Cuddles hesitated, and tried to pretend his delay came from something other than pride, but Harris persisted: “There are two bottles of pre-Prohibition Stoli still standing—at the back of the closet, where my moose used to be.”
Once the two of them got settled on opposite sides of the big marble desk, under the gaze of Yvette and Claudine, Harris could no longer hold it in: “I’ve got twenty minutes left to pick up the phone. I haven’t heard from Boylan, and the trucks leave the plant at five-thirty.” He looked at his EDITOR OF THE YEAR cigarette case, and the buckram-bound back issues, and the pictures of Mae West and Walker and all the rest of them inside their simple black frames. “I’m damned either way. What am I supposed to do? Hold it back and skip an issue?” He knew that would be like asking the rain cycle to skip a step; the sudden downward lurch of the sales graph would resemble the thunderbolt immediately hurled by Oldcastle. “Even Betty’s taken a pass,” said Harris. “She claims she’ll love me either way.”
“Sounds good to me,” said Cuddles.
“Not to me,” Harris responded. “I’ll hate myself if I pick wrong. And hate myself worse if she still loves me after that.” He took a frustrated pause. “Christ, we came so close with this. I don’t know whether to kill Jimmy or kill Norman.”
Cuddles thought a moment before asking, “You know that second bottle of czarist Stoli? Wrap it up for Jimmy. And put in a thank-you card—for forcing you to the top of your game.”
Harris looked at him blankly.
“Has my judgment ever been wrong?” asked Cuddles.
It was an astonishing question. Cuddles’ absence of initiative had for so long been so total that one would no more ponder the matter of his judgment than one might worry over the walking skills of a man who’d stopped breathing.
“Call the plant,” said Cuddles. “Tell the trucks to roll.”
Harris was sweating. His own judgment and initiative were top-notch, but what he’d always had in huger measure than anyone else was nerve. He now peered at Houlihan, the last man around the campfire. To bet everything on the look in his eye, which hadn’t been clear since long before Bandbox began its slide, would take the last dollop of guts the editor-in-chief could find.
“Mrs. Zimmerman,” he said, not even realizing he’d picked up the phone. “Get me the printing plant.”
56
The following morning, at five minutes to six, Mukluk was barking so loud even Betty could hear him. Taking off her sleep mask, she sat up in bed and noticed that Joe was gone. She went to the window and peeked through the blinds to see whether the sun had even come up. Sixth Avenue looked barely awake. The Italian news vendor hadn’t yet opened his stand in front of the Warwick, and Betty could see a lone, too-early customer trying to extract a magazine from a bundle dropped off by a delivery truck.
She realized it was Joe, who’d been up most of the night hoping for a call from Boylan. She sighed, and stepped away from the window. “Do you think you’d like it if we all went to live in the country?” she asked the highly indifferent Mukluk.
Out on the sidewalk, dressed in his best suit for the GME breakfast, Harris continued his struggle with the bale of magazines, until he felt a tap on the shoulder.
“I was going to leave the money!” he protested.
“Hasn’t the all-night newsstand made it to Manhattan?” asked a familiar voice. “We’ve had ’em in Brooklyn for years.”
Cuddles Houlihan handed his boss the latest issue of Bandbox. In another hour Rosemary LaRoche would be kissing Shep on a thousand magazine racks across New York City.
“Jesus,” said Harris, startled more by the horrid fact of the magazine than by Cuddles. He asked if Betty had somehow dispatched him to the hotel to provide moral support.
“No,” Cuddles explained. “I knew you’d be out here. I’m just glad you’re not in your slippers. Come on, you’ve got an appointment downtown.”
Downtown! It sounded to Harris like news of his arrest.
“Trust me,” said Cuddles, who put the two of them into a taxi he directed to Centre Street.
Traveling along Broadway, Harris couldn’t stop himself from looking into the magazine’s new issue. He winced at the picture of Boylan next to the crucial, now-erroneous paragraph.
“Try the piece on Nelson’s Loose-Leaf Encyclopaedia,” Cuddles suggested. “It’s really got something.”
It was still not seven when they walked into Judge Gilfoyle’s courtroom—so odd an hour they couldn’t be sure whether night court or the regular daytime version was in session. Then Daisy DiDonna, glowing with maximum wattage, rose from one of the spectators’ benches to greet Cuddles with a kiss on the lips.
