Potboiler

by Jesse Kellerman

  “But . . .” Frustrated, Pfefferkorn aimed to score a hit. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to use the movies?”

  Savory sighed in a way that suggested Pfefferkorn was terribly slow.

  “Jesus,” Pfefferkorn said. “Them too?”

  “If you think things are bad now, just imagine what might’ve happened if we’d allowed you to sign a film deal. We’ve been playing catch-up as it is.”

  “I’m not following you at all.”

  “What do you know about Zlabia?” Savory said.

  43.

  Pfefferkorn told him what he knew.

  “That’s not much,” Savory said.

  “Sue me.”

  “Let me ask you this: when did your first novel come out?”

  “Nineteen eighty-three.”

  “Not that first novel. Your other first novel.”

  “About a year ago.”

  “Can you think of anything in recent Zlabian history that happened around then?”

  Pfefferkorn thought. “They tried to kill whatsisface.”

  Savory cackled. “Gold star for you. For the record, whatsisface’s name is East Zlabian Lord High President Kliment Thithyich, and he’s a very rich, violent, and unstable man, the sort of fellow who doesn’t take kindly to being shot in the ass.”

  “What does my book have to do with any of this?”

  “Let’s start by reminding ourselves of one key fact. It wasn’t your book. Was it.”

  Pfefferkorn said nothing.

  “‘In one fluid motion,’” Savory said.

  “What?”

  “‘In one fluid motion.’ That was the flag. The manuscript you stole wasn’t even finished, and then you had to go ahead and have your way with it.”

  “It needed trimming,” Pfefferkorn said.

  “Not the kind you gave it. Do you know how many ‘in one fluid motions’ you deleted?”

  “It’s cliché,” Pfefferkorn said. “It’s meaningless.”

  “Seriously, take a guess. How many.”

  Pfefferkorn said nothing.

  “Twenty-one,” Savory said. “Three of them you left in. That’s seven-eighths of the code, destroyed. You turned it into cryptographic Swiss cheese. God knows how the operatives made anything out of it. But obviously they did, because next thing we know, the president of East Zlabia is in intensive care. At first we assumed it was the West Zlabians. Everyone did. They’ve been at each other’s throats for four hundred years. But then we get a coded transmission from one of our Zlabian sleeper cells that the operation had been a failure. Well, that set off a scramble. What operation? We hadn’t called any operation. It wasn’t long till we figured out what the message referred to. What stumped us was how the order had been set in motion. In the first place, the manuscript you stole had nothing to do with shooting Thithyich, at least not until you mangled it. It was supposed to be a plain old recon directive. In West Zlabia, no less. More to the point, it never should have been released, because after Bill died we ordered all his files destroyed.” Savory touched his lips philosophically. “Although given what you did to it, one could argue that the book was, in fact, destroyed. Neither here nor there. Somehow it missed the shredder and got into your hands, leaving us with a pantsload of angry East Zlabians. Thing about Thithyich is, despite being a merciless tyrant, he’s quite the populist. Born dirt poor, ‘one of us,’ all that jazz. To you and me he’s a run-of-the-mill post-Soviet autocrat. To your average East Zlabian peasant grinding it out at subsistence level in a thatch-roofed hut filled with six, maybe eight, kwashiorkoric children who have, collectively, no more than ten, maybe twelve, teeth, he’s Jack Fucking Kennedy. Try to see it from their side. They’re upset.”

  “I shot the president of East Zlabia,” Pfefferkorn said.

  “The power of literature,” Savory said. “Whatever. The important thing now is to stop the bleeding.” He stood up. “That’s where you come in.”

  Pfefferkorn was alarmed. “Where.”

  Savory shuffled to the file cabinet and began opening drawers. “We need someone to fill the position vacated by Bill. Seeing as how you’ve already gone ahead and preempted us . . . where the hell did I . . . and over and above that, established superb brand recognit—ah.” He found what he was looking for: a thick manuscript bound with rubber bands. He brought it over and dropped it heavily on the desk in front of Pfefferkorn.

  “Tag,” Savory said. “You’re it.”

  44.

  The title page read Blood Night.

  “I think you’ll find that it expands upon the themes begun in Blood Eyes,” Savory said. “Additionally, there’s a lot of good character development, some real poetry to the descriptions of weather. Killer sex scenes. The Boys are proud of it, and rightfully so.”

  “This is outrageous,” Pfefferkorn said.

  “Quit being such a prima donna.”

  “It’s blackmail.”

  “The word is ‘collaboration.’”

  “Not if I don’t have a choice, it isn’t.”

  “Oh, you always have a choice,” Savory said. “But why in the world would you say no? I guess you could, but then you really are done with publishing. Let me let you in on a little secret, Artie: you haven’t got any talent. I read your first book. It was a piece of dreck. Here’s another secret: I’ve read your interviews. I’ve been to your new apartment building. I’ve seen enough to know that you like being a published author. Of course you do. Your new life is a hell of a lot nicer than your old life. You’d be a fool to give it up. And for what? It’s not like I’m asking you to do anything you haven’t done already. I’m giving you the chance to keep your reputation, serve your country, and build up a decent retirement fund in the process. It’s the best deal imaginable. You should be spit-shining my asshole.”

