Bandbox

by Thomas Mallon

“Mr. Boylan.”

  “It’s Captain Boylan, actually.”

  Harris smiled, and nodded toward the thing in his hand. “It’s a little early for New Year’s, I guess.”

  “That object you’re holding is nearly three hundred years old. It’s what the Dutch Rattle Watch once employed while on foot patrol to warn the good people of New Amsterdam about any sign of trouble. A first defense against the community’s undesirables and malefactors.”

  “Clever race, the Dutch,” said Harris, who replaced the rattle onto Boylan’s desktop. He thought of adding “Nearly as clever as the Irish,” but decided against it after another look at Boylan’s expression.

  “We arrested your friend Mr. Roma while you were out of the country.”

  “Yes,” said Harris. “A prince of a guy. I’m sure all that will prove to be a misunderstanding.”

  “A princess, perhaps. Maybe one of the ‘horticultural lads’ who seem to enjoy your magazine.”

  If Harris had been uncomfortable before, he was plain angry now. What rock was this guy living under? How many years had it been since he’d picked up Bandbox?

  “We’re actually concerned,” continued Boylan, “with what preceded Mr. Roma’s arrest. A reliable informant tells us that you had been offering illegal monthly gratuities to a uniformed officer of this department in order to keep concealed certain facts of Mr. Waldo Lindstrom’s past, thereby allowing him to continue working for your publication. I would like the name of that officer.”

  Harris tried, quickly, to figure out Boylan’s angle: Did he want to shake down the cop for a portion of the take? Maybe scapegoat him to reduce the newspaper heat on higher-ups? Or maybe—the worst possibility—this guy was on the level? Maybe Boylan was some high-strung Savonarola trying to clean up his church right here in Little Italy? Whichever, Harris decided it was better not to offer him the free pair of Show Boat tickets he’d discovered in his pants pocket on the way downtown.

  “I may have made contributions,” he said, finally.

  “To whom?” asked Boylan.

  “An officer who comes into Mr. Roma’s restaurant from time to time, soliciting for the police widows’ fund.”

  “Let me suggest that this officer comes into the restaurant once a month.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “Let me suggest that it’s exactly right. What is this officer’s name?”

  “I don’t know,” said Harris. “He’s a tall friendly Irishman.” He knew he would regret this last remark, but allowed it to escape his lips nonetheless.

  Boylan glared. “You’re telling me you never asked this officer his name. Well, I’m telling you that the Widows and Orphans Fund does not go about soliciting donations in restaurants.”

  “This one did,” said Harris, who once a month, out of sight in Gianni’s kitchen, would hand over the payoff envelope.

  “So,” said Boylan, “if I were to find this officer, he would tell me that these payments had to do with charity and not with Mr. Lindstrom?”

  Harris, speaking what was only the truth, replied, “I would hope so.”

  “And you have no idea where Mr. Lindstrom is?”

  “None,” said Harris, eyeing an antique, knobby nightstick that was mounted on the wall. He wondered if it, too, was Dutch, or maybe Indian. “This informant of yours,” he at last made bold enough to say, all but mentioning Jimmy by name, “have you asked him how he knows what he says he knows? Have you given any thought to what ax he might be grinding?”

  “We leave axes to Major Campbell and the federal boys,” said Boylan. Harris took this to be a reference to the overzealous bust-up of Helen Morgan’s nightclub, around New Year’s, by some Prohibition officers. “But I will tell you something about grinding, Mr. Harris. I shall grind into sawdust anyone who helps diminish the reputation of this department.”

  By that standard, Harris couldn’t understand why Boylan’s real quarrel wasn’t with Jimmy Gordon, who was flinging around all these aspersions. Nor could he understand why the cash he paid to Officer Michael O’Flynn, always extracted from a “Special Projects” box kept beneath Hazel’s desk, was any more tainted than the public money with which the police department regularly paid its stool pigeons.

