by Adam Langer
“Look,” Conner said. “This was my deal. You made it with me. I fucked it up. OK. Please, please, whatever you do, leave my wife and son out of it.”
Dex smiled. “You see,” he said. “I told you that you had a better imagination than I. What crime did I commit? The one you wrote. What punishment might I inflict? The one you now imagine. Take the worst you can imagine; that is what will happen.”
Conner’s anger collapsed into desperation. “But you already know I can’t repay you immediately,” he said. “Not all at once.”
“Then we will need to make another arrangement,” said Dex.
“Which arrangement?”
“Listen to your imagination. What does your imagination tell you?”
“Oh, fuck your games,” Conner shouted.
“I am not playing a game,” said Dex. “I have never been playing a game. I have told you what I wanted and you have played games with me. I will ask you again. What does your imagination tell you?”
There was a steak knife beside Dex’s plate. How easy it would be to grab that weapon and plunge it into Dex’s heart; how easy it would be to chase down Pavel. The criminals in Conner’s novels, even in The Embargoed Manuscript, had never wanted or intended to be criminals; they were merely men pushed beyond their limits, men who had begun to believe they had no other choice. Conner had never killed a man; he had never thought he could; but the Navy had taught him how, and his time working the crime beat at the Daily News had taught him how easy it was to get away with. One crime—wasn’t that what his characters always thought? One crime and you’d never have to pay for it. The trouble came when you got cocky and tried to do more. He could do it, he thought, as long as it meant he could keep his wife and son safe.
But just at that moment, when Conner was contemplating murder in the Grand Central Oyster Bar, an idea occurred to him, an idea he sensed Dex had been leading him to all this while. A volt of understanding surged through him. His eyes brightened slightly and he could see just a bit more clearly.
“Oh,” Conner said. “Oh, I get it now.”
“Yes,” said Dex. “I thought you might.”
Dex smiled, and so did Conner.
“You mean another book,” said Conner.
Dex nodded.
“Another story of a perfect crime,” Conner said.
Pavel smiled too. “Something like thees, yes,” he said.
“A story that will pay back the money I owe you,” said Conner.
“Yes, that’s it exactly,” said Dex. “And everything I make over and above that will be yours.”
Pavel produced a contract and handed it to Conner, who didn’t bother reading it this time, just signed the damn thing and gave it back to Dex. Dex offered to buy Conner a drink, but Conner said no; he wanted to get to work as soon as he could.
“But how could you do that?” I asked Conner in the Coq d’Or, where the pianist was playing “Naima,” by John Coltrane. How could he still work for Dex, given everything that happened, given the threats Dex had made?
Maybe, I thought, this was where I came in. Maybe this was where I could prove my decency or my heroism. Maybe he’d had trouble writing another crime novel for Dex; maybe he could no longer stomach the idea of writing a crime he knew would become reality, and now he was going to call upon me to help him because I wouldn’t suffer the same moral conflict. Plan a heist, have someone else carry it out, keep the money left over, tell everyone that I had only written a story, so it wasn’t my fault—sounded like a good plan to me.
“I imagine it must have been hard,” I said.
“What was?”
“Writing a novel for a man like that, I mean, now that you knew who he really was and what he was after. I don’t know how you could square it with your principles.”
“Maybe that’s how it would be for you,” said Conner. “For me, it was easy.”
“Then what was hard?” I asked.
“Making Dex think it was hard.”
Because, Conner explained, he knew exactly the sort of novel he would write, and he knew how it might solve all his problems—getting Dex and Pavel out of his life and bringing Angie and Atticus back into it. He could have everything he wanted as long as he wrote the right sort of novel.
“What sort of novel would that be?” I asked.
“A novel about a crime destined to fail,” he said. “I’d write something that looked like the perfect crime, but when Dex and Pavel tried it, they’d get nailed.”
