“Hey, let him go!” someone in the crowd shouted. “He was next!”
The crowd surged forward, and the frightened face of Victor Hessbaugh suddenly appeared, flattened, against Tepper’s window. The police sergeant was shouting now, and pulling at the man in the T-shirt, who kept saying, “I’ve been here since five-thirty, goddamn it!” For a couple of minutes, it appeared that Victor Hessbaugh’s face was going to be flattened against the Chevy’s window for the foreseeable future, but then a couple of police vans screeched to a halt next to Tepper’s car, and a squad of policemen carrying billy clubs climbed out. Within a few minutes, the crowd was moved away from the car.
“All right, it’s all over here,” a policeman with captain’s bars on his shoulder kept saying. “Let’s move it out. Nothing left to see. Nothing left to see. Let’s go on home now, folks.”
Harris and the others drifted off. Tepper, finding himself alone again, picked up the Post. Then he noticed another figure standing on the sidewalk—a man carrying a couple of shopping bags that bore the logo of the local supermarket. It was Ray Fannon, the columnist. In one bag, Fannon had mostly diet drinks and club soda. In the other bag he had the potato chips and corn nuts and peanuts he put out on the table for the poker game—what the regulars called Fannon’s gourmet treats. Fannon was on his way home. His apartment was just down the street, and it was poker night.
19. Who’s Crazy Now?
BY THE TIME THE REGULARS ARRIVED FOR FANNON’S poker game, the only sign that there had been a disturbance on Seventy-eighth Street was the presence of one television reporter, a late arrival, who, standing in the Diplomatic Plates Only space, was doing a wrap-up that included an interview with an apartment house super who’d seen everything. (“The man was legally parked. No question in my mind.”) Following the longtime custom at Fannon’s game, most of the discussion of what had happened was put off until after the final hand—one hand of a game called Discards Wild, dealt by Bart Adams, who also seemed to be the only person at the table to grasp the rules.
“So, was Yesboss really smashed up against the car when you got there?” Chuck Gold asked Fannon, the moment the game was over. Adams was raking in the chips from the final pot. Most of the other players had folded, some of them because of weak cards and some of them because of a total lack of understanding of what constituted weak cards.
“I’m afraid Yesboss could have lost some bridgework for the cause,” Fannon said. “The odd thing is that even with his face in a shape that could be fairly described, I think, as one-dimensional, he still seemed to be talking. I suppose he was continuing to explain in great detail why this was perfectly legal, the way he explained in great detail why everything was perfectly legal that time when City Hall managed to evict the Head Start program from P.S. 4’s building after the director said ‘Hail, Caesar’ when he was introduced to the mayor. I can’t be certain of that, though. He couldn’t move his lips much, so it was hard to understand exactly what he was saying. It was like listening to a very bad ventriloquist.”
“I can’t believe Il Duce is doing this,” Chuck Gold said. “It’s obvious that there’s tremendous sympathy in the city for this guy Tepper.”
“It’s really screwy,” Steve Lopez said. “People love Tepper for standing up and doing what he wants to do. They seem to see him as a big rebel—someone engaged in principled civil disobedience or something like that. But the whole point is that he’s in a legal spot. He’s not disobedient at all. When it’s all over, he’s got seven minutes left on the goddamn meter.”
“But what can Ducavelli get out of this?” Brian Higgins said. “Going against Tepper is bound to be bad for his numbers—right, Mike? I mean, is there any way this could be good for his numbers?”
“Well, I suppose if Yesboss pokes around enough there’s an outside chance of finding that Tepper has some connection to the Ukrainian delegation to the United Nations,” Shanahan said.
“I’m afraid not,” Steve Lopez said. “I heard that both sides of his family were originally from Lithuania. That delegation happens to have very few unpaid tickets. It may be that they have a paucity of drivable cars.”
“Well, there goes our silver lining,” Shanahan said. “Failing that, there’s no way it could be good for his numbers, and I, as the chief executive officer of the political polling firm that he has had the wisdom to hire, told him that. Our quickie the other night showed that the citizens of every age and race and income level admire Murray Tepper, even if he’s taking up a spot they might be able to use—an expression of mass unselfishness that is, as far as I know, unprecedented in this city.”
