The Ghost (5 page)

I finished the last of the six hundred and twenty-one pages
(“Ruth and I look forward to the future, whatever it may hold”)
in midafternoon, and when I laid down the manuscript I pressed my hands to my cheeks and opened my mouth and eyes wide, in a reasonable imitation of Edvard Munch’s
The Scream.

That was when I heard a cough in the doorway and looked up to see Ruth Lang watching me. To this day I don’t know how long she’d been there. She raised a thin black eyebrow.

“As bad as that?” she said.

SHE WAS WEARING A
man’s thick, shapeless white sweater, so long in the sleeves that only her chewed fingernails were visible, and once we got downstairs she pulled on top of this a pale blue hooded windbreaker, disappearing for a while as she tugged it over her head, her pale face emerging at last with a frown. Her short dark hair stuck up in Medusa-like spikes.

It was she who had proposed a walk. She said I looked as though I needed one, which was true enough. She found me her husband’s windproof jacket, which fitted perfectly, and a pair of waterproof boots belonging to the house, and together we stepped out into the blustery Atlantic air. We followed the path around the edge of the lawn and climbed up onto the dunes. To our right was the pond, with a jetty, and next to that a rowboat that had been hauled above the reed beds and laid upside down. To our left was the gray ocean. Ahead of us, bare white sand stretched for a couple of miles, and when I looked behind, the picture was the same, except that a policeman in an overcoat was following about fifty yards distant.

“You must get sick of this,” I said, nodding to our escort.

“It’s been going on so long I’ve stopped noticing.”

We pressed on into the wind. Close up, the beach didn’t look so idyllic. Strange pieces of broken plastic, lumps of tar, a dark blue canvas shoe stiff with salt, a wooden cable drum, dead birds, skeletons, and bits of bone—it was like walking along the side of a six-lane highway. The big waves came in with a roar and receded like passing trucks.

“So,” said Ruth, “how bad is it?”

“You haven’t read it?”

“Not all of it.”

“Well,” I said, politely, “it needs some work.”

“How much?”

The words “Hiroshima” and “nineteen forty-five” floated briefly into my mind. “It’s fixable,” I said, which I suppose it was: even Hiroshima was fixed eventually. “It’s the deadline that’s the trouble. We absolutely have to do it in four weeks, and that’s less than two days for each chapter.”

“Four weeks!” She had a deep, rather dirty laugh. “You’ll never get him to sit still for as long as that!”

“He doesn’t have to write it, as such. That’s what I’m being paid for. He just has to talk to me.”

She had pulled up her hood. I couldn’t see her face; only the sharp white tip of her nose was visible. Everyone said she was smarter than her husband and that she’d loved their life at the top even more than he had. If there was an official visit to some foreign country, she usually went with him: she refused to be left at home. You only had to watch them on TV together to see how she bathed in his success. Adam and Ruth Lang: the Power and the Glory. Now she stopped and turned to face the ocean, her hands thrust deep in her pockets. Along the beach, as if playing Grandma’s footsteps, the policeman also stopped.

“You were my idea,” she said.

I swayed in the wind. I almost fell over. “I was?”

“Yes. You were the one who wrote Christy’s book for him.”

It took me a moment to work out who she meant. Christy Costello. I hadn’t thought of him in a long while. He was my first bestseller. The intimate memoirs of a seventies rock star. Drink, drugs, girls, a near-fatal car crash, surgery, and finally rehab and redemp in the arms of a good woman. It had everything. You could give it at Christmas to your grungy teenager or your churchgoing granny, and each would be equally happy. It sold three hundred thousand copies in hardcover in the UK alone.

“You know
Christy
?” It seemed so unlikely.

“We stayed at his house on Mustique last winter. I read his memoirs. They were by the bed.”

“Now I’m embarrassed.”

“No. Why? They were brilliant, in a horrible kind of a way. Listening to his scrambled stories over dinner and then seeing how you’d turned them into something resembling a life—I said to Adam then: ‘This is the man you need to write your book.’”

I laughed. I couldn’t stop myself. “Well, I hope your husband’s recollections aren’t quite as hazy as Christy’s.”

