Foul Matter

by Martha Grimes

  Bill gave him a razor smile and said, “Yeah. What’ve you got?”

  Well, Clive hadn’t got anything, had he?

  Both Bill and Nancy had X-ray vision and mirror eyes good enough for a Village of the Damned remake. Because of that, Clive might have believed they could see straight through him had he not known their vision was clouded by their own predilection for sham and subterfuge. So, having nothing at all, he resorted to a wide-eyed innocence designed to pique their curiosity even more about the coup they thought he must have brought off.

  His shrug was elaborate. “I haven’t got anything.”

  Nancy put on her disbelieving face, turned sideways in her chair, and shook her head at this witless attempt to convince her.

  “Yeah, right,” Bill said.

  The three of them had never actually discussed Paul Giverney. Had never so much as mentioned it over the telephone, because none of them had wanted the others to think he or she was working ropes and pulleys like holy hell behind the claptrap scenes of their dusty stages, trying to grab Giverney’s agent’s ear, hurling more and more outlandish offers. Clive knew he was right in assuming their offers had been intoxicating. But Bobby Mackenzie’s had been so far off the charts Giverney’s agent could easily retire on the commission. Never have to return another call in his life, he wouldn’t. It was just the sort of advance that would bring the publishing industry to its knees, eventually. Monster advances of the kind being offered would never be earned out.

  This, too, thought Clive, was sad. But, again, he wasn’t wearing this fifteen-hundred-dollar silk suit by virtue of adhering to the Tom Kidd publishing virtues.

  “Lunch, for God’s sakes,” answered Clive, affecting a laugh insincere enough to prove it must be otherwise. “We haven’t had lunch since—” He bethought himself.

  Nancy answered: “Since I signed Tasha Gorky for a one-mil advance on spec.”

  That was walking right into a trap she should have foreseen, being Nancy. She must be desperate.

  Clive smiled. “As I recall, Nancy, the spec turned out to be one purely ghosted outline with the ghost departing into the ether.”

  Tasha didn’t have any ideas, much less could she write. Tasha’s writing expertise extended to autographing tennis balls.

  Nancy’s preeminent trait was her ability to stonewall anybody. “Yes, why’re you surprised? It was obvious I was taking a big chance. But like I always say, no pain, no gain.” (The only thing she got out of her occasional bouts with AA were the aphorisms.)

  Of course, she was managing to turn things around to make her editorial errors look like brave risks. They were off the subject of the reason for the lunch. But Clive knew well enough they’d be right back on it at any second. They were too sharp to be taken in by his we-haven’t-seen-one-another-lately gambit. Too sharp and too envious. Too much like him, in other words.

  Did he dare? He cut off a bite of swordfish with surgical precision. Given Bobby Mackenzie’s determination to sign Giverney, wasn’t it already a foregone conclusion that they’d get him? If by some chance they didn’t, surely he’d be able to cover himself. So he dropped it right in the middle of talk about Tasha: “We’re signing Paul Giverney for two books. That’s what we’re celebrating.”

  They seemed to turn to stone right before his eyes. He thought about Lot’s wife . . . but, no, that was a pillar of salt, wasn’t it? Their mouths looked as thin as fissures in rock. He wanted to chortle out loud, but constrained himself. He had bested them, no doubt of it—grabbed the gold ring, kicked the ball into the end zone, gone for broke, and hit the jackpot.

  But it was rather a thin payoff. They both recouped, stone turning back to flesh, and congratulated him and began the process of pretending they hadn’t lusted after the same writer.

  “Naturally,” said Bill, “we considered Giverney—”

  Didn’t you just! Clive wanted to yell.

  “—but his agent—what’s his name?”

  As if he didn’t have it carved in blood on his wrist!

  “Mort Durban.” Apoplectic Mortimer, the agent’s agent.

  “Ah, yes. Anyway, he was demanding so much we knew the advance would never earn out. We’d lose a helluva lot. But Bobby Mackenzie can probably afford to carry the loss. He’s got millions to throw around.” Bill flashed a smile.

  As if, of course, Bobby was some spoiled kid who had no idea how to run a publishing house. Raging inwardly, Clive kept on smiling. “Lose? I guess our people must be using different figures. We’re planning a one-million first printing.”

