The Accident (10 page)

Whatever fate befalls McNally & Sons, Inc., most of the editors will be fine. But probably not Fielder. He’s a senior editor in his mid-forties who used to be at the top of the game, with bestsellers and prize-winners and positive postmortem P&Ls. But when his wife left him, it all seemed to come crumbling down around him. It doesn’t take long for an editor to cool off. For agents to scratch you off their submission lists. For sales executives to stop believing in your enthusiasm; to stop believing in you.

Which means that now Fielder’s career track has a foreseeable end, and it might be right up ahead, at the next round of layoffs, or a buyout, or whatever event makes a publisher take a hard look at his list of editors, and say—probably without much handwringing—“It looks like we’ll have to get rid of Fielder.”

Someone like Jeff Fielder probably won’t recover from something like that. He may never get another job as a book editor, ever again. Brad wonders if Fielder knows what a precarious position he’s in; surprisingly, people frequently don’t. Brad is more than a little worried that he himself is in the same type of tenuous situation.

“Tell me what you have, Jeff.”

The editor takes a deep breath. “It’s a book about Charlie Wolfe,” he says. “An exposé.”

Oh God, Brad thinks, leaning back in his chair. He certainly didn’t expect Fielder to be the one. He’s shocked. But now upon closer thought, it’s obvious.

“I don’t yet know what bombshells, exactly,” Fielder continues. “But the agent seems to think the revelations are, um,
newsworthy
. And she is—or might be, I’m not sure—looking for an eight-figure advance.”

Brad almost falls out of his chair. “You’re kidding.”

Fielder shakes his head.

“Who’s the author?”

“It’s anonymous.”

“Who do you
think
is the author?”

“No idea,” Fielder says, but Brad can see in the guy’s face that this is not particularly true. Maybe there’s a good reason for the lie. If this book is what Brad suspects it is.

“Who’s the agent?”

“Isabel Reed.”

Of course.

“And for forty-eight hours,” Fielder continues, “I have it exclusively.”

“What? Why?”

Brad can see that Jeff is getting nervous with this conversation, the challenges in Brad’s questions. Everyone has seen this type of thing time and again, in meetings: you come into the room wanting something, maybe even needing it, and at first everyone is neutral. But then someone turns against you and nay-says, and next thing you know the surrounding personnel fall like dominoes: first one person says it sounds dubious, then another chimes in, and by the third person—this can be thirty seconds into a conversation—they’re heaping insults upon injuries, eventually even mocking and ridiculing you for bringing your crappy desire into this room, maybe even turning hostile, resentful for wasting their
time and energy, belittling, humiliating, until you retreat like a beaten dog to hide under a car.

“She knows I’m interested in this type of thing.” Fielder shrugs. “She knows you’re motivated.”

The two men stare at each other across the desk.

“Here.” Fielder lays a small stack of paper on an already covered surface. Brad doesn’t keep a neat desk. “A sample, from the beginning.” Fielder stands.

“Okay, I’ll take a look asap. End of day latest.”

“Thanks.” Fielder turns, walks away, then turns back. “Brad, I’ve never been a boy who cries wolf.”

“Yes, Jeff, I know.”

“But I’m pretty sure about this.” He smiles uncomfortably. “So: wolf.”

T
his is one of those moments that defines you as a publisher. Hell, as a
person
. Do you put yourself—your career, maybe your life—on the line, to do what’s right? Rather, what you
think
is right? Or do you follow the rules, stay safe, protect yourself and your family? Isn’t that a different type of doing what’s right?

Brad watches Fielder retreat as Seth returns, and blah-blah-blahs some more before departing with his sheaf of bad news and his medley of bad clothing.

Brad sinks lower in his chair, loses himself in thought. His brief reverie is broken by a rapping on his door, and he looks up to see Camilla being ushered in by his unfailingly grumpy and disdainful secretary, Lorraine, who’s sneering at the curvy, hyper-sexual director of subsidiary rights. Lorraine seems to hate almost everyone in this office, with the exception of those who fawn over her, willing to play the hackneyed game of pretending that it’s the boss’s secretary who really runs the show. Camilla isn’t one of those; Camilla doesn’t get along all that well with women.

