The Salinger Contract

by Adam Langer

  “Of course you went,” I said to Conner.

  “I did.”

  “So what happened?”

  Conner said he was surprised by how empty the streets were when he joined Dex and Pavel, who were waiting for him in front of the Walton Street entrance of the Drake Hotel. He had always thought of Chicago as a smaller Manhattan, but it was actually far larger and more spread out. Chicago wasn’t a city that never slept; it tended to go to bed around ten p.m. Outside, in the still-searing summer night—nights didn’t cool down in Chicago the way they did in Indiana—every restaurant seemed closed; hotel lobbies were empty; sidewalks were populated by a smattering of nervous city dwellers walking home as quickly as they could and tourists who thought they were in a smaller New York and didn’t realize they were supposed to move fast.

  Conner looked for a car, imagining a sinister black Volga with a posse of arms dealers inside. But he didn’t see any vehicle waiting.

  “Where is it?” Conner asked. “The car.”

  Dex’s face registered puzzlement and disapproval. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable getting into a car with strangers, and I wouldn’t expect you to do so either,” he said. “No, we will walk. The air is good, the night is lovely, and we won’t be walking far.”

  And so Conner strode between Pavel and Dex, heading east, passing darkened doorman buildings and restaurants that had shut down hours before. The only sounds Conner could hear were those of cars zooming down the Drive on their way home, the roiling black lake crashing against the shore, and the footsteps of these men—Dex, himself, and Pavel. Before them, the lights of the Ferris wheel on Navy Pier blinked on and off, like some electric god’s eye.

  “Tell me,” Dex asked Conner as they walked, “how does it feel?”

  “How does what feel?” Conner asked.

  “The gun,” said Dex. “To hold a weapon that so many others before you have held, so many notable individuals.”

  Conner snorted slightly. “Yeah? Like who else do you have in mind?”

  “Well, Norman Mailer held that gun,” Dex said. “Saul Bellow, also. He was quite old when he held it. His hands shook and I feared I might have to take it back from him, lest it go off inadvertently.”

  Conner followed the men as they turned south, passing stark, black apartment buildings—all bright emptiness in their lobbies, all darkness on the floors above. Dex continued enumerating the authors who had supposedly held the weapon Conner now had in his pocket. John Updike had held it, said Dex. And Jarosław Dudek. So had Robert Stone, Truman Capote, and even Harper Lee.

  “You have to be joking,” Conner said.

  Dex stopped walking.

  “Something you should know about me, Conner, if we are going to be doing business together,” he said. “I appreciate a good sense of humor. I enjoy it on the rare occasions when I see it in your work. But I never tell jokes myself, and I never joke about business.”

  “I didn’t realize we had decided to do business together,” said Conner.

  “We may not,” said Dex. “That will be up to you.”

  Dex began walking again, propelling himself forward with his befalconed walking stick, and Conner and Pavel sped up to keep pace with him. Conner could now see the address up ahead for a high-rise apartment building—680 N. Lake Shore Drive.

  13

  I hadn’t lived in Chicago for nearly fifteen years, had spent a little more than half that time working for Lit in New York and the other time keeping house in South Central Indiana, but I did remember 680 Lake Shore. It had once been the Furniture Mart and its original address was 666. The building’s developers, fearing the satanic associations of 666 might scare off buyers, changed the address to 680. On the lobby floor when I lived in the city, there used to be a cocktail lounge called the Gold Star Sardine Bar, featuring cabaret singers, dishes of free cigarettes at every table, and, most important, no cover charge. It was reputed to be a good place to take a date, but not a date I was interested in seeing for more than one night; cocktail lounges with free smokes and cabaret tunes may have been my mom’s favored venues when she was my age, but I didn’t feel comfortable in them. During the few years when I was working at CBS, writing radio news copy and fetching sandwiches from the White Hen Pantry for John Cody and the rest of the news reporters and anchors, I took interns and desk assistants from DePaul and Loyola to the Gold Star. I paid for their drinks, lit their cigarettes, then watched them go home with older, wealthier men. I never took Sabine; she would have found the place pompous and the music boring as hell.

