Reacher Said Nothing

by Andy Martin

  “What I do is I start by planting all these picturesque details—the Western Union office, the store selling rubber goods, the woman in white in the Cadillac—and just like the grape and the tomato and the mushroom, I try to stir them all together into some kind of intelligible stew.” All through January the stew was starting to take shape in his mind, and then in the middle of February, almost halfway into the cook, he started setting out his vision for me. The big picture. The secret.

  I had been reading fragments. A chapter here and there. A few characteristic sentences. Rereading the same pages again and again. But I had no sense of where the narrative was going. Nor did Lee. Now, suddenly, he was sitting at his desk and twisting around in his chair and waving a hand out ahead of him and saying, “I can see a through-line, some kind of a plot.” The idea was electrifying. “I don’t know if it will endure.” The hand drooped again.

  I was trying not to sound overexcited, like some plot virgin. Stay calm, no stupid leaping up from the couch. “So…can you give me the gist? I mean, you know, just a feel for what’s coming up.”

  Part of it was to do with the “deep web.” A natural habitat for criminal conspiracies. The obvious point about the World Wide Web is that a search engine can find things on it—you can track down websites, find fridges, toasters, cars, obscure vinyl records owned by obsessive collectors, and people. People who, by and large, don’t mind being found and who are often advertising their presence. They want to be noticed. The deep web is different: here there are no tags, no hooks, no easy-to-remember addresses, nothing searchable. A website on the deep web can only be found by people who know a specific rather recondite URL address. These people desperately don’t want to be found, they don’t want to be traced, not unless you are buying their particular service (which may well be illegal). This is one of the stories written up by the science editor on the L.A. Times (the one Reacher and Stashower were after). “Instead of andymartinink,” says Lee, “it would be am3589xyz23 or whatever.”

  “Okay,” says I, nodding, scribbling away, and basically none the wiser. “What kind of conspiracy are we talking about here?”

  He had just got back from Bermuda (while New York had been in the grip of the dreaded “polar vortex”). Now he was all focus. With a bit of a tan. No coffee, no cigarettes.

  “Remember what happened to Sylvia Plath?”

  “Head in the oven.”

  “You can’t do it now.”

  “Gas is not toxic.”

  “Natural gas. You can sit around sniffing gas all day long, won’t do you a whole lot of harm. Pointless sticking your head in the oven.”

  “Unless you want to cook it of course.”

  “Same with cars. The old hosepipe attached to the exhaust routine.”

  I was shocked. “You mean that doesn’t work anymore? It always worked in the movies.”

  “Catalytic converters,” said Lee, in a tone of regret. “They’ve filtered out all the carbon monoxide.”

  “I never much fancied the hosepipe anyway.”

  “Oh, it was one of the best ways to go,” says Lee, nostalgically. “I love the smell of automobile exhaust. And gasoline. I like to sniff the benzene when I’m filling the car. The hosepipe was great. You fall asleep, you don’t even know it’s happening, and then you just stay asleep. Forever. It was perfect—now it’s gone.”

  “Too bad.”

  “And what about Monroe?”

  “Kennedy killed her. So they say. But he didn’t need to.”

  “So if not Kennedy?”

  “Drugs, sedatives, overdose.”

  “The so-called sleeping pill. It was either Nembutal or Seconal. One or the other. Maybe both. They were good. They really knocked you out. So it was dead easy to OD on them.”

  “Was…?”

  “Can’t get them anymore—precisely because of the safety considerations. Unless,” he added, “you’re a vet. If you’d rather not shoot the horse, then you use Nembutal.”

  I was starting to get an inkling of what he was on about. The big old vet store in Mother’s Rest.

