by Howard Fast
“Why cremation?”
“He told me he was alone, no relatives, no one in the world. A burial would have been costly and ridiculous.”
“You’re an unusual man, Mr. Brody.”
“No indeed. I am what is called a mark. That’s an old-fashioned word, but descriptive.”
“And there’s nothing else you can tell me about Smith?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“I see. Very well. There’s no criminal connection. We can let it rest there. Thank you for your time.”
After he left, I could feel my heart hammering and the sweat gathering under my collar. I almost gave up the whole thing right there. But after a few minutes I was all right again; I felt a sense of aliveness and excitement. I knew more clearly than ever what I intended to do, and I knew with great certainty that I could go through with it.
I had a lunch date with Rosie Krantz, who does a column in the Hollywood Reporter, but as I was leaving, the phone rang. It was Evelyn. She informed me that she was leaving for Acapulco and taking my daughter, Ruth, with her. “It’s spring vacation for her, you know. I didn’t think you’d mind. I wanted to talk to you about it last night, but you were frightfully late.”
“I don’t mind,” I said. “It’s probably all for the best. I think I want a divorce.”
“What?”
“Yes. And I want us to do it in a civilized manner.”
“That’s a hell of a note—to spring this on me out of the blue. What kind of a bastard are you?”
“Ordinary run-of-the-mill kind.”
“Drop dead,” she told me.
9
Rosie Krantz faced me, all two hundred modestly malignant pounds of her, put a piece of steak in her mouth and said between chewing, “You do look pleased with yourself, Al.”
“I am. I have just cut my throat.”
“You’re not bleeding.”
“Little do you know. But I think I am enjoying it.”
“And what goodies do you have for me today?”
“One for you, one for me.”
“I like it that way,” Rosie agreed. “What’s for me?”
“I am going to divorce Evelyn—if I can make it stick.”
“Ha—fat chance.”
“I told her.”
“And what did she say?”
“She told me to drop dead.”
“That’s colorful. Can I quote her?”
“If you wish.”
“And will you oblige her?” Rosie asked.
“More or less. I’ll give her whatever she wants.”
“House, swimming pool, Rolls—the lot of it?”
“Right on.”
“You’re an odd candidate, but you must be in love, Al?”
“Conceivably.”
“Can I tell?”
“If it works, you’ll be the first to know.”
“You’re a love, Al. Al and Evelyn Brody decide to call it quits. Much too mundane. I owe you a juicy one. Is Evelyn in town?”
“She’s on her way to Acapulco.”
“That fleshes it out. One for me, one for you. What’s for you, Al?”
“What do you want for dessert?”
“Floating island. I am dieting now. In six weeks you will see a new Rosie. I’ve chosen the Air Force diet. Now what’s for you?”
“There’s a very important committee in South Africa called the Ad Hoc Committee for Black Liberation.”
“There are twelve thousand Committees for Black Liberation, Al. That’s not news.”
“That’s why it’s one for me and one for you, Rosie. This one is for me. The Ad Hoc Committee has called a client of mine into the mess in Rhodesia. I’ll probably hold a press conference on it tomorrow.”
“Who’s the client?”
“His name is Andrew Capestone, author, lawyer, humanitarian, defender of the poor and downtrodden, international figure and perhaps one of the world’s great authorities on law as applied to colonial minorities.”
“You amaze me, Al. If I become a client of yours, can you make me a Gloria Steinem?”
“Eat your floating island and listen to me. You can get the dope on Capestone at the press conference tomorrow. Meanwhile, keep him out of your story. Just boost the Ad Hoc Committee a bit. It will be the first American newsbreak for it.”
“Al, I’m the Hollywood Reporter, not the Los Angeles Times”
“That’s just it. They’re going to appeal to Hollywood celebrities for support. Since the governor made it, Frank Sinatra rates higher than most senators. Think of it—a liberation group in Africa calls upon Hollywood stars for support. It ought to be worth four or five lines.”
“What stars?”
“Make it general. It hasn’t happened yet, so you’re in there ahead. The names can be a follow-up.”
“I get them first?”
“Rosie, of course you do.”
“And what about this client of yours—Andrew what’s his name?”
“Capestone. No, you can’t use him. He’s been invited down there to get into Rhodesia and meet with them, and I’ll give you all of that tomorrow. You won’t blow it, will you, Rosie? It could be dangerous for him.”
“Have I ever double-crossed you?”
“Never, which is why I love you.”
“All right—Committee for Black Liberation. What time tomorrow?”
“Eleven A.M., I think. Millie hasn’t set it up yet.”
“That’s a smartass little girl,” Rosie said. “She should have better than the kind of cathouse you run.”
10
It was two-thirty when I returned to the office, five-thirty in New York, I tried Alexander Crimm at his office and surprisingly found him still there; surprisingly because, with his reputation as a playboy and bon vivant, I had not expected to find him at his office at all. We had met a few times, and once I shared a talk show with him, so I mentioned that and he pretended to remember my name.
