“You’re really claiming you can’t get Bella Bond or anyone else to intercede on Cindy Sella’s behalf?”
Bobby shrugged. “I’ll say it again. Harbor Books. I don’t tell Bella what to do.” He didn’t add that she was on Block Island, or he would have.
“Then I’ll tell you why we’re having this lunch. It’s a farewell lunch.”
Bobby sat back. “Oh, come on! You’re not serious!”
“All you’ve got is a one-book contract. After that, we’re done.”
It was hard to outmaneuver Bobby Mackenzie, but this had done it. Bobby hated a cliché far more than the next man, but with his back to the wall, he used one. “This is blackmail.”
“Makes no difference to me who publishes my books.”
“That’s absurd.” Bobby drank, took in an ice cube, and started gnawing it.
“Given the way I chose you, I’d think it would be obvious that I don’t much care.”
Bobby signaled the waiter with his upraised glass. “When my—our—friends Candy and Karl came calling, they were saying some of the same things.” He seemed unable to decide upon the romaine leaf he had picked up from his Caesar salad. “It occurs to me that instead of all these late-night visits and secret lunches—”
“They came at night?”
“No, no, of course not. But I’d like something like that for your new title instead of the one you have. Slow Motion. How thrilling is that? You are a thriller writer, after all.”
“No, I’m not, after all.”
“Jimmy McKinney has been hard at work trying to get this book marketed as a straight literary novel.”
“That is your job, Bobby; that’s why I said you’re not publishing me right.”
“True. But I’m not a magician.” He thought that over. “Well, not all the time.”
“We’re off the subject. You were saying—”
“I wasn’t, but I will. Maybe we all should ‘take a meet’ at my office. Say tomorrow afternoon—no, evening. I’ve got a sales meeting at five. Say sixish? We’ll consider our options. You, me, Clive Esterhaus, and the two goons.” Bobby picked up the glass the waiter had just set down and smiled a sly smile.
Paul smiled, his own sly smile. “Make that the five goons.”
19
Cindy Sella was watching her clown fish and wondering if they felt the limitations of their lives or were content to swim around the curves of their small bowl. She was going to get them a bigger one; she had furnished the present one with little plastic ferns and a rock with holes in it that they could swim through. But they did a lot of resting, she thought, for they seemed happiest reclining on the two plastic leaves she had attached to the tank.
Gus had carefully monitored the fitting of these items in the bowl, perhaps thinking they would give him greater access, but that dream was thwarted. He had joined Cindy on the bench, which would sit here probably forever.
What had caused this concern for life limitation, she knew, was her own wintry, thinly coated, brackish one. She wasn’t doing anything about it but piling up adjectives, and the wrong ones, at that.
She had only two friends, besides people in publishing, and she’d hardly call them friends, not even her editor, whom she saw seldom and who, she sometimes thought, wasn’t sure he recognized her. Her only real publishing-world friend was Jimmy McKinney. Her two regular friends were Sammy Tooley and Rosa Parchment. A lesser friend was Benny Bennet, who, when she’d last seen him, had sold her his mantra; then he’d gone back to drugs. She was afraid he’d also gone back to using the mantra he’d sold her, and she wondered how much that diluted it.
What she was thinking about was drugs: One of her characters was in danger of becoming addicted, and she knew nothing about heroin or crack cocaine or other hard drugs. Sammy didn’t do drugs, not like Benny; that wasn’t surprising, as Sammy was so hyper already that any drug would have him flying above her instead of walking beside her.
Cindy knew Rosa was a user; she’d been in rehab twice and picked up once in Washington Square for dealing. Rosa wasn’t routinely a dealer, but she was friends with Benny, and Cindy suspected that Benny did deal. Rosa had a boutique in the Village called Nevermore, where she sold “antique” clothing that she got mostly from Goodwill. When Rosa saw Cindy looking at the track marks on her arm, Rosa said her cat had done it; Renée (the cat) was always raking her claws over everything. Clearly, if Rosa had relapsed and gone back to sticking needles in her arm, she didn’t want to talk about it. So she would be no source of information.
