The Ghost

handhold of interest I could cling to. No wonder McAra had thrown himself off the Martha’s Vineyard ferry. No wonder Maddox and Kroll had flown to London to try to rescue the project. No wonder they were paying me fifty thousand dollars a week. All these seemingly bizarre events were rendered entirely logical by the direness of the manuscript. And now it would be my reputation that would come spiraling down, strapped into the backseat of Adam Lang’s kamikaze seaplane. I would be the one pointed out at publishing parties—assuming I was ever invited to another publishing party—as the ghost who had collaborated on the biggest flop in publishing history. In a sudden shaft of paranoid insight, I fancied I saw my real role in the operation: designated fall guy.
    I finished the last of the six hundred and twenty-one pages (“Ruth and I look forward to the future, whatever it may hold”) in midafternoon, and when I laid down the manuscript I pressed my hands to my cheeks and opened my mouth and eyes wide, in a reasonable imitation of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.
    That was when I heard a cough in the doorway and looked up to see Ruth Lang watching me. To this day I don’t know how long she’d been there. She raised a thin black eyebrow.
    “As bad as that?” she said.

    SHE WAS WEARING A man’s thick, shapeless white sweater, so long in the sleeves that only her chewed fingernails were visible, and once we got downstairs she pulled on top of this a pale blue hooded windbreaker, disappearing for a while as she tugged it over her head, her pale face emerging at last with a frown. Her short dark hair stuck up in Medusa-like spikes.
    It was she who had proposed a walk. She said I looked as though I needed one, which was true enough. She found me her husband’s windproof jacket, which fitted perfectly, and a pair of waterproof boots belonging to the house, and together we stepped out into the blustery Atlantic air. We followed the path around the edge of the lawn and climbed up onto the dunes. To our right was the pond, with a jetty, and next to that a rowboat that had been hauled above the reed beds and laid upside down. To our left was the gray ocean. Ahead of us, bare white sand stretched for a couple of miles, and when I looked behind, the picture was the same, except that a policeman in an overcoat was following about fifty yards distant.
    “You must get sick of this,” I said, nodding to our escort.
    “It’s been going on so long I’ve stopped noticing.”
    We pressed on into the wind. Close up, the beach didn’t look so idyllic. Strange pieces of broken plastic, lumps of tar, a dark blue canvas shoe stiff with salt, a wooden cable drum, dead birds, skeletons, and bits of bone—it was like walking along the side of a six-lane highway. The big waves came in with a roar and receded like passing trucks.
    “So,” said Ruth, “how bad is it?”
    “You haven’t read it?”
    “Not all of it.”
    “Well,” I said, politely, “it needs some work.”
    “How much?”
    The words “Hiroshima” and “nineteen forty-five” floated briefly into my mind. “It’s fixable,” I said, which I suppose it was: even Hiroshima was fixed eventually. “It’s the deadline that’s the trouble. We absolutely have to do it in four weeks, and that’s less than two days for each chapter.”
    “Four weeks!” She had a deep, rather dirty laugh. “You’ll never get him to sit still for as long as that!”
    “He doesn’t have to write it, as such. That’s what I’m being paid for. He just has to talk to me.”
    She had pulled up her hood. I couldn’t see her face; only the sharp white tip of her nose was visible. Everyone said she was smarter than her husband and that she’d loved their life at the top even more than he had. If there was an official visit to some foreign country, she usually went with him: she refused to be left at home. You only had to watch them on TV together to see how she bathed in his success. Adam and Ruth Lang: the Power and the Glory. Now she stopped and turned to face the ocean, her hands thrust deep in her pockets. Along the beach, as if playing Grandma’s footsteps, the policeman also stopped.
    “You were my idea,” she said.
    I swayed in the wind. I almost fell over. “I was?”
    “Yes. You were the one who wrote Christy’s book for him.”
    It took me a moment to work out who she meant. Christy Costello. I hadn’t thought of him in a long while. He was my first