The Bookmakers

by Zev Chafets

  Copyright © 1995 by Zev Chafets

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Jobete Music Co., Inc. for permission to reprint two lines from “The Way You Do the Things You Do” by William Robinson, Jr., and Robert Rogers. Copyright © 1964 by Jobete Music Co., Inc. Reprinted by permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Chafets, Ze’ev.

  The bookmakers / Zev Chafets.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79973-9:

  1. Authors and publishers—New York (N.Y.)—Fiction.

  2. Novelists, American—New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 3. Murder—New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.H225B66 1995

  813′.54—dc20 94-32159

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  One

  At 3:15 on the morning of his forty-fifth birthday, near the corner of West Seventy-sixth and Columbus, Mack Green received a gift from a stranger. The gift—unexpected and startling—came wrapped in a revelation: that he was a man capable of seriously contemplating his own suicide. And although it was something that had never occurred to him before, he instantly recognized it as the idea that would save his life.

  Mack was on the street at that hour because he dreaded the prospect of discussing the future of the American novel—especially his own American novels—in bed, buck naked, before breakfast, with a woman whose name he didn’t know. Brenda or Glenda—she had only said it once, and her Indiana accent made it hard to catch—claimed to be a literary critic from Indianapolis. This wasn’t entirely improbable; the Flying Tiger Polo Lounge, described in an outdated guidebook as “New York’s hottest literary hangout,” where Mack had been celebrating his birthday with double bourbons, attracted a disproportionate number of literary ladies from the Big Ten states. Over the years, Mack, whose resistance to sexual temptation was close to zero, had succumbed with amiable ease to the charms of countless Brendas and Glendas looking for a one-night stand with a once-famous author.

  In bed, half drunk, the bookish groupies of middle America comported themselves like high-priced, low-minded hookers. But in the morning, with sleep-putty still clogging the corners of their eyes and tequila on their breath, they underwent a frightening transformation into serious-minded free-verse poets or assistant professors of creative writing. What was Updike really like? How does one find a really fine New York publisher? And, inevitably, why had so much time passed since Mack’s last novel?

  Mornings, he had learned, were best spent alone, asleep on the perennially unmade mattress in his West Side studio apartment. And so Mack, who tried hard never to hurt people’s feelings, waited until the literary ladies snored off before slipping out of bed, scribbling an affectionate note and fleeing into the night.

  Most times he took a taxi home, but tonight he decided to walk. A few days earlier he had been given a harsh lecture by Dottie Coleman, who, combining the internist’s natural alarmism with the brutal frankness of an ex-lover, had warned him that his cholesterol and liver enzymes looked like “a Molotov cocktail in a test tube,” that he had every risk factor for most of the diseases common in the industrialized world and that his lifestyle was twenty years too young for his body. She had used hard words—“alcoholic,” “lung cancer” and “drop dead at any minute” were the ones that lingered in his mind—and while he detected a certain fond malice in her attitude (ending their affair had been his idea), the dire picture she painted was not entirely unfamiliar. Mack was too allied with his bad habits to abandon them, but he was willing to moderate their evil effect by sporadic acts of medical virtue, such as a salubrious postcoital hike.

  And so he had walked from the Waldorf, arriving at the corner of Columbus and Seventy-sixth in a sweaty, self-congratulatory state. He was thinking about calling Dottie later to let her know he was taking her warning seriously when he heard a thick, furry voice from a doorway next to his brownstone.

  “ ’Scuse me, mister, you got the time?”

  Mack turned and saw a thin young black man in a crummy-looking imitation-leather jacket. In the dim light of the doorway he could see dulled, yellowish eyes peering at him. Though the kid looked no more than sixteen, Mack immediately understood that he was about to get robbed.

  “I said, do you have the time?” repeated the boy, who suddenly darted in front of Mack, blocking his way.

  “I heard you,” said Mack.

  “You too good to talk to niggers?”

  “Naw, I talk to niggers all day long,” said Mack. The smart-ass answer startled him. After twenty-five years in New York, he knew better.

  “Gimme your watch, you nigger-talking motherfucker. And your wallet.” The kid was trying to sound threatening, but his voice wobbled nervously. When Mack didn’t move, he reached inside his jacket, pulled out a Smith & Wesson .32 revolver and pointed it at him. “Right now, man. I ain’t playin’.”

  Mack noticed that the kid’s arm was trembling. He saw it with a kind of intense but distant interest, as if the hand holding the pistol belonged to one of his fictional characters. Suddenly he felt the once-familiar hunger to mold and craft a great scene. The feeling gave him a sense of fearless control.

  “Beat it, Junior,” he said, watching the kid’s eyes widen in disbelief.

  “Man, you must be crazy,” said the mugger, waving the gun. “You give it up right now or I’ll shoot your motherfucking ass for real.”

  “Go ahead,” said Mack. “Let’s see you do it.”

