Bandbox

by Thomas Mallon

  52

  “Bellissimo!” cried Mrs. Pandolfo from the top of the stoop. At this early hour on Cornelia Street, her husband was carrying a just-purchased lamb, its feet bound and ready for Easter slaughter, toward the patch of yard at the back of the building.

  Walking past, Allen Case kept his eyes on the sidewalk and tried to ignore this grim reminder of Sunday’s approach. But he did make a mental note to pick up some carrots, a holiday treat, for Sugar.

  Arriving at the office before 8:30, Allen looked around for the next piece of Max Stanwick’s closely guarded draft, which had been reaching the Copy Department two or three paragraphs at a time. As the text grew and rearranged itself according to Max’s latest inspiration, the layout and photographs kept changing with it. And this morning there was something different.

  That had to be a mountain lion. And in the next photo on the pile: wasn’t that the wingspan of a condor?

  “NO,” said Gardiner Arinopoulos, bustling in. “Those are already OUT.” He took the prints from Allen’s hand. “We MAY use that little QUAIL instead. See it looking so HELPLESS on that sandy PATH? An analogue to our CAPTIVE SUBJECT.”

  Allen thought about driving a no. 2 pencil into the wrinkled patch of skin between the photographer’s eyebrows.

  “So WHAT do you THINK?” Arinopoulos asked Allen, drawing his attention back to the prints just snatched from his hand.

  “I th-think they’re all w-wonderful.”

  “THANK you.”

  Allen had meant the animals, not Arinopoulos’s artistry. He let his gaze linger on the eight-by-ten image of a wolf pondering its apparent freedom out there in California; just across the East River, he knew, the photographer’s own no-longer-wanted menagerie must be in the early throes of starvation.

  Arinopoulos chuckled as he put the pictures back into his portfolio. “They’re as PAMPERED as FOLLIES girls, these ones.”

  “Who t-takes care of them?” asked Allen.

  “Some CRAZY old dago Jew,” explained the photographer. “Mr. Isidore Mazzaferro. He used to KILL people for Rothstein when he wasn’t running diplomatic missions between the Ginny and Hebrew bubbles of crime’s MELTING pot. NOW he PURRS over every HAIR on these CREATURES.” Arinopoulos tapped the portfolio. “Rothstein’s PENSIONED him off to this little NATURE preserve. Along with the cattle, he takes care of these NOT-quite-indigenous PETS.”

  This was all news to Allen; Max hadn’t written a word about the ranch’s animals, at least not in the bits of copy he’d seen so far.

  “Not that Mr. M’s KILLER instincts have disappeared ENTIRELY. You should have seen his RAGE when this cowboy named DARYL dug one of his HEELS a little too hard into his horse.”

  Allen spoke carefully. “I imagine M-Mr. Mazzaferro would h-hurt anyone doing something b-b-bad to the creatures in his pr-preserve.”

  “WORSE harm than came to Diamond Joe Esposito,” Arinopoulos assured him, with a loud laugh.

  “I imagine,” said Allen, “that he’d want to h-hurt anyone doing h-h-harm to animals anywhere. Even in Qu-Queens?”

  Arinopoulos narrowed his eyes. “What are you TRYING to say?”

  “Take me out to that warehouse,” said Allen, with a force that broke through every consonant.

  The photographer tried laughing off this sudden request. “I have a COVER shoot THIS afternoon. I need to get ready.”

  For a moment Allen said nothing, just continued looking straight at Arinopoulos, who realized with a chill that this gaunt, bespectacled boy might be crazier than Mr. Mazzaferro.

  “You stopped p-paying the bills five days ago,” said Allen.

  “YES,” said Arinopoulos. “I DID. The creatures had SERVED their purpose. Let somebody BUY them and EAT them. WHAT business is it of YOURS?”

  He was almost out the door when Allen blocked his path into the corridor.

  “Mr. M-Mazzaferro w-will be seeing this article. He’ll be m-m-mad enough already. Th-then wait until he finds out about that w-warehouse in Queens.”

  “And YOU’RE going to tell him that?” With contempt, the photographer scanned the boy from head to toe. He was as skinny as … a fuse. Arinopoulos swallowed hard.

  “Take me there,” said Allen. “N-now.”

