The Ghost Page 2

  It was obvious the moment I got outside that another bomb had gone off. At Tottenham Court Road people were surging up above ground from all four exits of the tube station like storm water from a blocked drain. A loudspeaker said something about ‘an incident at Oxford Circus’. It sounded like an edgy romantic comedy: Brief Encounter meets the War on Terror. I carried on up the road, unsure of how I would get home – taxis, like false friends, tending always to vanish at the first sign of trouble. In the window of one of the big electrical shops the crowd watched the same news bulletin relayed simultaneously on a dozen televisions: aerial shots of Oxford Circus, black smoke gushing out of the underground station, thrusts of orange flame. An electronic ticker-tape running across the bottom of the screen announced a suspected suicide bomber, many dead and injured, and gave an emergency number to call. Above the rooftops a helicopter tilted and circled. I could smell the smoke – an acrid, eye-reddening blend of diesel and burning plastic.

  It took me two full hours to walk home, lugging my heavy bag of books – up to Marylebone Road and then westwards towards Paddington. As usual, the entire tube system had been shut down to check for further bombs; so had the main railway stations. The traffic on either side of the wide street was stalled and, on past form, would remain so until evening. (If only Hitler had known he didn’t need a whole air force to paralyse London, I thought: just a revved-up teenager with a bottle of bleach and a bag of weedkiller.) Occasionally a police car or an ambulance would mount the kerb, roar along the pavement and attempt to make progress up a side street.

  I trudged on towards the setting sun.

  It must have been six when I reached my flat. I had the top two floors of a high, stuccoed house in what the residents call Notting Hill and the Post Office stubbornly insists is North Kensington. Used syringes glittered in the gutter; at the halal butchers opposite they did the slaughtering on the premises. It was grim. But from the attic extension which served as my office I had a view across west London which would not have disgraced a skyscraper: rooftops, railway yards, motorway and sky – a vast urban-prairie sky, sprinkled with the lights of aircraft descending towards Heathrow. It was this view which had sold me the apartment, not the estate agent’s gentrification patter – which was just as well, as the rich bourgeoisie have no more returned to this area than they have to downtown Baghdad.

  Kate had already let herself in and was watching the news. Kate: I had forgotten she was coming over for the evening. She was my …? I never knew what to call her. To say she was my girlfriend was absurd: no one the wrong side of thirty has a girlfriend. Partner wasn’t right either, as we didn’t live under the same roof. Lover? How could one keep a straight face? Mistress? Do me a favour. Fiancée? Certainly not. I suppose I ought to have realised it was ominous that forty thousand years of human language had failed to produce a word for our relationship. (Kate isn’t her real name, by the way, but I don’t see why she should be dragged into all this. In any case, it suits her better than the name she does have: she looks like a Kate, if you know what I mean – sensible but sassy, girlish but always willing to be one of the boys. She works in television, but let’s not hold that against her.)

  ‘Thanks for the concerned phone call,’ I said. ‘I’m dead actually, but don’t worry about it.’ I kissed the top of her head, dropped the books on to the sofa and went into the kitchen to pour myself a whisky. ‘The entire tube is down. I’ve had to walk all the way from Covent Garden.’

  ‘Poor darling,’ I heard her say. ‘And you’ve been shopping.’

  I topped up my glass with water from the tap, drank half, then topped it up again with whisky. I remembered I was supposed to have reserved a table at a restaurant. When I went back into the living room she was removing one book after another from the carrier bag. ‘What’s all this?’ she said, looking up at me. ‘You’re not interested in politics.’ And then she realised what was going on, because she was smart – smarter than I was. She knew what I did for a living; she knew I was meeting an agent; and she knew all about McAra. ‘Don’t tell me they want you to ghost his book?’ She laughed. ‘You cannot be serious.’ She tried to make a joke of it – ‘You cannot be serious’ in an American accent, like that tennis player a few years ago – but I could see her dismay. She hated Lang; felt personally betrayed by him. She used to be a party member. I had forgotten that, too.

  ‘It’ll probably come to nothing,’ I said, and drank some more whisky.

