Gideon (3 page)

For the moment, however, the room belonged to him. And in a strange way, he realized, from this point on it would belong to him forever. He was alone now, but that wouldn’t last long. One of the little people would be there soon. Someone with papers to sign and problems to solve and statements to issue.

He liked being alone.

It was time for his solution.

He reached into the drawer of the desk and pulled out the second secret he’d been keeping: the .45 revolver he’d put there the day she had told him about the package. The day he’d first known it all had to come to an end.

It was his old service revolver. He had almost thrown it away many times in the past. Always he changed his mind and kept it. Now, it was clear, there’d been a reason.

He put the barrel of the revolver into his mouth, all the way until he felt it touch the back of his throat. He had to be thorough. This was one time he could not afford to make an error.

He sat at his desk and tried desperately to think of something he was going to miss. It was important to him. Maybe it was the roaring in his head, it was so damn distracting, but he couldn’t think of anything. Not one thing. It made him overwhelmingly sad. There had to be something.

He heard the footsteps then. They were coming. The bean counters. The little people. And suddenly he thought of something. Yes, there
was
something he would actually miss: her flowers. He smiled, satisfied. Those goddamn flowers. The roaring inside his head stopped. He felt happy. He felt lucky. And he was. Because he didn’t feel the back of his head explode. He didn’t see the blood and hair and bone that splattered all over the wall of the office he so detested. He didn’t hear the door crash open and someone say, no louder than a whisper, “Jesus Christ!” and he didn’t hear the voice that tried to say, “Call his wife,” but couldn’t get the words out without crying. He didn’t hear any of the words that were now being screamed or the hysteria that was erupting outside the door as people began rushing up, demanding to know what had happened. And he didn’t hear the weeping or the wailing or feel the shock of pain that swept through the hallway when they learned the answer to their frantic questions.

He didn’t know or care or think about anything. Not after his one final thought, which raced through is brain moments before the bullet destroyed it, and provided him with a surprising amount of glee and then sadness and then regret.

It’s a great and terrible thing I’m doing.
he thought.
And no one knows why.

And God help anyone who ever finds out.

June 18—July 9

It had not been one of Carl Granville’s better weeks.

For starters, in his weekly pickup game at the Chelsea Piers, he had been taken to the hoop and dunked on by a spindly high-school kid. Then
New York Magazine
gave the Nathan Lane profile they’d promised him to another freelancer—the editor’s sister-in-law. Then his dad called from Pompano Beach to tell him he thought Carl was wasting his precious Ivy League degree and his life, not necessarily in that order. Plus the Mets had lost three in a row, Nick at Nite had cleared out
The Odd Couple
and
Taxi
to make way for
I Dream of Jeannie
and
Bewitched
, and now, just to round things out, he found himself in a room with the only two people left in the world who believed in his talent, in his future, in him. Unfortunately, one of those people was dead and the other one hated his guts.

No, it definitely had not been one of Carl’s better weeks.

He was standing next to an open casket in the Frank E. Campbell funeral parlor on Madison Avenue and Eighty-first Street, where Betty Slater, the legendary literary agent and even more legendary alcoholic, was laid out, looking as rosy and lifelike as a basket of wax fruit. At least she was not glowering at him with undisguised hostility, the way Amanda Mays, standing on the other side of the casket, was. Amanda was still angry over a slight misunderstanding. Something to do with a certain plum job in Washington, marriage, and living happily ever after. Carl had to admit to himself that some of the misunderstanding was his fault.

Actually, Carl had to admit that all of the misunderstanding was his fault.

The turnout for Betty’s funeral was huge, considering just how cranky Betty had gotten toward the end of her life, when she’d managed to offend just about every publisher, critic, and author in town. It was her brutal honesty, mostly. Throwing out words like
stinks
, and
phony
, and—one of her favorite combinations—
pseudointellectual crap
. Nonetheless, this was an event the people had dutifully turned out in droves for it, clustering around her open casket in solemn tribute. Norman Mailer was there. And John Irving. Maya Angelou was there. So were Sonny Mehta, Tina Brown, Judith Regan, and a number of prominent editors and literary agents. All to pay their respects. To mingle. And, Carl was horrified to observer, to work the room. Because Betty had still had a few money clients in her stable, and now they were on the loose. Most notably Norm Pincus, the balding, splayfooted little shlub known to the reading public as Esmeralda Wilding, author of eleven straight best-selling bodice rippers. Agents were hovering around the tubby little gold mine like vultures, waiting to swoop down on him. It was, Carl reflected, in terrible taste.

