The Accident (39 page)

Blood is oozing through the fingers of the naked Frenchman, pouring down his abdomen, getting caught in the dense tuft of his pubic hair.

The author swings the candlestick with all his might. At the last moment before impact he closes his eyes, but he can still feel the reverberation in his hand, and he can hear the appalling crack.

He opens his eyes, and sees that he’ll need to swing again, at least once more. And this time he’ll have to keep his goddamned eyes open.

CHAPTER 49

H
ayden scans the shoreline of the harbor, the boats bobbing, the pier and docks, the little structure with a flagpole, awnings, outdoor furniture.

He had gotten about halfway through reading the manuscript, then realized he was out of time. So he skipped to the end, read the last few pages, and that’ll have to be that. Half the story. Which is a lot more than none of it.

“Empty that bin, will you?”

“Yes sir,” Tyler says, and upends the big galvanized bucket, ice packs and beer cans and a bag of pretzels.

Hayden struggles to stand up, his legs tired and sore, his pants wrinkled and a little bit wet. He has been wearing the same clothes for an extraordinarily long time, lightweight charcoal slacks, a pale-blue spread-collar dress shirt, dark-chocolate English brogues with crepe rubber soles. His sport jacket is folded in his bag, and he digs it out, rummages through the pockets, finds a Zippo. Hayden has never smoked, but he has always carried a lighter.

He crumples up a few pages of the assistant’s copy of the manuscript, and drops them into the steel bin, and sets the manuscript afire.

T
hey tie up the boat alongside a sign that reads
30 MINUTE DOCKING
, and walk away from another stolen mode of transportation. Hayden looks around the marina, at all these choices of other watercraft for later. He spots a beautiful Beneteau—fifty-four feet? more?—which looks a lot like the boat his family sailed every summer from the Cape to Maine, delivering and collecting the smaller children from sleep-away camp, making an adventure out of a chore. He also sees a boat very similar to the one he rented a few summers ago in Mallorca. The perfect craft for a long single-handed sail. Yes, he thinks, that’s the one.

He and Tyler walk up the dock as if they don’t have a care in the world, a couple of fishing buddies, albeit without the tackle. Halfway to land, the wooden dock becomes a concrete jetty, the surface gritty with sand, pebbles, shells dropped by seagulls. Then they’re on a leafy street, dense with houses, flowering shrubs, porch swings, imported station wagons.

Hayden is lost in thought, outlining the steps of his new plan, enumerating the challenges, countering with solutions.

They pass a shuttered ice-cream parlor and a post office and a general store, all quiet, and then a woman walking a little brown dog, slowly. An old dog, like Hayden himself, looking up with rheumy eyes.

“Hi,” the woman says.

“Good evening.”

Hayden realizes they should be making small talk, he and Tyler. Two men on a sidewalk at night should be chatting; silence is suspicious. But he can’t think of a damn thing to say.

I
t was almost a year ago when they sat in a corner banquette in a room filled with white tablecloths and burgundy upholstery, marble columns supporting the soaring, ornately plastered ceiling, waiters wearing black vests with white aprons.

“So. Things went very badly in Finland,” Hayden said. “I don’t disagree.”

Charlie Wolfe was staring down at his untouched wiener schnitzel, wedges of lemon, a big white plate. “I can’t do this anymore,” he said.

Hayden took a bite of sweet spiny lobster. He had access to plenty of good schnitzel in Munich, but he liked the bouillabaisse here at his favorite Berlin restaurant on Französische Strasse, a short walk from his office at the embassy.

“It’s too dangerous for me, Hayden. To be involved in things like this.”

Hayden put down his fork and knife. Wiped his mouth with the big napkin. “You mean you don’t
need
me anymore. Now that you’re a billionaire.”

“I’m not a billionaire.”

Now Hayden understood why Charlie wanted to meet in a restaurant. In fifteen years they’d had only one other meal together, a quick lunch in Davos. Otherwise it had been isolated benches in quiet parks to arrange the mutually beneficial scandals.

“But I’ve become too visible. And I want to become
more
visible. I can’t … you know.”

This was apparently the end of their long symbiotic relationship, a cordial parting smoothed with a nice bottle of Meursault, very much in public.

Hayden nodded. He picked up his fork and knife again, and took another bite of seafood. Swallowed. “I feel like there’s something else. Is there?”

Charlie didn’t answer immediately, mustering courage. “Dave found out about it.”

Hayden squinted. “To what does
it
refer?”

“The guy in Finland.”

Hayden took a deep breath.

“His
kid
was in the house, Hayden. When the police burst in, and he started shooting, and the police returned fire … It was a three-year-old boy who got shot. He bled out. While hugging his goddamned
teddy bear
.”

“I know what happened, Charlie.”

“Well, Dave flipped out. And then some.”

“Is it under control?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know.”

“How’d you handle it?”

“Not as well as I should have.”

“Meaning?”

“He was sanctimonious with me, belligerent. And I tried to be accommodating—it’s not like I feel
good
about the Finnish guy, and his kid—but I lost my temper. I ended up saying some things I shouldn’t have. He was
pissed
.”

“Is this reparable?”

“I think so, yes. I hope so. But honestly?”

“No, Charlie, please
lie
to me.”

“Honestly Hayden, I just don’t know.”

Hayden took a sip of the Burgundy, trying to remain calm. This was very bad news. He couldn’t help chasing the worst-case scenarios through the corridors of his imagination, and a number of them led through his safe-deposit box in Basel.