Cindy had been living in Manhattan for seven years and still had no group of friends—a group who hung out together, went to movies, Broadway shows, museums, and Central Park together. She spent her hanging-out time in Ray’s coffee shop, writing. That wasn’t really hanging out.
She watched the ghost clown fish and thought of Monty and his three friends in the room where marijuana and cigarette smoke hung like curtains at the window. Now, there was a group. A gang. Stoned was definitely togetherness. Four of them, yet they seemed as one. She thought for a moment. What she could do was buy another clown fish. The phone rang just as she was thinking about picking it up.
It was Sammy. “Cin, hi, want to get some chow?”
For a writer, he came up with awfully old, used words. Did people really call food “chow” anymore? She agreed to go with him. “Listen, do you know anything about drugs? I mean from personal experience?”
“I smoked some weed in ninth grade.”
“That doesn’t really count.”
“No? Excuse me, but it counted to me. I’d’ve got the shit beat out of me if I didn’t go along.”
“Well, I’m sorry. But I need to know about the big ones: heroin, crack cocaine—”
“Cindy, don’t even think about it. It’ll fuck you over good.”
“Sammy, I don’t want to use anything. It’s because of one of my characters.”
Sammy sniggered. “Sure, they all say that.”
She frowned. “They?”
“Writers.”
“Sammy, we’re writers. We’re the they.”
“Okay, we all say that. We get out of admitting we want to know about A.A. or we’re going into rehab by blaming it on the characters.”
Oh, for God’s sake. There was no way to talk to Sammy sometimes. “Is Rosa using again? I think maybe she is.”
“Rosa? Oh, you mean because you’ve seen what look like needle marks, you think she’s shooting up? Nah. Those are claw marks. Her cat did that.”
Cindy had slung one strap of her bag over her shoulder and opened the door to see Edward Bishop just coming through the exit door. He liked to use the stairs.
He stopped. “Cindy!”
She had to admit one reason she liked him was that he made her feel she was a real treat—a sight for sore eyes, a port in a storm, a harbor. That’s enough, she told herself. “Edward! Come on in and have a drink.”
He walked toward her, smiling. “Thanks. I could use one.” He was wearing the same suit he always wore in the colder months. He had a high forehead, thinning brown hair, brown eyes, a mustache, wire-framed glasses, and no money. “You look to be going out.”
“Not right this minute. In a while. I’m just going to meet Sammy at Ray’s. Why don’t you come?”
A couple of times he had. He fitted right in. Even Ray thought he was a “good guy,” though he looked for all the world out of another decade. That suit, that mustache. Edward was a respected poet. Jimmy McKinney thought he was wonderful, that he might just be another Edwin Arlington Robinson. He had published two books of poetry, refreshing for Cindy, since the poems seemed out of an earlier era, too, one that made use of form and rhyme. Petrarchan sonnets, terza rima, sestinas.
“I can’t manage that tonight, but I’d like to come in and talk for a minute. Anything to put off the writing.”
“You mean you feel that way sometimes.”
Edward sat down in one of the armchairs. “I feel tha
t way most of the time. It’s a kind of agony. Pardon the drama.”
The idea of Edward Bishop being dramatic made her pour more Jack Daniel’s into the glass than she’d intended. He drank bourbon, but very little. He tasted bourbon.
“Thank you. Mind?” He’d taken a pipe from his pocket, knowing she wouldn’t, and now unrolled some tobacco, stuffed it in, used his lighter.
She handed him the glass. “But how do you manage to do it for hours on end, Edward, if it’s so hard?”
“I don’t have much choice, since I do nothing else.”
“Oh, of course you do. Even Edwin Reardon—you know, the impoverished writer in New Grub Street—goes out walking for long periods of time.”
“Ah, but poor Reardon had the weight of the world on his shoulders. Or at least the weight of a wife and child. An unsympathetic wife, at that.”
“I hated her. I don’t think it’s fair that Edwin died and she wound up happily married to that writing-for-money Milvain at the end.”
“Perhaps that was Gissing’s final irony.”
