The Bookmakers

by Zev Chafets

  “Other authors get more?”

  Wolfowitz shrugged. “Some do.”

  “I knew I was getting fleeced,” said Mack, although he seemed more amused than upset. “Hey, grab your drink and join us. I want you to explain this shit to me.”

  Wolfowitz followed Mack to his table, where he was introduced to half a dozen people whose names he didn’t catch. “Artie’s the vice president of the New York City branch of the Nolan Strong fan club,” Green told them. “He also works at Gothic. Be nice to him and he’ll tell you how publishing really operates.”

  Artie Wolfowitz never learned why Mack had singled him out that evening, and for a long time he suspected some ulterior motive. Eventually, though, he accepted the friendship and his role in it as Mack’s sidekick. It was a role Artie didn’t mind a bit, especially since Mack was a generous and charming patron. He called Artie “Stealth” in tribute to his supposed business acumen, brought him into the inner circle at the Tiger and included him in his restless midnight pub crawls and pick-up expeditions. Together they careened through the city meeting beautiful women, drinking with celebrities and eccentrics, crashing parties where they were always welcomed, Mack constantly running and laughing and emanating an aura of joyful exuberance, Wolfowitz trailing happily in his wake.

  His friendship with Mack had a galvanizing effect not only on Artie Wolfowitz’s social life, but on his career. The young snobs at Gothic began treating him with respect. Even Douglas Floutie, who had recently acquired a controlling interest in the firm, took notice. One day he stopped the heretofore invisible young accountant in the hall and asked him to tell Mack how much he admired his work. “Let him know that Gothic is the kind of house that appreciates fine writing,” he said.

  Wolfowitz debated a long time about delivering the message—he was afraid Mack might think he was exploiting their friendship—but in the end it was Green himself who brought up the subject.

  “I’m just about done with The Oriole Kid,” he told Wolfowitz one night at the Tiger. “You think Gothic might be interested?”

  “What’s the matter with the publisher you’ve got?”

  “Not aggressive enough,” said Mack. “Besides, the editor I want is at Gothic.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “You,” said Mack.

  Wolfowitz burst out laughing. “Me? What the hell do I know about editing? I haven’t read ten books since high school.”

  “I don’t need Max Perkins,” said Mack. Wolfowitz nodded, although he had no idea who Max Perkins was. “Giving me a literary editor is like giving Willie Mays a batting coach, it’d just mess up my style. I can write the books without any help. What I need is somebody who can sell ’em.”

  “What makes you think I could do that? I don’t know anything about marketing or publicity. I’m a bookkeeper.”

  “So become a bookmaker. Look, the editor I’ve got now at Marathon takes me to lunch and talks about the goddamn French existentialists. He told me that great books sell themselves. You think great books sell themselves?”

  Wolfowitz shook his head.

  “Fuckin’ A,” said Mack. “We’re a couple of smalltown boys, Stealth. You know about money and you’ll pick up the rest as you go along. The main thing is, I trust you. I know you’ll fight for me.”

  “Even if I wanted to, they’d never go along at Gothic,” said Wolfowitz.

  “They’ll go along,” Mack assured him. “Set me up an appointment with Floutie and you’ll see.”

  Much to Wolfowitz’s amazement, Mack was right; Floutie, after reading part of his new manuscript, agreed to the arrangement. He invited his newest editor and his newest author into his wood-paneled office, poured them each a stingy portion of sherry and raised his glass. “My dear Green, my dear Wolfowitz,” he said in his acquired British accent, “let us toast a long and artistically profitable relationship.”

  “Floutie’s a real fruit fly,” Mack remarked that evening at the Flying Tiger. “What’d he do, inherit the company?”

  “Close,” said Wolfowitz. “His wife’s father is Harlan Fassbinder.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “You’ve never heard of the Prince of Poultry? He’s the biggest chicken grower in the country.”

  “And he bought Gothic for Floutie? He must love his ass,” said Mack.

  “I think he just wants to keep him out of the poultry business,” said Wolfowitz. “Floutie’s an ex-prof from Princeton. He knows about money like I do about Shakespeare. The old man probably figured that he couldn’t lose too much publishing books.”