“Don’t count on it.” She pulled back her hood and took a deep breath. She was better looking in the flesh than she was on television. The camera hated her almost as much as it loved her husband. It didn’t catch her amused alertness, the animation of her face. “God, I miss home,” she said. “Even though the kids are away at university. I keep telling him it’s like being married to Napoleon on Saint Helena.”

“Then why don’t you go back to London?”

She didn’t say anything for a while, just stared at the ocean, biting her lip. Then she looked at me, sizing me up. “You did sign that confidentiality agreement?”

“Of course.”

“You’re sure?”

“Check with Sid Kroll’s office.”

“Because I don’t want to read about this in some gossip column next week, or in some cheap little kiss-and-tell book of your own a year from now.”

“Whoa,” I said, taken aback by her venom. “I thought you just said I was your idea. I didn’t ask to come here. And I haven’t kissed anyone.”

She nodded. “All right then. I’ll tell you why I can’t go home, between you and me. Because there’s something not quite right with him at the moment, and I’m a bit afraid to leave him.”

Boy, I thought. This just gets better and better.

“Yes,” I replied diplomatically. “Amelia told me he was very upset by Mike’s death.”

“Oh, did she? Quite when
Mrs. Bly
became such an expert in my husband’s emotional state I’m not sure.” If she had hissed and sprung claws she couldn’t have made her feelings plainer. “Losing Mike certainly made it worse, but it isn’t just that. It’s losing power—that’s the real trouble. Losing power, and now having to sit down and relive everything, year by year. While all the time the press are going on and on about what he did and didn’t do. He can’t get free of the past, you see. He can’t move on.” She gestured helplessly at the sea, the sand, the dunes. “He’s stuck. We’re both stuck.”

As we walked back to the house, she put her arm through mine. “Oh, dear,” she said. “You must be starting to wonder what you’ve let yourself in for.”

THERE WAS A LOT
more activity in the compound when we got back. A dark green Jaguar limousine with a Washington license plate was parked at the entrance, and a black minivan with darkened windows was drawn up behind it. As the front door opened, I could hear several telephones ringing at once. A genial gray-haired man in a cheap brown suit was sitting just inside, drinking a cup of tea, talking to one of the police guards. He jumped up smartly when he saw Ruth Lang. They were all quite scared of her, I noticed.

“Afternoon, ma’am.”

“Hello, Jeff. How was New York?”

“Bloody chaos, as usual. Like Piccadilly Circus in the rush hour.” He had a crafty London accent. “Thought for a while I wouldn’t get back in time.”

Ruth turned to me. “They like to have the car ready in position when Adam lands.” She began the long process of wriggling out of her windbreaker just as Amelia Bly came round the corner, a cell phone wedged between her elegant shoulder and her sculpted chin, her nimble fingers zipping up an attaché case. “That’s fine, that’s fine. I’ll tell him.” She nodded to Ruth and carried on speaking—“On Thursday he’s in Chicago”—then looked at Jeff and tapped her wristwatch.

“Actually, I think
I’ll
go to the airport,” said Ruth, suddenly pulling her windbreaker back down. “Amelia can stay here and polish her nails or something. Why don’t you come?” she added to me. “He’s keen to meet you.”

Score one to the wife, I thought. But no: in the finest traditions of the British civil service, Amelia bounced off the ropes and came back punching. “Then I’ll travel in the backup car,” she said, snapping her cell phone shut and smiling sweetly. “I can do my nails in there.”

Jeff opened one of the Jaguar’s rear doors for Ruth, while I went round and nearly broke my arm tugging at the other. I slid into the leather seat and the door closed behind me with a gaseous thump.

“She’s armored, sir,” said Jeff into the rearview mirror as we pulled away. “Weighs two and a half tons. Yet she’ll still do a hundred with all four tires shot out.”

“Oh, do shut up, Jeff,” said Ruth, good-humoredly. “He doesn’t want to hear all that.”

“The windows are an inch thick and don’t open, in case you were thinking of trying. She’s airtight against chemical and biological attack, with oxygen for an hour. Makes you think, doesn’t it? At this precise moment, sir, you’re probably safer than you’ve ever been in your life, or ever will be again.”

