Brightness Falls Read Online Free Page B

evidence, documentation, smoking guns out the wazoo. This book's got assassination, dope-dealing, money-laundering, and all of it leading straight to the front door of the White House. Nixon got chased out for less. So what does it take with you guys, a game-show angle?"
    "I have a meeting, Russell."
    "Can you promise me a review, at least?"
    "I'll see what I can find out from the books people."
    "Loved the cover story on Michael Jackson, by the way. Hard-hitting stuff."
    "Jesus, Russell. I said I'll try."
    Russell detached the receiver from his ear and lifted it overhead, then made the sound of an airplane falling out of the sky as the instrument traced a series of descending loops ending with a loud crash on his desktop.
    From outside his office a nasal female voice called out: "Any survivors?"
    "That's a negative."
    After six years of Reagan and almost as many in publishing, Russell thought of himself—though he was alone in this perception—as a fairly jaded character. But when this manuscript came across his desk he knew it was one of the books he'd been waiting to publish. It seemed to him a shameful characteristic of the era that the liberal press lacked all con- viction while the yahoos were full of passionate insensitivity. For two years the author had followed the story of the secret war in Nicaragua from El Salvador to Israel to Cuba to Washington to Managua to Little Havana. He'd talked to gunrunners and drug runners, contras and Sandinistas, slept in jungles and had his life threatened, and Russell seemed to be the only one who was terribly interested. For weeks he'd been trying to get the big papers and magazines to pick up some of the more sensational revelations. He'd sent galleys to national-affairs editors, followed up with phone calls, and lunched every contact he had, this last one an alleged friend, an editor at a so-called newsweekly.
    Righting his tilted chair, he fired off three darts at the opposite wall, missing Elliott Abrams, three points, assistant secretary of state, but catching Oliver North right on the chin, for five points, with the third dart. Various politicians, book reviewers and indignitaries served time on the dartboard when their behavior earned Russell's disapproval.
    On the facing wall were photographs of friends, family and heroes: snapshots of Corrine, his mother and father; a framed, already yellowing page from the Sunday New York Times, the review of Jeff's book; a poster of the Karsh portrait of Hemingway circa The Old Man and the Sea; a photograph of bearded, bleary John Berryman, chin and cigarette in hand; another of Keith Richards, onstage with tongue out, dripping toxic sweat; a publicity still of Jack Nicholson, signed "To Russ, who gives good book—Jack," souvenir of a movie tie-in edition; as well as the usual author photos and book posters.
    The phone trilled—neither a ring nor a buzz but a kind of exotic birdcall.
    "Incoming," Donna called out. "Victor Propp."
    Russell glanced wistfully at the First World War German infantry helmet on his desk, a trophy his grandfather had picked up in the Argonne Forest in 1918, shortly before losing half of his eyesight to mustard gas.
    Punching in the speaker phone, he said, "Victor, how goes life and literature?"
    "Life is short and brutish, Russell. Full of S and F, et cetera. Literature—truly endless."
    Russell took the latter to mean that the book wasn't finished, hardly a surprise. Victor had been working on it for about twenty years, the deadline for delivery receding gradually into a semi-mythical future. In this unfinished condition it, and its author, had become a local literary legend, the locale in this case being a literary/academic republic encompassing patches of Cambridge, New Haven and Manhattan's Upper West Side.
    "Did you see that piece on Roth in the TransAtlantic? A very snide reference to me—'unlike those rococo goldsmiths who worry the surfaces of their bibelot sentences...
    Russell decided he just