The Ghost

was the sequence of events my actions had set in motion. If I hadn’t gone to see Emmett, Emmett wouldn’t have contacted Lang to warn him about the photograph. Then maybe Lang wouldn’t have insisted on flying back to Martha’s Vineyard that night to see Ruth. Then I wouldn’t have had to tell him about Rycart. And then, and then…? It nagged away at me as I lay in the darkness. I just couldn’t erase the memory of how bleak he had looked on the plane at the very end.
    “Mrs. Bly wonders if Mr. Lang didn’t actually recognize his assassin and deliberately head toward him, knowing that something like this might happen…”
    “Yes,” I said to Rick. “Yes, I did like him.”
    “Well, there you go. You owe it to him. And besides, there’s another consideration.”
    “Which is what?”
    “Sid Kroll says that if you don’t fulfill your contractual obligations and finish the book, they’ll sue your ass off.”

    AND SO I RETURNED to London, and for the next six weeks I barely emerged from my flat, except once, early on, to go out for dinner with Kate. We met in a restaurant in Notting Hill Gate, midway between our homes—territory as neutral as Switzerland and about as expensive. The manner of Adam Lang’s death seemed to have silenced even her hostility, and I suppose a kind of glamour attached to me as an eyewitness. I had turned down a score of requests to give interviews, so that she was the first person, apart from the FBI and MI5, to whom I described what had happened. I desperately wanted to tell her about my final conversation with Lang. I would have done, too. But in the way of these things, just as I was about to broach it, the waiter came over to discuss dessert, and when he left she announced she had something she wanted to tell me, first.
    She was engaged to be married.
    I confess it was a shock. I didn’t like the other man. You’d know him if I mentioned his name: craggy, handsome, soulful. He specializes in flying briefly into the world’s worst trouble spots and flying out again with moving descriptions of human suffering, usually his own.
    “Congratulations,” I said.
    We skipped dessert. Our affair, our relationship—our thing —whatever it was—ended ten minutes later with a peck on the cheek on the pavement outside the restaurant.
    “You were going to tell me something,” she said, just before she got into her taxi. “I’m sorry I cut you off. I only didn’t want you to say anything, you know…too personal…without telling you first about how things were with me and—”
    “It doesn’t matter,” I said.
    “Are you sure you’re all right? You seem…different.”
    “I’m fine.”
    “If you ever need me, I’ll always be there for you.”
    “There?” I said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m here. Where’s there?”
    I held open the door of her cab for her. I couldn’t help overhearing that the address she gave the driver wasn’t hers.
    After that, I withdrew from the world. I spent my every waking hour with Lang, and now that he was dead, I found I suddenly had his voice. It was more a Ouija board than a keyboard that I sat down to every morning. If my fingers typed out a sentence that sounded wrong, I could almost physically feel them being drawn to the Delete key. I was like a screenwriter producing lines with a particularly demanding star in mind: I knew he might say this, but not that; might do this scene, never that.
    The basic structure of the story remained McAra’s sixteen chapters. My method was to work always with his manuscript on my left, to retype it completely, and in the process of passing it through my brain and fingers and on to my computer, to strain it of my predecessor’s lumpy clichés. I made no mention of Emmett, of course, cutting even the anodyne quote of his that had opened the final chapter. The image of Adam Lang that I presented to the world was very much the character he’d always chosen to play: the regular guy who fell into politics almost by accident and who rose to power because he was neither tribal nor ideological. I reconciled this with the chronology by taking up Ruth’s suggestion that Lang had turned to politics as solace for his depression when he first arrived in London. I didn’t really need to play up the misery here. Lang was dead, after all, his whole memoir suffused by the reader’s knowledge of what was to come. That ought to be sufficient, I reckoned, to keep the ghouls happy. But it was still