A Dangerous Fiction (6 page)

I grabbed the mouse and logged into my e-mail account. There were a dozen new messages. I scrolled down the list of senders until I came to one named “JDonovan.”

“That one,” Lorna said, startling me. She was behind me now, looking over my shoulder.

I opened the e-mail. “Can you hear me now?” it said. No salutation, and no signature; but in my head I heard the words in Sam Spade's voice.

I looked longingly at the Leibovitz portrait of Hugo on the opposite wall. If he were alive, none of this would have happened. I'd been safe with him, for the first and only time in my life. “Does Molly know?” I asked; I don't know why.

“We haven't told anyone. Jean-Paul wanted to call Max, but I said to wait for you.”

My lips felt numb and my fingers were icy. I wanted another drink, but I knew that would be a mistake. After Hugo died, I'd tried drinking myself to sleep every night. Whatever worked, I'd thought. In India, they give widows opium. I got pretty good at solitary drinking, but I quit when Molly took me into the agency and I had to get up mornings. Hadn't missed it, till now.

The phone rang and Lorna picked up. “Hamish Donovan Literary Agency.” She listened for a moment. “No, sorry, still out. She's got meetings all morning. I'll tell her you called. . . . No, I don't know anything about it. . . . I will.” She hung up and looked at me. “Gordon Hayes. Wants to talk to you about the Animal Planet deal.”

“What Animal Planet—oh God. This is a nightmare.” Slowly, so slowly, it was starting to sink in. I'd known from the first how devastating this disappointment was going to be to my writers. Now I began to realize what it could do to the agency. The victimized clients would blame me. I could lose them all. I could lose Harriet, too. Ever since Molly retired, that tie had been fraying; this could sever it entirely.

I felt assaulted, violated, too shocked even for anger, though that would surely come. But Lorna was looking at me anxiously, and I felt the weight of the silence outside my door. Later, safe in my empty apartment, I would howl and curse and lick my wounds, but right now someone had to deal with this mess, and there was nobody else.

I braced myself. “How many?”

“Based on the gifts, the voice mail, and this morning's calls, twelve.” Lorna hesitated. “Twelve we know of.”

Of course; there could be others who hadn't checked in yet. Part of me wanted to curl up in a ball under my desk. Another part of me smacked that part in the face and told it to buck up. Step by step, I told myself. That's how I got through Hugo's funeral, and if I could get through that, I could get through anything.

“I need a list of the twelve clients, with phone numbers. Then a full client list, also with phone numbers.”

“I thought you might.” She pointed to a file on my desk.

“You're a godsend. Ask the others to stay in the office and say nothing to anybody. I'll see everyone in a little while, including Harriet. Max may want to talk to them, too.” A thought struck me. “Were any of Harriet's clients involved?”

“Not that we know of.” Lorna edged toward the door, relieved, I suppose, that I hadn't actually dissolved into a puddle.

“And get rid of those flowers,” I called after her.

I
Skyped Max. It was early morning in L.A. and he was at his desk, dressed for work in jeans and a graphic tee with a picture of the Brooklyn Bridge on it. Behind him I could just make out a large picture window with a view of Benedict Canyon. His and Barry's house was a graceful concoction of iron, cement, and glass, cantilevered over the cliff at an angle that defied God and gravity.

I'd set up my computer at the head of the conference table, where I usually sat. Harriet, Chloe, Jean-Paul, and Lorna sat in a semicircle around me, close together so Max could see us all.

I filled him in. When I finished, there was a long silence. Max looked like he'd broken a tooth.

“We need those e-mails,” he said at last.

“I know,” I said. “As soon as we get off I'm going to start making those calls.”

“Forward me the one you got right away.”

“That's it?” Jean-Paul burst out. “You want to look at e-mails? We've got to stop this bastard!”

“Which bastard is that?” asked Max, as calm as Jean-Paul was agitated.

“The stalker, of course; Sam Spade, who else?”

“Did he sign that e-mail?”

“He didn't have to,” I said. “It's obvious from the content. ‘Can you hear me now?' That's been his demand from the start. I have to hear him. I have to pay attention.”

Max's face was inscrutable. “So it seems. Lorna, did you pull together that submission log?”

“It's done,” she said. “You want me to e-mail it?”

“Hold on to it. I'm flying in.”

“Absolutely not,” I said firmly, for I'd expected this and was prepared. “You have a book tour starting in three days. You have a million things on your plate. I can handle this.”

And Harriet for once backed me up. “That's a very kind offer, Max, but at this point, Jo clearly needs to go to the police. I only wish she'd done it sooner.”

“She
is
going to the police,” Max said. “And I'm going with her.”

“I don't need you to hold my hand,” I said.

“Too late, doll. You hired me.”

“For five bucks!”

“And I'm going to earn every penny. Jean-Paul?”

Jean-Paul straightened, nearly saluted. “Sir?”

“You'll see Jo safely home tonight.”

“Yes, sir!”