  Pfefferkorn said nothing.

  “You can always say no. You can walk out of here right now. I’d hate for you to do that, though. Never mind the headache it makes for me. Never mind that. It’s more that I’d hate to see you suffer. You do understand, don’t you? I’ll expose you. I’d have to. It’s the only fair thing to do. What a field day the press would have with that, huh? Just imagine. You’ll be trash, and so will your agent, your publisher, and your family. Everyone within fifty miles of you will reek.”

  “If you expose me,” Pfefferkorn said, “I’ll expose you.”

  Savory smiled. “Go for it. I’m sure everyone will believe you.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Does Carlotta know?” Pfefferkorn asked.

  “She’s clueless.”

  “I don’t want her to find out.”

  “She won’t unless you tell her.”

  There was a silence.

  “What really happened to Bill?” Pfefferkorn asked.

  “Hand to God,” Savory said, “it was a boating accident.”

  There was a silence.

  “The flag is ‘Hurry, we don’t have much time.’ Got that? So do me a favor. Don’t touch that phrase. Come to think of it, don’t monkey around with it at all. It’s fine the way it is. Resist the urge to mark your territory and everything will be fine.” Savory stood up and put out his hand. “Do we have a deal?”

  45.

  “I love it,” Pfefferkorn’s agent said.

  “Thanks.”

  “I’m not gonna lie: you had me sweating there, all that stuff about—but, look, the important thing is to realize what we have, and what we have is a gem. A rock-solid grade-A twenty-four-carat gem.”

  “Thanks.”

  “The thing that sets you apart,” the agent said, “is character development. The daughter—sorry, you know I’m terrible with names.”

  “Francesca.”

  “Francesca. She is just a fabulous
character. That bit where she steals the ruby from her grandmother’s necklace and replaces it with the piece of glass taken from her broken locket that her dead mother got from the man she loved before Shagreen who—it’s fantastic, not just the idea itself but the way you handled it, the subtlety—this guy the mother once loved, and then we’re given to understand maybe Shagreen might’ve had something to do with his death . . . I mean, come on.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Layers upon layers.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Great title.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Good. Well, if you’re ready, I’m going to get this over to them today and start pressing for the D-and-A.”

  “I’m ready.”

  “Excellent. Cause as they say on the Ferris wheel, here we go again.”

  46.

  Blood Night met with unanimous approval at the publisher, who decided to rush the book to press in time for beach-read season. The accelerated schedule was made possible by the fact that the manuscript required almost no editing. Pfefferkorn’s editor wrote to him that, aside from a handful of typos caught by the copy editor, the text was “as close to word-perfect as I’ve ever seen.” Savory had informed Pfefferkorn of these typos in advance. “If there wasn’t anything to fix,” he told Pfefferkorn, “it would look fishy.” Pfefferkorn thought it looked mighty fishy regardless, but the publishing machine had too many parts, moving at too great a speed, for anyone to dare derail its operation by questioning why a book was better than expected.

  Watching Blood Night barrel along toward publication, he felt a strange sense of gratification. It wasn’t the novel he’d always dreamed of writing, but nor was it pure schlock, and he took some small amount of credit for laying the groundwork that had enabled the Boys, as Savory referred to them, to flesh out Harry Shagreen’s personal life. They had given him a hobby, playing full-contact Scrabble. They had assigned a sizable role to his daughter, a character mentioned in passing in the first novel. (Pfefferkorn had reconfigured her out of Stapp’s son.) A former math whiz turned drug-addled cat burglar with a heart of gold with a gaping hole in the shape of her father’s missing love, Francesca Shagreen screamed off the page, and the final scene, with Shagreen dragging her into the emergency room, was a serious tearjerker. Pfefferkorn was perturbed to catch himself choking up as he read it. It wasn’t unusual for a writer to get sentimental about his characters. But the operative word was “his.” He had no more ownership of these characters than Bill had. Like Dick Stapp or Harry Shagreen, Pfefferkorn was a man who couldn’t let emotions cloud his judgment. He had a mission. Duty called.

  47.

  Except he didn’t know what the mission was, and his duty—to send in the novel, sit back, and let events play themselves out—turned out to be far harder than he had anticipated. Against all odds, he was going to accomplish something he had long thought impossible: he was going to publish a book that changed the world. It might be a large change. It might be a small one. It might be a change he approved of, politically and morally. It might not. He had no idea, and he agonized over the thought that he had sold his soul. He was surprised at himself. He had never been much of an activist. Even during his student days, his crusades had been primarily artistic, rather than political, in nature. Moreover, he had assumed—incorrectly, it seemed—that his soul was already gone, sold on the cheap along with the first manuscript. To combat his anxiety, he ran through all the good things that had come about as a result of his deal with Savory. He no longer had his agent, editor, and publisher breathing down his neck. He had been able to put an offer in on the house his daughter wanted. These had to count for something, didn’t they? Besides, the mission’s aims weren’t necessarily objectionable. He just didn’t know. But his conscience would not be quieted, and as the publication date loomed, he began to feel suffocated by a sense of powerlessness.

