"I'm terribly sorry, but he isn't in the office this afternoon. There was a special luncheon uptown today—"
"That's what I want to talk to him about."
"Well, he decided not to come back after lunch but to go on home."
"Then I'll talk to him there," Corella said.
"All right," the girl said. "I am sorry about the mixup, gentlemen."
Corella said, "What's his address?"
"Oh, I'm sorry," she said. "We don't give out home addresses."
"Then his phone number," Corella said. With the phone number, he could get the address himself.
But the girl said, "I'm sorry, not those either. Would you like to talk to Mr. Beemiss's secretary about making an appointment? He might have some time free tomorrow, I couldn't be certain." Her hand was resting on the complicated telephone console beside her. "It's today I want to talk to him," Corella said.
"Then I really wish you'd phoned this morning."
Corella stepped back a pace. "Earl," he said. "Explain it to her."
Earl, who was very big and very tough and who had been Jerry Manelli's contact in the Port Authority parking garage, flexed his shoulder muscles inside his jacket. He said, "We think it's important to get Beemiss's address."
The girl smiled at him. She said, "Do you know, when I first moved to New York I was afraid of muggers and rapists and all sorts of things, but for the last two years I've been studying at a women's martial arts centre down on Chambers Street, and it's just built up my confidence tremendously. For instance, studying karate and tai chi chuan, I've gotten to the point where just with the edge of my hand I can break a board just about as thick as your head." Picking up the phone receiver, she said, "I'll call Mr. Beemiss's secretary; you can arrange with her for an appointment later in the week."
"Never mind," Corella said, and left the office. Out in the hall Earl said, "Mr. Corella, I could of taken her."
Corella didn't bother to answer. He pushed the elevator button, and said, "Find Beemiss."
"Yes, sir, Mr. Corella."
So then Corella went home to Red Bank, New Jersey, and waited for Earl to report, which he didn't do until well after five o'clock. He had the address at last, and when Corella and Ralph picked him up on the way through Manhattan, it turned out he had a black eye as well. It made him sullen, having a black eye. Apart from the physical pain, he believed that a black eye detracted from his credibility as a bodyguard and general tough guy.
What had happened, Earl had tried his regular sources of information, looking for Bud Beemiss's home address, but his regular sources of information mostly knew things like the addresses of hit men or where to buy an untraceable gun, so finally he just waited until Bud Beemiss Enterprises closed for the day, then entered the premises and found the address on Beemiss's secretary's Rolodex. He was out of the office and almost to the elevator when who should come down the hall but that damn smart-ass little receptionist. Immediately she was suspicious, "What are you doing here?" Irritated in general, and bugged by this girl in particular, Earl didn't try to calm her with some story, but attempted instead to brush on by her. That's when she started doing her nasty karate moves, bouncing him off the corridor walls. And when, plagued beyond good manners, he took a swing at her, she moved in under his roundhouse and poked him a very smart left fist in the eye. Bony goddam hand. If he hadn't fled at last down the stairwell who knows what might have happened?
So now they were heading northeast at last across Connecticut, Ralph the chauffeur annoyed because he'd had a terrific date set up for tonight, Earl annoyed because of his black eye, and Corella beginning to get annoyed because it was taking one hell of a long time to get there. They'd travelled on the Merritt Parkway for a while, but now Ralph's road map had dumped them onto a winding blacktop two-lane road in the twilight, surrounded by local traffic that didn't care when it got home. Ralph brooded on his lost date. Earl brooded on his throbbing eye, and Corella brooded on all this wasted time. He too had financial pressures these days, though certainly less so than a duffer like Vic Krassmeier, and he wanted that damn statue found and delivered and paid for. But here they were mousing around the boondocks of Connecticut, amid the waving maple trees, following some arthritic station wagon. Annoyance suddenly spilling over, Corella leaned forward and said, "Ralph, you gonna follow that son of a bitch into his garage?"
Ralph hated people to yell in his ear. "Soon as I get a passing zone, Mr. Corella," he said.
