Perhaps they’d been laughing at me all the while, as they examined me like some pea-brained guinea pig. Maybe the business with the library had been another falsehood, a pretext to keep me there for some twisted reason. I suddenly saw the whole story in a different light. I must have been blind not to have realized that everything she’d ever told me had been lies, without even any great effort to make them sound real.
I went back inside and called for a cab. Then I set out for the professor’s house in the snow, which began to fall more heavily.
That was where the partial manuscript came to an end. I gathered the pages back together and placed them on the coffee table. The clock on the wall read 1:46 a.m. I’d been reading without a break for more than two hours.
What was Richard Flynn’s book intending to be?
Was it a belated confession? Was I going to find out that he was the one who’d murdered Wieder, and that he’d managed to elude arrest, but now he’d decided to confess? He’d mentioned in the online submission form sent alongside his query that the full manuscript had seventy-seven thousand words. Something important must have happened after the murder, too—the killing wasn’t the end of the entire story.
I’d lost track of the timeline of events to a certain extent, but it seemed that the fragment, whether deliberately or not, ended at the point when he set off for the professor’s house, convinced that Laura had been lying to him, including about the real nature of their relationship, on the very night when the man was murdered. Even if Flynn hadn’t done it, he’d certainly gone to Wieder’s house on the evening of the murder. Had he caught the two of them together? Had it been a crime of passion?
Or maybe he hadn’t killed him, but he had come to unravel the mystery so many years later, and this manuscript was intending to unmask the real culprit, whoever it might be. Laura Baines?
I told myself that there was no point in my getting carried away, given that I’d soon find out what it was all about from none other than the author himself. I finished my coffee and went to bed, determined to ask Flynn to send me the full manuscript. True-crime books were popular, especially when they were well-written and about unusual, mysterious cases. Wieder had been a celebrity at the time, he was still an important figure in the history of American psychology, as Google had informed me, and Flynn wrote in a fluid, gripping sort of way. So I was almost convinced that I was dealing with a good acquisition, for which a publisher would be willing to sign a substantial check.
Unfortunately, however, things didn’t turn out as I’d wished.
I sent Richard Flynn an e-mail on my way to work the very next morning, using my personal address. He didn’t get back to me that day, but I presumed that he’d taken advantage of the extended MLK Day weekend to have a short holiday and wasn’t checking his messages.
After two or three days with still no reply, I called the cell phone number he’d given me in his letter. I reached his voice mail, but found I was unable to leave him a message because it was already full.
Another couple of days passed without my hearing from him, and after a few more attempts to reach him on his phone—which by now was switched off—I decided to go to the address he’d given in the letter, which was near Penn Station. It was an unusual situation—I mean chasing an author—but sometimes if the mountain won’t come to you, you have to go to the mountain.
The address led me to an apartment on the second floor of a building on East Thirty-Third Street. I rang the intercom, and eventually a woman’s voice answered. I told her I was Peter Katz, looking for Richard Flynn. She curtly informed me that Mr. Flynn wasn’t available. I explained that I was a literary agent and briefly told her what I was there for.
She hesitated for a few moments, and then I heard the lock buzz open. I took the elevator to the second floor. She was already standing in the doorway of the apartment and introduced herself as Danna Olsen.
Ms. Olsen was in her forties, with the kind of face you usually forget shortly after first seeing it. She was wearing a blue housecoat and had ebony hair, most likely dyed, brushed back and secured with a plastic headband.
I left my coat on the rack in the hall and went into the small but very tidy living room. I sat down on a couch upholstered in leather. Because of the colors of the carpets and curtains and the knickknacks spread all over the place, the apartment looked like it belonged to a single woman rather than a couple.
After I told her my story once more, she took a deep breath and spoke quickly: “Richard was admitted to All Saints Hospital five days ago. He was diagnosed with lung cancer last year, when he was already in stage three of the disease, so they couldn’t operate; instead, they started chemotherapy. For a while he responded positively to treatment, but two weeks ago he contracted pneumonia, and his condition worsened abruptly. The doctors don’t hold out much hope for him.”
I uttered the meaningless platitudes one feels obliged to express in such situations. She told me she had no relatives in the city. She was from somewhere in Alabama and had met Richard a few years ago, at a marketing workshop. They’d written to each other for a while, gone on a trip to the Grand Canyon, and then he’d insisted that they move in together, so she’d come to New York. She confessed to me that she didn’t like the city, and the job she’d found, at an advertising agency, was below her level of training. She’d accepted it only for Richard’s sake. If she lost her partner, she was intending to move back home.
For a few minutes she cried softly, without sobbing, wiping her eyes and nose with tissues she took from the box on the coffee table. After she calmed down, she insisted that she make me a cup of tea and asked me to tell her about the manuscript. She didn’t seem to have been aware that her partner was writing a book about his past. She went into the kitchen, made some tea, and brought it out on a tray, along with cups and a sugar bowl.
I told her what the partial I’d received by e-mail was about. I had a copy of his letter with me, which I showed her, and she read it carefully. She looked more and more surprised.
“Richard didn’t tell me about it,” she said bitterly. “He was probably waiting to hear back from you first.”
