Читать книгу Reacher Said Nothing - Andy Martin - Страница 12

It ended the way it was always going to have to end. With a burial. Lee stubbed out a final Camel filter cigarette (except it was anything but final) and breathed out a cloud of New York Times number-one bestseller smoke. Leaned back in his chair and scrutinized the last sentence of Personal:

O’Day was to be awarded three more medals posthumously, and a bridge was to be named after him, on a North Carolina state route, over a narrow stream that most of the year was dry.

Always good to end with a death, of course. Posthumously … it was like hammering a last nail into the coffin. Or more, planting a gravestone. There was a finality to it. A valediction. But then it was a pointlessly inadequate memorial. He liked anything to do with bridges and routes (so much sheer hard labour had gone into them), but he particularly liked the dried-up stream. So the bridge was pointless too.

And his own stream, the great flow of inspiration that had kept the novel afloat for the last eight months – hadn’t that about dried up now too? A narrow stream that most of the year was dry. Could that be … me?

What the hell, it was all like a diary anyway, only masquerading as an adventure.

The End. He didn’t write it down. Didn’t need to. He knew he was supposed to put it in for the benefit of the typesetters, but he didn’t see the necessity. That great sense of an ending – the release, the relief, the closure, that satisfying last expulsion of smoke – it all had to be contained in the rhythm and feel of the last sentence. The end had to be nailed right there. Those concluding lines, like the final notes of a Beethoven symphony, a coda, had to have some kind of dying cadence to them, a falling away, an elegiac cessation that said, ‘I’ve said everything I needed to say.’ So you really didn’t need to write The End too. It offended his sense of economy. Two words too many. If it was the right sentence, the sentence would say it for him.

He couldn’t hit send just yet though. He would have to wait a couple of days, let it percolate in his head, see what subliminal second thoughts might bubble up. But all the loose ends had been tied up with a bow. Personal, his nineteenth Jack Reacher novel – done.

Word count: 107,000. Substantially across the crucial 100,000 line. That’s what it said on the contract. Anything shorter and it would be too short. Still, 107,000 was relatively short for him. The Enemy, for example, was a full 140k. But it was enough. His books had been getting shorter and tighter. He loved the beginning, that gorgeous feeling when nothing has been screwed up yet. Loved the ending too, that great rush towards the finale, when it was all downhill. But the middle – the middle was always a struggle – by around page two it was like rolling the rock up the hill again day after day. He’d developed a cunning strategy for Personal though, had pretty much outwitted the middle – he just left it out, fast-forwarded straight from the beginning right through to the end, without a pause, non-stop. Problem solved.

Anyway, it had been a blast, the whole way – Paris, London, Romford – so fuck it, it would have to do. He wasn’t going to change it now.

He glanced at the time on the computer screen. 10.26, Tuesday night. April 15, 2014. (Reacher, he considered, would know what time it was automatically, without having to check with a mere machine, but of course he – Lee – was not Reacher, he had to keep reminding himself. There was so much Reacher could do – about the one thing he couldn’t do was write a novel about his own experience. Which was why Reacher still needed him.) He’d written the first line on September 1, 2013. It had to be September 1. Every year. Without fail. Now it was over.

Lee turned his head away from the screen and looked out of the big window to his left. Tonight the Empire State Building was lit up orange and green – pistachio, like some dumb giant icecream cone. It didn’t use to look that way. Once it had had only clean vapour lights, white or maybe yellow, so it was like looking up at heaven. Now, with the coming of LED, it could look like anything anybody wanted – it could be red, white and blue on July 4, for example. But mostly it looked like a bad 1970s disco light show. It used to be an immense, stately edifice, he thought. Now it’s ice cream. Like dressing Jack Reacher up like a disco dancer. It was this view that had convinced him to come and live here, on 22nd Street, on the twenty-fifth floor of a building across from the Flatiron Building. Now – cheapened, stupid, gaudy – the view made it less of a wrench to leave. Farewell Empire State, I loved you once. Or maybe twice.

He still remembered that feeling he’d had when he first came here. The romance. With the Empire State framed in the window, it would be like living in the offices of the Daily Planet in Metropolis: oh look, isn’t that mild-mannered, neatly suited Clark Kent up there in the clouds, looking out masterfully on the world (with lovely Lois Lane by his side)? And wouldn’t his superhuman powers extend to writing too? It was logical. Wouldn’t a writer from Krypton be all-powerful, all-conquering – a Superman among writers?

