The Ghost Read Free Page B

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 nineteen nineties. Wrenched out of their Dickensian garrets in Bloomsbury, upsized, downsized, rebranded, renamed, reorganized, modernized, 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 pebble-dash 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 notice board 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 large 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 foulmouthed 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, “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 higher than his superhero chest. Next to him was Lang’s Washington attorney, Sidney Kroll, a bespectacled fortysomething with a delicate pale face, floppy raven hair, and the limpest and dampest handshake I’d been offered since Dippy the Dolphin bobbed up from his pool when I was twelve.
    “And Nick Riccardelli I