The Salinger Contract
Page 14
“Who do I get to be?” I asked. “The hero or the decent human being?”
“Same as always. You get to choose.”
34
I knew this city better than any other city in the world. I was born here; I grew up here, went to college here, worked writing news copy for the radio station, drove the CBS Radio company car to press conferences all over the city and suburbs. I wrote travel articles about Chicago, met my wife here, set my first and only novel in the neighborhood where my mom still lived—in the drabbest part of the north side, a neighborhood of alleys, walk-ups, gas stations, convenience stores, graveyards, dentists’ offices, and strip-mall Asian restaurants and karaoke bars. I knew all this city’s weird little alcoves and hiding places, every untraveled forest preserve, where serial killers stashed their bodies, every unlicensed restaurant that masqueraded as a “social club.” I asked Conner if he wanted me to suggest some out-of-the-way place to meet where we wouldn’t be discovered, but he said that didn’t matter anymore.
“Fuck it. Let’s just meet at the Coq d’Or,” he said.
“Hiding in plain sight?” I asked.
“Something like that.” He spat out a rueful laugh, which quickly became a hacking, tubercular cough.
“Are you sick?”
“Nah,” he said. “I wasn’t in the hospital for the cough.”
“What were you in for?”
“I’ll explain it all when you get here, bro. How long do you think it’ll take you?”
“Twenty minutes? Half an hour?”
It actually took longer. I took side streets most of the way, the same basic route I used to take riding the 50 bus to get to class at UIC. The closer I got to the Drake Hotel, the more slowly I drove. I had the strange sensation I was being set up—for what, I didn’t know. Here was my opportunity to either become a hero or demonstrate I was a “decent human being.” It was the sort of opportunity the Conner Joyces of the world leaped at, but that I had been avoiding all my life. I didn’t give a crap about being a hero or a decent human being. I just wanted to survive.
Along my way, near the corner of Ashland Avenue and Division Street, I stopped to let a coyote cross the street. Conner liked these animals and may have seen great significance and symbolism in the figure of the coyote, but there were actually lots of them in Chicago now. The city had recently initiated its so-called Coyote Project, introducing about three hundred of them to combat the rat population. The coyote crossed slowly, then stopped and stood in the beam of my headlights. I looked into the animal’s gray eyes. From the backseat, Hal whined. The coyote disappeared into an alley, and I drove on.
When I got to the Coq d’Or, it was much as I remembered it. If I used to go there to breathe the air my father had inhaled and exhaled when, one night, he met a cocktail waitress and invited her up to the room where I was conceived, by now, I had lost my curiosity. I now knew, no matter how hard I looked, some secrets would never be revealed, as if they were the contents of some strange private library that would be destroyed the moment its owner died. The bar was just a bar; Sidney J. Langer was just a man; my mother had secrets and her own reasons for keeping them—so be it. What difference did any of it make?
“Partner!” Conner said when he saw me. He was sitting at a table by the bar when I arrived, in the most crowded part of the lounge. He had a good view of the pianist who was playing Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five.” Normally, when Conner greeted me, he stood up, shook my hand, or slapped my back and kissed my cheek; not this time.
“What the hell happened to you?” I asked.
A bandage was wrapped around his wrist, and his right arm was in a sling. His face was clean-shaven and pale; he had lost more weight. There was gray in his hair, shocks of it near the temples. I imagined if I walked out the door and came back a few moments later, Conner’s seat would be occupied by an old man. His back would be hunched, his hair silver, and he would carry a hand-carved walking stick with a yellow-eyed falcon for a handle.
I ordered a club soda, and while I waited for it to arrive, I told Conner about the ordeal Sabine and I had been going through in Indiana, the uncertainty we faced, not knowing where we would be living next. I spoke as if I were letting Conner in on a secret and as if he were one of the few people I could trust with this information, and I’m sure part of that was true. But I’d be lying if I said that was my only motivation; I had become a sort of accomplice to Conner’s story, and I felt entitled to some dough. Aside from that, it felt good to tell Conner my story—he really seemed to care. “Harsh,” he kept saying. “No way,” and “Oh, that’s bullshit, man.”
