The Way of All Fish

by Martha Grimes

  She shook her head. “Only the number of the house we met in. I got it from Craigslist.”

  Paul rolled his eyes.

  “That’s where they all hang out.”

  “What about the others?”

  Cindy thought as she sucked up her soda. “Monty. He’s the one who advertised on Craigslist. Monty goes to Florida, too, sometimes. He’s good with boats. Then there’s Bub. He works in a junkyard. I think he lives there. He’s writing a book that he says is in the Philip K. Dick vein. Robot Redux is the title. The idea is that all these pieces of metal somehow fly together—”

  “And make a robot.” Paul smiled and drank his coffee.

  “He’s into physics. Especially string theory, if you understand that.”

  “Enough to know I don’t understand it.”

  “Then there’s Graeme. He used to be part of a magic act at the Mirage.”

  “You mean Vegas?” When she nodded, he said, “What kind of act?”

  She was making noise sucking froth through her straw. “He throws light around, for one thing.”

  “There doesn’t have to be another. This is some gang you hang out with.”

  Gang you hang out with! Could he have said anything more pleasing? No.

  “I wonder . . .” He was looking in his empty coffee cup.

  Cindy waited for him to finish the statement of wonder. Finally, she leaned over the table and said, “You wonder what?”

  He looked up. “Besides the junkyard guy—”

  “Bub.”

  “Bub. Do these others have actual jobs?”

  “Molloy does. He works in a place called Aquaria. It doesn’t sound like a full-time job, though.”

  “Selling aquariums.”

  “That’s right. I don’t know whether Monty has a job. It’s his place they all go to. He doesn’t act like he has a job right now. Why?” She frowned and turned her straw in her empty glass. “And why do you want to talk to someone who’s experienced with alligators?”

  “My book. The one I’m researching.”

  She continued to frown. “The one you told Jimmy about doesn’t sound anything like your usual books.”

  “You’ve read them?”

  “Of course I’ve read them. Like half the rest of the world.”

  “Thanks. Anyway, can you fix it so I can meet these guys?”

  She nodded, smiling. The notion that she was a fixer pleased her inordinately. “I can fix it. When?”

  “How about tomorrow?”

  “Okay. I’ll give Monty a call. I don’t think their calendars are full.”

  26

  Candy and Karl agreed that meeting a contract killer in a crepe restaurant would cast serious doubt on his credentials if it hadn’t been Arthur Mordred they were meeting. Anyway, they weren’t looking for a hit; they just wanted him to fill in the rest of the action in Lena bint Musah’s story.

  They found him in a booth eating lemon and lavender crepes. “House specialty,” he added. “Meyer lemons only.”

  “Oh, well,” said Karl, seeing the smoking sign with the X’d-out red circle and taking out one of his thin cigars.

  They had met Arthur Mordred in Pittsburgh. Arthur had been hired by Paul Giverney to protect Ned Isaly. If Paul Giverney hadn’t put his dumb idea in motion in the first place, Ned wouldn’t have needed protection. Thank God for scruples, they had said many a time since then; if they hadn’t had scruples, Ned Isaly wouldn’t be around to write another book.

  “So, guys. Somebody need protection from the likes of you?” Arthur stuffed a slice of sleek lemon crepe in his mouth.

  “Funny, ha-ha. No, Arthur, we want you to do a job for us.”

  “Something you two can’t handle? Oh, dear, I feel like Elvis, with you guys as audience.” He wiped his fork, loaded with a section of crepe in lemony-lavender sauce, across his plate. “Sure you won’t join me? The champagne chai is to die for.”

  “We probably would. No, we’re not talking about a hit.”

  “Not protection, I hope. That’s such a bore.”

  “If you’d shut up and let us finish,” said Karl. “How much do you know about endangered species?”

  “About as much as I do a warm and loving home life.”

  “We’re thinkin’ fish. To be more precise, exotic fish. Say like the Andean catfish or the Lost River sucker, or the—”

  Karl cut in on this showing off. “If we feed you some info about the subject, you got a good enough memory to spit it back?”

  “The Lost River sucker, sic. You sure that’s not some old geezer panning for gold back in Oklahoma a century ago?”