Ruth laughed again and made a face. “Boys with their toys!”

The outside world seemed muffled, distant. The forest track ran smooth and quiet as rubber. Perhaps this is what it feels like being carried in the womb, I thought: this wonderful feeling of complete security. We ran over the dead skunk, and the big car didn’t register the slightest tremor.

“Nervous?” asked Ruth.

“No. Why? Should I be?”

“Not at all. He’s the most charming man you’ll ever meet. My own Prince Charming!” And she gave her deep-throated, mannish laugh again. “God,” she said, staring out of the window, “will I be glad to see the back of these trees. It’s like living in an enchanted wood.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the unmarked minivan following close behind. I could see how this was addictive. I was getting used to it already. Being forced to give it up after it had become a habit would be like letting go of mommy. But thanks to terrorism, Lang would never have to give it up—never have to stand in line for public transport, never even drive himself. He was as pampered and cocooned as a Romanov before the revolution.

We came out of the forest onto the main road, turned left, and almost immediately swung right through the airport perimeter. I stared out of the window in surprise at the big runway.

“We’re here already?”

“In summer Marty likes to leave his office in Manhattan at four,” said Ruth, “and be on the beach by six.”

“I suppose he has a private jet,” I said in an attempt at knowingness.

“Of course he has a private jet.”

She gave me a look that made me feel like a hick who’d just used his fish knife to butter his roll.
Of course he has a private jet.
You don’t own a thirty-million-dollar house and travel to it by bus. The man must have a carbon footprint the size of a yeti’s. I realized then that just about everybody the Langs knew these days had a private jet. Indeed, here came Lang himself, in a corporate Gulfstream, dropping out of the darkening sky and skimming in low over the gloomy pines. Jeff put his foot down and a minute later we pulled up outside the little terminal. There was a self-important cannonade of slamming doors as we piled inside—me, Ruth, Amelia, Jeff, and one of the protection officers. Inside, a patrolman from the Edgartown police force was already waiting. Behind him on the wall I could see a faded photograph of Bill and Hillary Clinton being greeted on the tarmac at the start of some scandal-shrouded presidential vacation.

The private jet taxied in from the runway. It was painted dark blue and had
HALLINGTON
written in gold letters by the door. It looked bigger than the usual CEO’s phallic symbol, with a high tail and six windows either side, and when it came to a stop and the engines were cut the silence over the deserted airfield was unexpectedly profound.

The door opened, the steps were lowered, and out came a couple of Special Branch men. One headed straight for the terminal. The other waited at the foot of the steps, going through the motions of checking the empty tarmac, glancing up and around and behind him. Lang himself seemed in no hurry to disembark. I could just about make him out in the shadows of the interior, shaking hands with the pilot and a male steward, then finally—almost reluctantly, it seemed to me—he came out and paused at the top of the steps. He was holding his own briefcase, which was not something he had done when he was prime minister. The wind lifted the back of his jacket and plucked at his tie. He smoothed down his hair. He glanced around as if he was trying to remember what he was supposed to do. It was on the edge of becoming embarrassing when suddenly he caught sight of us watching him through the big glass window. He pointed and waved and grinned, exactly the way he had in his heyday, and the moment—whatever it was—had passed. He came striding eagerly across the concourse, transferring his briefcase from one hand to the other, trailed by a third Special Branch man and a young woman pulling a suitcase on wheels.

We left the window just in time to meet him as he came in through the arrivals gate.

“Hi, darling,” he said and stooped to kiss his wife. His skin had a slightly orange tint. I realized he was wearing makeup.

She stroked his arm. “How was New York?”

“Great. They gave me the Gulfstream Four—you know, the transatlantic one, with the beds and the shower. Hi, Amelia. Hi, Jeff.” He noticed me. “Hello,” he said. “Who are you?”

“I’m your ghost,” I said.

I regretted it the instant I said it. I’d conceived it as a witty, self-deprecatory, break-the-ice kind of a line. I’d even practiced my delivery in the mirror before I left London. But somehow out there, in that deserted airport, amid the grayness and the quietness, it hit precisely the wrong note. He flinched.

