The Bestseller

by Stephen Leather

  The woman looked away and hurried down the path.

  “See that?” he said to Jenny. “Why do people hate smokers so much?”

  “Smoking kills people,” said Jenny.

  “Smoking kills smokers,” said Slater. “It’s a choice.”

  “There’s secondary smoke.”

  “I’m outside, in a park,” he said. “A park surrounded by roads full of cars belching fumes that are far more poisonous than this.” He held up his cigarette. “The average New York taxi cab puts out more pollution in a day than I’ll cause in a lifetime of smoking. And the jury’s out on secondary smoking. Trust me, I’ve looked at the evidence and there isn’t any. You breathe in more toxins walking down Sixth Avenue than you do living with a smoker.”

  He walked off the path and onto the grass. Jenny followed him. “I lied when I said I’ve never smoked,” she said. “I tried it once. It made me cough.”

  Slater laughed. “How old were you?”

  “Fifteen.”

  “You rebel. It makes everyone cough the first time. It’s like coffee. No one really likes their first coffee. It’s an acquired taste.” He sat down on the grass, put down his backpack and motorcycle helmet, then took out his pack of cigarettes, flicked it open and offered it to her.

  She stood looking down at him, frowning, then realized that he wanted her to take one. “Oh no, I can’t,” she said.

  “Of course you can. You tried when you were fifteen. You can try again now.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You don’t want to? Or are you being told that you mustn’t? You’re scared of the disapproval of the sour-faced hag pushing her ugly offspring around in his five-hundred dollar stroller? Think what her carbon footprint is? Her banker husband probably drives a Ferrari and they fly first class to the Bahamas twice a year and let’s not get started on all the electrical appliances they have in the duplex in Park Avenue.”

  “You know her?”

  “I’m guessing,” said Slater. He jiggled the pack at her. “It’s your life, Jenny. Your body. Your soul. It’s up to you to make your own decisions, you can’t let everyone else tell you how to run your life.”

  Jenny bit down on her lower lip and then hesitantly reached out and took a cigarette.

  “Good girl,” said Slater, putting the backpack and motorcycle helmet onto the grass and holding up his lighter. He flicked the thumb wheel and she bent down and lit the cigarette from the smoky flame. She straightened up and almost immediately began coughing. She patted her chest with her left hand and grinned ruefully as she blinked away tears.

  “I told you, it’s an acquired taste,” said Slater. He patted the grass next to him. “Come on, sit down.”

  Jenny sat down next to him, crossed her legs and took a slow pull on the cigarette but after just a few seconds she started to cough again. She put her hand over her mouth as she coughed, then shook her head. “I can’t,” she said.

  “Take it slowly,” said Slater. “And give the nicotine a chance to work its way through your bloodstream.”

  “You’re the devil, aren’t you?” said Jenny, looking at the cigarette as if seeing it for the first time. “I can’t believe you’ve got me smoking.”

  “You have to try everything, at least once,” said Slater. He lay back and stared up at the sky. “We’re writers, Jenny. We write about the human condition. If you write about a character smoking, then you have to know what it feels like to smoke a cigarette. If you want to write about getting drunk then you have to know what it’s like to be drunk.” He blew a plume of smoke up into the air and watched the wind whisk it away. “Do you think a virgin could write about making love?”

  Jenny lay down on the grass. Overhead there was a puffy white cloud in the shape of a duckling.

  “Well?” said Slater.

  “Well what?”

  “Can a virgin write about sex?”

  “If she has a good imagination, maybe.”

  “Nonsense,” said Slater dismissively. “You have to do it before you can write about it. You have to write from experience.”

  Jenny took a careful pull on her cigarette and held the smoke deep in her lungs. She could feel it, almost like a living thing, deep in her chest, warming and comforting. Then she exhaled and it wasn’t until the last of the smoke had left her lungs that she coughed. She grinned as she realized she was getting the hang of it. “So what about this Marvin character. The serial killer. How do you write about a killer if you yourself haven’t killed?”

  “I didn’t say that Marvin was the killer. Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t.”

  “But my point stands. If all writing has to come from experience, how can you write about a serial killer?” Slater didn’t reply and Jenny rolled over and looked at him. “Come on, answer the question.”

  He smiled easily. “This isn’t an interrogation, Jenny.”

  “Ha! You can’t answer, can you?” She grinned and lay down again. She took another pull on her cigarette. This time she inhaled and exhaled with no discomfort at all. She smiled.

  Slater blew smoke. “I’ve killed,” he said quietly.

  Jenny sat up abruptly. “You have not,” she said.

  He nodded slowly as he stared up at the sky. “I had to,” he said. “I needed to know what it felt like, to take a life.”

  “Bullshit,” said Jenny.

  Slater grinned. “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?”

  “You’ve killed someone? Really?”

  “I didn’t say I’d killed someone,” said Slater. “I said that I’ve killed.” He rolled over to face her. “Cattle,” he said. “I killed cows.”

  Jenny frowned. “Cows?”

  “I went to a slaughterhouse, in Texas. They let me kill a few. With one of those bolt gun things.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Sure.”

  “You killed cows?”