  Karl shrugged. “Arthur, you can’t take us serious, we’re outta here.” He was denied a dramatic rise from the booth because he was on the inside, pressed against the wall.

  “Don’t be so prickly. You haven’t told me anything to take serious. You haven’t said whatever the hell you want or as much as given a flying kiss re money. ‘Re’ goes with ‘sic.’ ”

  Candy frowned. “You stoned? You on something?”

  “Stoned? I’m just eating my lemon crepe. I may have a maple crème fraîche for dessert. I haven’t had a drink since Pittsburgh. That was my single brief relapse. I’m back to my A.A. meetings. My sponsor thinks I was trying for a geographic cure by going to Pittsburgh.”

  “Which is shit. You got paid by Paul to go to Pittsburgh and protect Ned Isaly.”

  “Yes, well, of course I couldn’t tell that to my sponsor.”

  “Tell him Pittsburgh never cured nothing, baby, except boredom.”

  They all laughed.

  “Now, for this job, we’ve got in mind this organization called the Bluefin Alliance, a name someone would think up to make themselves sound like an insurance firm. Or maybe even sound like they’re into Greenpeace shit. This bunch is definitely operating under the radar. What they do is, they bring illegal fish, exotic endangered fish, into the country. They do know the Bluefin Alliance is as bad as your Mexican cartels.”

  “How? How do they know that?”

  “They know because we told them, Arthur.”

  “I never heard of this Bluefin bunch.”

  “That’s because it doesn’t exist.”

  Arthur forked up a bite of crepe. “So who is they?”

  “Couple of lawyers.”

  Arthur Mordred actually put down his fork. “What are you guys looking for?”

  “Well, not the Law Review.” Karl sniggered. “What we want is everything they have on Cindy Sella.”

  This meant filling Arthur in on who she was and telling him about the papers passed between L. Bass Hess and the Richard Geres, Wally and Rod, and the Snelling legal outfit.

  “We got some of those documents by mistake. But there’s nothing in them to prove anything came from the Snelling firm.”

  Mordred squinted. “So I go in armed and make this turd open his files.”

  “No,” said Karl, “although that’s a brilliant and really original plan.”

  “I detect sarcasm. So, what is the plan?”

  “We need you to come to a meeting at this address.” Karl scribbled it on the back of a coaster, pushed it toward Arthur. “She hasn’t given us a time yet.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “Lena bint Musah. You’ll like her.” Karl nodded toward Arthur’s cup. “Her espresso is terrific. So are her cigarettes.”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “You will.”

  27

  Paul Giverney had his plan outlined, albeit sketchily, for it depended upon the availability of talent.

  He’d been working on this all morning when he should have been writing the next chapter of The Drowning Man (a title he disliked but liked more than Like a Drowned Rat, from Hannah, and who refused to be dissuaded despite there being no rats in the book). The new book was not yet under contract, nor would it be while L. Bass Hess was on the horizon; Hess was ignorant of the fact. He didn’t know it and was hard at work negotiating wi
th Bobby Mackenzie, who had been prepped to offer terms either outrageously complex or merely outrageous. Or both.

  L. Bass had not yet suggested shopping the book to other publishers. “Any publisher in New York would die for a book by you. Is Mackenzie insane?”

  “You only just noticed?” Paul had said.

  Hess blubbered. “I know he can be irrational sometimes, but he’s a brilliant publisher.”

  “You can always try somebody else.”

  Hess wanted to keep on with Mackenzie-Haack because Bobby had made an (insane) offer of $3 million. For a single book. A 15 percent commission would earn Hess $450,000. It was the kind of deal an agent would jump off the Seagram Building to collect.

  Paul’s mobile, which he had left on vibrate, was quivering across his desk. He grabbed it up. “Yes?”

  “Bass here. Listen to Mackenzie’s latest demand. After I thought things were pretty well settled. He wants the advance paid out in twelfths. T-W-E-L-T-H-S.” Hess spelled it out. “Can you imagine?”

  “Is that how you spell it? T-W-E-L-T—isn’t there an F in there somewhere?”

