the one of the apple-cheeked boy who lived in New York. He lived on the nth floor of some lofty Manhattan apartment block, reaching right up into the sky, with a bird flying by. And he was looking out of his window at the Empire State Building. Lee Child was that boy, half a century later. He had always wanted to be him, had just been temporarily trapped in the wrong country or the wrong body.
It was like a brain transplant – or metempsychosis – or déjà-vu. He must have been that New York boy in a previous life, and somehow he had contrived to get back to what he always had been. A kid in a skyscraper.
And yet now he was leaving.
The apartment he called his ‘office’ had been emptied out. Hoovered clean. The white walls were a blank. It was not just the end of one novel, it was the end of a whole string of novels, Forever. Another time, he might have stood up and picked up the red Fender he kept in the corner for celebratory moments like this one. Plugged it in and switched on the amp. Turned the volume up high. Put the strap over his head and hoisted up the mast of the guitar, stared out into the night and tightened the fingers of his left hand over the frets and wound up his right arm and unleashed the plectrum over the strings. And some mighty earth-shattering chord would rip out into the darkness, accompanied by obscene pelvic thrusting.
Except all the guitars had been shipped back to England. And … oh yeah, he couldn’t play a note. He was a lapsed musician. The guitars were just there for inspiration. Maybe he’d come back as a rock star. (Or maybe a footballer? George Best or Lionel Messi would do.)
Even his desk had been taken: he was perched at an old dining table, white, circular, sitting on a black dining chair. Not even a decent ashtray (the saucer was full of butts – where was he supposed to empty it? The bin had gone too). He felt like a refugee crouched in the corner of an abandoned building. Squatting. Like the last man left alive, staring out at the abyss, the ruined deserted city that was once New York. Just him and a few post-apocalyptic rats. And a coffee machine.
He took the phone out of his pocket and switched it back on. It pinged with a text from his daughter Ruth.
‘Hey Doof!’ it began (short for ‘dufus’).
Lee smiled. OK, not quite all alone. She was the one who had started it, all the talk about moving. Maybe she was right, though; maybe he had been vaguely dissatisfied. And now he was really dissatisfied.
He’d had to finish by April. Moving date was the 24th. Most of the furniture had already gone. The books had all gone. They’d left him the computer, the old Mac desktop. Now it was doomed. He wasn’t going to take it with him. He shut it down for the night. It didn’t know it was junk quite yet. Shh.
Lee lived upstairs – same building, different apartment. That was stripped nearly bare too. Just a bed. And a coffee machine. He didn’t go back to the office all the next day, the 16th. Just wandered around. Sat in cafés or diners, drank coffee, smoked more cigarettes. Came back to it on the 17th. Looked at it one more time. Then hit send.
Then he started looking for his hammer. The big claw hammer.
That would do the job.
Of course his hammer wasn’t in his office. Where the hell was his tool box? So he popped out the hard disk and put it in his pocket. Went to the hardware store in Union Square. Then he hopped on an uptown C train at 23rd Street, got out at 86th and went up to the new apartment. Put the disk down on the kitchen table, then he opened up his bag from the hardware store.
It didn’t have to be a very big hammer, he knew that. It was just a modest claw hammer, this one, but it would do the job. A hard disk consists mainly of glass, toughened up with some kind of aluminium or ceramic. He gave it a gentle whack and it shattered into a dozen pieces straight off. Was that all it took? He was kind of disappointed. So much for the ‘hard’ disk. Fragile disk more like. Mission Impossible-style: this disk will self-destruct in … about two seconds.
If anyone asked, it was a security thing. Really. He had the new Apple desktop set up in the new apartment, in the office at the back. So the old one was surplus. He wasn’t too worried about identity theft. If someone wanted his identity they were welcome to it. There was no such thing as privacy any more. On the other hand, he didn’t fancy people poking about in his old emails. Seeing little phrases popping up on social media. Embarrassing. Potentially.
And really it would be a betrayal of his entire life’s work if he wasn’t just a little bit paranoid.
But then again: hard disk, hard man … Reacher was all over the old computer. He didn’t exist as far as the new one was concerned. Lee loved Reacher, naturally. Reacher was Lee Child on steroids, after all, a surgically enhanced, superhumanly calm hooligan. A zen caveman. But at the same time, it would be good to have a holiday from him. Reacher had been pounding his brain for the last eight months. Now Reacher lay in pieces over the table. Shattered into little shards. Dust. Random pixels. Stray molecules.
But if there was one thing he had learned about the recurring hero series business, it was this: You can’t kill the bugger off!
It would be like killing off the golden goose. You can expose him to mortal danger of every kind. You have to expose him to mortal danger. Bury him. Blow him up. Cuff him to a train. Put him up against an entire army. Put an angry sniper on his trail. But he has to get out of those ridiculously tight situations. Somehow survive, no matter what. Otherwise how could he recur? He couldn’t see a metaphysical, ghostly Reacher working. Reacher v Vampires. Reacher v Zombies. That was never going to fly.
He wasn’t Dracula, but maybe he was a little bit Frankenstein’s monster. A behemoth on the loose. Which he, the mad Dr Lee Child, had unleashed upon the world.
‘Predictable.’ That is what Reacher had said about himself in Personal. Predictable in survival terms, anyway. It was a constraint. Look at the trouble Conan Doyle had got into when he bumped off Sherlock Holmes, shoving him over the Reichenbach Falls. The fans had forced him to bring the great detective back again. He’d had to turn the tables on Professor Moriarty after all.
The number of times he’d thought about killing him off. He’d have to go out with a bang, that was the first theory. Shot to pieces while in some way saving the day. Lee still remembered a cartoon story in Valiant so many years ago (or was it Victor? or Hotspur?). It’s the Second World War and a very big guy is given the job of guiding a couple of young kids to safety across enemy territory. They are holed up in a bomb shelter and then some passing Nazi lobs in a grenade. It’s about to go off; they are all doomed. And then the big guy hurls himself on top of the grenade in a final, heroic gesture, buries it beneath his massive, muscular chest. He, naturally, is blown to smithereens, but the two kids are saved. He is their saviour. A sublime father figure. But dead. It was simple and beautiful. Something like that would work.
And then Lee had thought, wouldn’t it be better just to have him arrive at the bus station, at the end of the book – all the bad guys are dead, he’s about to hop on the bus, and then he says to himself, ‘I like it here, I think I’ll stay.’ And he gets off the bus. (Maybe he becomes an upstanding citizen – or a writer? Gets married, settles down, buys a house.) There would be an emotional resolution. He could have ended Personal that way. But he hadn’t. Medals, bridge, stream. Reacher lives! Lee had a contract – a three-book contract – that said he would have to.
All the same, he would enjoy having a Reacher-free vacation. Reacher, unreachable.
All May and June he was setting up the new apartment. Stacking the shelves. Putting up the Renoir and the Warhol. Ruth was right, it was a great place. She’d found it, a classy-looking turn-of-the-century building