“And Carmody is running,” Bart Adams said, looking up from where he was piling his Discards Wild winnings in even stacks to turn in. “My quickie showed the same results, and Carmody’s sure to jump all over this. It’s just his sort of thing: Il Duce bullying a little guy who just wants to be left alone to read the afternoon paper and talk to the folks. I’d bet this pot that Maxie Allen’s already at work on the music for some ditty like ‘When They Hauled Me Away I Had Time on the Meter and You.’”
“So why is Ducavelli doing this?” Higgins said.
“Why does a compulsive person spend a lot of time organizing his bolts and screws and nuts and nails by size when he knows perfectly well there are better ways to spend his time?” Adams said. “Because he can’t help himself. He’s gotten himself so worked up about the forces of disorder that he’s even afraid of somebody who’s overwhelmingly orderly.”
“So it gets back to what I’ve been saying all along,” Higgins said. “People think Carmody’s crazy and Ducavelli’s rational, but it’s the opposite. Carmody would never do anything that’s bad for his numbers.”
“Do you realize what you’re saying?” Gold said. “What you’re saying is that a politician who does anything that is not good for his numbers—that is, in other words, not in his political self-interest—can be considered mentally unbalanced.”
They all nodded soberly. “I’ll go for that,” Fannon said.
20. Aftermath
THREE DAYS LATER, AT THE OFFICES OF WORLDWIDE lists, Murray Tepper pushed aside a large pile of rate cards he’d been perusing and began to reread Ray Fannon’s column in the Daily News. “This week, I saw a large crowd gathered around a man who has no interest in drawing attention to himself,” the column began.
Amidst the strivers and climbers and hustlers who are drawn to this city, Murray Tepper is that New Yorker too rarely encountered by a newspaper columnist—a man who simply wants to be left alone. He’s polite to reporters, but he doesn’t cultivate them. He’s patient with those who want to tell him their stories, but he doesn’t claim any special wisdom. He’s a man who likes to sit in his car—legally parked—and read the newspaper. If he hadn’t been reading a rival newspaper when last I saw him, I’d be tempted to call him a model citizen.
“Am I interrupting, Murray?”
Tepper looked up from his desk. Howard Gordon was standing at the door of the office.
“Of course not, Howard, come in,” Tepper said. “I was just taking a break from going through some of these old rate cards to see if there’s any way we can go further with that connection we found between accountants and designer blue jeans. I wish I understood it better. There is no doubt that if you’re trying to sell men’s designer jeans there is no better list than a list of accountants. We stumbled into that with some discount designer jeans—Arnie found it, really. But what exactly is the connection? The discount had nothing to do with it; they’re just as eager to buy full-price designer jeans. And it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with their interest in numbers. We’ve tested mathematicians, for instance, and people who work in banks. Nothing. Then we thought maybe in some way it had some connection with professions that lounge comics like to make jokes about, so we tried it with dentists. Nothing. Well, not nothing—a slight bump over lists of other professions, but not enough of a bump to be commercially significant. So,
it remains a mystery.”
“My brother-in-law wears designer blue jeans,” Gordon said. “Always with a very pronounced crease.”
“And? I can’t remember—is he an accountant?”
“No, he sells appliances.”
Tepper waited for a moment, to see if something followed that. Nothing did. “Well,” Tepper finally said, “what can I do for you, Howard?”
“I just dropped by to see how you’re holding up, with all this stuff, Murray. Is the summons something to worry about?”
“It doesn’t seem very serious,” Tepper said. “Maybe a hundred-dollar fine, tops, I’m told—although I’m not sure I completely understand it. This lawyer for the city really did try to explain it. I’ll give him that. But with his face pushed up against the window he was hard to make out.”
“We could call Stan Lerner,” Gordon said. “He’s not a criminal lawyer, of course, but maybe he could recommend somebody.”
“Actually, I got a call from someone at the Civil Liberties Union,” Tepper said. “Jeremy Thornton. He said they would like to represent me, but if they did they would take it to court rather than pay the fine. No fee to me for their services. He said they believe that this ordinance the lawyer with his face in the window was talking about is unconstitutional, at least in the way the city employed it. They think it violates the Constitution’s guarantee of the right of free assembly. They’d like to test its constitutionality.”