  Paul could nearly smell the fumes coming off Hess across the wire.

  “Paul, that’s—ha-ha-ha—immaterial. He wants to divide up the three mill into twelve payments.”

  “I’ll be damned. Well, I guess that’s what they do with baseball players.” Paul was studying the outline of his plan. He was looking at “magician.” Beside his notebook on the desk was a copy of The Magic Mountain, which he fingered. It had nothing to do with the word “magician,” or at least not consciously. He crossed out “magician” and penciled in “bush.” The plan was organic; it was on the way to becoming a whole. It was like at a certain point when he was writing a book, he saw it. It. The whole picture. It really was like creating a tiny world. Maybe Wallace Stevens was right: God was the imagination.

  Then again, it was like connecting the dots on those place mats they put down for children in some restaurants. Dot . . . dot . . . dot . . . until the picture came clear.

  “One twelfth on signing, one twelfth on delivery of initial manuscript, one twelfth on final manuscript—that’s after copyediting—one twelfth . . .”

  Paul let him ramble on. He wasn’t listening; he was leafing through Mann’s book and thinking of the idea of sanctuary.

  “. . . and I’m going to demand he change this to six payouts. Six.”

  “You do that, Bass.”

  “And if he won’t agree?”

  “That’s your job, Bass. That’s what I pay you fifteen percent for. Gotta go, dude (and if ever a dude was not, it was L. Bass Hess); someone’s at my door. Bye.”

  Cindy sat watching her fish and thinking about the talk with Paul Giverney in the coffee shop.

  Maybe he was going to pay Monty and the others to lure Hess into a dark alley and club him. Or maybe, when Hess was on his way to Connecticut some weekend, the four of them would wait by the side of the road and flag him down, drag him out of the car, and leave him in a wheat field. Hess was allergic to wheat. Cindy pictured him, bleeding and staggering through the high wheat, arms out like a scarecrow, choking and sneezing . . .

  She added several more not unpleasant images to this montage and hoped Paul Giverney would find the place in Sunset Park from her meager directions.

  The building looked, as Cindy had said, like a warehouse, probably because it was. Paul braked, switched off the engine, and popped the trunk. He got out and went around to get the beer.

  He schlepped it to the door, which opened on Monty as if he’d been waiting his whole life. He probably saw the beer and probably was.

  Bub and Molloy nearly erupted off the low-slung sofa. “Whoa! What have we here?”

  “Just what it looks like. Beck’s, Sam Adams. Wasn’t sure what you liked.”

  “All of it, man. Come on in.” He introduced Paul to the other three.

  “You’re the writer? Paul Giverney the writer?” said Bub. “Man, let me shake your hand. I got all your books down at the yard.”

  “You’re wondering why I’m here. I have a reason.”

  “Hey, man, you don’t need a reason.”

  “I’ve got one nonetheless. For the moment, I’ll just see in what way you—each of you—fit my plan.”

  “What plan?”

  They had already opened beers and were settling back.

  “Getting rid of Cindy Sella’s insane ex-agent. When I say ‘get rid of,’ I don’t mean bump him off. I know a couple guys who do that kind of work. No, I mean drive him crazy and out of New York.”

  “Didn’t know she had an agent. She doesn’t talk much about herself. That’s cool,” said Molloy.

  Paul told them about L. Bass Hess.

  “Jesus!” said Bub. “Maybe I shouldn’t bother with my book, if that’s what publishing is like.”

  “Cindy said you’d written one.”

  “Yeah. Robot Redux. It’s about things falling apart. I work in a car junk yard. Auto parts, crushed cars, and like that.”

  “Okay. I won’t give you details because I don’t know all of them myself. But . . . remember Scrooge?”

  They all nodded. “Dickens? That Scrooge?”

  “It’s kind of like that.”

  “He gets visited by ghosts. You want us to play ghosts?”

  “No. Anybody could do that. No. I want you to use your various fields of expertise. And since I’ll be taking up a lot of your time, I’ll be paying you a lot of money. I’m thinking in the neighborhood of five thousand.” Their eyes rounded. “Each.”

  Monty dropped his beer; Bub choked on a toke he’d just inhaled. The other two simply stared.