  She went back to watching the news, only now with her arms tightly folded, always a warning sign. The tickertape announced that the death toll was seven, and likely to rise.

  ‘But if you’re offered it you’ll do it?’ she asked, without turning to look at me.

  I was spared having to reply by the newsreader announcing that they were cutting live to New York to get the reaction of the former prime minister, and suddenly there was Adam Lang, at a podium marked ‘Waldorf-Astoria’, where it looked as though he had been addressing a lunch. ‘You will all by now have heard the tragic news from London,’ he said, ‘where once again the forces of fanaticism and intolerance …’

  Nothing he uttered that night warrants reprinting. It was almost a parody of what a politician might say after a terrorist attack. Yet watching him, you would have thought his own wife and children had been eviscerated in the blast. This was his genius: to refresh and elevate the clichés of politics by the sheer force of his performance. Even Kate was briefly silenced. Only when he had finished and his largely female, mostly elderly, audience was rising to applaud did she mutter, ‘What’s he doing in New York anyway?’

  ‘Lecturing?’

  ‘Why can’t he lecture here?’

  ‘I suppose because no one here would pay him a hundred thousand dollars a throw.’

  She pressed mute.

  ‘There was a time,’ said Kate slowly, after what felt like a very long silence, ‘when princes taking their countries to war were supposed to risk their lives in battle – you know, lead by example. Now they travel around in bomb-proof cars with armed bodyguards and make fortunes three thousand miles away, while the rest of us are stuck with the consequences of their actions. I just don’t understand you,’ she went on, turning to look at me properly for the first time. ‘All the things I’ve said about him over the past few years – “war criminal” and the rest of it – and you’ve sat there nodding and agreeing. And now you’re going to write his propaganda for him, and make him richer. Did none of it ever mean anything to you at all?’

  ‘Hold on a minute,’ I said. ‘You’re a fine one to talk. You’ve been trying to get an interview with him for months. What’s the difference?’

  ‘What’s the difference? Christ!’ She clenched her hands – those slim white hands I knew so well – and raised them in frustration, half-claw, half-fist. The sinews stood out in her arms. ‘What’s the difference? We want to hold him to account – that’s the difference! To ask him proper questions! About torturing and bombing and lying! Not “How does it feel?” Christ! This is a complete bloody waste of time.’

  She got up then and went into the bedroom to collect the bag she always brought on the nights she planned to stay. I heard her filling it noisily with lipstick, toothbrush, perfume spray. I knew if I went in I could retrieve the situation. She was probably expecting it: we’d had worse rows. I’d have been obliged to concede that she was right, acknowledge my unsuitability for the task, affirm her moral and intellectual superiority in this as in all things. It needn’t even have been a verbal confession: a meaningful hug would probably have been enough to get me a suspended sentence. But the truth was, at that moment, given a choice between an evening of her smug left-wing moralising and the prospect of working with a so-called war criminal, I preferred the war criminal. So I simply carried on staring at the television.

  Sometimes I have a nightmare in which all the women I have ever slept with assemble together. It’s a respectable rather than a huge number – were it a drinks party, say, my
living room could accommodate them quite comfortably. And if, God forbid, this gathering were ever to occur, Kate would be the undisputed guest of honour. She is the one for whom a chair would be fetched, who would have her glass refilled by sympathetic hands, who would sit at the centre of a disbelieving circle as my moral and physical flaws were dissected. She was the one who had stuck it the longest.

  She didn’t slam the door as she left but closed it very carefully. That was stylish, I thought. On the television screen the death toll had just increased to eight.

  Two

  * * *

  A ghost who has only a lay knowledge of the subject will be able to keep asking the same questions as the lay reader, and will therefore open up the potential readership of the book to a much wider audience.

  Ghostwriting

  * * *

  RHINEHART PUBLISHING UK consisted of five ancient firms acquired during a vigorous bout of corporate kleptomania in the nineties. Wrenched out of their Dickensian garrets in Bloomsbury, upsized, downsized, rebranded, renamed, reorganised, modernised and merged, they had finally been dumped in Hounslow, in a steel-and-smoked-glass office block with all its pipes on the outside. It nestled among the pebbledash housing estates like an abandoned spacecraft after a fruitless mission to find intelligent life.