Especially because not one of the vultures was paying the least bit of attention to
him
.

Hey, wasn’t he talented? Didn’t he have the potential to write best-sellers?
Quality
best-sellers? Couldn’t he go on
Oprah
and charm the hell out of America?

And wasn’t that Maggie Peterson staring at him from across the room?

It was.

Holy shit.
The
Maggie Peterson. Staring at him. And not only that. Now coming toward him. Smiling and sticking her hand out. The most famous, the most visible, the most flamboyant, and by far the hottest editor in New York publishing was speaking to him. She’d had three number-one best-sellers in a row. Her own imprint at Apex, the international multimedia conglomerate. She was a star. And Carl Granville knew that what he could use more than anything else right now was just a little bit of stardust. He was twenty-eight years old and burning to write the next great American novel. He had just delivered the first draft of his most recent attempt to Betty Slater, but she had died before she could tell him what she thought of it. And now he had no agent, no money to pay this month’s rent, and no reason whatsoever to believe that his next payday would arrive any sooner than the twenty-fourth of never. But suddenly there was hope. Maggie Peterson was saying something to him.

She was saying: “I don’t know whether to hire you or fuck you.”

Carl had to admit, she got his attention.

Everything about Maggie Peterson was calculated to get attention. The severe blue-black pageboy hairdo that had been cropped sharply at the chin, with what looked to be a hatchet. The wide sash of bright red lipstick. The matching skintight black leather jacket and trousers. This was a highly charged woman, most likely forty, a lean, tightly coiled whippet who exuded energy and sexual challenge. This was a very sexy predator. A meat eater. And right now she was eyeballing him up and down as if he were a T-bone steak, medium rare.

Carl glanced around just to make absolutely, positively sure that he was the person Maggie had said those words to. He was. So he cleared his throat and took his shot. “If I have a choice,” he said, smiling, “I need the job more.”

Maggie didn’t smile back. He got the feeling that smiling was not usually on her agenda.

“I read those murder mysteries you ghosted for Kathie Lee,” she said, gazing up at him. “I liked them. I liked them a lot.”

That would be Kathie Lee Gifford. Not his proudest creative moment. But a job was a job.

“Betty got that for me,” he said, and modestly shrugged his broad shoulders at Maggie, feeling the twinge in the left one that was always there. A Penn power forward who was now playing over in Greece had given that to him under the boards his senior year. Carl had started at point guard for Cornell for three years, a smart, determined floor leader, a good passer, an accurate shooter. He was the complete basketball package. He had it all—everything except the height, the vertical leap, and the foot speed. He was an inch and three-eights over six feet tall and his weight hadn’t changed, it was still 185. Although fifteen of those pounds kept wanting to drift south. He had to work out regularly to prevent that.

“Betty sent me your novel, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know.” He couldn’t help it; his pulse was definitely quickening.

“It was the most dazzling prose I’ve read in two, possibly three years. Parts of it were even brilliant.”

There it was, the
b
word. The word every writer hungered to hear. And it wasn’t just anybody saying it to Carl. It was Maggie Peterson, who could actually
do
something about it.

“We need to talk,” she was saying now.

Carl stood there a moment, grinning. He looked no more than eighteen when he grinned. He looked, Amanda once told him with a disgusted look in her eye, like an overgrown Campbell’s Soup kid, with his shiny blue eyes and apple cheeks and unruly dirty blond hair that was forever tumbling down into his eyes. He was so wholesome and innocent-looking that bartenders still asked him for his ID.

“Well, sure,” he said. “Let’s talk.”

Maggie glanced abruptly at her watch. “Meet me at three o’clock.”

“Your office?”

“I have a lunch date on the East Side. It’ll be easier to meet at my apartment. Four twenty-five East Sixty-third. We can be alone there. Have a nice little talk in my garden.”

“It’s pouring rain outside.”

“I’ll see you at three, Mr. Granville.”

“It’s Carl.”

“I thought people called you Granny.”

“Some do,” he allowed. Although precious few, and it had to be his idea, not theirs, and …”

And how the hell did she know that?