As he sat across from the men in the Oyster Bar, Conner tried to keep himself from acting too cocky, tried to pretend he was still furious with Dex and Pavel. He swore at the men, told them he wanted them out of his life and, once he had written this last book, he was through with them. For good! He kicked a chair and threw over a few saltshakers before he exited the restaurant. And then he disappeared into the crowds of Grand Central Station as if he had just committed a hit.
39
Writing a novel about a crime that wouldn’t pan out was easy enough—Conner had breezed through enough airport crime novels that weren’t remotely plausible, and made assumptions about criminals and law enforcement apparently without ever having done any research. Every James Patterson and David Baldacci novel he had skimmed en diagonale seemed ridiculous, and so did every episode of Law & Order he had ever watched. The hard part was writing a crime good enough to convince Dex it would work. Conner would have to employ his customary level of detail; he would have to provide enough of it to make Dex believe the story, yet at the same time, create a transition from truth to fiction so seamless Dex wouldn’t see it happening.
Conner spent his days brainstorming as he walked along the Delaware River or rode Angie’s motorcycle over the back roads of the Pokes. He tapped on his manual Smith-Corona, hoping all his bad ideas would lead to a good one. The urgent need to devise an appropriate idea didn’t make the process of finding it any easier. Each day, he considered then rejected dozens of scenarios; by the time the first ice storm of autumn arrived, he had generated enough ideas to fill a small library, and he still hadn’t settled on one that felt right.
By now he was on speaking terms with Angie again. She let him take Atticus out for walks whenever he came into the city, walks that were always far shorter than Conner would have liked. He didn’t tell her about the plan he had hatched, and she didn’t advise him to turn himself in to the police. For the time being, she just wanted to keep her distance. Once Conner had written the book that would get Dex and Pavel out of the way, and he figured he could reveal his story to the police without fear of retribution, he would tell her everything.
Before the ice storm hit, Conner took Atticus for a sled ride through Riverside Park, and returned the boy to Angie right after sleet started mixing with the snow. He wanted to get back to the Poconos while it was still safe to drive. But by the time he got on the road, it was already too slippery—as it turned out, he couldn’t make it past East Stroudsburg. He exited the highway, sliding and spinning over the asphalt at barely five miles per hour.
He skidded through downtown East Stroudsburg, in search of a bar or coffee shop where he could wait out the storm. He parked on Courtland Street in front of the main branch of the East Stroudsburg Credit Union, which had closed early because of the weather. He was walking past the bank, heading for a sports bar called the Diggity Lounge, when, out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of his own image in one of the video monitors in the bank’s security booth.
Hail pinged against his cheeks as he paused to look at himself on the screen—there were flecks of ice in his beard, shadows under his eyes. He looked gaunt. He then watched the image switch from one of himself to one of snow-dusted Courtland Street to one of an empty teller booth. The TV monitor scrolled through more than a dozen images, all being taken at that very moment by the security cameras in the bank. At the bottom of the scr
een was a black band with a digital readout of the date and time. But the readout was wrong. Where the time should have been, zeroes were strobing. He wondered what would happen if someone robbed a bank when the date and time were wrong. How would that affect the admissibility of evidence? This may not have seemed like much to base a story on—no doubt the digital readout would be fixed by the time the bank reopened in the morning—but it gave Conner an idea.
He waited out the storm in the Diggity Lounge, eating stale pretzels, drinking flat sodas, and jotting down ideas on napkins before returning home to his typewriter to write. The key, he knew, was not to take the story too fast. No matter how much he ached to finish so he could return to the important business of reuniting with his family and ridding himself of Dex and Pavel, he worked in the same methodical fashion with which he had approached every one of his books. He did not skimp on detail. He wanted to get so many details right that Dex wouldn’t be able to recognize the ones he got wrong.