“Do you remember a book you published in 1957?” I asked him. “It was called Law and Civilization, and the author was Andrew Capestone?”
“Indeed I do. I don’t forget a good book, and that was a damn good one.”
“Well, our firm represents Mr. Capestone, and I was wondering whether the book is still in print.”
“Good heavens, no. Only the Bible and Fannie Farmer’s cookbook stay in print that long. Barring a rare exception, a few months is the lifetime of any book. Publishers dream of the old days, when a book had a respectable lifetime.”
“And stock? Would you have stock?”
“Only three file copies, I am afraid,” said Mr. Crimm.
“All right—”
“By the way,” he interrupted, “what ever happened to Capestone? He was a brilliant and incisive writer, and we had rather high hopes for him. Then he just dropped out of sight.”
“He’s been doing his thing. I was just going to tell you that right now he’s somewhere in Rhodesia, special consultant to the Ad Hoc Committee for Black Liberation. He’s in a very delicate and dangerous position …”
“Really. That sounds fascinating. There’s certainly a book in that.”
“I would guess there’s a lot of books in Mr. Capestone’s life, if the story could ever be told. But right now we’re interested in his immediate situation. I’m holding a press conference here in Los Angeles tomorrow, and within a week the newspapers will be full of Andrew Capestone. What are the possibilities of a fresh edition of Capestone’s book?”
“Very slim, Mr. Brody. For one thing, unless the book is a perennial seller, we hold plates for five years at the most. Then, unless the author wishes to buy them back, we melt them down.”
“You could offset one of your file copies.”
“Yes, and we do that when the necessity arises. But the plain fact of the matter is that an out-of-print book published ten or fifteen years ago is more lifeless than a dinosaur. Only the most extraordinary circumstances could call it back to life.”
“It’s just not financially feasible.”
“If I gave you an order for fifteen hundred copies, would that make it financially feasible?”
“It might. Will you lay stress on the book at the press conference?”
“I will.”
“Do you have his power of attorney?”
“I do.”
“Now, at best, we could not republish in less than two months. Say two thousand copies—”
“No, no,” I interrupted. “Two months is out of the question. What about a paperback?”
“We have our own quality paperback line, but the smallest edition we do is five thousand. There’s simply no market in paperbacks for that kind of book.”
“There will be. Look, how quickly could you get out a paperback if I guaranteed—say ten thousand?”
“I simply can’t give you any decision right now. Let me talk it over with my colleagues and see what comes out in the press, and I’ll give you the decision in a day or two.”
“I suppose, since the book is out of print, that I could go to another publisher.”
“Give me twenty-four hours. That’s reasonable, isn’t it?”
“Reasonable enough,” I agreed.
I hung up, and then Anne Jones buzzed me that she was holding a collect call from my son. He was calling from Berkeley, where he was in his first year. I took the call, and he informed me that he had heard that I intended to divorce his mother.
“Word gets around.”
“She called me. Is it true?”
“Yes, it’s true. Why?”
“I don’t know why. I just thought I’d call and ask you.”
“Well, there it is. We’ll both be better off.”
“I guess you will at that,” he said, surprisingly.
“Will you be coming home for the spring vacation?”
“I guess I’ll stay here,” he said. “I want to think about the whole thing.”
11
Once, years ago, before everyone or almost everyone traveled by air instead of rail, I did a story on the Santa Fe crack Super Chief and rode for a day in the engineer’s cab. Doing a hundred and ten miles an hour on the straightaway, the engineer indicated a crossing more than a mile ahead of us and told me that even if he sighted a trailer truck stalled on the crossing, he couldn’t possibly stop the train, not even if he threw on all his brakes full strength. He would just have to sit in his cab and watch the train hurtle down and crash into the obstacle. That’s how I felt right now, like that engineer, and I wondered whether he would have felt, under those circumstances, the same sense of exhilaration and fear that possessed me.
I asked Millie to step into my office. When she appeared, with her ever-present pad, I asked her what she had decided about dinner.
“I’ll be hungry at seven-thirty—if you want to pick me up?”
“Good. Now we’re going to have a press conference on the subject of Andrew Capestone—tomorrow at eleven, so put Anne on it. We’ll hold it here in my office.”
She stared at me a moment and then made marks in her pad. “All right—tomorrow at eleven.”
“Add Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter.”
“Does that make sense?”
“I had lunch with Rosie Krantz today and planted a small item about Capestone’s committee. Just a few lines, and not mentioning Capestone at all, but indicating that the committee would ask the support of Hollywood notables.”
“That’s pretty vague, Al.”
“I know it is. I gave her one in return. I told her that I had asked my wife for a divorce.”
A long silence. She made no notes in her pad.
“When did you ask your wife for a divorce?” she said finally.
“This morning. I asked Rosie to be at the press conference, and if we have Rosie, we have to ask Variety”
“All right.”
“We’ll eat at Chasin’s.”
“I’ll wear my golden slippers.”
“Do that.”
