Corkscrew (5 page)

'Now ask me,' Bryce said.

Fred chuckled. 'The client always thinks these things take too long. Wait till it's over, you'll be glad Bob dotted the i's.'

'What a lot of i's you have, grandma,' Bryce said. 'But that isn't why I'm here.'

'No, of course not.'

'I need a contract written,' Bryce said. 'I need it as soon as possible, and I need it in absolute secrecy.'

Fred gave him a startled and curious look; Bryce Proctorr was not a client who normally came up with surprises. 'Whatever you tell me, you know,' he said, and waved a hand to suggest the rest of the sentence.

'Yes, naturally. Is private.' Bryce rubbed his left hand over his face, as though brushing away cobwebs. It was a gesture that had become frequent with him this last year, though he wasn't yet aware of it. 'You know,' he said, 'this divorce, all this dotting of i's, it's seen a real distraction.'

'Of course it has.'

'I haven't been able to work.'

'I know it's hard to concentrate with—'

'No, Fred, I haven't been able to work. Not at all.'

Once more, Fred was surprised. 'You haven't said anything.'

'I haven't exactly been lying,' Bryce said, but I haven't been admitting the truth either, Joe asks me — you know, my editor — how's the new book coming along, I say slow. Well, zero is slow, isn't it?'

'Zero? Bryce, honestly, you aren't working at
all?'

'I don't like to go into the room with the computer,' Bryce told him. 'I'll let a week go by without even looking to see if I have any E-mail.'

Fred now looked very worried. 'Are you seeing anybody?'

'What do you mean, therapy? Fred, I know what the problem is. I have this buzzing in my ear and it's called divorce, and until it goes away I can't concentrate on anything else. All therapy would do is give me one more thing to be impatient about.'

Fred, who naturally believed there was a professional of some sort to be hired for every one of life's many problems, spread his hands, saying, with palpable doubt, 'You'll know best, Bryce.'

'I hope I do. Anyway, it can't go on. I owe a book, and I need money. So what I'm doing is, I'm taking on a collaborator.'

'You? Bryce, everything you say to me today is out of character.'

'I have to do
something,
Fred. This guy, I've known him a long time, he's a good writer in his own right, he's published some books, but he's hit on hard times. So he's gonna plot the new one with me, and write it with me, but it would be very bad news commercially if the word got out. So it has to be absolute secrecy.'

'And you can trust this other fellow.'

'Completely. He wants this as much as I do. And it wouldn't help
his
career if the word got around he was becoming a ghost. It would be like people finding out he was writing novelizations.'

'I don't know what that is,' Fred admitted.

'Oh, the paperback form of a movie, written from the screenplay.'

'And it's not considered a very high level of occupation, I take it.'

'Hackwork.'

'I understand.'

When Fred was getting down to business, he would lean forward and put both forearms on the desk, right hand near his pen and yellow pad, and that's what he did now. 'You've worked out the details of the agreement with him?'

'The contract will say he's being hired as an editorial consultant,' Bryce said, and paused while Fred wrote that down. 'It won't say anything about his doing any writing or plotting. It says his work is confidential, and that if he breaks confidentiality the contract is null and void and he doesn't get paid.'

'And if he does get paid?'

'Five hundred fifty thousand dollars, out of the first earnings of the new book.'

This time, Fred was absolutely astonished. 'That's an amazing amount of money, Bryce!'

'It's half the advance,' Bryce pointed out. 'I told you, it's a collaboration, so he has to get half. But after that, any future moneys, foreign sales, movie sales, anything like that, he gets a quarter.'

'Not half?'

'No, a quarter.'

'Will he agree to this?'

'I'm sure he will,' Bryce said, because he wanted to be sure. 'He'll understand, any additional income like that, it would all be coming in because of my name anyway, not because of any specific thing he might have put into the book.'

'I'm sure you're right.' Pen poised, Fred said, 'And what is this collaborator's name?'

'Tim Fleet. Like the street.'

Fred wrote it down. 'And who is representing him?'

