The Hook

by Donald E. Westlake

  Wayne looked off down the path to his right, and saw Lucie coming. He blinked, but of course it wasn’t Lucie. It never was. A tall slender woman with that kind of halo of gold-shavings hair, wearing black, walking with that the-street-is-mine stride, was not a rarity in New York. Wayne saw about one Lucie a month, but of course on second look they were always significantly different.

  This one, for instance. She was with two other women, she walking on the left, on Wayne’s side as they moved toward him along the path, and when he’d first seen her she’d had her head back, laughing. Now, when she wasn’t laughing, and she had turned her profile to Wayne to face the other two women, she didn’t look like Lucie at all. They never did.

  He’d been sitting here too long; he was beginning to feel the chill. He waited for the faux Lucie to go on by, then stood, and jogged home.

  * * *

  Shelly Katz was a tiny dynamo of a woman, compact, with tightly curled black hair almost as Brillo-like as her husband’s. Her whole body seemed to be tightly curled, one muscle ready to spring, but her manner was easygoing, comic, relaxed. “I want to see the changes you made,” she said, Saturday evening, as Wayne and Susan greeted them at the door.

  “Not that many yet,” Susan told her.

  Wayne was helping with their coats when Shelly pointed at the hall table where Jorge the doorman would leave their mail if they were to go away. “Isn’t that Bryce’s?”

  Wayne, trying to sound light and casual but feeling again that flutter, as though he were about to be found out for some crime, not knowing exactly what that crime might be, said, “A lot of the stuff here is Bryce’s. He left it all behind.”

  “We’ll replace as we go along,” Susan explained, “but for now, it helps to fill the place.”

  Shelly gave Joe a bewildered look. “He left his furniture?”

  “He thought of it as Lucie’s,” Joe told her. “She decorated this apartment.”

  Wayne hadn’t thought of the furniture as Lucie’s, he’d thought of it as Bryce’s, and he’d enjoyed living in its midst. He said, “Bryce must have had something to do with it. Picking it out.”

  “Writing the check, I think,” Joe said.

  Susan said, “Wayne, you put their coats in the bedroom, and I’ll do drinks.”

  “Right.”

  Wayne carried the coats to the bedroom, seeing for the first time that the furniture around him, the colors of the walls, were all Lucie, not Bryce. It made him feel odd, uncomfortable. That ghost had faded, so much so that even when he saw it walking, as he had yesterday in the park, it had no power to bother him. But the furniture? Lucie’s? It was like suddenly finding yourself in enemy territory.

  Everything in the bedroom was theirs, their own, brought up from Perry Street. His office, too, was all his, except for the leather armchair and the revolving bookrack. The dining room was completely their own. It was the living room, and the kitchen, and the guest bedroom, and the outdoor furniture on the terrace, and the long room-size hallway, it was all of those that had the mortmain of Lucie Proctorr laid heavily upon them, like a fog you just can’t quite see.

  Where Joe and Shelly will spend the next hour before dinner, Wayne thought, in that living room, that’s where they’d spent so much time with Bryce and Lucie, on those sofas, with that coffee table, those end tables, those lamps. Even the drapes kept open to frame the view of the park.

  He found himself reluctant to leave the bedroom, to go to the living room, as though some jaws were waiting for him in there, some trap. Or maybe some glaring bright light to shine into his soul and show him complete to Joe Katz; like the picture of Dorian Gray. We all have that picture inside us, don’t we, he thought, in the locked secret attic nobody ever sees.

  It had been a long while since he had visualized Lucie clear in his memory, her mocking eyes, that slightly twisted mouth and the raised head of the matador as she’d said, “Is Susan any good in bed?” The last words she’d ever spoken.

  The doorbell snapped at his attention. His own bedroom was around him, in this strangely wonderful new place. He left it, to be host. This was his home now.

