The Salinger Contract (18 page)

C
onner had spent a lifetime around guns, and yet this was the first time he had seen at such close range a gun he was certain would be used against him. It looked small in Pavel's hand.

“Pavel? Don't you have a family?” he asked.

“I left them long ago. Much heartache. But familiar story.
Pedestrian
. Not so interesting.”

“Isn't there something I can do?” asked Conner.

Pavel held up a finger to quiet Conner. He patted Conner down, as if searching for a weapon. He reached into one of Conner's pockets and took out a pen—the black-and-gold Montblanc that had once belonged to J. D. Salinger. Pavel unscrewed it; inside was a small microphone receiver. Pavel cracked the pen in two, then threw it down, speckling the snow with black ink.

“
Ees
there something you can do?” Pavel asked. “Yes, Conner. There is. Take the gun.” The weapon was lying in Pavel's open palm. “Take it,” he said.

“That didn't turn out so well the last time,” said Conner. “What're you trying to frame me for this time?”

“Frame?” Pavel asked. “Nothing is framed.”

“Then what's the twist?”

“The
tweest
? This is it. The
tweest
. In Dex's story, I am supposed to shoot you, you understand.”

“Dead?” asked Conner.

“This is it. Exactly. This is what he would like. You dead. The Hudson River, et cetera. He is no writer. His is an obvious story. Unnecessarily crude. Not so imaginative. And then, of course, the next step.”

“Which is?”

“Which is I take a cab uptown to your mother-in-law's apartment. I find your wife, your son, and there are some ugly things that I say and do to them there. I do not wish to speak further of this.”

Conner made as if to speak. Pavel interrupted. “But I do not like this story so much. I prefer my own way of devising a story. More elegance. Less bloodshed and cruelty.”

“What happens in your story?” asked Conner.

“The one I will tell Dex if he finds me?” Pavel shrugged. “I will say that you and I, we struggled for the gun. You grabbed it, you shot me, perhaps in the hand, perhaps in the leg, nowhere too dangerous. You choose. Something like
thees
. It will not seem so implausible.”

“But why?” asked Conner.

“Because I do not like to shoot people in general, and I certainly do not want to shoot you, Conner,” said Pavel.

“Why not?”

“Perhaps it is because I have a soft spot for writers,” said Pavel. “Particularly those who wrote me nice letters many, many years ago.”

Pavel reached into the inside pocket of his blazer, from which he extracted a folded sheet of yellowed paper.

“Dear Mr. Dudek,” the letter began; it was signed by Conner Joyce. It was one of the many letters Conner had written when he was a young man. He had written to so many of his heroes and role models—Thomas Pynchon, J. D. Salinger, and Jarosław Dudek, the Olympic shot-put medalist and author of
Other People, Other Lives
who had once worked as a functionary for the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

“Dudek?” asked Conner.

“I am he.”

Conner studied the man's face; he could see the resemblance to the last known photo of Jarosław Dudek. And he could recognize the sardonic, shrugging, fatalistic humor of Dudek's prose in Pavel's speech too.

“But you disappeared,” said Conner.

“I did,” said Jarosław Dudek.

“You never published again.”

“This I did not.”

“And you wound up working for Dex?”

Dudek took a breath and smirked. “In a sense, one way or the other, we all wind up working for Dex,” he said.

“But who's Pavel Bilski?” asked Conner.

“
Thees
is the name of a character in a book I once wrote.”

“I don't think I read that book.”

“Only one man did,” said Dudek.

“Dex?”

Dudek nodded.

“So, it's all true. Everything—about Salinger and everyone else.”

“Yes,” said Dudek. “All true.”

“And the flash drive? That was your idea, not Dex's.”

“Yes. So one day you would be able to prove your story was true.”

Conner looked down at the fountain pen that had concealed the mike. “And that's how?” he asked.

“How what?” asked Pavel.

“How you listened to me? How you knew what I was doing?”

“Yes, of course, but if not that, then something else. There are numerous ways. I have much experience with this. Much professional experience. This is unimportant. We have other business to attend to.”

“Like what?” asked Conner.

Pavel reached into a trouser pocket, took a key, and handed it to Conner.

“What's that?” asked Conner.