Eventually a passing zone did appear, and Ralph angrily yanked the Caddy around the drifting station wagon containing Mel Bernstein, yowling his horn enough to make Mel nearly swerve completely off the road. Then the Caddy tore on northeastward toward 11 Winding Lane, Greenway, Connecticut, the home of Bud Beemiss.
"Goddam it!" Mel hollered, wrestling with the steering wheel. "Goddam road hog!" Then he got the station wagon once more under control, and he too continued northeastward toward 11 Winding Lane.
In addition…
MEL BERNSTEIN HAD almost been a lawyer. The way it had happened — or not happened — was like this. Mel's father, a bus driver with the City of New York, was a compulsive gambler and therefore always broke. Meantime, Mel's mother's brother Phil Ormont (né Goldberg) had a ladies' clothing store in Miami Beach (pronounced "Momma Bitch") and was not a compulsive gambler, and he was doing very well, thank you. So Mel spent his formative summers in Momma Bitch, where the heat and humidity are both ninety-two all the time, day and night, and Uncle Phil kept assuring him his future was made. "Your future is made, kid," Uncle Phil used to say, in the air-conditioned splendour of his store, amid the old ladies fingering the flower-print dresses. "Anything you want, kid, it's yours."
"I want to be a lawyer," Mel said, more than once.
"It's yours, kid," Phil answered, more than once. "Go help the old lady. Look in her shopping bag. I think she just boosted a package Supphose."
Then, in February of the year that Mel was seventeen, his Uncle Phil left the air-conditioned splendour of his store, entered the natural environment of Momma Bitch, and promptly dropped dead on the spot. Heart; what else?
Mel's mom waited three months before writing to Aunt Rachel, and when there wasn't any answer by Mid-June she splurged on a long-distance call, and the Ormonts' home phone number was not-in-operation-at-this-time. So she called the store and the new owner told her Rachel had moved either to Las Vegas or Saint Thomas, unless maybe it was someplace in California.
The problem with being somebody who had almost been a lawyer is there's this constant tingle in the fingertips. What is the alternate occupation of preference for somebody who thought he was going to be a lawyer?
For Mel it had been lots of jobs, lots of hustles. He'd been a door-to-door salesman, he'd run a mail-order business selling a book called Danish Marriage Secrets, he'd even sold Arizona land by phone to Washington Heights housewives. For a while he'd been a used car salesman for an outfit in the Bronx called Big Man Motors. (The television commercial tells the Big Man Story: "The Big Man hates to say no! Instant credit on the late-model used car of your choice! Got no cash for the down payment? That's okay, the Big Man takes anything — your old TV, washing machine, refrigerator, you name it. You come to the Big Man, you gone go way with a deal!")
You'd think the main problem with a scam like that would be unhappy customers pushing their dead clunkers back onto the lot, but you'd be wrong. Since the customers, generally speaking, never made any of their payments, they weren't in any position to complain. No, the main problem was with the banks that wound up eating all that worthless paper. The way it works, you sell some janitor's assistant a seven-year-old-clapped-out Mercury for a sofa down and forty-seven dollars a month, and then you discount the loan to the bank. Two months later the bank repossesses the car, since the janitor's assistant never will come up with any forty-seven dollars, and then what does the bank have? A seven-year-old-clapped-out Mercury. Meantime, Big Man has converted the sofa to cash through a subsidiary firm called Soul
Furniture, the salesman got his commission out of the money the bank paid when it took over the loan, the janitor's assistant got to drive around in a regular automobile for a couple of months, and nobody's unhappy except the bank.
Big Man had run through a lot of banks, and was reduced to dealing with some very hard-nosed type alternate sources of financing, and then it turned out these new financers didn't believe in repossessing junk. They believed in breaking heads. A couple of janitor's assistants got their heads broken so bad they wouldn't ever need a car any more, and a few others who'd only had secondary bones broken started coming round Big Man looking for the salesman who'd got them into this. It was hard to convince such simple brains that it wasn't the salesman's fault, and Mel decided to try another occupation.
Which was when he found Literature.