They’d had a thing, Brad and Camilla, a few years ago. Ignited one long boozy week at the Frankfurt International Book Fair, and burning for a couple of hotel-room months in New York, then fizzling before anyone found out, before anyone was hurt. Brad was left with the distinct feeling that he hadn’t been the first married man with whom Camilla dallied, and wouldn’t be the last. But she had been his one and only extramarital affair, and it wrecked him. He doesn’t intend to do it again. Then again, he didn’t plan on it the first time.

But God, look at this woman, her curves straining the confines of her suit. “Hullo McNally,” she says. “Just a quick check-in before I’m off. Anything?”

It takes Brad a second to register what she’s announcing, and asking. Is this what Alzheimer’s feels like? But now he remembers: Camilla is leaving for one of her West Coast trips to meet with film producers, and agents, and whoever. Brad has never been entirely clear on the precise utility of these LA trips. Camilla explained it to him once, but he’d been too busy imagining her naked to accurately assess her argument.

“No,” he says, instinctively glancing down at his desk, at the photocopied inch of Jeff’s manuscript. A hundred pages?

“What’s this?” Camilla taps it with a recently manicured red nail, smiles coyly with freshly red-painted lips. “
The Accident
, by Anonymous. Intriguing.”

“Nothing,” he says. “Something submitted to Fielder. We don’t own it yet. I don’t know what it is.” He shrugs, and gives his affable chuckle, the laugh he started using as a nervous teenager, and never stopped employing, even after he was no longer a teenager, nor especially nervous. He knows that everyone thinks he laughs too much, when things aren’t funny. But that’s sort of what it is to be affable, isn’t it?

Camilla leans forward, affording—insisting upon—a resistance-melting view of her black lace bra. “Are you
lying
to me, Love?”

“Come on.” He chuckles again. “Do I ever?”

She straightens, languorously, pushing her chin up, breasts out.
“Listen, McNally, I know my department have not been pulling our weight. And I won’t blame you for making me—as we say back home—redundant.” She purses her lips. God, those lips. “I’m not claiming it’s my
fault
. The business has changed. Musical chairs, and I’m odd chap out. Or will be, soon. So I’d understand.”

He makes a noncommittal grumble. It’s true that much of the subsidiary-rights business has disappeared entirely, and most of what remains is controlled by literary agencies. Camilla is running out of relevancy.

“But until that happens, please—
please
—give me every chance of surviving.” She inclines her head down at
The Accident
.

“I wish I could, Camilla. But honestly, it’s just not ours to shop around, to anyone, for any reason. Also, as I said, I don’t even know what it
is
.”

“Rubbish.” She smiles wider. “If you didn’t know what it is, it wouldn’t be here, on the middle of your desk. It’d be over
there
.” She nods at the coffee table piled high with stacks of manuscripts and book proposals and finished books and bound galleys. All the stuff Brad is supposed to read. Or review. Or whatever the hell he’s supposed to do with the tens of thousands of pages piled on that goddamned table.

“Don’t forget,” she says, rising, reaching out across the desk to place her palm on his cheek. “I
know
you, Mr. Boss-Man.” She withdraws her hand, turns, and walks away, slowly and deliberately.

And then he’s alone, for the first time all morning. Alone with this manuscript, and this decision. He turns to the small stack of pages that Jeff left for him, flips to the rear few, and starts reading.

The bar had stopped serving alcohol a half-hour earlier. The deejay changed the soundtrack from fast dancing to slow going-home. The lights came up. People started shuffling to the doors, raucously or dejectedly, to the parking lot, to drive their third-hand Datsuns and their parents’ deaccessioned Acuras to the handful of college campuses within striking distance of this dance club on a quiet, rural road along the sparsely populated stretch of lakeshore.

