“Fuckhead! Internal Revenue ain’t goin’ to get Lonergan’s money back for him.”
Slowly Persky straightened up. His face returned to its normal color. “I don’t keep the books here. They’re in my apartment.”
“We’ll go over there and look at them then,” I said. “Where is your apartment?”
“Upstairs,” he said. “Over the store.”
Verita spread the ledgers and the pile of forms across the kitchen table. “It’s going to take me some time to sort this out,” she said.
“How long?” I asked.
“Maybe the rest of the day. It’s a mess.” She turned to Persky. “Do you have a four-column pad?”
“What you see is what I got.”
“I’ll run down to a stationery store and get one,” she said.
Persky looked at me after she had gone out. “Would you like a beer?”
“Thanks,” I said.
I followed him into the kitchen and he took two beers from the refrigerator. We drank from the cans. “Ever run a paper?” he asked.
“No.” I let the beer run down my throat. It was cool, not cold.
He saw the expression on my face. “There’s something wrong with the damn refrigerator. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn’t. If you’ve never run a paper, what makes you interested in this one?”
“I didn’t say I was. It was Lonergan’s idea.”
“What makes him think you can do it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe because I used to write and worked on some magazines.”
“It’s not the same thing,” he said. He looked at me shrewdly. “Lonergan got you, too?”
“No. I’m straight with him.” That was the truth. At the moment I owed him nothing.
He was silent for a moment. “Be careful. Lonergan’s got half the world by the balls now and he’s looking to get the other half.”
I didn’t say anything.
For the first time an expression of interest came over his face. “Write, you said? What kind of material?”
“Articles, commentary, poetry, fiction. I tried them all.”
“Any good at it?”
“Not very.”
“I’d settle if I could be even a half-assed writer, but I know now I can’t get enough words together to make a decent sentence. Once I thought I could. That’s how I got into this paper.”
“What did you do before?” I asked.
“I was circulation manager for several papers like this around the state. They all did pretty good and it seemed easy, so when I got the chance, I grabbed this one.” He paused heavily. “It wasn’t easy.”
“How’d you get in with Lonergan?”
“How does anybody get involved with Lonergan? You run a little short. Next thing you know you’re a lot short.”
“You had a business. What about the banks?”
“Zilch. I tapped out with them the first time around.”
“What do you owe Lonergan?”
“I don’t the fuck know. How does anybody know with that crazy six-for-five bookkeeping mushrooming week after week? I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out to be a million dollars by now.”
By the time Verita finished at six o’clock that evening it turned out that he owed Lonergan nineteen thousand dollars. Plus about eight thousand dollars to the printers and suppliers and thirty-seven thousand dollars in withholding taxes to the state and federal governments. And no assets except a couple of lousy old desks.
“You hit the jackpot. Sixty-four thousand dollars,” I said.
His voice was a whisper as he stared down at the yellow sheet covered with Verita’s neat little accountant’s figures. “Jesus! I knew it was a lot, but seeing it like that—it’s scary.”
Verita’s voice was gentle. “You have nothing really to sell. What you should do is go bankrupt.”
He stared down at her. “Does bankruptcy get me out of the taxes?”
She shook her head. “No, taxes are not forgiven.”
“Nobody busts out on Lonergan either. Not if you want to keep your head attached to your neck.” His voice was dull. He turned to me. “What do we do now?”
I felt sorry for him. Then I got angry at myself. I was feeling sorry for too many people. I had even been sorry for the gooks I lined up in my rifle sights in Vietnam. The first time it happened I couldn’t squeeze the trigger until I saw the bullets tearing into the shrubbery around me and realized that he was my enemy and wasn’t feeling sorry for anybody. Then I squeezed the trigger and saw the automatic fire hemstitch across his middle until he almost broke in half. I had had no business feeling sorry then and I had no business feeling sorry now. Not for the kid who tried to hit me last night or for this asshole, who was willing to go along while Lonergan ripped me off.
I turned to Verita. “Let’s go. We’re not catching the Hollywood Express.”
She began to get up. Persky grabbed my arm. “But Lonergan said—”
Roughly I shook my arm free. “I don’t give a damn what Lonergan said. Lonergan wants your paper, let him buy it. With his money, not with mine.”
“The Collector’s coming back for you at seven. What should I tell him?”
“You can tell him what I told you. He can give Lonergan the message. I’m going home.”
5
Verita had left her car at my place, so we walked home. It took us about an hour.
“I’ll go home now,” she said as we reached the apartment.
“No, come upstairs. I have a bottle of wine. We can have a drink. I want to thank you for what you’ve done.”
She laughed. “It was fun. I had six years of training for this kind of work and today was the first time I ever got a chance to use it.”
Something hit me. “You’re not talking Chicano.”
She laughed. “That’s for the unemployment office. Accountants speak another language.”
I found myself with a new respect for her. “Come on up,” I said. “I promise we’ll talk American.”
She looked up at me out of the corner of her slightly slanted eyes. “But—the boy?”