WRITING IS NOT ENOUGH
Of course, you're a writer. You know that. But it isn't enough merely to write, you need to be published as well. Success in writing is really yours when you have reached the great Public with your ideas.
But how can you "break into" print? Is publishing really the closed world that people say? Do you really have to "know somebody"? Or, can talent "make it" on its own?
I say you can make it. I've seen others who made it, and I've helped some of them along the way, and I can help you, if you have the talent, and the desire, and if you'll trust me.
For a limited time only, the Zachary George Literary Agency is seeking to expand its client list. Send me your short story, your novel, your magazine article, your poem. If it's saleable, I'll find the right market for it. If it isn't quite "up to snuff," I'll write you a personal letter, telling you where I think you went wrong.
Once you're successful, I'll take only the standard 10 percent commission from my sales of your work. Until then, of course, it will be necessary to charge an advance against those commissions — fully refundable when you begin to sell — at the following rates:
Short story or article $ 10.
Novelette or TV script 25.
Novel or film script 50.
Get in touch with me today. Why wait for success any longer?
Mel wrote that ad in a burst of literary inspiration one cool Sunday afternoon in October three and a half years ago, since when it had appeared frequently in the gamier men's magazines, the loonier women's magazines, and the more tolerant writer's magazines. And didn't the stories come in. Short stories combining two or three recent television shows, novels imitating 1960 paperback originals, articles on fluoridation and Reinhard Heydrich, film scripts about people inadvertently taking LSD, poems about sunsets, novelettes about a young girl's first sexual experience ("awakening," in the language of the authors), TV scripts about youth gangs terrorizing subways—oh, the stories came in, right enough. Everybody in America, it seemed, had glared at the TV set and said, "I can write better than that." It was amazing how many of them were wrong.
As a hustle, and except for the reading involved, the Zachary George Literary Agency was Class A. It still wasn't The Law, but it was nice. And the best part was that Mel was now a dignified Professional Man, just like an attorney or doctor or dentist or CPA. He was a Literary Agent.
Within a year, so many hopeful writers had sent in so much hopeless crap that Mel expanded out of his midtown convenience address and his Queens closet full of letterhead stationery into an actual two-room office on Varick Street in Manhattan, with a good-looking secretary-receptionist named Ralphi Durant.
But the reading did get grim after a while. It began to look as though progressive brain-poisoning would bring an untimely finish to Zachary George's career. Then, midway through his second year of operation, Mel suddenly found the solution, in the person of Ralphi's boyfriend, a fellow named Ethelred Marx who was a poet, and who was so stoned all the time that his ears steamed, like sewer gratings in the early morning. Ethelred wanted nothing from life but enough cash money to keep himself clothed, sheltered, and bombed while he worked on his projected twelve-million line epic about the American railroads. (He'd been stuck for the last three years trying to find a rhyme for "parallel.") Within Ethelred's gangly corpus, however, lay the remnants of a Rhodes Scholar, Guggenheim Fellow, and Ph.D. in American Lit, and it turned out he was the perfect reader for the Zachary George Literary Agency; his zonked mind absorbed all those stories and novels with a Buddha-like receptive wonder, and his letters of response — freely adapting Mel's stock paragraphs — were marvels of erudition, insight, bullshit, and weird linkages.
Not trusting the strange aromas that seemed to hang around Ethelred all the time, Mel signed a lease on a one-room office next to his present two rooms, and that was where Ethelred these days did his reading and his letter-writing and his freaking out. (Strange noises came from Ethelred, too, sometimes.) Ralphi continued to fend off the amateurs in the outer room of the main office, and Mel spent his days at his desk in the inner room, where he was secretly — even Angela didn't know about this — working on a novel. (One of the early submissions had had an idea in it that Mel kind of liked, so he'd saved a Xerox of the manuscript and was doing his own version of the story. It was about a girl who kidnaps a psychiatrist to get him to cure her nymphomaniac twin sister, and so far as Mel could see it had best seller written all over it.)
