by Shaun Harris
“Are you going to do me this favor?” I said. I pressed my hand against the phone-booth wall and pushed my back into the opposite one, trying to stretch it out. I was still hurting from the ride in the VW.
“We need to talk about your plans for Toulouse, Coop,” Ox said. I could hear his two-day stubble rubbing against the receiver. “You are killing the proverbial golden goose.”
“Which proverb was that, Ox?”
“The one where God came down from the mountain and told the Israelites not to kill off a lucrative brand so they can pursue some bullshit artistic flight of fancy. Don’t you know that a brand, a solid brand, is a gift from God?”
Oxblood had been my agent from the beginning, almost ten years, ever since he’d judged a short-story contest I had entered just after college. I’d come in third place, but Ox had championed my story about a once-ambidextrous amputee trying to make it on the professional jai alai circuit. It wasn’t long before he became one of my closest friends, which put him at the top of a very short list.
“There’s a precedent for killing off a pen name,” I said. “Stephen King did it.”
“You’re not Stephen King,” Ox said. “And he killed off Bachman years after everyone was in on the joke. He was also already successful under his real name. No one knows who the fuck you are.”
“That’s what I want to change.” I looked out the window and saw Grady standing next to my rental. It was a nice ostentatious yellow Hummer, the perfect vehicle for a covert operation in Ensenada. Grady was giving some last-minute instructions to Digby, who was nodding enthusiastically while trying to light a joint in the stiff wind coming off the sea.
“You want people to buy you drinks, is that it? Don’t I buy you enough drinks?”
“I’m tired of people thinking I have a vagina,” I said.
“You whine like you do. There are more people who depend on Toulouse than just you, you know.” This was the umpteenth permutation of the same conversation we’d been having for the last month and a half. The hardest thing to achieve in publishing is a recognizable brand. There are only so many authors out there whom the average reader has time to give a shit about. To most readers, books are like potato chips; you go with the brand you like. It’s why new writers clamor all over themselves to get a blurb from a recognizable author. It’s why Toulouse Velour gets six-figure book deals and Henry Cooper does not. It matters not that we’re the same person.
The idea to bump off Toulouse Velour had germinated last year when I was reading Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live. He posited that one of the best things that could happen to a musician’s career was dying. The artist’s death makes his art more valuable because there won’t be any more produced. Rarer is more valuable. This coupled with our species’ overwhelming obsession with death and all its connotations makes shuffling off the mortal coil one hell of a marketing scheme. Look at Michael Jackson. The King of Pop was always a big seller, astronomical even, but after decades of weird scandals his sales had begun to slide into oblivion. It was his ignominious death, however, not his overhyped comeback tour, that rocketed him back into the stratosphere. Consumers are like the Irish. To them everybody is a saint after they die.
This phenomenon is not limited to the music industry. In fact, it had already been perfected by the publishing world. Take J. D. Salinger, who was already using the old marketing trope of lunatic isolation to garner respect and adulation. The day he died, bookstores were inundated with people clamoring for Holden Caulfield as if they hadn’t stuffed Catcher in the Rye in the bottom of their lockers when they were in high school. It was this example that I used to approach Ox with my plan to kill Toulouse. I brought up the multitude of manuscripts that Salinger had squirreled away in a desk drawer. Now they could be posthumously published and would fly off the shelf regardless of their quality. Hell, if they found a collection of grocery lists in his closet they’d try to publish it.
Ox was right on board with the idea at first. His eyes glazed over, and a touch of drool congealed at the corner of his mouth as he thought of the swarming mass of MacMerkin fans beating their breasts and tearing their sleeves over the loss of their beloved Toulouse. He conjured up a picture of them descending on Barnes and Noble like ants on a discarded Snickers bar, consuming every last MacMerkin crumb. He imagined parceling out Toulouse’s posthumous works as each one was “found” in a fictitious attic, like a literary Tupac.
