As he ruminated on this, finishing up his sandwich, the outer door opened and Paul Giverney walked by Jimmy's office, tossing him a wink and a salute.

Mort was always saying what an "arrogant b.a.s.t.a.r.d" Paul Giverney was. As Jimmy couldn't imagine anyone more arrogant than Mort himself, he could only question this a.s.sessment. Mort was the least self-aware person Jimmy had ever encountered. Publishers hated him because he gouged them for such huge advances, but Jimmy had no sympathy for the publishers, not a sc.r.a.p; if Random House (and all its little Randomettes) were willing to pay these over-the-moon advances to get a writer they wanted, or else engage in an auction-a p.i.s.sing contest to see who had the biggest set of bra.s.s ones-then why blame Mort for going around with a mask and a gun?

Paul Giverney could afford being as much of a b.a.s.t.a.r.d as he liked because he was on the top tier of authors who breathed the rarefied air of seven-digit advances. Giverney's last two-book contract had been for $6.2 million. His current contract with Mackenzie-Haack, for $8 million, was as yet unsigned and would remain so "until certain conditions were met."

"What the h.e.l.l conditions?" Mort had asked Paul awhile back.

"You don't need to know, Mort," Paul had said.

"What? I'm your agent for G.o.d's sakes."

"All the more reason."

This enigmatic estimate of Mort's worth was followed by Paul's thumbs-up, not to Mort but to Jimmy, who'd brought in the promotion plans for Paul's new book, Don't Go There.

It was this book that Jimmy was reading now at his desk. It had taken him completely by surprise. He had always thought Paul Giverney was better than he was given credit for being, but with this last book the writer had hit the ball way, way out of the genre ballpark. Yes, it was still a page-turner, a sinfully readable book, even more so than the others, at least the two Mort Durban had been agent for. Something was going on in this new book that certainly bore thinking about, something ineffably sad. It was more than anxiety (and why not fright? If familiar surroundings had turned foreign, why wasn't this woman scared as h.e.l.l? She seemed merely confused and questioning).

Jimmy loved the book. If he had been Paul's agent, he would have swept aside the extra million advance and forced its publisher, Queeg and Hyde, to produce a promotional campaign that would take the book to another level. People should realize just how good Paul was.

"How come you have this rep?" Jimmy asked. "For being, well . . ."

"A son of a b.i.t.c.h?" Paul grinned. "Because that's what I want people to think, some of them. You'd be surprised how it cuts through the c.r.a.p, publishing being a particularly c.r.a.p-filled occupation. Or maybe you don't agree."

This conversation had taken place a few days ago when Paul had suggested coffee. They'd gone to the coffee shop just outside the entrance to the ma.s.sive building where Mort Durban had his suite of offices.

"I agree." Jimmy poured another ounce of sugar in his coffee. "In the five years I've been doing this, I can count on one hand the people who didn't make me want to head for the shower."

"Why do you stay, then? You're too good for this life; you're too good to be working for a sc.u.mbag like Mort."

"The money."

Paul shook his head. "Uh-uh. Not you. You must be in hock to someone for something. Wife? Kids? Private schools? Barney's? Mob? Tony Soprano?"

Jimmy laughed. "All those things except the mob and Tony. I guess it would be hard on the family to get along on a lot less."

"Why would it? That's what you've been getting along on."

Jimmy was astonished that anyone, much less Paul Giverney, could see into him so well. He was silent, turning this over. Then he said, "I write poetry."

"I know." Paul pulled a narrow book out of the inside pocket of his mac. "My wife wants your autograph. Molly, that's her name." He slid the book across the table.

Jimmy was stunned. He opened the book and looked down at the t.i.tle page, seeing it as if for the first time. He remembered that time, ten years ago, his spirit soaring when he'd opened the package that held the ten copies sent from the publisher. It's why he could understand how important publication was to writers. It wasn't money, or at least it didn't start out to be. It was seeing your words in print. He took the pen Paul reached toward him.

