Jay McInerney - Bright, Precious Days

“Actually, he was supposed to be here tonight,” Russell said, “but he canceled on me.”

“Maybe we should, uh…” He motioned to an unoccupied corner, to which Russell followed him. His manner seemed ominous.

“What’s up?”

“I wanted you to have a chance to answer these accusations before I—”

“What accusations?”

“Basically, my sources are saying that during the time Kohout was supposedly in captivity in the North-West Frontier Province, he was hiding out in an opium den in Lahore.”

Russell laughed. “You’re talking about the stuff on that Islamist Web site last week? I mean, come on, we saw that. It’s a forum for crazy jihadist ranting. What evidence is there?”

“Dated photographs. Video. E-mails. All from the time Kohout claimed to be a captive in Waziristan. In fact, it seems he was briefly held, and roughed up, by some drug dealers he owed money to.”

“Where’s this coming from?”

“Obviously, I can’t divulge my sources, but this is coming from people who saw him in Lahore.”

“The fact that he spent some party time in Lahore doesn’t mean he wasn’t in captivity in Waziristan. He writes about it in the book.” Russell’s mind was racing, his sense of indignation undercut by a creeping sense of dread. The Internet was awash in conspiracy theories and unfounded innuendo, as Kohout had reminded him when the first post questioning his claim to have been captured was brought to his attention. But, like stopped clocks, cranks and lunatics sometimes told the truth.

“The evidence we’ve gathered suggests he was in Lahore the entire time. And according to our Washington desk, the State Department had doubts from the beginning. They’re working the story on that end, and we’d clearly like to talk to Kohout and get his response. But in the meantime, I’m curious to get your reaction. Were you aware that Kohout was perpetrating a hoax?”

“Of course not. I’m still not aware of any such thing.”

“I’d be interested to know what kind of vetting and fact-checking you’ve done to verify his story.”

Russell felt dizzy and slightly nauseous. In fact, he’d done very little — the story of Kohout’s abduction had been reported all over the world, including the pages of The New York Times, and the book itself was vivid, rich in detail and texture.

Suddenly, he saw a glimmer of light, a chance of reprieve. “If you want to talk about vetting,” Russell said, “ The New Yorker ’s running their excerpt next week, and they’ve got the toughest fact-checking department in the world.”

“What I hear — they’ve dropped the excerpt they were publishing precisely because of concerns about veracity. You didn’t know about this?”

Could that possibly be true? If so, it was a very bad sign. Of course, he’d had his moments of doubt about Kohout’s story, certain details in his narrative that didn’t quite jibe with others, but Kohout’s explanations had seemed convincing enough, though in retrospect Russell had been perhaps too willing to accept them, too facile in suppressing his concerns. And Kohout’s last-minute cancellation tonight, just before the screening, suddenly seemed suspicious, and telling. Thinking back on it, he realized Phillip had seemed a little flustered and out of sorts this past week, hadn’t he?

Suddenly, Sanders was holding a small digital recorder in front of his nose. “Would you care to comment on the allegations?”

“No, I fucking wouldn’t.” He couldn’t print that in the Times. He glanced at his watch: ten-forty, too late for tomorrow’s paper. Assuming Sanders felt he had enough to go with, Russell had less than twenty-four hours to get this figured out. In the meantime, he shouldn’t be pissing the guy off. “Obviously, I’ve got to look into this,” he said. “I’ll call you first thing in the morning.”

“This isn’t going to go away, Russell,” Sanders said, looking uncharacteristically fierce behind his round steel glasses, seeming less clueless and nerdy than at any time in their acquaintance.

Sanders followed Russell as he pushed through the crowd toward the elevator. In his haste to escape, Russell almost collided with Chessie Steyl, who was being interviewed by a video crew.

“Oh here’s my friend Russell Calloway,” she blurted. “He’s a brilliant editor. We were just talking about books. He’s, like, my literary mentor. Mostly he publishes fiction, but he was just telling me about this memoir by that guy who was captured by the Taliban. I’m so bad with names — what was it, Russell?”

“Um, Phillip Kohout.”

“I can’t wait to read it,” she said.

The interviewer seemed not to know what to make of this exchange; Sanders, though, appeared to find it fascinating, hunched over his notebook, scribbling away, his head bobbing up and down like a hungry crow pecking at carrion.

—

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Russell wasn’t the only person looking for Phillip, apparently — that lying bastard. He decided to try cornering him in his apartment, only a few blocks away at Spring and Sullivan — a breach of Manhattan etiquette necessitated by the urgency of the search. He had to tread carefully, the frozen SoHo sidewalk slick as a water slide against the leather soles of his new cordovan loafers.

There was no answer to his repeated ringing of Phillip’s buzzer. He would have called Briskin, Phillip’s agent, who would at least, presumably, know if The New Yorker had backed out of the deal, but he didn’t have his home or cell number.

Almost more than anything else, he dreaded telling Corrine. She’d been against his acquisition of the Kohout book from the start, and while she hadn’t exactly questioned its authenticity, she’d certainly questioned the author’s character, which was really the ultimate point at issue. She didn’t trust him, and now he felt it in his gut: She was right, and he was screwed. He’d printed 75,000 copies of the book, more than half of which were already in transit to bookstores at this moment; advanced copies had been in the hands of reviewers and journalists for weeks. Just two days ago he’d written Kohout a check for $250,000; Briskin had asked for an early payment of the amount due on publication — a request that now looked highly suspicious. The book was, for all intents and purposes, already published.

Standing on the sidewalk outside Phillip’s building after fruitlessly ringing his buzzer, he realized that one of the few people he knew at The New Yorker lived only a few blocks away, and on an impulse he set off for Thompson Street, even as he wondered whether she might still be living there after all these years. As he approached the doorway, he felt a tingling of recognition that seemed to suffuse his bloodstream, heating the surface of his skin; for years he’d visited this apartment for late-night assignations with a woman with whom he’d never shared a meal or accompanied to a social gathering, arriving in the middle of the night after a drunken business dinner or a book party. He hadn’t hit that buzzer in many years—9/11 had served to break the spell — and he’d seen her only once in the aftermath, though he still called upon the store of memories of their past encounters when he was in need of erotic stimulus, and now, involuntarily, he felt a stirring in his groin as he found himself standing in front of the familiar door. Checking the names on the row of buzzers, he found hers and pressed it, jumping when the intercom crackled with her voice.

“Who is it?”

He could hardly bring himself to answer, ashamed as he was of his neglect of her for the past six years. But then, he’d always felt a measure of shame standing in front of this door. “It’s Russell,” he finally managed to croak.