I smiled at her. “He’s probably gone by now.”
But I was wrong.
The delicious odor of roast beef greeted us as we came through the door. The table was set for two—china, crystal, linen napkins and heavy silver flatware and candlesticks.
“You live pretty good,” Verita said, looking at me.
“None of those things are mine. I never saw them before.”
I went into the kitchen. The boy was standing in front of the oven. He was dressed in a light plaid jacket and white linen slacks, a St. Laurent foulard tied casually inside the collar of his silk shirt. He turned as I came in. “Dinner will be ready in about twenty minutes.” He smiled. “Go back inside and relax. I’ll be right out to fix you a drink.”
Without answering, I turned back to the living room. “He says he’ll be right in to fix us a drink,” I said in a stunned voice.
She laughed. “Looks like you came up with a winner.”
The boy came in from the kitchen, went over to the small hutch on the wall and opened it. The bottles were neatly arranged on the shelf—vodka, gin, scotch, vermouth. Without saying anything, he took some ice from a golden bucket, put it in a glass and poured scotch over it. He turned to me, holding it out. “You drink scotch if I remember?”
I nodded as I took the drink. He turned to Verita. “What would you like?”
“Vodka tonic?” Her voice was questioning.
He nodded and came up with a bottle of tonic from a lower shelf. Quickly he fixed her drink. She took it and we both stood there staring at him. He gestured toward the couch. “I rolled a few joints,” he said. “They’re with the cigarettes in the box on the coffee table. Why don’t you just have a few tokes? It will help you relax. You both look a little uptight.”
“Hey—” I called as he went through the door to the kitchen.
He turned. “Yes?”
“Where did all this come from?”
“I just called up and ordered it.”
“You called up and ordered it?” I repeated. “Just like that?”
He nodded. “They were very nice. I told them to rush because I needed everything for dinner.”
I looked at him suspiciously. “They didn’t ask you for money or anything?”
“Why should they? I just charged it.”
I was getting punchy. “You ever stop to think how I’m going to pay for it? I haven’t any money.”
“That’s nothing. I told you I’m rich.”
“When did you tell me?”
“Last night. Don’t you remember?”
I shook my head. “I don’t remember anything about last night.”
“You were reading your poetry, the window was open and it began to rain. You were naked and you said that the Lord was washing away your sins. It was beautiful. Then you began to cry and said the world was all fucked up because of money and that if everyone had been born rich, there wouldn’t be any problems. That’s when I told you I was rich and I had problems. And you felt sorry for me. That’s when I fell in love with you. No one had ever felt sorry for me before.”
“Oh, shit,” I said. “I must have been stoned out of my head.”
“No,” he said quickly. “You were really cool. You made me see things more clearly than I had ever seen them before.”
“I did?”
He nodded. “I called my father and told him I forgave him.”
I hadn’t the faintest notion of what he was talking about. He saw the expression on my face. “You really don’t remember anything, do you?”
I shook my head.
“You were on Hollywood Boulevard hitching a ride—”
I had a sudden flash of memory. “The silver-blue Rolls convertible?”
“Yes. I stopped to pick you up and we began to talk. I said I would drive you home, but you said a car like that in this neighborhood would get ripped off. So we put it in a garage a few blocks away.”
It was beginning to come back to me. We’d stopped in a liquor store and he’d paid for a few bottles of wine; then we’d come to my place and talked. Mostly about his father and how his father could not accept the fact that his son was gay. And how he constantly tried to keep the boy hidden from his congregation. After all, the Reverend Sam Gannon was almost as famous as Billy Graham, Oral Roberts and Kathryn Kuhlman combined. You could see him almost every week on television, preaching to the world that God cures all. Yet even God couldn’t straighten out His son. Jesus did His own thing and look at all the trouble He’d got himself into. I remembered telling the boy to tell that to his father. I also remembered something else. We just talked. We never fucked.
“Okay, Bobby,” I said, finally remembering the boy’s name. “I just got it together.”
“Good,” he said, smiling. “Now, relax while I finish dinner.”
“We’re going to have to talk,” I said.
He nodded. “After dinner.”
I turned to Verita, who had been watching us. “We got a shot for nothing. I never fucked him.”
She looked at me, relief in her eyes. “That proves one thing. Lonergan doesn’t know as much as he thinks he does.”
I slumped onto the couch and reached for a cigarette.
She stood looking down at me. “Lonergan isn’t going to like it.”
“Fuck him.”
“Not that easy. He’s tough. He usually gets what he wants.”
“Not this time.”
A shadow came into her eyes. “You’ll hear from him.”
She was right about that. The knock came just as we were finishing dinner. I started to get up.
“Finish your coffee,” Bobby said, opening the door. Over his shoulder I could see the Collector.
He pushed past the boy, his eyes taking in the room before looking down at me. “Got the best of both worlds, haven’t you?”
“I’m trying.”
“Lonergan wants to see you.”
“Okay. Tell him I’ll be over later.”
