“Clearly your project was designed to humiliate Wyatt. You couldn’t resist gloating over dinner on the first night, and Wyatt was mortified by what you’d told him. He yelled at you that what you were doing would ruin him. Then he tried to buy you out. I assume you declined?”
“The price of preserving literature isn’t one that can be paid by men like him.”
“Exactly. So the question becomes: what could you possibly have done that would ruin Wyatt Lloyd? The answer is simple. You’ve invited three people on this train journey: two art curators and a book reviewer. All three of them are reading
If you’re playing along at home, you’ll know Wolfgang was at 94 mentions, and Erica was on 12. Added together as per my rules for aliases, that puts him on a certain magic number.
“Oh, you’re much better than Alan,” Wolfgang said with a smirk.
“That’s why you have a Gemini pen,” I said.
Wolfgang made a great act of pulling off an invisible mask from his chin to his forehead. His eyes sparked. “You’re looking at Erica Mathison. Wyatt didn’t know it was me. I set it up through a company, with an international account and a PO box for him to send contracts or whatever.”
“Or a pen.”
“Indeed. My plan was to sell him the most basic, abjectly dreadfully written pulp”—his wet lips popped with disgust on the P—“and he lapped it up. Like a dog. Then he made it into one of the year’s biggest bestsellers. Proving my point: true art is undervalued, and commercial art can be concocted.”
“You didn’t exactly mind the commercial aspect, though, did you? Simone told me your sales are likely miserable. And yet you pulled up to Berrimah in a two-hundred-thousand-dollar Jaguar. You’re not exactly Robin Hood.”
“The spoils are part of the point,” he said, sneering. “It’s irony. I can explain it to you if you like.”
“You can justify it however you want. For the record, I think you’re a hypocrite. But you are a man of convictions, and the point of the experiment was always to unveil it. That was what you were telling Wyatt over dinner: who you really were. You were also telling him that you were going public. That’s why you invited these influential tastemakers, people whose opinions you respected. You let them in on the joke, signed their books, basked in their adulation of your genius.” The comments that had so appalled Simone, from the supposedly respected professionals over such a trashy novel—
I paused, glanced around the room, then turned back to Wolfgang. “But none of that’s
Erica Mathison was supposed to be a huge middle finger to the establishment; she was supposed to take them down a peg. Veronica Blythe had said this herself to Simone:
“Erica Mathison isn’t real. But here’s the kicker: neither are the books she wrote.”
At this, Wolfgang’s smugness dropped for the first time. He knew I had him all figured out.
“It was never as simple as writing a book that you consider beneath you. You created