  “Let’s start with the Everglades.” Paul looked at Monty. “You’re good with boats.” He turned to Molloy and grinned. “And you’re good with alligators.”

  28

  We want to get him to Everglades City,” said Paul. “Into the swamp.”

  “Why? And the next ‘why?’ is ‘why me?’ ”

  “Because you’re a friend of Hess’s.”

  “I’m not a friend,” said Clive. “I only know him through books he’s agented.”

  “Is that really a verb?”

  “Isn’t everything these days? We’re in constant motion. What’s your point?”

  “You’re an acquisitions editor. And you’re interested in the story of his/her life.” What Clive was to be had not occurred to Paul before just that moment.

  “Lives.”

  “Okay. All I want is for you to get L. Bass to the ’Glades. You can be very persuasive, Clive.”

  “I hate Florida.”

  “Come on, Clive. Florida isn’t a state anyone can hate.”

  “Why don’t you go yourself? It would make more sense. It’s your idea, after all.”

  “Bear with me, Clive. I’ve got a plan I’m working on.”

  “Your plans make me nervous, Paul. My mind keeps returning to your plan for Ned Isaly.”

  Paul sighed. “That was not my plan. That was Bobby’s plan. I’m not responsible for what he does.”

  “He couldn’t have done it if you hadn’t made your contract contingent on getting rid of Ned. So it might just as well have been your plan.”

  “Clive, only Bobby Mackenzie is nutty enough to hire a hit man.”

  “And only you are nutty enough to give him a reason to do so. Okay, I’ll get the address in Everglades City. I’ll be your goon. I’ll go to Florida.”

  29

  Angelfish,” said Lena bint Musah. “The Clipperton isn’t illegal to import, but one has to have special permission to do so. There was a dealer who smuggled about fifty Clippertons into the U.S., claiming they were blue passer fish. They resemble Clippertons, but not so much that anyone with knowledge would mistake one for the other. The USFWS certainly knew the difference.”

  “So how much is this fish worth?” asked Karl.

  “You could sell one for ten thousand dollars.”

  “What? That me
ans this guy had half a million worth of these fish?”

  They were all sitting in Lena’s living room—Karl, Candy, and Arthur Mordred—having a little of Lena’s coffee and a lot of Lena’s cigarettes. The dog lay quietly, this time at Arthur’s feet.

  “Jesus, these are something,” said Arthur. “It’s as good as a couple shots of Glenfiddich.” He inhaled, slowly exhaled. “Make that three shots.”

  “You’re in A.A.,” said Candy.

  Arthur shrugged and inhaled. “For the most part.”

  “A.A.’s not in parts. You either are or you aren’t.”

  Lena continued, “There’s the peppermint angelfish. There are only two in captivity. One would cost you up to twenty thousand dollars.”

  “My God,” said Arthur, leaning down to rub the old dog’s neck. The dog did not respond.

  “A further obstacle to owning one is that they are extremely difficult to take care of. They refuse food.”

  “What? They don’t eat, they die,” said Arthur. “Why in hell would someone shell out twenty large for a fish that’s likely to die on him?”

  “Serious collectors are often obsessed, hugely competitive, and egoistic. Such a fish would be worth that amount just to say you have one. What do we do with these elegant fish?” She looked from Candy to Karl.

  Karl, who’d been lounging in his chair with his legs stretched out, said, “These are the fish the U.S. government is after you about. I mean, that’s what you say.”

  “If there are only two of these peppermints in the world—”

  “Not in the world, Arthur, in captivity. Do you think these ridiculous lawyers have ever heard of such fish?” Lena gave a small feminine snort.

  “Right, you are right,” said Arthur, helping himself to another fantasy cigarette. “What I’m wondering is what happens to Cindy Sella if this book of hers gets around? I mean, wouldn’t the Bluefish Alliance put her on their dead-even-as-we-speak list?”

  Both Candy and Karl swerved off course in lighting up fresh cigarettes. Candy said, “Arthur, there ain’t a Bluefin Alliance. That is a made-up fiction.”

  “Meaning you don’t really exist,” said Karl, laughing through smoke.