The Ghost

He frowned. “I can’t quite put my finger on it. The way no one’s allowed to see anything, for a start. And that fellow Kroll makes me shiver. And poor old Mike McAra, of course. I met him when we signed the deal two years ago. He didn’t strike me as the suicidal type. Rather the reverse. He was the sort who specializes in making other people want to kill themselves, if you know what I mean.”
    “Hard?”
    “Hard, yes. Lang would be smiling away, and there would be this thug next to him with eyes like a snake’s. I suppose you’ve got to have someone like that when you’re in Lang’s position.”
    We reached the ground floor and stepped out into the lobby. “You can pick up a taxi round the corner,” said Quigley, and for that one small, mean gesture—leaving me to walk in the rain rather than calling me a cab on the company’s account—I hoped he’d rot. “Tell me,” he said suddenly, “when did it become fashionable to be stupid? That’s the thing I really don’t understand. The Cult of the Idiot. The Elevation of the Moron. Our two biggest-selling novelists—the actress with the tits and that ex-army psycho—have never written a word of fiction. Did you know that?”
    “You’re talking like an old man, Roy,” I told him. “People have been complaining that standards are slipping ever since Shakespeare started writing comedies.”
    “Yes, but now it’s really happened, hasn’t it? It was never like this before.”
    I knew he was trying to goad me—the ghostwriter to the stars off to produce the memoirs of an ex–prime minister—but I was too full of myself to care. I wished him well in his retirement and set off across the lobby swinging that damned yellow plastic bag.

    IT MUST HAVE TAKEN me half an hour to find a ride back into town. I had only a very hazy idea of where I was. The roads were wide, the houses small. There was a steady, freezing drizzle. My arm was aching from carrying Kroll’s manuscript. Judging by the weight, I reckoned it must have been close on a thousand pages. Who was his client? Tolstoy? Eventually I stopped at a bus shelter in front of a greengrocer’s and a funeral parlor. Wedged into its metal frame was the card of a minicab firm.
    The journey home took almost an hour and I had plenty of time to take out the manuscript and study it. The book was called One Out of Many . It was the memoir of some ancient U.S. senator, famous only for having kept on breathing for about a hundred and fifty years. By any normal measure of tedium it was off the scale—up, up, and away, beyond boring into some oxygen-starved stratosphere of utter nullity. The car was overheated and smelled of stale takeaways. I began to feel nauseous. I put the manuscript back into the bag and wound down the window. The fare was forty pounds.
    I had just paid the driver and was crossing the pavement toward my flat, head down into the rain, searching for my keys, when I felt someone touch me lightly on the shoulder. I turned and walked into a wall, or was hit by a truck—that was the feeling—some great iron force slammed into me, and I fell backward, into the grip of a second man. (I was told afterward there were two of them, both in their twenties. One had been hanging round the entrance to the basement flat, the other appeared from nowhere and grabbed me from behind.) I crumpled, felt the gritty wet stone of the gutter against my cheek, and gasped and sucked and cried like a baby. My fingers must have clasped the plastic bag with involuntary tightness, because I was conscious, through this much greater pain, of a smaller and sharper one—a flute in the symphony—as a foot trod on my hand, and something was torn away.
    Surely one of the most inadequate words in the English language is “winded,” suggestive as it is of something light and fleeting—a graze, perhaps, or a touch of breathlessness. But I hadn’t been winded. I had been whumped and whacked and semiasphyxiated, knocked to the ground, and humiliated. My solar plexus felt as though it had been stuck with a knife. Sobbing for air, I was convinced I had been stabbed. I was aware of people taking my arms and pulling me up into a sitting position. I was propped against a tree, its hard bark jabbing into my spine, and when at last I managed to gulp some oxygen into my lungs, I immediately started blindly patting my stomach, feeling for the gaping wound I knew must be there, imagining my intestines strewn around me. But when