She thought about it. “I don’t have the weight of the world on my shoulders, and I fool around most of the time.”
“You don’t carry a weight? Are you joking? I don’t see how you manage to concentrate at all with this damned agent and his godforsaken lawsuit. Yet you stay right with it.” He looked at the notebook on the side table, the pen atop it. “Today?”
“Yes, but I keep getting stuck. I don’t know enough.”
“Nobody knows enough.”
“I’ve been working on this book for two years, and I’m barely halfway through, if even this half is half. Did you know George Gissing wrote this”—she picked up New Grub Street—“in two months? There were three volumes; he wrote one every two or three weeks. And all of it in two months!”
“Weren’t there a lot of false starts and torn-up pages for a year before those two months?”
“Maybe, but—”
“Very probably he’d already done most of the work. I’d say Gissing’s two months were more like two years.”
For some reason, she preferred the two months. Maybe because it was something to hope for, to aim for, to admire.
Edward seemed to sense this. “You might very well be right. Perhaps he had tremendous focus and wrote for ten or twelve hours a day.”
“I think that’s it.”
The tiny movements of the fish must have caught at the corner of his eye, for he looked over there. “You’ve got a clown fish.” He rose and walked to the shelf that held the bowl, drink in hand.
Gus quickly uncurled from what had seemed a drugged sleep by the fireplace and hopped on the bench, as if he feared an interaction that he would miss out on.
“An albino clown fish, too,” said Edward. He talked for a good five minutes about clown fish, a detailed commentary on the various kinds.
“Edward,” she said, struck by his great store of knowledge. “Did you ever do drugs?”
20
They were gathered in Bobby Mackenzie’s office—Bobby, Paul Giverney, Candy and Karl, and Clive Esterhaus. Clive had been a senior editor who was handed the plum job of publisher when Bobby went off (much against his will) to Australia, with a side trip to Dubai. He’d been gone for half the year and come back with a different view of things. Now Bobby Mackenzie liked to say, “To paraphrase Red Sanders, ‘Mackenzie isn’t everything; he’s the only thing.’ Just kidding.” Which he wasn’t.
They were all ranged around the office: Bobby was sitting with his feet up on his desk, smoking a Cuban cigar. Paul was lying on the big downy sofa against the far wall, his drink balanced on his chest. Candy and Karl were sitting in the same chairs they had last occupied, taking advantage of Bobby’s Cubans. Clive was leaning against the sill of the big window that overlooked Madison and half of Manhattan.
Clive had been rewarded with his own imprint when Bobby returned. The gesture was uncharacteristically generous. Clive wasn’t Bobby’s fall guy any longer.
They were gathered in perfect companionable silence, which had to set a record, given what they were: publisher, writer, editor, and two hit men.
Bobby had been talking about publishing—self-publishing, Amazon, e-books, unsolicited manuscripts, over-the-transom. “. . . an antique phrase. The stuff that used to get read by editorial assistants, the old slush-pile stuff. No more. Now the reading public, they’re the keepers of the slush pile, because practically anyone who can string three words together can get published on the Internet. Or Amazon-assisted. Or actually published by Amazon. Writers, take heart! The world is your slush pile.”
Clive grunted. “Oh, shut up, Bobby.”
“No.” To the other three, he said, “Listen. Down the hall I have a little room. It was a small office that I’ve converted into a kind of library. Except there are no books, only unsolicited manuscripts. Shelves and shelves of them, ones that were never returned to the writers for one reason or another. I’ve been collecting them for years. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, I don’t know. I even got friends at other houses to donate them.” Bobby leaned back in his chair again and swirled the Scotch in his glass. “Whenever I hear some writer whining about how he can’t write, how he’s lost it all, I boot him in there for an hour so he can leaf through a few. It’s quite a tonic.” He raised his glass. “Or whatever.”
They were all drinking Talisker except for Clive, who was a Grey Goose guy. He had been in publishing for twenty-three years, long enough to be convinced that he was dumb when he was actually pretty smart. He had known L. Bass Hess for years as a conniving, litigious agent with an ego the size and shape of the Flatiron Building.
