The Getaway Car

by Donald E. Westlake

  But he never entirely faded from view. From almost the beginning I had had that rough idea for a Levine story which I’d never written, and which I now realized was the logical story to follow “The Death of a Bum,” but the silence had lasted too long, my concentration was elsewhere, and in any event I had just about given up writing short stories and had certainly stopped writing novelettes. From that high of forty-six short stories and novelettes in 1959, by 1966 I was down to zero novelettes and only one short story (which was never published). Between 1967 and 1980 I wrote no novelettes at all and only seven short stories, most of which had been commissioned.

  Some of Abe Levine’s sensibility, if nothing else, came out in a group of five novels I wrote in the late sixties and early seventies, using the pen name Tucker Coe, about an ex-cop named Mitch Tobin. But Tobin was not Levine, and death was not Tobin’s primary topic.

  Abe Levine’s saga remained incomplete, and I knew it, and it gnawed at me from time to time. Once, in the late seventies, I tried to rework the stories into a novel, intending to plot out the final unwritten story as the last section of the book. (At that time, I thought it was a story about a burglar.) But, although I see an organic connection among the stories, they are certainly not a novel, nor could they be. They are separate self-contained stories, and putting them in novel drag only makes them look embarrassed and foolish. That novelizing project failed of its own futility, and I stopped work on it long before I got to the new material; so the final story remained unwritten.

  It might have remained unwritten forever except for Otto Penzler, proprietor of the Mysterious Press. In the spring of 1982 he and I were talking about another project I don’t seem to be working on, which is a book about Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Jasper didn’t do it). I told Otto about Levine, about the five stories I’d written and the one I hadn’t written, and he asked to read them. Having done so, he then said he would like to publish them as a collection, but they weren’t long enough to fill a book. “You’ll just have to write the other story,” he said.

  Well, of course I didn’t have to write the other story. But the truth was, I wanted to write that story, it had been itching at me for a long time, but I had never had the right impetus at the right moment before. Did I have it now? Obviously, since you are holding the book in your hands, I did.

  The last story.

  I might be able to write just one more story about Levine, but I knew from the beginning that that would be it. I couldn’t possibly resurrect the character, dust him off, and run him through an endless series of novelettes, not now. But one story; yes.

  There were problems, though, and the very first problem was time. The first five stories were all over twenty years old. The final story could not take place twenty years later in Levine’s life, even though it was doing so in his author’s. Should I rewrite the earlier stories, updating them, moving them through experiences they had never known; Vietnam, Watergate, the Kennedy assassinations, the changing public perceptions of policemen, all the rest of it? Should I rather attempt to write historical fiction, to write the final story as though it were being written in November of 1962 instead of November of 1982?

  I’ve thought about the problem of updating before this, and generally speaking I’m against it. I believe that television has made a deep change in our perception of time—at least of recent time—and that in some way all of the last fifty years exists simultaneously in our heads, some parts in better focus than others. Because of television and its reliance on old movies to fill the unrelenting hours, we all know Alan Ladd better than we would have otherwise. We all understand men in hats and women in shoulder pads, we comprehend both the miniskirt and the new look, automobiles of almost any era are familiar to us, and we are comfortable with the idea of a man making a nickel phone call. Train travel is not foreign to us, even though most Americans today have never in their lives ridden a train. Without our much realizing it—and without the academics yet having discovered it as a thesis topic—we have grown accustomed to adapting ourselves to the time of a story’s creation as well as to its characters and plot and themes.

  Besides which, updating is hardly ever really successful. The assumptions of the moment run deep; removing them from a generation-old story isn’t a simple matter of taking the hero out of a Thunderbird and putting him into a Honda. It’s root-canal work; the moment of composition runs its traces through the very sentence structure, like gold ore through a mountain.

  And if it isn’t possible to bring twenty-year-old stories blinking and peering into the light of today as though they were newborn infants, it is equally unlikely for me to erase the last twenty years from my own mind and write as though it were 1962 in this room, I am twenty-nine, and most of my children aren’t alive yet. If I write a story now, this moment will exist in it, no matter what I try to do.

  I have written that final story, called “After I’m Gone.” I have as much as possible tried to make it a story without obvious temporal references, neither then nor now. I have tried to make it a story that could be read in a magazine in 1983 without the reader thinking, “This must be a reprint,” and at the same time I’ve tried to make it flow naturally from the Levine stories that preceded it. No one could succeed completely straddling such a pair of stools, certainly not me. But if I have at least muted my failure and made it not too clamorous, I’ll be content.

  As for Abe Levine, we are old friends. He’s been there all along, inside my head, waiting for the next call. I had no trouble getting to know him again, and it’s my fond belief that he is clearly the same person in the last story that he was in the first, however much time may or may not have gone by. I would like to introduce him to you now, and I hope you like him.

  In Westlake’s files I found a copy of a letter he sent to Evan Hunter a few years before Hunter’s death in 2005 in which he mentioned that a fan had recently sent him a video cassette of the episode of 87th Precinct he discusses in this piece—so, decades later, he’d finally gotten to see it. As for the book about Edwin Drood . . . well, there’s always the chance it will see the light of day eventually.—Ed.