“He feels like a new man!” she cried, struggling to keep down the decibels of this remark about the judge.
“I knew you two had something in common,” replied Cuddles, as he sat Harris down beside the countess.
The whole scene had a disturbing, dreamlike quality for the editor-in-chief, who felt he might at any moment discover himself to be wearing pajamas or standing on a ledge. The three of them in this back row were, aside from the bailiff and two lawyers, the only ones in the courtroom.
“All rise!”
In walked Francis X. Gilfoyle, who seemed newly magisterial, a lofty, independent jurist on the order of Charles Evans Hughes, not some small-time robe rack co-owned by Tammany and the gangs.
Daisy could not stop effervescing. “Look at him!” she whispered to Cuddles. “Not even a speck of dandruff. Those Listerine scalp rinses really work, just like the advertisements say!”
The judge banged his gavel and Daisy came to order with a smile, as if he’d given her a love tap.
“Bring them in,” Gilfoyle ordered the bailiff, with a great deal of volume and sincerity.
Captain Patrick Boylan himself led in three men for arraignment. Within two minutes the judge had read out kidnapping charges against the fellow who’d helped Eddie Diamond hustle Shep out of Oldcastle’s apartment, and assault counts against the one who’d roughed him up in the New York garage. The third man, Mr. Ivan Jones, aka Jacobs, had participated only in the California phase of this crime, but had been arrested out there by Boylan’s men on a series of outstanding New York charges.
Gilfoyle banged his gavel a second time, refusing to let the men’s lawyer—with whom he was well acquainted—say anything on their behalf. He denied the defendants bail before they could even ask for it, and kept them standing for a crisp, eloquent denunciation of the evils wrought by organized criminality in the realms of loan-sharking, sports-fixing, and even “the construction of substandard housing for the colored and the poor.” He made sure this last, pointed complaint had drilled the ears of Rothstein’s foot soldiers before actually crying, “Take them away!”
Everything the judge had said reached Harris’s ears, too—without, however, being absorbed by his understanding. He watched the prisoners as they were led off by the bailiff and Boylan, who locked eyes with him and glared—half in anger, half in triumph. No, he hadn’t had any choice but to make the arrests, not if he didn’t want Harris’s publicity machine depicting his department as hopelessly off the ball; but Boylan could see, in the editor’s still-drooping countenance, that he’d extracted at least a pound of flesh by the torturous waiting game. Before disappearing from the courtroom, the captain narrowed his eyes still further, sending a message that he would get Jehoshaphat Harris yet.
“It all fits together!” cried Daisy. “Just like Scanties!” It was unclear to Harris which part of this puzzle corresponded to the panties, or the girdle, or the brassiere of that detestably unseductive piece of modern apparel. But then Cuddles told him what he’d told Daisy and Becky late last night—that Tuesday’s noontime delivery to Rothmere Investments had been a single sheet of paper Shep had heard about and then taken from Mr. Jones’s desk out in the San Rafael Valley: a few columns of spectacularly incriminating facts and figures that Shep then kept hidden on his person at all time
s, including the moment of his rescue by Max. Amidst the glamour of the dining car and the Commodore, he’d forgotten, until Sunday night, about this piece of paper whose handful of details made most of Rothstein’s better-known operations, from the Black Sox to Juniper, look like a summertime chautauqua.
Yesterday afternoon, just before his errand at the Commodore, Miss Freda Rosenberg had called to thank Cuddles for the document, in exchange for which, Mr. Rothstein agreed, Max Stanwick could live out his life in good health and Judge Gilfoyle consider his judicial independence restored.
That everything had bounced like a double-play ball from Tinker to Evers to Chance began to dawn on Harris even more brightly than the morning sun, now established in the sky above the courthouse.
“We’d better get to the Biltmore,” said Cuddles, once they were out on the sidewalk. “You don’t want the porridge getting cold.”
Harris didn’t hear him. Fully reanimated, he was striding toward Patrick Boylan, determined to reach the captain before he got into his squad car.