And a cheapskate, Clive had said. You wouldn’t catch Bass Hess placing pieces of gold on the eyes of the corpse of an Egyptian king. He’d put them in his pocket.
“So what now?” said Candy.
They had all decided that running Hess out of town would be a temporary fix (and not punishment enough). They wanted something permanent.
“If Joey G-C’s guys get to him again, that’ll be permanent,” Candy said.
Karl thought for a moment. “You know, we can maybe stop that hit if we show Joey we got something worse in store for Hess, and also maybe we can get Clive here to read Fabio’s manuscript—”
“Whoa!” Clive shoved out the hand not holding his vodka, palm out. “I’ve already got Danny Zito breathing down my neck with his new book. Not another goodfella, thanks.”
Karl shrugged. “Just a thought.”
“It’s not a bad one,” said Paul, who was tapping a Scripto pen against a small notebook resting on his chest beside his drink. Every now and then he made a note. “Fabio might appear to L. Bass in a new and dangerous light.”
“Meaning?” said Clive.
“I don’t know. I’m just mulling. One thing leads to another. What do we know about Hess? What does the guy do? You said”—Paul looked over his shoulder at Clive—“the guy goes to Florida every year.”
“To the Everglades.”
“The ’Glades?” Paul wrote something down. “Sweet!”
“Visits his uncle. His uncle or his aunt.”
Bobby took the cigar out of his mouth. “He can’t tell the difference?”
“Uncle that went through a sex change, much to Bass’s disgust,” said Clive, knocking back his vodka, helping himself to more.
“You’re shitting us. Hess visiting a transvestite aunt?”
“Not the same thing, Bobby. You should read your own Dunces series: Sex Change for Dunces.”
“My God, that’s not mine. That’s E-Z Books, another imprint. That was started up after some birdbrainstorming by the Dubai brothers.”
Clive said, “Whatever else the aunt is, she’s rich. She’s his father’s brother-sister, and Bass is the only remaining relative. In other words, heir. But she’s big on the Everglades, a real alligator guy-girl, and she likes to threaten him with leaving her fortune to Friends of the Everglades. So he real
ly sucks up to her.”
“The father,” said Bobby. “Someone told me—you? him?—his father was a champion bass fisherman.”
“No, not really. He cheated,” said Clive. “He’d net some four- or five-foot bass, keep them trapped overnight, then go out and reel them in the next day. He, too, was an asshole.”
“Does Hess fish when he’s there?”
Clive nodded. “Pretends to like it. The uncle-aunt adored the father, so Bass has to imitate him.”
Paul said from his prone position, with notebook, to Candy and Karl, “You guys have been tracking him for how long?”
“Three weeks,” said Candy. “Guy’s like a zombie. Ought to be down at the mall with the rest of the Undead, shopping. He meets up with clients or editors or whatever at the stroke of one at the Gramercy Tavern or 21 or that French place, Arles. He doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t eat nothing but fish and peas and a boiled potato. We could tell you where he’ll be every damn minute. Once we got to Gramercy Park three minutes early, checked our watches, said ‘Now!,’ and here he comes around the corner.”
“He lives where?” said Bobby.
“Upper East Side, during the week. But his home’s in Connecticut. Wife and daughter live there. Second wife. I think the daughter’s hers, not his. They live in Darien—no, Wilton. Wilton, Connecticut.”
Bobby gave a small whistle. “You can’t even look at a house there for under a million. He must be getting a helluva lot in commissions.”
Clive shook his head. “His wife has money. I think she sank some of it in the agency when it wasn’t doing so well.”
Karl got up to top up his drink, said, “Every Wednesday on the way home, he stops off at St. Patrick’s.”
Paul looked up. “Yeah. Is he actually a Catholic, though? Or does he just like the cathedral?”
Karl shrugged, sat down again. “Dunno.”
“But you followed him in.”
“Sure. It’s only been the three times. We just sort of case the joint. Pretend we’re tourists.”
“What’s he do? I mean, does he genuflect? Do a little knee dip?”
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