The Hook

by Donald E. Westlake

  “What? I don’t know, a while ago.”

  “Some time in February, wasn’t it? Early February. You left before your lease was up.”

  “Around then,” Bryce agreed. “Listen, this hen is great, if we don’t eat, Mrs. Hildebrand is gonna come in and ask us what’s wrong.”

  Again they all ate, but Wayne kept thinking about the conversation and where he needed it to go and how to get it there. At last, he said, “You’re too cut off here, Bryce, that’s what it comes down to. You need input, you need to get back on track.”

  “Living in New York isn’t gonna—”

  “That’s not my idea,” Wayne told him. “My idea is, we work together the way you told Joe we were working together. Only this time we do it for real.”

  Bryce ate hen, chewed, frowned at Wayne, and said, “How?”

  “I come up here every weekend,” Wayne said. “We talk. You think during the week, make notes, we discuss the ideas on the weekends, shape them, focus your thinking.”

  “Focus,” Bryce echoed. “That’s the word Joe used. Or maybe I did.”

  “That’s what we need,” Wayne said. “Maybe Susan could come up with me sometimes.”

  “Sure,” Bryce said, indifferently. “If she won’t be bored.”

  Susan said, “When do you open the pool?”

  The look Bryce gave her, Wayne saw, was almost hostile. He said, “Early in May.”

  “Then that’s it, then,” she said. “I love to swim, I’m a fish.”

  Wayne, needing to push his idea forward, said, “However long it takes, Bryce, every weekend we work on it, honing your ideas. You’re a very talented guy, a very successful guy, you just got derailed somewhere, the two of us can get you back on track. However long it takes.”

  The repetition of that phrase finally produced the response Wayne needed. Bryce said, “It can’t go on and on, you know. Joe says I’m a year late already. We can’t just sit here every weekend forever and talk. I need a book.”

  “I have a book,” Wayne said.

  Bryce peered at him. “What?”

  “Half a book,” Wayne corrected himself. “I haven’t been working on it because I’ve been doing all these magazine pieces, to make some money. But I could go back to it on Monday. That’s what I could do during the week, while you’re up here working on ideas. Then every weekend I bring up what I’ve done, and we go over it, and we go over your ideas, and when you’re ready, you start your book.”

  Bryce said, “And yours?”

  “Same as before,” Wayne said.

  “That’s the book we give Joe, you mean. Your book.”

  “That’s the only one we’ve got,” Wayne pointed out. “You have to give Joe something, you know you do. So this is the stopgap, until you get your feet under you again.”

  Bryce’s face had started to crumple, as though he were a little boy, who was about to cry. But he didn’t cry; he said, “I wanted a book of mine.”

  “It will be a book of yours,” Wayne told him. “I haven’t been working on mine for a while, because there was nothing to do with it. But now there is. It’s yours, the same deal as last time, only this time, there’s only half a book, you can have input from here on, that’ll help you, too, getting back into the details of the characters, the plot. Every weekend, we talk about the book we’re working on, and we talk about your ideas for the next one.”

  “I wanted my own book,” Bryce said. “That’s why I called you, that’s what I said to Joe, that’s what I wanted. This time, my own book. I wanted you to help me find my own book, but mine.”

  “I will,” Wayne said. “I promise. We don’t have time now to do a brand new novel from scratch, you know we don’t, with no ideas for it, with Joe at the end of his patience, so this one is a, it’s a collaboration, and—”

  “It isn’t mine.”

  “The next one is yours. I promise.”

  Bryce looked at him, silent, for a long time. Then he said, “You promise?”

  Twenty-nine

  Bryce said, “He’s a traveling salesman, he sells computer equipment to school systems, he travels all over the northeast. In this one school district, the Board of Education offices are in the high school, you know, consolidated high school for the whole district.”

  “Uh huh,” Wayne said.

  “He’s coming out of there,” Bryce said, “late afternoon, school closed, meets this woman in the parking lot, teacher, she’s unhappy, recently divorced, he asks her to come have a drink, she says okay, they have dinner, wind up in his motel room.”