  Six-Eighty Lake Shore was the sort of building that was ubiquitous on the Upper East Side of Manhattan—uniformed doorman out front; marble floors and brass fixtures in the lobby; crystal chandeliers; a late-night, luxury grocery store on the first floor; a health club with splendid views of the city. But in Chicago, it was something of a rarity, a throwback to a previous age, like the Coq d’Or or Dex Dunford himself.

  The doorman, in a dark-red jacket and pants with gold stripes and matching epaulets, was a short man in his early seventies with prominent front teeth. He greeted both Dex and Pavel—“Good evening, Mr. Dunford”; “Pleasure to see you again, Mr. Bilski.” He had an understated, professional manner, which suggested a man capable of maintaining the confidences of tenants. But when Dex introduced Conner, using his full name, the man smiled broadly.

  “Conner Joyce?” he asked. “The writer?”

  The doorman told Conner how much he had enjoyed Devil Shotgun. “That was a seismic work, Mr. Joyce,” he said. “Absolutely seismic. Did you ever write anything else?”

  “I did and I didn’t,” Conner said, then followed Pavel and Dex into the lobby.

  As the men approached the elevators, Conner watched himself in the walls of mirrors. To his surprise, his reflection portrayed a man a great deal more confident than he felt. He could see that he was taller than Dex, his body fitter and seemingly more agile than Pavel’s. As they rode the elevator to the penthouse, Conner tried not to feel tense—he reminded himself of the note he had left with the desk clerk at the Drake, of the gun he had in his pocket as he stepped out of the elevator and approached the door to Dex’s apartment. He was leaving a trail. He had witnesses. In a book he might write, all this knowledge would have helped a character, given that character confidence, though it didn’t do much for Conner himself—all he truly wanted was to return to his hotel, sleep, board his plane, then get back together with Angie and Atticus.

  “So, what was Dex’s place like?” I asked Conner.

  “Lovely, and yet …”

  “And yet what?”

  “And yet it was so strange.”

  “Not what you expected?”

  “Well, no,” said Conner. “But at the same time it was exactly what I should have expected if I’d been paying attention. And, let me tell you something, my friend, what I found there—I think you’re the one guy who would really appreciate this.”

  When they entered the apartment, Conner was taken with its elegance. He noted the Oriental carpets in the main room, the views that gave out onto Lake Michigan, but when he saw a small crater in the white wall of the main hallway, he stopped. The hole was about the circumference of a half-dollar and quite deep, revealing gray cement beneath chipped white plaster. Lines radiated out from the hole like legs from the body of a spider. Conner gripped the gun in his pocket.

  “Ahh, I see you’ve found it,” Dex said.

  “Found what?” asked Conner.

  “One of my most prized possessions. Do you know what it is?”

  “A bullet hole.”

  “Exactly. Do you know who made it?”

  Conner shook his head.

  “Mailer,” said Dex.

  “Norman Mailer?”

  Dex nodded. He said that the author had taken the very same walk that Conner had taken and the two of them had conducted a
similar conversation. They had met in the cocktail lounge of the Drake Hotel. Dex had told Mailer he wanted to make him a proposal. He gave the man the gun and a check, then brought him here. But Mailer had not believed the gun was real. The moment they entered the apartment, he said, “Let’s see what that baby’s got,” then fired the gun at the wall.

  “It was then that he understood my story was real,” said Dex. “This was years ago now, but I still don’t have the heart to plaster over the hole.”

  Dex led Conner past the hallway and into the next room.

  “My mind was going crazy,” Conner told me. “I thought there might be a body. I thought there might be guns or a suitcase full of drug money, all this stupid shit. I didn’t know what the hell there would be.”

  “So, what was there?” I asked.

  “Books,” Conner said.