He wrote one thousand words per day and spent the rest of his time revising those words and walking through East Stroudsburg, trying to imbue his novel with the town’s ambience. He strived for pinpoint accuracy, particularly when writing about the bank. He included the model numbers of each of its dozen cameras, researched the manufacturing processes used to produce its Mosler security vault. He wrote down the names of each of the bank’s security guards, managers, loan specialists, and tellers, whom he greeted every morning when he withdrew cash—so much so that he began to worry the bank’s employees might suspect he was planning to rob the joint himself. He introduced himself to Hunter Leggett, the bank’s regional manager, gave Leggett copies of Devil Shotgun and Ice Locker, both now available for 50 percent off, and got a tour of the bank vaults and a crash course in the bank’s security systems. He even watched Hunter Leggett type in his own security access codes. It had always amazed Conner how much purportedly confidential information he could get merely by identifying himself as an author or journalist. Without even having to show a business card or pass through a metal detector, he had gotten access to runways at LaGuardia and JFK just weeks after 9/11, had sat seatbelt-less on a day’s worth of runs on a Brink’s truck, had gotten within easy shooting distance of governors, senators, and even one time the vice president of the United States.
Conner made sure to write a genuine novel, not just a blueprint for a crime. If he wrote only the heist and not the story behind it, Dex might concentrate too fully on the details and come to identify the flaws. So when Conner saw Rosie Figueroa, one of the bank’s tellers, alone at the Diggity Lounge one night after the East Stroudsburg Credit Union had closed, he bought her a beer and learned her story—single mom, divorced, undergraduate degree in finance from East Stroudsburg U. She didn’t want to talk much about her ex-husband, but Conner was still good at getting people to tell him their stories, and from what the woman said, he was able to concoct a suitable biography for a thief. He imagined Rosie’s ex to be a convict just out of the joint, seeking to take advantage of his ex-wife’s position at the bank. Rosie’s ex-husband would force her to ingratiate herself with the bank’s security director, from whom she would learn the pass codes, security protocols, and remote video procedures Conner himself had learned through his research. He called Rosie’s husband Chet Davila, a name he picked out of an old phone book.
In the novel Conner was writing, Rosie and Chet conspired to commit a robbery at midnight on February 29. He had chosen the date carefully. During the course of his research, he had learned that the East Stroudsburg bank was protected by two major computer systems, but that each system was manufactured and serviced by a different company. The video cameras were manufactured and maintained by DGA Security Systems in Manhattan. The German-based multinational P. B. G. Krenz, whose American headquarters were located in Tallahassee, Florida, maintained the locks to the doors, the vault, and the keypads. The systems had been installed at different times, and whenever there was some sort of malfunction, which usually took place during a particularly brutal storm, such as the one Conner had experienced when he first concocted his story idea, both systems broke down and Hans Plitsch, the bank’s security director, had to coordinate the schedules of repair people from both DGA and Krenz.
The difficulty of coordinating schedules was harder to address if anything happened to go wrong during a leap year on February 29, since DGA and Krenz had different, arcane methods for dealing with the extra day. Every four years, at the end of February, the two systems would stop talking to each other, forcing them to shut down, leaving the bank essentially unguarded, without either functional locks or security cameras during the ten minutes it took the systems to reboot. For those ten minutes between midnight and 12:10 a.m., the only thing keeping a thief—in this case Rosie’s ex-husband, Chet Davila, but in real life Dex Dunford and Pavel Bilski—was the overnight security guard, Lyle Evans. Once Pavel and Dex had overpowered Lyle Evans, they would have ten minutes to take everything they could carry.
40
The Coq d’Or’s pianist was taking a break and had joined some of the tourists at the bar to watch a college basketball game. The TV didn’t seem like it belonged in the bar, which itself conjured up an era before the advent of television. When I used to come here to write, nobody watched sports.
On the TV screen, march madness!!! was flashing in bright red letters. Only a couple of days had passed since February 29, and I hadn’t heard anything about a leap-year bank robbery. Then again, I didn’t read the newspapers much; when I did, I pretty much stuck to the front page, the sports, the op-eds, the job ads, and the vegetarian recipes in the Dining section. I looked at the gauze and tape around Conner’s wrist, the sling he was wearing. Both were bright white, as if brand-new.