  I arrived, with professional punctuality, five minutes before noon, only to discover the main door locked. I had to buzz for entry. A noticeboard in the foyer announced that the terrorism alert was ORANGE/HIGH. Through the darkened glass I could see the security men in their dingy aquarium checking me on a monitor. When I finally got inside I had to turn out my pockets and pass through a metal-detector.

  Quigley was waiting for me by the lifts.

  ‘Who’re you expecting to bomb you?’ I asked. ‘Random House?’

  ‘We’re publishing Lang’s memoirs,’ replied Quigley in a stiff voice. ‘That alone makes us a target, apparently. Rick’s already upstairs.’

  ‘How many’ve you seen?’

  ‘Five. You’re the last.’

  I knew Roy Quigley fairly well – well enough to know he disapproved of me. He must have been about fifty, tall and tweedy. In a happier era he would have smoked a pipe and offered tiny advances to minor academics over long lunches in Soho. Now his midday meal was a plastic tray of salad taken at his desk overlooking the M4 and he received his orders direct from the head of sales and marketing, a girl of about sixteen. He had three children in private schools he couldn’t afford. As the price of survival he’d actually been obliged to start taking an interest in popular culture: to wit, the lives of various footballers, supermodels and foul-mouthed comedians, whose names he pronounced carefully and whose customs he studied in the tabloids with scholarly detachment, as if they were remote Micronesian tribespeople. I’d pitched him an idea the year before, the memoirs of a TV magician who had – of course! – been abused in childhood, but who had used his skill as an illusionist to conjure up a new life, etc., etc. He’d turned it down flat. The book had gone straight to number one: I Came, I Sawed, I Conquered. He still bore a grudge.

  ‘I have to tell you,’ he said, as we rose to the penthouse floor, ‘that I don’t think you’re the right man for this assignment.’

  ‘Then it’s a good job it’s not your decision, Roy.’

  Oh yes, I had Quigley’s measure right enough. His title was UK Group Editor-in-Chief, which meant he had all the authority of a dead cat. The man who really ran the global show was waiting for us in the boardroom: John Maddox, chief executive of Rhinehart Inc., a big, bull-shouldered New Yorker with alopecia. His bald head glistened under the strip lighting like a massive varnished egg. As a young man he’d acquired a wrestler’s physique in order (according to Publishers Weekly) to tip out the window anyone who stared too long at his scalp. I made sure my gaze never rose further than his superhero chest. Next to him was Lang’s Washington attorney, Sidney Kroll, a bespectacled forty-something with a delicate pale face, floppy raven hair and the limpest, dampest handshake I’d been offered since Dippy the Dolphin bobbed up from his pool when I was twelve.

  ‘And Nick Riccardelli I think you know,’ said Quigley, completing the introductions with just a hint of a shudder. My agent, who was wearing a shiny grey shirt and a thin red leather tie, winked up at me.

  ‘Hi, Rick,’ I said.

  I felt nervous as I took my seat beside him. The room was lined, Gatsby-like, with immaculate unread hardcover books. Maddox sat with his back to the window. He laid his massive, hairless hands on the glass-topped table, as if to prove he had no intention of reaching for a weapon just yet, and said, ‘I gather from Rick you’re aware of the situation and that you know what we’re looking for. So perhaps you could tell us exactly what you think you’d bring to this project.’

  ‘Ignorance,’ I said brightly, which at least had the benefit of shock value, and before anyone could interrupt I launched into the little speech I’d rehearsed in the taxi coming over. ‘You know my track record. There’s no point my trying to pretend I’m something I’m not. I’ll be completely honest. I don’t read political memoirs. So what?’ I shrugged. ‘Nobody does. But actually that’s not my problem.’ I pointed at Maddox. ‘That’s your problem.’

  ‘Oh please,’ said Quigley quietly.