  “Man, give me the wallet,” the kid said, his voice rising. “Give me that motherfucker, man—”

  “Hey, don’t shout,” said Mack. He was surprised to see that the kid instinctively lowered his voice. He took a sudden step forward, not knowing exactly what he was planning to do. The kid retreated, stumbling slightly. While he was off-balance, Mack lunged and grabbed him by the forearm. Even through the jacket sleeve the arm felt thin and weak. Mack shook it hard, and when the Smith & Wesson clattered to the pavement he put his foot on it and pushed the kid back against the building. Then he bent down and scooped up the gun. The whole thing took less than ten seconds.

  “Man, you’re the worst fucking thief I ever met,” said Mack, breathing hard from the exertion. “This your first time or what?”

  “Don’t hurt me, man, I’m sick.”

  “Sorry to hear it,” said Mack. “You should take better care of yourself. I know an internist I could recommend if you don’t
mind a woman doctor.”

  The kid looked at him through scared yellow eyes and said nothing.

  “I have this theory,” Mack continued in an easy, conversational tone he barely recognized as his own. “People get the mugger they deserve. You think I deserve you?”

  “Man, what you gonna do?”

  “I’m talking to you, son. We’re having a late-night chat. Answer my question—you think I deserve you?”

  “You a cop?”

  Mack laughed and shook his head. “I’m a writer. I can talk like a cop, though. I make up dialogue. You know what dialogue is? Like in the movies, when people talk to each other? What I’m doing now is bantering with you, cop style.” Green was aware that he was babbling, but he didn’t care. It was three in the morning, he was flying on adrenaline and he had already begun to grasp the significance of this encounter.

  “Let me tell you something else,” he continued. “People get the mugger they deserve? Well, muggers get the muggees they deserve. You got me and I’m the wrong one. Know why?”

  The kid shrugged. Green could see that he was no longer frightened. In fact, he looked a little impatient.

  “Because I wasn’t afraid to die just now. Usually I am, just like everybody else, so don’t blame yourself. You just happened to catch me on a bad night.”

  The kid shifted his feet and looked at Mack. His nose was running and he wiped it with his sleeve. Suddenly Green felt very tired. “Okay, Dillinger, split,” he said. “I want to go home and get some sleep.”

  “What about my gun?”

  “I’m keeping the gun,” said Mack. “It’s a souvenir. In the morning it will remind me of you.”

  “Oh, man, I need that gun. I ain’t gonna do you nothin’,” moaned the kid with soft, hopeless urgency.

  “Nosiree, bob, this here six-shooter stays with me,” said Mack. “That’s cowboy dialogue I’m doing now. Recognize it? You go to the movies ever?”

  “Shit,” said the mugger.

  “I used to go every Saturday, in Oriole. That’s where I’m from, Oriole, Michigan. Name’s Mack Green but they call me the Oriole Kid and I’m confiscating your shooting iron, pardner. Now run your ass back uptown before I make you dance. And tell them up there that the Oriole Kid is back in town.”

  The young man gave Green a long look, appraising his chances of grabbing the pistol. Then his shoulders slumped and he started trudging up Columbus. Green watched him for a moment as he absently emptied the bullets from the revolver and tucked it into his waistband. After years of inexplicable bad luck and frustration, Mack knew that he had been given the gift he had been waiting for: the return of his creative imagination.

  “Hey, kid,” he called out. The boy stopped and turned, facing Mack.

  “Yeah? What?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Shit,” said the boy defiantly.

  “Good name,” said Mack. “It fits you. When the new bestseller by Mack Green comes out, be sure and steal a copy. It’ll be dedicated to you.”

  Two

  When the phone on Tommy Russo’s nightstand rang he awoke instantly, a reflex from his days at the seminary. He checked his Rolex, saw it was just past nine—too early for a call from the Coast on the movie deal—and let the machine answer. “You have reached the residence of Tomas Russo,” said the refined telephone voice, which belonged to one of his actor clients. “Please leave a message and I’ll return your call as soon as possible.”

  “Tommy, pick up the phone. It’s me, Mack.”

  Russo leaned over and pressed the speaker button. “Yo, Mack, what’s the deal?” he said in his Brooklyn honk.

  “We’ve got to talk,” said Mack excitedly. “What time are you going into the office?”

  “I’m not,” said Russo. “I’m working at home for a few days.”

  “You sick or something?”

  “Naw, just trying to avoid the rat race.” He didn’t mention that the rat was Herman Reggie, to whom he owed eighteen thousand dollars.

  “I can’t wait a few days,” said Mack. “This is a big thing. Meet me for lunch.” The invitation was at once friendly and imperious—the tone Mack had used with Tommy Russo from the beginning.

  “What kind of big thing?” Tommy asked cautiously.

  “A book idea, the one I’ve been waiting for. It came to me last night.”

  “A book idea,” Tommy repeated in an expressionless tone. In the old days, when Mack was a hot writer, Russo had made a lot of money on his book ideas; nowadays they just cost him drinks and lunch—and with Mack, that could be an expensive proposition. Still, he owed Mack, and Tommy Russo had been raised to respect his obligations. “I’ll meet you at one,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “How about the Tiger? I haven’t been there in a while.”