  * * *

  He was seated at dinner between Shelly and a woman named Ann, whose husband worked with Susan. Again he was surrounded by his own furniture, and the easy rituals of dinner chitchat were familiar and comforting. It wasn’t until they went back to the living room for after-dinner drinks that he sat near Joe, who looked around and said, “I have to tell you, it’s weird to be here like this. Without Bryce and Lucie, but with all this familiar stuff. I keep expecting them to walk in. Well, him, anyway.”

  “It’s a bigger apartment than our old one,” Wayne said, “too big for what we brought with us, and the stuff was here. But Susan’s right, we’ll have to replace it. A couple things you might be interested in.”

  Joe grinned. “Because now we’re in a bigger place? I don’t think so, Wayne.”

  “No, there’s one thing in particular,” Wayne said. “I brought everything up from my office, and he left a couple things, and it’s too crowded in there. One thing he left is a very nice wooden revolving bookrack, looks expensive, but I don’t need it. Would you like to see it?”

  “No, I remember it,” Joe told him. “Lucie gave Bryce that for Christmas, three or four years ago. He left that behind? That surprises me.”

  “Well, I don’t want it,” Wayne said. “I thought you might.”

  Joe shook his head, with a rather sad, nostalgic smile. “I was part of the conspiracy,” he said, “when we smuggled that thing in here without Bryce’s knowing, so it could be a surprise on Christmas Day.”

  “Oh.”

  “Every once in a while, you know, Wayne,” Joe said, “some unexpected emotion shows up, something you didn’t remember or didn’t know you cared about. That bookrack—You know, now I’m thinking about it, I think Bryce always thought it was kind of over the top. Too ostentatious, you know? I don’t think he ever did like it.”

  “So that’s why he left it.”

  “But it still represents a happy moment,” Joe said. “A moment in this room. Me sitting on this sofa, right here. They used to have the Christmas tree over there. When Lucie was pleased by something, you know, she used to clap her hands together, like a little girl.”

  Wayne almost said, “I never saw her do that,” which would have been a brainless thing to do. Instead, he said, “I guess they had good times before the bad. Most divorced couples can say that.”

  “Oh, sure.” Joe nodded, and looked toward the empty corner where the Christmas tree would go. “I can just see her, though, clapping her hands like that, when Bryce suddenly found this huge kiosk kind of a thing, all wrapped in gold paper, hidden, believe it or not, behind the tree.”

  Gold paper; Wayne could believe that. “It sounds like a great Christmas,” he said.

  “If I were you, Wayne,” Joe told him, “I’d take that, it’s on its own wheels, I’d take it down the service elevator and just put it out by the curb. That’s the great thing about New York, you know. Anywhere else, you put something out on the sidewalk, either it stays there for a month or you get a ticket for littering. In New York, you can put anything out on the street, on West Fourth I saw a sectional sofa put out, must’ve been ten feet long. In twenty minutes it’s gone, no matter what it is. That’s New York.”

  Wayne understood now that everything Joe saw around himself in New York had to be unique to the city; crackpot but benign. “You’re right,” he said.

  “Wheel it out,” Joe advised. “In twenty minutes, it’ll be on its way to Queens.”

  “I think I’ll do that,” Wayne said.

  Twenty-five

  Wednesday again, a week since Detective Johnson’s visit, and the new regime was holding. Bryce had stopped prowling in stores, and now he limited himself to quick trips for perishables and the Times, which was also a perishable, of course. He spent most of his daylight hours now outdoors around the house, repairing winter’
s damage, getting ready for spring. He felt better, almost as though he’d gotten over something physical, the way you get over a low-level fever that had hung on for so long that it had begun to seem like normality; when at last it lets go, what a relief to find the real normality once more.

  He had also stopped making up new storylines every morning. He didn’t know how many he’d done, but there were certainly a bunch of discs in the rack on the shelf above his computer screen. He didn’t remember any of them exactly, but felt that soon he would go back into the office, run through all those ideas, choose one, and finally get started on the next book.

