In the Night Room Read Online Free PDF Page A

opened to the title page, to Kohle, who was waiting to receive it like a child, both hands out. Gimme gimme gimme. He yanked the book from Underhill’s hands, turned it around, and dipped his head toward the inscription. Odd, irregular white-gray streaks ran through the thick black pelt on the top of his head. When he snapped his head back up, his eyes held a dull, flat glare, and the skin at the corners of his mouth looked wrinkled and dark with grease.
    “What happened to ‘I yam what I yam’?”
    “I’m not doing so well this morning, but I don’t think I ever put that in a book,” Tim said.
    “Oh yes, you did. That cop, Esterhaz, says it in
The Divided Man.
‘I yam what I yam.’ Right at the beginning, when he’s hungover and getting out of bed. Just before he sees the dead people marching around.”
    At his worst moments, Hal Esterhaz, an alcoholic homicide detective in Tim’s second novel, had seen an army of the dead trudging aimlessly through the streets. He had not once, however, quoted Popeye.
    “I see you don’t believe me,” Kohle said. “No wonder, stupid me—you can’t, because you don’t know. Okay, go ahead, sign the other books, you probably got things you want to do.”
    Tim removed the second book from the pile and opened it to the title page. He looked back at Jasper Dan Kohle and found that he could not resist. “I don’t know what, exactly?”
    “Mr. Underhill,” Kohle said. “Tim. Let me say this, Tim. And I’m saying this although I know that you will have precisely no idea at all what I’m talking about, because that is guaranteed one hundred percent certain. So first let me ask you: do you have any idea
at all
why a guy like me would want to collect twenty copies of the same book? A hundred copies, if I had all the money in the world, a likely story, thank you very much?”
    “As an investment?” Tim took his eyes off Kohle long enough to sign the second book and pick up the third.
    Kohle went through a savage parody of yawning. “I don’t even live in this neighborhood. But I saw you doing your crossword puzzle, and I let my whaddayacallit, my joie de vivre, get the better of me, and the next thing I know, I’m spending a whole lot more money than I should on your new book. Which to tell you the truth is a little lightweight, not to mention kind of rushed at the end.”
    “Glad you liked it,” Tim said.
    “So why do I want fifteen, twenty copies of a book that isn’t really all that hot, if you don’t mind my saying so?”
    “That was my question, yes.” Tim pushed the last two books across the table.
    “Listen up now, here it comes.” He leaned over and cupped his mouth with his hands, as April had done.
“One of them might be the real book.”
    He pulled the three copies of Underhill’s novel into the circle of his arms. “What, you ask, is the real book? The one you were supposed to write, only you screwed it up. Authors think every copy of a book is the same, but they’re not. Every time a book goes through the presses, two, three, copies of the
real
book come out.
That’s
the one you wanted to write when you started out, with everything perfect, no mistakes, nothing dumb, and all the dialogue and the details exactly right. People like me, that’s what we’re looking for. Investment? Don’t make me laugh. It’s the
reverse
of an investment. Once you find a real book, sell it to someone? Give me a break.”
    “You’re out of your mind,” Tim said.
    Kohle raised his hands chest-high in exasperation. “You guys are all the same. Ninety percent of the time, you’re just making things up. You act like a bunch of lazy, irresponsible gods. It wouldn’t be so bad if you weren’t basically deaf and blind, too. You don’t listen.”
    “What are you talking about?” Tim asked, unsettled by the sudden reappearance on his mental screen of his sister, April.
    “If you paid more attention, your real books wouldn’t be all that different from the ones