  “As long as we don’t lose, that’s all I care about,” said Mack with an intensity that surprised Wolfowitz; it was part of Mack Green’s style never to seem too serious about anything, especially his own career. But there was no mistaking his seriousness now, or his determination. “I’m counting on you to make The Oriole Kid a bestseller.”

  Wolfowitz remained silent and after a moment Mack grinned. “You missed your line. You were supposed to say, ‘I’ll do my best.’ ”

  “Not my best,” said Wolfowitz grimly. “Whatever it takes.”

  Five

  Wolfowitz kept his promise. He worked twenty-hour days, browbeating the Gothic sales force into pushing The Oriole Kid, cajoling bookstores and the chains into increasing their orders, fighting his former colleagues for promotional dollars and constantly screaming at the hapless people in the Gothic PR department to get Mack Green more ink, more TV guest shots, more attention.

  Inexperience liberated Wolfowitz from the genteel conventions of the publishing business. Books to him were not literature, not art, not even entertainment—they were gym shoes, breakfast cereal, a commodity in a wrapper to be hawked and hyped. As he worked frenzied days and nights on behalf of The Oriole Kid, he found he had an instinct for seeing—or creating—marketing and promotional schemes and gimmicks that older, more traditional editors never would have imagined. His personal favorite was talking the PR guy of the New York Yankees into letting Mack, the Oriole Kid himself, pitch in an exhibition game and then buying enough drinks and dinners for sportswriters to turn it into a national media event and a segment on Wide World of Sports.

  The day after Mack’s baseball debut—which consisted of two walks, a wild pitch and a hilarious pick-off move to first that landed in the stands—Wolfowitz got a call from Harlan Fassbinder. “I hear you’re the genius got some book writer of mine on TV last night,” he said without preliminaries.

  “It was my idea, yessir,” said Wolfowitz.

  “Floutie don’t think it’s dignified,” Fassbinder said.

  “He’s probably right, but it’s going to sell a lot of books,” Wolfowitz replied.

  “That’s what you think is important, is it?” snapped Fassbinder in a challenging tone.

  “Yessir, I do,” said Wolfowitz, trying to keep his voice steady.

  “Well, goddamnit Wolfowitz, so do I,” squawked the King of Poultry. “It’s about time I got myself a real rooster up there at Gothic. I’m keeping my eye on you.” The phone went dead and Artie Wolfowitz sat at his desk with the receiver in his hand, feeling the thrill of the old man’s approval. No one had ever called him a rooster before.

  Unlike his father-in-law, Douglas Floutie was unhappy with the flurry of unconventional publicity surrounding The Oriole Kid. “Gimmicks, as you call them, are all well and good,” he told Wolfowitz, “but you’ll discover that serious reviews ultimately make a book and a writer’s career. Mack Green is a considerable literary talent and with time he may develop into a truly important artist. I don’t want him presented to the public as a buffoon.”

  Wolfowitz fought back an urge to tell Floutie about his conversation with old man Fassbinder. There was no point in making an enemy, and besides, he realized that Floutie had a point. The reviews would still be critical to the book’s success.

  “How do you fix a review in the Times?” he asked Leon Goldman, one of Gothic’s senior editors, over lunch at Antonelli
’s.

  Goldman stared at him for a long moment through filmy gray eyes and said, “Pardon me?”

  “How do you make sure a book gets reviewed the right way over there?”

  “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” said Goldman stiffly.

  “In that case, I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear myself invite you to lunch,” said Wolfowitz. “Pick up the tab yourself.” He hurried back to his office and called Fred Banner, an occasional drinking buddy who worked in the Times accounting department. “Who do you know at the Book Review?” he asked.

  “You gotta be kidding,” said Banner. “How would I know any of those Ivy League turds?”

  “I’m talking about one of us, a secretary, a typist, somebody who would appreciate five hundred dollars.”

  “For doing what?”

  “For telling me who’s been assigned to review Mack Green’s novel. It’s called The Oriole Kid, and it’ll be out in a few weeks.”

  “That’s industrial espionage,” said Banner.

  “Seven fifty,” said Wolfowitz.

  “You’ll be hearing from me,” Banner said.