  Slater mimed firing a gun. “Straight between the eyes. Bang. They’re dead before they hit the ground.”

  “How many?”

  “A dozen or so.”

  “And what was it like?”

  Slater lay back on the grass and took another pull on his cigarette before answering. “The first time was hard,” he said. “Really hard. Harder than I thought it would be. I nearly passed out and my hand was shaking like I was having an epileptic fit. I almost couldn’t go through with it.”

  “But you did?”

  “I had to. I couldn’t not do it.” He sighed. “The second time was easier.” He chuckled. “It was like smoking. The first time was pretty horrible, the second was a bit better, and after six or seven it was fine. I could just do it. Put the gun to the cow’s head and pull the trigger and bang. One dead cow. It’s as easy and as complicated as that.”

  “Did you feel sorry? Guilty?”

  Slater shrugged. “They were going to be killed no matter what I did. They were meat, pure and simple. Why should I feel guilty? I’m no guiltier than the housewife who bought the plastic-wrapped steaks at the supermarket.” He pulled on his cigarette and then blew the smoke slowly through pursed lips. “But I saw what I wanted to see, Jenny. I saw living things die. I saw the life fade from their eyes and I know what it’s like. I can write about it.”

  “And you think it’s the same? Killing a cow and killing a human being?”

  “Practically speaking, sure. Emotionally, no. But the book I wrote wasn’t really about the emotion of killing because the killing is done by a psychopath and psychopaths don’t have emotions.”

  “So this Marvin is a psychopath?”

  Slater chuckled. “You’ll have to read it.”

  “Come on, you can tell me. I want to know.”

  “I don’t want to spoil it for you.”

  “Does he get caught?”

  “Jenny…”

  She reached over and tickled him in the ribs. “I want to know,” she said. She held up the cigarette. “I smoked this for you,” she said. “The least you ca
n do is to tell me the plot of your novel.”

  “It’s a novella rather than a novel,” said Slater. “It’s about forty thousand words, give or take. It’s written from two viewpoints. There’s Marvin, written in the first person. Then there’s the killer, and that viewpoint’s in the second person.”

  “So Marvin’s not the killer?”

  “That’s the hook,” said Slater. “You try to work out if both viewpoints are Marvin’s, but that because he’s a psychopath he thinks differently when he’s in killer mode.”

  “And who’s the hero?”

  “The hero?”

  “The character you identify with. Is it Marvin?”

  Slater laughed. “Marvin? Hell no, Marvin’s a shit. He’s arrogant, he’s not as smart as he thinks he is, and most of the time he has his head up his own ass.”

  “So who does the reader identify with?”

  Slater finished his cigarette and flicked it away. “Why does the reader have to identify with anyone?”

  Jenny sat up. “Are you serious?”

  “It’s a story. The reader doesn’t have to identify with anyone.”

  “There are cops in it, right?”

  “Sure. A man and a woman. Detectives. They’re on Marvin’s case. They think he’s got a woman locked up somewhere and that he’s torturing her before killing her.”

  “So they’re your heroes?”

  “They’re pretty nasty characters too.”

  Jenny frowned and ran a hand through her hair. “So everyone in the book is unpleasant?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Jenny put her head on one side and narrowed her eyes. “I don’t get it.”

  “What’s to get?”

  “In a novel you have to have a protagonist that you identify with, and he or she has an obstacle that he or she has to overcome. That’s what makes a story.”

  Slater laughed. “Is that what Grose says?”

  “It’s what everyone says.”

  Slater’s eyes sparkled with amusement. “Everyone?”

  “You know what I mean. Every book on creative writing says that.”

  “And who writes these books? Real writers write real books. The ones that write books on writing are the failed writers.”

  “That’s a bit harsh.”

  “The truth often is. I wrote from the heart, Jenny. I write what I want to write, not what some failed writer thinks I should be writing.” He sat up and crossed his legs. “You need to do the same,” he said. He tapped his chest. “Write from the heart. Write what you believe in. Then let the readers decide.”

  Jenny sighed. “I wish I had your confidence.”

  “If you don’t believe in yourself, how can you expect anyone else to?” He looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go.” He stood up and brushed grass off the knees of his jeans, then picked up his backpack and laptop. “If you want, I’ll print you off a copy of the basement story. Just promise me one thing.”

  “Not another cigarette?”

  Slater grinned. “That was a one-off,” he said. “No, just don’t show it to Grose. Keep it between us. I’ve never shown it to anyone else and to be honest I’m pretty sure he’ll hate it.” He held out his hand and helped her up.

  “I promise,” she said. “Can you do me a favor?”

  “Anything.”

  She laughed. “Nothing serious, I’d just prefer a PDF that’s all.”

  Slater grinned. “Deal,” he said.

  “So you’ll let me read it? Really?”

  “You sound surprised.” He unzipped one of the pockets on his backpack and took out a thumbdrive. He grinned and handed it to her. It was made from soft plastic, in the shape of a burger, complete with lettuce, tomato and a slice of cheese.

  Jenny laughed as she looked at it. “You’ve got to be joking,” she said. She pulled it apart to reveal the USB connection. “A burger?”

  “It’s ironic,” he said. “Books are the new fast food. Cheap and disposable.”

