“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.