by Adam Langer
“If I were a different sort of guy, I’d do something right now, buddy,” he said.
“Like what?” I asked.
“I dunno. Like kick your ass or something. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?”
I had never seen him angry before. I tried to match my rage to his.
“If I were a different sort of guy, I wouldn’t have believed your story in the first place, buddy, and I would’ve kicked your ass for that,” I said. I had learned from dealing with my wife’s former colleagues in Indiana—if you met hostility with hostility and stood your ground, people usually backed down whether you were right or not.
Conner squinted at me. He raised his right hand as if he were about to make a fist, then dropped his arm to his side.
“What’re you talking about, man?” he asked. “I don’t even get you.”
“What do you think?” I asked.
“If I knew, I’d tell you,” he said.
We stood there in front of the coyote, who gazed out at us from atop his stone perch, and I told Conner what I meant. I told him I really had started out trying to write the story the way he had told it, but I had stopped believing it, had become convinced he had lied to me. I said that I had read The Russia House and I kept thinking about that one line—“He’s crossed over. My Joe’s crossed over.”
“That’s in the goddamn movie,” he said. “That’s not even in the book.”
Nevertheless, I pressed on, and as I did, the color began to fade from Conner’s cheeks and his eyes looked softer. I had always said people looked at me and saw what they thought of themselves, and the same was true of Conner. I had looked into Conner’s eyes and seen a liar; he was looking into my eyes and seeing a guy who told the truth. Maybe neither of us had the slightest sense of who the other man was; maybe all we could see were versions of ourselves.
“So, when did you start to think maybe I wasn’t lying,” Conner asked.
“When Shascha offered to pay me two million bucks to keep me from publishing it,” I said. “What would you have done in my position? Told the story or taken the dough? If Angela hadn’t found out about the flash drive, you wouldn’t have said a word to her about it. Besides, I might’ve gone along with it if I hadn’t realized how little you thought of me.” There was nothing for me to lose anymore, so I told him everything I had kept to myself during the times we had spent together: I knew why he had chosen me—because I was gullible and had weak morals. I knew it didn’t have anything to do with my skill as a writer or even with the fact that he thought of me as a friend; he just knew I was one lazy sucker.
Conner cocked his head to one side and studied my face as if he had seen something on it he hadn’t expected to find there.
“You mean you don’t know?” he finally asked. “You’re not pretending. It’s not that you just don’t like talking about it; you really don’t know.”
“Know what?” I asked.
“Why I asked you.”
“But I do,” I said. “I just told you.”
Conner smiled and shook his head as if he just now realized that he had spent his life as the butt of a cruel practical joke, but it had been going on so long that all he could do was laugh.
“You think that’s what it’s about? Really?” he asked.
“What else could there be?”
Conner took off his backpack and laid it on the sidewalk. He crouched down, unzipped the backpack, and as he did, he asked, “Do you remember what I told you about the surprise I might give you after you wrote the book?”
“Sure,” I said, “and I didn’t like your condescending little enticement. In fact, that pissed me off too.”
“I didn’t think I’d give this to you,” he said. “I didn’t think you deserved it. But now I don’t think I have a choice.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“I don’t know anymore,” he said. “Maybe it’s your legacy.”
He reached into the backpack and pulled out a bound, typewritten manuscript. It was about two hundred and some-odd pages long; the paper looked thin, yellowed, and brittle, and there were a pair of small, reddish-brown splotches upon it that could have been ink and could have been blood.
“What the hell is this?” I took the manuscript and stared at it.
Its title was The Missing Glass, but that’s not what made me stop dead and look at the page with such confusion and fear that even the coyote must have sensed my turmoil because he started to howl. I felt pale, dizzy.
“No,” I finally said. “It can’t be real.”
“It is,” he said.
“I thought you said Salinger wrote this,” I said.
Conner winked at me. “He did,” he said. “Don’t you see? He did.”
“But …” I didn’t complete the sentence. There was one name on the spine, but the other one on the title page caught my eye—Sid J. Langer. My mom had always had a thing about anagrams, but I was never much good at them. I kept messing around the letters in my head, spelling them one way and then the other—Sid J. Langer. J. D. Salinger. In some absurd way, it made sense. Like all solutions to mysteries, it explained both everything and nothing at the same time.
“Revelatory,” Conner had written when he had blurbed Nine Fathers. “Keeps all its secrets until the very end, which is a whopper.” I had no idea what he might have meant until this very moment. A reader can understand so much more about a story than the author himself.
I tried to think of anything to say that would keep me from fainting. “Did you read it?” I asked.
“On the plane, yeah,” said Conner.
“Where were you coming from?” I asked.
“I’m not telling you that, pal,” said Conner. “I don’t trust you that much.”
“How is it?” I asked. “The book.”
“Not his best. Crime wasn’t his thing. But there’s a part of the story that’ll probably interest you.”
“What part?”
“About a writer, pretty well known. He comes to Chicago, meets a cocktail waitress at a nice hotel. They have a kid together. He agrees to support the boy and give her money whenever she asks, but on one condition—she never tells her son or anyone else who the real father is. You could say there was kind of an unwritten contract between them.”