“I do my homework,” she said, as if reading his mind. Her eyes were already elsewhere, flicking around the crowded room, restlessly searching. When they came to rest, she was looking down at the waxen body in the casket. “This really is the end of an era, isn’t it?” The realization seemed to please her. She turned her gaze back to him. “Don’t disappoint me, Carl. I can’t stand to be disappointed.”

And with that she vanished back into the crowd of mourners.

* * *

It was Amanda Mays who offered Carl the ride home in the rain.

Her same old dented, rusted-out wreckage of a Subaru station wagon was parked illegally out front in the loading zone that was reserved exclusively for hearses. The interior, as always, was littered with collapsed Starbucks containers, an assortment of coats and sweaters and shoes, notepads, file folders. Neat the woman never was. He stood there on the curb with the rain pouring down the back of his neck while she unlocked the door and threw the shit that was on the front passenger seat on top of the shit that was in the backseat so that he could get in.

Once inside, he folded his long legs so that his knees almost touched his chin. Other than offering him a ride, Amanda still hadn’t said a word to him. He realized it was up to him to be mature and civil. “When are you heading back to—”

“Washington? Right now. We’re in the middle of a huge team investigation of the D.C. school board. I’m quarterbacking and I don’t want anyone else mucking it up. Besides, there’s no reason to stay around, is there?” she said pointedly.

“Amanda, can’t we at least be—”

“Friends? Sure, Carl, we can be friends. ” She was forever cutting in on him like this, never letting him finish a sentence. Their conversations were always fast, sometimes furious, rarely linear. It was the way her mind worked—in overdrive.

“Well, do you want to get—”

“A cup of coffee? No, thanks. I just don’t think I can handle that much friendship today.”

The Subaru didn’t particularly want to start. The engine was balky and reluctant. And when Amanda finally pulled away from the curb, it started clanking, regularly and loudly.

“You’re not going to drive this thing all the way back to D.C. sounding like that, are you?”

“It’s
fine
, Carl” The day they’d broken up was the day she’d stopped calling him Granny. “It’s been making that noise for the last seven thousand miles.”

“But—”

“It’s nothing. So just shut up about it, will you?” She floored it, just to prove her point. He closed his eyes and held on for dear life, remembering.

Remembering
them
.

They’d met at a pub party for a mutual friend’s book. And for eighteen months, two weeks, and four days after that, they had been inseparable. She liked the Velvet Underground, the Knicks, and cold pizza for breakfast. She was pleasantly round in all of the places she should be and enviably taut in all of the others. She possessed great masses of rust-colored hair that tumbled every which way, impish green eyes, a smattering of freckles, and the most kissable mouth he had ever personally kissed.

Remembering their nights together. Making love, talking into the dawn, making love again. And again.

Remembering how she made him feel: warm and excited, exhilarated and insecure, always so alive. Amanda was tremendously warm and passionate and even more tremendously opinionated. She was also a pain in the ass. Not easy to get along with. Intense, spiky, and stubborn. She was the smartest person he had ever met and, sitting next to her now. Carl realized with a touch of regret that her approval and respect still meant everything to him.

Remembering how it had ended between them.

Badly, that’s how.

Mostly, she’d said, she wanted him to get real. Like she had. After years of scratching around as a freelancer, living month to month in a crummy studio apartment, she had decided that what she really wanted more than anything else in the world was a life. A good job. A nice place to live. Commitment. Him. She had found the good job—deputy metro editor of the
Washington Journal
. And D.C. was the perfect place for her. She loved politics, it was her passion. That was where they were different. Numbers were his. As in 30.1 and 22.9, which were Wild Chamberlain’s scoring and rebounding averages per game for his career. Or .325—Dick Groat’s batting average in 1960, when he beat out Norm Larker for the National League batting title on the last day of the season. Still, there was a good job waiting there in D.C. for him, too. Hell, a great job. The
Journal
was looking for someone to cover sports as a form of popular culture, not a game. Profiles. Think pieces. It might even lead to a column. But he had turned it down. The job would have been all-consuming, and he refused to abandon his book. He also refused to abandon New York, so, furious, she had gone without him. She had not understood. How could she? She was thirty then. He was twenty-seven—which, in gender evolution, meant she was somewhere between nine and twelve years ahead of him on the maturity scale. He knew he was giving up something special. But he could not change how he felt.