Potboiler (7 page)

23.

One of Pfefferkorn’s more shameful secrets was that he had once tried to write a popular novel of his own. Fed up with being perpetually broke, he took a few days to sketch the plot—it was a murder mystery set at a small college on the Eastern Seaboard—before sitting down to bang out a quick and dirty ten chapters. His daughter, then thirteen, noticed the pile growing on his desk and beamed with pride. Indeed, it was the only time since publishing his novel that he had gotten any further than the first five pages, and while he detested every word he’d written, he had to admit feeling some satisfaction in seeing any book of his achieve a third dimension.

The problem was the ending. In his zeal to entertain he constructed six distinct, wildly complicated plotlines, giving but the slightest consideration to how they might ultimately intertwine. He soon found himself stymied, spinning in place like a man whose six dogs have all run off in different directions. Frustrated, he reversed tack, stripping away all but one of the plotlines, leaving him with a mere forty pages. Attempts to expand these pages proved ham-fisted and futile. He tried introducing a romantic interest, only to discover, to his dismay, and over his loud mental protests, that his protagonist was a latent homosexual. To increase the suspense he murdered another administrator. He murdered a student. He murdered a hapless janitor. Bodies kept piling up and still he had fewer than twenty-five thousand words. It didn’t take much, he discovered, to kill someone in print, and there was only so much page space one could reasonably fill with gory descriptions.

In a fit of pique he caused the campus quadrangle to be detonated.

After much floundering he threw the manuscript in the trash. His daughter came home from school and, seeing the empty spot on the desk, the dustless rectangle where once their hopes for a better future had lain, ran to her room and locked the door, deaf to his entreaties.

As he sat at his computer, plagiarizing Bill’s manuscript, Pfefferkorn thought often of those days. He regretted having given up so easily. He might have done his daughter proud after all. But there was no sense fretting. She was getting married and he had work to do.

The theft of
Shadowgame
had begun with Pfefferkorn placing the manuscript in his carry-on, but it was not complete until eleven weeks later, when he finished retyping the text. He would have finished far sooner had he not chosen to fix some of the more infelicitous phrasing. For instance, it was characteristic of special agent Richard “Dick” Stapp to perform difficult physical feats
in one fluid motion
. Pfefferkorn didn’t care for the expression one bit. It was better to say
fluidly
, or
smoothly
—or, better yet, to apply no modifier but rather to plainly state the action in question and allow the reader to envision it. In redacting the manuscript, Pfefferkorn tallied twenty-four instances of movements taking place
in one fluid motion
, striking all but three from the final text. Two he left in because he felt he owed it to Bill to not eliminate wholesale what was obviously a pet phrase. The third
in one fluid motion
came when Stapp simultaneously answered his cell phone and floored an attacker, a spectacular move that began with Stapp’s hand darting to his belt clip and removing the phone before proceeding in a sharp, shallow arc up toward his face to answer the call, the resultant jutting elbow striking his assailant in the solar plexus, leaving him—the assailant—“sinking to his knees, gasping for breath” (a phrase that itself cropped up again and again, along with “snapped his neck,” “dove for cover,” and “chambered a round”) while he—Stapp—calmly said
I’m gonna have to call you back
. In this case, Pfefferkorn decided the phrase meant something: it conveyed that two fundamentally disjointed movements were being carried out with such precision and ease that they appeared harmonious. He doubted that any but the most careful reader would intuit the thought behind the words, but games like this kept him entertained throughout the revision process. They also helped him convince himself that his efforts were not wholly without artistic merit.

He scrubbed out all the shouts, exclamations, declarations, and avowals, leaving in their stead a simple “said.” He mopped up inappropriate tears and scraped down the ugliest dialogue. Names, dates, and locations had to be changed. Last, there was the matter of the non-ending. It was to this, the most daunting task, that Pfefferkorn turned his attention for a full month.

