A Dangerous Fiction (5 page)

These are the last words she speaks before his lips close on hers. They make brilliant, passionate love for hours before he rises to paint her portrait as she lies in exhausted sleep. When he finishes, he steps back and sees the best work he has ever done. At long last, the artist has found his muse.

With a shaking hand, I turned back to the first page and read the title: THE HAND-ME-DOWN MUSE, a novel by Sam Spade.

•   •   •

I didn't see Max until dinner, where we were seated at separate tables. When I spotted his bald head glistening under the lights, I went over and put my mouth by his ear. “Buy you a drink later, big guy?”

“Sure thing.” He looked at me. “What's wrong? It's not Molly, is it?”

I could have kissed him for that. Nine writers out of ten, sensing something amiss, would have asked first about their book deals.

“It's not Molly,” I said.

We cut out early and ended up in the bar of La Fonda on the plaza. It was Saturday night and the place was jumping, but blessedly not with writers. Up front a first-class bluegrass band was playing. Max commandeered a booth in the back. It was the perfect spot: we could hear each other just fine, but no one else could overhear. Over drinks I told him about Sam Spade, starting with the ambush outside my office and ending with the synopsis, which I handed to him.

Max put on a pair of glasses and held the pages close to the candle on our table. The band broke into “Blue Ridge Mountain Blues” and I couldn't keep from tapping my feet. It was a song I heard a lot growing up, and though I had no nostalgia for those times, I never held it against the music. The second scotch was kicking in.

“How do you know it's the guy from outside your office?” he asked, handing back the pages.

“I called him Sam Spade, because of his fedora and trench coat. He must have adopted it as a pseudonym.”

“When was the first encounter?”

“Ten days ago.”

“And Jean-Paul ran him off. Was that before or after he asked for a job?”

“The same day. Right after.” A moment passed. “Don't be ridiculous, Max!”

“I'm just saying. The kid gets to play the hero and clinches the job.”

“No way. He's a good kid. Besides, Sam Spade's here, he followed me.”

Max nodded. “What do you make of him, based on those pages?”

I hadn't expected the question but didn't have to stop and think. “He's no writer, that's for sure. He's never published, but my guess is he's tried and been roundly rejected; hence his search for the missing element, his muse. He's not illiterate, probably even college-educated, but he thinks in clichés and his aesthetic is totally hackneyed: the sad-clown paintings and that tacky Madonna reference. And he's nuts, of course. Grandiose and delusional.”

“Would you know him if you saw him?”

“No. I never really saw his face. The night he waylaid me, it was raining and he wore a trench coat and a fedora tilted down over his face, Bogart-style. That's why I called him Sam Spade. But I'm scheduled to meet him tomorrow, to discuss this dreck.”

“If he shows. Guy strikes me as the shy type.”

I didn't like the sound of that. “You're the profiler; what do you make of him? Do I need to worry?”

“You? You're golden.” Max leaned back, hands clasped behind his neck. “Boyo needs to worry.”

O
n Sunday, Max arranged for hotel security to place several people in the conference room where presenters met one-on-one with attendees, while he himself lurked behind a screen in one corner of the room. Sam Spade was the fourth and last of my scheduled appointments.

He never showed.

On Monday, Max flew back to New York with me. There was no talking him out of it. The strange thing was that, having convinced him to take my stalker seriously, I now found myself incapable of doing so. It wasn't as if this were the first I'd ever dealt with. Hugo had attracted a whole following. Fans and aspiring writers used to send letters, hang around the building, or leave manuscripts with the doorman. Women, too, called the apartment, demanding to talk to Hugo, refusing to leave messages. Some were so persistent that I was finally forced to change our number. Especially when he was writing, my husband relied on me to protect his privacy, and I felt a . . . I won't say “sacred duty
,”
for that sounds slavish, but an absolute imperative to do so. People had no consideration and would disturb him day and night if I didn't intervene. I'd dealt with his stalkers as efficiently as a farmwife deals with flies. Why should Sam Spade be any different?

