He was carrying a Bloomingdale's shopping bag; he was chewing bubble gum.

He blew an enormous bubble before saying anything. It just missed his mustache when it burst. He grinned. "I'm a poet," he said in a raspy voice to the woman, "and I got copies of all the poems I ever wrote right here in this bag. This looks like a classy place, so I figured you might be interested in buying some direct from the author. Eliminate the bourgeois capitalist middleman who sucks the blood out of us sensitive artists, know what I mean? So what do you say? A lyric ode, maybe? Or a sonnet sequence—you look like the romantic type, am I right? How about a sestina? Very tricky to write, sestinas. They're on special this week, actually. Two for a dollar ninety-nine, and that's my final offer."

Marcia picked up the phone. "I'll tell Mr. Hershohn you're here, Mr. Fulton."

"Shit," Fulton said.

* * *

Charles Hershohn was a bloodsucking bourgeois capitalist middleman. It was not an easy job. The man sitting across the desk from him wearing the University of Guelph sweatshirt was the main reason. "How nice to see you, Daniel," Hershohn said. "You're looking well."

Fulton blew a bubble.

"Marcia informed me there was some sort of, uh, problem with the, uh, CIA while I was out of town."

Fulton took off his sunglasses. "Have you received an offer from Goskoncert for me to play in Moscow this fall?"

Hershohn nodded. "It would have been forwarded to you in due course with all the other offers, to save you the trouble of rejecting each of them separately."

"Very kind of you. This one I want to accept."

Hershohn felt a sudden need for a drink. He was not a drinking man. "Daniel," he said as gently as he could, "how do I know that this will be different from the other offers that you have, on occasion, accepted in the past three years? I only end up apologizing to everyone when you change your mind."

"I know. I've been a bad boy," Fulton said. "But this is different. You can trust me on this one."

He sounded sincere. He often sounded sincere. "Daniel, give me a reason why I can trust you on this one. I don't mind kissing off the communists if you change your mind , but if you
are
going to do this, I want a record contract, I want a video, I want you to make some real money—and that starts to complicate things."

"I don't care about that stuff. Let's just do the recital."

Hershohn made a connection. It seemed crazy, but... "Does this have anything to do with the CIA business you were talking to Marcia about, Daniel?"

Fulton stared at him, stared at the ceiling. "Are you going to bother me until I give you a reason?" he asked finally.

"Daniel, your career is on the line," Hershohn said. "You might not care about it, but I do. No matter how talented you are, you can't keep acting irresponsibly and not have some fallout."

Fulton shrugged. "Okay. There is a psychic in Moscow. The CIA wants me to go there, using the recital as an excuse, meet her, and convince her to defect. You cannot tell that to a living soul. Now will you make the arrangements?"

"I thought the CIA, uh, kidnapped you."

"For God's sake, Charles, Marcia has always thought I was loony. She just got the message wrong."

"I'm trying to understand, Daniel. The CIA? Arranging a defection? Do you really want to return to public performance with—with that sort of thing on your mind?"

"Yes, I do. I'm not loony, and I know what I'm doing. I want it the way it was the other time I played in Moscow, all right? I stay in the National Hotel. And I play in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. They'll want me in the Tchaikovsky Hall, but turn them down. Clear?"

Hershohn sighed. "Clear."

Fulton smiled and stood up. "Great. Thanks, Charles. By the way, can I sell you a sonnet sequence?"

Hershohn closed his eyes. "Oh, Daniel. Please go away."

He heard the door shut, then waited for about a minute, forcing himself to keep his eyes closed and to refrain from thinking. Then he called his secretary. "Marcia, would you please bring me the pending offers for Fulton?" he asked, in what he hoped was a calm, professional manner.

"Coming right up."

Marcia brought in the folder a few moments later. She was a stout young woman with dyed red hair. She wore dresses that were too tight for her, her perfume was overpowering, and she knew everything. "I suppose it's none of my business," she said, setting the folder down on his desk.

"Um," Hershohn replied. Many of his conversations with Marcia started this way.

"...but has our friend finally gone completely around the bend?"

He shrugged. "It is entirely reasonable for Mr. Fulton to wear a disguise in public," he said. "He's trying to cope with problems that you and I can't even dream of."

"He's bonkers."

"He's a genius."

"He's a humbug." Marcia was tone-deaf, and immune to Fulton's charms. "You should drop him before he comes here with an ax in his Bloomingdale's bag and murders us all."

"Um, well." He reached for the folder. Marcia glared at him for a moment, then stomped out. If they were all murdered one of these days, he knew who would be to blame.

He stared at the offer to play at the Moscow Peace Festival. It wouldn't do much for Fulton's reputation in certain political circles, but if it got Fulton playing in public again, Hershohn didn't care who was offended. On the other hand, if it turned out to be a bad experience, Fulton might just give up concertizing for life, like Glenn Gould. And that wouldn't do at all.

Daniel Fulton was born to play the piano in public. There was some chemistry with the audience, some intensity that possessed him when he went onstage—something that made his recitals unlike anything Hershohn had ever experienced.