“That makes it sound pretty important—testing its constitutionality. Of course, it would still be a drag for you—testifying, meeting with them, press conferences, all that sort of thing. More reporters.”
“Oh, it probably wouldn’t be so bad,” Tepper said.
“Are there still a lot of letters coming in?”
“Oh, yes. Letters. E-mails. Phone calls. All that has increased a lot in volume since the business on Seventy-eighth Street Monday night. I’ve got Arnie testing out the list we’re making of the names. You know I hate to leave any list untested. Actually, I told him to go ahead and get a Taunton test done. You never know.”
Gordon nodded, and said, “Sure. Fine. I saw Barney Mittgin on one of the news shows, by the way. He seemed in good spirits.”
“Barney’s pretty happy,” Tepper said. “Every time he gets interviewed for television or one of the papers he tells the story about how I thought of testing the computer-repair magazine list for his pillow and how brilliant that was. Actually, the test drew a one-point-one response, which wasn’t enough to justify using the list, but I gave up trying to tell Barney that after the eighth or ninth time. Anyway, he’s mentioned the map-pillow in that story so much that some people apparently started to look for it in the few catalogs he got it in, and he’s finally moving some of them. Also, his cousin in Detroit saw him on television and now thinks he’s a big shot, and that’s worth a lot more than pillow sales to Barney. For the first time since we’ve been in business, I think you could call him a satisfied customer.”
“Murray,” Gordon said, “where’s this all going—this parking? I mean, what’s going to happen?”
Tepper looked at his partner. Was he just imagining it, or did Howard look sadder than ever? “Well, I’m not sure, Howard,” Tepper said. “Maybe—”
Tepper was interrupted by the buzzer on his desk, and the voice of Hilda, the receptionist. “Murray, you said to remind you at four that you absolutely had to leave for an appointment with a Mr. Lambert.”
Tepper thanked her, and stood up. Gordon took a step or two toward the door. “I’m sorry, Howard,” Tepper said. “We’ll have to talk about that Monday. I’ve got this appointment.”
“Sure, of course,” Gordon said, as they neared the door of Worldwide Lists. “This is Sy Lambert, the big agent, if I may ask?”
Tepper nodded. “We arranged to meet at his office, on Fifty-seventh Street,” he said.
“Murray, I hope you don’t mind my asking—you’re not planning to drive there, are you?”
Tepper stopped at the door. “Howard,” he said. “Please. It’s four o’clock in the afternoon, on a weekday. I’m supposed to go up to the West Side, get my car, and drive it down to Fifty-seventh Street, to a block that’s going to be No Parking Nine to Seven at best? Now that would be eccentric. Maybe not a misdemeanor, but certainly eccentric.”
Howard Gordon nodded. “Good,” he said, as if welcoming the news of a very small victory. “Fine, Murray. We’ll talk about it later.”
When Tepper emerged from the building, he started to walk toward the subway. He was still a bit ahead of rush hour. Because of the warm weather, the air-conditioning inside the trains had been turned on, but the weather hadn’t been warm enough to build up the heat in the stations; there was still a month or so to go before the system had created what Tepper always thought of as the New York version of the Swedish sauna, offering, instead of an abrupt change from a hot tub to freezing snow, an abrupt change from furnace-like stations to freezing trains and back again.
Suddenly, a bike messenger jumped the curb in the space next to a fire hydrant, rode up on the sidewalk, and screeched to a halt in front of Tepper. The messenger appeared to be young, but it was difficult to tell, since part of his costume consisted of a sort of burnoose wrapped partly around his face. The burnoose was black and so were his shirt and trousers. He carried a huge black leather pack on his back. “You’re my man, Murray,” the messenger said, extending to Tepper a greasy black glove. “Stick to your guns. You just keep on parking, man!”
“Thanks very much,” Tepper said, shaking the messenger’s hand.
“Let me tell you what that freaky mayor wants to do to bike messengers.”