From Kennedy we taxied into Manhattan, weaving through rush-hour traffic. The sky was pewter-colored, and the air smelled of rain and exhaust. I opened my window to the polyglot babel, horns, sirens, rumble, and clatter that was home for me. It was nearly six by the time we reached my office, but everyone was there, gathered around the conference table. Harriet looked pointedly at her watch as we entered. Jean-Paul brought in an extra chair for Max, who sat beside me at the head of the table. Lorna, as usual, anchored the foot with her trusty steno pad at the ready. They must have ordered in Chinese; my office smelled of fried rice.

Max filled them in on the events in Santa Fe, then handed around copies of Sam Spade's novel summary. We'd argued about this on the plane, and I lost. It would be as obvious to them as it was to me that the muse in Spade's story was a stand-in for me, with the author cast in the role of Well-Hung Starving Artist. It disgusted me to be the object of this perv's sexual fantasies, and I felt that letting my colleagues read his story would diminish me in their eyes. But Max said that someone in the office must have read some pages of the manuscript when Spade originally submitted it, and the summary might ring a bell.

Chloe, the first to finish, pushed the pages away with the tip of one finger. “This is so creepy. Who
is
this guy?”

“At the very least,” Max said, “he's someone with boundary issues and a fixation on getting Jo as his agent.”

“Not just as his agent!” Jean-Paul said. His face was bright red.

“Right,” Max said calmly. “Which is why we need to figure out who he is.”

“Then it's a shame you didn't check with the conference organizers,” Harriet said. “He must have been registered.”

I was used to her patronizing tone, but Max, who wasn't, answered coolly. “Sam Spade was a walk-in registrant. He paid cash and registered with a nonexistent New York City address and phone number. If he was staying at the hotel, it wasn't under that name. But I doubt he was; the hotel had been booked up for months.”

“So how do we find him?” Jean-Paul asked.

“Well, the guy claims he submitted a manuscript to the office and it was rejected. We can assume this happened not long ago, say within the last six months. Someone in this office read his submission. Did anything sound familiar in the pages you just read? Either the content or the voice?”

They all shook their heads except Lorna, who never read.

“Do you keep track of all submissions?” Max asked.

She looked up from her pad. “I do that.”

“Even rejections?”

“Every submission, with the date received, who read it, how and when we responded.”

“Excellent,” Max said. “I'd like a copy of that log.”

“It's confidential,” she said repressively, with that mulish look she got whenever anyone trampled on her secretarial turf.

“Max has appointed himself our chief of security,” I said.

“He appointed
himself
?”

I frowned at her, but Max laughed and said, “No, she's right. Jo, give me a dollar.”

I looked in my wallet and, finding no singles, handed him a five.

“Even better,” he said. “No one should say I work cheap. Now we're official. All right, Lorna?”

“No problem.”

“Is there some reason,” Jean-Paul cut in, “why Jo shouldn't go straight to the police and get a restraining order?”

“Against whom?” Max said.

“Let them find out! He's stalking her; that's got to be illegal.”

“Unless bad writing is a crime, and writing as bad as his should be, nothing Sam Spade has done so far is actionable. And we want to keep it that way, which means that apart from IDing this guy, our goal is to prevent another approach. We need to make Jo impossible to reach.”

“He'll never get past me, I can tell you that!” Lorna said stoutly. She had forsaken her notebook for once and was gaping at Max. It wasn't a good look for her, not that she'd care. Ever since she'd come to us, I'd been trying tactfully to get Lorna to do something about her appearance. She had lovely skin and youth to offset those extra pounds, but she hid her face behind thick glasses and mousy brown bangs and her body in shapeless corduroy slacks and calf-length skirts. For her birthday I'd taken her shopping at Bloomingdale's and bought her two charming outfits, youthful but professional, perfect for work. She'd thanked me earnestly and repeatedly, but what she did with them I don't know; she certainly never wore them to the office.