  They were over the Queensboro Bridge within fifteen minutes, the photographer doing his best not to appear afraid. When they arrived at the warehouse property in Long Island City, Allen made a fast survey of its torn wire fencing; the weeds strewn with car parts; the broken little factory windows. From somewhere inside the low brick building a radio played “Make My Cot Where the Cot-Cot-Cotton Grows.”

  “Don’t move,” Arinopoulos instructed the taxi driver. “We’ll PAY you to WAIT.”

  No growling dogs were in evidence this time, perhaps because it was daylight. Allen and Arinopoulos had a clear path to the overhead garage door, which went up seconds after the photographer knocked on it.

  “I thought you were through with all that,” said Mr. Boldoni, the manager, with a vague hand gesture toward some distant but, even from here, pungent precinct of the interior. Allen leaned forward, trying to find the little zoo inside this vast and filthy expanse—half auto body shop, half indoor junkyard.

  “C’mon,” said Mr. Boldoni, in a weary tone. He led them inside at last, wishing that Arinopoulos would make up his mind about these smelly beasts. “You’re lucky any of them are still around.”

  The sight of a half-dozen scrawny caged animals, without even straw beneath them, just sodden newspaper, seared Allen’s vision. A wild-eyed ram weakly bleated, while the lemur who’d done the House & Garden shoot shivered violently, trying to sleep through its slow starvation. Through one of the broken windows Allen could see what appeared to be an open pit for burning trash. God only knew how many creatures had been flung into it.

  A blue vein bulged through the thin skin of his neck, as he turned toward Gardiner Arinopoulos: “Mr. M-Mazzaferro would be very m-m-mad.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s SAKE!” cried Arinopoulos, who reached into his wallet for a wad of small bills that he handed over to Boldoni.

  “Here’s their MEAL ticket for ANOTHER month.”

  Imagining the long days and nights that Canberra had spent here, Allen told the photographer: “I’m afraid that’s n-not going to be good enough. For m-me or Mr. Mazzaferro.”

  53

  At lunchtime that day, Nan stood in Harris’s office going over a piece of Max’s story. She had, at least so far, no obscenity problems to raise, only a concern that Max’s cowboy dialect sounded less than wholly accurate. She was reading Harris some examples of it when Mrs. Zimmerman rang Hazel’s desk to announce that Rosemary LaRoche had just arrived on fourteen with her own hairdresser, chauffeur, and secretary. Hazel took only enough time to repeat the information before dashing off to Reception for a look.

  Nan had a suggestion for the boss. “Tell Miss LaRoche to send all her flunkies back to the Plaza. Order her to wait for the photographer, right there by the elevator, and don’t even offer her a glass of water.”

  Harris looked incredulous.

  “Try it,” urged Nan. “Honest.”

  Harris buzzed Mrs. Zimmerman and dared to convey the instructions. After a long moment, during which the receptionist covered the telephone’s mouthpiece, Mrs. Z replied: “It’s all right. She’ll wait.”

  Harris still had no idea what they had on this Hollywood dame. Newman might be handsome, but surely something more than a good-looking juicer was keeping LaRoche in that chair out there.

  The film star waited a full hour and a half for the photographer to show up. Harris never went out to greet her, just checked with Mrs. Zimmerman every so often to see that she was really still there. Finally, at 3:15, Gardiner Arinopoulos, looking quite white, arrived back at the office. “I’m sorry,” he said, with none of his usual volume or any of the deference Rosemary LaRoche’s presence ought to generate. “I’ll go set up in Studio Two.”

  “Are you all right?” asked
Mrs. Z.

  “Yes, it’s all settled,” said the photographer, with cryptic haste.

  It was four o’clock by the time Harris walked into the studio to watch the setup. With all the trouble she’d caused these last two months, he had forgotten how blindingly beautiful—and hard—Rosemary was. Like a silver hood ornament. Even under the hot overhead lamps she seemed lit more from within than without.

  “Hello, Mr. Harris,” she said.

  What, he wondered, had happened to “ ’Phat”?

  “It’s a pleasure to see you again,” he replied.

  “Yeah,” she said, quietly. “A barrel of laughs.” Something had gone out of her, Harris could tell; the remark was a papier-mâché imitation of her old nasty confidence. But even now, nothing could melt the exterior of this broad. Arinopoulos kept ordering his assistant to move the lights even closer, but Rosemary never blinked or broke a sweat.

