She imagined hands on her throat, a weight pressing down on her. Asphyxiation was supposed to have an erotic element, God only knew how many idiots died every year hanging themselves to intensify their orgasms. It was probably safer with a partner—if you wanted that kind of thing, and if you trusted the person to know when to stop.

Maybe Marilyn had wanted Creighton to choke her—just a little, just to get her over the edge. Maybe his hands had had a mind of their own.

Maybe she came and went, just like that.

She should run it by Maury. Maybe he could try it as a defense strategy if all else failed. Except lots of people had tried variations of that, hadn’t they? It was rough sex, that’s the way she wanted it, and it just went too far. Had any jury ever bought that one? If so, she couldn’t remember it.

Well, she didn’t want to get what Marilyn got. But she wanted some excitement, a stranger if not a strangler. Where should she go looking for him?

She put on makeup and perfume. Changed her earrings for her amethyst studs. Put on a little black dress with not a thing under it except the gold in her nipples. Slipped on a pair of Blahniks, changed her mind, went with the Prada pumps. Like it mattered, like anybody was going to be looking at her shoes.

She had to wait ten minutes for a cab. “Stelli’s,” she told the driver. “Do you know where that is?”

fourteen

AUCTION TIME.

He didn’t see why he should feel anxious. He remembered something Lee Trevino had said in response to talk about the pressure involved in trying to sink a putt in a tournament playoff: Pressure? If you make it you get a million dollars, but if you miss it you still get half a million. That’s not pressure. Pressure’s when you’re in a two-dollar Nassau with five bucks in your pocket.

And where was the pressure for him? Esther Blinkoff at Crown had already given a floor bid of more money than he had ever expected to find on a contract with his name on it. The worst that could happen, the absolute worst that could happen, was that the other four prospective bidders would hear the numbers Crown had put on the board, shrug their shoulders, and go home. And he’d get an advance of $1,100,000.

He’d been up late the night before, fooling around on the computer, then channel surfing. AMC was running Casablanca, and he told himself he’d just watch it for a few minutes, but he’d never been able to turn that film off and couldn’t this time, either. He got misty when they played “La Marseillaise,” the way he always did, and he was still there and still paying attention when Bogart told Claude Rains that it looked like the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

It must have been close to three when he got into bed, and not quite eight when he rolled out of it. He was working on his second cup of coffee when the phone rang at ten after nine, and it was Roz.

“The horses are at the starting gate,” she said. “Actually they’re just leaving the paddock, because I don’t start making calls until ten o’clock. Is this your first auction, John? Well, do you know how it goes?”

“The high bidder gets me.”

“I mean the mechanics of it. They’re all at their desks, and I call one of them and tell them where the bidding stands, and they go into a huddle and get back to me, and then I call the next one. It’s not like sitting in the gallery at Christie’s and bing bang boom it’s over. It can take all day, and sometimes more than a day.”

“So this could be continued on Monday?”

“No,” she said, “because everybody’s on notice that today is the day, and by five o’clock you’re going to have a new publisher. Or a new old publisher, if you wind up with Esther.”

“At one point one.”

“Or at x-point- x, if she exercises her topping privileges, which she got by giving us the floor.”

“Do the others all know about the floor?”

“Honey,” she said, “everybody in America knows about the floor. It was in Publisher’s Lunch yesterday. Believe me, all four of them know they can’t play for less than seven figures.” Publisher’s Lunch was a daily e-newsletter, full of industry news and gossip and free on request. He’d subscribed for a while, then unsubscribed when he realized how much time it was draining out of his day. The fact that they’d reported the floor bid somehow made it more real.

“John,” she was saying, “what I want to know is whether or not you want me to keep you in the picture. I can call you whenever somebody bids or passes, but I know you’re working on the book, and maybe you’d rather not be interrupted, in which case you won’t hear from me unless there’s something I need to clear with you. Or until the auction is over, whichever comes first.” He said the latter sounded like a good idea. She agreed, and they wished each other luck, and after she rang off he realized she’d sounded faintly disappointed by his choice. And why wouldn’t she be? She was sitting all alone in her office, running a drawn-out auction over the phone, and he was telling her no, he didn’t want to share the excitement with her.

Far as that went, she wasn’t the only one he’d just disappointed.

He rang her back. “Changed my mind,” he said. “Yes, keep me posted.”

“If it’s gonna interfere with your writing—”

“Who are we kidding? What am I going to get written today, whether or not the phone rings? You know what I realized? I’m in a profession that’s supposed to be glamorous, and maybe it is, if you’re sitting upstairs of a garage in Moline, Illinois, typing away and dreaming of someday seeing your words in print. But when you’re doing it, all it is is a combination of daydreaming and word processing.”