  “You mean…?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “It’s like you’re in a bazaar in Istanbul, in the Casbah, and there are stalls and loads of people milling about and it’s all visible, out in the open—and then you slip through a door and suddenly you’re underground, it’s hidden. They offer a service: they make it nice and easy. An old V8 engine, unconverted, the hosepipe, pumping into the room. As advertised. Come on in! There is a beautiful boudoir. Nembutal. Comfortable, painless, you’re on velvet. But what if…”

  “Fuck! That’s it,” I said, leaping up, stupidly, losing self-control.

  “What?”

  “You have fucking cracked it.”

  On the whole, I try not to sound like too much of a fan, but this wasn’t one of those times.

  “You evil mastermind bastard.” I was holding my head in my hand, as though it were about to explode.

  He cackled, leaning back in his chair, like the evil mastermind bastard that he is.

  The Child method was paying off yet again. I had recommended it to a woman called Pali in Think Coffee just the night before when she expressed a degree of nervousness regarding her future. I summarized it in two words: sublime confidence. You just assume everything will sort itself out, and it does (unless you “come unstuck”).

  But there was something else to it. Something I was apt to forget. Lee was not just Reacher: he was every single bad guy he had ever dreamed up; he was the author of all their evil schemes. Good and bad, they are all his alter egos.

  “People who want to commit suicide—they are desperate. They want to believe, even though they basically know they are going to be ripped off.”

  “Reacher is indignant?”

  “Indignation,” said Lee. “It’s a good word. Yes, he begins with indignant, then he goes beyond indignation…”

  “Righteous fury?”

  “Yep. And then it’s kill-everyone mode.”

  We were sitting in his office. I gazed out of the window, looking west, as if I could see Mother’s Rest in the distance, beyond the rooftops, all the way to the silos.

  “Was that in the back of your mind all along?”

  “At a certain age it comes to the front of your mind.”

  I should have seen it coming. He should have seen it coming. We had been talking about it right on the very first day of writing, way back in September. Jump off a mountain somewhere in Austria, one of Lee’s mates had suggested. Rubbish! says Lee. Far better: a Mexican veterinary store, with an unregulated supply of horse tranquilizer. And now…

  “But the main man, the mastermind behind it all, has now ordered Reacher’s execution. An assassin is trailing Reacher and Stashower. So they are in mortal danger, but they don’t know it yet. I’ll try to have them avoid the assassin through chance and luck—without it becoming too slapstick.”

  At this point I was stalking about the room, kind of groaning. I had unbuttoned my waistcoat. He was just leaning back in his chair, feet on desk, hands steepled on his lap, looking up at the ceiling, a grin on his face. I was too wired to sit down, as if someone had just shot me full of the exact opposite to Nembutal, more like a dose of the great amphetamine stash from 61 Hours.

  “This is huge,” I said. For once I should really write “I exclaimed” and maybe throw in an exclamation mark too. Was I talking about a book or, rather like Lee when he goes into one of his trances, thinking more about a very real and badly screwed-up town? I no longer knew.

  “I wanted it local. None of that taking-over-the-world bollocks, or it becomes too Tom Clancy.”

  “It’s local,” I said. “But it’s global, it’s universal, in the sense that it taps into our deepest anxieties.”

  “They’re exploiting the difference between Washington and Oregon [where assisted suicide has been legalized] and the rest. Even in Washington and Oregon it’s so bureaucratic, it
’s hard to get all the signatures you need.” Lee paused to consider the options. “Of course, you can still blow your brains out.”

  “Messy though.”

  “It’s more macho. But the ‘falling asleep’ method—more ‘feminine’ in some way—it’s just not available.”

  There was a “logical problem” of course. There generally is somewhere. “It’s been bothering me,” said Lee. “It’s right back at the beginning. Keever. Why would they need to go to all that trouble?”

  “With the backhoe. And the hogs.” I sat back down on the couch, having finally got a bit of a grip.

  Which is when we started talking about the rubber aprons and rubber waders on sale at the rubber store in Mother’s Rest. They were like the grape in the fridge. Lee didn’t want to just leave them there, doing nothing in particular. He was pleased because now he had found a use for them.