"Molly loves poetry; she reads most of the quarterlies, the little magazines. She especially likes yours. A book of poetry published by FSG-that's no small matter."

"It seems small to me." No, it didn't, not really. Small only by comparison with novelists like Paul. He handed back the pen.

"It shouldn't. You're just too used to book publishing."

"Where did she find the book, though? It's been out of print for years."

"From your publisher. She has a friend there. It's one of the two or three really good publishers."

"Why don't you go there? Why Mackenzie-Haack?"

"FSG would never publish me. Too commercial."

"FSG publishes commercial stuff. Best-sellers. Don't they publish Scott Turow?"

"He's not that kind of commercial. I'm more the John Grisham kind of commercial." Arms folded on the dull Formica top, he leaned toward Jimmy. "What you should do, Jimmy, is go to a place like Yaddo or the MacDowell Colony. You really should."

Jimmy's shrug suggested the uselessness of this. "I wish I could."

"You can. MacDowell's stints go for as short a time as a month. Imagine not having anybody bother you-no claims on your time, you can write all day, no Mort, no wife, no one breathing down your neck. You can't get away for one f.u.c.king month?"

"Somehow the bills have got to be paid."

Again, Paul leaned toward him. "Listen to me: I have a wife and a seven-year-old daughter, both of whom I really love. But if I was trapped in a system that didn't allow me to write, I'd leave. There's a great line Robert De Niro got off in a movie a few years ago: 'Allow nothing to be in your life that you cannot walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner.' That's good advice, Jimmy."

Jimmy stared. "h.e.l.l it is. You're telling me you could leave your family in thirty seconds?" He shook his head. "No, you wouldn't."

"I would." Paul nodded.

"That's pretty d.a.m.ned ruthless."

"I know. Could you understand it any better if I were, say, Salinger or Thomas Pynchon? Some writer we consider truly valuable?"

Jimmy thought about this. "I see your point. But I'm pretty sure I couldn't do it. I don't mean from some high moral plane, just that I'd have a failure of nerve."

"Okay. But right now, there's no heat"-Paul tipped his head backward-"around the corner. You still owe it to yourself."

"Those places-you have to apply far in advance . . ."

"So apply. You can do that without ever leaving."

There was a silence. Jimmy said, "Could we talk about your book? I think it's enigmatic, to say the least."

"Isn't that what you'd expect of a thriller, for lack of a better genre?"

"No. I don't mean in that sense. Maybe I should say 'ambiguous. ' My question is: Is her environment-like the pharmacy and the garden-unreal, or is she?"

Paul laughed. "That's very good, Jimmy."

Jimmy opened the book to the point he'd stopped reading it.

"Even along the moonlit paths of the maze there were striking differences: the white iron bench should have been sitting not at this turning but at another, though she would have been hard put to say exactly where.

"Ambiguous, at least. I was going along with her until I came to this garden business. So is it she or the world around?"

Paul shrugged. "Are those the only alternatives?" At Jimmy's frown, he went on: "They could both be."

"Unreal, you mean?"

"Or, possibly, real."

"Real? Come on, Paul." Jimmy smiled, realizing he was no longer intimidated by Paul Giverney's fame and fortune and felt thankful for it. "It can't be both. How can it? In the beginning section, when she goes into what she had last seen as the drugstore and now finds is an old-fashioned pharmacy-it must be one or the other, mustn't it?"

"Maybe. Maybe not. Read the rest of the book. It's way too early to wonder about the nature of reality." He leaned across the table. "You don't want to be an agent; that's obvious. I hate agents; they're working both sides of the street. They want to retain the publishers' goodwill, so they're not working a hundred percent for their writers. It really makes me mad, that does. At least with real estate agents, if one advertises himself as a 'buyer's' agent, he isn't around sucking up to the seller the way agents keep sucking up to publishers. They should be acting as guides through this swamp; they should be monks, not pimps." Paul stopped and took a sip of coffee. He held up the signed book, Lapses. "This is what you should be doing, Jimmy."

