The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair

by Joël Dicker

  Harry smiled. “I rarely answer the telephone.”

  “Is this your new novel?” Rendall asked, spotting the pages scattered over the table.

  “Yes. It’s coming out this fall. I’ve been working on it for two years. I still have to reread the proofs, but … you know, I don’t think anything I write will ever live up to The Origin of Evil.”

  Rendall gave Harry a sympathetic look.

  “Writers only really write one book in their life,” he said.

  Harry nodded in agreement and got his visitor some coffee. Then they sat at the table and Rendall explained the reason for his visit: “Harry, I came to see you because I remember your telling me you would like to teach at the college level. Well, there’s a position available in the English department at Burrows. I know it’s not Harvard, but we are a good school. If you’re interested, the position is yours.”

  Harry turned toward the sun-colored dog and patted its neck. “You hear that, Storm?” he whispered. “I’m going to be a college professor.”

  6

  The Barnaski Principle

  “You see, Marcus, words are good, but sometimes they’re not enough. There comes a time when some people don’t want to hear you.”

  “So what should you do?”

  “Grab them by the collar and shove your elbow into their throat. Hard.”

  “Why?”

  “To throttle them. When words lose their power, you have to throw a few punches.”

  At the beginning of August 2008, in light of the new evidence uncovered by the investigation, the D.A. presented the judge with a new report concluding that Luther Caleb was guilty of the murders of Deborah Cooper and Nola Kellergan, whom he had kidnapped, beaten to death, and buried at Goose Cove. Upon reading this report, the judge summoned Harry for an urgent hearing, during which the charges against him were finally dropped. This latest development turned the case into the great soap opera of the summer: Harry Quebert, the star author whose past had caught up with him and who had fallen into disgrace, was cleared at last, having seen his career destroyed and having nearly been convicted of murder.

  Luther Caleb achieved a posthumous infamy, with his personal history recounted all over the newspapers and the Internet and his name added to the pantheon of notorious American criminals. Soon the nation’s attention was focused entirely on him. His past was ransacked, and the tabloid magazines told the story of his life, illustrated by old photographs purchased from friends and relatives: his early carefree years in Portland, his talent for painting, the horrific attack on him, and his descent into hell. The public was fascinated by his need to paint naked women, and psychiatrists were asked to provide explanations: Was this a well-known pathology? Could it have foretold the story’s tragic ending? A leak from the authorities enabled the press to publish photographs of the painting found in Elijah Stern’s house, paving the way for the most outrageous speculation. Everyone was left wondering why Stern, a powerful and respected man, should have allowed his disturbed employee to paint a nude fifteen-year-old girl.

  Disapproval was directed at the D.A., whom certain people held responsible for having rushed to judgment, thus causing the Quebert fiasco. Some even believed that by signing the August report, the D.A. had signed off on his own career. He was saved in part by Gahalowood, who, having led the police investigation, fully accepted responsibility for it, holding a press conference to explain that he was the one who had arrested Harry Quebert, but that he was also the person who had freed him, and that this was neither a paradox nor a failure, but was in fact proof that the justice system was functioning correctly. “We did not wrongly imprison anyone,” he told the clamoring reporters. “We had suspicions and we cleared them up. We acted consistently in both cases. That is the job of the police.” And to explain why it had taken so many years to identify the culprit, Gahalowood mentioned his theory: Nola was the central piece of evidence toward which many others gravitated. All of these had to be examined in order to discover her murderer. But that work had been possible only after her body had been found. “You say it took us thirty-three years to solve this murder,” he told his audience, “but in fact it took us only two months. Prior to that there was no body, and therefore no murder. Just a girl who had disappeared.”

  The man left most confused by the situation was Benjamin Roth. One afternoon I bumped into him in the cosmetics aisle of one of Concord’s big drugstores.

  “It’s crazy,” he told me. “Yesterday I went to see Harry at his motel. He didn’t even seem happy that the charges had been dropped.”

  “He’s sad,” I explained.

  “Sad? We won, and he’s sad?”

  “He’s sad because Nola is dead.”

  “But she’s been dead for thirty-three years.”

  “But now she’s really dead.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Goldman.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.”

  “Anyway, I went to see him so I could make arrangements for the house. I’ve been talking to the insurance people, and they’re going to pay for everything, but he has to get in touch with an architect and decide what he wants to do. But he seemed completely indifferent. All I managed to get out of him was: ‘Take me there.’ So we went to the house. It’s still full of crap—did you know that? He left everything inside, furniture and other undamaged items. He says he no longer needs any of it. We stayed there over an hour. An hour to ruin my expensive shoes. I showed him what he could recover, especially the old furniture. I suggested he knock down one of the walls to extend the living room, and I also reminded him that we could sue the state for compensatory damages over this whole affair and that we could probably get a nice payoff. But he didn’t even react. I offered to contact a moving company to take away everything that was undamaged and put it in storage. I told him he’d been lucky so far because it hadn’t rained and no-one had stolen anything, but he told me there was no point. He even said it didn’t bother him if anything was stolen, because at least that way the furniture would be of use to someone. Does any of this make sense to you?”

