“Nice of you to join us, General,” he said using the French pronunciation of the title as she took a chair. In private, she was Charlie; before others she was Charles or General, both pronounced with French accents. She wished she weren’t. The nicknames, even the formal nicknames, implied an intimacy that didn’t exist. He’d been kind to her, and she was grateful, but generosity and gratitude were not intimacy. As far as she was concerned, they necessitated the opposite relationship. Especially with him. The youthful man in that old photograph had been reputed to be, if not a wolf, then a dangerous heartbreaker, though she was pretty sure those days were behind him.
The other editors were already seated around the table, restive as racehorses at the starting gate, mentally snorting and pawing the ground in their eagerness to break away from the pack with a surefire bestseller, or at least an enviable quip in their own presentation or a droll jibe at a colleague’s. They got started.
Carl Covington had a biography of Lincoln by a leading scholar.
“Not another one,” Bill Quarrels said.
“One-decade rule,” Carl answered. “If there hasn’t been a biography in ten years, it’s time for a new one. And books about Lincoln sell.”
Walter Price, the sales manager, nodded. “Books about Lincoln sell. So do books about doctors and books about dogs. So what I don’t understand is why none of you geniuses has managed to find a book about Lincoln’s doctor’s dog that I can sell.”
The discussion turned to the author’s previous sales figures, the likely sum for paperback rights (a new phenomenon since the war), and how little the agent would take. Horace didn’t say much, but his nod at the end of the discussion was eloquent. Carl said he’d make an offer.
Bill Quarrels had a novel by a marine who’d fought his way through the Pacific.
“Wait, let me guess,” Carl said. “The author’s name is James Jones.”
“The market for war books has peaked,” Walter warned.
He and Carl had been too old for the war, Bill too young. None of them looked at Horace as they spoke.
They moved on to Faith. She had a first novel about life in a small New England town. It was quiet, she admitted, but beautifully written, and didn’t they publish moneymaking potboilers precisely so they could afford to publish small literary gems like this? No one bothered to answer that particular question, though Charlotte, who’d read the manuscript, seconded Faith’s literary opinion. Horace gave a nod of approval. No one mentioned money. No one had to. Faith had been in the business long enough to know that an appropriate advance for a book like this would be a few hundred dollars.
Charlotte presented a book about the interaction of politics, diplomacy, and art in Renaissance Italy. That met with silence, too. She had what amounted to her own little fiefdom at G&F. Only Horace cared about the books she brought in, unless they were foreign novels that might be banned. Then suddenly everyone wanted to take a look. But this one squeaked through with a nod of approval. Again a paltry advance was taken for granted.
They went on that way for the better part of two hours. Editors presented books, formed alliances, switched sides. The process reminded Charlotte of the papal conclaves she’d read about. Only the white smoke at the end of the meeting was missing.
She had gathered her papers and was starting for the door when Bill Quarrels caught up with her.
“Did you have a chance to look at that novel? The one about the American spy dropped behind the lines in France before the Invasion?”
“Didn’t you get my memo?”
“All you said was that it was incredibly steamy.”
“I said it was steamily incredible. Any spy who spent that much time between the sheets would have been dead twenty-four hours after parachuting in. Forty-eight at the outside.”
He leaned his big body toward her. “Are you speaking from experience?”
She was debating whether to bother answering when it happened. Standing in the doorway with their backs to the conference room, neither of them saw it coming. Horace Field, his massive arms propelling the wheels of his chair, came barreling between them. He missed her by a hair’s breadth but managed to careen over Bill Quarrels’s cordovan-clad right foot. Horace arrived early at meetings because he didn’t like people watching him maneuver his wheelchair, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t skillful at it.
“Ouch,” Bill shouted, and jumped out of the way, too late.
“Sorry, Bill,” Horace called back as he sped down the hallway.
* * *
She hadn’t forgotten the letter she’d tossed in the wastebasket. Now and then during the editorial meeting, she’d found herself thinking about it. She didn’t want to read it, but she knew she would. She wasn’t sure why. She couldn’t erase the past, despite what the woman in the Saks makeup department had promised, but she had no intention of wallowing in it. Still, it didn’t seem right not to read it. She’d resolved to fish it out of the wastebasket as soon as she got back to her office, but she hadn’t counted on finding Vincent Aiello, the head of production, waiting in her cubicle.
“You know that mystery of yours set in Morocco?”
For a moment she thought he might actually have read one of the books he steered through production and wanted to tell her he liked it.
“We got bound books,” he said.
“They’re early. That’s good.”
“Not so good. They’re missing the last page.”
“This is a joke, right?”
He shrugged.
“It’s a mystery, Vincent. Not that it wouldn’t be a disaster if it weren’t. But readers do tend to want to find out who did it.”
“Look on the bright side. Now it’s a do-it-yourself whodunit. We could be starting a whole new trend.”
“The entire print run?”
“Every last copy.”
“This is coming out of your budget, not mine.”
“To hell with budgets. I’m taking out a contract to have the binders’ kneecaps broken.” He smirked, as if daring her to believe the rumors about him.
* * *
She was standing on Madison Avenue, waiting for the bus and brooding about the entire print run of the unsolved mystery, when she remembered the letter. For a moment, she thought of going back, then looked at her watch and decided against it. She didn’t mind leaving Vivi alone for a few hours after school, especially if Hannah Field had finished seeing patients for the day and lured Vivi in for her homemade cakes and cookies, but she did like to get home in time to make dinner and sit down to it properly. She’d fetch the letter out first thing in the morning. And if this was one of the nights the cleaning crew came through and emptied the baskets, so much the worse. It wasn’t as if she had any intention of answering it. In fact, so much the better. The matter would be taken out of her hands.
Two
She stepped down from the bus and started along Ninety-First Street, careful of her footing in the gathering dusk. The rain had stopped, but a carpet of wet leaves made the sidewalk slippery. Light spilled out of the wide bay windows and intricately worked fanlights of the brownstones and lay shimmering in the puddles. Occasionally she stopped on the street and stood looking into those brilliantly lit rooms. The life going on within them intrigued her. The aura of safety mesmerized her, though she knew that was a mirage. As she stood there now, the faint aroma of a wood fire made her nostalgic, though she couldn’t have said for what. Certainly not for the acrid stench of burning papers. Then it came to her. The scent reminded her of a fire burning in the hearth on a damp night at Grandmère’s house in Concarneau. She and her mother had always wanted to go south for the summer holidays—one of the few issues on which she and her mother were arrayed against her father—but her father had been adamant about visiting his own mother. The older Charlotte had got, the more bored and sullen she’d grown during those weeks in Brittany, but what wouldn’t she give for them now, for herself, and for Vivi. She imagined the two of them walking down the long poplar-lined road and saw Vivi break into a run at her first glimpse of the sea. She straightened her shoulders against the image and started walking again.