Small Town by Block Lawrence

Author:Block, Lawrence [Block, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, Crime, Thriller
ISBN: 9780752858746
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2004-03-04T00:00:00+00:00

SEVENTEEN

It was, no question, the best day of his life. First the auction. It had been genuinely exciting, in a way a writer’s life never was.

Oh, there was pleasure in the work itself. That was where the real satisfaction lay. You imagined something and put words together, and you opened a door in the imagination and walked down an untrodden path, and it led to another door. And you opened that, and went off to see where it led, and day by day and page by page an entire alternate universe manifested itself before you.

Sometimes you struggled, and stared for hours at the empty page that reflected the barren imagination. Sometimes, like Flaubert, you spent the morning inserting a comma and the afternoon taking it out.

Sometimes you were able to write, but the words tasted like ashes in the mouth. You tapped at the keys like a field hand chopping cotton, like a factory worker on the assembly line. Somehow the words got on the page, and afterward they turned out as often as not to be as good as words that sang as you typed them, but they weren’t much fun to write.

And sometimes, sometimes, the book came utterly to life and wrote itself. The words came too quickly for the fingers to keep pace with them. Characters spoke their own perfect dialogue spontaneously, and you were the court stenographer, dutifully recording everything they said. Plots, hopelessly tangled, worked themselves out before your eyes, like the Gordian knot magically untying itself. It was you doing it of course, or otherwise you wouldn’t walk away from the keyboard exhausted, drained, empty. But it was a part of your consciousness that consciousness knew nothing of, and it was sheer joy when it took over and ran the show for you.

But was it exciting?

Maybe, maybe it was. But not like this.

And it had been the best sort of excitement, because the exhilaration of climbing higher and higher was not balanced by a fear of falling. Each bid brought another roll of the dice, but he wasn’t going double or nothing, he wasn’t risking anything. He was already a winner. The only question was the amount of his prize.

And wasn’t it remarkable how each increase raised the threshold of his own greed? Weeks ago, before any of this had happened, before he had ever heard Marilyn Fairchild’s name, he’d really wanted only two things to finish his book, and to find someone willing to publish it. He’d want a five-figure advance, certainly, because he had to eat, he had to pay the rent, but he wouldn’t expect much, and it wouldn’t have taken much to make him content.

Once they started bidding, once the numbers started to climb, he kept wanting more. Two million? Someone actually wanted to pay him two million dollars? That’s amazing, that’s wonderful, that’s miraculous now how about two point five? How about three?

When it was over, when Crown had topped St. Martin’s, when even that price turned out to

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