“Right,” he said doubtfully, and although he shook my hand, he also drew his head back slightly, as if to inspect me from a safer distance.

Christ, I thought, he thinks I’m a lunatic.

“Don’t worry,” Ruth told him. “He isn’t always such a jerk.”

“BRILLIANT OPENING LINE,” SAID
Amelia as we drove back to the house. “Did they teach you that at ghost school?”

We were sitting together in the back of the minivan. The secretary who’d just flown in from New York—her name was Lucy—and the three protection officers occupied the seats in front of us. Through the windscreen I could see the Jaguar immediately ahead carrying the Langs. It was starting to get dark. Pinned by two sets of headlights, the scrub oaks loomed and writhed.

“It was particularly tactful,” she went on, “given that you’re replacing a dead man.”

“All right,” I groaned. “Stop.”

“But you do have one thing going for you,” she said, turning her large blue eyes on me and speaking quietly so that no one else could hear. “Almost uniquely among all members of the human race, you seem to be trusted by Ruth Lang. Now why’s that, do you suppose?”

“There’s no accounting for taste.”

“True. Perhaps she thinks you’ll do what she tells you?”

“Perhaps she does. Don’t ask me.” The last thing I needed was to get stuck in the middle of this catfight. “Listen, Amelia—can I call you Amelia? As far as I’m concerned, I’m helping write a book. I don’t want to get caught up in any palace intrigues.”

“Of course not. You just want to do your job and get out of here.”

“You’re mocking me again.”

“You make it so easy.”

After that I shut up for a while. I could see why Ruth didn’t like her. She was a shade too clever and several shades too blonde for comfort, especially from a wife’s point of view. In fact it struck me as I sat there, passively inhaling her Chanel, that she might be having an affair with Lang. That would explain a lot. He’d been noticeably cool toward her at the airport, and isn’t that always the surest sign? In which case, no wonder they were so paranoid about confidentiality. There could be enough material here to keep the tabloids happy for weeks.

We were halfway down the track when Amelia said, “You haven’t told me what you thought of the manuscript.”

“Honestly? I haven’t had so much fun since I read the memoirs of Leonid Brezhnev.” She didn’t smile. “I don’t understand how it happened,” I went on. “You people were running the country not that long ago. Surely one of you had English as a first language?”

“Mike—” she began, then stopped. “But I don’t want to speak ill of the dead.”

“Why make them an exception?”

“All right, then: Mike. The problem was, Adam passed it all over to Mike to deal with right at the beginning, and poor Mike was simply swamped by it. He disappeared to Cambridge to do the research and we barely saw him for a year.”

“Cambridge?”

“Cambridge—where the Lang Papers are stored. You’ve really done your homework, haven’t you? Two thousand boxes of documents. Two hundred and fifty yards of shelving. One million separate papers, or thereabouts—nobody’s ever bothered to count.”

“McAra went through all that?” I was incredulous. My idea of a rigorous research schedule was a week with a tape recorder sitting opposite my client, fleshed out by whatever tissue of inaccuracies Google had to offer.

“No,” she said irritably. “He didn’t go through every box, obviously, but enough so that when he finally did emerge, he was completely overwrought and exhausted. I think he simply lost sight of what he was supposed to be doing. That seems to have triggered a clinical depression, though none of us noticed it at the time. He didn’t even sit down with Adam to go over it all until just before Christmas. And of course by then it was far too late.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, twisting in my seat so that I could see her properly. “You’re telling me that a man who’s being paid ten million dollars to write his memoirs within two years turns the whole project over to someone who knows nothing about producing books and who is then allowed to wander off on his own for twelve months?”

Amelia put a finger to her lips and gestured with her eyes to the front of the car. “You’re very loud, for a ghost.”

“But surely,” I whispered, “a former prime minister must recognize how important his memoirs are to him?”

“If you want the honest truth, I don’t think Adam ever had the slightest intention of producing this book within two years. And he thought that that would be fine. So he let Mike take it over as a kind of reward for sticking by him all the way through. But then, when Marty Rhinehart made it clear he was going to hold him to the original contract, and when the publishers actually read what Mike had produced…” Her voice trailed off.

