The Ghost

difference! To ask him proper questions! About torturing and bombing and lying! Not ‘How does it feel?’ Christ! This is a complete bloody waste of time.”
    She got up then and went into the bedroom to collect the bag she always brought on the nights she planned to stay. I heard her filling it noisily with lipstick, toothbrush, perfume spray. I knew if I went in I could retrieve the situation. She was probably expecting it; we’d had worse rows. I’d have been obliged to concede that she was right, acknowledge my unsuitability for the task, affirm her moral and intellectual superiority in this as in all things. It needn’t even have been a verbal confession; a meaningful hug would probably have been enough to get me a suspended sentence. But the truth was, at that moment, given a choice between an evening of her smug left-wing moralizing and the prospect of working with a so-called war criminal, I preferred the war criminal. So I simply carried on staring at the television.
    Sometimes I have a nightmare in which all the women I have ever slept with assemble together. It’s a respectable rather than a huge number—were it a drinks party, say, my living room could accommodate them quite comfortably. And if, God forbid, this gathering were ever to occur, Kate would be the undisputed guest of honor. She is the one for whom a chair would be fetched, who would have her glass refilled by sympathetic hands, who would sit at the center of a disbelieving circle as my moral and physical flaws were dissected. She was the one who had stuck it the longest.
    She didn’t slam the door as she left but closed it very carefully. That was stylish, I thought. On the television screen the death toll had just increased to eight.

TWO
    A ghost who has only a lay knowledge of the subject will be able to keep asking the same questions as the lay reader, and will therefore open up the potential readership of the book to a much wider audience.
    Ghostwriting
    RHINEHART PUBLISHING UK CONSISTED of five ancient firms acquired during a vigorous bout of corporate kleptomania in the nineteen nineties. Wrenched out of their Dickensian garrets in Bloomsbury, upsized, downsized, rebranded, renamed, reorganized, modernized, and merged, they had finally been dumped in Hounslow, in a steel-and-smoked-glass office block with all its pipes on the outside. It nestled among the pebble-dash housing estates like an abandoned spacecraft after a fruitless mission to find intelligent life.
    I arrived, with professional punctuality, five minutes before noon, only to discover the main door locked. I had to buzz for entry. A notice board in the foyer announced that the terrorism alert was ORANGE/HIGH . Through the darkened glass I could see the security men in their dingy aquarium checking me on a monitor. When I finally got inside I had to turn out my pockets and pass through a metal detector.
    Quigley was waiting for me by the lifts.
    “Who’re you expecting to bomb you?” I asked. “Random House?”
    “We’re publishing Lang’s memoirs,” replied Quigley in a stiff voice. “That alone makes us a target, apparently. Rick’s already upstairs.”
    “How many’ve you seen?”
    “Five. You’re the last.”
    I knew Roy Quigley fairly well, well enough to know he disapproved of me. He must have been about fifty, tall and tweedy. In a happier era he would have smoked a pipe and offered tiny advances to minor academics over large lunches in Soho. Now his midday meal was a plastic tray of salad taken at his desk overlooking the M4, and he received his orders direct from the head of sales and marketing, a girl of about sixteen. He had three children in private schools he couldn’t afford. As the price of survival he’d actually been obliged to start taking an interest in popular culture, to wit, the lives of various footballers, supermodels, and foulmouthed comedians whose names he pronounced carefully and whose customs he studied in the tabloids with scholarly detachment, as if they were remote Micronesian tribespeople. I’d pitched him an idea the year before, the memoirs of a TV magician who had—of course!—been abused in childhood but who had used his skill as an illusionist to conjure up a new life, etc., etc. He’d turned it down flat. The book had gone straight to number one: I Came, I Sawed, I Conquered . He still bore a grudge.
    “I have to tell you,” he said, as we rose to the penthouse, “that I don’t think you’re the right man