Ox’s excitement lasted for two days, until he met with his mentor and former boss, Stu Weingold. Weingold had tutored Ox in the immutable laws of agency. The first rule, or one that was right up there, was “Thou shalt not fuck with a brand.” Ox, properly chastised, had been dead set against Toulouse’s death ever since.
“You’re a murderer, Coop. I don’t know how else to characterize it,” Ox said. We had been referring to Toulouse’s impending doom with such casual hyperboles for a while now. I knew he only meant it as a joke, but in the light of the last two hours it wasn’t funny anymore. The phone became cold and clammy in my hand.
“Listen, Ox,” I said as calmly as I could. “Help me out with some research.”
“You think I have the time to do your research for you? You think I’ve got all day?” Ox said. He probably did have all day, and most of the next as well. His agency had three clients, and two of them hadn’t written anything in five years. While Ox was an unabashed bibliophile, he had zero feel and even less ambition for literary-agenting. It was more of a hobby than a profession for a man whose personal wealth rivaled that of small nations. The money had been passed down for so many generations that not an Oxblood alive could remember how it was made in the first place. The most popular rumor was that an ancient Oxblood had invested in the original East India Trading Company.
Ordinarily I’m not the type to consort with a man so deeply embedded in the upper crust, but Ox had three things that appealed to me. The first is that he actually thought I was a decent writer. He liked my early work on its merits as much as my latest work for its profitability. The second was that he was also a Notre Dame alumnus, which always buys someone a place in my heart. The third reason was that the upper crust, what would otherwise be his birthright, had thoroughly rejected Ox from the time he was in diapers. They just didn’t like him. He had as much insight and understanding into the mercurial world known as Society as I had, and far less interest in it. For reasons unknown to either Ox or his parents, he simply did not get it. He moved through that world with all the grace of a mule in an evening dress. On the other hand, in a twist that would make O. Henry groan, his breeding, education, and money made it nearly impossible for him to relate to anyone who’s net worth was less than on par with Bill Gates.
“Do you know anybody into rare books?” I said, pressing on.
“Maybe,” he grumbled.
“Can you ask around about a guy named N. Thandy? Rare book dealer, maybe out of Atlanta.”
“I want the first draft of the new MacMerkin by the end of the month, and I want you to do that anthology I asked you about.”
“Those are your terms?”
“Yes.”
“Oh come on, Ox,” I said, aware of the whine in my voice. “An anthology of stories set around a celebrity reality-show contest? You really want me to do that?”
“Dancing with the Dead has a lot of great writers attached to it,” Oxblood said. “And they’re offering a lot of money to do it. But, if you think it’s beneath you, then maybe I don’t have the energy to poke around about this Thandy fellow.”
“Fine,” I said. “When did you suddenly learn how to negotiate?”
“That hurts, but I’ll let it go,” he said, almost giddy. “Why do you need to know about this guy?”
“Research,” I said. “For a new novel.”
“Uh-huh.”
I said good-bye and hung up. The thing to do with Ox was to get off the phone as soon as you got what you wanted.
Chapter Seven
We took the Hummer I’d been renti
ng for the last four weeks. The road to Ensenada was a sidewinding, potholed business cut into the side of the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir. The edge of each precarious turn was decorated with prismatic flurries of flowers and wooden crosses, memorials for those who didn’t have the dexterity or the sobriety to safely complete it. Graveyards of Detroit’s finest scrap metal decorated the mountainside below. These harbingers hadn’t any effect on Grady, who took each turn as if we were on the Bonneville Salt Flats. I did my best to concentrate on the Hemingway pages while blocking out that I was probably going to die before we reached Ensenada.