  “I suggest that you explore your memory, Mr. Harris. That you give it a good ransacking before Mr. Roma comes to trial next month. You know, we don’t break down doors with axes, but we might take a sudden interest in looking around your offices. It would be a shame if any liquor, or large sums of money, or questionable ‘fashion’ photographs were found on the premises. You, by the way, have a history with photography, don’t you?”

  Boylan reached into a drawer for two poses of “Yvette” and “Claudine.” He laid the postcards on the desktop, facing Harris, who had never been arrested in connection with his previous venture but could, even now, the sweat breaking out on his neck, recall some of the “warnings” he’d received. Boylan might not be current about some things—would it help or hurt to comp him a subscription to the renovated Bandbox?—but his thoroughness seemed otherwise to rival Spilkes’s. Oh, why, Harris asked himself, had he not told Norman about the payoffs to O’Flynn? The m.e. wouldn’t have liked the idea, but last month’s envelope would at least have gotten there.

  The police matron—who was no Yvette—came in to summon Boylan to an appointment.

  “Good day, Mr. Harris,” said the captain. “Don’t travel too far.”

  Harris exited into the severely overcast day. He wandered through Little Italy for several blocks, stopping in front of a bakery window that displayed a picture of Mussolini. Envying the Duce’s absolute power, he sighed. A pretty girl in a white apron came out to offer him two biscotti fresh from the oven. So delicious were they, compared to what got served at Malocchio, that Harris had to wonder, munching and walking away, whether Gianni didn’t belong in jail after all.

  34

  Newman had been sprung from the District of Columbia jail a week ago today. The charges against him had, by some miracle, been dropped. After two days hiding out at Fitz’s, he’d been bundled onto a train for New York, where he quickly resumed the drinking he’d begun at the chophouse across from the Press Club. In the five days he’d been back in his own place, he had remounted the wagon every twenty-four hours or so, until the weaker side of his nature once again took over and had him reaching for the Bushmills instead of for Dew-ol’s nerve-strengthening tonic.

  The carpet was littered with ten or twelve pages of notes—interviews with the Washington bachelors Fitz had brought to the house in Foggy Bottom, in the days after Newman’s release, as occupational therapy. Work had not, alas, proved especially strong medicine. Newman could barely read the notes, let alone write from them. He had, however, succeeded in pulling the telephone out of the wall, so he wouldn’t have to hear himself be fired by Harris or Spilkes. As it was, he expected to see news of his dismissal come slithering under the door in the form of a telegram.

  Disconnecting the phone had also cut off the terrifying prospect of a call from Rosemary, who’d now returned to Hollywood, where production had finally begun on her new film.

  Newman knew she would at some point exact punishment for his desertion, or for the bad publicity any association with him might yet bring. He had the blinds drawn as much against her as the sunlight. The one time he’d made himself go out and sit in Gramercy Park, he’d spent no more than a quarter of an hour there, all of it looking over his shoulder.

  “Stuart?”

  Newman jumped at the sound of a voice beyond the door. Up to now, he’d believed not even his landlady knew he was home. With caution, he rose from the bed, put on his slippers, and soundlessly approached the peephole. Looking through it, he saw the unexpected face of Nan O’Grady.

  “Hey, kiddo,” he heard himself saying, before simulating a cough and trying to remember if he ever even called Nan by that name. Was he drunk or sober today? On the wagon or off? He was honestly unsure.

 
; “Do you need a minute or two?” asked Nan. “Take your time.”

  Allen Case, watching some squirrels from the hall window, was out of the peephole’s range, but he’d come here from the office with Nan, listening to her on the subway trip down as she tried to interest him “in a human rescue.” While conceding that Newman was nice enough as humans went, Allen had changed the subject to the animal warehouse in Queens and what he was sure the lemur had told the ocelot after enduring the House & Garden shoot with Gardiner Arinopoulos.

  Nan now waited with whatever patience she had left. Behind her she could hear Allen whispering to the rodents; through the wooden door she detected the sound of Stuart’s panicky, circular movements. She shook her head. Three years ago she would have been behind her desk at Scribner’s correcting some New England dowager’s spelling of wistaria. Now, for a few extra dollars a week, she was caught between one guy full of sunflower seeds and another full of booze, neither of them with the slightest interest in her.