“Couldn’t he just have paid the money back and started all over again?”

“I think you know the answer to that question better than I do.”

“He wouldn’t have got nearly such a large advance.”

“Two years after leaving office? He wouldn’t have got even half.”

“And nobody saw this coming?”

“I raised it with Adam every so often. But history doesn’t really interest him—it never has, not even his own. He was much more concerned with getting his foundation established.”

I sat back in my seat. I could see how easily it all must have happened: McAra, the party hack turned Stakhanovite of the archive, blindly riveting together his vast and useless sheets of facts; Lang, always a man for the bigger picture—“the future not the past”: wasn’t that one of his slogans—being feted around the American lecture circuit, preferring to live, not relive, his life; and then the horrible realization that the great memoir project was in trouble, followed, I assumed, by recriminations, the sundering of old friendships, and suicidal anxiety.

“It must have been rough on all of you.”

“It was. Especially after they discovered Mike’s body. I offered to go and do the identification, but Adam felt it was his responsibility. It was an awful thing to go through. Suicide leaves everyone feeling guilty. So please, if you don’t mind, no more jokes about ghosts.”

I was on the point of asking her about the rendition stories in the weekend papers when the brake lights of the Jaguar glowed, and we came to a stop.

“Well, here we are again,” she said, and for the first time I detected a hint of weariness in her voice. “Home.”

It was fairly dark by this time—half past five or thereabouts—and the temperature had dropped with the sun. I stood beside the minivan and watched as Lang ducked out of his car and was swept through the door by the usual swirl of bodyguards and staff. They had him inside so quickly one might have thought an assassin with a telescopic sight had been spotted in the woods. Immediately, all along the façade of the big house, the windows started lighting up, and it was possible, briefly, to imagine that this was a focus of real power and not merely some lingering parody of it. I felt very much an outsider, unsure of what I was supposed to do and still twisting with embarrassment over my gaffe at the airport. So I lingered outside in the cold for a while. To my surprise, the person who realized I was missing and who came out to fetch me was Lang.

“Hi, man!” he called from the doorway. “What on earth are you doing out here? Isn’t anybody looking after you? Come and have a drink.”

He touched my shoulder as I entered and steered me down the passage toward the room where I’d had coffee that morning. He’d already taken off his jacket and tie and pulled on a thick gray sweater.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to say hello properly at the airport. What would you like?”

“What are you having?” Dear God, I prayed, let it be something alcoholic.

“Iced tea.”

“Iced tea would be fine.”

“You’re sure? I’d sooner have something stronger, but Ruth would kill me.” He called to one of the secretaries: “Luce, ask Dep to bring us some tea, would you, sweetheart? So,” he said, plonking himself down in the center of the sofa and flinging out his arms to rest along its back, “you have to be me for a month, God help you.” He swiftly crossed his legs, his right ankle resting on his left knee. He drummed his fingers, wiggled his foot and inspected it for a moment, then returned his cloudless gaze to me.

“I hope it will be a fairly painless procedure, for both of us,” I said, and hesitated, unsure how to address him.

“Adam,” he said. “Call me Adam.”

There always comes a moment, I find, in dealing with a very famous person face-to-face, when you feel as if you’re in a dream, and this was it for me: a genuine out-of-body experience. I beheld myself as if from the ceiling, conversing in an apparently relaxed manner with a world statesman in the home of a media billionaire. He was actually going out of his way to be nice to me. He
needed
me. What a lark, I thought.

“Thank you,” I said. “I have to tell you I’ve never met an ex–prime minister before.”

“Well,” he said with a smile, “I’ve never met a ghost, so we’re even. Sid Kroll says you’re the man for the job. Ruth agrees. So how exactly are we supposed to go about this?”

“I’ll interview you. I’ll turn your answers into prose. Where necessary, I might have to add linking passages, trying to imitate your voice. I should say, incidentally, that anything I write you’ll be able to correct afterward. I don’t want you to think I’ll be putting words in your mouth that you wouldn’t actually want to use.”

“And how long will this take?”