“That’s a fucked-up story,” I said.
“True ones usually are,” said Conner. “Man, I figured you had to know. You wrote that whole book; it’s so obvious.”
“Not to me, apparently,” I said.
“Anyway, that’s the reason I wanted you,” Conner said. “His son. I wanted his son to write my story. Dex knew it too—but he’d already signed an agreement saying he’d never mess with one of his sons.”
“His sons?”
“Yeah, sons. That’s what he made Dex put in the contract.”
I took a breath, tried to slow my heart. “Well,” I said, “I guess his son did wind up telling your story.”
“Yeah, I suppose you did do that,” Conner said. “Didn’t turn out quite the way I was planning.”
“Right. But then again, Catcher in the Rye didn’t either,” I said.
“How’s that?”
“Book winds up in the back pockets of killers,” I said. “I doubt old Sid J. Langer was planning for that.”
“Well, sometimes you don’t have control,” Conner said. “Actually, you never do. You write a book and people use it in ways and for things you never dreamed.” He slapped the manuscript with his palm. “You should read it.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m kind of afraid to.” I knew the manuscript was worth millions, but I didn’t want to look at it now. I knew it could tell me some of the secrets I had spent my life trying to discover, but I didn’t want to hear them anymore. I put the manuscript in the basket of my daughter’s stroller. She was st
ill sleeping and the coyote was still howling.
“Man, I’m sorry, dude,” I told Conner.
“For what?”
“I fucked you over. You’re right.”
“You didn’t know.”
“Doesn’t matter. I should’ve trusted. I’ll try to make it right.”
“Little too late for that, buddy,” said Conner.
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“You don’t have it in you to be a hero,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe a decent human being, though.”
I shook his hand, and he pulled me close. I felt his whiskers against my cheek as he thumped me on the back.
“So how does it feel?” I asked. “Being a recluse writer; is it just like you dreamed?”
“Wish I knew,” he said. “I’m not a recluse; I’m more like a fugitive. Maybe I can be a recluse one day.”
Then he told me he had a plane to catch, and I knew not to ask him where he was going. All I needed to know was that he and Angie were still together and Atticus was well. I wished him luck.
Conner told me that we might not meet again, but I didn’t believe that. Somehow, I figured our paths would cross and probably even sooner than either of us would like. Margot was undoubtedly looking for him, Shascha too, maybe even Dex, but I thought I could find a way to protect Conner, honor the unwritten contract I had with him. I watched Conner walk through the zoo, hands in the pockets of his jeans. When he had exited the gates and turned out of sight, I could hear my daughter stirring in her stroller.
“Dad?” she asked. She looked frightened.
“Yes, Bea?”
“I heard talking.”
“No,” I said. “It was just a coyote.”
Postscript
Conner had given me the idea. It was the same basic one he had given Dex when he’d written The Embargoed Manuscript. But I wanted to use that idea to save somebody, not to rob them. The thief in Conner’s novel—and Dex and Pavel in real life—had stolen a flash drive. They set up a website, leaked word that they could provide pirated editions of the new Wizard Vampire Chronicles book. They took credit-card orders, transferred the money to their bank account, clicked Send All, then shut down the site. Selling over the Internet was easy; the hard part was convincing people you had something they wanted to buy.
I didn’t care only about the money. I might even have given away the true story about Conner Joyce but for the fact that I didn’t think people would have given it too much attention unless I charged something. I wanted people to believe, really believe. So I spent a lot of time proofreading the manuscript, typesetting it, formatting it so that people could read it on an iPad, a Kindle, or a Nook. When I was done, I put the word out on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. If people wanted to hear the true story about the theft of WVCIX, I said, all it would take was ten bucks and a credit card.
At first, everyone assumed my story was a hoax, and during the first few days, I sold only a couple dozen copies. But then, after people started reading it, they began posting reviews, and although most of them were positive, the negative ones were just as powerful because people were really starting to discuss it; even if they didn’t like the story or the way I wrote it or the way I had characterized Margot Hetley, most seemed to take it for granted that it was true. I guess the details and the little personal touches were what convinced them—my descriptions of Shascha and of Courtney Guggenheim, of the doorman at 680 N. Lake Shore Drive, of my wife’s colleagues, and our Buck Floomington blog, and that last scene in the zoo with my daughter waking up after Conner left and me telling her that she hadn’t heard voices, only a coyote.
I tried talking to my mother about everything that happened, but she didn’t want to discuss it. Her memory really was fading, or she was doing a very good job of pretending it was. To me, she had always been a puzzle and always would be. That I had found out who my dad really was didn’t change the fact that she had made a promise to him that she wasn’t going to break, not even after he had cut her off financially, and not even after he had died. She wouldn’t read The Missing Glass. “I already know that story; why would I want to read about it?” she asked.
I asked her what I should do with the manuscript, and she gave the same answer Dex would have given: “Burn it.”
I should probably tell you I felt guilty about violating my agreement with Shascha. After all, I had taken her money. I should probably tell you I had some reservations about accusing Margot Hetley of a crime without any actual proof. But I felt a greater responsibility to Conner; one time, long ago when he was just a boy, he wrote a letter to my father and never got a response, which was in some way how I had spent my life—asking questions and waiting for answers that I finally gave up hoping would ever come.