  14

  Dex had the most beautiful little private library I’ve ever seen,” said Conner. “If I had the cash, I’d build myself one just like it.”

  “What was it like?” I asked.

  “Shit, man. I’m not sure I can do it justice.”

  “Try.”

  In the center of the room was a long, lacquered ebony table illuminated by green glass desk lamps. Restored eighteenth-century reading chairs were adorned with golden filigree. Against one wall was a small wooden bookcase filled with manuscripts locked behind a plate of glass.

  Conner stood in front of that locked bookcase, trying to determine what sort of manuscripts might have been inside when Dex produced a key, inserted it into the lock, and opened the bookcase’s doors.

  “Yes, you may look,” Dex said.

  Conner stepped closer.

  Clearly, they were all original manuscripts—either written longhand or typed on a manual typewriter. Many had apparently been written by famous authors, a good deal of whom were among Conner’s favorites, some of whom he had written letters to when he was a young man. J. D. Salinger was one of the authors. So was Jarosław Dudek; there were manuscripts by Thomas Pynchon, Harper Lee, Margot Hetley, B. Traven, Truman Capote, and yes, Norman Mailer. Yet, Conner did not recognize any of the titles. All the manuscripts sounded like crime novels, though these authors were, for the most part, not known for crime fiction—Mailer’s manuscript was Mightier than the Gun; Dudek’s, An Escape from Warsaw; Salinger’s was The Missing Glass. On each title page was a simple inscription, the one Conner Joyce had written on more than a dozen Ice Locker title pages—“To Dex.”

  As Dex stood behind him and Pavel lurked in the hallway, Conner stared at the manuscripts, trying to figure out what they might be. He took down the Mailer manuscript, opened it to a random page, glanced at it, put the manuscript back. Then he opened the Dudek. He thought he had read absolutely everything these men had written. But he knew he hadn’t read these.

  “Are they real?” he asked.

  “How do you mean?” asked Dex.

  “I haven’t heard of any of these titles.”

  Dex took a seat at his table, his back framed by a view of Lake Shore Drive and the black lake beyond it.

  “That’s right,” Dex said. “Some people collect art. Some collect autographs. I collect stories—novels, memoirs … if there’s really any difference between them. It all depends upon the author’s willingness and upon my fancy. As you may have noticed, my tastes tend towards crime stories. But you are absolutely correct—you won’t find these in any other library in the world. You won’t find them mentioned in any one of these authors’ biographies, autobiographies, or bibliographies. The only place you will find them is here.”

  Conner selected another manuscript, this one by Margot Hetley—Bluddy Brillyance: A Tale of Wizzerds, Vampyres, and Vampards.

  “Ahh, yes. Lady Hetley’s book,” said Dex. “No one knew her then. She’d written only one book, but I knew she had the gift. Ruthless. But brilliant. Pity I can’t let you read it.”

  Dex returned the Hetley manuscript to the shelf. Conner turned his attention to The Missing Glass.

  “But this one,” said Conner. “Surely …”

  “Surely what?” asked Dex.

  “I thought he …”

  Dex finished Conner’s sentence for him. “Stopped publishing?”

  Conner nodded.

  “Yes,” said Dex. “In fact, he did. But that doesn’t mean he stopped writing. You heard he wanted to stay out of the public eye? Well, that was part of our agreement as well. Still, everyone has his price. Even wealthy, reclusive authors. Every author you see represented here—they all made their agreements, and I paid each of their prices. All of this will be part of our agreement too, Conner—yours and mine, if you decide that you would like to work with me.”

  As Dex and Pavel both stared intently at Conner, the manuscripts in the bookcase began to make more sense. Apparently, Dex had commissioned these authors to write books for him. But what sort of books? And why hadn’t he heard of any of them before? How valuable might these be if they were authentic? An original, unpublished novel by J. D. Salinger? One by Harper Lee? By Jarosław Dudek? Conner began reading the first page of the Salinger manuscript and instantly recognized his favorite author’s style—it was like a fingerprint; you couldn’t counterfeit it. But before he could get the slightest sense of the story, a shadow fell over the page, and he noticed Pavel standing beside him, holding open a hand. Conner looked over to Dex, who indicated to Conner with a slight jut of the chin that he should hand the manuscript back to Pavel. Conner did. Pavel reshelved the book. Dex stood and locked the bookcase. He placed the key in his pocket.