  “Stuart,” she said, knocking again. “You really don’t need to fuss for me. I’m here with Allen. We want to help.” She tried the doorknob. “May we come in?”

  Newman, who had certainly not fussed, managed to open up. Nan noticed the clothes, loose papers, and movie magazines featuring Rosemary LaRoche all over the floor. She also couldn’t help noticing how beautiful Stuart looked, unshaven and slightly haggard, in his undershirt. He was no longer just handsome, but poetic, the way the young men in La Bohème should have looked, instead of being so operatically fat, when she took her mother to the Met.

  She tried for a lightness of touch. “We’ve given up on Harris ever arriving at the office,” she said, laughing. “We decided we’d rather see you instead.”

  “Do I still have a job?” asked Newman, quite bewildered.

  “There hasn’t been time to fire you,” said Nan, still bundled up against today’s weather. “And there’s no need to, Stuart. Your column can still make it into the issue if we have a draft by tomorrow. Were you able to do any work on it before your”—she paused for the right word—“mishap?”

  Stuart tried to gather lucidity, and at last said, huskily: “I did a little work after it, actually.” He bent down to pick up the notes scattered across the floor; he felt ashamed handing them to Nan, whose whole life, he knew, was a matter of order.

  But she took them with a smile, consciously checking the reflex by which she would ordinarily have rolled her eyes. “Wait just a minute,” she said, before crossing the room to confer with Allen, who’d been checking one of the nerve-tonic labels for mineral content and, he hoped, an absence of animal fat. He took the notes, straightened them into a stack, and nodded in response to Nan’s whispered instructions. He waved goodbye to Newman and left the apartment, observing, before he crossed back over the threshold, that Nan had begun to throw away the empty whiskey bottles.

  Despite the weather, Allen decided to walk home to Cornelia Street, down Sixth Avenue, whose soaked excavations for a new subway line had the Stygian appearance of those Somme Valley photographs that had shaped him long ago. He half expected to see a dead horse float by the wooden pilings.

  Tonight he would easily accomplish what Nan wanted done with the notes. Before he went to bed they’d have bloomed into a whole column in Stuart’s trademark Lothario style, which was already, Allen knew, an unnatural impersonation on Stuart’s part. Even so, he could hear his own parody beginning to take shape inside his head: If you’re courting a gal on Capitol Hill, let me give you some advice for getting her consent …

  Hopping a puddle, Allen decided that under certain circumstances it was probably all right to help out a human. Still, he knew that when he turned out the light and said good night to Sugar and to Freddy and the new moosehead, he would lack any sense of achievement. What he’d still be feeling, even as Canberra spent her first night on the high seas, was his terrible failure to have accomplished the liberation of that warehouse across the East River. What use were his perfect grammar and talent for mimicry when it came to effecting what had become his one object in life?

  If you’re trying to free a Long Island City lemur, let me give you—

  All at once, as the rabbi he was passing struggled with a broken umbrella, the solution had flown into his head. If he could impersonate David Fine and Paul Montgomery and Stuart Newman when need be, why couldn’t he also write in the voice of Gardiner Arinopoulos?

  35

  Hiram Oldcastle’s blandly agreeable manner was supplemented by a few pronounced eccentricities. Uptown he might live in sleek modernity, but he often came to his sixteenth-floor office in the Graybar dressed in flannel shirts and dungarees. The robust Americanism that he imposed on his magazines—each Oldcastle title, even Bandbox, had to do a Fourth of July cover—sprang not from his deep native roots (he came from one of the country’s oldest families) or any love of democracy, but from a violent bout of homesickness he’d suffered as a child. When young Hi’s mother deserted his father to marry an English actor, she’d inflicted on the boy several miserable years in the Cotswolds. Several decades later, any subject of George V still had a hard time getting hired at Oldcastle Publications: Andrew Burn and Richard Lord had been exceptions, the first for his iron Scottish nationalism, the latter as part of the carte blanche Joe Harris enjoyed after Bandbox’s miraculous turnaround.