“So, how’d it all go?” I asked him when I was through.
“Which part do you mean?” he asked.
“Well, your trip back to Pennsylvania, for starters. The last time I saw you, you were heading to Indy to catch a flight home to see Angie. She had called you a ‘fucking liar,’ I recall.”
“Oh yeah,” Conner said with a cough, a laugh, and a wistful shake of the head. “Well, that didn’t go all that well now that you mention it.”
After the drive-in movies, he had gone to Indianapolis. He spent the night there, and in the morning he caught the first plane to LaGuardia. He found Angie’s old motorcycle where he had parked it, and rode back to Pennsylvania as fast as the speed limit allowed. He had an inescapable premonition that she had already packed her bags and taken their son. When he and Angie had purchased the home in the Poconos, he had delighted in its isolation. He had figured Atticus would enjoy all those aspects of country life that he’d loved as a boy visiting his grandparents’ house in Yardley, Pennsylvania—chasing frogs and fireflies, playing mumblety-peg with a Swiss Army knife. But this time, as he rode west on I-80, he hated every mile, wished he’d never left the city. In fact, he wished he’d never gone to Chicago at all, not the first time he’d met Dex, and not the second time when he’d flown back to confront him.
As it turned out, Conner’s fears had been well founded, though the scene at home wasn’t quite as dramatic as he’d imagined. Angie was, in fact, leaving; she had packed her bags; she was taking Atticus with her; but she hadn’t gone yet.
35
How the hell did you get this, Conner?” Angie was standing by the counter in their kitchen—the beautiful new granite counter in their beautiful, newly renovated kitchen, paid for with the money that Dex had paid Conner. She was wearing jeans and a black leather jacket, and she was twirling a set of keys on a finger as Atticus slept in the carrier strapped to her chest.
Conner didn’t need to ask Angie what she was referring to; it was right there on the kitchen counter. It looked battered and stained from the ride in the toilet, but the jewels and MAH monogram were still there, and it was sitting atop the Times article about the theft. He had been a fool to flush the damn thing in this old house where the plumbing never worked right. Moreover, he had been a fool to lie to the woman he loved, to the woman who had told him she hated liars more than anything else in the world.
“Angie, I just can’t tell you,” he said.
There are some people whose beauty is revealed through anger, whose loveliness is accented by flushed cheeks, flared nostrils, piercing eyes, crimson earlobes. Not Angie, Conner said. He followed her around the house as she packed clothes into bags, zipped up suitcases, lugged them outside, and threw them into the trunk of their Subaru.
“I just can’t talk about it. I told you,” he said as Angie slammed down the trunk of the car, then told Conner to keep his voice down so that he wouldn’t wake Atticus. Such had become her modus operandi during arguments. She would raise her voice, then criticize him when he did the same thing.
“Bullshit,” she told him.
“It’s true. I signed a confidentiality agreement.”
“With who?” she asked.
“Hollywood. I told you.”
“Hollywood who?”
Conner kept talking. “If I even mention it to anybody and they find out, I have to give back what they paid me,” he said.
Angie hustled down the stairs. “If they find out? What? You’re telling me somebody bugged this place?”
“I don’t know,” said Conner.
“You think somebody bugged you?”
“Maybe. I just don’t know.”