An unstated rule of William de Vallée novels held that justice must be done—to a point. The sadistic minions, the brainless goons, always met an untimely end, but the mastermind often escaped to plot another day. This lack of resolution was important for two reasons. First, it implied that there were more adventures to be had. There was, too, a certain pleasurable chill in the suggestion that evil still lurked. In this day and age it was implausible to suggest that good would ever fully prevail. The contemporary reader required a touch of moral and narrative ambiguity. But only a touch. In constructing his new ending, then, Pfefferkorn strove mightily to achieve this delicate balance.

He killed off Dick Stapp.

Or at least he appeared to. It was unclear: a cliffhanger. And Stapp was not Stapp, for Pfefferkorn had rechristened him Harry Shagreen.

What remained after Pfefferkorn had finished his tinkering was an extraordinarily odd hybrid of his and Bill’s writing styles. Some might quibble with the ending, but Pfefferkorn thought there was more than enough justification for buying the manuscript in its present form. He printed it out. He printed out the new cover page. The new title was
Blood Eyes.
He put the book in the mail to his agent and waited for a response.

TWO
COMMERCE

24.

Pfefferkorn was rich. His novel
Blood Eyes
had been on the best-seller list for one hundred twenty-one days. His publisher had chosen the book
as the lead title for the fall list and consequently had poured ample funds into promoting it, taking out ads in newspapers and magazines of national repute as well as on the Internet. Now Pfefferkorn’s embossed foil name was visible at airports, supermarkets, and discount warehouse stores, on library shelves and in the hands of reading groups. Boarding a busy bus or a subway car in a major American city without seeing at least one person engrossed in a copy would present a challenge. The novel had been reconstituted as an audiobook, an abridged audiobook, an electronic book, an “enhanced” electronic book, an “amplified” electronic book, a “3-D” electronic book, a graphic novel, a pop-up book, a “3-D” pop-up graphic novel, as manga, in Braille, and in a large-print edition. It had been translated into thirty-three foreign languages, including Slovakian, Zlabian, and Thai.

The success of the book was not strictly commercial. Critical acclaim had been lavish. Among the phrases oft repeated were “far better written than your average thriller” and “turns the genre on its ear.” Several reviewers had singled out the ending for its deft touch.

Pfefferkorn had granted scores of interviews and had been the subject of countless blogs. He had attended a convention of thriller aficionados who anointed him “Rookie of the Year.” He had shaken so many hands and inscribed so many copies that his wrist had begun to ache. His publisher had established for him a website and encouraged him to engage in the new social media. He responded personally to every letter and e-mail. The volume of correspondence was smaller than he would have expected, given his sales figures. Most people didn’t have the time to write, it seemed. Those who did tended to fall at the far ends of the bell curve, either blindly adoring or else filled with rabid, foam-flecked hatred. The former greatly outnumbered the latter. For this, Pfefferkorn was glad.

He was given to understand by his agent that there was no longer any money for book tours. Amortizing the cost of a flight, a hotel, a media escort, and meals against the number of books the average author could expect to sell at any given event invariably resulted in a net loss—making it all the more remarkable that the publisher had decided to send him to eleven cities. He was met everywhere by large, enthusiastic crowds. It took him a while to get the hang of public speaking. At first he stammered. Then he spoke too fast. He told himself that an audience was basically a roomful of students. With this in mind he was able to relax, and by the end of the tour, he felt slightly disappointed that it was over.

Despite the speed and force of the changes being wrought in his life, he tried to keep a level head. His luxuries were few. He found a new apartment, bigger than his old one but far less than what he could have afforded. At his daughter’s behest he acquired a cell phone, and he would occasionally take a taxi rather than the bus—although never to work. That he did not quit his job was a fact he made a point of mentioning in interviews. Teaching, he said, had always been his first love. He said this not out of guile. It was a lie he had come to embrace, as it helped him convince himself that his values remained unchanged. He was still Pfefferkorn, adjunct professor of creative writing. Waiting on the corner for the number forty-four, he would note his position on the best-seller list, then deliberately deflate his sense of satisfaction by turning to the front page. One glance at the headlines was all it took. Everything was right with the world, which was to say: everything was appalling. A babysitter had murdered her charges by supergluing them to the blades of a ceiling fan and running it on high. A senator had been indicted for hiring a prostitute, then refusing to pay with anything other than bulk-sized bags of nougats. The president of East Zlabia had survived an assassination attempt for which the West Zlabians were denying responsibility. Members of the international community were calling on both sides to exercise restraint. It was business as usual. Violence, poverty, and corruption still reigned. So he had made a little money. So what?