"My wife-"

Paul was shaking his head the moment the excuse started out of Jimmy's mouth. "It's not down to her; you know it isn't. Or your six kids. Or keeping your dog in Kibbles."

"Yeah, well, that's easy for you to say-"

"Oh, come on, Jimmy. Not that old dodge, that poor man, rich man s.h.i.t. Imagine how you'd feel if I were, say, an oncologist telling you you had only a couple of months to live. You'd be shocked out of your mind not just by death but by the realization you'd squandered a big part of your life. Think about that. It's my theory that none of us really believes he's going to die. We think we believe it, given all the evidence, but we really don't. Freud said a man can't imagine his own death. Probably, we think there's something more due us and maybe that's the reason immortality is such a popular idea. What we really want is another chance, and we think we're going to get it-the chance to straighten out everything, to get it right."

"What about you? Wouldn't you have any regrets? Such as being sorry you squandered your talent for so many years?" His voice was rising along with his anxiety at being found out, at having what he feared was his cowardice exposed.

This charge surprised Paul. "Have I?"

"Well, look at Don't Go There. You know you're one h.e.l.l of a good writer. Why do you do this genre stuff?"

"You like this new book?"

"h.e.l.l, yes, I like it! It infuriates me that it's going to be lumped with writers like Dwight Staines."

Paul laughed. "Doesn't make me very happy, either."

"I'm not saying I don't like your other books. But this one"-he held up the new book-"this one is beyond good-"

Paul interrupted. "Why aren't you my agent?"

Jimmy, poised to continue his rant, fell back in the booth as if Paul had whipped out a gun and shot him. "Me?" He stared at Paul wide eyed, and then he laughed. "Ha! Mort would never let that happen."

"He wouldn't have any choice, would he?"

"He could make my life miserable."

"Oh, really? You mean more miserable than you're making it all by yourself?"

Jimmy reddened and smiled. Then he said, "He could just make up some excuse to fire me."

"Good. Then you could go to Yaddo and write poetry. Or wait a minute: I just remembered there's a writers' retreat upstate that'll let people go there for a weekend to see how they like it. Now, don't tell me you couldn't get away for one weekend."

"I suppose I could. What's it called?"

"Birches." Paul was writing down the address.

Jimmy smiled. "Birches. I like that. 'When I see birches bend to left and right-' "

Paul looked up. " ' . . . I like to think some boy's been swinging them.' "

"You like Robert Frost?"

"Of course I do; who doesn't? Do this, Jimmy. One weekend. If you hate the setup, that's that. Tell you what-be my agent for a year, rake in enough money to quit for at least two years. I'll tell Mort it's only temporary, make up some reason as to why I'm doing it."

"There is a reason: altruism."

Paul snorted as he motioned to the waitress. He said, "No. I doubt I've ever done anything for that reason-at least not wholly, maybe not even largely. No. I want to see something."

The waitress put down the check.

"I want to see how far you go."

Jimmy regarded Paul quizzically. "How far I go?"

Paul nodded, putting a bill down for the check. "That's right. How far you go."

TWENTY.

Paul Giverney didn't like the sound of it. He didn't like the sound of it at all. He slapped his cell phone shut and slouched in one of the cheap molded-plastic chairs that were kept on the roof for tenants in case they wanted to party up there.

Sitting in his overcoat, Paul had been flinging darts at the dartboard he moved from living room to study to roof whenever the dart mood came over him. Darts were as good as any alcoholic's booze: to celebrate success, to sh.o.r.e up failure, to be a live wire at a party, to be isolated on a beach, to- In other words, anyplace, anytime. In a write-up in one of the newspapers or magazines-there were so many of them-the journalist had suggested darts might permit him to tap into his creative power and solve writing problems. Paul had told him that all darts did was keep your mind on the f.u.c.king board.

