He would have to tell her to go home. He did not want to be overheard when he made this telephone call.
Just as he was getting up, Amy stopped in the doorway, wearing her coat, and said, “Well, good night?”
As if it were a question. “Yes, good night, Amy. Did you finish that copy?” Stupid of him not to leave it at “Good night.”
“I told you before?” It was close to a whine. “I finished it, yes.”
“Good, good. Well . . .” He nodded. She didn’t move. Would there be any closure here at all? He picked a rubber band from a little jar and started snapping it.
Then “Bye!” she said, as breathless as if she’d been running past the door and the sight of him had taken her by surprise.
With her gone, he had no further reason for procrastinating. What he needed was a drink, a bracer, a snort of cocaine, an anesthetic. He kept a bottle of Bombay gin in his bottom desk drawer (homage to Sam Spade and the others), but decided against the gin, which would, at this point, have traveled to his brain like a cruise missile. Bobby had Scotch, which would warm him without putting his mind out of commission.
Clive rose, pocketed the Rolodex card (afraid that it might be discovered by someone), and walked out of his office, through the open-office pen, and down the corridor to Bobby’s office. He walked through the outer to the inner office, where he opened the little doors of the burled mahogany cabinet, took out the Scotch, and poured a couple of fingers into one of Bobby’s Venetian glass tumblers. Bobby didn’t mind anyone helping himself to his private stock. Bobby was, in things like this, quite generous. Then he sat down on the old soft sofa and stretched out his legs.
Yes, Bobby would’ve been a great guy to work for if only he could stay the same guy for three days running. Some of this erratic behavior could be explained by the man’s being a kind of publishing genius. But, really: wasn’t all of this business about Paul Giverney pretty childish? He finished off the first drink, got up, and poured himself a second. He felt a little looser, more relaxed, composed, in charge of the matter, and decided to make the call from Bobby’s office. Lie on the couch and call. The image pleased him. This whole half-baked plan was so crazy he might as well relax.
One of the telephone extensions was sitting on an end table by the arm of the couch. He took out the card, dialed the number. It surprised him that it was a 212 exchange; he would have thought Danny Zito would have gotten as far from New York as he could.
He coiled the phone cord and listened through six rings and was about to hang up (with thanks to God) before he heard the receiver’s being lifted. He wondered how big this apartment was the bureau had found for Danny.
“Yeah.” The voice wasn’t surly, just bored.
“Dan—sorry. Jimmy Bradshaw, is he there?”
Silence. “Who wants him?” More interested now, perhaps a little tense.
Clive wondered if there was a sort of password Bobby had neglected to give him. “Tell him (why not string out the game?) that Clive Esterhaus would like to talk to him. See, I know Jimmy.”
“Clive!” All pretense of Jimmy Bradshaw and taking a message dropped through the floor. “Hey, man, long time, no see.”
“An interesting comment coming from someone in the witness protection program.”
Danny was easily amused. He laughed.
Clive said, “I thought you’d be living somewhere like Bozeman, Montana, Dan—ah, Jimmy. I’m surprised you’re still in New York.”
“Couldn’t live nowhere else, Clive-O.”
“But—isn’t it dangerous?”
“Nobody’s found me yet, pal. Nice to hear from my publisher. Book’s doin’ great, ain’t it? But what happened to my Barnes and Noble win-doooowww?” He sang the two syllables, trilled them up and down.
Clive shut his eyes tightly and tapped his forehead with the cold black receiver. Give me a fucking break! Every damned fool who put pen to paper thought he deserved a shot at a bookstore window.
“Sorry about that, ah, Jimmy” (and if Danny Zito insisted on mouthing off about his book, what the hell difference did it make what Clive called him? Jimmy or Danny or semiretired Snitch, who’d brought the Bransoni family to its knees, got “Papa B”—as they fondly called him—a stretch in jail, together with two of his sons, but left plenty more relatives who were looking for Danny).