'No one. This is just between the two of us.'

Fred put down his pen. 'Are you sure, Bryce? He really should have representation. If there are questions later—'

'There won't be questions,' Bryce assured him, knowing this was merely once again Fred's liking for everybody to be surrounded at all times by a magic circle of professionals. 'Tim and I worked it out,' he said, 'and we shook on it, and now we just need it done in proper legal format.'

'And what's the time frame?'

'As soon as possible. Some time next week?'

'No,' Fred said, 'I meant the term of the collaboration. Deadline, you call it?'

'Oh, no, we'll leave that open,' Bryce said. 'Neither of us wants to
add
pressure.' Grinning, he said, 'The book doesn't even have a title yet. It's just being worked on.'

It
was
being worked on, in fact, and so was the title. In the Danbury train, on the way to his stop, Bethel, the last before the end of the line, he found a dual seat to himself, since he was leaving early enough in the afternoon, ahead of the real rush, and settled down to read the book again, make notes, and think about titles.

The book was good, certainly good enough to become his own. This weekend, he'd scan it into his computer and start the rewrite. He'd keep the basic storyline, but there would have to be changes. There needed to be alterations in tone and mood, differences in language to make the book read like a Bryce Proctorr novel, and also a general tightening to increase the tension, since it seemed to him that one of Wayne's failings was a tendency to write flat, as though it were just a report he was making and not incidents ripe with drama.

Also, the main characters would have to be recast. The senator, for instance, who was our hero's main problem, would have to become someone else entirely. Wayne had written him sort of like a college dean, academic, tough but with gloves on, while Bryce would make him more of a movie director type, more obviously tough and self-assured, and a showboat as well. He'd be fun to write.

The first time through the manuscript, though, he'd concentrate on language. He noticed, for instance, whenever the characters reacted to something they didn't like, they 'winced.' 'Winced' wasn't a word he liked, nor would ever use, so an early order to the computer would be to change every 'winced' to 'twinged.'

The other question was the title. Even if he liked
The Domino Doublet,
which he didn't at all, he wouldn't be able to use it, because Wayne's agent and his former editor had both seen the work under that title. His own third book had been called
An Only Twin,
which would be perfect for this one, given the relationship between the businessman and the senator; too bad he'd already used it up.

A lot of people got off at the two Wilton stops, and then the countryside in the late afternoon light began to look more and more familiar, more and more comfortable. Isabelle would already be there, at the house, when he arrived, and they'd have the weekend.

He felt himself relaxing. He wasn't even thinking now about whether Wayne Prentice would do, he was only thinking about whether his novel would do, and the answer was yes.

Two Faces in the Mirror
. He made a note.

Wayne had been trying to work on a new novel. He had an idea about a man whose brother disappears in Central America, and he goes looking for him. The brother was supposedly a stock-broker in New York, but as the hero searches, more and more ambiguities arise. Was his brother really CIA? Was he a money launderer for the drug cartel? Was he involved with right-wing generals? Wayne hadn't decided yet, and felt the character of the hero would eventually lead him to the character of the missing brother. He was calling it
The Shadowed Other,
but he was having a hell of a time getting into it.

In the first place, what was it for? Who was it by? Would he spend all the time and research and effort, and then sell it to some minor house for five thousand dollars? Or to nobody at all? Would he try to create a
third
name? The effort seemed too much, and what good would it do?

Was he a hobbyist now? Was he one of those people who do their writing on weekends and spend ten years finishing a novel and then nobody cares? Even if…

Well. Even if he got the money from Bryce and
The Domino Doublet
was published under Bryce's name, what good would that do him in the long run? Bryce wouldn't be blocked forever, and wouldn't need a ghostwriter any more. Sooner or later, the money would be gone, and then what would Wayne do?

The money wasn't the point, anyway, the writing was the point. He wanted to sit at his computer, the same as ever, unreel the stories, but he didn't want it to be meaningless, spinning his wheels, a mockery. He didn't want to be foolish in his own eyes.