He had become Fulton's manager at a time when no one else sensed the chemistry. Fulton had been at that awkward postprodigy age when the public loses interest in you—you're too old to be a freak, too young to be a mature artist. He had shepherded Fulton through those few dark years, keeping him away from the grinding competitions, trying his best to prepare him for life among the elite of concert pianists. They had both succeeded—at least for a while. Fulton's debut was spectacular, and the career that followed was more spectacular still. Hershohn had tried never to miss one of his performances. Watching Fulton onstage, Hershohn sometimes felt as if Liszt had been born again, with women swooning and men cheering and everyone trying to touch him, to share his magic. It was a manager's dream come true.

And then Fulton stopped—walked away from the adulation at the summit of his career. It wasn't totally unexpected; pianists, after all, are hardly the most stable of God's creatures. And Fulton, offstage, had the grownup prodigy's share of problems. He often seemed perplexed, wary of his power, uncertain about what to do with his life. Hershohn had tried countless times to get behind the façade, to see if he could help, but had never succeeded. And so Fulton had retreated to his little house on Long Island to puzzle things out for himself. His retirement was big news for a while, and then the world put him in the back of its mind and went about its business.

But Daniel Fulton
was
Charles Hershohn's business. And it was difficult to stand by and watch Fulton toss away his career. Oh, Fulton had tried a couple of studio recordings, but they were outside his standard repertoire, and without the stimulus of an audience he turned into just another superb technician, a dime-a-dozen Juilliard grad; the records had bombed. He had agreed halfheartedly to a couple of new commitments, only to back out after a few days of contemplating his navel, or whatever he did to pass the time.

It wasn't just the loss of revenue that bothered Hershohn. He genuinely cared about Fulton. The man could be infuriating, but he could also be funny and accommodating and generous and an all-around nice fellow, no matter what Marcia thought. And so Hershohn was sitting at his desk pondering whether this Moscow recital was a good idea for Fulton, instead of jumping for joy at the man's decision to start earning some money once again.

The CIA business bothered Hershohn. Was it a paranoid fantasy of some sort? If so, something had to be done about it. Maybe great artists have to be a little weird, but too much weirdness can harm even a genius. The trouble was, Hershohn had no one to turn to for a second opinion: Fulton was unmarried, had few close friends, and had long ago severed connections with his parents. So it seemed to be up to his manager to decide whether he should send Fulton to Moscow, or to a shrink.

He didn't relish the prospect of interrogating Fulton any further about this secret mission of his. So what was he supposed to do?

He thought about it for a long time, and then he sighed, and he buzzed Marcia.

* * *

"Yes, sir?"

"Marcia, I want to talk to someone in CIA headquarters. Would you see if you can find where that is and put through a call?"

"Right away."

Marcia shook her head. They were all going to be murdered—if not by Fulton, then by the CIA. Why wouldn't Mr. Hershohn listen to her advice?

She didn't need to find out where the CIA was. Anyone who had ever read a spy novel knew that. She called directory assistance for Langley, Virginia, and a minute later she had made the call. She thought about staying on the line, then decided against it. If her boss was going to get them into more trouble, she didn't want to know about it.

* * *

"Yes, um, my name is Charles Hershohn, of Hershohn Creative Management Associates. I have a client named Daniel Fulton, whom you may have heard of. Mr. Fulton tells me that someone from—from your organization has approached him to give a piano recital in Moscow this fall in order to meet a Russian psychic...." And Hershohn tried to summarize the state of affairs for the silent public relations flunky on the other end of the line. It wasn't easy, and the silence didn't help. "...and so you see, I need to obtain some independent confirmation that this is real, and not just a figment of Mr. Fulton's imagination. Now obviously you people are not going to want to tell me, but look, I have a moral responsibility to my client. If this is some delusion of his, I need to convince him to seek psychiatric help. Can you understand that?"

"Yes, sir. I hope you can understand, sir, that it can hardly be CIA policy to—"

"Yes, yes. Look, I'm as patriotic as the next fellow, and I wish your, um, organization all the best, and I know you're not the right person to be talking to about this, but let me make one thing clear: If I don't get some sort of answer from you people, I'm going to do everything in my power to talk Fulton out of giving this recital. I don't need any details, I just need a yes or a no. You can follow me and tap my phone and read my mail and all that spy stuff, but you've got to give me a yes or a no. Clear?"

Silence. Then: "Perfectly clear, sir. I'll just take your phone number and pass your request along to the appropriate personnel. I must tell you, though, that you should not be optimistic about receiving a response."

"A yes or a no." Hershohn gave his phone number to the flunky and hung up.

He was sweating. He needed a drink. He had just threatened the Central Intelligence Agency.

Why was Fulton doing this to him?

Chapter 9

The key words "Moscow" and "psychic" meant that the transcript of the conversation was forwarded automatically to Bill Sullivan. When he saw it, he called Celia immediately. "Ten minutes," he pleaded. But he was in the red now, and she couldn't possibly fit him in before tomorrow afternoon.

Very little work got done the rest of the day. Afterward, he drove back to his pleasant, empty ranch house in his pleasant Virginia suburb, and he tried to stay away from the beer beckoning to him from his refrigerator. His lawn needed mowing; he got out the old gas mower and did a nice job, even raking the grass up after he was done, happy for once to have the mindless chore to keep him occupied. He had told himself a hundred times to sell the place and move to some high-rise condo where he wouldn't have to worry about chores. But he could never bring himself to do it, and tonight he was grateful for his indecision.