57
Holding aloft his silver-pencil trophy, Jimmy Gordon looked down from the dais and decided that the applause, sweet as it might be, couldn’t compare with the sight of the empty Bandbox table down front. Its only occupant was an identifying centerpiece, a fishtailed stack of the magazine’s brand-new mendacious issue. Jimmy had imagined what it would feel like watching Joe listen to his speech, but the absence of his vanquished rival—too scared to show!—felt even better.
He looked out across the whitecaps of napery in the ocean-sized dining room. Everyone was here: the bespectacled old brass of the Saturday Evening Post and Century; the upstarts, nearly as young as himself, from The New Yorker and Time. Four years working for Joe had kept him one of the crowd; eight months on his own had him up at this lectern.
“Cutaway,” he intoned, “will shine its light not only on the fashionable and famous, not only on the achievers and the record-breakers, but also on the sad overreachers who drag down our age with their dishonest graspings.”
As he ladled these words over the industry assembled at his feet, a squad of well-tailored young men infiltrated the four dozen breakfast tables, passing out the just-printed May number of Cutaway, which Jimmy had not wasted on a centerpiece, but held in reserve for this moment.
THREADBARE!
shouted the cover line.
JOE HARRIS AND BANDBOX
CREATE A TAILOR-MADE FRAUD
A Special Investigation by Paul Montgomery
Jimmy continued his slow, sonorous remarks while the diners flipped to the opening graf of the lead article, which read:
For a good part of our dapper, kinetic decade, Joe Harris’ revitalized Bandbox has been filling up the American man’s mind along with his armoire. Only lately, faced with a stiff breeze of competition from this magazine, has Bandbox resorted to pulling some thick lamb’s wool over its readers’ eyes.
Jimmy took a long pause to let everyone scan the accumulated evidence, as well as Paulie’s brief peroration against “an alliterating fantasist’s corruption of youth, and a whole magazine’s mockery of the once-proud NYPD.”
The susurrus in the ballroom became a loud buzz; editors sprinted to the Bandbox centerpiece to see just what Joe Harris had perpetrated. Jimmy watched the commotion and felt he was making commercial and artistic history. People would be talking about this occasion years from now, the way they still recalled the Armory Show and The Rite of Spring’s premiere. He waited for the noise to die down enough that he could tell everyone how Cutaway now stood as “the only magazine in this new awards category.” And while he waited, he could see, just outside the room, through two open doors, the smoke from a photo flash.
The buzzing did not abate, but the smoke quickly cleared, and once it did Jimmy’s eyes were greeted by the sight of the Shepard kid leading a three-man parade through the ballroom, all the way to the Bandbox table, which had been denuded of its May issue. Behind the kid marched the unmistakable form of Joe Harris, and behind that a figure recognized from the newspapers as Captain Patrick Boylan.
“There’s no centerpiece,” said Joe. He was taking note of an opportunity, not a lack. “Shep, get up there.”
John Chilton Shepard, by now accustomed to orders of the most inexplicable kind, bounded up onto the tablecloth in his newly shined shoes. The crowd, not knowing what to think, began to quiet down.
“Captain?” said Joe, pressing his luck. “Want to make Commissioner someday?”
Boylan, who’d already been persuaded against his better judgment to come uptown with this man, narrowed his eyes.
“If you want to,” advised Harris, “you’ll stand up on that table and hoist the kid’s arm into the air.”
Boylan glared at this detestable Barnum for one moment longer, until ambition once more overrode caution.
The crowd, noting that something had gone very wrong with Jimmy Gordon’s expression, fell almost silent when Boylan’s feet joined Shep’s somewhere in the small space between the water pitcher and the coffeepot. And then, accustomed by the age to throwing ticker tape and applause at a new hero every day, it began to clap, first in a slow, rhythmic wave, and finally—once Harris, rising like Tunney from the Long Count, joined Boylan and the boy atop the table—in a thunderous, whooping storm of half-comprehension and complete delight.
With one arm holding Boylan’s wrist, and the other pulling Shep’s hand even higher, Harris looked out into the audience, where he saw Betty mouthing the words “Felicity Shunt” to a confused reporter, and the figure of Cuddles Houlihan, leaving the hall like a man who’d completed his work.
