I had never particularly cared for this place, but now I viewed it with a sensation approaching nostalgia. It was a place comfortably free of ambition or expectation. Maybe Conner had been right to seek me out here—even if someone had overheard us, no one would have believed this discussion of big book contracts, unpublished Salinger manuscripts, nefarious skullduggery, and cockeyed flumdummery would happen here. “But exactly how would someone steal the flash drive?” I asked Conner. “So easily,” he said. “So, so easily, my friend. Or at least it could be if you were writing a novel about it.” Throughout the history of literature, every publishing company has had special protocols for dealing with its most important manuscripts. In the old days of tweed and cigars, of manual typewriters and carbon paper, critics or journalists who wanted an early look at an important forthcoming novel by, say, Ernest Hemingway or J.