“I don’t know whether I was the only one he wrote to,” I said. “Have you been contacted by any other agent or publisher?”
“No. The first day after he was admitted to the hospital, I took Richard’s calls on my cell phone, but then I gave up. Eddie, his brother from Pennsylvania, and the guys from his company know about his condition, and they have my phone number. I don’t have the password to his e-mail account, so I haven’t been able to read his messages.”
“So you don’t know where the rest of the manuscript is?” I asked, and she confirmed that she didn’t.
All the same, she offered to look on the laptop Richard had left behind. She took a small Lenovo from a drawer, then plugged it in and turned it on.
“He probably set a lot of store by it, if he sent you that letter,” she remarked while she waited for the laptop to spit its icons onto the desktop. “Obviously, even if I find the manuscript, you do realize that I’ll have to talk to him first before I can give it to you?”
“Sure.”
“What would it mean in financial terms?” she asked, and I explained that an agent was only a middleman and that a publisher would be the one to make an offer, which might include an advance and royalties.
She put on a pair of glasses and started to search the computer. I realized I was about to miss another appointment, so I called the guy, excused myself, and asked him if we could reschedule.
Ms. Olsen informed me that the manuscript didn’t seem to be either on the desktop or in the documents files: she’d checked every file, no matter what name it’d been saved under. There weren’t any password-protected files. It was possible, she said, that the document was at his office or on a memory stick. There were a few sticks in the same drawer in which she’d found the laptop. She was about to visit Richard at the hospital, so she promised she would ask h
im where he kept the manuscript. She saved my number in her cell and said she’d call as soon as she found out.
I finished my tea and thanked her again. I was getting ready to leave when she said, “Up until three months ago, Richard had told me nothing about the whole business—about Laura Baines, I mean. But then one evening, somebody called him on his cell, and I heard him arguing. He’d gone into the kitchen, so that I wouldn’t hear the conversation, but I was surprised by his tone of voice, because usually he never loses his temper. He was furious; I’d never seen him like that before. His hands were trembling when he came back into the living room. I asked him whom he’d been talking with, and he told me that it was an old acquaintance from his time at Princeton, someone by the name of Laura—that she’d ruined his life, and that he was going to make her pay for it.”
Five days after my visit, Danna Olsen called me to say that Richard had died. She gave me the address of the funeral parlor, in the event that I wished to pay my last respects. When she’d arrived at the hospital, on the day of my visit, her partner had already been unconscious, because of the sedatives, and shortly thereafter he’d slipped into a coma, so she hadn’t been able to ask him about the manuscript. She’d also checked the memory sticks and discs around the house, but she hadn’t found anything containing the manuscript. The company he’d worked for was going to send his personal belongings from the office in the following days, so she’d also check them.
I went to the ceremony, which was held on a Friday afternoon. The city was under deep snow, just like on that day in late December when Professor Joseph Wieder had met his end.
A handful of people in mourning were sitting in a row of chairs in front of the bier, on which the body of the late Richard Flynn lay in a closed coffin. A framed picture, with a black ribbon in the corner, had been placed next to the coffin. It showed a man in his forties, smiling sadly into the camera. He had a long face with a prominent nose and gentle eyes, and his slightly wavy hair was receding at the forehead.
Ms. Olsen thanked me for coming and told me that the picture had been Richard’s favorite and the only portrait he had. She didn’t know who’d taken it or when. He’d kept it in his bottom desk drawer, which he’d jokingly called “the wolf’s lair.” She also said that she was terribly sorry for not having been able to find the rest of the manuscript, which must have been very important to Richard, given that he’d been working on it during his last months. Then she signaled to a gloomy man, and introduced him to me as Eddie Flynn. He was accompanied by a small, lively woman with a silly hat perched on her flame-red hair. She shook my hand, introducing herself as Susanna Flynn, Eddie’s wife. We talked for a couple of minutes, just a few steps away from the coffin, and I got the strange feeling that we’d known each other for a while, and that I was meeting them that day after a long absence.
When I left, I thought that I’d never find out the outcome of that old story. Regardless of what Richard had intended to reveal, it seemed that in the end, he’d taken his secret with him.
/ Part Two /
JOHN KELLER
When we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for the others.
—Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
ONE
I started talking to the dead because of a broken chair.
As Kurt Vonnegut Jr. might have said, the year was 2007 and John Keller was finally broke—that’s me; pleased to meet you. I’d taken a creative writing course at NYU and, to be honest, I was going round and round my own illusions like a moth drawn to the dangerous glare of a light bulb. I was sharing a railroad attic space on the Lower East Side with an aspiring photographer, Neil Bowman, sending long and pointless query letters to literary magazines, in the hope that one of the editors would finally offer me a job. But none of them seemed prepared to take any notice of my brilliance.
Uncle Frank—Mom’s brother—had struck it rich in the mid-1980s by investing in the IT industry, which back then had begun to inject its steroids. He was in his early fifties and lived in a swanky apartment on the Upper East Side. In those days, he didn’t seem to have any business other than buying antiques and hanging out with pretty ladies. He was handsome, sunbed-tanned, and dressed snappily. He used to invite me to dinner at his house or a restaurant every now and then, giving me expensive gifts, which I’d then sell at half price to a guy named Max, who was in cahoots with the owners of some dodgy shop on West Fourteenth Street.