  He went downtown to see Savory.

  “I need to know what the message is.”

  “That’s not important.”

  “It is to me.”

  “You’re going to have to learn to live with ambiguity,” Savory said.

  “It’s about the Zlabias, right? Tell me that much.”

  “Bill never asked,” Savory said. “It’s better if you don’t, either.”

  “I’m not Bill.”

  “You’re having qualms,” Savory said. “That’s to be expected. You have to remind yourself that your government has your best interests in mind.”

  “But I don’t believe that.”

  “You goddamned boomers always have to drag everything before a fucking ethics committee. Do you think we beat the Nazis sitting around worrying about hurting people’s feelings? Go home, Artie. Buy yourself a watch.”

  He didn’t buy a watch. Instead, he spent several afternoons at the university library, enlisting the help of a friendly student worker (who became even friendlier after Pfefferkorn handed him a hundred-dollar bill) to make photocopies of the front pages of all major American newspapers for the two weeks following the publication of every Dick Stapp novel. It came to more than a thousand pages in total, and he stayed up all night, jotting down the headlines in a notebook he had divided by subject. The pattern that emerged confirmed his hunch: the novels of William de Vallée anticipated every twist of Zlabian political fate from the late 1970s on. On the half-dozen occasions Pfefferkorn could not find a coup or riot linked in time to the publication of a Dick Stapp novel, he assumed there was cloak-and-dagger going on, the kind of stuff that would never be known outside select circles. He shut the notebook, his heart racing. He was blithely toying with the fate of people whose countries he couldn’t find on a map.

  He looked at the clock. It was eight-thirty a.m. He ran downstairs to find a cab.

  As he rode along, he prepared his speech. I want out, he would say. Or: I’ve had it with this rotten business. Savory would try to dissuade him, of course, and then would come the threats. He would have to stand tall. Do your worst, he would say. I am not your tool. Mentally, he revised: I am not your plaything.

  He got in the elevator and pressed the button for the top floor. Listen here, he would begin. I am not your plaything. No: you listen here. That was better. It made clear who was in charge. He tried again, once with Savory’s name and once without. Using Savory’s name pinned Savory to the wall, giving him no way to pass the buck. On the other hand, it gave Savory an identity, and Pfefferkorn was aiming to reduce the man, to make him as small and squashable as possible. You listen here. It had a staccato rhythm, like a handgun. You listen here, Savory, sounded more like a slice from a sword. He still hadn’t made up his mind when a chime sounded and the elevator opened. He stepped briskly forth to knock. There was no answer. He knocked again, assertively. Still there was no answer. He tried the knob. It turned. “You listen here,” he said, stepping into the doorway. He went no further. The room had been stripped bare.

  48.

  Pfefferkorn called his agent.

  “We need to hold the book.”

  His agent laughed.

  “I’m serious,” Pfefferkorn said. “It can’t go out the way it is. There are too many mistakes.”

  “What are you talking about? It’s perfect. Everybody says so.”

  “I—”

  “You said so yourself.”

  “I need to make changes.”

  “Look,” the agent said, “I understand you’ve got butterflies, but—”

  “It’s not butterflies,” Pfefferkorn shouted.

  “Whoa there.”

  “Listen to me. Listen. Listen: I need you to call them up and tell them we’re going to hold it another month so I can make revisions.”

  “You know I can’t do that.”

  “You can. You have to.”

  “Are you hearing yourself? You sound nuts.”r />
  “Fine,” Pfefferkorn said. “I’ll call them myself.”

  “Wait wait wait. Don’t do that.”

  “I will unless you do.”

  “What is going on here?”

  “Call me back after you’ve spoken to them,” Pfefferkorn said and hung up.

  Forty-five minutes later the phone rang.

  “Did you talk to them?” Pfefferkorn asked.

  “I talked to them.”

  “And?”

  “They said no.”

  Pfefferkorn began to hyperventilate.

  “You have a first printing of four hundred thousand,” the agent said. “They’re already shipped. What do you expect them to do, pull them all? Look, I understand how you feel—”

  “No,” Pfefferkorn said. “You don’t.”

  “I do. I’ve seen this before.”

  “No, you haven’t.”

  “I have. I’ve seen it dozens of times. This is not unusual. You’re having a normal response to a stressful situation. You’ve got people counting on you, the stakes are high. I get it, okay? I know. It’s a lot to shoulder. That doesn’t change what you’ve done. You’ve written a fantastic book. You’ve done your job. Let them do theirs.”

  Pfefferkorn stayed up all that night as well, rereading the book and dog-earing every instance of a character hurrying for lack of time. The pace was supercharged—he could all but hear a ticking clock—and he counted nineteen flags. He copied out the surrounding paragraphs, studying them for patterns. Who am I kidding, he thought. He needed the decryption key or whatever. He needed training. He went online and read about code-breaking. Nothing he tried worked, although he did accidentally discover that the instructions on his washer/dryer formed a substitution code for the opening scene of Waiting for Godot.