Read Online Escape the Night by Richard North Patterson - Free Book Online Page A

there were women—editors and actresses, writers and bored wives—who would take him on his own terms.
    Ruth Levy had not been one of them.
    She had come to his office that first day, severely dressed and still clutching her résumé, his friend’s sister: thin-faced like Levy, with those same marmoset eyes that seemed to look through him. She covered their intensity with staccato speech and quick, birdlike gestures that betrayed the cigarettes hidden in her purse and a metabolic rate so high that she could burn off calories while perched at a desk. She had black unruly hair, long legs and no breasts to speak of. Her nose was thin, her skin ivory, and her eyes shone with an intelligence that made her seem terribly serious, yet oddly pretty. She had graduated summa from CCNY: Carey figured she was a Spartacist, at least, furious about the Rosenbergs and Sacco and Vanzetti and never smiled. When he told her that, in bed two years later, she laughed until her small breasts shook.
    â€œJesus, Carey, you are such a smug bastard!”
    He smiled as she rifled her purse for a cigarette. “Well, most of it was true.” Mocking her nasal cadences, he began, “‘Harry Luce is such a fascist—I just couldn’t stand it over at Time . And those maps , those silly, fucking right-wing maps: Italy carved up like a pizza, with the Christian Democrats getting a thirty-two percent wedge and the Communists nineteen and all the pepperoni, painted red and located near Milan, where your fucking friend Clare would never go because the workers smell bad and speak no English …’”
    â€œ I never said that.”
    â€œYou were going to—next week.”
    She smothered him with a pillow.
    From behind it came his muffled sounds of gagging. “Do you give up?” Ruth demanded.
    â€œChrist, yes,” he gasped. “I thought you didn’t believe in capital punishment.”
    â€œOnly for sexual purposes.” Abruptly, she drew the pillow down over his chest and lay across it, holding his bemused face in her hands. “Did you know that I loved you before we ever met? From your picture in Bill’s yearbook, when I was fourteen.”
    She kissed his forehead.
    It had happened by degrees. Hiring her, Charles watched as she took on the thankless piecework of editorial assistants, screening calls for Phillip, arranging Black Jack Carey’s lunches, shuttling manuscripts to Charles at his home, and writing polite turndowns to the hopeless authors of unsought masterpieces, like the widow from Kansas who, traumatized by seventeen rejections, threatened suicide should Van Dreelen & Carey refuse to publish her love poems to her dead son. “She’s probably got him in the ’fridge,” she shuddered to Charles. “Jesus, the pain out there.”
    â€œIt’s scary,” he agreed and then, remembering Levy’s mother, he added softly, “But these people never do, you know.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œKill themselves.”
    Her mouth curled downward: for an instant she looked almost forlorn. “Why did you hire me?” she asked. “Was it my brother?”
    â€œNo.” He smiled. “It was because I figured you were either a genius or a tower sniper. I was curious which.”
    â€œAnd what do you think now?”
    â€œThat I hired a good editor by accident.”
    Assigned to Phillip, she could not find a novel that would please him. Gradually, she turned to Charles for encouragement as she battled the mind-numbing avalanche of manuscripts, winnowing, sorting, stacking and restacking, carting more stacks home on the subway to read at night until her nerves jangled with bad coffee and she realized that the page swimming in front of her had been there for an hour. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “Some night you’ll open something wonderful by a writer no one’s ever heard of, and by next year everyone else