The Accident (16 page)

She makes her way around the perimeter of chairs, sunglasses and towels and bikinis and biceps, magazines and newspapers, books and tablets, cigarettes and wineglasses and tall beady bottles of sparkling water. What are all these people doing here, in the middle of a workday? This isn’t LA or Miami; people are supposed to
work
in New York City.

On the small table next to Dean is a frosty bucket, with the telltale silver foil of a Champagne bottle peeking out from the ice water, and a used ashtray with a packet of cigarettes and a silver lighter, and a phone, and a couple of half-full flutes, one with a lipstick smudge. There’s a lithe woman half his age in the next chair, just a few square inches of Lycra removed from naked.

“Isabel, hello.” Dean stands, proffering a cheek kiss, leaning close to let his hair-tufted chest brush against her. Dean goes to great pains to paint himself as an action hero sort of character, tattooed and scarred
and ropy-muscled, unfiltered cigarettes and excessive quantities of liquor and drugs, a shameless womanizer. “Great to see you. This”—gesturing at his companion—“is Betsy.”

“My name’s Brecka,” the girl says with a scowl. She doesn’t hold out her hand, or move from her prone position.

“Really?”
Dean asks. “
Breck
a? That’s a
name
?”

The girl exhales a plume of smoke in his general direction.

“Are you absolutely sure?”

She stares at him.

“Oops. Apologies.” Dean mugs at Isabel, shrugs. “Just the same, Brecka, give us a minute, will you? Isn’t that friend of yours Laura over there at the bar?”

“
Her
name”—the girl stands—“is Laur
el
.”

“Yeah, well.” Dean pats the girl’s rear, shooing her away while copping a feel. Multitasking.

Isabel takes Brecka’s place on the chaise, but leaves her feet on the floor. She feels ludicrous up here in her business attire, amid all these bathing suits. Like walking into the lobby of a five-star hotel wearing sweats, but the opposite.

Dean removes his sunglasses, revealing a black eye.

“Jesus,” Isabel says, her heart falling into the pit of her stomach. Is Dean involved too? “What happened to you?”

“Oh this?” He points at his swollen blue-black flesh. “It’s nothing.”

“Come on.”

“You know about my anti-Hummer, er, cru
sade
?”

Dean has a tendency, when plastered, to walk around the city leaving windshield notes,
Hummers are for douchebags
, a word that he thinks is the all-time greatest linguistic innovation.

“Well, one of the douchebags caught me in the act. He was with his posse, a whole douchemobile worth. I didn’t stand a chance. But I don’t regret it one fucking bit.” He picks up the wine bottle. “So. It’s a rare pleasure for my esteemed literary agent to hunt me down in the middle of
a workday.” He holds the bottle by its neck, tilts it toward Isabel. “Or, rather,
week
day.”

“No thanks.” She too removes her sunglasses, in the shade of the umbrella, and places them on the table.

“Especially,” he continues, “considering that I’m now—what is it?—
ten
months late with my manuscript delivery?”

“Two years.”

“Mmm.”
He takes a deep drag of his cigarette. “As I think we both know, I’m going to finish that book … Let’s see,
right:
the day after never. And yet here I am, whiling away another day with sparkling wine and unfiltered cigarettes and underage women.” He taps one out of the pack, lights it.

“How do you earn a living, Dean?”

“
Earn?
A
living?
You know damn well that I don’t do any such thing.”

Dean is one of those fearless journalists who specialize in dangerous places, batting around Bosnia and the Sudan, Afghanistan and Syria. Through the unpredictable alchemy of the book-publishing process—an inexact mix of sales-force enthusiasm and word-of-mouth industry buzz, of long-lead magazine coverage and full-length newspaper reviews and weekly-magazine squibs—Dean’s most recent book, about an obscure corner of the Afghan war, achieved the much pursued status as being
the
nonfiction book of the year: international editions in thirty languages, and audio books and e-books and paperbacks, and a fast-track film from a major studio with first-name-recognized leads, and then movie-tie-in editions … Royalties are flowing in from dozens of accounts on six continents. And in the meantime a prominent magazine hired Dean as a contributing editor, providing him with a business card and a monthly stipend in exchange for a commitment to supplying five thousand words per year, which as a rule he does in one fell swoop after returning from some war-torn hellhole, a cocaine-fueled stream-of-consciousness dump of experiential prose, unconventionally punctuated and ridden with misspellings and grammatical errors. But there are editors to fix that; it’s
what editors are for. The rules of stylistic consistency are beneath Dean. Hobgoblin of little minds.