  Bill laughed. “With a fifty, sixty percent return?”

  “Giverney’s books never have that kind of return. Twenty-five at the most.”

  “Come on, Clive. Half those books’ll come back, they always do. It gets worse every year; publishers just can’t afford these humongous advances anymore—”

  Oh, Christ! Bill was turning this to his advantage. Bill pontificating about publishing excess? The very man who’d tried to lure Rita Aristedes away from Mackenzie-Haack by brokering a Tuscan villa? (Rita was mad for everything Italian except their love of the earth and each other.) Clive just sat, swordfish forgotten, arms folded, featherweight smile on his face.

  Nancy’s turn: “Thing is, Mackenzie-Haack always had this absolutely fabulous list—I don’t mind admitting I envy you (a supercilious smile meant to belie that envy)—until lately.”

  Clive had to respond to that, he couldn’t help himself. “ ‘Lately’? Mackenzie’s still got the best list of anybody in town.”

  “Better than Fritz Pearls?”

  Fritz Pearls was the most literary of all of them. “Of course not.” Clive grimaced as if surely it was clear F.P. outshone all of them. “Mackenzie’s size, I mean.”

  Nancy went on: “You just signed on Dwight Staines. So you’ve got him, Rita Aristedes, and now Paul Giverney. I’d say”—she slugged back her half glass of wine—“you’re getting as commercial as Disney.” She smiled widely, showing her platform teeth.

  Clive managed a hearty, false laugh. “Not much chance of that, Nancy girl. Not when we have writers like Eric Gruber or Ned Isaly. In addition to a dozen others.”

  Bill strode in again. “Yeah, but they’re all midlist writers, except maybe Isaly. And he only turns one out every four, five years. You haven’t got a Mailer or an Updike. You haven’t got any literary heavy hitters.”

  “Saul Prouil.” This was a lie, but Clive was getting used to it.

  “What? Come on. You haven’t got Prouil under contract. Hell, Saul Prouil hasn’t published a book in a decade.”

  “No. But what he’s working on is brilliant.”

  “Like, what’s he working on?”

  Clive laughed. “You know Saul. He doesn’t like anyone talking about work in progress.” God, why had he brought Saul Prouil up? He hadn’t as much as said hello and good-bye to him in nine years. And he had never been the man’s editor.

  “Yeah? Maybe that’s because he’s not making any.” Nancy was helping herself to the last of the wine.

  This whole lunch was not going the way it was supposed to, damn it. They were supposed to cut open a vein and bleed jealousy all over the gardenia-white cloth. They were supposed to be humbled, supposed to see that in the long run, Clive was the most successful of the three of them, better, the best.

  “Shit,” said Bill, pulling himself sideways in his chair, blowing smoke from the cigarette he wasn’t supposed to be smoking there. “You know what we are? Pimps, that’s all.” He inhaled again, his brows rammed together, looking angry.

  This pretense of self-denigration might have fooled an outsider, but not Clive. Anyway, the denigrating was all for Clive, so that Bill could push Clive into pimpdom. One could hardly do that without generously including oneself. Clive slumped. He felt he had put himself in jeopardy for nothing. Hadn’t he known that their face-saving techniques were every bit as good as his? He couldn’t impress them; they were all unimpressible. It was rather
a shock to think that.

  And there was still the unsigned Giverney contract. Hell.

  Without a care in the world for an expense account (as it wasn’t theirs), Nancy and Bill ordered up a couple of Remys.

  “Make it doubles,” Bill called to the waiter’s departing back. “Anyway, congrats, Clive. Good job. I’m glad I’m not going to have to take the heat, though, when Giverney doesn’t earn out.”

  Clive mumbled a response.

  “You know what one of Giverney’s demands is going to be, don’t you? He’s going to want Tom Kidd as editor. You know that, don’t you?”

  Clive stared at him. How in hell did Bill know that? Well, he wasn’t going to tell him he was right. “What makes you think that?”

  Bill shrugged. “Makes sense, doesn’t it? Giverney’d want the best. He’s such an arrogant bastard.” He had that stupid smile pasted back in place. “I’m only glad I don’t have to be the one to tell Tom Kidd.” He swiped at his knee with his hand, laughing. “I’m just glad I don’t.”