I knew that one day it might all catch up with me, but I didn’t hide. I didn’t pack up my family and move out of the country. I didn’t change my name; I even kept my phone number listed. I took our house off the market, figuring we would hunker down and wait to sell until the end of the global depression or whatever it was that we seemed to be going through. I knew wherever I went, someone could find me. And I knew whatever I wrote, someone might use it for reasons I never intended. Maybe they would use it to find Conner, or maybe they would use it to find me, or maybe my story would give them an idea for a crime. I didn’t really give a damn. If someone wanted to track me down and confront me, I would deal with all that when the time came.
It happened at my father’s gravesite. I had gone there not so much to pay my respects as to try to make manifest a story that still seemed to exist only in my own mind. But as far as that was concerned, visiting the New Hampshire cemetery didn’t do much good—the name engraved on the headstone was just one more name in a cemetery full of them. Whether the name was J. D. Salinger or Sid J. Langer or something totally different didn’t matter. Some of the gravesites had flowers on them, but his didn’t and I hadn’t brought any, just a manuscript completed right around the time I was born.
I was laying the manuscript atop the earth before the gravestone when I saw Dex approaching. He wore a pinstriped navy-blue suit with a pale-yellow pocket square. He looked scrawnier and older than Conner had described. But I recognized him by the long, wide scar on his neck and the yellow-eyed falcon atop his walking stick. Conner had made that walking stick seem like an affectation, but now Dex seemed to need it. Pavel Bilski was gone, taking Jarosław Dudek along with him; maybe that’s why Dex looked so alone.
“Mr. Dunford,” I said, and he smiled, perhaps surprised I already knew who he was. We talked by the grave, and he told me of all the trouble Conner and I had caused him. I was not surprised when he told me I would have to devise some way to compensate him. And I had already prepared my response.
“Why don’t I write you a book?” I said.
“A book?”
I nodded.
“What sort?” he asked.
“A perfect crime,” I said.
“Just one copy?” he asked.
“Manual typewriter,” I said. “No copies, no carbons.”
“Yes,” said Dex, “that’s it exactly.”
He held my glance for quite some time.
“What would you like me to write about?” I asked.
“I’m not the writer,” said Dex.
“I know,” I said. “But why don’t you try anyway?”
“All right,” he said. And after he had considered for a while, he said, “Why don’t you start with this? Somewhere in this world, there is a very rich, very ruthless, very powerful woman who stole some priceless manuscripts from me and nearly killed me in the process. Those manuscripts are very dear to me, and I would very much like to get the damned things back.”
He then gestured to the manuscript on my father’s grave. “You can start by giving that one back to me, Adam. It’s mine, you know.”
And so I handed it to him.
Conn
er Joyce had told me he felt some compunction about writing that first novel for Dex. He said he wouldn’t have done it save for the fact that he had no other choice. I did have choices, but I wanted to do it anyway. I already had an idea for a story that would get Dex what he wanted. And I knew that, at least for me, inspiring one person was just as good as inspiring thousands. I didn’t really care who that person was or what I would or wouldn’t inspire him to do. I really didn’t mind that I would be working for Dex now; a man does what he has to do in order to protect and provide for his family. And as one of Conner’s favorite writers told him, in one way or the other, we all wind up working for Dex.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to everyone who helped me in one way or another to create this book, especially the Langer, Sissenich, and Langer-Sissenich families. My heartfelt thanks also go out to Maria Braeckel, Campus View Child Care Center, Thomas Conner, Beth Dembitzer, Laura De Silva, Gina Fattore, Jane Friedman, Terry Govan and Mark Leuschner, Richard Green, Amy Hackenberg and Erik Tillema, Harmony School, Julianne Hausler, the Jewish Daily Forward, Cynthia Joyce, Gretchen Koss, Jerome Kramer, Hana Landes, the Lahn family, the Macy Family, Nicholas Meyer, Nicole Passage, Tina Pohlman, Michael Radulescu, Marly Rusoff, Martha Sharpe, Anjali Singh, Corinne Smith, Cindy Spiegel, Amy Watts, and Michelle Weiner. And, of course, many, many thanks for the inspiration provided by the Chicago Public Library, the Coq d’Or Lounge of the Drake Hotel, Feast Bakery Café, the Hungarian Pastry Shop, the Monroe County Public Library, and the Uptown Café of Bloomington, Indiana.
About the Author
Born and raised in Chicago, Adam Langer is the author of the novels Crossing California, The Washington Story, Ellington Boulevard, and The Thieves of Manhattan, and the memoir My Father’s Bonus March. He has written about books and authors for such publications as the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Huffington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Washington Post, among others. He has been a frequent radio and TV guest, including appearances on CNN, Fox, and NPR’s Morning Edition and All Things Considered. The Chicago Public Library recently purchased a significant collection of his papers. He is the former senior editor of Book Magazine and currently serves as the arts and culture editor of the Jewish Daily Forward. Langer lives in New York City with his wife, Beate; his daughters, Nora and Solveig; and their dog, Kazoo.