He takes a deep drag of his Player’s Plain. It was the most available cigarette in Pakistan when Dean lived there in the 1990s, and he never gave it up, despite increasing challenges to procurement. “So: to what do I owe this very
special
pleasure?”

“Dean, you were nosing around DC when David Miller killed himself, right?”

One of the benefits of working in the publishing world is that Isabel knows—or can easily access—at least one expert in practically any subject. Geopolitics, pediatric medicine, Spanish cooking, whatever. The leading lights in every field write books about their areas of expertise; even the leading experts in the field of writing books write books about writing books. And all experts have literary agents.

Dean, an expert in the duplicities of politics, exhales a cloud of smoke, but doesn’t say anything.

“Were there any rumors?” she asks. “Rumors wouldn’t have reached me, you know.”

Dean stares at her, clearly debating whether to engage in this subject, and to what extent. “Yeah,” he says, resigned. “Of course there were rumors.”

“Rumors that he was murdered?”

“Ah, yeah. Inevitable, the rumors. Important man, suddenly no longer alive.”

“And?”

He shakes his head dismissively. “There was nothing to it.”

“Were there suspects? A motive?”

“No, not really. And honestly the murder possibility wasn’t the most compelling, ah,
alternative
explanation for his disappearance.”

“Which was?”

“Which was that Miller’s death”—Dean turns his head more directly toward Isabel, strains his neck in her direction—“was a
hoax
.”

This is what Isabel had been expecting to hear; this is the idea that she’d been unable to suppress since she began reading the manuscript yesterday.

She takes one of Dean’s cigarettes, lights it. She coughs, the unfiltered too untamed for her lungs.

“Was there any evidence?”

“A few days after his disappearance into the Atlantic, someone who looked a lot like Miller arrived in Brussels on a flight that originated in the Bahamas. Different name on his passport, of course. A passport that turned out to be stolen from someone who lives in DC and works in the Administration.”

“And then?”

“Unfortunately—or is it really
un
fortunate? Who’s to say?—the trail ended there, in the Brussels airport. But Brussels is a gateway to anywhere. By connecting flight, by train, by car. It’s a very convenient place to arrive, if what you’re planning is to end up somewhere else.”

Isabel takes another drag, much less harsh than the first. That seems to be how it is with things that are bad for you.

“Are you certain you don’t want any Champagne? You look like you could use something.”

“Did anyone look into this, Dean? Did
you
?”

He nods. “Found nothing, nowhere.”

“What about alternative cancer-treatment centers?”

“Oh, Isabel, is it really as bad as all that?” Dean looks down at his cigarette. “It’s true that I can’t
quite
seem to shake this cough—”

“I’m not talking about you.”

“I know what you’re talking about. Of
course
I investigated the medical angle. Miller definitely consulted with a variety of doctors, as well as with a number of his colleagues. He contacted cancer-treatment centers in different parts of the world. I wasn’t able to get any hard information about recommendations or possible treatments or anything specific; medical professionals tend to take patient confidentiality rather seriously,
everywhere. But yeah, I investigated this angle thoroughly. And I found nothing.

“As you know, Miller was—
is?
—rich. And smart. A rich and smart man can easily buy himself a new identity, in a well-protected hiding spot. And he can stay safely hidden for a very, very long time.”

He leans toward Isabel. “Especially if he’s scared.”

CHAPTER 20

T
he author walks into one of the large front-facing rooms of the sturdy old
Schloss
. This would’ve been a bedroom, back when the building was a residence. All these rooms retain their eighteenth-century character, person-size fireplaces and Persian rugs, heavy wooden furniture and ornately framed oil paintings on the walls. It’s the back of the building that’s twenty-first-century, brushed steel and gleaming veneers, bright flat shadowless lighting systems and a mesmerizing array of cutting-edge medical technology.

He settles into a creaky leather armchair facing the big mahogany desk, and catches a glimpse of himself in a gilt-edged mirror, nearly unrecognizable, an entirely different person here in Zurich than he’d been in Washington.