  “Sit down, Joe,” said Oldcastle, smiling into the middle distance. “Did you have a good trip?” The owner tolerated the annual London pilgrimage as a business necessity, but he still didn’t like it.

  “As good as you can expect,” said Harris, who always knew how to play this. “But what an awful place. I couldn’t find a cigar worth smoking.”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Oldcastle, before he announced, in the same cheerfully flat tone: “I’ve had some more disturbing numericals, Joe.”

  Harris nodded. “I know, I know. Wanamaker’s. Norman told me.”

  “I’m afraid it’s more than that, Joe. A different set of figures entirely. Advance word from the GME.”

  “More numbers? I feel like I’m working for Burroughs.”

  Oldcastle appeared perplexed.

  “The adding machines,” said Harris.

  “That’s a good one, Joe.” Without hesitation, or any change in expression, the owner continued: “You remember that Cutaway ran a special subs promotion for women buyers before Christmas.”

  “Yeah,” said Harris. “ ‘Please the Man in Your Life.’ I guess I can’t get Jimmy to stop being the man in mine.”

  “They had a big success with it, Joe.”

  “All right,” said Harris, sighing. “I’m sure that’s slowed our rate of growth. But how could we have kept it at the same level after the four phenomenal years—”

  “Your subscriptions have dropped, Joe. Not the rate of growth. The actual numbers.”

  Harris looked as if he’d just been told the sixteenth floor was plummeting to the sidewalk.

  “The GME reports that Jimmy’s up 43,215 for October through New Year’s. That’s not surprising, since Cutaway is still a start-up. But you’re down 17,690 for the same period, Joe. Which may suggest that this town isn’t big enough for both you and Jimmy.”

  “Hiram, what are you suggesting?”

  “That if Jimmy looks like he’s winning the game, it might make sense to sell.”

  “I don’t follow you,” said Harris. “Sell what? More subscriptions? Believe me, we’re trying.”

  “No, Joe. Sell Bandbox. To Nast. Let Jimmy absorb it into Cutaway while the subscription list and masthead are still worth charging him real money for.”

  Harris’s face turned as gray as the rain falling past the window. “And what do you expect me to do? Go to work for Jimmy?”

  “I don’t expect anything, Joe. I’m just saying that we need to be realistic if present trends continue.”

  “Trends? It’s one set of numbers!”

  “Joe,” said Oldcastle, not a decibel higher than
he’d said anything else. “When I hired you, how long did it take you to turn Bandbox around?”

  “One business quarter.”

  “That’s right, Joe. And it can head back in the other direction just as quickly.”

  “You let the old version languish for twenty years!”

  “That was a sentimental gesture, Joe. Something for the family.” Oldcastle was now old enough that people sometimes forgot he’d inherited the first of his several millions, as well as the company, from his childless uncle, who had started Bandbox.

  “Now, Joe,” the publisher continued, “no long faces. During this wait-and-see period I’d like to talk about some things we really can’t have going on. Let’s start with your employment of this fellow Lindstrom.…”

  From Waldo, it was on to Gianni, and then Newman, and then Mr. Palmer. Fifteen minutes passed before Harris, having done little more than nod, could get up from his chair and, with Oldcastle’s permission, leave the office.

  Right now Paul Montgomery, hidden behind two potted palms at the elevator bank, felt confident that with a little scrutiny of Harris’s facial expression, he’d be able to infer just what had happened behind Oldcastle’s door. Paulie had been up here on the sixteenth floor four times today, ever since noticing the summons to the boss on Hazel’s desk. And now, at last, after getting a good look at Harris watching the elevator arrow, he had the information he’d come for.

  It was time for him to quit.

  36

  “This is the first year I haven’t had a Valentine from Daisy,” said David Fine, sitting across from Spilkes at Malocchio. They were close to finishing the main course.

  “She must be serious about this judge.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t figure she’d cut me off. She never did during the polo player. Or the wrestler.”

  Harris finally entered the restaurant, an hour late, so ashen and unsteady that a waiter helped him toward the table. Spilkes and Fine could scarcely conceal their shock.