The dartboard was leaning against the roof's bal.u.s.trade and every time he got up to collect the darts he would treat himself to a view of Manhattan against the black sky. For Paul, it was always a treat; he was besotted with love of the MetLife and the Chrysler buildings. He couldn't write if he didn't have this knock-out view of Manhattan always at his bidding. It was especially strange since he had never set one of his books here. People, fans, were always asking him where he did most of his writing and he would answer (with a kind of pride) "right here in New York." They thumbed this unexciting news through the book of places in their heads and came up disappointed. That wouldn't inspire anybody. They wanted a destination more exotic to take away with the book he'd just signed (not to forget standing in line for an hour to get it). Yes, New York as an answer saddened them, saddened the smiles on their faces, so that he leaned closer across the little table, engaged their eyes, and told them the truth: "It's the only place I can write." But this clear admission of a New York neurosis didn't get the smile back. The fan only took this metaphorically-the writer is New York-when he'd meant it literally.

He had even been forced to go to a psychiatrist whom a friend of Paul's had recommended who wasn't in any better mental shape after seeing this doctor for three years. He was still the way he'd been all of his preceding forty years. Paul's friend swore by Dr. Nutley (despite the name), said he was downtown and down to earth. A great guy.

Nutley was downtown, all right (Twenty-second Street), but as for the "down to earth" bit, Paul could only wonder, what earth? And Paul would never have been able to describe him as a "guy." Nutley, with his tweeds and his beard, his casual erudition, his quoting of learned books and articles, his determination that the transference must get under way tout de suite or what were they all here for? The good doctor was not one of the guys. Insofar as Paul's problem was concerned, Dr. Nutley made no suggestions, no diagnoses, gave no advice. You could say that Nutley was the most perfect example of noninvolvement with another human being that you were ever likely to find this side of Transylvania. Paul went along with this for some months. h.e.l.l, he could afford it. He could probably afford making his own psychiatrist: putting some young swab through Johns Hopkins Medical School, then a four-year tour of duty in the psychoa.n.a.lytical arena, then get him a duplex in the Upper Eighties, Eighty-seven, Eighty-eight, near the Metropolitan Museum-which Paul had often found very therapeutic, even if you couldn't tell a Vuillard from a Monet. Get him established and then go to him for problems such as the inability to write outside of Manhattan.

For even though Paul would say "right here in New York," his writing geography was bound by this even smaller playing field: Manhattan. His childhood had not been contained here; he was from the Midwest. He had lived in Manhattan for only fifteen years and now he knew he could never live anywhere else. Paul considered himself lucky; he had found what people mean by "home."

Paul had met Ned Isaly only twice, the first time at one of those drunken brawls publishers like to throw for books and writers whom the publishers think deserve them, meaning, of course, the best-selling, TBR list writers. The moneyed elite, the Hamptons of writers, the Great Neck, the Back Bay, the Aspen, the Colorado Springs of writers, the Tahoe, the Vail, the Santa Fe of writers; any of the chic and pricey in places-take your pick-those writers. Paul was high on the list of the Flashy Few, this despite his living in nothing more than a two-bedroom-plus-study rental on the edge of Greenwich Village. But then the publishing world didn't know how he lived because it never got invited up.

Paul liked to schmooze at these parties, mostly to see the new arrivals to the list. Whose "debut" novel would be buzzed onto the TBR list? What "genre" novel would be touted as having shot the mystery/thriller/sci-fi genre up to the stratosphere? What commercial book would break the literary gla.s.s ceiling? And what literary novel would push through the commercial floor? That, of course, was the big prayer answered, to publish a book that would pay back millions, and also be reviewed in The New Yorker by John Updike.

Ned Isaly fit none of these categories.

It had been, he supposed, a wretched thing to do and Paul knew he would probably fry in h.e.l.l, but he couldn't get rid of the idea. Actually, it had come out of that long conversation with Ned Isaly at one of these c.o.c.ktail parties.

He could have simply made it all up, but Paul was certain that his own imagination, which had served him so well for years of deadpan genre-noir thrillers-that even he could think of nothing so outrageous as what appeared to be happening. The blackmail angle hadn't really surprised him. Trust Bobby Mackenzie to think of that.