  “That was another part of my agreement with these authors, and that will be part of ours, too,” Dex said. He directed Conner to sit across from him at the library table. “No other readers aside from me.” He looked up at Pavel, who was still guarding the bookcase. “Pavel may read, but no one else.”

  As Conner told me his story while we reclined on our poolside lounge chairs, I shifted back and forth between excitement and jealousy. I was fascinated by the idea of all these unknown works. Yet I was envious that Conner was, in a sense, being asked to join these men, while here I was in Indiana, once again listening to another author’s story instead of telling my own. I was even more envious of the idea of writing a story, getting paid for it, and not having to share it with anyone or risk alienating anybody.

  “I wish I could tell you more about the story in that Salinger book, buddy, or about any of the others. But they were all private books,” said Conner. “He said he wanted me to write his very own private book.”

  You may wonder why I was so willing to believe Conner, why I accepted, almost without question, the idea that Conner Joyce, while on a book tour of the Midwestern United States, met a man who owned original manuscripts he had commissioned from J. D. Salinger, Jarosław Dudek, and all the rest, and asked Conner to join their ranks. But I am a generally believing sort. Perhaps this quality would make me a lousy juror, but at one time it had aided me greatly in writing author profiles. Authors liked telling me their stories because I listened, I didn’t interrupt, and I believed. And even if I wouldn’t believe any random mope who told me the story Conner Joyce was telling me, I certainly believed him—Conner was even more guileless than I was; I felt almost sure that he never lied.

  “So,” Conner said to Dex, piecing it all together, “you’re asking me to write a book.”

  “That’s it, exactly,” said Dex. “A book for only one reader. Me.”

  “But why?” Conner asked.

  “That’s not so hard to figure out, is it?” asked Dex. “Isn’t that what anyone with enough money would want?”

  15

  In that immaculate little chamber that resembled a reading room in one of the world’s grandest libraries, Dex leaned forward in his chair and rested his hands upon the falcon atop his walking stick. He gazed at Conner and smiled.
/>   “Tell me, Conner,” he said, “who is your favorite author?”

  Conner smiled wistfully, then looked back at the manuscripts Dex had shown him, now locked behind glass. “You’ve probably got half of them here,” he said. “I used to write letters to some of them—Salinger, Pynchon, Dudek, Capote … all those guys.”

  “Letters,” said Pavel. “I like this. This is quaint.”

  “Indeed,” said Dex, then turned back to Conner. “Well, we all have our own fantasy about our favorite authors, don’t we?”

  “Which is what, exactly?” asked Conner.

  “That the author is speaking only to us, that he is writing only for us, that no one on Earth has the same relationship to that author as we do. I have the same fantasy every time I read a book I love, no matter who wrote it, no matter when it was written. That the author has written his book only for me.”

  Conner considered. Well, yes, he had once had this fantasy too. As a boy, when he had read adventure tales by Rudyard Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson; as a young adult when he had read Catcher in the Rye; as a grown-up reading Graham Greene and John Le Carré, he had wondered how any author had been able to capture his own thoughts so thoroughly—he, too, had fantasized that his favorite books had been written only for him. He had written something much like this in the letters he sent to Salinger, Dudek, Capote, and Harper Lee—letters that were never answered. And yet, wasn’t the terrific thing about stories the fact that they joined readers together, that they made people realize they were not alone in their hopes, dreams, and fears? And, putting such philosophical questions aside, there was still the question of money. Writing was a business, and you couldn’t expect to make a living writing books for only one reader. But before he voiced this concern, Dex said, “I wouldn’t worry about how much money you’d get.”