She was an exasperating child, but I could have hugged her now. I could have hugged them all, even Harriet, who despite her supercilious tone was gazing at me with concern. It moved me to see it, and it opened my eyes.

I grew up without a family. My parents died when I was three; I have no memories of them. My mother's mother took me in. She was a God-fearing woman with a heart of carbolic acid who knew her duty and set about it grimly. I got a cot, secondhand clothes, enough food to survive, and nothing else: not a kind look, not a hug, not a word of praise, even though for years until I wised up I nearly killed myself trying. Luckily for me I found other sources of approval and a way out. I graduated high school at seventeen with a full scholarship to Vassar in my pocket, and once I left, I never went back.

When I married Hugo, he became my family. He was my father, my mother, my husband, and my child. His death left me orphaned anew, widowed, bereft in every possible way. I thought I was down for the count. And yet here I was three years later, still kicking. As I looked around at the room, I realized that somehow this agency had become my home, these people my family.

The panic I'd felt in Santa Fe had evaporated completely. Sam Spade was no threat to me; he was barely a nuisance. I tried to explain this. Everyone listened politely. Then they turned back to Max, and Harriet spoke for them all. “Tell us what to do.”

Max ran through a litany of security measures, most of which I'd already heard on the plane, while Lorna's pen flew furiously over her pad. All calls were to be screened, all doors kept locked, all computer passwords changed. He was meeting the head of building security that evening, while I was delegated to brief the doormen in my apartment house. “Most important,” Max said sternly, turning to me, “you need to vary your schedule. No more runs around the reservoir, for the interim, anyway. Work at home more; come into the office at odd hours. Don't be predictable.”

Just past Max's shoulder, Hugo gazed at me from his portrait, smiling slightly as if to say,
So much fuss, my dear!

“Is all this really necessary, Max?” I said. “Isn't it overkill?”

“Think of it as an ounce of prevention,” he said. “Stalkers can be incredibly persistent; that's what makes them stalkers. Trust me, you'd rather have bedbugs in your apartment than one of these bastards fixated on you.”

A few minutes later, the meeting ended and Max took off. I asked Jean-Paul to stay for a moment. He took the seat beside mine, and I looked at him with a pleasure akin to that aroused by a beautiful Greek sculpture. Sitting so close, I had to resist the temptation to run my hands through his black curls. It wasn't a sexual impulse. In museums, too, I had a hard time keeping my hands to myself. For his part, Jean-Paul seemed to avoid looking directly at me. The charm I'd seen him display toward others was eclipsed in my presence by an awkwardness I could only attribute to my being his boss.

“I've thought about what you asked me,” I said. “If you're still interested—”

My door opened, and Chloe's smiling face peered around it. “Ready?” she asked Jean-Paul.

“What?” he said blankly. “Oh, right. Sorry; go without me.”

The smile faded fast. “You're kidding.”

Boys can be so dense, I thought, and pointed to the door. “Go. You have plans. This can wait till tomorrow.”

“No, it can't.” He looked back at Chloe. “See you tomorrow, OK?”

“Whatever.” She backed out, not before casting me a look I can only call lethal.

Poor child, I thought. She really had it bad if she saw me as her rival. But Chloe would have to learn to deal with her little crush if our intern became a staffer.

“You were saying, Jo?” he said.

“I could use a good assistant. Lorna's wonderful, but she's strictly secretarial.”

“You're offering me the job?”

“I am.”

His face shone. “I accept.”

“Hang on, we haven't talked about salary yet, or what you'll be doing.”

“Whatever it is,” Jean-Paul said, “I'll take it.”

T
he next day Max drove up to Westchester to visit Molly. That evening, with no further sign of Sam Spade and with many exhortations to contact him immediately if anything happened, he flew home. We followed his orders like good little soldiers. The office door was kept locked; visitors and deliverymen had to buzz to get in, and with Lorna on the gate I could not have felt safer. We all changed our computer passwords. Max had said to use random digits and letters, but I knew I'd never remember such a password, so I changed mine from Hugo's birth date, which was ludicrously obvious, to a date that was equally meaningful but only to me: 7/10/1996, the day we met.