  Only Bonus Corer, whose cover debut had been pushed back a month, was disappointed by her appearance here today. Everyone else on staff, even Sidney Bruck, found an excuse to enter Studio Two for at least a glimpse of the film star—who, to everybody’s surprise, made no objection to the gawking.

  Andrew Burn was the only ogler to arrive with actual business on his mind. As the setup continued, he whispered to Harris a reminder of the outrageous seven-cents-per-copy skim the actress had demanded.

  Harris tapped him on the arm and whispered, “Watch this.” Over the groaning movement of stanchions and dollies, he called out to Rosemary: “Wonderful of you to do this for nothing more than the chance to promote Chained with our readers.”

  Rosemary kept gazing straight into the lights. She didn’t say a word.

  Harris, like a fascinated matador, tried to see if he could provoke her.

  “It’s a good arrangement, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” she said, not shifting her eyes. “It’s swell.”

  Burn was impressed.

  “Gardiner,” called Harris, “are you almost ready?”

  “Yes, I believe I am,” said the distracted photographer, without a syllable of emphasis.

  “Good,” said Harris, “because I’ve got something to add to your composition. Clear the studio! Everybody not needed here get out!”

  Arinopoulos looked perplexed, but not the least bit violated artistically.

  Harris picked up the telephone. “Hazel, get the kid.”

  It took just five minutes to bring John Shepard from the Commodore up to the Graybar’s fourteenth floor, during which interval Rosemary managed to hold both her tongue and her pose. But then she saw Harold Teen come in, wearing Hart, Schaffner & Marx, a six-dollar pair of blue-striped suspenders, and a cowlick.

  “Okay, Shep,” said Harris, “stand next to her.”

  “What is this?” Rosemary at last allowed herself to say.

  “I want you to kiss his cheek,” said Harris, “while with your left hand you muss his hair, and with your right you pull on one of his braces. Get ready to shoot on the count of three, Gardiner.”

  John Shepard, thinking of how his mother would scold his pa whenever his suspenders even showed in front of a woman, swallowed nervously. Rosemary had the expression of a beautiful, lethal beast whose tranquilizing dart was beginning to wear off. A couple of spectators actually took a step backwards.

  But Harris ignored her look of imminent refusal. “Shep,” he ordered, “remember to let your eyes show your excitement.” Then, to guarantee the necessary result, he used the line Nan O’Grady had delphically suggested for this moment: “Remember, you’re being kissed by a movie star, not a grandmother, right?”

  Rosemary narrowed her eyes.

  “DILATE!” cried Gardiner Arinopoulos, whose professional reflexes were at last responding.

  With her right heel Rosemary gave the stool she was sitting on a little kick. “This isn’t what—”

  “One, two, three!” shouted Harris.

  And then it was the turn of Rosemary’s professional reflexes to respond. As Arinopoulos’s assistant lit the flash powder, she gave it everything she had—a full, one-hundred-percent blaze of authentic beauty and false passion—the same as she would for any nellie director who stood between her and a paycheck. She leaned in and planted her blood-red lips on Shep’s cheek. The boy’s eyes popped with more candlepower than the blazing magnesium.

  “Again!” cried Harris, six times, until the air was full of fumes and they had the shot. By the time Arinopoulos came out from under the camera’s hood, Rosemary had covered Shep’s cheek with more lipstick than she’d smeared over Stuart two weeks ago, prior to Nan’s rescue.

  The smudges gave Shep a look of dissolute innocence, and Richard Lord decided to keep them, unairbrushed, on the cover that was soon laid out to proclaim:

  THAT’S OUR BOY!

  FILM STAR WELCOMES B’BOX SUBSCRIBER HOME FROM KIDNAP ORDEAL

  A Special Investigation by Max Stanwick

  54

  President Coolidge threw out the first baseball of the season four days later, but a week after that, on Tuesday, April 17, it seemed as if the long, implacable winter had returned yet again: snow flurries were falling in New York.