  But not yet. At the moment, all he wanted to do was physical labor by day and then watch tapes of old movies after the dinner he heated for himself every evening. Weekends, he still had plenty of social invitations, so he certainly wasn’t becoming some kind of hermit.

  Before now, he’d only been full-time in this house in the summer months, and hadn’t been much aware of it as an entity in itself. Now the changeable beauty of the land fascinated him, and he found himself much more aware of the details of the weather than when he’d lived mostly in New York. He loved being out here, working, in the middle of his land.

  He always carried the cellular phone from the BMW with him when he worked outside, and on Wednesday afternoon it rang as he was using the posthole digger to make a hole for a new support at one corner of the fence around the swimming pool. This was the kind of job he always used to have Gregg, the lawn guy, or one of the other local handymen take care of, but he was finding these days he liked to do the work himself.

  He left the digger propped in the half-dug hole, peeled off his work gloves, and answered the phone just after the second ring: “Hello?”

  “Bryce. Joe. How we doing?”

  “Oh, fine.” Bryce was back to telling Joe the vague nontruths about his progress on the alleged new book. “Slow, you know, but getting there.”

  “Terrific. But what I’m calling about is not to nag you, at least primarily not to nag you—”

  “You don’t nag,” Bryce lied. “And anyway, I need it.”

  Joe laughed. “Very Talmudic,” he said. “No, what I want to talk to you about is Two Faces, promotion thereof.”

  “Oh, sure.” Because Two Faces in the Mirror would be coming out in June, three months from now.

  “The first question is,” Joe said, “a tour.”

  “If I have to,” Bryce told him. “I’d rather do phoners, you know that.”

  “You can talk that over with Ricki Sussman,” Joe said, she being head of the Pegasus publicity department. “She’ll give you a call.”

  “Ricki’s only happy when she knows I’m on an airplane,” Bryce said.

  “Talk it over with her,” Joe advised, “and leave me out. And the other thing is, the New York Review of Books would like to do an interview with you.”

  “Review of Books? Aren’t they a little . . . academic for me?”

  “It’s been a while since you’ve had a book out,” Joe explained, “you’re part of the culture, part of the zeitgeist, and they won’t put you down, or why should you do it?”

  “Gore Vidal won’t be the interviewer, in other words.”

  Joe laughed. “No, we’ll have approval.”

  “Sometimes,” Bryce said, “I think the worst part of writing is getting published.”

  “Other people,” Joe said, “have suggested that’s the second worst.”

  “Okay,” Bryce said. “Okay.”

  “Time is short,” Joe told him, “so the interview will have to be this month. Up at your place, okay?”

  “Sure, I’d prefer that.”

  “I thought you would. Let me get off now, I don’t want to keep you from the new book.”

  “That wasn’t nagging either,” Bryce assured him, and hung up, and turned back to the hole he was digging.

  Lucie had gone on tour with him, just once. Six cities in eight days. Chicago was one of them that time, and Houston, and Seattle. Was that San Francisco?

  In any event, it had been her idea to come along, for what she’d thought was the glamour of it, staying in the hotels, being squired around, being the lion, being the big fish in a succession of small ponds. But then she was there for the reality, and she hated it. She hated it, and she made life on tour even more complicated for Bryce as a result. She fought with the staff at most of the hotels where they stayed, was difficult to bookstore clerks—a thing you don’t do—and generally made her disaffection felt at every turn.

  The problem was, she was used to attention, usually a lot of attention, but always at least some of the attention in the room, but in this context there was no attention left over for her at all. She was used to Bryce being famous, and very used to him being rich, but she wasn’t at all used to him being a star, being the one who used up all the oxygen in the room, and she didn’t like it. All the press interviews, all the television talk shows, all the fans, all the bookstore clerks, everybody everywhere had eyes and attention only for that person standing to Lucie’s left. She was bad-tempered for weeks afterward, more bad-tempered than usual, and never again suggested she join him on tour.