“And?”

“And here’s the one time in a writer’s life when it’s genuinely exciting, and the horses are leaving the paddock, and I’ve got a fistful of tickets, and here I am telling you I don’t want to watch the race, just call me when it’s over. So I changed my mind.” H E ’ D F I G U R E D W O R K W A S out of the question, but decided there was no reason why he couldn’t tinker with what he’d written earlier that week. He went over what he’d printed out, noting typos, finding and fixing the occasional infelicitous phrase. He was entering his changes on the computer when she called at ten-fifteen.

“I drew lots,” she said, “and called Putnam first, and they didn’t have to go into a huddle, they’d already gone into their huddle because they knew what the floor was. They bid one point two.”

“That’s more than one point one.”

“You could have been an accountant, did anybody ever tell you that? The important thing is they’re in. I’d rather have a slight increment from them than a big jump now.”

“Why’s that?”

“Psychologically I think it’s better at this stage. Anyway, I knew Gloria wouldn’t try a preemptive overcall, if you don’t mind a bridge term in the middle of an auction, because it’s not her style, which is why I called her first.”

“I thought you drew lots.”

“No, why on earth would I do that? I know what order I want them in. I said I drew lots, because that makes it sound fair, and they pretended to believe me, but I didn’t and they know I didn’t.”

“Wheels within wheels,” he said.

“Now I’m waiting to hear from St. Martin’s. Having fun?”

“Uh-huh. Are you?”

“Time of my life,” she said. “Stay close to the phone, okay?” I N T H E B E G I N N I N G , A rejection slip with a handwritten Sorry! on it was encouraging, while an actual note saying that they’d liked his story (albeit not enough to publish it) was cause for minor celebration. His first sale was to a little magazine that paid in copies, but it was his first sale, for God’s sake, and what difference did it make how much they did or didn’t pay him?

It was never about the money. He hadn’t gotten into the business to get rich—and, indeed, hadn’t thought of it as a business when he got into it. It was what he wanted to do, and he had the unwarranted self-assurance to believe he’d be able to make a living at it.

And, one way or another, he had. Somebody (he was pretty sure it was James Michener) had said somewhere that a writer could make a fortune in America, but couldn’t make a living. It was a great line, and there was truth in it, because the men and women who hit the bestseller list did make a fortune, and the overwhelm-ing majority who ground away at it, and who were good enough to publish one book after another, had to have professorships or day jobs or trust funds to get by.

But there were others who didn’t hit the list or line up for food stamps, people like him who came out with a new book every year or two, and wrote short stories, and did some reviewing, wrote the occasional article. Picked up a few dollars running the odd workshop at a writers’ conference, critiquing manuscripts, looking good for the wannabes. Knocking out a novelization of a film, or a TV tie-in, or whatever someone would pay you to write quickly and under a pseudonym.

Writing, and turning a buck at it. Never getting rich, always getting by.

But it had gotten harder in recent years, and not just for him.

Increasingly, the top and bottom grew at the expense of the mid

dle. Michener’s half-truth was becoming unqualified fact. You could make a fortune as a writer, but you couldn’t make a living.

And it was beginning to look as though he was going to be one of the ones who made a fortune. Of course, whether or not he would get to spend any of it was an open question.

“S T. M A R T I N ’ S J U S T B I D one point three.”

“A subtle pattern begins to emerge.”

“Next up is Simon & Schuster, then Little, Brown.”

“This could be a long day.”

“Jesus, let’s hope so,” she said.

T R E V I N O M I G H T B E R I G H T about pressure, but there was a difference between pressure and excitement. He wasn’t under any pressure right now, there was nothing he had to do, nothing expected of him. After the deal was done, when he had to sit down and produce a book to justify an advance of one point one or two or three or four million dollars, that’s when the pressure would come in.

Right now it was exciting. He couldn’t work on the book, not even on polishing what he’d written. As edgy as he felt right now, he’d wind up changing things for the worse.

He stood up, paced the floor, went over to the shelf with his books, and took down a copy of Edged Weapons. He read the front matter—the dedication, the acknowledgments, and an epigraph quote from “The Death of the Hired Man,” by Robert Frost. He’d paid something like a hundred dollars for permission to use it—

authors had to pay for permissions themselves, he’d been cha-grined to learn—and, reading it now, he wondered why he’d spent the money. He loved the poem, he’d reread the whole thing not that long ago, but the lines he’d quoted didn’t seem to him to have much to do with his stories.

Maybe he’d just wanted Robert Frost’s name in a book of his, and maybe it was worth a hundred bucks to make it happen.