I went home to an empty house. My wife had thoughtfully given Clara her two weeks’ vacation, for which I was grateful. I went into the study and took Andrew Capestone’s wallet out of the pigeonhole in my desk where I had left it, and then the notion hammered at my mind that I had not left the wallet in that pigeonhole but in the one next to it. Or had I? I fell into one of those painful exercises in recollection that yield absolutely nothing. My wife had enormous hang-ups in relating to me, as I had with her. She might hate or despise me or tolerate me, but in all the years we had been married she had never gone through my pockets or the drawers of my desk. Clara? I shook my head. Clara was nasty, astringent, hostile, but honest. I went through the contents of the wallet. Everything was there—but were the papers just as I had placed them? I simply couldn’t remember, and then I put the whole thing out of my mind.
12
Millie wore a white silk blouse and a long black skirt, and when we went to our table, enough heads turned to make me realize that I was not an observant man. For six years it had not occurred to me that Millie was a very beautiful woman.
“You know, this is the first time I’ve ever been here, Al,” she said after we had ordered. I had told her my thoughts, and she said, “I’m not a beautiful woman, not in this town. I’m tall and skinny, so I pass with a long skirt. A beautiful woman gets taken to Chasin’s at least once before she’s thirty.”
“Are you thirty?”
“Next month.”
“How come you never got married?”
“I told you.”
“I mean again.”
“It’s a buyer’s market. Oh, Christ, Al, the whole thing stinks. You buy me a steak and then you take me to Chasin’s, and you’re a hero because you got up enough guts to ask a woman who’s been sleeping around like a high-class pro for a dozen years to give you a divorce, and like a fat little kid you run to Rosie Krantz to let all your friends know that finally Al Brody is a man, or what passes for one in this stinkhole we inhabit. And now you want me to pat you on the back and tell you how flattered I am because maybe you might ask me to marry you.”
“That’s a hell of a thing to say. You don’t only put in a knife, you like to twist it.”
“Yes, I like to. I love you. That never occurred to you, did it?”
“No one loves me.”
“Poor fat, bald Al Brody. No one loves him. I went to bed with him because he bought me a New York steak. I go to bed with anyone who buys me a steak. That’s part of the course.”
Then I had nothing to say, and I just sat there. Two or three people stopped at the table and said hello, and I said hello and introduced Millie. Then I sat in silence again.
“It’s going to be a long evening if you don’t say anything, Al.”
I turned and stared at her, and then I touched her arm as if I wanted to be sure it was still there, and then I said, “Will you stop eating for a moment?”
“I’m hungry.”
“You eat like a truck driver. Why don’t you get fat?”
“I only eat like a truck driver when someone else is paying for it. Why should I stop eating?”
“Because I want to talk to you. I don’t like women who talk while they chew.”
“How about men?”
“Go to hell.”
“That’s nice.” She stopped eating. “OK—what?”
“What did you mean when you said you loved me?”
“Figure it out.”
“I can’t.”
“Try.”
“Would you marry me?” I asked her.
“That’s both subjunctive and conditional. Try will.”
“If you want it that way. Will you marry me?”
“No.”
“You can go on eating,” I said. “I’m seventeen years older than you, and I am also, as you take great pleasure in pointing out, fat and bald.”
“All of which has nothing to do with i
t.”
“What has?”
“You hate yourself, and you’re always trying to prove something so that you’ll hate yourself a little less. Only you never prove it, do you? I don’t want to marry anyone who hates himself. It’s too painful.”
“Maybe it’s better than hating others.”
“It’s the same dish. Oh, God, Al, what’s the use of talking about something like this? I was very content here tonight before you began to talk about marriage.”
“All right, I’ll change the subject. I offered you a partnership. That was neither subjunctive nor conditional. What about it?”
“I gave it some thought. I don’t think I want it.”
“Why?” I insisted.
“Lots of reasons, Al. For one thing, I care about you, and not the way a partner should. Anyway, I’m not sure I want to be a flak.”
“You’ve been working for me six years.”
“Well, the days pass. Anyway, that’s not it—not all of it. I don’t like what happens to you, and what you do. If I were your partner, I’d argue about that. We’d be at each other over what you do, and that would be no good, would it?”
“Like for instance?”
“Like the senator, for instance. I wouldn’t have him as a client for all the gold at Fort Knox. I’d tell him to take his lousy political sinecure and shove it up you know where.”
“Maybe you’re right. What else?”
“You want it plain and ugly?”
“Might as well. At least it’s honest,” I said.
“I don’t know what’s honest anymore, Al. Like Rosie Krantz and trading shots. You don’t even know whether Evelyn will give you a divorce—and then you broadcast it all over town.”
“That’s me, not the business.”
“All right, let’s get down to Andrew Capestone. You’re the best public relations man in Los Angeles, and you haven’t had a five-thousand-dollar client in years. Now you’re pulling out all the stops for Capestone—and there’s something wrong about the whole show.”
“I made the senator—you know that. All those years I built that image of his. He didn’t exist.”
“So what? You were paid. You build images. You hate it, but now you’re trying to prove something with Capestone. If you hate it so, why don’t you get out of it?”