  “Uh huh,” Wayne said.

  “In the night,” Bryce said, “she leaves, he goes on to the next town, goes back to that motel, she’s there.”

  “Ah hah,” Wayne said.

  “She’s attached herself to him, she’s gonna follow him, she’s obsessing on him, he’s like her salvation,” Bryce said. “Only he’s married.”

  “Uh huh,” Wayne said.

  “They go out to dinner,” Bryce said, “he tries to talk sense to her, she won’t listen, they’re walking back to the motel, late, dark, all at once he starts hitting her.”

  “Hah,” Wayne said.

  “He can’t stop,” Bryce said, “he keeps going and going, and she’s dead. He goes back to the motel, showers, gets rid of those clothes, sleeps badly.”

  “Uh huh,” Wayne said.

  “Nobody knows he ever even met her,” Bryce said. “Nobody knows she followed him, there’s no link, they’ll never catch him.”

  “Right,” Wayne said.

  “So it’s like he has to keep going over it,” Bryce said, “the scene itself, the killing, going over it and over it, playing it out different ways, trying to find some resolution, but there isn’t any.”

  “Nobody’s after him,” Wayne said.

  “No, that’s just it,” Bryce said. “It’s Crime and Punishment, or it’s Les Misérables, but there isn’t any Inspector Porfiry, no Javert. He’s his own nemesis, he tracks himself down.”

  Wayne said, “What does he do when he catches himself ?”

  Bryce knew there was mockery in that question, but he didn’t care. “He goes to the woman’s family,” he said. “He turns himself in to them.”

  “Why?” Wayne asked.

  “Because he can’t stand it any more. But they don’t want to know about it, the dead woman’s sister and her brother, they don’t want the whole thing opened up again, their parents upset again, her children to know she died because she was having sex with some stranger she picked up, obsessed over. So they kill him.”

  Wayne said, “Who does?”

  “The brother and the sister,” Bryce said. “They beat him to death, and that’s the end. Now he knows how it feels, how it felt to her. You see?”

  Wayne sat back and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “Who does he talk to?”

  “It’s all interior,” Bryce said. “It’s all inside him.”

  “Joe would want some action, I think,” Wayne said. “And readers, too, they expect something else from you.”

  “Oh, there’s action,” Bryce said. “It’s just, the main thing is, what’s going on in his mind.”

  “Well, okay,” Wayne said. “It’s possible. You might have something there. Only, I wish he could have somebody to talk to, get out of his mind sometimes.”

  “I think I could do something like that,” Bryce said.

  “And I’d like to know more about the action,” Wayne said. “I tell you what. Next week, flesh that out a little more, put it down on a disc, lay it out, and we’ll be able to go over it some more next weekend.”

  “Okay,” Bryce said.

  “And in the meantime, you could read this. The Shadowed Other, the first half.”

  “Okay,” Bryce said.

  * * *

  “Did you read the manuscript?”

  “Yes, it’s good, all that Guatemala stuff is very good.”

  “We’re gonna have to switch some of that
around a little,” Wayne said, “because I used some of it for a piece I did for the New York Review of Books. I can show you the stuff we can’t use, and you could maybe do some work in there. I mean, if you want to work on it.”

  “Oh, I do want to work on it,” Bryce said. “It’s very good, but I do have some ideas.” He laughed, and rubbed his left hand over his face, and said, “But I don’t want to make another Henry-Eleanor mistake.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” Wayne said, “we can always discuss things and change things around. But what about the other thing? The guy that killed the woman?”

  “Oh, no,” Bryce said, dismissing it. “Not that.”

  “What? You were going to add to it, write it out. The action, somebody to talk to.”

  “No, forget that,” Bryce said. “I looked it over, and you were right, it’s too interior, so I’ve got another idea.”

  “Okay, fine.”

  “I want to use the same guy,” Bryce said, “the background, selling computers to schools, traveling around, all that, but a completely different story.”

  “Okay,” Wayne said. “That’s a good character, the salesman, he’s very modern, with the computers and the school systems and all that, but he’s classic, too, the wanderer.”