  She put the thumbdrive into her pocket. “You won’t really write about me in The Bestseller, will you?”

  “Why? Are you scared that Dudley will read it?”

  “No,” she said. She shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “Don’t worry, you can trust me,” he said. He picked up his motorcycle helmet, blew her a kiss and walked away.

  Jenny watched him go. She felt a sudden craving for another cigarette and she laughed quietly to herself.

  CHAPTER 10

  Grose sat back in his chair, closed his eyes and groaned. The words just wouldn’t come. He’d sat at his desk for the best part of two hours and all he had to show were two hundred words and he’d crossed most of them out. He just couldn’t concentrate. He pushed back his chair, stood up and walked over to the window. It was dark outside and there were thick clouds obscuring the moon and stars. He looked down at the garden. There was a block of light from the kitchen illuminating part of the lawn and a shadow moved across it. His wife, probably making herself her evening cocoa. She’d had the same evening routine for the last ten years. A TV movie, usually on the Hallmark Channel with a mug of cocoa followed by half an hour in bed reading one of her insufferable romances. Grose had long given up complaining about her choice of reading matter and more often than not he stayed in his study until she was asleep.

  He sat down again and picked up his pen. He sighed. He was trying to start a new novel but his mind was still buzzing with the characters in The Homecoming. The Homecoming was unfinished business, it was in limbo, trapped in a netherworld between being written and being published and he had no way of knowing how long it would remain there. The Homecoming was a good book, possibly a great book, as good as any of his earlier works. The fact that Pink hadn’t wanted to sell it had come as a shock. It was the last thing that Grose had expected to hear. He knew that the sensible thing to do would be to send it out to another agent but Pink’s rejection had been so hurtful that Grose couldn’t bear repeating the experience. At some point he’d have to, but not just yet. He’d thought of rewriting the book, giving it another polish, but after rereading it he’d decided that there was nothing he could do to improve it. The Homecoming was perfect, and Pink was an idiot for not realizing it.

  He tapped his Mont Blanc fountain pen on his notepad. He didn’t have a title for the book that he was about to start writing. Generally he didn’t, the titles of his books usually came to him about halfway through the writing. He had the outline of a plot. A father who discovers that his twenty-year-old son is gay and disowns him. Five years later the son is sick and needs a kidney transplant. The father offers one of his own kidneys but the son refuses. It’s not a kidney he wants, it’s acceptance, but the father can’t give that. The book would go to the heart of what it meant to be a father, and Grose was drawing on his own experiences with his own father who had died three years earlier. It would be a moving book, powerful and emotional, but try as he could the words just wouldn’t come. He wasn’t even able to come up with names for the characters, and that was always a bad sign. Titles could wait, and sometimes were even changed before publication, but names were crucial. Names went to character and Grose needed a name before he could write. The father’s Christian name was Gideon, Grose knew that. It was Biblical and Gideon was a man who believed in the Bible. But Grose couldn’t come up with a family name and until he had that he couldn’t even start to describe the man or put words in his mouth.

  The opening paragraph was going to be a description of the man’s house, as if the reader was approaching it from the road. It was winter and there would be a thin plume of grey smoke rising from the chimney. Grose could picture the house and the snow that covered the garden, but every time he tried to put words down onto paper they came out stilted and forced. He dropped his pen and ran his hands through his hair. It wasn’t that the words wouldn’t come – he had nothing but contempt for writers who claimed to be blocked – it was simply that the words that were coming were the wrong o
nes. The few sentences he had written would have shamed a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl.

  He stood up again and paced over to the window. The block of light had gone. His wife would be in front of the TV with her feet up on the coffee table, her mug of cocoa by her side. He went over to his desk, pulled open the top drawer and took out his cell phone. He hadn’t saved Jenny’s number just in case his wife ever went through the phone’s contacts list. He tapped out the digits from memory and held the phone to his ear as it rang out.

  CHAPTER 11

  Jenny jumped as her cell phone vibrated on the sofa next to her. She was curled up with her Kindle, half way through Slater’s book. She had been totally immersed in the writing and stared resentfully at the vibrating phone. She had thought she’d set it to silent but clearly had once again failed to get to grips with its operating system. She picked it up and looked at the phone’s screen and her heart fell when she saw who was calling. An evening call meant he was feeling lonely and needed reassurance, but also meant that he was at home with his wife.

  “Dudley, hi,” she said, putting down the eReader.

  “God, I miss you,” he said. That was the way he always started his evening calls. But if he really missed her, all he had to do was to come to her. She was the one living alone, she was the one whose door was always open. If anyone should have been doing the phoning it was her, but he’d made it clear that she was never to phone him while he was at home. It was rule number one of the Dating A Married Man game. There were a lot of rules, and over the course of the relationship she’d come to resent each and every one.

  “I miss you, too,” she said, but strictly speaking that wasn’t true because she had been so engrossed in Slater’s book that she hadn’t given him a moment’s thought since she’d started reading.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing,” she lied. She knew that he’d hate the fact that she was reading Slater’s book. He’d see it as a betrayal, maybe even a threat, and she couldn’t face an argument with him.