  “They won’t have to deduct points, then?”

  “You want to know the great thing about being a writer? If it hadn’t worked out, I could always have gone back and deleted the grape in the fridge. No one would ever have known it was there. Except for you, of course.”

  THE NAMING OF NAMES

  “YOU KNOW HOW you think you’re influencing me?”

  “Do I think that?”

  “You said it in that article of yours.”

  “Oh yeah that. I was just kidding around. Quantum theory.”

  “Well, here’s your big chance. To stick your oar in.”

  “Really? I don’t know. Maybe I should keep out of it.”

  He had been thinking about it all the time he was in Bermuda. Not writing, just thinking about it. A reader had paid for the right to get him thinking about it. When you got right down to it, probably just about everyone was trying to influence him one way or another. Umberto Eco (and others) used to speak of how the reader must be “constructing” the book, not just the writer. It was a fair comment: every reading was a reinterpretation which skewed the text in the direction of a different culture, a time, a psychology, a specific existence, whatever was happening on that particular afternoon. So it was all collaborative. But everything was in someone’s head. Whatever Roland Barthes said, nobody was actually rewriting the text (no matter how “scriptible” it was) in any visible way. You could chop it up and quote it and deconstruct it and reconstruct it in another text—academics did it all the time—but the original text remained intact. As Socrates says, “Written words…go on telling you the same thing over and over again forever.”

  Now readers weren’t satisfied with that purely theoretical semiotic relationship with the author anymore, they really wanted to get right in there, to leave their stamp on the text, to alter it in some way, to give it a swerve. Readers are no longer satisfied with good old-fashioned reading. They want to be part of the action, not just the reaction. More interventionist, like surrogate authors, or scriptors. But how can you let everyone else—the future—know that “X was here”? You can do it, but (you knew this was coming, didn’t you?) it’s going to cost you. You can buy a character’s name, at an auction (online or otherwise). Or rather, it’s your name, superglued to a character, irremovably. Lydia Lair wrote a fat check for the privilege.

  The money was going to a good cause, not into Lee’s back pocket. A charity. It was all kosher and aboveboard. I had a feeling Flaubert wouldn’t put up with it; on the other hand, even he got “Madame Bovary” from someone.

  The burning question was: should Lydia Lair replace Michelle Stashower? Lee was torn. On the one hand, Stashower had already established herself, her name was woven into the text. On the other hand, it was not too late, Lee could always press the “replace” button. Replace all! There was a potential stand-in waiting in the wings.

  “I like Lydia Lair,” I said. “Reminds me of Lois Lane.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then there is that song about Lydia.”

  “Song?”

  “You know the Marx Brothers: ‘Oh Lydia oh Lydia that encyclo-pydia…’ ”

  “Yeah.”

  “So it’s cartoony.”

  “Sounds like someone invented it even though it’s real.”

  “A bit like Blair without the B.”

  “Unfortunate.”

  “How is it going to be when you write, ‘…Lair said…Lair said’ and so on? It’s a bit short, isn’t it. Same number of letters as said. Assonance. Another monosyllable. Could be a bit monotonous?”

  “Hmm.”

  “I don’t want to influence you.”

  “Ha!”

  “Okay, if you really want to nail me down, I do like Lydia Lair, it’s a good, catchy name. But Stashower has more…power.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s longer, weirder. More Germanic. Or Eastern European possibly. So it suggests more of a deep background of some kind. More substance. More heft.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And then there’s Stash of course. Her nickname. Nice. Criminal associations. Mind you, Lair is not bad either in terms of connotations.”

  “Fuck it, then! I’m going to stick with Stashower. I’m too invested in the name. I’ve got a whole paragraph of her going on about her nickname. And I’ve already changed Janice to Michelle. No going back!”

  “What are you going to do with oh Lydia oh Lydia, then?”

  “She can have a bit part. Something poignant. And then she dies. Short but sweet.”

