Janson crossed the room, a walking shadow. He hadn’t shaved, but the stubble was as much a part of his face as anything else.
He was probably the kind of guy who grew scruff within seconds after shaving, just to cover his face a little, Adam thought. Not just to make him look tough, but to keep something in. He had the hardest green eyes Adam had ever seen. They reminded him of his father’s.
“Please. Sit.” Adam beckoned Janson forward, indicating the smaller seat on the far side of the desk.
“Tha-” Janson cleared his throat. “Thank you,” he said, and sat down. His voice was rich and deep; it had a full rainbow of colors in it. Adam found himself instantly charmed.
“I like you,” he said.
“Excuse me?” Janson replied. He didn’t look shocked (Adam bet it took a hell of a lot more than that to shock a guy like Janson), just perplexed. And more than a little out of his element. Adam tried again.
“I like you. I like your writing. I haven’t read it all, but I took home the first half of your book as a weekend read and I like your style. Reminds me of…” Adam stopped for a minute, studying the Lichtenstein hanging behind Janson’s head. “Reminds me of Faulkner. I’m intrigued. I want to read more, I want to know more. You’ve got a rough style that’s not meant to be polished. I like that. I like the… animal feel. Where’d you get it?”
Janson frowned, biting his lip and pulling it to the side. Adam could see something moving in him like wind through a chime. Discomfort, maybe. “My mother was a schoolteacher,” Janson finally said. “Had me reading early and typing by high school. I had a year of junior college before the war.” He was proud of that. Proud, yet not asking for approval.
“I have always thought,” Adam replied, “that formal schooling is vastly overrated.”
Janson flicked his head back slightly in response, and Adam could detect a slight edge in his eyes. Suddenly he didn’t like him quite so much.
“You want me to cut the bullshit and tell you why you’re here, don’t you?” Adam asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you know what I do?”
“No.”
“I’m not really an agent like you’d think of an agent. More of a packager. I put deals together. Books. Movies. People. I like your style, I like your writing. I already told you that. I need the end of your book, then I need to run it through a circuit of editors and producers.”
Janson watched Adam attentively, chewing on the skin underneath one of his fingernails.
“Now, here’s what I can do for you,” Adam continued. “I can run this story through my circuit, and if it goes, it goes. Not small time. I’m talking book deal, publishing, hard and soft cover-I don’t work with anything without a hard release. I’m talking film rights, and we can negotiate for screenwriting credit. It depends what you come up with, how much the studios like it and you, and if you can give them what they want. A publishing deal can get you from twenty-five thousand to a quarter of a million. That used to be more than you could expect for a first-time writer, but first-time writers are hot. Unless you’re John Grisham or Jane Austin, established writers are having a tough time at the movies right now. They’re looking for hot young writers. You’re not exactly young, but you’re new and that’s the biggest word from LA to New York. Film rights go, they can go seven figures.”
Adam watched Janson’s eyes widen. I have him, he thought. He’s mine and only mine until I decide if I’m using him. He continued, tasting the words as they rolled from his tongue. “Now I deal mostly with film rights, but if those go, you can expect a publishing deal. What publisher isn’t going to want to get a book if we get you on line with a big studio? None. More money for you, more money for them.” He paused and let the thoughts sink in, fumes settling over a softly lit meadow.
Adam cleared his throat once. Sharply. “Now before you go picking out the color of your new BMW, I’m telling you now that none of this could go. When it’s all said and done, I’m making you no promises, no guarantees. But I will tell you this.” He leaned forward in his chair. “I want the end of the book, I want you to release the whole thing so I can have people ‘officially’ read it and so I can move it around my office and through my contacts. I want you to sign this-customary procedure. Leaves you with the rights to all profit, the ability to decide your own contract with us or with anyone else. It just gives us the right to read it and says you’re aware we may have other properties with similar themes.”
Janson leaned forward and signed.
You idiot, Adam thought. I could be taking your house right now and you wouldn’t know the fucking difference.
In fact, Adam was moving through proper legal channels just as he’d claimed. He was too far along in his career to risk “borrowing” material, but the simple scrawl of Janson’s signature on the form infuriated him. The trust in simply giving up his name like that, in relinquishing it.
But he had him now, and had him just where he wanted him. He had the full story (and the only copy from the appearance of the first two-thirds of it), and all the time in the world to decide if he wanted to make it hot.
Adam took the form back across his huge desk. “Great,” he said, forcing a smile, though he didn’t feel much like smiling at all. “We’ll be in touch. I’ll have Scott pick up the end of your manuscript from your buddy at your… dinner place. Any questions?”
Janson studied a dirty fingernail. “Yeah.” His eyes were glazed, distant. He raised them. “Are we having lunch?”
“No. Sorry. I have a lunch meeting later. I’m afraid you’ll have to pick something up on your way back,” Adam said. He smiled handsomely and his eyes flashed to the door.
HIS FEET ACHED from walking by the time he got home, but he was good at ignoring pain, and he thudded heavily up the stairs to his tiny room. The meeting hadn’t gone too badly. He remembered the manic nausea that had washed over him when Adam introduced those numbers, that money, so casually. Twenty-five thousand dollars to a quarter of a million. Janson couldn’t think in numbers that big, couldn’t quite get a handle around them and put them somewhere that showed what they were. He didn’t even try.
The lowest number was more than his father had saved in his entire life, let alone earned in a single year. But a lifetime of blue bruises that turned a sickly black was enough to wash some of the green from the dollars floating through his head.
Just one thousand dollars, he thought. That’s not much, not much given the numbers these men talked. Could get me far and away from here and put me up for a few nights in a new town-a town, not a city-until I found work. Somewhere I could see the sky, not just a translucent gray fog, and trees glancing from pools of water standing as still as sleeping shadows. And cool nights with stars laid out like holes clear through to heaven.
He closed his eyes and thought for a minute, his mind catching the image of a wood fire burning in the country somewhere, of smoke moving through the night air along lines as soft as the curves of a woman.
There were things he could still do. Not many, not skills, but there were things, and a check with four digits on it could get him to a place where he could show just what those things were. Once he didn’t have to bend his back to keeping the door shut, he could bend it to other tasks. And leave the city with its one check a month, its stamps for meals, its pitiful offering of a lifeline which did not include a life.
He swung the door open to find the typewriter staring at him, a metal eye in the middle of the stark room. The odor of his sweat drifted to him as the draft sucked the stale air past him into the hallway. The typewriter watched him expectantly. Not yet, he told it with his eyes. Not yet. He fell on his mattress, exhausted, and watched the rotating fan overhead.