Come to think of it, Clive decided it was not such a hot idea to be belting his own name and the publisher’s around, either. “We did try to get it for you (a lie), but DreckSneed beat us to it with that Dwight Staines book—”
“Shit. Genre stuff. No class at all. So what’s up?”
“Well, Bobby’s talking a sequel.”
“No problem.”
No problem? Christ, the writer’s ego. At least he supposed he had to give Danny credit for actually writing Fallguy. It had taken several bouts of heavy editing but it had, in the end, been readable. So here he was, revving up for book number two. Almost taking for granted there would be a number two. “What I’d really like is to talk to you in person. Can you manage that?” He wondered if Danny ever went out.
“Me? Hell, yes. I just take a little extra care, is all. Gotta watch my back. You know.”
Which gave Clive the uncomfortable feeling that he soon might have to be watching his. “You should work in publishing for a day. Listen: there’s something you can do for us. It’s a, uh, another kind of contract. We figure you’d have the connections.”
“Connections? To what?”
“Maybe you could give me the name of a, uh, an agent? A representative. A middleman. Someone like that?”
Danny seemed to have gone away from the telephone for something. Clive heard him laughing in the background. Probably went to get his drink. Clive checked his own Scotch. Then Danny was back. “Yeah, I’m sure.”
“So just pick any place you like. I’ll meet you wherever.”
“You mean now? Tonight?”
“Why not? In a couple of hours. If you’re not otherwise engaged.”
“Nah, I ain’t got nothin’ on. As you can guess, my popularity’s suffered some. Okay, so let’s say the Chelsea Piers. Say, Pier Sixty-one?”
“All right. Around seven thirty, eight?”
“Great. Should we exchange contracts?”
Hysterical laughter. Clive hung up.
He lay on the leather couch with the phone on his chest. He checked his watch. Two hours. The Chelsea Piers, then afterward he could go to that restaurant on Ninth that was getting a lot of play. Would Danny want to go with him to dinner? He hoped not. Clive sighed and replaced the telephone receiver.
The Chelsea Piers, for God’s sakes, for someone in the witness protection program.
TWELVE
The Chelsea Piers.
It was not a mise-en-scène Clive had often feasted his eyes upon. Rarely did he venture below Thirty-eighth Street, either West or East, and never had he done it in the last decade. His mental map of this far downtown was covered with fuzz and dust. Yet many years ago, he had gone all the way down to Greene Street to talk to one of Mackenzie’s young hopefuls, sitting outside some coffee bar at a table on the pavement. The funny thing was, he forgot the writer, the book, what either of them had said, but the little wedge of Greenwich Village, shaped like the Flatiron Building, had stayed in his mind, had never dislodged.
Clive wondered why. And why he hadn’t gone back.
Bobby Mackenzie, never reality’s groomsman, had finally come across a scheme, a marriage of greed and inventiveness that truly merited the Mackenzie-Haack imprint. It made kicking out André Schiffrin seem small potatoes. It made HarperCollins’s reneging on a hundred contracts hardly worth the postage it took to send the manuscripts back.
So why hadn’t Bobby just done that? Found some flea-bitten clause in Ned Isaly’s contract, or some unacceptable thing in Isaly’s manuscript when it came in that would “forbid” publishing the book.
Well, he’d already said it, hadn’t he? This scheme h
ad the Mackenzie-Haack logo all over it.
So here he stood on Chelsea Pier 61, waiting in a dim, dim light. Ever since Clive had been a small boy he’d been in love with fog. Fog was the gray area between black and white; it was the medium of deceiving and forgetting. You could hide in it; you could walk out of it, mysteriously.
It was in this broody state of mind that Clive (still clutching his collar) saw a black shape bearing down on him like a small ship plowing through the pier mist. He shook himself.
Danny Zito stood there dressed head to toe in total and unforgiving black, looking as if he’d invented the witness protection program single-handed.
“Clive-O,” Danny stuck an affectionate O on the end of names, including (Clive imagined) those of most of the men he’d murdered. He put out a hand to slap into a handshake.