I changed my schedule, too. Instead of running in the park, I ran on a treadmill with a manuscript propped up in front of me. I went to work late, came home early, caught up on reading. Life in the agency returned more or less to normal. On Wednesday I e-mailed the Keyshawn Grimes novel to Marisa Deighton at Doubleday; she sent back a lovely note thanking me and promising a quick read. On Thursday, I received an unexpected offer on a book, a combination memoir and how-to book on dog training. I don't normally handle either genre, but this one came with a unique voice and a story worth telling. The author, Gordon Hayes, was an ex-Marine and former monk who now bred and trained protection dogs. The journey of a man with such an eccentric résumé was a big part of the story. Everyone liked the book, but no one had a clue how to market it, and after twenty rejections I'd nearly given up hope. Now I got to do my favorite part of my job: I called my client and told him we had an offer.

On Friday, Teddy Pendragon called the office. I'd finally read his
Vanity Fair
profile the night before, lying in the big brass bed that I'd shared with Hugo and had been unable to fully colonize in the three years since his death (even if I managed to fall asleep in the middle, I invariably woke up hugging the left edge). Molly had called the piece flattering and it was, in a smarmy sort of way. Teddy wrote almost worshipfully of Hugo's work, which he'd discovered as a precocious, lonely adolescent, the age when we are most susceptible to seductive voices. In the piece, he idolized Hugo and romanticized me, quoting writers I'd worked with and altogether portraying me in such a flattering light that the cynic in me wondered if he hadn't written it with a biography of Hugo in mind. Still, it was a promising start, if start there must be.

To Lorna's surprise, I took his call.

“I read it,” I said. “I liked it; how could I not?”

“I'm relieved to hear it,” Teddy said, and he did sound relieved.

“Molly thinks I should cooperate with you on a bio.”

“What do you think?”

“I won't lie. It feels like a damned intrusion. But I'm convinced that if it's not you, it'll be someone . . . else.”

Someone worse, I meant, and he seemed to know it, for his dulcet voice hardened to the consistency of cold maple syrup. “I gather you've heard about Gloria Vogel's little project?”

“Never happen,” I snapped. “No one who knew Hugo would give her the time of day. It's a pipe dream.”

“Of course,” he said soothingly, but I felt, as he surely did, a sudden, slight pitch in the balance of power. He knew why I needed him, and that gave him leverage.

“I'm prepared to move ahead with this,” I said. “You could have your agent talk to Random.” That was clumsy. I was a lot more interested in having the book sale announced than actually facilitating its writing, and Teddy would know that.

He didn't say, “Not so fast.” He wasn't that crass. But I heard it in his voice nonetheless. “I think it would be a good idea if you and I talked a little more first. Why don't I take you to lunch one day and we'll put our heads together?”

I had no lunches free for weeks, so we made it for dinner the following Tuesday. I spent much of the intervening weekend fretting about it, trying to decide what I'd give him and what I wouldn't. Then something happened that put Teddy Pendragon right out of my mind.

•   •   •

Sunday night I went out with some friends from Paris, the Lepetits. Valerie was a painter, originally from Chicago, and her husband, Yves, was a jazz pianist. Hugo and I met them soon after we moved to Paris, in a jazz club on the Rue des Lombards. They were sitting at the table next to ours, and we couldn't help noticing them, for they were an odd-looking couple: a stunning black woman nearly six feet tall and a diminutive white man some twenty years her senior. Midway through the set, Yves was called up onstage and introduced; then he sat in on a couple of songs. After the set, Hugo struck up a conversation. They knew Hugo's work, of course, and admired it. Before long we were sitting at the same table, chatting like old friends. Hugo and Yves bonded over the music they both loved, while Val and I found common ground as Americans in Paris, both married to older men. After that we met often and grew close, even vacationing together several times in the south of France. For Hugo's birthday, I commissioned a portrait of him from Val; it still hangs in his study. When Hugo died in Paris of a sudden massive heart attack, I would have been lost without Val and Yves, who saw to all the arrangements. When I decided to sell the Paris apartment, they handled that, too. We hadn't met since Hugo's memorial service in Paris, and I'd missed them badly.