  The Oriole Kid had been assigned for review to a novelist of good reputation and modest commercial success named Walter T. Horton. Horton was originally from Mississippi, but he now lived in Manhattan, in a dicey neighborhood not far from Columbia. Wolfowitz arranged to meet him in a bar called the Urban Pioneer not far from the campus.

  “I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long time,” Wolfowitz said. “I’m a fan of yours.”

  “That puts you in a small but distinguished company, sir,” said the author in a stagy, effeminate southern drawl that didn’t conceal his delight.

  “Not so small,” said Wolfowitz. “There’s a lot of people who admire your books. There ought to be a lot more. Are you working on something now?”

  “As a matter of fact I am,” said Horton.

  “I imagine you’ve already got a publisher.”

  “Several houses are interested,” said Horton. “I really can’t say more than that.”

  “Well, I’d like you to consider coming over to Gothic,” said Wolfowitz. “I don’t know what your last advance was”—he paused and scratched his head in a gesture meant to convey his embarrassment at talking to an artist about money—“and I’m not crass enough to ask, but let’s say, for the sake of argument, it was in the fifty-thousand ballpark.” He raised his eyebrows to show that he considered this a shrewd guess and Horton smiled coyly. Actually Wolfowitz was certain that Horton had never gotten half that much. “If the book you’re working on now is as good as the last ones, I might be able to do better than that.”

  “I’d be happy to show you the manuscript,” said Horton. “Truly I would.”

  “Would you mind if I gave it to someone else, for an opinion?”

  “Well …”

  “You probably know him. Mack Green?”

  A cloud of doubt and suspicion passed over Walter T. Horton’s face. “I’ve seen him at the Flying Tiger from time to time but I don’t really know him.”

  “Mack’s the one who put me on to you in the first place,” said Wolfowitz. “He thinks you’re the most unappreciated writer of your generation.”

  “Is that a fact?” said Horton, torn between ethics and ego, suspicion and greed.

  “Truth is, I’m not really much of a literary expert,” said Wolfowitz. “My thing is selling books and making money. I wouldn’t even be an editor if it wasn’t for Mack.”

  Walter T. Horton searched Artie Wolfowitz’s earnest, innocent face and allowed himself to believe that the editor’s sudden interest in him was a coincidence. “I guess it would be all right,” he said slowly, “but I wouldn’t want anyone to know.”

  “Mum’s the word,” said Wolfowitz, pressing his index finger to his lips.

  The day The Oriole Kid came out, five hundred hired street peddlers dressed in Yankee uniforms passed out autographed pictures of the author in front of bookstores around the country. That night Green appeared on the Tonight Show with Mickey Mantle, who called him “a major-league scribbler.” Floutie was almost incoherent with anger and embarrassment—until he read Walter T. Morton’s full-page review in the Times on Sunday, which included these lines: “It’s probably too early to compare Mack Green with Mark Twain, but in his remarkable new novel, Green has given us a fictional hero, the Oriole Kid, who is a contemporary cousin to Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer …”

  The Oriole Kid hit the bestseller list in its first week, rose to number one and stayed there for four months. The day Mack’s picture appeared on the cover of Time, Douglas Floutie promoted Wolfowitz to senior editor and Harlan Fassbinder sent Mack and Artie each a crate of frozen chickens. To Wolfowitz’s he appended a handwritten note: “Goddamn,” it said, “I knew you were a rooster.”

  A few weeks after the Time cover, an article on Artie “Wolfwitz” was published in The Wall Street Journal. It hailed him as “a new-breed editor who knows how to read a balance sheet as well as a manuscript.” It was the first time that Wolfowitz had ever seen his name in the newspaper and even the fact that it had been misspelled didn’t detract from his pleasure.

  That night Mack arrived at the Tiger with a woman named Louise Frank. “I thought you two ought to get to know each other,” he said. “Louise is a writer, too.”

  Wolfowitz tried to smile, but he felt as though his face was frozen. Louise Frank was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. He stared at her and Mack, trying to figure out their relationship. With Mack it was never clear. He flirted with every good-looking woman he met, slept with most and refused to take any of them seriously. He would go to great lengths to charm and seduce a woman, but he was completely unpossessive about his conquests. “There’s plenty to go around,” he often told Artie. “If you see someone you want, just help yourself.”