  “So…was that an influence? Did I influence you or what?”

  “Nah, I was already thinking all that anyway. You’re just bouncing it back at me.”

  “Yeah.”

  THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM

  WE HAD TO MEET in secret. Like lovers. Which in a way we were. Or junkies. Or maybe undercover agents pretending to collaborate with Mr. Big in order to prise his secrets from him. We did the Poe Purloined Letter thing of hiding in plain sight. Having a conversation where everyone else was already conversing at high volume. So high we could hardly hear each other. Like trying to hold on to your hat or umbrella in a howling wind.

  The pub was one of those old Victorian classics, the kind you feel Dickens and Mr. Pickwick would have been at home in, with barrels and kegs and purple doors and gleaming brass. It was across the street from the British Museum, in Bloomsbury. It was dark and cold outside but warm and bright and crowded within.

  Quiller is an Oxford man. I’m calling him Quiller because I don’t want to jeopardize his academic career by mentioning his true name, so I’m using a fictional character instead. He teaches American literature at a college in London. He has wide interests. Most of which I can’t actually mention either. Samuel Beckett, for example. He has worked a lot on contemporary writers, English and American, writes reviews for all and sundry, and he has an endearing weakness for French philosophers, going so far as to produce an online concordance to one of them, with indispensable references to certain key concepts that cannot be named. He has a crew cut and a crew-cut-equivalent beard.

  But the other thing about Quiller (and the main reason for our meeting at the pub) is that he is a Reacher fan. “I like Lee Child,” he had originally written to me. Adding, “I’m probably not supposed to.” Reacher was his secret passion. He was “saving up Personal” but he had read all of the previous eighteen, “some of them twice.” And he was desperate for news of the twentieth. We were conducting an information exchange: he was giving me tips on text analysis software and I was giving him a few hints and a couple of key lines from the work-in-progress, which left him begging for more.

  The aspect of the Child oeuvre that he found so “fascinating” was his “unique style.” The four-word sentence killed him (“One of his longer ones then, eh?”). And Quiller yearned to do with Lee Child what he was doing with X and had already done with Y, namely to feed the collected works into a machine and get it all chewed up and spat out again in the shape of word frequencies and collocations. “What do you think the most frequent word will turn out to be?” he said.
“Other than ‘the,’ of course. And ‘a.’ ”

  “ ‘Coffee,’ ” I said. “Or ‘diner.’ ”

  “Or ‘gun,’ ” he said. “What about recurrent phrases?”

  “Reacher said nothing. Or possibly That’s for damn sure, but I think he’s eased back on that one.”

  “Of course you’ll have to check the least frequent terms too.”

  “ ‘Whom’?”

  “ ‘Phallogocentrism’?”

  “Come on—that’s all over them!”

  We looked over our shoulders from time to time. We didn’t want to be overheard, not by academics anyway, sharing our thoughts on Lee Child. He was the dark side, the noncanonical, uncertified, unregulated, not quite kosher, a fugitive from justice who had holed up on the bookshelves of the airport lounge.

  There were only four writers (at least in the twentieth century and beyond), Quiller said, whose works had sounded an entirely “new note” to his ear, a “voice” distinct from all others: Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Chandler, J. G. Ballard, and…Lee Child.

  We buttoned up and went out into the night and parted outside the gates of the British Museum. I was heading back to New York the following day. “Convey my respects,” Quiller said. “And you can tell him that comes from a stuck-up Christ Church literary snob.”

  ON THE COUCH

  I WAS TRYING TO EXPLAIN to Lee Child why it was he needed me.

  It had something to do with Kant and Newton and Homer. Kant reckoned that Newton could show anyone step by step how he worked out gravitation and the whole logic of the solar system in the Principia Mathematica, whereas, in contrast, Homer really had no idea what he was doing, how his thoughts connected up one with another. “He himself does not know” was the phrase that stuck with me. Lee/Homer did not know either, thus needed me to explain it to him.