  “Yes. The house is of no use to him now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there’s no longer anyone to wait for. Nola’s dead.”

  Roth shrugged. “Basically,” he said, “I was right all along. That Kellergan girl was a slut. The whole town had her, and Harry was just the butt of the joke, a sweet and slightly stupid romantic who shot himself in the foot by writing a love letter to her. Well, a whole book of love letters, in fact!”

  He laughed heartily.

  This was too much for me. With one hand, I grabbed him by the collar and smashed him against a wall, causing bottles of perfume to rain down and crash to the floor. Then I shoved my free forearm into his throat.

  “Nola changed Harry’s life!” I shouted. “She sacrificed herself for him. I will not let you go around telling everyone that she was a slut.”

  He tried to free himself, but he couldn’t move. I heard him gasping. People crowded around, and security guards came running in our direction. Finally I let him go. His face was bright red like a tomato, his shirt rumpled.

  “You … you … you’re crazy, Goldman,” he stammered. “You’re insane! As crazy as Quebert. I could file a complaint against you for this, you know.”

  “Do what you want.”

  He stalked off angrily, and when he was a safe distance away, he yelled: “You were the one who said she was a slut, Goldman! It’s in the pages you wrote. All of this is your fault!”

  *

  Roth was right about that last point, at least, and I was hoping my book would repair the damage caused by the publication of my notes. A month and a half remained before its official publication, and Roy Barnaski called me several times a day to share his enthusiasm about it.

  “Everything’s perfect!” he told me during one of our conversations. “Perfect timing. The D.A.’s report coming out now, all this commotion—it’s an incredib
le stroke of luck, because three months from now it’ll be the presidential election, and no-one will give a flying fuck about your book or this case. You know what information is, Goldman? It’s a limitless flow in a limited space. The mass of information is exponential, but the time that each person gives it is very limited. The average person devotes—what—one hour a day to the news? Twenty minutes reading the free paper on the subway in the morning, maybe half an hour on the Internet at the office, and fifteen minutes of C.N.N. in the evening before switching to their favorite T.V. show. And yet there is an endless amount of material competing to fill this small space! So many terrible things are happening in the world, but most of them never get mentioned because there isn’t time. The news can’t cover Nola Kellergan and Sudan, there’s not enough time. Life is about priorities.”

  “You’re a cynical man, Roy,” I said.

  “No, I’m just a realist. You’re a romantic dreamer, an idealist who would travel the world in search of inspiration. But you could write me a masterpiece on Sudan, and I wouldn’t publish it. Because no-one gives a shit about Sudan! People couldn’t care less. So, sure, you can label me a bastard if you like, but all I’m doing is responding to public demand. Everyone is washing their hands of Sudan—that’s just how it is. All people care about right now is Harry Quebert and Nola Kellergan, and we have to take advantage of that. Two months from now they’ll all be talking about the next president, and your book will no longer exist. But we’ll have sold so many copies that you won’t care because you’ll be chilling out in your new house in the Bahamas.”

  There was no point arguing with him. Barnaski had a gift for commanding the media spotlight. Everyone was talking about my book already, and the more they talked, the more he made them talk by intensifying the advertising campaign. The Harry Quebert Affair: the two-million-dollar book, as the press was calling it. Because I now realized that the astronomical sum he had offered me, which had been widely publicized, was in fact an advertising investment: Instead of spending that money on conventional promotion, he had used it to attract public interest. He didn’t even attempt to deny this when I asked him about it: According to him, all rules had been overturned by the new dominance of the Internet and social networks.

  “Think how much it costs, Marcus, to buy advertising space in a New York subway car. A fortune. You pay a lot of money for a poster with a limited lifespan that will be seen by a limited number of people; in order to see it, people have to be in New York and take that particular subway line within a given time frame. Whereas now all you have to do is get people interested, one way or another, to create a buzz, to get them talking about you, and you can rely on those people to talk about you on social networks. In that way you access an advertising space that is free and limitless. People all over the world take responsibility, without even being aware of it, for advertising your product on a global scale. Isn’t that incredible? Facebook users are just people wearing sandwich boards for free. It would be stupid not to use them.”

  “So that’s what you’ve done?”

  “By paying you two million dollars? Yes. Pay a guy an N.B.A. or N.H.L. salary to write a book, and you can be sure that everyone will be talking about him.”

  *

  At Schmid & Hanson’s headquarters in New York, tension was at its height. Entire teams had been mobilized to ensure the book’s timely publication. A teleconference machine was sent to me via FedEx so I could participate from my hotel in all sorts of meetings that were taking place in Manhattan: meetings with the marketing team in charge of the book’s promotion; with the design team in charge of creating the book’s jacket; with the legal team in charge of studying all possible libel issues; and, last, with a team of ghostwriters which Barnaski desperately wanted to palm off on me.

  Conference Call Number Two: With the Ghostwriters

  “The book has to be done in three weeks, Marcus,” Barnaski told me for the umpteenth time. “After that we’ll have two weeks to edit it, get it in type, and correct proofs, and then one week for printing. Which means we hit the bookstores in mid-September. Are you going to make that deadline?”