  “Exactly,” Bryce said. “And what happens is, the book opens, he’s coming to in the hospital. At first, he doesn’t even know who he is.”

  “Uh huh,” Wayne said.

  “What happened was,” Bryce said, “somebody beat him up, almost killed him, they got him into the hospital just in the nick of time.”

  “Uh huh,” Wayne said.

  “His memory comes back,” Bryce said, “except for that. The beating. He doesn’t remember anything about that.”

  “Uh huh,” Wayne said.

  “That’s common, you know,” Bryce said. “A traumatic experience, and people block it from their memory.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Wayne said.

  “So he doesn’t know who did it, and he doesn’t know why,” Bryce said, “and he doesn’t know if they’re waiting out there to finish the job.”

  “Uh huh,” Wayne said.

  “So when he gets out of the hospital,” Bryce said, “he starts searching back, trying to get to that moment of the beating, understand it.”

  “Uh huh,” Wayne said.

  Bryce looked at him. He didn’t say anything.

  Wayne said, “And?”

  “That’s all,” Bryce said. “I mean, that’s all I have so far.”

  “Well, who beat him up? Why?”

  “That’s what I haven’t worked out,” Bryce said. “I thought, this week, that’s what I’d work on. If you thought it was a good, you know, setup.”

  “Sure, it’s a good setup,” Wayne said, “but you need more than that.”

  “Oh, I know.”

  “And it’s gotta come from you, Bryce,” Wayne said. “You know that. If I say it was this person beat him up, or that person, for this or that reason, then it isn’t your book any more. And the idea is, this is your book.”

  “Oh, I know, I know,” Bryce said. He smiled and said, “It’s gonna be mine, but you’re gonna help me make it happen.”

  “Absolutely. And on the other . . .”

  “I saw that. You brought me some more pages.”

  “I mentioned it to Joe,” Wayne said.

  Bryce felt a little pang. He said, “Oh? You saw Joe?”

  “He wanted to know how we were coming along,” Wayne said. “I said you’d found something that I thought was gonna be good, gonna work out, and you were at work on it, and he wanted to know when he could see pages.”

  “I don’t show Joe pages,” Bryce said. “I show him the book when it’s done.”

  “This time,” Wayne said, “he’s more comfortable if he sees pages. I told him, in a couple weeks you’d probably have enough to show him. You can send him a hundred pages or so, a couple weeks from now, say, the middle of May.”

  Bryce didn’t like this. “That’s not the way we’ve always done things,” he insisted.

  “Once he sees you’re back at work,” Wayne said, “he’ll calm down. But you know yourself, this isn’t a normal situation. By the next book, your book, things will be back the way they were.”

  “But this time,” Bryce said, “I have to show him pages.”

  “Just to keep him calm,” Wayne said.

  * * *

  The next Wednesday, the first week of May, they came to open the pool. Bryce went out and stood out of the way to watch them do it. The water was unappetizing when the cover was first folded back, oily-looking and gray and metallic, but he knew the chemicals would clear that up in a couple of days. When the water was clear, he’d turn the heater on. Saturday, you could swim in it, and so far, the weather prediction for Saturday was very good: sunny, low- to mid-sixties.

  The story about the computer salesman in the hospital wasn’t going to work. He couldn’t think why the man had been beaten or what he could do to trace it back. It was a dry hole, a dead end. Before Saturday, he had to have something else, something new, something better.

  What was working, and very well, was The Shadowed Other. He liked what Wayne was doing with the original idea, and he could see more or less where it was going, and he was very interested in making the book just as good as possible. He spent time thinking about that story, as though it actually were his own, and he liked to sit at the computer and tinker with it. He didn’t do too much of that, because it was very good as it was, and also because any changes he made he’d have to clear with Wayne, and he wanted to be sure he could justify them. But those parts of his day felt good, working on that book, at that time he felt exactly the way he used to feel, at the computer, the story rolling out.

  They’re digging a swimming pool, he thought, and they come across ancient Indian burial mounds. Sacred Indian land, and this radical Indian group attacks the house, to burn it down.