  “I thought you hated the place.”

  “I’m in a nostalgic mood,” said Tommy. The Flying Tiger would be perfect, he thought; Reggie would never think of looking for him in a dive like that. Besides, it wouldn’t cost a fortune.

  “Okay,” said Mack. “The Tiger at one. And Tommy? This time I’ve really got something.”

  Russo climbed from between his satin sheets and padded into the bathroom to shower. Twenty minutes later, shaved and powdered, he returned to the bedroom and stood in front of his open closet, trying to decide what to wear. In the years since Tommy Russo had left the priesthood, he had never lost his pleasure in the simple act of dressing himself as he pleased. He had Mack to thank—or blame—for that.

  The Flying Tiger was nearly deserted when Mack walked in just past eleven. As usual, Otto was behind the bar polishing beer glasses and breaking rolls of quarters into the old-fashioned cash register. The jukebox played Ray Charles’s “The Night Time is the Right Time.” Mack loved oldies, especially fifties R&B and the Tiger had a great selection, thanks to Otto, who shared Mack’s taste in music. What he thought of as their friendship had begun one night, years ago, when he overheard the bartender remark to someone that rock and roll died the day the Beatles stepped off the plane in New York.

  The Tiger had a shifting clientele. The daytime customers were mostly construction workers drinking their lunches and reporters lubricating their gossip with Irish whiskey. Next came the businessmen, slurping up happy-hour courage for the miserable commute home. And then, around ten, the young writers began to arrive. Otto, a creased, rumpled man in his late fifties, ministered to them all, dispensing big drinks, greasy food and bland patter with a detatched impartiality that bespoke a fine Catholic understanding of human frailty.

  When Mack first started coming to the Tiger it was as a member of the daytime journalist crowd. He was fresh from Ann Arbor, where he had been sports editor of the Michigan Daily, a credential that got him a reporter’s job at the New York Post. One day, sitting at the bar, he fell into conversation with a tattooed guy about his own age who claimed to be a Vietnam veteran. “I killed me fifty-seven gooks over there,” said the man. “If I was a pilot, that’d make me an ace, like Jimmy Doolittle and them.”

  Mack looked down the bar, noticed a bottle of Heinz 57 Varieties near the man’s plate and instantly recognized it as the source of the body count. “What’re you going to do now that you’re back in civilian life?” he asked.

  “I’m going to re-up, go back and get me an even hundred,” said the guy. “I promised my girl. Then I figure I might run for public office in my native Wisconsin.”

  “Otto,” Mack called to the bartender, “put this man’s lunch on my tab. He’s a great American.”

  That night Mack went home, sat down at his Smith-Corona portable and began to write the story of Ace Fletcher, a good-natured, dim-witted farm boy who tries to impress a girl by joining the army and killing a hundred Vietcong. Eighty thousand words later he had a novel, which he called Bragging Rights.

  The book came out in 1972, and it was greeted enthusiastically by critics who saw it, in the words of The New York Times, as “a bitingly fun
ny satirical send-up of the war. Vietnam may have found its Joseph Heller.” The book didn’t quite reach the bestseller list, but on the strength of reviews like this it became a minor campus classic and made its author a celebrity spokesman for his generation.

  Mack was bemused by his status as an antiwar culture hero. As the only son of a widowed mother he had a draft deferment, and he hadn’t really given Vietnam much thought. He saw Bragging Rights as a story about a weird guy, nothing more. But if America wanted to consider Mack Green an idealist, and rich and famous, he had no objection.

  With his royalty money, Mack quit the Post and became a full-time novelist. During the days he worked on a new book, The Oriole Kid, about a sportswriter from a small Michigan town who talks the Yankees into giving him a tryout and actually makes the team. At night he enjoyed his newfound celebrity as a welcome guest at boozy, druggy parties; in countless beds; and at the Young Authors’ table at the Flying Tiger. In those days he would often catch the stares of the tourists and bask in their envy, a successful young man in a glamorous profession, like a private eye or an international diamond thief.

  But Mack was no longer young and nowadays he did his drinking at the bar with Otto. Sometimes, when it was quiet, they watched a few innings of a ball game together, or shot the breeze about movies. They never discussed Mack’s books because, as far as Mack knew, Otto never read books. He had been serving liquor to writers long enough to surmise that he wasn’t likely to be entertained or enlightened by their printed thoughts.

  Otto Kelly had owned the Tiger as long as Mack had been going there, and he remembered the days when Mack sat with the writers. He recalled him, a good-looking, sandy-haired kid, always with a girl, singing snatches of R&B hits along with the jukebox and dancing in the narrow aisle between the tables. Mack was still good-looking—Otto thought he resembled that actor, Jeff Bridges—but he was starting to thicken around the waist and to take on the deceptively outdoor rosiness of the habitual indoor drinker.

  Still, Otto was nobody’s judge. That morning he greeted Mack the same way he had for twenty years, with a smile and a wink and a friendly, “Hiya, kid, what’ll it be?”