  Maybe he wouldn’t have to tour this time. He’d rather not, he’d rather stay here. Looking down into the hole he was digging, thinking about the rigors of book tours, he lifted the posthole digger by its two long wooden poles as high as his arms would reach, so that the two curved metal shovel heads facing one another at the bottom were completely up out of the hole. Then he drove it down, the shovels punching into the packed soil at the bottom, breaking some dirt and small stones loose. When he spread the poles, it made the shovel faces scoop in toward one another, gathering the loosened soil. He lifted it out, moved it to the side, brought the poles closer together, and the dirt fell onto the mound he was building on a piece of burlap. Then he repeated the operation, driving the digger down into the hole.

  It hit a rock. The clang came with a tremor that ran up the poles to vibrate inside his arms, and all at once he saw that figure again, that dark figure, crouched, seen from behind, punching, punching. That was all he could see, the crouched and punching figure, from the back. Why could he never see Lucie?

  He shifted position, to flank the rock rather than hit it, and drove downward again. Was this what it was like? He lifted the digger and drove it down. Was this what it was like? He drove it down. Was this what it was like? Was this what it was like? Was this what it was like?

  Twenty-six

  It had probably been a mistake to take the apartment, but Susan had been so determined that Wayne hadn’t seen any way to argue about it. In fact, at that time, he hadn’t even wanted to argue. The idea of living in Bryce’s apartment, taking over Bryce’s apartment, might have occurred to him as well, but he would have brushed it away as embarrassing and improper. But when the idea came from Susan, and so forcefully, as though she knew without a question it was the right thing to do, he could only go along with her, feeling a little sneaky private pleasure in what they were up to.

  But now here they were, with a rent that was almost quadruple what they used to pay, and an income that had drastically shrunk. Susan still had her job, and Wayne seemed to have created this new career for himself in magazines, but it wasn’t enough to keep them on Central Park West. He’d have to sell three articles to the slick magazines a month in order to net enough after taxes just to pay the rent, and there was no way he could turn out that much salable work month after month. It’s true Mark Steiner was holding half a million dollars for them, investing much of it, doling out a four-thousand-dollar-a-month deposit into their checking account for their daily expenses, but eventually even that well would run dry, and then what? And why permit it to run dry at all?

  If it weren’t for the money question, he’d be enjoying this new career. The other difference he’d discovered between writing novels and writing magazine nonfiction was the fact that when you wrote for magazines you knew you were turning out forg
ettable words, disposable, gone forever in a month, but when you were working on a novel you were always aware, in the back of your mind, that this just might be deathless prose; think of that. To be absolutely certain that what you were writing had a shorter shelf life than yogurt was a great relief.

  But there was the money question, and so he’d decided to try something else. He’d decided to take a little time off to write a screenplay. He was well aware that the world was awash in screenplays written on spec, hopeless, doomed, never to be anything more than Xeroxed pages gathering dust on a shelf, orphans, almost every shelf in Hollywood a complete orphanage in itself, but somebody hit. Some movies were made. Yes, and the losers also told themselves the same thing, and Wayne was aware of that, too.

  But he had to try, and he thought he did have a leg up on the orphans out there, in that he was a published novelist. He was a man with a body of work, a packet of good reviews, a bunch of actual hardcover books you could hold in your hand. Hollywood might be sharp about a lot of things, but they wouldn’t be sharp about the chain-store computers. They wouldn’t know he was roadkill. All they’d know is that he was a novelist, and not only that, a New York novelist. They would at least give him a respectful hearing, which is more than they would do for the screenwriters in their midst.

  When his first novel, The Pollux Perspective, had been published, there’d been some movie interest, and in fact a small one-year option that had not been renewed. That novel was now over twenty years old, but he’d read it through again and it seemed to him the story still worked, the updating would not be at all difficult.