“You’re famous.”

“Isn’t it wild?”

“It’s going to get you caught.”

“I know.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Look. Maybe I started this thing without too much thought, but I realized pretty quick that I’m doing something here, something I feel is important. Everyone’s on their best behavior. No one’s cheating. No one’s playing dirty. No one’s ripping anyone off. No one’s screwing anyone. Sport’s going through a reformation. Everyone’s taking the ethics seriously.”

“How can you talk about ethics! You’re a cold-blooded murderer! I think you should give yourself up.”

“Are you nuts? This is who I am! This is what I was put here to do!”

“Caroline came home.”

There was a sharp intake of breath. I could hear Terry moving around, dragging a chair across the floor. Then I heard him sit.

“Where is she? Does she know? Can you take her a message?”

“She left again.”

He took another breath, this time deeper, and I waited a full thirty seconds before I heard him let it out. He cracked open a can of something, then swallowed maybe half by the sound of it. He still didn’t say anything. Caroline’s absence seemed to weigh more heavily on both of us than murder.

“So are you going to stop or not?” I asked.

“Listen, Marty, one day you’ll understand all this. The day you believe in something. Oops. Gotta go. Pizza’s here.”

“Hey, I believe in-”

Click.

I put down the receiver and kicked the wall. It’s normal to think that the laws of physics don’t apply when you’re angry, that your furious foot will pass through brick. Nursing my injured toe, I felt extremely agitated. The sound of profound gratification in Terry’s voice was enough to put me on edge. He didn’t give me a chance to tell him I’d found my belief. I was doing something important too. He didn’t know I’d been irresistibly drawn to Harry’s book and was instrumental in getting it published. Well, how could he? I wasn’t getting it published. And why not? Terry was doing everything possible to murder those sportsmen, but was I really doing everything I could for the book? The idea began gnawing at me that I didn’t have it in me to go all the way, to go with total devotion down a road on which it was impossible to do a U-turn. Terry was displaying absolute ruthlessness and obstinacy in pursuit of his goal, and I needed to apply the same ruthless obstinacy to follow my path incessantly; otherwise I was just another frightened worthless hypocrite unwilling to put himself on the line for his cause.

I made a groundbreaking decision.

If the next publisher rejected the book, I simply wouldn’t accept his rejection. I would reject his rejection. I wouldn’t take no for an answer. I wouldn’t take never for an answer. I’d demand he publish it, and if that meant holding him hostage until it was in the stores, then so be it. It would be easy enough to get my hands on a gun. You only had to open a cupboard at Harry’s or plunge your hand deep into the sugar bowl to find a semiautomatic. Of course, I despised guns and all the baggage that went along with them, like bullet wounds and death, but on the other hand, I liked the idea of breaking another one of the Ten Commandments, especially since I didn’t honor my father either. They couldn’t very well force you to suffer for two eternities, could they?

That night before going home, while Harry was out cold on vodka and sleeping pills, I plunged my hand deep into the sugar bowl. The pistol inside came out covered in sticky crystals. I brushed them off into a cup of tea and drank it. I could taste the gun.

The next day I left my house when it was still dark. Terry hadn’t made a whisper in the world for at least a week and there were no reporters camping in our yard, although their cigarette butts were wet with dew. I took the bus into the city. The office building of the next publisher on the list was across the road from Central Station. Before going in, I studied the train timetable in case I might need to make a hasty getaway. One train or another was leaving every three minutes, if I wasn’t too particular about the destination. I bought a whole bunch of tickets, gateways to everywhere.

The lobby had a blackboard under glass listing the building’s residents in white letters. There, on the fourth floor, was the name of my last hope. Strangeways Publicati ns. The “o” was missing. It wasn’t too difficult to see why. On the sixth floor was a company called Voodoo Cooperative Clothing, while on the second floor resided another company called Ooooops! Stain Remover Inc.

I took the elevator to the fourth floor. There was a bathroom at the end of the corridor. I went inside and hung my head over the toilet bowl for a good twenty minutes, strategizing, before going back out into the corridor and making my way to the door of Strangeways Publications. Before knocking, I reached into my bag. The gun was still there, but the sugar was gone. There was nothing sweet about it anymore.

I knocked. I heard a voice say, “Come in.”

A man was sitting behind a desk reading. Without looking up, he motioned for me to sit down. I was too nervous to sit. My knees wouldn’t bend. They hardened. I looked around the office. It was no bigger than a closet, and was a pigsty. Newspapers were stacked up from the floor to the ceiling. A pile of clothes and a brown suitcase sat in one corner. The window was shut and there was no air in the place. The publisher was in his forties. Whatever he was reading made him smile like a senile goat. There was a toothbrush and a white bowl filled with green water on the desk. The toothbrush made me sick. It had a hair in it.

“What can I do for you?” he asked, looking up.

I reached into my bag, felt the gun, and pulled out the manuscript. I plopped it on his desk and went through my routine. The author, I said, who shall remain anonymous for the moment, was seeking the right publisher for his groundbreaking masterpiece, and because of the sensitive nature of the subject matter, I couldn’t possibly leave the manuscript with him, but if he had an ounce of curiosity and didn’t want to miss out on the most sensational opportunity of a lifetime, he’d really need to look through the manuscript now, while I waited. I had made this speech so many times I said it without thinking. He stared at me the whole time, with half-drunk eyes, smiling that old-goat smile as if he were thinking of bubble baths.

“Well, let’s have a look at her then, shall we?”

He turned to the first page. Through the window behind him I could see a train snake into the station. The publisher flicked to the middle of the manuscript, giggled at something, then put it down.

“A satire, eh? I love a good satire. It’s well written and it’s pretty funny, but to be honest, not really in my line.”

My hand, grasping the gun, was all sweat.

“Thanks for coming in anyway.”

I didn’t move. A minute dragged by. He made gestures with his eyes that directed me out the door. I ignored them.

“Look,” he said. “Things are a bit rough for me right now. I couldn’t afford to publish my own obituary if I wanted to, so why don’t you fuck off.”

I didn’t move. It was as though the air in the room had turned solid and trapped me where I was standing.

“You know what I was reading when you came in? No? Nothing- that’s what! I was pretending to read so I’d look busy. Sad, huh?” When I still didn’t so much as visibly breathe, he said, “Take a look at this.”

A pile of books towered beside his desk, and he picked the top one and handed it to me. I took a look. It was a biology textbook.

“Back in London I was working for the tabloids. That was a long time ago.” He came around and sat on the edge of his desk, his eyes darting around the room. “This is a small publishing company. Nothing too flash. We publish science textbooks. Physics, biology, chemistry, the usual suspects. Me and my wife, we shared this business fifty-fifty. Her money, inherited from her father, and my money, saved through blood and sweat. So ten years we ran our little company, and sure, we had our domestic disputes, and I had my indiscretions, but I was discreet about them, so what was the harm? Look at this. Feast your eyes on the instrument of my destruction!” He motioned to the biology textbook in my hands and said, “Page ninety-five.”