My Home in America. That other great work of literature that always sprang back to mind – was never really out of his mind. His genesis and exodus. The book of commandments that had guided him here in the first place. He had come across it, aged five, in the old Elmwood Public Library, in Birmingham. It was just lying there on the floor. He’d picked it up. A stiff, cardboard sort of book, mostly illustrations with just a few words. With pictures of children in their faraway homes – he remembered a New England colonial ‘saltbox’, an isolated farmhouse on the prairies, and a Californian beach house with surfboards and palm trees. But the picture he always went back to (he borrowed the book and took it home and eventually returned it, much thumbed, but he had carried it around with him in his head ever since, pristine and perfect, a portable Garden of Eden) was the one of the apple-cheeked boy who lived in New York. He lived on the nth floor of some lofty Manhattan apartment block, reaching right up into the sky, with a bird flying by. And he was looking out of his window at the Empire State Building. Lee Child was that boy, half a century later. He had always wanted to be him, had just been temporarily trapped in the wrong country or the wrong body.

It was like a brain transplant – or metempsychosis – or déjà-vu. He must have been that New York boy in a previous life, and somehow he had contrived to get back to what he always had been. A kid in a skyscraper.

And yet now he was leaving.

The apartment he called his ‘office’ had been emptied out. Hoovered clean. The white walls were a blank. It was not just the end of one novel, it was the end of a whole string of novels, Forever. Another time, he might have stood up and picked up the red Fender he kept in the corner for celebratory moments like this one. Plugged it in and switched on the amp. Turned the volume up high. Put the strap over his head and hoisted up the mast of the guitar, stared out into the night and tightened the fingers of his left hand over the frets and wound up his right arm and unleashed the plectrum over the strings. And some mighty earth-shattering chord would rip out into the darkness, accompanied by obscene pelvic thrusting.

Except all the guitars had been shipped back to England. And … oh yeah, he couldn’t play a note. He was a lapsed musician. The guitars were just there for inspiration. Maybe he’d come back as a rock star. (Or maybe a footballer? George Best or Lionel Messi would do.)

Even his desk had been taken: he was perched at an old dining table, white, circular, sitting on a black dining chair. Not even a decent ashtray (the saucer was full of butts – where was he supposed to empty it? The bin had gone too). He felt like a refugee crouched in the corner of an abandoned building. Squatting. Like the last man left alive, staring out at the abyss, the ruined deserted city that was once New York. Just him and a few post-apocalyptic rats. And a coffee machine.

He took the phone out of his pocket and switched it back on. It pinged with a text from his daughter Ruth.

‘Hey Doof!’ it began (short for ‘dufus’).

Lee smiled. OK, not quite all alone. She was the one who had started it, all the talk about moving. Maybe she was right, though; maybe he had been vaguely dissatisfied. And now he was really dissatisfied.

He’d had to finish by April. Moving date was the 24th. Most of the furniture had already gone. The books had all gone. They’d left him the computer, the old Mac desktop. Now it was doomed. He wasn’t going to take it with him. He shut it down for the night. It didn’t know it was junk quite yet. Shh.

Lee lived upstairs – same building, different apartment. That was stripped nearly bare too. Just a bed. And a coffee machine. He didn’t go back to the office all the next day, the 16th. Just wandered around. Sat in cafés or diners, drank coffee, smoked more cigarettes. Came back to it on the 17th. Looked at it one more time. Then hit send.

Then he started looking for his hammer. The big claw hammer.

That would do the job.

Of course his hammer wasn’t in his office. Where the hell was his tool box? So he popped out the hard disk and put it in his pocket. Went to the hardware store in Union Square. Then he hopped on an uptown C train at 23rd Street, got out at 86th and went up to the new apartment. Put the disk down on the kitchen table, then he opened up his bag from the hardware store.

It didn’t have to be a very big hammer, he knew that. It was just a modest claw hammer, this one, but it would do the job. A hard disk consists mainly of glass, toughened up with some kind of aluminium or ceramic. He gave it a gentle whack and it shattered into a dozen pieces straight off. Was that all it took? He was kind of disappointed. So much for the ‘hard’ disk. Fragile disk more like. Mission Impossible-style: this disk will self-destruct in … about two seconds.

If anyone asked, it was a security thing. Really. He had the new Apple desktop set up in the new apartment, in the office at the back. So the old one was surplus. He wasn’t too worried about identity theft. If someone wanted his identity they were welcome to it. There was no such thing as privacy any more. On the other hand, he didn’t fancy people poking about in his old emails. Seeing little phrases popping up on social media. Embarrassing. Potentially.

And really it would be a betrayal of his entire life’s work if he wasn’t just a little bit paranoid.

But then again: hard disk, hard man … Reacher was all over the old computer. He didn’t exist as far as the new one was concerned. Lee loved Reacher, naturally. Reacher was Lee Child on steroids, after all, a surgically enhanced, superhumanly calm hooligan. A zen caveman. But at the same time, it would be good to have a holiday from him. Reacher had been pounding his brain for the last eight months. Now Reacher lay in pieces over the table. Shattered into little shards. Dust. Random pixels. Stray molecules.