“Well, actually, I have an appointment—”
The messenger began a detailed, surprisingly scholarly account of a proposal Mayor Ducavelli had made for bringing order to bicycle traffic in the streets—a proposal that, as the messenger told the story, would destroy the bike-messenger industry and, for all practical purposes, end communication among businesses in Manhattan. Finally, Tepper was able to break away, but he decided it was too late to take the subway. Spotting an empty taxi moving in his direction, he stepped out in the street and raised his hand to hail it. Just as the taxi stopped, Tepper felt a hand on his arm. He turned, expecting to encounter someone with a specious claim about having been waiting there ahead of him. Instead, he found himself facing a policeman.
“You’re breaking the ordinance against hailing a taxi out in the street,” the policeman said, drawing out a summons book. “You got any identification?”
As he pulled out his wallet, Tepper could hear shouting from the sidewalk. It was the bike messenger. He was pulling out his cell phone as he talked. “They can’t get away with this, Murray,” he said. “I’m calling Channel Five News Tips. Stick to your guns, Murray!”
21. Important People
SY LAMBERT’S OFFICE WAS IN A SLICK NEW BUILDING that had several huge trees growing in an otherwise spare lobby, as if they’d wandered over from Central Park by mistake. The suite of offices marked SY LAMBERT, AUTHOR’S REPRESENTATIVE seemed to be mainly dark wood and framed photographs. The photographs were all portraits, blown up to five or six times the size of portraits usually found on office walls. Some were of people Tepper thought of as authors, but most of them were of assorted celebrities—actors, anchormen, the showier real estate developers, even one bullfighter. All of the portraits were inscribed to Sy Lambert, but not with just a line or two of script. They all had at least a full paragraph. The texts read less like inscriptions on photographs than like honorary degree citations, or maybe even eulogies. The portrait of a man who owned a couple of sports teams—a man Tepper had often read about on the sports pages as notorious for meddling with his managers and firing people capriciously—began, “To Sy Lambert. Sy Lambert is more than simply the finest author’s representative in the United States—or, really, in the world. He is a person of great vision, of incredible integrity. In any company, Sy Lamb
ert would be, to put it mildly . . .” Tepper read on for another few sentences before the receptionist said, “Mr. Tepper, Mr. Lambert can see you now. Let me take you back.”
They walked through a hall lined with the same sorts of huge portraits that were in the reception area. Tepper was ushered into a vast office. Here the inscribed portraits seemed even larger, but they didn’t take up all the wall space. There were also paintings, and Tepper, before he thought about it, stopped for a moment to take a closer look at one that seemed familiar, maybe from the scheme to sell reproductions through the mail. It was a picture of a table that looked almost, but not quite, real. The colors were arresting.
“Hockney!” said a booming voice from across the room.
Tepper looked behind him. “Hockney,” Sy Lambert repeated, stepping out from behind a huge desk that, if Tepper wasn’t mistaken, rested on a small platform. “The picture is by David Hockney. You’ll never guess what I paid for it.”
Tepper shrugged and shook his head, trying to indicate that he would have no idea of what such a painting would cost.
“Go ahead—guess. You’ll never guess. So guess!”
Tepper shook his head again. He didn’t know whether Lambert was boasting that he paid a lot for the painting—that he was rich and could afford to pay a lot—or that he had paid very little for it, having been shrewd enough to buy it before David Hockney’s prices went up. He also didn’t know which of those any figure would signify.
“Klee!” Lambert boomed, pointing to a painting on the opposite wall. “I paid a bloody fortune for that one, but I had to have it. It spoke to me.” From that remark, Tepper decided that Lambert had paid an impressively high price rather than an impressively low price for the Hockney.
Lambert stood silently for a few moments in front of the Klee. He was a large man with a large head, large features, and large glasses. He was heavy, but not in the bulging sausage-casing way that Barney Mittgin was heavy. Lambert seemed to be someone who’d added another chest and stomach right on top of his original chest and stomach. He had, in effect, a second front. He was in his shirtsleeves—one of those shirts that was blue except for its collar, which was exceedingly white. He was wearing large gold cuff links. He was also wearing a dark blue tie that swelled out over his second front.
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