“How much of this is true?” I asked.
“The whole story was true,” said Conner. “At least up until the part that wasn’t.”
“When did the story stop being true?” I asked.
“February twenty-eighth.”
According to Conner, all the details he had written about the bank itself were accurate; the entire leap-year plot was bulljive. What happened when midnight struck on the second to last night of February? Absolutely nothing. Video cameras continued to run; locks stayed locked; Lyle Evans remained at his security post, and there would have been little chance for Dex and Pavel to “overpower him” as they had in the novel because, unlike the lethargic caricature in the story Conner wrote, Lyle Evans was a big, muscular, conscientious dude. Plus, just in case, about fifteen minutes before midnight, Conner’s plan had been to call Lyle Evans and warn him.
Once Conner had completed the manuscript for the novel he had decided to call Leap of Fate, the hardest part was waiting—that, combined with the need to suppress whatever desire he had to tell Angie what he was planning. He wanted to tell Dex he had finished, and worried that Dex might not get in touch until after February 29. If Dex didn’t get the manuscript in time to act on it, he would either have to wait another four years or write another novel that wasn’t so time sensitive.
But Dex got in touch with Conner on the twenty-seventh of January.
“I bet you remember that date, my friend,” Conner said to me.
“Why?” I asked.
“That’s the same date Mr. Salinger died.”
I nodded, pretending I knew.
Conner met Dex and Pavel at the bar of Keens Steakhouse, where he handed over the manuscript of Leap of Fate, which he had dedicated to Dex. This was to be a quick meeting, Dex had told Conner over the phone—no meal, no drinks, just a drop-off. At the bar, Pavel regarded the title with his customarily inscrutable amusement.
“Is it a thriller?” Dex asked.
“Yeah, but with a twist,” said Conner.
“Yes, with you, always a tweest,” said Pavel. “I like thees veddy motch.”
“How long do you think it’ll take you to read it?” asked Con
ner.
Dex flipped through the first few pages, then turned to the last page and read the final paragraph before fixing Conner with a stare.
“You asked when you would hear from me?”
“I did.”
“Well, judging from what little I’ve seen so far,” said Dex, “I imagine that you’ll be hearing from me on or around the twenty-ninth of February.”
Dex packed the manuscript in his attaché case and strolled to the exit, leading the way with his walking stick. Pavel followed behind. “So long, Conner,” Pavel said. The way Pavel said “Conner” sounded funny, but it didn’t register to Conner until later that he had never heard Pavel use his first name.
41
February 29 took far too long to arrive. Each day seemed to last longer than the one before. Conner tried to pass the time. He worked out—ran ten miles a day, lifted the dumbbells he hadn’t used in more than a decade. He repainted just about the entire inside of his house, cleaned it again and again, preparing for what he hoped—no, what he knew—would be Atticus and Angie’s imminent return. He looked forward to weekend walks and breakfasts with Atticus, who was now able to conduct conversations, albeit brief ones—“Want to go home,” he frequently said. Conner read a lot too, actually read all nine volumes of the Wizard Vampire Chronicles series and, to his surprise, got caught up in the stories. No matter how unpleasant an individual Margot Hetley may have been in real life, he couldn’t deny she had mad skills. He understood why her work was worth millions, why Dex had recognized “a raw and ruthless talent” in her before she had betrayed him. What struck Conner most profoundly about the books was their ferocity and brutality; Hetley’s audience was made up mostly of kids and teens, and yet there was more bloodletting and perverse sexuality in any chapter of the Wizard Vampire Chronicles books than in any of Conner’s purportedly adult crime novels. Conner’s characters agonized over the crimes they committed; Margot’s wizards, vampires, and vampards never gave a damn.