But if there was one thing he had learned about the recurring hero series business, it was this: You can’t kill the bugger off!

It would be like killing off the golden goose. You can expose him to mortal danger of every kind. You have to expose him to mortal danger. Bury him. Blow him up. Cuff him to a train. Put him up against an entire army. Put an angry sniper on his trail. But he has to get out of those ridiculously tight situations. Somehow survive, no matter what. Otherwise how could he recur? He couldn’t see a metaphysical, ghostly Reacher working. Reacher v Vampires. Reacher v Zombies. That was never going to fly.

He wasn’t Dracula, but maybe he was a little bit Frankenstein’s monster. A behemoth on the loose. Which he, the mad Dr Lee Child, had unleashed upon the world.

‘Predictable.’ That is what Reacher had said about himself in Personal. Predictable in survival terms, anyway. It was a constraint. Look at the trouble Conan Doyle had got into when he bumped off Sherlock Holmes, shoving him over the Reichenbach Falls. The fans had forced him to bring the great detective back again. He’d had to turn the tables on Professor Moriarty after all.

The number of times he’d thought about killing him off. He’d have to go out with a bang, that was the first theory. Shot to pieces while in some way saving the day. Lee still remembered a cartoon story in Valiant so many years ago (or was it Victor? or Hotspur?). It’s the Second World War and a very big guy is given the job of guiding a couple of young kids to safety across enemy territory. They are holed up in a bomb shelter and then some passing Nazi lobs in a grenade. It’s about to go off; they are all doomed. And then the big guy hurls himself on top of the grenade in a final, heroic gesture, buries it beneath his massive, muscular chest. He, naturally, is blown to smithereens, but the two kids are saved. He is their saviour. A sublime father figure. But dead. It was simple and beautiful. Something like that would work.

And then Lee had thought, wouldn’t it be better just to have him arrive at the bus station, at the end of the book – all the bad guys are dead, he’s about to hop on the bus, and then he says to himself, ‘I like it here, I think I’ll stay.’ And he gets off the bus. (Maybe he becomes an upstanding citizen – or a writer? Gets married, settles down, buys a house.) There would be an emotional resolution. He could have ended Personal that way. But he hadn’t. Medals, bridge, stream. Reacher lives! Lee had a contract – a three-book contract – that said he would have to.

All the same, he would enjoy having a Reacher-free vacation. Reacher, unreachable.

All May and June he was setting up the new apartment. Stacking the shelves. Putting up the Renoir and the Warhol. Ruth was right, it was a great place. She’d found it, a classy-looking turn-of-the-century building north of the Dakota, and extolled its virtues; he’d bought it on the basis of the floor plan alone, the geometry: he knew it could accommodate all the shelves. He’d have somewhere for everything. So long as he kept on reading he would always need more shelving.

Jack Reacher – huge footloose wanderer, armed only with a toothbrush. Lee Child – tall guy with shelves! Paintings! First editions! Apartment overlooking Central Park. House in France. Farm in the south of England (two farms, to be exact). On the one hand, nomadic hunter-gatherer, on the other … farmer? It was easy for Reacher, he didn’t have to do any writing. His job was straightforward enough – go about killing bad guys, and also not die. Easy. Whereas writing about that … it for sure needed more than a toothbrush. He’d still be the boy in the tall Manhattan building.

Sometimes Reacher felt like a reproach. It was like writing about Jesus. The gospel according to Saint Jack. How could you live up to those standards – or down to them?

July, he wrote a TV pilot with his daughter. She was into forensic linguistics. The pilot was CSI but with words, not DNA. It suited Lee. The job was to track down villains on the basis of what they actually said. Everybody leaves verbal fingerprints. There was the case of the guy who murdered his girlfriend, and then texted afterwards using her phone but pretending to be her. The forensic linguists were able to demonstrate that it was really him not her, on the basis of his distinctive punctuation – or lack of it. Lee loved that idea – that you could be sunk by a comma or a hyphen. It all mattered, linguistically. Nothing was too trivial. The best clues were like that – subtle and insubstantial, not a big fat muddy boot print by the garden window.

Most of August he spent in France and England. Eating and drinking. Reading. Smoking. Putting his feet up in the sun.

But now it was nearly the end of August and he was back in New York.

People would often say to him: ‘How come Reacher is always getting into trouble? Always finding some new drama to poke his nose into? Doesn’t he ever take a break?’

‘I write about him when he’s doing nothing,’ he would reply. ‘When he’s on holiday and not smashing up bad guys. But they don’t publish those ones. They’re too boring.’

Now it was time for Reacher to get real again. Reacher was back from vacation. Reaching out to him. Again.