When he’d arrived in Europe in the early winter he’d had no belongings, no luggage. Lost by the airline, is what he claimed to the thoroughly uninterested clerk at the grubby hotel near the Bruxelles-Midi station.

For a few days he walked the damp cold streets of the big Belgian city, buying a whole new wardrobe a few items at a time, paying cash for skinny suits and slim-fitting shirts to replace those formless sack suits of DC, American clothing designed to hide the pear shape of the typical American man. He bought snug shoes, the types of footwear you really
don’t find on men’s feet in the USA. He was trying to look like someone who belonged in Europe, who lived here, maybe even was from here. Not an American on the run.

But his first order of business had been to trudge through the narrow medieval streets around the spectacular Grand-Place—gift shops and chocolatiers, unruly school trips and the inevitable Japanese tour groups—looking for a busy barbershop that cycles through men at a production-line pace, quick clips and close shaves, snip-snip buzz-buzz. He found the right sort of busy anonymous shop in a covered arcade near the Bourse, and had his dark curls shorn down to a tight crew cut. He’d also stopped shaving a few days before his fateful Piper flight, and after a week this purposeful neglect had blossomed into a short beard.

He visited an Internet café that also sent and received snail mail from all over the globe, and picked up a package that he’d mailed to himself from a similar outfit in DC.

He bought thin angular eyeglasses and acquired tinted contacts to hide the bright blue of his eyes, the first thing anyone ever noticed about him, the most important detail to disguise. But he didn’t start wearing these contacts until he’d rented a car and driven out of Belgium and across northern Germany to Berlin, where a new identity—Stuart Carner—was waiting for him courtesy of a Russian forger and twenty thousand euros cash, a disappointingly thin stack of banknotes, forty pieces of purple paper.

He didn’t care for the name Stuart, but it was better than Stu; there’d been a jackass Stu in college who had permanently tainted the name.

Herr Stuart Carner was his second new identity. The first had been the passport of a Treasury wonk who was the author’s virtual doppelganger; for the past few years, people were constantly remarking that the resemblance between the two men was uncanny. And everyone who knew this glorified accountant also knew that the guy never,
ever
left DC, much less America, except for a famously disastrous trip to Cancún a few years earlier. He was unlikely to miss his passport.

It hadn’t been much trouble to find someone willing to break into the guy’s apartment; the hard part had been convincing the burglar not to steal anything besides the passport.

So then in Berlin those striking blue eyes became black, cloaked in mourning. He’d also lost fifteen pounds over the preceding few months. Now with the short hair and the dark eyes and the glasses, the skinny suits and pointy shoes, he was nearly unrecognizable, to the naked eye. But he’d still be plenty identifiable, with facial-recognition software, not to mention his fingerprints.

With his new appearance and fictitious identity and his two new suitcases filled with his new wardrobe, he boarded an Air Berlin flight, the stewardesses wearing kinky red leather gloves with black palms, bound for the large Zurich airport and a reservation in a business hotel near the Paradeplatz, a convenient base to explore, to find a place to live, to drive out to this converted old estate up in the hills, this unobtrusive medical complex, which was the primary reason to come to the quiet tidy little city in the first place.

He hears someone enter the room behind him, and a hand squeezes his shoulder as the doctor comes into peripheral view. The tall German settles behind the desk, opens the file, turns a page, turns to the front again.

“So, Herr Carner, how are you feeling?”

“In general I feel good.”

“Exercising?”

“Yes.” He’d taken up running, for the first time in his life. His apartment is a block from the lakeside’s park and its pleasant path along the quai, packed with people on a sunny warm day like today, but deserted in the usual drizzle of Europe in winter and spring.

“I run now, almost every day.” Working his way up to respectable distances. And finally able to feel reasonably comfortable wearing headphones while running out in public, overcoming a paranoia that dated back to junior high, when the Walkman was first invented, and
his grandparents had given him one for his thirteenth birthday, but two weeks later he was mugged while wearing it, unable to hear the thugs coming up behind him, and they took the Sony as well as the folded-up dollar in his pocket, on his way to Gino’s to buy a pizza-soda-ice lunch special for fifty cents, plus a pack of baseball cards from the candy store whose primary business was dime, nickel, and trey bags of low-quality marijuana. Brooklyn in the early eighties.