The Ghost

taste. “If we work really hard we should be able to break the back of it in a week.”
    “A week?” Lang performed a little facial mime of alarm.
    I resisted the temptation to point out that ten mllion dollars for a week’s work wasn’t exactly the national minimum wage. “I may need to come back to you to plug any holes, but if you can give me till Friday, I’ll have enough to rewrite most of this draft. The important thing is that we start tomorrow and get the early years out of the way.”
    “Fine. The sooner we get it done the better.” Suddenly Lang was leaning forward, a study in frank intimacy, his elbows on his knees, his glass between his hands. “Ruth’s going stir-crazy out here. I keep telling her to go back to London while I finish the book, see the kids, but she won’t leave me. I love your work, I have to say.”
    I almost choked on my tea. “You’ve read some of it?” I tried to imagine what footballer, or rock star, or magician, or reality game show contestant might have come to the attention of a prime minister.
    “Sure,” he said, without a flicker of doubt. “There was some fellow we were on holiday with—”
    “Christy Costello?”
    “Christy Costello! Brilliant. If you can make sense out of his life, you might even be able to make sense out of mine.” He jumped up and shook my hand. “It’s good to meet you, man. We’ll make a start first thing tomorrow. I’ll get Amelia to fix you a car to take you back to your hotel.” And then he suddenly started singing:
    “Once in a lifetime
    You get to have it all
    But you never knew you had it
    Till you go and lose it all.”
    He pointed at me. “Christy Costello, ‘Once in a Lifetime,’ nineteen seventy”—he wobbled his hand speculatively, his head cocked, his eyes half closed in concentration—“seven?”
    “Eight.”
    “Nineteen seventy-eight! Those were the days! I can feel it all coming back.”
    “Save it for tomorrow,” I said.

    “HOW DID IT GO?” inquired Amelia as she showed me to the door.
    “Pretty well, I think. It was all very friendly. He kept calling me ‘man.’”
    “Yes. He always does that when he can’t remember someone’s name.”
    “Tomorrow,” I said, “I’ll need a private room where I can do the interviewing. I’ll need a secretary to transcribe his answers as we go along—every time we break I’ll bring the fresh tapes out to her. I’ll need my own copy of the existing manuscript on disk—yes, I know,” I said, holding up my hand to cut off her objections, “I won’t take it out of the house. But I’m going to have to cut and paste it into the new material, and also try to rewrite it so that it sounds vaguely like it was produced by a human being.”
    She was writing all this down in her black and red book. “Anything else?”
    “How about dinner?”
    “Good night,” she said firmly and closed the door.
    One of the policemen gave me a ride back to Edgartown. He was as morose as his colleague on the gate. “I hope you get this book done soon,” he said. “Me and the lads are getting pretty brassed off stuck out here.”
    He dropped me at the hotel and said he’d pick me up again in the morning. I had just opened the door to my room when my cell phone rang. It was Kate.
    “Are you okay?” she said. “I got your message. You sounded a bit…odd.”
    “Did I? Sorry. I’m fine now.” I fought back the impulse to ask her where she’d been when I called.
    “So? Have you met him?”
    “I have. I’ve just come from him.”
    “And?” Before I could answer, she said, “Don’t tell me: charming.”
    I briefly held the phone away from my ear and gave it the finger.
    “You certainly pick your moments,” she went on. “Did you see yesterday’s papers? You must be the first recorded instance of a rat actually boarding a sinking ship.”
    “Yes, of course I saw them,” I said defensively, “and I’m going to ask him about it.”
    “When?”
    “When the moment arises.”
    She made an explosive noise that somehow managed to combine hilarity, fury, contempt, and disbelief. “Well, yes, do ask him. Ask him why he illegally kidnaps British citizens in another country and hands them over to be tortured. Ask him if he knows about the techniques the CIA uses to simulate drowning. Ask him what he plans to say to the widow and children of the man who died of a heart attack—”
    “Hold on,” I interrupted. “You lost me after drowning.”
    “I’m seeing