“Dex's key,” said Dudek. “There should be a manuscript or two in his apartment that could be of some use to you.”

Conner took the key. “What will I do if Dex is there?”

Dudek shrugged. “He is an old man, Conner. And he has lost his best protection.”

“You mean you?”

“This is my meaning—yes.”

Conner took the gun. He wanted to ask Dudek so many more questions—about writing, about Poland, about what exactly he had done for the Ministry of Internal Affairs, about how he had spent the past twenty-odd years, about whether or not he would publish again.

“Perhaps we can discuss this upon some other occasion,” Dudek said. “But now, it is time for you to shoot me.”

“What will you tell Dex if he finds you?” asked Conner.

“A story. He likes stories. This is what I like best about him. Perhaps he will believe me. Perhaps he will not.”

“And if he doesn't?”

“I wouldn't worry about me. This is not your problem,” said Dudek. “And I have always been quite adept at finding ways to disappear. Now, shoot me, Conner.”

Conner took half a dozen steps backward. He cocked the weapon. He aimed it at Jarosław Dudek's leg. And then he fired.

T
he last flight to Chicago was leaving at 10:05 p.m., and Conner had less than an hour to catch it. He had waited in Riverside Park until he made sure Jarosław Dudek had hobbled into a cab to Roosevelt Hospital. Then Conner flagged down another cab and told the driver to take him to 145th and Amsterdam.

In the back of the taxi, Conner kept punching Angela's number into his phone's keypad. And no matter how many times he got the message saying, “This voice mail customer's message box is full; please try your call again later,” he kept trying until the taxi stopped in front of the De La Rojas' apartment building.

“It's Conner,” he shouted into the intercom. “I need to see Angie.”

“She is not here, Conner,” Gladys said.

“Buzz me in. It's important.”

The door clicked open. Conner ran up the stairs to the apartment on the fourth floor. Angela's mother stood in front of the door wearing a housedress and shower clogs. Her hair was white, but in the hallway's fluorescents, its glow was lavender.

“Angie here?” Conner asked.

“No, Conner,” said Gladys.

“Where is she?”

“I don't know.”

“She's really not here?”

“No.”

“Where did she go?”

“I don't know. She got a call.”

“She got my calls? She listened to my messages?”

“I don't think so. She talked to someone and then she said she had to go.”

“To where?”

“She didn't tell me.”

“Did she say when she's coming back?”

“As soon as she can.”

“Where's Atticus?” asked Conner.

“The child is sleeping.”

“Can I see him?”

Gladys stepped back from the doorway. Conner walked past her, into the room where a crib was stationed beside a bed that had once been Angie's. On the few nights Conner had stayed over, even after they had gotten engaged, he had not been allowed to sleep in this room. He had slept on the living-room couch, which was a few inches shorter than he was. Now, as he stared at his son's face, Conner could see his wife's cheekbones, her luminescent black hair. Friends and family often said that Atticus had his father's eyes, but those eyes were closed, and as for that peaceful expression on the boy's face as he slept, Conner couldn't say whether that belonged to him or to Angela. If either of them had ever looked so calm, both he and Angela had lost that feeling long ago. He wished he could rest in the bed beside the cot until the boy woke up. But in his pocket, he had a key to an apartment, which contained the manuscripts that, along with the flash drive, could help to convince Angie and the police that his story was true. And in his coat, he had a gun with one bullet gone.

“I'll be back for you, buddy,” Conner whispered to his son. “As soon as I can. I'm gonna leave you for just a little while, but after I'm back, I'll try my best to never leave you again.”

He kissed Atticus's forehead, ran his hand through the boy's hair. And then he walked out of the bedroom. Conner borrowed a shoebox and a suitcase from his mother-in-law. In the bathroom, he unloaded the gun, and placed it and the bullets in the suitcase along with his coat. He knew he could carry a gun in his checked luggage as long as it wasn't loaded—Cole Padgett did it all the time.

T
he flight from LaGuardia was fast and smooth, and the skies were so clear that, as Conner looked out his window, it seemed as though the plane were flying upside down and the lights he was seeing were coming not from towns and cities but from planets and stars. He passed over Pennsylvania and Ohio. On some level, he was aware of all the drama in the lives that must have been going on below him. Yet at the same time, he found himself unable to conceive of those lives from this distant vantage point, even when he passed over a tiny slice of Indiana, the state in which the events of my last half decade had been playing out—a small version of Conner's story, a tale of lives upended by words.