The antique furniture in his living room had been purchased in Italy many years ago. The chairs were made of carved wood and were upholstered in brown leather, and the touch of time gave them the look of wrinkled cheeks. The back of one unlucky chair had fallen off, or something of the sort; I can’t really remember the details.
So my uncle had called a famous restorer from the Bronx, who had a waiting list that was months long. When he heard that Frank would pay double the usual fee if he let him jump the line, he picked up his tool kit and drove straight to my uncle’s apartment. By chance, I was there that day.
The restorer, a middle-aged guy with a shaved head, broad shoulders, and inquisitive eyes, dressed in black like a hit man, examined the broken chair, grumbled something, then set up camp on the terrace. It was a beautiful day, the sun shining, and the buildings of the East Seventies were like giant blocks of quartz laved in the morning mist. While the restorer displayed his skills, I drank coffee with Uncle Frank, chatting about girls.
Frank noticed that the repairman had brought a magazine with him, which he’d left on a table. It was called Ampersand Magazine, had forty-eight glossy pages, and on the third page, which listed the editorial staff, it revealed that the publisher was a company run by John L. Friedman.
My uncle told me that he’d gone to Rutgers with Friedman. They’d been pals but had lost touch with each other a couple of years previously. How about, my uncle asked, he calls Friedman and asks him for a job interview? I knew that connections made the world go round, as well as money, but I was young enough to think that I could make my own way, so I turned him down. And besides, I said to him, as I circumspectly leafed through the magazine, the publication was about the occult, the paranormal, and New Age stuff, none of which I had a clue about and in which I didn’t have the slightest interest.
Frank asked me to stop being so stubborn. He trusted his old pal’s financial skills—even in college, Friedman had been able to wring money from dry stone—and a good reporter needed to be able to write about any subject. In the end, he concluded, it was more interesting to write about the Great Pyramid than about some ball game or humdrum murder, and in any case, readers were all morons nowadays.
The restorer joined in the conversation at one point, after we’d invited him to have some coffee with us. He told us in a hushed voice that he was convinced that vintage pieces of furniture conserved inside them the positive or negative energies of the people who’d owned them over the years, and that sometimes he was able to sense those energies when he touched an object; his fingers would tingle. I left after Frank grabbed a bottle of bourbon from the bar and the restorer started telling him about a sideboard that had brought misfortune to its owners.
Two days after that, Frank called me on my cell phone to tell me that Friedman was expecting me at his office the next day. All he needed was somebody who knew the alphabet—the editor in chief, a slightly deranged man, had filled the office with bizarre people who didn’t really know how to write. The magazine had been launched a couple of months ago, and it was still struggling to get off the ground.
But there’s no point in my spinning out the story.
I didn’t want to fall out with Uncle Frank, so I paid Friedman a visit. It turned out that I liked him, and the feeling was mutual. He couldn’t give two hoots about paranormal stuff and didn’t believe in ghosts, but there was a niche for that kind of magazine, especially among the former baby boomers.
He offered me a far bigger salary than I wa
s expecting, so I accepted the offer then and there. My first published story was about the restorer, as I felt that, in a way, I owed him for my entry into the occult press. I worked for Ampersand for about two years, during which time I met half of all the city’s freaks. I attended voodoo séances in Inwood and visited haunted houses in East Harlem. I received letters from readers who seemed to be more cuckoo than Hannibal Lecter, and from priests who warned me that I was heading for the fires of hell.
Then Friedman decided to shut down the magazine and helped me get a job as a reporter for the New York Post, where I worked for six years, until a friend persuaded me to join a new publication devised by some investors from Europe. Two years later, when online papers butchered most of what was left of the printed small dailies, and titles were dying out one after the other, I found myself out of a job. I started a blog, and then a news site, which earned me next to nothing, and I tried to make a living from all sorts of freelance work, nostalgically looking back at the good old days and amazed that in my early thirties, I already felt like a dinosaur.
It was at that time that a friend of mine, Peter Katz, a literary agent for Bronson and Matters, told me about the Richard Flynn manuscript.
We’d met when I was studying at NYU and had become friends. He was quite shy and reclusive—the kind of guy you might mistake for a rubber plant at a party—but very cultivated, and one could learn a whole lot from him. He’d skillfully avoided all the cunning traps his mom had laid for him in collusion with the families of marriageable girls, stubbornly remaining a bachelor. What’s more, he’d chosen to become a literary agent, although he came from a long line of lawyers, and that made him a bit of a black sheep in his family.
Peter invited me to lunch, and we went to a place on East Thirty-Second Street, called Candice’s. It’d been snowing heavily for days, even though it was already the beginning of March, and the traffic was hellish. The sky was the color of molten lead, about to flow down on the city. Peter wore an overcoat that was so long he kept tripping on its hem, like one of the Seven Dwarfs from Snow White. He was carrying an old leather briefcase, which swung in his right hand as he dodged the puddles on the sidewalk.
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