“He wants to see you now.”
“There’s no rush. We’ve got nothing to talk about. Besides, I haven’t finished dinner.”
I sensed rather than saw his movement. I was a lot slower than I had been in the Green Berets seven years ago, but a lot faster than he could have expected. My knee and elbow came up, the knee catching him in the balls, my elbow jammed into his Adam’s apple. He gave a weird kind of grunt and fell onto his knees. Then slowly he rolled over on his back. His eyes bulged in a face that had turned a strange shade of pale gray-blue, his mouth was open, gasping for air, and his hands clutched at his genitals.
I looked down at him and, after a moment, saw the natural black color begin to return to his face. Without getting out of my chair, I picked up the steak knife and held the point to his throat while I opened his jacket and took the heater from his belt holster. I waited until he caught his breath. “I don’t like being pushed. I said I would come over later.”
His eyes crossed as he looked down at the knife held to his throat. Lonergan’s voice came from the still-open doorway. “Feel better now, Gareth?”
He was slim and pale and his eyes were narrowed behind the gold-rimmed spectacles. He stepped into the room, his bodyguard on his heels. “You’ve proved yourself. Now you can let him up.”
I straightened up and put the knife back on the table. I met his eyes. “You got my message?”
He nodded.
“I’m not interested in the paper. It’s like buying my way into bankruptcy.”
“You’re right.”
I was silent.
“If you had gone for that deal, I wouldn’t have made it. I can’t stand stupidity.”
“Then what do you want?”
“Would you take the paper if it were free and clear of all attachments?”
I glanced at Verita. She nodded almost imperceptibly. I turned back to him. “Yes.”
“You’ll still have to get a loan to carry the operating expenses.”
Verita spoke before I had a chance to answer. “The only way he can afford that is if he gets to keep twenty-five percent of the classified advertising revenue.”
“Your accountant’s pretty sharp,” he said. “Twenty percent.”
I looked at Verita. “With twenty percent we could just make it,” she said. “But it would be tight.”
“Let me think about it. I’ll let you know in the morning.”
Lonergan’s voice turned hard. “You’ll let me know now.”
I was silent while I thought. What the hell did I know about running a newspaper even if it was just an advertising freebie?
“Afraid you can’t cut it, Gareth? All the big talk about writing and publishing is different now that you might have to put your money where your mouth is.”
I still didn’t say anything.
“At least your father tried, even if he didn’t have the guts to carry it through. You haven’t even got the guts to begin.” His voice had taken on an icy edge.
I remembered that voice from when I was a kid and knew that it reflected a controlled contempt for the rest of the world. I was suddenly angry. I wasn’t going to let him or the sound of his voice push me into doing anything I wasn’t ready to do.
“I’ll need help,” I said. “Experienced help. Will Persky still be around?”
“If you want him.”
“I’ll need an art director, reporters, photographers.”
“There are services that supply all that. You don’t need them on your payroll,” he said.
“Have you figured out how many copies I would have to sell at a quarter each to break even?” I asked Verita.
“About fifteen thousand,” she said. “But nobody ever paid for the paper before.”
“I know that, but that’s not the kind of paper I want to run. I want a chance to make some real money.”
Lonergan smiled suddenly. For
a moment I almost suspected he had a sense of humor. “Gareth,” he said, “I’m beginning to think you’re growing up. This is the first time I’ve ever heard you express an interest in money.”
“What’s wrong with that, Uncle John? Being rich hasn’t seemed to cramp your lifestyle.”
“It might cramp yours.”
“I’ll take that chance.”
“Then we have a deal?”
I nodded. I leaned forward and helped the Collector to his feet. I held out his gun. He took it. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I get nervous when people make sudden moves toward me.”
He growled something roughly in his throat.
“Your throat might be sore for a few days,” I said. “But don’t worry about it. Just gargle with warm salt water and it’ll be all right.”
“Come on, Bill,” Lonergan said, moving toward the door. “Let’s leave these good people to finish their dinner.”
In the doorway he looked back at me. “Eleven o’clock tomorrow morning in my office in Beverly Hills.”
“I’ll be there.”
“Good night, Gareth.”
“Good night, Uncle John.”
The door closed behind him and I turned to Verita. “I guess we’re in the publishing business,” I said.
She didn’t speak.
“You’ll come with me, of course.”
“But my job.”
“I’m offering you a better one. A chance to do what you trained for. Besides, I need you. You know I’m not a businessman.”
She looked at me for a moment. “I can take a leave of absence while we see how it works out.”
“That’s okay with me. At least that way if I go on my ass, you won’t get hurt.”
“I’ve got the strangest feeling,” she said in a hushed voice.
“What’s that?”
“Your stars have crossed. And the path of your life will change.”
“I don’t know what that means. Is it good or bad?”
She hesitated. “Good, I think.”
There was a knock at the door. I started to open it, but Bobby got there first. The bodyguard looked over the boy’s head. “Mr. Lonergan asked if you wanted a car sent for you.”
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