“At ease, soldier,” Chloe muttered.

After Max logged off, I moved to the head of the table. “We have to assume that this guy has hacked into our computer files and e-mail accounts; I don't see how else he could have learned enough to pull this off. For the time being, we're going to have to avoid using e-mail. Harriet, I suggest you and Chloe go through your contact list and let everyone know that until further notice, any communications from us will be by phone or messenger.” Harriet nodded. I went on. “Lorna and Jean-Paul, you can divide up my contacts and do the same. If any more phony offers turn up, pass those calls to me. I'm going to ask you all not to talk about what's happened. Clients who were victimized will have to be told the whole story, of course, but I'll make those calls. The others need only be told that our e-mail's been hacked. The longer we can keep the whole story quiet, the better.”

The young 'uns nodded solemnly, but Harriet arched an eyebrow. She knew as well as I did that it couldn't be for long. Too many clients had been duped; God knew how many people they'd already talked to.

Chloe hugged herself. “This whole thing is so . . . I mean, cue the spooky music, right?” Jean-Paul put a hand on her shoulder and she shot him an upward glance. I wondered what would happen if Harriet left me. Would Chloe go with her, or would she stay?

“Buck up,” Harriet said reprovingly. “Look at Jo: cool as the proverbial cucumber.”

“Just numb,” I said. “Wait till I start making the calls.” One more thing remained to be said, though I feared the consequences. “This is going to get ugly, guys. It's already ugly. If any of you feel it would be better to disassociate yourself from the agency, I will be very sorry, but I'll understand and accept it.”

Four faces stared back at me. No one spoke. Outside, a phone rang twice and stopped, shunted to voice mail.

“You don't have to answer now,” I said. “You can see me later if you—”

“How can you even ask that?” Jean-Paul said, his dark eyes blazing.

Chloe nodded fervently. “It's insulting.”

I looked at Harriet, to whom my words had been primarily addressed.

“Not to worry, Jo,” she said. “We'll see you through this.” Though hardly open-ended, this commitment was more than I had hoped for, and I knew Harriet was as good as her word. I gave her a grateful nod. Only Lorna had not yet spoken, and I hardly felt she needed to. But the others all turned to her expectantly.

“Me?” she said, looking surprised. “I'm not going anywhere.”

•   •   •

And then there was nothing standing between me and the phone. I asked Lorna to reschedule my appointments for the day and closeted myself in my office.

The twelve victims were a mixed bunch, weighted toward fiction, as my list was. It included first-timers and old hands, midlist and bestselling writers, male and female. Some of my favorite clients were on the list, though Sam Spade could hardly have known that. Or maybe he did; he'd certainly figured out the best way to strike at me.

Publishing is a big, tough business, and a writer's agent is all that stands between him and the machine. So great is the dependence of writers on their literary agents that a reciprocal response is all but inevitable. Even those writers who are decades older than me became my children, to be guided, encouraged, and protected. I had many clients, and there were days when I felt like a mother bird with far too many hungry chicks. But nothing in my working life was sweeter than delivering good news, and nothing hurt more than disappointing them.

I started with Gordon Hayes, my ex-Marine, ex-monk dog trainer. There was no Animal Planet deal, but I had just sold his book, so he'd have something to fall back on. Besides, he was a gentle, taciturn man; with him there'd be no tears.

He answered his phone on the first ring. I heard dogs barking in the background.

“Jo Donovan,” he said, “you are rapidly becoming one of my all-time favorite people.”

“Not for long,” I said, and broke the news.

When I finished, he asked, “Was it just me, or were there others?”

“At least a dozen.”

“Who the hell would do that to you?”

“Me?” I said, startled. “It's not about me. I'm just so sorry about your disappointment.”

“Of course it's about you. Do you have any idea who's behind it?”

With a dozen difficult calls yet to make, I didn't want to get into details. I asked him to forward the e-mail he'd received and tried to get off. But Gordon kept asking questions, and his normally soft voice went so alpha-dog that I couldn't refuse. I told him about the stalker and Max and the police and my protective staff.

“It's not enough,” he said. “I can help with that, at least. Will you be in your office tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow we're seeing the police. But Gordon, please don't—”

“The day after, then. I'll call.” And he hung up on my protestations.

I put the phone down and looked at it. That hadn't gone at all as I'd anticipated. Most writers are egoists, even the most charming of them. They need to be, to survive in this business. I'd expected anger. I hadn't expected it to be on my behalf.

The next call was tougher. Edwina Lavelle wept buckets, while I writhed in sympathetic agony. Her first novel was a beautifully written story about a family of Haitian immigrants living in Brooklyn. When I offered to represent her, I'd known plenty of editors who might take a chance on a talented newcomer, despite what they might see as limited demographic appeal. But that was before the economy crashed. Now half those editors were gone, and the rest were in no position to stick their necks out.