  “Yes, Roy.”

  “We can come right away if you need us,” shouted the head of the ghostwriting team, a man named Frank Lancaster. “We can be there in a matter of hours.”

  I heard all the others saying yes, they’d be there as soon as possible and it would be fantastic.

  “What would be fantastic is if you’d let me do some work,” I replied. “I’m writing this book on my own.”

  “But they’re very good,” Barnaski insisted. “Even you won’t notice the difference!”

  “Yup, even you won’t notice the difference,” Frank repeated. “Why would you choose to work when you don’t have to?”

  “Don’t worry—I’ll meet the deadline.”

  Conference Call Number Four: With the Marketing Team

  “Mr Goldman,” said Sandra from marketing, “we’re going to need photographs—of you during the writing of the book, of Harry, of Somerset. And the notes you took while you were writing the book.”

  “Yes, all your notes!” Barnaski said.

  “Yes … Alright … Why?”

  “We want to publish a book about your book,” Sandra explained. “Like a diary, with lots of illustrations. It’ll be big: Everyone who buys your book will want the diary, and vice versa. You’ll see.”

  I sighed. “Don’t you think I have enough on my plate right now, without having to prepare a book on the book that I haven’t even finished writing yet?”

  “Not finished writing?” Barnaski yelled. “I’m sending you the ghostwriters now!”

  “Don’t send anyone! For God’s sake just leave me alone so I can finish my book.”

  Conference Call Number Six: With the Ghostwriters

  “We’ve written that Caleb cries when he buries the kid,” Frank Lancaster told me.

  “What do you mean, ‘we’ve written’?”

  “Yes, he buries the kid and he cries. The tears fall onto her grave, and the soil turns to mud. It’s a really nice scene—you’ll see.”

  “Jesus Christ! Did I ask you to write a nice scene about Caleb burying Nola?”

  “Well … no … but Mr Barnaski said …”

  “Barnaski? Hello? Roy, are you there? Hello?”

  “Um … yes, Marcus, I’m here …”

  “What is all this bullshit?”

  “Don’t get annoyed. I can’t take the risk that the book won’t be finished in time. So I asked them to go ahead, just in case. It’s simply a precaution. If you don’t like it, we won’t use it. But just think—if you don’t have time to finish it, this will be our lifeline.”

  Conference Call Number Ten: With the Legal Team

  “Hello, Mr Goldman, this is Richardson, from the legal department. So we’ve been through everything here, and we feel you can use people’s real names in your book. Stern, Pratt, Caleb. Everything you’ve written is in the D.A.’s report, which has been widely reported in the media. We’re bulletproof—there’s no risk at all. There is no invention, no defamation, only the facts.”

  “They say you can also add sex scenes and orgies in the form of fantasies or dreams,” Barnaski added. “Isn’t that so, Richardson?”

  “Absolutely. I told you that before. As long as it’s in a dream, you can put the sex into your book without risking a lawsuit.”

  “We need a bit more sex, Marcus,” Barnaski said. “Frank was saying the other day that your book is very good, but she’s fifteen years old, and Quebert was thirty something at the time. Let’s heat things up a little! Caliente, as they say in Mexico.”

  “You’re nuts,” I told Barnaski.

  “You’re spoiling everything, Goldman,” he said with a sigh. “No-one likes stories about goody-goodies.”

  Conference Call Number Twelve: With Roy Barnaski

  “Hello, Roy?”

  “Markie?”

  “Mom?”

  �
��Markie? Is that you? Who’s Roy?”

  “Shit, I dialed the wrong number.”

  “Wrong number? You call your mother, you say ‘shit,’ and then you say it’s the wrong number?”

  “That’s not what I meant. It’s just that I had to talk to Roy Barnaski and, without thinking, I dialed your number. My head’s in the clouds at the moment.”

  “You call your mother because your head’s in the clouds … this gets better! I give you life, and what do I get in return? Nothing.”

  “Sorry, Mom. Tell Dad hi from me. I’ll call you back.”

  “Wait!”

  “What?”

  “So you can’t even spare a minute for your poor mother? Your mother, who made you such a handsome and talented writer, doesn’t even merit a few seconds of your time? Do you remember little Jeremy Johnson?”

  “From elementary school? Yes. Why?”

  “His mother was dead. Remember? Well, don’t you think he would have liked to have been able to pick up the telephone and talk to his darling mommy who’s in heaven with the angels? There is no telephone line to heaven, Markie, but there is a line to Montclair! Try to remember that from time to time.”

  “Jeremy Johnson? His mother wasn’t dead! That’s what he told people because she had so much hair on her face she looked like she had a beard, and everyone made fun of him about it. So he claimed his mother was dead and that woman was his nanny.”

  “What? The nanny with the beard was Jeremy’s mother?”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  I heard my mother calling my father. “Nelson, come here quickly! There’s some plotke I absolutely have to tell you about. The bearded woman at the Johnsons’ house—she was the mother! What do you mean, you knew? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Mom, I have to hang up now. I have a conference call.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a meeting that takes place on the telephone.”

  “Why don’t we have conference calls?”

  “Conference calls are for work, Mom.”