Which was why this golden-statue thing was such a godsend. Like most writers, Mel felt everything would be okay if he could just get a little money ahead, so he could sit down and really write, without having to worry about anything else. The Literary Agency hustle was doing very well, but it all just seemed to dribble away. The trip to Israel had been expensive, the trip to Rome had been expensive, and in between Angela could always find domestic ways to be expensive. No matter how quickly Mel's income increased, his outgo seemed to increase at the same pace. With a quarter million dollars, though, he could leave Ralphi and Ethelred in charge of the agency, move into a secluded cottage down in Puerto Rico or somewhere, and really write.
Driving northeast across Connecticut, in the wake of the road hog in the maroon Cadillac, Mel hunched over the steering wheel and wondered if it was considered ethical for a Literary Agent to peddle his own stuff.
Simultaneously…
JERRY WAS PARKING the station wagon next to a fireplug on West End Avenue when a shoe bounced off the hood. "What?" he demanded, and glared all around, like any true New Yorker. His expression became clouded when a grey cardigan sweater with leather patches on the sleeves spread itself like a despairing widow over the windshield. "Well, son of a bitch," Jerry said, and, "wait a damn minute." And he stepped out of the car to a veritable rain of haberdashery.
This was no place for a man without a hard-hat. Skipping through the T-shirts and sweatpants, he trotted across the sidewalk and ducked into the vestibule at number 237. A large grey stone building, it was half a block wide and a dozen stories high. There was the usual West Side-style Early Tile Revival decor in the vestibule, in contrasting black black and grey white, with the usual Brass Array addition of rank upon rank of doorbells.
Jerry looked for the name "Harwood" among the doorbells, and finally found it next to the button marked 7K. Fine. He took out his Bankamericacard, planning to slide it down between the door and the frame, to force the bolt back and unlock the door, and then he noticed the metal slat screwed into place along the edge of the doorframe, blocking the space he needed to get at.
Well, hell. Now what?
He was still standing there, credit card in hand, when the door was abruptly yanked open and a good-looking but grimly angry girl stalked out, carrying two suitcases. She brushed by Jerry without a glance and marched on out to the street.
Jerry moved fast, and got a hand on the swiftly closing door before it could snick all the way shut. With a glance over his shoulder at the girl — who was kicking her way through drifts of jockey shorts — he entered the building and made his way to the seventh floor.
There was no sound behind the metal door of 7K. Pausing there, Jerry loo
ked up and down the hall, and saw off to his right a door marked Service. Service? Going down there, opening that door, he found a grubby grey-painted stairwell, with a landing full of cartons, stacks of newspapers, brooms, and a tricycle missing one wheel. Also the back doors to four apartments: 7J, 7K, 7L, 7M.
"Right." He stepped over several cartons to ring the doorbell at 7K. When nothing happened he rang again, and still nothing happened, so he was already in the process of slipping the Bankamericacard in next to the door — no damn metal slat here, anyway — when a male voice called out from inside, "Who is it?"
"Uh," Jerry pulled the card back, slipped it into his shirt pocket, and in a loud confident voice he cried out, "Maint'nince."
"Is something wrong?"
"Trouble widda plumbin'."
Waiting, Jerry looked around at the junk out here, and saw leaning against a stack of newspapers an old red rubber plunger with a wooden handle. Picking it up, he held it over his shoulder like a bindlestiff.
Meantime, several locks and bolts and chains had been rattling and popping on the other side of the door, followed by a brief but bewildering silence. What now? Jerry was about to shout again when the voice, sounding much farther away, called, "Come in!"
Something was screwy here. Holding the plunger in front of himself like a club, Jerry reached out and turned the doorknob and pushed.
The door opened. It eased back in a slow curve, showing more and more of a small cluttered kitchen which happened to be empty. Frowning, Jerry advanced pace by pace into the room and it just went on being empty.
"Excuse me," said the familiar voice.
It was like Alice in Wonderland. Jerry looked to his right, and a head was peering through an almost closed doorway across the room. Only the head and the fingers of one hand showed, and both were bony. The expression on the head's face seemed uncertain, tentative, unsure of everything including itself; it featured very highly raised eyebrows. It appeared to be male.
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