The Salinger Contract (21 page)

W
ell, you screwed me, pal,” Conner told me with a heavy sigh. “You screwed me big-time.”

I had wondered when or if word would get back to Conner that I had written his story but had sold it to Shascha. I wondered what he would think if and when he learned no one would ever read it aside from Shascha, Courtney, and me.

For the first few days after I returned to Indiana from my trip to New York, I felt nervous and had the distinct sensation that cars were following me, but I may have just imagined it. After Shascha's check cleared, I turned my attention to more pressing matters, such as walking the dog, dealing with Ramona's and Beatrice's ear infections, getting one or both kids out of the house so that Sabine could write some more job applications, and trying to figure out what we would do with our lives. At least now, with the money Shascha had paid me, we had time to try to figure that out.

I was in Chicago. My kids and I were visiting my mother for Fourth of July weekend while Sabine was in Bloomington to oversee yet another open house. Ramona was with my mom at the North Park Village Nature Center and I was pushing Beatrice's stroller through Lincoln Park Zoo when I became conscious of a presence behind me. The presence became considerably more noticeable as I approached the coyote habitat. Beatrice had fallen asleep shortly after we got out of the car, so I hadn't really been looking at animals, just pushing the stroller so that she would stay asleep.

The coyote was small—a good deal smaller than my own dog. His fur looked coarse and reddish-brown, and I was staring into his indifferent ice-blue eyes when Conner approached me; his hair was nearly all white now. He was wearing a pressed white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and new blue jeans. He carried a black backpack over one shoulder.

“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 still 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.”