  Nancy said, straight faced, at least at first, “Tom will just take out a gun and shoot you. Fancy that. Poor Clivey.”

  When Clive returned to his office after lunch, feeling deflated, he found a book lying in the center of his desk blotter. It was one that Mackenzie-Haack had published two years previously, Fallguy. This was the book Bobby had mentioned, the one by Danny Zito, who took a lot of heat for it, but would have taken more, and worse, had he not gone into the witness protection program right before the book had come out.

  It had been one of Clive’s books, though he’d told Bobby Mackenzie another editor, someone like Peter Genero, would do a much better job (meaning, the book was beneath Clive) and that Peter would get on a lot better with Danny Zito.

  “Why? Because he’s Italian? You mean, it takes one to know one?”

  That had been Bobby’s response. He’d told Clive that the book needed some toning up, some class, however superficial, and Clive was just the one to supply it.

  Danny Zito had turned out to be a very down-to-earth (well, sure), entertaining guy. He was a hell of a conversationalist over pricey lunches (though Clive was always watching his back) and the book had done somewhat better than expected.

  Clive sat down then with the book in his hands.

  Why?

  He got up and went to the door. His assistant, Amy Waters, was working on some copy. “Amy, where did this come from?” He held the book up. It had quite a handsome black-and-white jacket with an embossed silver title.

  Amy squinted as if she couldn’t see the four-inch-high Fallguy from a couple of feet away. “Maybe Bobby left it?” She went back to her copy.

  “You put that as a question, Amy. The question is what I’m asking you, for God’s sakes.” Why did he bother saying that? Amy always put statements in the form of questions.

  “Oh. What I mean is: Bobby was in your office before.”

  “But what did he say?”

  “Nothing. Just walked in and walked out. He said, ‘Hi, Amy,’ but I wasn’t paying much attention; I’m trying to get this copy ready for the catalog?”

  Clive grunted and walked back into his office with the book, sat down, and stared at it.

  Danny Zito?

  SEVEN

  Clive was still looking at Fallguy, thumbing through the book, about to pick up the phone—no, to go to Bobby’s office to ask him what in the hell he’d left the book for. He was thinking this when Tom Kidd materialized in Clive’s open doorway. “Materialized” was the right word for Tom had found a patch of darkness and it was difficult to make out his features, except for the tonsure of pale hair that, lit from behind, foamed around his head.

  Tom was not one for telephone chat or a “Hey, got a minute?” approaches. Clive rarely saw him, and when he did it was usually in a sudden appearance, such as this. Rarely did he have an opportunity to talk with Tom; Clive certainly never made one. Tom was not one to stop by for an editorial chat; he fairly lived in his office, small but with a view that was magnificent, even by New York City standards. The view was meant to keep Tom happy. It was wasted on him; views of Manhattan didn’t interest him, since he doubted the place changed much from day to day (he’d said). Tom had merely found the New York scenery a good backdrop for stacks and stacks of books.

  Clive imagined that even when Tom’s head came up from reading one of his manuscripts, he didn’t really see, as on a winter’s night, the lighting up of Fifth Avenue, all of the lamps in front of the Plaza pressing through amber fog, nor did he see the dark drapery of trees at this end of Central Park. He saw words. Tom would still be seeing the words of the manuscript in his mind—this sentence, this image, this transparent page superimposed upon the Plaza and the park—whose sentence? Whose image? Isaly’s? Gruber’s? Grace Packard’s? describing the scene down there with such precision that the words seemed to melt into the fog and the trees and the snow and become it.

  That, thought Clive, was what editors like Kidd saw. There weren’t many of them. Thank God. Kidd always made Clive feel inadequate; he did this without even trying. All he had to do was appear in the damned doorway.

  Clive would have to rally. “Tom!” he said, rising from his chair.

  “Clive.” Tom was lighting up one of his big cigars. They were quite vile. All of the flack on smoking seemed to have sailed right over Tom Kidd’s head. “I just saw Tootsie Malone.”

  Agent for Clive’s one good writer, Jennifer Schiffler. “Was she coming to see me? What’d she say?”