I tried to reconcile my memory of A Moveable Feast with Milch’s new pages. It had been ten years since I’d read Hemingway’s Parisian memoir, and the only snippets I could conjure were veiled references to Gertrude Stein’s sexuality and a brief appearance by Aleister Crowley. I had read it in college while taking a class on the lives of American novelists. Hemingway had finished the book just before his death in 1961, but it wasn’t published until three years and several extensive edits later. His third and final wife, Mary, had edited the book, rearranging the order of the chapters and leaving out an apology to Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley. My professor had made a crass joke about catty women that didn’t go over too well with the ladies in class.
I looked for the apology first and found it toward the end, written, not typed, in Hemingway’s looping, somewhat-feminine handwriting. It was short and the notes on it were sparse with only a few red circles and an occasional (sp?). As expected, Papa didn’t lay his soul bare or beg forgiveness from a woman long gone from his life. It read more like regret than redemption. I was about to move on when I spotted a cryptic line that the editor had furiously crossed out: And I should have never involved her in the business with the man from Auteuil.
“Anything good in there?” Grady said over the dying cigarette in his teeth. His bare elbow dangled out the open window, and his Wayfarers hung off the tip of his nose. He looked like he was on a weekend road trip to catch some waves.
“There’s an interesting note here about the Auteuil Hippodrome,” I said, flipping through pages. When an editor goes through a first draft with her red pen, the result usually looks like the aftermath of a grisly battlefield. Two of the chapters in the collection of pages looked like Gettysburg and Antietam respectively. The first was Hemingway’s description of the suitcase Hadley lost at the Gare de Lyon, and the second was an extended chapter on his time at the Auteuil.
“Never heard of it,” Grady said, and swerved to avoid some dead animal in the road.
“It’s a racetrack in Paris,” I said. My thumb found the chapter heading “End of a Vocation,” and I pulled the pages close to my eyes. The red pen had swept over it with the sanguine focus of Sam Peckinpah. “Hemingway spent a lot of time there when he was in Paris.”
“Is it something new?” Grady said.
“There was a chapter on it in the original,” I said, trying to talk and read at the same time. This Auteuil chapter was much longer than I remembered. “There’s a note in here about involving Hadley in something, maybe something bad. It has something to do with someone he knew from the track.”
Grady peered over his Wayfarers. We had crested over a mountain, and the valley flowed out below us like a sandy-green Persian carpet. Grady pointed at a small group of buildings set in the shadow of the next mountain. I could see a red-and-white strip stretched across the road and several people milling around it.
“Checkpoint up ahead. Hide the drugs.”
“You didn’t bring any, did you?” I said, snapping my head up from the manuscript. Grady laughed and shook his head but checked his breast pocket anyway.
“You think Hemingway got himself in trouble with gamblers?”
“Maybe,” I said. “It seems like something he’d do.” While the idea of holding the raw material of one of America’s greatest writers in my hands was exciting, the only thing I could think of was the note the editor had scrawled on the last page. Something in these pages could have, in the mind of the editor, destroyed Hemingway even after his death. I scanned each sentence with a voracious need to find clues to what that something could be. I began to suspect it was connected with Hadley and the unidentified man from Auteuil.
Auteuil had been a place where the Parisian elite mingled with the lower classes of the day. Rich men of industry rubbed elbows with starving artists and shifty criminals. Hemingway loved watching the people interact as much as he loved watching the horses race. The racetrack was a cornucopia of humanity, and the budding author had soaked it up with gusto.
“It seems he was close with an American thief,” I said. “They were drinking and gambling buddies. I don’t remember anything like that from the published book.”
“A thief?”
“Yeah, story says the guy had come over with General Pershing during the war and just stayed in Paris after it was over.”
“Which war was that?”
“World War I,” I said. “The one we never seem to talk about anymore. Apparently the guy was an accomplished cat burglar in the States.”
“No wonder he stayed in Paris. A lot more good shit to steal,” Grady said.