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  This essay was written as a contribution to I, Witness: Personal Encounters with Crime by Members of the Mystery Writers of America, which was edited by Westlake’s friend and sometime collaborator Brian Garfield and published in 1978.—Ed.

  At the kind of literary cocktail party where the only food available is seven or eight trendy variants on potato chips, I sometimes limit my drinking to dry vermouth on the rocks, as a self-protective gesture. That’s what I was carrying, while roaming with less and less hope in search of at least one small bowl of peanuts, when the short lady with the lace at her wrists said, “May I ask you a question?”

  “You haven’t seen any cashews, have you? Possibly a bowl of fruit?”

  “Sorry, no. May I ask you a question?”

  Near to hand was a bowl of trendy potato chips; they had a rippled surface, like my stomach lining. “Yes, of course,” I said.

  “Tell me,” she said. “Where do you get your ideas?”

  “I am a Crime Novelist, madam,” I said. “I steal them.”

  She laughed, but didn’t go away. “Surely not,” she said.

  “Surely so,” I insisted. The rippled chip was very dry and very salty. I sipped vermouth and said, “Tom Lehrer defined it for all.” And, in my loud, tone-deaf voice, I sang, “Plagiarize! That’s why the Good Lord made your eyes!”

  “But not you,” she said. Nothing would deter her, and my singing—which normally can empty a room—had attracted two or three passersby.

  “Everyone,” I told her, and them, “everyone steals, whether only a line, a situation, a character quirk, a setting, perhaps a murder method, a complete plot, possibly even an entire thematic substructure, a whole view of life. As we stand here gorging ourselves on potato chips, college students all over the country are writing themes in which every s
entence ends with three dots, thanks to their recent exposure to Celine. And why not?” I demanded, noticing that one or two fiction writers had joined the group. “Plagiarism is merely imitation, and imitation is said to be a form of flattery. One of the better forms of flattery. I have in my time,” I continued, “both flattered others and been myself flattered by those bastards treading on my heels.”

  “Sorry,” said the short gent behind me. He picked up the chip bowl and moved around front.

  “Not you. And in any case there’s no point getting upset about people stealing ideas from one another. I’m finally coming to understand that no matter how hard I hustle or how lazily I dawdle we’ll all get to Tuesday at the same time.”

  “What have you stolen?” demanded a fellow I recognized as a moderately known novelist reputed to be very handy with a lawsuit.

  “I won’t tell you what I’ve stolen personally,” I answered, “but I will tell you of a time when I became a receiver of stolen goods, even to the point of filing off the serial numbers and reselling the stuff.”

  “Who’d you steal from?”

  “I didn’t steal. I received stolen goods.”

  “Who from?”

  “A Hollywood movie producer.”

  The entire group shifted from one foot to the other. Hearing that Hollywood movie producers might be found with stolen goods about their persons was not interesting news.

  The litigious novelist, however, pursued the point: “Who’d he steal from?”

  “A gang of professional criminals in France. And they had started the process by stealing from Lionel White.”

  The lady with the lace at her wrists said, “Who is Lionel White?”

  “A very good crime novelist,” I told her. “I doubt he himself knows how many of his books have been made into movies. There was The Money Trap with Glenn Ford, and an early Stanley Kubrick movie called The Killing, and—”

  “Get to the point,” suggested the novelist.

  “I suppose I will, eventually,” I said, pausing to sip vermouth. “But mentioning The Killing reminds me of another example of how ideas travel. That movie was based on a novel called Clean Break. A while later, there was a novel called League of Gentlemen, written by John Boland, and made into a movie—”

  “—starring Jack Hawkins, with a screenplay by Bryan Forbes,” suggested the short gent. He was eating all the chips out of the bowl, one after the other, like a metronome: dip-chip, dip-chip, dip-chip.

  “That’s right,” I agreed. “In that movie, which was a comic treatment of the kind of caper story at which Lionel White has always specialized—the tough gang of professional crooks pulling off a robbery of some sort—Jack Hawkins assembles his gang by sending each man half of a five-pound note and—”

  “Ten-pound note,” corrected the short gent.

  “Are you sure? Anyway, half a note and a paperback crime novel. He wants them to read the novel to see how professionals do it, and the novel he sends them is Clean Break, by Lionel White. So the notion of using Lionel White’s ideas to trigger other people’s ideas already exists.”

  The novelist said, “What does all this have to do with you and receiving stolen goods?”

  “Now we’ve come to that,” I assured him. “Among Lionel White’s other books was one called The Snatch, which was a kidnapping novel, featuring his usual breed of hard-bitten professionals. As with many American crime novels, this was translated into French and published by Gallimard in their Serie Noir. A minor French criminal read the book, decided it was a blueprint for a practical crime, and induced a few of his criminal friends to read it.”

  “Wait a minute,” said the short gent, putting down the empty chip bowl. “That’s what Jack Hawkins did in League of Gentlemen.”