  It was an offer that Wolfowitz had never accepted. He had a straitlaced, secretly romantic attitude toward sex and found the idea of swapping women like sweaters distasteful. Besides, he was sure that the kind of women attracted to Mack wouldn’t be interested in him. Artie had accepted this as a fact, without envy or resentment. Until Louise.

  “I think Stealth’s in love,” said Mack, looking at the stunned expression on his friend’s face. Wolfowitz blushed deeply but said nothing; he didn’t trust his voice.

  “Well, that was quick.” Louise laughed. “I can’t wait to see what happens next.”

  From that night on, Artie Wolfowitz divided his energies and wiles between promoting Mack and pursuing Louise Frank. He tolerated her capricious independence and her infidelities, sent her exotic flowers and expensive jewelry, praised her writing and humbly obeyed her commands (a new wardrobe, a different haircut, replacing Artie with Arthur). He also bought a still-unfinished book of her short stories for fifteen thousand dollars. Luckily for Wolfowitz, Floutie was impressed with her Radcliffe prose and authorized the deal, but even if he hadn’t, Wolfowitz was prepared to pay the advance out of his own savings.

  On her twenty-fifth birthday, they went to dinner at the Rainbow Room. After three cocktails, Wolfowitz reached into his pocket and with a trembling hand produced her birthday gift—a diamond engagement ring.

  “If I take this, it means I have to marry you, doesn’t it?” she said lightly.

  “Don’t tease me,” he said. “I can’t take it anymore.”

  “All right then,” she said, “here are my terms. I want a kid right away and a nanny to take care of him so I can go on writing. And I don’t want you to have any fantasies about the little woman waiting for you to come home at night. That’s not me. If I marry you, I intend to have an independent career and an independent personal life. Understood?”

  Wolfowitz nodded, so overwhelmed with emotion that he couldn’t speak; so overwhelmed, in fact, that for the first time in his life he failed to grasp exactly what he was being told.

  A less love-struck, less cynical man would have wondered why a w
oman as beautiful and desirable as Louise Frank would agree to marry him. Wolfowitz attributed it to his growing professional importance, his persistence and Louise’s recent, almost obsessive desire for a child.

  In this he was partly correct; Louise Frank was almost two months pregnant when she accepted his proposal. Of the possible fathers—a movie critic married to her cousin, a South American novelist named, she was pretty sure, Ramone, her tennis coach, her tennis coach’s friend, who had been visiting from Denver, and Artie—Wolfowitz was the only one who would conceivably marry her.

  The ceremony was held at City Hall, with Mack acting as best man. Afterward they repaired to the Tiger for a raucous celebration hosted by Otto. Wolfowitz, drunk on champagne, played “Mind Over Matter” on the jukebox, draped his arm over Mack’s shoulder and pulled him close. “I love you, I just want you to know that,” he slurred. “I love Louise and I love you. You’re my family.” He leaned over and kissed Mack wetly on the cheek.

  “Yeah, right.” Mack grinned, embarrassed by the uncharacteristic show of affection.

  “No, I mean it, Mack, I really mean it. I love you. Honest to God, I really mean it. Do you believe me that I mean it?”

  “Sure, I love you too, Stealth,” he said.

  “Naw, you don’t love anybody,” said Wolfowitz with drunken insight. “Everybody loves you but you don’t love a goddamned soul.”

  Six

  Not long after Wolfowitz’s marriage, Mack met Tomas Russo. Their first encounter took place in the confessional at St. Frederick’s, where Tommy was serving as junior priest and all-purpose workhorse under Francis X. Dorsey, the laziest pastor in New York. Tommy got all the parish scut work, but the job he hated most was hearing confessions. It infuriated him that shrinks and talk-show hosts got paid big money for listening to the same kind of sordid crap he had to hear for free.

  And so Tommy Russo had been in a foul mood when Mack Green slipped into the booth and said, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.” Russo, who had perfect pitch for the sound of Catholic contrition, instantly recognized from the tentative inflection that the man on the other side of the screen had never been inside a confessional in his life.