They were already seated when I arrived at the restaurant on West Fourth, and a great chord of gladness sounded in me when Val saw me and waved exuberantly. I blew past the maître d' in my hurry to reach them. Yves kissed me on both cheeks, then Val enveloped me in a good old American hug.

After dinner and a couple of bottles of wine, we went on to the Blue Note and the Vanguard. We drank some more, and in between sets talked about Paris and the old days with Hugo. Yves's English was weak, so we spoke in French. When he left us to talk to a musician he knew, Val slid over till her thigh touched mine.

“Dear Jo,” she said, switching to English, “I feel so close to you.”

“You
are
close to me.”

“I've thought of you so often. I always meant to call.”

“You should have.”

“
You
didn't. And I was so afraid you were upset with me.”

“Why would I be?” I asked, surprised.

“You know.”

“I don't.”

“That night at the hospital . . .”

All at once I realized what she was talking about. Hugo had been stricken at around eleven p.m., on his way home from a movie theater. I hadn't gone, which is something I'll always regret, but it was one of those noisy American films based on comic books that I loathed and he loved. The first I knew of his collapse was a call from the emergency room of the Hôpital Européen Georges-Pompidou. I grabbed a taxi and offered the driver double the fare if he could make the hospital in ten minutes. He did it. I paid, jumped out, and was approaching the door to the ER when it opened and Val emerged.

We exchanged a few quick words. She'd brought in a neighbor who cut herself on a carving knife. I told her about the hospital's call. “They wouldn't say what's wrong with him,” I said.

“I'm sure it's nothing,” she replied. “You know men.” I must have expected her to turn around and walk back inside with me, because I was surprised when she didn't. But the incident was so thoroughly eclipsed by the disastrous news to come that I'd forgotten it until this moment.

“That was nothing,” I said. “You couldn't have known. I can't believe you worried over that.”

Val hugged me with one arm. She smelled of paint and French perfume. “I'm so glad. You know I loved you both. Hell, I owe my career to your husband!”

“You do?”

Her eyes brimmed with whiskey tears. “Before I met you two, I was struggling to show my work, let alone sell it. Then you commissioned that portrait, and when it was done, Hugo made a point of showing it to his friend Henri Roux, who has galleries in Paris and New York. Henri loved it and he came to see more. That's how I got my first solo show.”

“I never knew that,” I said.

“No one knew. It was just Hugo being kind.”

How typical of Hugo to do a good deed secretly. Strange, though, that he hadn't told me, for there were no secrets between us. Maybe he had said something and I'd forgotten.

Yves returned to us then, and we switched back to French. Val ordered another bottle, but I'd had enough. By the time I got home it was past two. I took a couple of aspirin to stave off a hangover and fell into bed.

I jerked awake to full daylight. The phone shrilled. I ignored it. Damn thing kept ringing.

Finally I picked up. Groggily: “Hullo?”

“Jo?” It was Lorna. I heard office noises in the background, but her voice was hushed. “Are you OK?”

I sat up too quickly and winced. Preemptive aspirin doesn't always work. I rubbed my temples. “What time is it?”

“Ten.”

“What do you want?”

“Did something happen I don't know about with Nancy Kurlin's book?”

“No, why?”

“Did you sell TV rights to the Gordon Hayes book?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Jo,” she said, “you'd better get in here.”