Clive put out his own, almost felt tiny bones shatter in Danny’s sudden grip, like a bat cracking against a ball. “Dan—” Clive caught himself. “Jimmy. Sorry.”
“Hey, forget it. Nobody’s listenin’. Nobody probably ever was.”
Clive frowned. Danny had a way of making these inscrutable pronouncements.
Slowly, Danny chewed his gum. “You bring it?”
In the furtive way a pusher might bring out a Ziploc bag filled with white powder, Clive pulled the contract from his pocket. It had been written up and signed in record time. Usually, it took months, but with no agent involved, minutes sufficed.
Danny shook it open; in the dark it glimmered, a magical thing; a book contract from a reputable New York publisher, the Great White Hope and aphrodisiac of every writers’ workshop, colony, conference, convention. Of course it was worth killing for.
“Only one copy?” Danny quickly thumbed through the eleven or twelve pages.
“We’re sending the others.”
Danny brought out a pen flashlight. (During one frantic second of which movement Clive was afraid he was going to burn the contract, toss it flaming into the Hudson, and pull out a gun.) “Lemme just check it out. Same terms? I’d like a better paperback split, say fifty-five/forty-five?”
Christ, these writers. Clive wanted to hit him. With what restraint he could muster, he said, “I imagine we can manage that.”
It obviously hadn’t occurred to Danny they couldn’t. He was already on to another clause. “Jacket approval, too.” He turned a page, traced it with his light beam.
“Danny, what the hell do you know about jacket art? Come on—”
“Yeah? I know as much as that stogie-smoking dyke you pay no doubt a handsome salary to. Did you see that last jacket?” He turned another page of the document.
“Obviously. I was your editor.”
“My own mother didn’t even want to read it with that jacket. She saw the mock-up, she says—”
“Danny—”
“—says ‘what kinda cover’s this, Danny? Black, white, silver, no picture, no girls? Go beat some sense into them.”
“Danny—”
“Jacket approval.” Danny rolled up the document and took a few friendly swipes at Clive’s chin.
“Could we get to our problem?”
“You mean, can I handle somethin’ personal? I’m in—”
“No, no, not you yourself. Just recommend somebody. Put us in touch with someone. I know you’re supposed to be in”—he’d almost said “hiding,” then thought Danny wouldn’t like that, so he changed it—“visible these days. You’re keeping a very low profile. You might be out of touch—”
“Outta touch? Hell, no. It ain’t safe to be outta touch.”
Clive thought it didn’t look all that safe to be in touch.
“I know some guys might do me a favor. Me a favor: you, you pay, right? Ones I’m thinking of, it might take a few days. They make themselves hard to get ahold of.”
They? “We only need one.”
Danny shook his head. “Ones I’m thinking of work absolutely together. They’re the best, don’t leave no trail, nothing. Only they’re particular. Well, that’s what you want, ain’t it? Wet work may be wet, but it don’t have to leave a puddle. I guess I’m not surprised; I guess it was only a matter of time before they got in.”
Clive frowned. What was he talking about?
Danny took a long drag of his cigarette, flipped it, and watched it arc out over the river. “Hell, if they’re into spas these days, no reason they’re not into publishing. Makes sense, just look at the way publishing’s going. Big conglomerates taking over, big fish sucking up the little fish—”
Clive was still back on spas. Spas?
“—it was only a matter of time. I guess the mob don’t miss nothin’, right?”
“You mean, you think this is a mob thing?”
“Ain’t it?”
“Not exactly. It’s a, ah, publishing thing.”
“Same difference. Meet me back here in a coupla hours. No, let’s say midnight. Back here at midnight.”
“Come on, Danny, can’t you simply give me a call?”
Danny just looked at him. “Better to do it in person. These guys, they don’t like their names bandied about over a cell phone. Back here.”
Clive sighed.
The dinner at Pastis had done something to restore Clive’s flagging spirits, which were quickly dissipating again as he stood on the pier, beating his gloved hands against the cold.
Danny appeared again, fog bound. From somewhere came the deep, hollow growl of a boat.