He looked around the house and imagined the whole place was wired. Why not? Everywhere was a good place to conceal a mike or camera. Who knew where surveillance devices could be hidden in a sprawling old house like this, with its cracked walls and its bad plumbing. Conner’s mind reeled back to consider everyone who had ever done work in the house; every single person became suspicious—plumbers, painters, carpenters … He thought about dog walkers, delivery people, and mail carriers, and considered whether there could be any profession better suited to spying than mail carrier, so blandly noticeable as to seem invisible. He imagined a husky, middle-aged Pavel reeking of vodka and aftershave, arriving at the house one day, claiming to be a contractor, just as he’d managed to get into Shascha’s office to snag the flash drive by pretending he was a writer with something to sell. Conner looked at every appliance he owned, every wire he could see—he looked at the baby monitors Angie was disconnecting and throwing into a duffel bag. A bug could be just about anywhere. He wished he had one of those nifty debugging devices that appeared in an early draft of one of his novels before Angie told him to remove it because the NYPD didn’t have room in its budget to buy that sort of high-tech gear. He tried to explain his addled frame of mind to Angie, but now Atticus was awake and crying and hungry, and Angie was saying, “Goddammit, Conner, didn’t I tell you to keep your voice down?”
And so, despite the heat he felt on his cheeks and the tears burning in his eyes, despite the fact that his entire world was disintegrating before him, he tried to keep his voice down.
36
Atticus was asleep again, and Angie was carrying him as she and Conner made their way down the rocky path to the banks of the Delaware River, where, several lifetimes ago, Conner had built a wooden bench big enough for three. Some of his fondest memories with Atticus and Angie took place here, looking out at the rippling water and the trees beyond it. As the sun dipped behind the dense black-green forests of Pennsylvania, the sky appeared lavender and the orangey-red trees looked as though they were on fire. The beauty of the view hurt; so did Angie’s beauty as her anger dissolved into somber resolution. Her newly calm demeanor bespoke certainty; she had made her decision, and when she looked at Conner, it was as though she were watching a memory.
“And this novel of yours?” she asked when he was done explaining. “Where is it supposed to be now?”
“I told you. Dex has it. There was only one copy of the manuscript. That’s how he wanted it.”
“Christ, Conner.” She gazed at him as if the person she loved the most had become the thing that she most dreaded. She had spent a decade in the NYPD being bullshitted by criminals and her superiors, and had spent another decade coaching Conner on how to write that sort of dialogue and make it more believable. She couldn’t fathom that he was trying to use the skills she’d taught him against her. “Please don’t bullshit me anymore,” she said.
“I’m not.”
She shook her head. “Then why don’t you tell someone else your story? Someone else besides me.”
“You mean like a cop?” he asked.
“You got it, CJ,” said Angie.
“Ange, they’d never believe me,” said Conner.
“You know what?” Angie said. “Neither do I.”
“You should have told her about me,” I said to Conner as we sat in the Coq d’Or.
“Yeah, maybe. I thought about that, but that just would’ve made it worse,” he said. “I keep it from her and I tell some guy in Indiana she barely even knows?”
“So, she was right. You were lying to her even then.”
“Not lying,” said Conner. “Just not saying everything.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
Conner considered. “Maybe it is,” he said.
37
Conner didn’t try to make Angie stay. In the gathering darkness, he sat on his porch swing and watched her drive the Subaru Outback that contained his entire life toward the highway. He went back into the house to get a sleeping bag so he could sleep in the woods; he didn’t care how cold it was, he didn’t want to spend the night in the house.
Angie had said she was driving back to the city to stay with her mom. He figured he would give her a couple of days to calm down. Then he would try to tell her the story again and make her believe it. But during the time he spent by himself, he felt less inclined to believe that story. Everything that had happened suddenly seemed like a fiction he had dreamt up for Dex. He still had the MAH flash drive to prove the story was true and that he hadn’t imagined it, but that didn’t matter much. The ride in the toilet had permanently damaged the drive; when he tried plugging it into the USB port of his computer, an error message appeared on his screen.
He spent days brooding, considering, reconsidering, wondering if he should call the police and then wondering how he could possibly do something as foolish as make that call. He wondered if he should do anything he could to get Angie and Atticus back or if he no longer deserved to be with them. He wondered why he had honored his contract with Dex but violated the one he had with Angie.