When he got to O'Hare, he picked up his luggage at the baggage claim. He unzipped the suitcase in a men's-room stall. He took out his coat, put it on, loaded the gun, and placed it in a pocket. He wheeled the empty suitcase to the taxi stand; no one else was waiting in line.

“Where to, my good friend?” the taxi driver asked as Conner got in.

“Six-Eighty Lake Shore.”

The driver laughed. “Used to be
seeks
-
seeks
-
seeks
,” he said.

“I've heard that,” said Conner.

The driver had an Eastern European accent, and for a moment, Conner feared that everything that had just happened in New York had been a fantasy, and now Pavel Bilski was driving him to be ambushed by Dex. But upon closer inspection in the rearview, the taxi driver—Sy Radosevich was printed on his license—had very little in common with Dudek, save for the accent and eyebrows. Conner wondered who this man had been before he started driving a cab. Maybe he had been a writer too, one who had also disappeared. Maybe cities were filled with writers leading double lives, all of them secretly working for Dex.

A black limousine was parked in front of 680 Lake Shore Drive, but Conner paid it little mind. The doorman greeted Conner by name, but Conner was walking past him too quickly to register whether or not the name on his brass plate really was Pynchon.

Conner took the gun out of his coat pocket as he rode the elevator up, held it firmly in his right hand. He stepped out onto the penthouse floor and wheeled his empty suitcase forward. It whirred softly over the carpet. Conner took Dex's key out of his pocket as he approached the apartment, and was surprised his hands weren't shaking. He brought the key toward the lock, but as he inserted it, the door gave way.

Conner froze for a moment. Then, he pushed the door open the rest of the way, leaving his suitcase just outside in the hallway. The door opened without even a creak. The apartment was dark as Conner stepped gingerly across the soft carpet. He felt his way through the hallway, past the Norman Mailer bullet hole, then into the library. Even though he could barely make out any of the furniture, he knew where he was going. He had mapped the apartment inside his mind. He would navigate his way past the chairs in the library, and when he reached the bookcase, he would use the butt of the gun to smash the glass. He would grab the manuscripts, run for the hallway, drop them in his suitcase, zip it, run for the stairs, then through the lobby, out the front door. He would catch a cab to O'Hare, drop the gun in the trash when he got to the airport, take the next plane to LaGuardia, then head back to Gladys's apartment; surely Angie would be back by then.

He felt his way along the wall and stopped when he reached the bookcase. He could picture the small, locked glass doors in front of the manuscripts. He put out his hand just to make sure that he was in the right place. But there was no glass where there should have been; instead, he felt varnished wood. Where bound manuscripts should have been was empty space. He moved his hand gently through air, then felt something sharp slice the back of his hand. Broken glass. Conner winced, felt blood ooze from his skin. He touched the bottom of a shelf—there were jagged shards. The bookcase had been smashed open. Conner stepped back, felt his way along the wall. He was looking for a light switch when a voice split open the silence.

“Put it down,” the voice said.

Not Dex's voice. Though the voice was low, it clearly belonged to a woman. “The gun,” the woman said. “Put it the fuck down.” Conner gripped the gun more tightly, but then a shot shattered one of the windows that gave out onto Lake Michigan. Conner lowered his hand, and when the voice ordered him once more to put down the gun, he placed it on the table.

The room turned bright. One of the desk lamps had been switched on; it illuminated the library in an eerie green glow. Now Conner could see that there were no manuscripts in the bookcase; it was empty—the glass plate had been shattered and slivers were lying not only on the shelves of the bookcase but also on the carpet beneath it. At the head of the table, Dex was lying facedown, a pool of black blood flowing out from under him. In the blood, Conner could see reflections of the illuminated desk lamp, bursts of green and white light like stars in a blood-black sky. Conner made as if to run toward Dex, but the voice stopped him: “Don't.”

Conner turned slowly. He could now see the face of the woman who was holding the gun on him; she, too, seemed to glow faintly green.

“Margot Hetley,” he said.