“Candy and Karl. They’ll meet you and Bobby Mackenzie two o’clock Friday at the RTR. They don’t wanna do lunch, necessarily, but they’ll have coffee, drinks, whatever. Get a banquette in the rear. They said.”
“That’s the Russian Tea Room, Danny. It’s closed.”
Danny’s eyes widened; he stopped chewing his gum. “Get outta here!”
“No, it’s true. It shut down.”
“Jesus. You can’t depend on nothin’ anymore. Okay, Michael’s, then. Only make sure Bobby gets a table near the front. Michael’s is a swell restaurant only I remember me and Jerry Bransoni went in there once—that’s when we were still talking—and they stuck us in the back room. I mean around the corner. As far back as you can get. The whole fucking Giancarlo family could have walked into Michael’s and me and Jerry none the wiser. You’d think, my God, they’d be more careful, that maître d’ and all. The place coulda gone up in smoke.”
“I don’t think Michael’s gets all that many drive-bys, Danny.”
“Yeah, well all the same. Don’t get the idea of meeting in some crumby coffee shop on Lex.”
“There are no crumby coffee shops in New York.”
Danny’s gum traveled from one side of his mouth to the other. “Just remember, these two, they’re the crème de la crème.”
Pronounced, Clive noted, with a long e.
“Make ’em sit around the corner and I can’t answer for what could happen.”
Oh, for God’s sakes. Clive sighed and said, “Look. Bobby won’t get a table back there. He’s too damned important.”
“In the window, maybe?” Danny was recklessly chewing his gum.
In another minute, Clive swore to himself he’d kick this guy into the Hudson and not look back. “Maybe, maybe. But wouldn’t it make more sense to meet somewhere private?”
“Like, you mean, here? Maybe in some dark alley? You see too many gangsta movies.” Danny twitched his shoulders to better settle his black cashmere coat. “You’re afraid they’ll show up wearin’ porkpie hats and yellow shoes?”
“Of course not.” Clive’s laugh was stagy.
“In case you want to know for future reference, they get all their stuff at Armani or Façonnable.” He reached out and plucked a bit of fluff from Clive’s lapel. “As do I.” He pulled on his own lapel. “Armani, this is. He makes good wpp clothes—grays and blacks, deconstructed—hell, you could carry a Uzi.” Danny still had the contract and stuck it in an inside pocket. “I never stopped, you know.”
What? Killing
people? Clive took an involuntary step back.
Danny, though, was looking out across the river. “I got maybe ten chapters going on this”—he patted his pocket—“so it’s not like I’m going at it, you know, cold turkey.”
“Good. Look, I hope coming out here tonight hasn’t, you know, compromised your, uh, safety.” What did these witness protection people do for God’s sakes?
“You kidding? I go out all the time.”
“But isn’t that dangerous? You’ve got a lot of people looking for you, surely. I mean, I would have thought remaining in New York pretty dangerous.”
Danny laughed, shook his head at, it would seem, Clive’s ingenuousness. “People see what they expect to see. Papa B, he expects to see me run like hell. The Bransonis are looking for me all over the map—except in Manhattan. I live here, you know.” There was an inclination of his head toward the streets behind them.
“You live in Chelsea?”
“Hub of the art scene, Chelsea. SoHo’s moved out, moved here. You should see the installation over at White Columns. You know this scene?”
Clive said no. “Look, uh, Danny, about—”
“You gotta see this stuff. There’s one installation of ephemeral art that’d blow you fucking away.”
“Ephemeral? Look—”
“Yeah. Ephemeral art, it’s hot—”
“Danny—”
“—see, it wears itself out, I mean, like some of it disappears like hours after it’s put in. Some of it in just minutes. Like the cut flowers wilt, like ice in the trays of ice cubes melts. Funny nobody ever thought of it before.”
“Somebody did. Frigidaire. I’ll just continue creaking around the Metropolitan and MOMA, thanks. Now, about these two—”
Foul Matter Page 7