Pfefferkorn met the parents of his future son-in-law. They all gathered for dinner at a restaurant Pfefferkorn’s daughter had picked out. This time his steak came in the shape of an Escher fork, which made it difficult to eat, as it kept disappearing each time he tried to cut into it.

An agreement was reached: Pfefferkorn was to assume half the cost of the wedding. As father of the bride, he was bound by tradition to pay more, but Paul’s parents refused to budge. Pfefferkorn, understanding that they did not want to look cheap or mercenary, did not press. Any arrangement was fine with him so long as he was not excluded. Throughout dinner he watched the clock, and at a predetermined moment he excused himself to the restroom. On the way back he gave the waiter his credit card, paying for the entire meal and leaving a generous tip.

25.

One worry remained, of course: Carlotta, with whom he had not spoken in close to a year. Pfefferkorn assumed that she had read his novel. For him to have suddenly produced a blockbuster thriller was an awfully convenient coincidence, and if he were her, he would be unable to resist a quick peek. When she did, the similarities to
Shadowgame
would be unmissable. True, she had claimed never to read Bill’s books before completion. But what husband didn’t talk about his work with his wife, if only casually? At minimum Bill must have described the basic premise to her. Pfefferkorn therefore had to conclude that she did know, and that her lack of response was deliberate. Every day that her call did not come reconfirmed that she was waiting for the right time to turn the tables on him—waiting until his fame reached its apex, so that his downfall would be all the more painful. He had never taken her for a cruel woman, and to imagine her scheming against him like this distressed him in the extreme.

He had but one way to protect himself. Bill’s original typewritten manuscript, wrapped in a plastic bag and stashed under Pfefferkorn’s new kitchen sink, was the only extant copy. Without it, there could be no proof of his misdeed, so he fed it, five pages at a time, into his new fireplace.

Seeing the paper blacken and shrink made him feel a trifle safer. Even so, he did not relish the idea of Carlotta knowing his secret. He feared her scorn far more than any public exposure. He wondered if he had blown his last shot at happiness. Several times he picked up the phone to call her, only to lose his nerve and hang up. Be a man, he told himself. Then he wondered what that meant.

26.

Soon after
Blood Eyes
began to make waves, calls started to come from Hollywood. Acting on the advice of his film agent, Pfefferkorn held out for more money, although he twice allowed himself to be flown to California to take meetings with loud men in turtlenecks. He enjoyed expensive lunches at no cost. He thought it comical and sad that the richer one was, the less often one had to pay for things.

“They want to meet you,” his film agent said. “This one looks like it might be legit.”

She had said as much the first two times, but Pfefferkorn packed his carry-on and flew to Los Angeles.

“A. S. Peppers,” the producer said, using the nom de plume Pfefferkorn had chosen after his surname was deemed too difficult to pronounce, “you’re a
star.
”

The assistant producers sitting along the wall nodded obsequiously.

“Thanks,” Pfefferkorn said.

The producer’s secretary poked her head in to announce that the head of the studio urgently needed to speak to the producer.

“Dang it all,” the producer said, standing up. “Well, you’re in good hands.”

Pfefferkorn sat while the assistant producers ignored him and gossiped for forty minutes.

“Sorry bout that,” the producer said, returning. “We’ll be in touch.”

Pfefferkorn’s cell phone rang as he was walking across the studio lot.

“How’d it go?” his film agent asked.

“Great.”

His hotel was located on a posh stretch of Wilshire Boulevard. He took a walk, passing a small group of people picketing a department store. Crossing the street to avoid them, he was then confronted by a woman who bade him to stop the atrocities in West Zlabia. He moved on.

Alone in his suite, he did the same thing he had done on his previous two trips to Los Angeles: he dialed Carlotta’s number on his cell phone, stopping short of pressing
CALL
. Be a man, he thought. He picked up his room phone and instructed the hotel valet to bring around his rental car.