When enough time had passed for Conner to fool himself into thinking Angie might have forgiven him or would at least be willing to talk, he rode the motorcycle into the city. He deposited his final check. He loitered in front of police stations, even the Twenty-Fourth Precinct, where he had first met Angie. He considered making a confession, but couldn’t go through with it.
From the precinct headquarters, he wandered all the way up Amsterdam Avenue to 145th Street, remembering the walks and rides he and Angie had taken when they were young and in love, when they would have done anything to spend just one more moment together. He stood outside the grimy walk-up where he had once waited for her to come running down. He buzzed her apartment, heard Angie’s mother’s voice on the intercom—she sounded older than he had remembered. When he asked if he could come up, Gladys De La Roja said no, her daughter was not there. The first time, he left a message; the next time, he didn’t. He returned several times throughout the day and the evening, but each time he buzzed the apartment, he got the same response—“No, Conner, she’s not here, but I’ll tell her you came by.” She never invited him up, not even to see his son.
Conner wandered through the city, amazed at how many people he could see and still feel so empty. He kept waiting for Angie to call. He kept checking his phone to make sure that it was charged, and that he hadn’t shut off the ringer. But when the phone did ring and Conner picked up, he didn’t hear Angela’s voice.
“What is it?” Conner asked.
“You have violated our agreement, sir,” said Dex. “We need to talk.”
38
Conner agreed to meet Dex and Pavel at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station, and as he approached the establishment, Conner couldn’t escape the notion that this would be a perfect spot to take out a hit on somebody. All Dex and Pavel would have to do would be to open fire, then blend into the crowds before boarding a train and rolling out of town. He sat down on the bench across from them as they were finishing their meals, and tried to determine whether Pavel was packing a weapon. He probably was. Maybe Dex was too. For all Conner knew, there may well have been a poisoned blade hidden in that walking stick.
As Conner joined the
men, he noted their demeanors—Dex’s stern, Pavel’s more apologetic, yet no more helpful, as if Conner’s imminent death was little more than an unfortunate fact he could do nothing to reverse. No one offered to buy Conner a meal or a drink.
“You disappoint me, Conner. Truly, you do,” said Dex.
“What’re you talking about?” Conner tried to deny that he had violated his contract, but he lost patience with himself even before Dex did. Why tell lies if you could no longer bother to believe them yourself? He had violated the agreement, so what punishment would Dex and Pavel exact? Margot Hetley had violated her agreement and she was still alive.
“Why don’t I just pay you back? I still have a lot of the money,” said Conner. “I haven’t spent it all. Far from it.”
But Dex knew all about that. “Yes, that is true about the money,” he said. “You have spent only perhaps fifteen percent of what we have paid you.”
Pavel nodded. “Fifteen percent, sixteen percent, yes, something like thees.”
“But that sixteen percent would be difficult for you to get a hold of quickly,” Dex said. “And the contract does stipulate that the money be paid back immediately and in full.”
“Or else what?” Conner asked.
“Do you really need me to tell you?” asked Dex.
“Yes,” said Conner. “Actually, I do.”
“Think, Mr. Joyce.” All pleasantries were gone, replaced by cold formalities. “You’re the writer; you have a far more vivid imagination than I do.”
“Is that what you told Salinger?” asked Conner. “Is that what you told Dudek?”
“These were men of their word,” said Dex.
Conner was about to ask if Dex was implying he was not a man of his word, but he knew that he wasn’t anymore. Yes, there had been a time when he had been that sort of fellow—Eagle Scout, Navy man, all that—but Dex knew he had changed. Dex had made Conner what he was today, or at least made him see what he had always had the potential to become, what every man had the potential to become, what Angie had seen him becoming. Conner shifted his gaze from Dex to Pavel and back again, the former drinking the last of the juice from an oyster shell, the latter daubing his lips with a white cloth napkin, and he understood once again that Dex was right; he did have a vivid imagination. At that very moment, he could imagine all sorts of horrific punishments.