And the other problem, of course, was Lucie Proctorr. He started
The Shadowed Other
on Monday, but Thursday just kept looming in his mind, distracting him, forcing him to invent scenarios about Lucie Proctorr rather than Jim Gregory, the hero of his novel.

By Wednesday, he was pacing the apartment more than he was seated at his computer, and Thursday was worse, made even more so by the fact that Susan wasn't coming home from work. She was going directly to Jill's place, up on Riverside Drive, and they'd go to dinner from there.

The invitation to
Low Fidelity
had come in Tuesday's mail, and it had said there would be a cocktail buffet following the performance. The opening night would begin an hour earlier than usual, at seven, so Wayne fed himself left-overs out of the refrigerator at six. 'There's good and bad in everybody,' he told himself, as he paced the kitchen. 'What's
my
grudge against her?
That's
the problem.' He felt more and more tense, and had one glass of white wine to calm himself, but was afraid to drink more.

It was a cool night in early November, not cold enough to need a topcoat. He wore his blazer, a blue shirt, and a red tie, and walked down to Grove Street, arriving at ten to seven, to see the usual cluster of people on the sidewalk out front. He didn't know any of them, and was the only singleton there. He recognized Lucie at once, from her picture in
People.
She stood talking and laughing with two other women, all three of them fortyish and very good-looking, in a Don't Touch The Merchandise way. The other two women were smoking, Lucie was not.

The only reasons to stand outside were to smoke or chat or wait for friends. Wayne had none of those reasons, so he went on inside and showed his invitation to a girl at a folding table set up just to the right of the door. She checked him off on a list, and gave him his ticket and the program.

He went on into the auditorium, which was small, under a very high black ceiling, with steeply-raked seating up to the right from the entrance, the stage to the left. There was no curtain fronting the stage, and the set was a busy one, a living room and a kitchen and a staircase, lots of furniture and lots of doors. The stage lights were off, so that the set was faintly mysterious and faintly threatening.

The theater was less than a quarter full, and he saw that in here there were a few other loners like himself. His seat was the last one on the far side, two-thirds of the way up. He crossed between the seats and the stage, aware of people who glanced at him and then away when they didn't know him. Would it matter, later on, if people remembered he'd been here tonight? No, it couldn't.

The program was the off-Broadway version of
Playbill,
full of chatty news about a world very different from his own. The writers he knew were novelists or short-story writers, or they had moved to California to be screenwriters and would occasionally come back to tell their horror stories. Theater people lived in a parallel universe.

The
Playbill
contained the usual pocket biographies, so he read the one about Jack Wagner, the playwright. This was his first play, it seemed. He was a journalist by profession, came from Missouri, had graduated from Antioch, lived near Rhinebeck with his wife, Cindy, and two sons. He had been nominated three times for journalism awards Wayne had never heard of.

More people came in, the theater filling, and then a cheerful older couple claimed the seats to his left. They wore lots of coats and scarves, and she carried a big black leather clunky purse, so it took them some while to get settled, during which Wayne read the list of individuals and organizations that helped support this theater, and then read the biography of the director, Janet Higgins, a native Floridian, who had directed half a dozen off-Broadway plays Wayne had never heard of and had considerable experience as well in 'regional theater.'

'Good evening.'

It was the woman to his left. Her husband was next to Wayne, so she had leaned forward to smile past him.

'Evening,' Wayne said.

'Isn't this wonderful for Jack?'

'From journalism to playwriting,' Wayne said, with admiration, as though describing some difficult acrobatic performance. 'Quite a leap.'

'No one deserves it more,' she said, which Wayne thought a non sequitur, but he agreed anyway. 'You're right.'

'Fred Gustav,' the man said. 'My wife, Molly.'

'Wayne Prentice.'

'Wasn't the traffic terrible tonight?' Molly asked. 'I couldn't believe it.'

'I walked,' Wayne told her. 'I live nearby.'

They both looked at him as though he were an interesting freak of nature. Molly said, 'You live in the Village?'