I told Edwina, by way of consolation, that she was one of a dozen clients who'd been victimized, but that only seemed to upset her more. In between sobs, she read me the phony e-mail she'd received. “Betsy Miller from Knopf called—said she can't get your book out of her mind, so decided to make offer after all. $80,000 advance. More info to come. Congrats, Jo.”

If it hadn't been so tragic, I'd have laughed. The scenario was absurd. For one thing, editors, like agents, don't look back. They might agonize over a submission, debate its merits and salability, but once they make the decision to pass, it is full speed ahead and on to the next. For another thing, no editor these days would pay $80,000 for a small first novel. This one had already made the rounds without attracting an offer.

But Edwina didn't know that. Edwina must have thought she'd hit the lottery.

“I'm so sorry,” I said. “I know how devastating this must be.”

“It's not that. I'm proud of my book even if it never gets published. I'm proud you liked it enough to take it on. But when I think about you sitting there, having to make twelve calls like this one . . .” Her voice broke again.

It was a moment before I could speak. “Come on, Edwina, don't worry about me. I'm a tough old bird.”

“Not old, and not so tough, either. Jo, baby, tell me: what can I do to help?”

And so it went on every call. Hurt though they were, and bitterly disappointed, none of my clients blamed me. For some reason this made me feel guiltier, though I knew I was as much a victim as they.

After the fourth or fifth call, I took a break, went online, and pulled up the e-mails my writers had forwarded. The sender clearly knew what manuscripts each of them had in play, as well as the authors' sales histories, for the offers he'd come up with, unlikely as I knew them to be, were just plausible enough to pass muster with writers who lived on hope anyway. Gordon Hayes had been told that Animal Planet had offered $75,000 for the television rights to his book,
My Life in Dogs
. Nancy Kurlin was a midlist novelist with declining sales whose last book hadn't sold at all. Her e-mail said that Viking was launching a new line of women's fiction and they wanted her book to inaugurate the series. Poor Marty Gillman was told we'd received an offer from DreamWorks for his upcoming thriller, and that Steven Spielberg himself was interested in directing.

The cruelest hoax of all was played on the client I loved the most. Alice Duckworth, a dear old friend of Hugo's, took me under her wing when Hugo and I first married. She was old enough to be my grandmother, yet we became fast friends, both of us being at loose ends: she because she'd just been widowed and I because Hugo was immersed in a new book. Alice was also a writer, much acclaimed for her first novel, published when she was only twenty-two. I'd read it as a girl; it was that book that first inspired in me the determination to live in New York. Despite critical praise, none of Alice's subsequent books sold as well as that first one, and of course she paid dearly for that. By the time she came to me for representation, she hadn't published in ten years, although she'd kept on writing, and her old books were long out of print.

I'd managed to sell her latest novel to Pellucid Press, who owed me for Rowena, but was unable to persuade them to put any juice behind it. It was slated to come out in a month with a tiny print run and no publicity budget. Alice, no neophyte, was rightly concerned for her book's prospects.

“Dear Alice,” the e-mail said. “Great news! NYT committed to a front-page review. Pellucid's going back for second printing. They want to reissue your entire backlist in a uniform trade edition. Congrats—this is long overdue. xoxo, Jo.”

I was reading that e-mail when Lorna walked in and caught me without my game face on. She stopped short halfway across the room. “Jo?”

I passed a hand over my face. “What now?”

“I'm sending out for sandwiches. What'll you have?”

“Nothing, thanks.”

“You have to eat.”

I could see by the flat-footed way she stood there that it was no use arguing, and anyway, I knew she was right. Part of getting through things, I'd learned, was eating even when you didn't want to.

“Soup,” I said. “Beef barley. Lunch is on me today. Take it out of petty cash.”

“I brought mine. I'll tell the others.” Then she left, easing the door shut behind her the way one does in a sickroom.

•   •   •

Sometime after six I got off the last call. Jean-Paul had waited, and we rode the elevator down together. My head was throbbing, and I had it in mind to walk home through the park, since I had an escort. It was a warm evening, and the sky between the buildings was streaked with pink. The sidewalk was mobbed, workers pouring out of office buildings into eddies of shoppers and tourists. We wove into the southbound stream, and it came to me suddenly that Sam Spade could be out there, watching. No sooner did the thought occur than it morphed into a certainty. Of course he was watching. Seeing my reaction would be half the fun. I stopped in my tracks. Jean-Paul was carried onward a few yards before he managed to get back to me.

“What is it?” he asked.

“He's here,” I said.

His head whipped around. “Where? Did you see him?”

Ahead of us, a lone man peered into the window of a jewelry shop. Across the street, a crowd of people waited at the bus stop. He could be any of a dozen men standing there; and since he could be any of them, he was all of them.

“I wouldn't know him if he was right in front of me,” I said. “I just feel it.”

Jean-Paul opened his mouth and closed it without speaking. Poor kid
,
I thought, for this he deferred Harvard Law? From our little cove by the building, I looked out at the great mass of pedestrians moving in sync, like shoals of fish. One step at a time, I told myself, but I couldn't take the step.