58
Four hours later, still limp with victory and disbelief, Harris was summoned to Oldcastle’s office. Getting off the elevator on sixteen, he consulted his reflection in the shiny leaf of a giant potted plant. He was combing his hair when he felt the footsteps of Jimmy Gordon coming up behind him. The two men looked at each other and then at the clock, realizing they’d been asked to appear here at the same time.
“After you,” said Jimmy, pointing to the door.
“That’s your problem,” answered Harris. “You always are.”
Oldcastle calmly greeted the two of them. “Joe, Jimmy, come sit down.” The owner sat behind his desk in a blue plaid flannel shirt and bolo tie and spoke, despite the wrangler’s getup, in the emollient tones of a trusts-and-estates lawyer.
“Did you see Condé on your way in?” he asked both men. “He was just here for a little discussion.”
Harris said nothing. He was remembering his last visit here, when Nast’s name had been so chillingly raised. He was also waiting for a word of congratulations.
“I’ll be seeing Mr. Nast this afternoon,” Jimmy said. “We’ve got to go over some projected fig—”
“Actually, Jimmy, you won’t be seeing him,” Oldcastle declared idly, as if observing that a train was a little late, or it looked like rain.
Jimmy frowned, hoping to remind the publisher that he was here as a courtesy, since Hiram Oldcastle hadn’t been Jimmy Gordon’s boss for almost a year.
“Condé’s just sold me Cutaway,” the owner at last explained.
Jimmy tightened his grip on the armrest of his chair. The whole day was starting to feel like some colossal practical joke.
“Tell us more, Hi,” said Harris.
Oldcastle went on at his own pace. “It seems, Jimmy, that your Mr. Montgomery got everything about Joe’s subscriber wrong. That’s bad enough—and of course I’m only telling you what Condé feels—but your writer made things very troublesome by suggesting that the New York Police Department is letting the citizenry down. You know, Jimmy, neither Condé nor I can afford to antagonize Captain Boylan’s men. There are delivery trucks that need protecting, outdoor photography shoots that need permits, and business dinners at which the service of certain beverages shouldn’t be interrupted.”
“It was one story,” said Jimmy.
“Joe,”
said Oldcastle, “how long did it take you to revive Bandbox?”
“I believe it was one business quarter.”
“There you go,” said the publisher. “Well, after one business quarter I hope we’ll have achieved a smooth amalgamation of the two magazines. Make ’em go together like bacon and eggs,” he added, pleased to be throwing in this bit of Everyman’s argot. “Cutaway, I’ve decided, will be the name of Bandbox’s fashion section—a supplement, really. Detachable along a perforation. As its name implies. You see? Cut-away, meaning—”
“I get it,” said Jimmy, gripping the other armrest.
“Some of your current staff can stay and work on it. And you, Joe, can concentrate more on the journalism you do so well. By the way, Mayor Walker wants to give the boy from Indiana—what’s his name?”
“Shep,” said Harris.
“The mayor wants to give Shep a little decoration on the steps of City Hall this coming Monday.”
“We’ll get him there,” said Harris. “And I’ll get Arinopoulos to shoot the ceremony.”
“Good,” said Oldcastle, actually smiling. “You know, gentlemen, Condé was actually quite happy to make the sale. Even during this short-lived success you brought him, Jimmy, his attention had really been moving toward some new idea he has for a travel magazine. He’s got this notion that everyone’s soon going to be traipsing around much more often and more quickly. He thinks we’re going to see more clothes packed into trunks than on people’s backs.” Oldcastle looked directly at Harris. “I suppose that’ll be a challenge for you, Joe.”
Like an aging Dalmatian hearing one last fire bell, Harris was already deciding how he could beat this new book. He’d take a few pages away from sports and food; hire a full-time travel writer who could flit from Tokyo to Timbuktu.
“Joe?” asked Oldcastle.
“Sorry, I was lost in thought.” After a moment’s pause, Harris amended the explanation, with a certain peevishness: “Actually, I was working. And if you don’t mind, I’d like to get back to my office.” He hoped his rudeness would serve as some small retort against the publisher’s earlier lack of faith, but Oldcastle had always been oblivious to any display of manners, good or bad, by the men he employed. He said nothing while Harris rose to his feet.
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