  “I don’t know. I couldn’t read the balloon above her head.”

  Tom hated agents of all stripes and kidney except for Jimmy McKinney, one of Mort Durban’s agents.

  “I understand you’re signing Paul Giverney.”

  Clive tried for hearty self-denigration, laughed, and said, “Trying like hell to.”

  “Why?” Tom had taken a step into the room and smoke billowed out behind him as he exhaled.

  “Why?”

  Tom nodded. “Why do we need another commercial writer? A new one seems to pop up every day. Now it’s Giverney.”

  “Come on, now, Tom. You know every house in Manhattan is trying to get him.”

  Tom shrugged. “Again I ask, why?”

  “Look, sit down, will you?”

  “No, I’ve got to finish going over Mary’s contract.”

  This was Mary Mackey. Clive saw an opportunity to get off the subject of Paul Giverney. “Mackey’s such a good writer. I’m glad you got her an extra twenty thousand.” He could have bit out his tongue; he was leading right into the subject of advances. Mary Mackey had originally been offered fifty thousand, but Tom had shoved it up to seventy. Still, it was mere change compared with someone like Dwight Staines or Paul Giverney. If Mackenzie-Haack took just 15 or 20 percent of the money it was paying writers like Staines or Rita Aristedes, it would be enough to keep really good writers out of trouble for years. Clive certainly wasn’t going to say this, or Tom would come back with one of his “forgotten world” speeches. Back there, in the mists of the forgotten world of publishing, it used to be that money would be paid to keep new writers afloat, even though there wouldn’t be a return on their books for years. The “forgotten world of publishing.” Back there with the dinosaur bones.

  This made Clive recall a recent sales conference during which Tom had presented a new novel by Eric Gruber. He took pains to point out that in this novel one character was a dinosaur. “Please keep in mind, when you go into the bookstores, that Eric Gruber is a fabulist, that he’s really not Stephen King or Michael Crichton. If you need a buzz term, call it magical realism, that’s as good as any—unfortunately.”

  Tom hated buzz words.

  Leo Brand, who headed up sales, told Tom he always talked as if the whole publishing machine—including sales—was a damned thorn in the writer’s side, as if the house were some obstacle course that Tom’s writers had to run, and Leo wished Tom would keep in mind that without Mackenzie-H
aack, Tom’s fucking writers wouldn’t even be in print.

  “What’s so great about print—” Tom had asked, unfazed “—if you’ve got a pencil and a piece of paper?”

  He made other editors—God knows he made Clive—feel as if they’d all come up short. Well, they had, hadn’t they? Tom’s writers took all of the literary prizes: a dozen National Book awards, several Pulitzers, scads of notable book citations, a number of New York Critics’ Circle awards, and the same number of foreign prizes. This was, admittedly, over a couple of decades. But decades had not turned up a rash of prizes such as these for any other editor, indeed, not for all of the editors put together. There had been a sprinkling of awards to other editors’ books, but that’s all.

  Of course there wasn’t a publisher in New York who hadn’t gone fishing to get Tom away from Mackenzie-Haack. The biggest lure they had tossed out was the offer of his own imprint, which was Queeg and Hyde’s offer. All of this was very hush-hush, of course, but there being no secrets in politics and publishing, the word had drifted around to Bobby Mackenzie, who had, naturally (and uninventively), offered Tom the same thing: his own imprint. This would mean Tom would have a small segment of Mackenzie-Haack all to himself. His name would appear right beneath the publisher’s own on the spine of the book and on the title page. A very prestigious thing, one’s own imprint. Clive had been trying to get one for years. “A Clive Esterhaus Book.” He loved the look of it when he typed it on a piece of paper. But it was a look that hadn’t materialized.

  Tom Kidd had (to no one’s surprise, really) turned down Queeg and Hyde and the imprint. “Why?” he had asked Bobby, when Bobby had offered him the same thing, “Why would I want that?”

  “Why?” was generally Tom’s answer to the underhanded, back-biting, envious maneuvers that went on at Mack and Haack. When Bobby had once offered him the position of editor in chief, assuring him he wouldn’t be doing anything more than he was already doing, that had been Tom’s response. “Why?”