Over the years Hayden had used more than a dozen miniature tape recorders, growing smaller and more discreet with each generation, and eventually giving way to the infinitely inconspicuous digital models. Then he procrastinated for a few years before undertaking the considerable and tedious task of transferring all the old analog tapes to digital storage, on CDs. And then more recently from CDs to flash drives. Ever smaller, more easily duplicated, effortlessly transmitted, with increasingly complex and tiresome security.

Or maybe the security isn’t really more complex, but Hayden has simply reached that fulcrum of age when all technological advances are the opposite of welcome.

Safe deposit boxes in Swiss banks have, thankfully, been relatively unchanged for the past forty years. Now all his life-insurance recordings sit on a single flash drive, so he no longer needs as big a metal drawer. Then again, he keeps a lot more cash in there than he used to.

CHAPTER 50

T
hat was nice
, she said. A dagger thrust into his stomach, then twisted:
nice
. That’s what you say after twenty years of marriage, not after your first time.

“Are you still thinking that we just wait?” Jeff pulls his boxer shorts over his ankles, facing away from Isabel now. He glances down at his penis, sticky and limp and faintly preposterous.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m beginning to wonder if we have to go public, somehow. Have a press conference, maybe.
Try
to have a press conference. Or just present ourselves to NBC or CNN or something, walk into an office and tell our story …”

Yes. This is what people like them would do, in this type of situation. “That sort of makes sense. Doesn’t it?” He settles back into bed beside her, but they’re not touching.

“I’m worried that going public only keeps us alive
tomorrow
. Then what, Jeffrey? Do we enter the witness protection program? Are we even
witnesses
to anything? Can we trust the people who are supposed to
protect
us?”

Jeff doesn’t answer.

“This is one of the most powerful men in America,” she continues. “And he’s intertwined with the CIA, operating illegally. They’ll
kill
us.
No”—shaking her head—“the only way television works is if the
author
is on it, or someone else with firsthand knowledge. And obviously if the author wanted to do this on TV, he wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of writing the manuscript. He wouldn’t still be hiding. He’d just go on TV.”

The idea of the author hangs in the air between them, uncomfortably.

Jeff fidgets with his hands. He knows he needs to try harder to conceal the deep simmering resentment that accompanies his long-unrequited love, the festering heart sore caused by rejection, indifference, tepid affection. Because now, as ever, he’s sure that Isabel doesn’t love him. She had a need and he was at hand, so they’re in bed. He’s like a fast-food hamburger, not a four-star meal: in a pinch, he suffices. He’s a
nice
hamburger.

“Why do you think he doesn’t do that? Just go on television?”

Isabel lets out a dismissive snort. “He knows the limitations of TV. Knows there’s no way to tell a complex story like this on cable news, which would just reduce everything to a one-ring circus about the single most lurid detail. He wants the audience to understand more. Plus I’m sure he wants the permanence of a book, the validation, the legitimacy conferred by having it out there in the physical world, in stores and libraries, on people’s shelves and in their laps and coffee tables. There are still some stories that warrant a book. This is one of them.”

“Y
ou awake?”

“Mmmmmmm.”
The halfway hum between awake and asleep.

“Can’t sleep,” he whispers. There’s too much buzzing around his brain, in bed with this woman after so many years, hiding in this house with this manuscript downstairs, with men with guns out there, maybe looking for him. “Going downstairs.”

“Mmm.”

Jeff walks down the long hall, the stairs. He closes the door to the stairs, a quiet buffer from Isabel. He doesn’t want to wake her.

He switches on the first light he can find by touch, on an end table, a bulbous ceramic thing with a pull chain, a twenty-five-watt bulb, ambered by a parchment shade. Deep shadows creep from every corner, behind every object.

He looks around in the soft light. He thought he’d left his bag here, on this couch. But it’s not there. He panics, eyes darting frantically. The panic lasts for only a second because there it is, on the floor, leaning up against the wall. Safe and sound.

Jeff opens the bag, removes the stack of paper, too thick for one hand, nearly a full ream. He deposits the manuscript on the glass-topped coffee table facing the floral-upholstered armchair with the small ottoman, in front of the fireplace. A nice place to read.

He takes two steps across the oval hooked rug, concentric elongated circles in blues and greens and dingy whites. He picks up the bulky fire screen, almost too heavy to lift with one hand, and moves it to the side. He crumples a few sheets of newspaper into the fireplace, atop the thin film of dust and ash, some shards of partially incinerated wood. He settles a fire-starter brick onto the newspaper, and a couple of small split logs on top. He slides open the long, slender box of wooden matches, and removes one, rough-hewn and splintering, its flammable phosphorous splashed onto its tip unevenly, wantonly. He strikes this messy match, and he stoops down, and he tucks the stick under the newsprint. The fire ignites.

Jeff wonders if this is how selling out always happens, for everyone, a clear-cut trade-off of integrity for success. He’d always assumed that the sellout was something that happens slowly, gradually, a long-term erosion of willpower, a chiseling-away at idealism, until you get to a point where the decision doesn’t even seem like a decision anymore, it’s just the thing that you do, and you don’t even realize that it’s selling out.

But no, here it is, upon him, different from what he imagined, as so many important things seem to end up being. Here it’s one fell swoop at a moment of weakness. His company is about to go under, and he knows he will not be one of the first of the newly unemployed to find a job. He’s saving his skin. It’s so trite.

It’s now clear to him that the most heinous part of selling out is that you betray someone’s trust. The trust of a friend, a family member, a colleague. Or even just your own trust of yourself, your self-respect. You do something, embrace something, believe something you know you should not. You do something you know isn’t right, isn’t what you intended to do. Isn’t who you wanted to be.

What do you get in return? It’s always the same, he imagines: you get success. It may come dressed in different costumes, but it’s probably always a similar calculation, for everyone, weighing the desire for some success against the cost of betraying someone’s trust.