Charlie was on a bench against the wall, making out with a brunette, a girl who he’d acquired sometime in the past fifteen minutes. It always amazed all the fraternity brothers how quickly Charlie could find a girl, at the end of the night. “Swooping in” is what people called it. He’d done it again.

The night hadn’t been unusual for an end-of-term blowout, with exams finished, and summer vacation about to start. Eric was headed to a newspaper internship in Cleveland, résumé fodder for an English major and school-newspaper writer. Dave was going to be staying at his mother’s house in Brooklyn, working a job at a Midtown advertising agency. Charlie was meeting his family for a few weeks in the South of France, followed by a month in East Hampton, studying for the LSATs when he wasn’t sailing or partying.

This was the three friends’ last night together of their junior year, a night to celebrate. But also a bittersweet night. They were about to start their final summer as undergraduates. Everyone understood, in a nonspecific way, that this meant the end of something. The end of carefree childhood.

At midnight Eric became morose, as he often did, and soon disappeared without notice, catching a different ride back to campus, which was not unusual for him.

Dave sucked down the last of his Coca-Cola, striving for sobriety and alertness, determined to not allow Charlie to drive; Charlie was pretty much never in driving condition by last call. And Charlie did indeed hand over the car keys without argument, his arm wrapped around the waist of the girl, named Lauren.

“One minute,” she said. “I need to say goodbye to my friend.”

That other girl, slender and blonde and looking tightly wound, was leaning on the bar thirty or forty feet across the room, fending off a slobbering jock, a big Golden Retriever of a boy with meaty paws. As Lauren leaned in, giggling, that blonde turned to stare through the thick stratus of cigarette smoke, tinted blue by the beer lights, trying to assess the trustworthiness of the two cocky-looking boys. But she was too far away to tell anything.

Lauren returned to Charlie, giddy, ready to ride back to Ithaca with the tall, handsome, rich boy. To be taken to that other more selective institution on that other nicer hill. To a towering Gothic fraternity house, to a secret basement tap room with more beer, to a balconied bedroom stocked with cocaine and condoms …

Or that’s what Charlie thought the girl wanted. Because back then, that’s what Charlie always thought all the girls wanted.

CHAPTER 12

T
he elevator doors open, and Isabel steps out into the basement. She looks left, right. She walks toward the sign for
SECURITY
, a plain steel door at the end of a cinder-block-walled hall, painted beige, pipes hanging from the ceiling. The bowels of the office building. It couldn’t look more different down here than up on 58, in the plushly carpeted, floor-to-ceiling-windowed, glass-and-steel-and-leather offices, the hustling hubbub of a major international agency—all-in-one Literary and Talent, Motion Picture and Television, Commercial and Speaking and Brand Management. Hundreds of people in the New York headquarters, buffered from the public by a towering double-floor reception hall with cantilevered stairs and a wall of windows behind the desk, a million-dollar view of Midtown Manhattan. A billion-dollar view.

The security chief opens the door to the surveillance center. “Hector Sanchez,” he says. “Pleased to meet you.”

Isabel looks around the cramped, dark room. There are dozens of little screens streaming real-time video of public spaces, monitored by a morbidly obese uniformed guard. “This is Reggie,” Hector says. “Please”—beckoning off to the side, a stand-alone monitor on a small metal table—“have a seat.”

Hector takes a stool next to Isabel, and they begin to scan through
Friday’s footage, slowing down and speeding up to examine various men, suspicious-looking or merely unfamiliar.

“Can you pause there?” Isabel asks. “That one?”

They watch a portion of tape, then Sanchez shakes his head. “No, that’s a lawyer from the firm on fourteen.” He seems to know everybody who enters this building.

“How do you recognize all these people?”

“Guess it’s my job.”

The fast-forwarding video continues. Five, ten, fifteen minutes. Isabel looks around, taking in this grim windowless room, the decrepit old monitor she’s been staring at, trying to identify a totally unidentifiable man. The more men she looks at, the more convinced she becomes that this is hopeless.

She asks to take a closer look at what turns out to be another lawyer. She didn’t even know there was a law firm in the building. There are apparently nine of them.