  With his left hand, he brushed cobwebs from his face.

  Thirty

  Wayne and Joe had lunch, late in May, to discuss the first hundred pages of The Shadowed Other. “You do miracles with Bryce,” Joe commented.

  “He’s doing it himself,” Wayne said. “He was just thrown off his pace for a while, that’s all, things got to him, he got confused. All he needed was another writer, another novel writer, somebody who knows what it is, just to sit there and talk to him and listen to him. And now he’s unblocked.”

  “He certainly is.”

  “This book is coming out of him, I bet it’s faster than he’s ever worked before.”

  “It’s prime Bryce Proctorr,” Joe said, “that’s all I know, and all I care, and I’m grateful to you, Wayne.”

  “I’m glad I can help.”

  “I have a few notes,” Joe said, “I thought it would be easier to discuss them with you, and then you can pass them on to Bryce. I know he doesn’t like to come to town these days.”

  He knows, Wayne thought. He knows, and he’d rather not know. What’s important to him is the brand name, keep that brand name solid and everything will be just fine. He likes Bryce, and he likes me, and if he can do this without having to admit to himself he’s doing it, what’s the harm? Bryce’s reputation stays solid, his income remains high, and I’m a lot better off than I was before. Where’s the downside? There is none.

  Wayne remembered, way back when he’d first met Joe and told him about the secret pen names, Joe had said, if he had any reconstituted virgins on his list, he didn’t want to know about them. So that was true. Here’s one, and he doesn’t want to know about it.

  * * *

  Susan was in the pool, and the two men sat on the terrace in the sunlight. “So he likes it,” Bryce said.

  “He’s very happy,” Wayne told him, “and he said no more pages, don’t worry about it, he knows everything is fine now, just go ahead and finish the book.”

  “Everything is fine now,” Bryce echoed, but his voice wa
s flat.

  This was the difficult part, keeping Bryce in line. If only the man could relax and enjoy it, if only he could say, “What the hell, I’ve got a ghostwriter, I’m taking some time off, I still get half the money, and I’ll get back to it when I get back to it.” But he couldn’t do that, unfortunately; the thought of not working on his own novel just made him too scared, as though his not being able to work today meant he wouldn’t be able to work forever.

  Wayne didn’t want to try to deal with that fear, because he didn’t want to bring it out on the surface, where they could all look at it and Bryce could get even worse. Somehow, Wayne had to keep Bryce from losing heart, even though he wasn’t really working.

  He said, “Bryce, have you figured out any more about the Indian burial mounds?”

  “No, forget that, that doesn’t work, that’s, I don’t know, juvenile. Indian raids in Connecticut, today. I’ll put them in war paint, I suppose.”

  “Birch-bark canoes,” Wayne suggested.

  “From Sears,” Bryce said. He seemed more cheerful now.

  Wayne said, “So what’ve you got?”

  Bryce rubbed his face. “I think and think,” he said, “and I don’t get anything. Nothing at all this week. I like working on your book.”

  “Is that enough for you?”

  “No!”

  “I didn’t think it was. Can I make a suggestion?”

  Bryce looked at him, hopeful but wary. “Sure,” he said.

  “First,” Wayne said, “you remember the deal, this story is yours, it has to be yours or you won’t be happy with it.”

  “Yeah, sure, I know.”

  “But I can make a suggestion once in a while.”

  “Oh, please. Please.”

  “Okay. I think you gave up too quickly on the story about the guy who murdered the woman he didn’t know. I mean, nobody knew he knew her.”

  Bryce cocked his head, gazing off. “You think so?”

  In fact, Wayne did not. He thought the story was suited to a paperback original published around 1954, and the woman’s brother would be a gangster, probably in a gambling racket somewhere. Kill Me Slowly, it would be called.

  But Bryce had to work on something, had to at least believe he was at work on something, and of all the fragments and remnants he’d come up with, Kill Me Slowly was the closest to coherence. It had a storyline, it had characters, it had a few scenes.