Grady was half right. World War I had been a depressing awakening for a lot of Americans. It had been their first chance to see the world, and it turned out to be a sewer. The leaders of the world had mined humanity’s darkest depths for four long years of blood and destruction and never deigned to explain why to the people who had plumbed those depths. But how could they? How could they apply reason to madness? Many of the American soldiers who had fought in the trenches stayed in Europe after the fighting was done. They chose a foreign land over a home that would look just as foreign when they returned. Hemingway had been one of these men. He had turned his angst to the written word and to drink. While one ventured to save him, the other worked its subtle destruction on him for the rest of his life.
“Why would a smart guy like Hemingway hang out with a crook?”
“I suppose he found the guy interesting,” I said. “You gotta remember, everyone he knew in Paris was famous or on their way to being famous. It must have been nice to chat with a guy who didn’t give a shit if you were published.”
“Hemingway wasn’t famous then?”
“No, he was a nobody reporter with the Toronto Star.” It was this fact, the pages illuminated, that attracted Hemingway to the thief. He was the only one with whom Hemingway could share his true fears, chief among them was the idea that he would fail as a writer. It was a frequent topic of conversation between them at the track. One anecdote in particular, one that had been scrubbed by the editor’s red brush, demonstrated Hemingway’s supreme angst and the thief’s singular advice as Hemingway was about to give up on fiction and accept a life as a correspondent.
“It seems to me that art isn’t nearly as important as the artist,” the thief told him one day over a café au lait. “What you need, Ernie, is a story.”
“I got stories,” Hemingway told him and waved a heavy Moleskine notebook in the thief’s face.
“No one gives a damn about those,” the thief said. “You need a story to tell the editors. Like when you got shot up driving that ambulance. What you need is a story to impress all your friends who are so damn impressed with themselves. And you know what impresses people these days?”
“What?” Grady asked. He was listening to me read the story out loud. Only a handful of people had ever heard it before.
“Suffering and loss,” I said.
“‘Suffering and loss’?” Grady said.
“That’s what the story says.”
“Who was this fucking guy?”
“The name’s covered with black ink,” I said. We pulled to a stop, and several soldiers came running to the car, a few more than usual, but mostly routine in this region.
“Hold the page up to the sunlight, dumbass,” Grady said, reaching for his license. I held the sheet of paper against the window, and th
e sunlight illuminated the thief’s name. One of the soldiers racked his weapon, but it sounded like a dull echo somewhere far away as all of my senses screwed together to focus on the name outlined in a black-red halo.
“Holy shit, Grady,” I whispered.
“Uh, Coop,” Grady said.
“You’re never going to fucking believe this,” I said. “The thief. Holy fucking shit.”
“Coop,” Grady said. “We have bigger problems at the moment.” I turned to see Grady with his hands in the air and the barrel of a machine gun pressed against his cheek. I turned back to the window and let the manuscript page drop. A serious-looking Mexican soldier was pointing his rifle at my head, and he beckoned me out of the car with a nod. I put my hands up and stepped out of the car. Grady got out on the other side and looked apologetically at me over the Hummer’s roof.
I would have to wait to tell him the name that had been so determinedly crossed out with black ink, the name of the thief that had been Ernest Hemingway’s confidant:
Ebenezer Milch.
They put us in a windowless room in a hut about the size of a Dunkin’ Donuts. It smelled of sweat and moldy paper, and we sat in wooden folding chairs that felt like they could collapse under our weight at any moment. The guards had been silent as they shoved us over the narrow footbridge spanning the ditch between the road and the compound. One of them, a stumpy-looking man with splotches of facial hair on his craggy face, tore my wallet from my back pocket. He took my license and my cash, a little under a hundred dollars, and tossed the eviscerated leather back to me. They did the same with Grady, though there wasn’t any cash. The stumpy guard pointed to the chairs, and we sat down without further prompting. They didn’t tie us up, which I found encouraging, but only a little.
“It’s Mexico, Coop,” Grady said, more annoyed than scared. “They expect us to pay them their bribe and be on our way.”
“They already took my money. You got any?”
“In my shoe. Should be enough.”