  “Except,” I pointed out, “that Hawkins and his gang used the manner of Clean Break while making up their own crime. Otherwise, John Boland and Bryan Forbes might very well have found themselves being sued by Lionel White.”

  My novelist friend growled low in his throat. He was drinking something as colorless as water, with a bit of lemon rind in it. Such drinkers are dangerous.

  “To return to France,” I said, “these criminals—”

  “I love France,” said the lady with the lace at her wrists. Her drink was a dark maroon in color, and it coated the glass. Had oil spill become a popular beverage?

  “France is all right,” I answered, “but if you—”

  “Lionel White,” insisted the novelist.

  “Those French criminals,” urged the short gent.

  “What happened next?” demanded two or three fringe members of the group. (They were, had they but known it, exemplifying not only the human need for narrative which creates jobs for storytellers like me, but also the professional need which at times drives writers to seek the answer to that question in other writers’ books.)

  “Well,” I said, “the French criminals weren’t planning to write any novels, so they didn’t have to be careful not to get too close to the original story. They decided to follow White’s blueprint exactly, doing everything precisely as described in the book.” I sipped vermouth. “The book,” I went on, “told them how and where to find their victim, so they did that part and it worked. It told them how to engineer the actual kidnapping, and they did that part and it worked. It told them how and where to keep their victim, how to make contact with the parents, and how to collect the ransom without getting caught, and everything it told them to do they did, and it all worked.”

  The novelist, sounding suspicious, said, “This is a true story?”

  “It is. The book told them to choose an infant, because an infant wouldn’t be able to identify them later, and the infant they chose was the grandson of the automaker, Peugeot. The Peugeot kidnapping became the crime of the decade in France; brilliant, audacious, professional in every way.”

  The lady with the lace at her wrists said, “What happened to the child?”

  “Fortunately,” I told her, “the book had emphasized the point that the child should not be harmed in any way. If the child were returned safely at the end of the exercise, the crime would eventually be forgotten and the police would concern themselves with other more recent outrages. But if they were to kill the child, the police—and the wealthy Peugeot family—would never give up, until the criminals were found. So, once they got their ransom money, the gang returned the child—in the manner described in the novel—and that was the end of it.”

  “What happened next?” asked two or three recent additions to the group.

  “They ran out of book.”

  “What did they do?”

  “They were left with nothing to rely on but their own teeny brains. They threw their money around in neighborhoods where they were known. They got drunk in bistros and hinted at secret knowledge in the Peugeot kidnapping. Within two weeks they were all under arrest and most of the money had been found and returned to the family.”

  Smiling—his chin was very salty—the short gent said, “They should have used some of the money to hire Lionel White to write a sequel.”

  “If he’d put that thought into the book, they would have.”

  The disputatious novelist said, “Where do you come into all this?”

  “Rather later,” I told him. “Let me make the point here that factual events cannot be copyrighted. It would be clean against the law to steal the plot or characters of Lionel White’s Clean Break, but it is not against the law to borrow for one’s own literary use the true story of a group of criminals imitating a novel. This was the suggestion brought back to me in the late sixties by a producer named Eddie Montaigne. A very nice, pleasant man, Montaigne had been the producer of the Phil Silvers TV series Sergeant Bilko and of a long line of movie comedies including the Don Knotts pictures. Universal Studios had offered to finance him for a major-budget comedy, and his idea was to do a movie based on the Peugeot kidnapping. Not that he insisted on a kidnapping, and he certainly didn’t want a
French background. What he wanted was a story about criminals copying a book. He asked me if I’d like to do this story, and I said I would, and in our final meeting I made my principal contribution to the project, by suggesting that a movie about these criminals should have them imitating not a book but a movie.”

  “Of course,” said the novelist.

  I sipped vermouth. “We had a step deal,” I said, throwing in a little shoptalk to please the novelist (pleasing one’s audience is much more important than having an opinion about one’s audience), “which began with my writing a ten-thousand-word story treatment. Initially I felt I’d rather stay away from kidnapping because if for no other reason it was too close to the truth, and after thinking about felonies for a while I came up with the substitute of counterfeiting. It seemed to me that Dennis O’Keefe had starred in any number of movies in which he was a Treasury Agent disguised as a crook so he could infiltrate a counterfeiting gang, and I thought it might be fun to cobble up a nonexistent movie out of bits and pieces of those Dennis O’Keefe epics, and make that the movie my own crooks would be imitating. The problem was—and it was frequently also a problem in the Dennis O’Keefe movies—there’s very little that’s either dramatic or comic in counterfeiting.”

  The short gent had wandered away—it’s hard to keep an audience interested—but now he came back with a new bowl of potato chips and said, “Why didn’t you have them rob a bank?”

  “The problem with robbery, and with most other crimes,” I told him, “is that they aren’t serial. They happen and they’re over with. There’s no reason for the criminals to keep going back to the book—or the movie—to see what to do next. Counterfeiting is at least a serial crime, in a dull way, but finally I had to go back to the original. Kidnapping is, more than any other, a crime that takes place step by step.”

  “So you did the story treatment about a kidnapping,” said the novelist.