•   •   •

The smell smacked me in the face the moment I opened the office door. For a moment I was back in the funeral parlor, sitting in state beside Hugo's coffin with the suffocating stench of lilies all around me; but this was a different room full of flowers and gaping faces. Jean-Paul and Chloe were huddled around Lorna's desk. I got the sense of excited speech that had ceased the moment I walked in. There was a crystal vase full of red roses on Lorna's desk, a spray of irises on Jean-Paul's, two more bouquets and a bottle of Champagne on the credenza. I plucked the card from the roses. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” it exclaimed, and it was signed “N.” I looked at Lorna.

“Nancy Kurlin,” she said. “I checked with the florist.”

The card on the irises was from Jenny Freund, whose first novel I'd been unable to place. “Bless you, Jo. I can't tell you what this means to me.” The Champagne came from Milo Sanders, whose fascinating biography of Bob Dylan ought to have sold and would have, if another one hadn't just been made into a PBS series. His note said, “To the world's greatest agent, with boundless gratitude.”

I couldn't speak. Writers often send flowers and little gifts as thank-yous, but there was no reason for any of these particular writers to be thanking me. Something burned in the pit of my stomach, and my limbs felt weightless. I didn't quite know what was happening yet, but I knew it was bad.

“There's more,” Lorna said, breaking the long silence. “Check your messages.”

Harriet stepped out of her office as I passed; her English complexion had lost the peaches and was all cream. She regarded me without a word. I went into my room and shut the door. The light on my phone was blinking and the counter showed six messages. I hit
PLAY
.

“Jo, it's Marty. My God, I can't believe it. Steven Spielberg? Call me—this is unbelievable—we have to celebrate!”

The next one was hard to make out because of the crying. “It's Edwina. Jo, you can't imagine what this means to me. I'd pretty much given up hope. God bless you, Jo.”

I couldn't listen to any more. My head was pounding and there was an ominous churning in my gut. Except for a ringing phone, quickly stilled, the silence outside my door was deafening. Now I knew the shape of this disaster, but I didn't yet know its scope; indeed I felt unequal to knowing.

I am a coward. I admit it. When the ER doctor came out to tell me about Hugo, he'd hesitated for a moment before speaking. That momentary pause and the look in his eyes revealed all; yet he, determined to break the news gently, listed all the steps they'd taken to save my husband before admitting they had failed. And I let him stall. That is the point: I let him. I even interrupted with a cogent-sounding question or two, because I couldn't bear to hear the words I knew were coming.

Now the message light blinked on and on, and I buried my face in my hands. I'm not sure how long I would have stayed like that if my secretary hadn't come in. She stood before my desk until I was forced to look up.

Lorna is not an expressive girl. Molly once said, unkindly but accurately, that she has as much affect as her computer. But I hardly knew her now. Her back was straight, sallow cheeks pink with indignation, bovine eyes gleaming behind their glasses.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Bad. But not as bad as my poor clients are going to be.”

She came around to my side of the desk, and for one awful moment I thought she was going to embrace me. Instead, she opened the bottom drawer where I keep a bottle of Johnnie Walker and a couple of shot glasses for celebrations. She filled one glass to the rim and placed it in my hand.

“Lorna, it's not even noon.”

“You've had a shock.”

I downed half the shot in a gulp and felt its warmth spread through my body. That felt good, so I finished it off. Liquid courage. There's a reason clichés become clichés.

“Sit,” I said to Lorna, still hovering about me. “Did you listen to the messages?”

She took the client's seat and glanced at the blinking light on my phone. “You didn't?”

“Just the first few. What's happened, Lorna? Can you explain it to me?”

“E-mails,” she said. “Sent over the weekend. Each with some kind of offer, apparently. Each signed by you.”

“How? Someone hacked into our e-mail?”

“I don't know. They weren't sent from any of our e-mail accounts. I checked everyone's sent mail.”

“Have we seen any of these e-mails?”

“Not the ones our clients got. I couldn't ask them to forward them without saying more than I thought I should. But there's one addressed to you, too. Check your personal inbox.”