“For a big book, I’d normally do fifty or sixty hours of interviews. That would give me about four hundred thousand words, which I’d then edit down to a hundred thousand.”

“But we’ve already got a manuscript.”

“Yes,” I said, “but frankly, it’s not really publishable. It’s research notes, it’s not a book. It doesn’t have any kind of voice.” Lang pulled a face. He clearly didn’t see the problem. “Having said that,” I added quickly, “the work won’t be entirely wasted. We can ransack it for facts and quotations, and I don’t mind the structure, actually—the sixteen chapters—although I’d like to open differently, find something more intimate.”

The Vietnamese housekeeper brought in our tea. She was dressed entirely in black—black silk trousers and a collarless black shirt. I wanted to introduce myself, but when she handed me my glass, she avoided meeting my gaze.

“You heard about Mike?” asked Lang.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

Lang glanced away, toward the darkened window. “We should put something nice about him in the book. His mother would like it.”

“That should be easy enough.”

“He was with me a long time. Since before I became prime minister. He came up through the party. I inherited him from my predecessor. You think you know someone pretty well and then—” He shrugged and stared into the night.

I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. It’s in the nature of my work to act as something of a confessor figure, and I have learned over the years to behave like a shrink—to sit in silence and give the client time. I wondered what he was seeing out there. After about half a minute he appeared to remember I was still in the room.

“Right. How long do you need from me?”

“Full time?” I sipped my drink and tried not to wince at the sweet taste. “If we work really hard we should be able to break the back of it in a week.”

“A week?” Lang performed a little facial mime of alarm.

I resisted the temptation to point out that ten mllion dollars for a week’s work wasn’t exactly the national minimum wage. “I may need to come back to you to plug any holes, but if you can give me till Friday, I’ll have enough to rewrite most of this draft. The important thing is that we start tomorrow and get the early years out of the way.”

“Fine. The sooner we get it done the better.” Suddenly Lang was leaning forward, a study in frank intimacy, his elbows on his knees, his glass between his hands. “Ruth’s going stir-crazy out here. I keep telling her to go back to London while I finish the book, see the kids, but she won’t leave me. I love your work, I have to say.”

I almost choked on my tea. “You’ve read some of it?” I tried to imagine what footballer, or rock star, or magician, or reality game show contestant might have come to the attention of a prime minister.

“Sure,” he said, without a flicker of doubt. “There was some fellow we were on holiday with—”

“Christy Costello?”

“Christy Costello! Brilliant. If you can make sense out of his life, you might even be able to make sense out of mine.” He jumped up and shook my hand. “It’s good to meet you, man. We’ll make a start first thing tomorrow. I’ll get Amelia to fix you a car to take you back to your hotel.” And then he suddenly started singing:

He pointed at me. “Christy Costello, ‘Once in a Lifetime,’ nineteen seventy”—he wobbled his hand speculatively, his head cocked, his eyes half closed in concentration—“seven?”

“Eight.”

“Nineteen seventy-eight! Those were the days! I can feel it all coming back.”

“Save it for tomorrow,” I said.

“HOW DID IT GO?”
inquired Amelia as she showed me to the door.

“Pretty well, I think. It was all very friendly. He kept calling me ‘man.’”

“Yes. He always does that when he can’t remember someone’s name.”

“Tomorrow,” I said, “I’ll need a private room where I can do the interviewing. I’ll need a secretary to transcribe his answers as we go along—every time we break I’ll bring the fresh tapes out to her. I’ll need my own copy of the existing manuscript on disk—yes, I know,” I said, holding up my hand to cut off her objections, “I won’t take it out of the house. But I’m going to have to cut and paste it into the new material, and also try to rewrite it so that it sounds vaguely like it was produced by a human being.”

She was writing all this down in her black and red book. “Anything else?”

“How about dinner?”

“Good night,” she said firmly and closed the door.

One of the policemen gave me a ride back to Edgartown. He was as morose as his colleague on the gate. “I hope you get this book done soon,” he said. “Me and the lads are getting pretty brassed off stuck out here.”

He dropped me at the hotel and said he’d pick me up again in the morning. I had just opened the door to my room when my cell phone rang. It was Kate.