  Inside the Fifth Avenue Child’s, Stuart Newman ate breakfast and read the paper with his overcoat on. Halfway through his bacon and eggs, he found an item about Rosemary LaRoche. She’d finally returned to the Wyoming Wilderness set, and agreed to pay a fine. Her recent absence was being attributed to romance, the most crowd-pleasing rumor of which involved a possible reconciliation with Howard Kenyon, who was thought to be in the East, “pining for her in an off-season Provincetown hotel.”

  Newman was still smiling over this last bit of intelligence when he heard his name being called.

  “I was on my way to the library,” said Becky, who came in flushed with the cold. “I saw you through the window.” She had promised to look up something on the Scottish Chaucerians for her boyfriend, but she accepted Newman’s invitation to sit down.

  He looked awfully well, thought Becky, if not quite so glamorous. The circles were gone from under his eyes, and he’d put on some weight. The tabletop might even be hiding the beginnings of a paunch. In any case, he appeared more relaxed than she could remember seeing him; the cup of coffee beside his scrambled eggs seemed for once like coffee instead of an antidote.

  “Things pretty frantic over there?” he asked.

  Becky laughed. “I take it you mean the magazine, not the library. Yes, they are,” she said, though she was sure Nan had kept him informed of everything going on. “I’m not certain what’s holding up Max’s story,” she added, her expression turning grave as soon as she mentioned it. Harris and Spilkes had said nothing about the delay and, unwilling to let their western caper become the basis for renewed daily proximity, Becky hadn’t allowed herself to ask Cuddles about the latest developments—though in fact she’d been hoping he’d invite her to Manking, where over two plates of what he liked to call the “feline duck” they could ponder the great Shep gamble he’d set in motion.

  “Well, at least you got your cover shot,” said Newman, whose voice startled Becky out of her revery. “I still don’t know how you managed that,” he continued, smiling through his fib while silently reflecting on all Nan had done for him. He was so grateful, so proud of her; it seemed a shame not to be able to reveal the story of her sleuthing. He settled for telling Becky how the two of them had gone last night to see the Greenwich Village Follies at the Winter Garden. “Blossom Seeley sang, and Dr. Rockwell was the comic,” Newman explained. “I thought he’d be a little broad for Nan’s taste, but I’ve never seen her laugh so hard.”

  He looked like a hearth-happy man, daydreaming of home. Becky hadn’t guessed that things had moved quite so fast and favorably for him and Nan, but her deduction of it now made her feel less happy for Newman than anxious about herself. The space around her own half-established hearth had seemed a little too warm last night—stuffy, in fact. Daniel had pu
t Palestrina on the Victrola, and the two of them had listened to the set of four records straight through without speaking a word to each other—not, in her case, from music appreciation; just from having nothing to say. Hearing about Newman’s night at the Follies, she knew she would rather have been there, though it wasn’t the sort of thing to which one easily invited Daniel.

  “I’ve got to run,” said Becky, as soon as she found herself thinking of just who would have been the ideal date for such an occasion.

  Daisy sat by herself in the fact-checkers’ bull pen, reading the same item Newman had about Rosemary LaRoche. Oh, to abscond from the stage-set of her own life, if only for a week! But there was no escaping the terrible pressures she was under. On Thursday the judge would have to sentence Gianni Roma, and right after that—having failed to get the prosecutors to drop the case—he’d have to begin getting ready for the trial of the Juniper Park foreman. Poor Francis was now like a crooked referee waiting for the opening bell. The messengers had made it plain that the judge’s securing of bail for the defendant was regarded, by The Brain himself, as a less than sufficient effort.

  The messengers had also been talking about events “out in California,” which she assumed had something to do with Cuddles’ interest in that ranch hideout and the rediscovery of that attractive boy from Indiana. But she didn’t know much more about the situation. Max’s current piece, said to be about all this, would not, she’d been informed, be passing through the Research Department—on account of its “special sensitivity.” Daisy had seen no sign of it, or for that matter of Max himself. Well, she already had too much to do for the May issue as it was, what with Chip always off shopping, instead of being at his desk.

  She looked around for him now but saw only Allen Case, who was passing through the corridor and, to her amazement, whistling, without the least bit of faltering between notes. He was also eating a doughnut, food she’d once heard him condemn, at Mrs. Washington’s coffee wagon, for being “f-fried in others’ f-fat.” He appeared to be on some sort of holiday from himself.