Potboiler

“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.