  ‘And let me be even more recklessly honest,’ I went on. ‘Rumour has it you paid ten million dollars for this book. As things stand, how much of that d’you think you’re going to see back? Two million? Three? That’s bad news for you, and that’s especially bad news,’ I said, turning to Kroll, ‘for your client. Because for him this isn’t about money. This is about reputation. This is Adam Lang’s opportunity to speak directly to history, to get his case across. The last thing he needs is to produce a book that nobody reads. How will it look if his life story ends up on the remainder tables? But it doesn’t have to be this way.’

  I know in retrospect what a huckster I sounded. But this was pitch-talk, remember – which, like declarations of undying love in a stranger’s bedroom at midnight, shouldn’t necessarily be held against you the next morning. Kroll was smiling to himself, doodling on his yellow pad. Maddox was staring hard at me. I took a breath.

  ‘The fact is,’ I continued, ‘a big name alone doesn’t sell a book. We’ve all learned that the hard way. What sells a book – or a movie, or a song – is heart.’ I believe I may even have thumped my chest at this point. ‘And that’s why political memoir is the black hole of publishing. The name outside the tent may be big but everyone knows that once they’re inside they’re just going to get the same old tired show, and who wants to pay twenty-five dollars for that? You’ve got to put in some heart, and that’s what I do for a living. And whose story has more heart than the guy who starts from nowhere and ends up running a country?’

  I leaned forwards. ‘You see, here’s the joke: a leader’s autobiography ought to be more interesting than most memoirs, not less. So I see my ignorance about politics as an advantage. I cherish my ignorance, quite frankly. Besides, Adam Lang doesn’t need any help from me with the politics of this book – he’s a political genius. What he does need, in my humble opinion, is the same thing a movie star needs, or a baseball player, or a rock star: an experienced collaborator who knows how to ask him the questions which will draw out his heart.’

  There was a silence. I was trembling. Rick gave my knee a reassuring pat under the table. ‘Nicely done.’

  ‘What utter balls,’ said Quigley.

  ‘Think so?’ asked Maddox, still looking at me. He said it in a neutral voice, but if I had been Quigley, I would have detected danger.

  ‘Oh, John, of course,’ said Quigley, with all the dismissive scorn of four generations of Oxford scholars behind him. ‘Adam Lang is a world historical figure, and his autobiography is going to be a world publishing event. A piece of history, in fact. It shouldn’t be approached like a …’ he ransacked his well-stocked mind for a suitable analogy but finished lamely ‘… a feature for a celebr
ity magazine.’

  There was another silence. Beyond the tinted windows the traffic was backing up along the motorway. Rainwater rippled the gleam of the stationary headlights. London still hadn’t returned to normal after the bomb.

  ‘It seems to me,’ said Maddox, in the same slow, quiet voice, his big pink mannequin’s hands still resting on the table, ‘that I have entire warehouses full of “world publishing events” that I somehow can’t figure out how to get off my hands. And a heck of a lot of people read celebrity magazines. What do you think, Sid?’

  For a few seconds Kroll merely carried on smiling to himself and doodling. I wondered what he found so funny. ‘Adam’s position on this is very straightforward,’ he said eventually. (Adam: he tossed the first name as casually into the conversation as he might a coin into a beggar’s cap.) ‘He takes this book very seriously – it’s his testament, if you will. He wants to meet his contractual obligations. And he wants it to be a commercial success. He’s therefore more than happy to be guided by you, John, and by Marty also, within reason. Obviously, he’s still very upset by what happened to Mike, who was irreplaceable.’

  ‘Obviously.’ We all made the appropriate noises.

  ‘Irreplaceable,’ he repeated. ‘And yet – he has to be replaced.’ He looked up, pleased with his drollery, and at that instant I knew there was no horror the world could offer – no war, no genocide, no famine, no childhood cancer – to which Sidney Kroll would not see the funny side. ‘Adam can certainly appreciate the benefits of trying someone entirely different. In the end, it all comes down to a personal bond.’ His spectacles flashed in the strip lights as he scrutinised me. ‘Do you work out, maybe?’ I shook my head. ‘Pity. Adam likes to work out.’