So Willing

by Lawrence Block

  And then, at last, it was time to leave Modnoc. It was time to go back to Boston, to meet Anita’s father, who somehow had been left out of the picture. Vince wasn’t especially looking forward to the meeting. From one standpoint, Mr. Merriweather was the great benefactor, the man with the five million dollars, the great white father who would see to it that Vince never had to work for the rest of his life. That was one way of looking at it, but it was not necessarily the right way.

  The other side of the coin had Mr. Merriweather playing the role of indignant papa, prepared to disown his willful daughter and to cast his new son-in-law out into the street, penniless. This was a far less attractive picture. From what Anita had said of her father, old man Merriweather was a twentieth-century improvement on the concept of the self-made man. He hadn’t exactly dragged himself up out of the gutter. But he had taken the three hundred thousand dollars his father had left him and turned it into five million. Which, all things considered, was no mean accomplishment. Even if you’re born with a silver spoon in your mouth, it’s a neat trick turning it into a platinum one.

  And what self-made man was going to look with favor upon a penniless son-in-law with the hand out? Not Mr. Merriweather. Not in a million years.

  Actually, Vince didn’t find either prospect particularly attractive. He wasn’t too keen on being disinherited, for obvious reasons. But at the same time he wasn’t too hot on the notion of living off Papa for the rest of his life. Somehow that took the kicks out of the game. It was sort of like settling down in Modnoc, except without a job. The same monotony, on a solid gold Cadillac level. The same lack of incentive and stimulation. It would be easier to bear, due to the presence of the most wonderful girl in the world, but he couldn’t help wondering how long it would take for even that to wear thin. If he didn’t work, and if everything got handed to him on a platinum platter, then he and Anita were going to have a rough time of it.

  “Don’t you worry about a thing,” Anita would say. “Papa will be perfectly wonderful about the whole thing. There’s an answer, somewhere in the middle, maybe. We’ll find it.”

  Vince pretended to be very optimistic about the whole thing, but he remained scared. And the scared feeling did not vanish when he met Mr. Merriweather. It grew.

  Mr. Merriweather wasn’t the type of man with whom you felt instantly relaxed. He was the type of man who made you feel as though your tie was crooked. Even if you didn’t happen to be wearing a tie. He was big, and he was white-haired, and he stood at attention even when he was sitting down. He smelled of money and hard work simultaneously and Vince felt intimidated.

  “Always figured Anita would do something like this,” he said. “Type of girl she is. High-spirited. Red-blooded. Sets her head and heart on something and doesn’t let go. Can’t fight her, whether I approve or not. Don’t know whether I approve or not. You good for anything, Vince? You got any ambitions? Any ideas? Or are you going to sponge off the old man and wait for him to die?”

  Vince was struck dumb. He hoped he didn’t look stupid but was sure that he did. He felt stupid. That much was certain.

  “Maybe you don’t want to be a playboy,” Mr. Merriweather said. “Maybe you want me to get you started in my business. Slip you into a junior executive slot at, say, twenty thousand a year. Move you up quickly, make a branch manager out of you or something. Wouldn’t have to do much of anything. Take a vacation whenever you felt like it, put in a couple hours a day at a desk the rest of the time. Give you a good position with enough money and enough respectability. That what you’re angling for?”

  “No,” said a voice. Vince looked around. Then he realized that it was his voice.

  “No?”

  “No,” Vince said, more positively this time. “I don’t want any favors. Whatever I get I’m going to work for. It’s not my fault if your daughter happened to be blessed with a rich father. I didn’t have anything to do with that. Neither did she. Whatever Anita and I have, we’re going to have for ourselves. And we’re going to get it by ourselves. Without any handouts.”

  Mr. Merriweather’s eyebrows went up. “You’re a good actor,” he said. “You almost make me believe that you’re sincere.”

  “Almost?”

  “Almost,” Anita’s father said. “But not entirely. Nobody throws money away. Self-respect is all well and good, but nobody turns down the sort of opportunity I just offered you. I’m afraid I don’t believe you, son.”

  Vince bristled. “That’s just too goddamned bad,” he said. “Because I don’t happen to give a damn whether you believe me or not. You can take your job and stick it up your—”

  “Vince!” Merriweather’s eyes blazed. “No one talks to me like that.”

  “I do,” Vince said.

  “Maybe more people should,” Merriweather said. “You know, I do believe you now. It’s ridiculous, of course, but I believe you. You’re a fool, of course, but maybe the world needs more fools.”

  Vince, naturally, kept his fat mouth shut. He was wondering why he hadn’t kept his fat mouth shut before, when he had an offer of twenty thousand dollars a year for doing nothing. Now he had no offer at all, which was substantially less.

  “Vince,” Mr. Merriweather was saying, “perhaps I have something else you might be interested in. Not as attractive, but something.”

  “I don’t want a handout, Mr. Merriweather.

  “This isn’t a handout. Are you interested?”

  “Maybe.”

  Merriweather laughed. It was quite a laugh. He threw back his head and broke the room in half with his laughter. “You little wise guy,” he said. “You sharpie. How old are you, Vince?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Just seventeen? You certainly aren’t the normal seventeen-year-old. What made you grow up so fast? Good Lord, the average youngster these days is a perfect example of stunted development. Four years of high school, four years of college, four years of graduate study—and the result is less mature than you are. Can you explain that? Was there any particular factor that made you grow up?”

  Someone—it couldn’t possibly have been Vince—said: “Women.”

  Merriweather’s laugh made the other laugh sound like a chuckle. “That’s it!” he said. “That’s the trouble with modern man. No rakes left in the world. A batch of sincere idiots. You must have been a real lady killer, Vince.”

  Vince lowered his head modestly.

  “That’s the secret,” Merriweather said. “Love ’em and leave ’em before you marry. Then stick to one woman. That’s the way I did it. I must have had…oh, I don’t know, but there were a hell of a lot of them. Then I met Helen and that was it for me. Strict fidelity. Uh…you will be faithful to Anita, won’t you?”

  “Of course,” Vince said. “When you’ve had the best—”

  “Precisely,” Mr. Merriweather said. “Vince, if someone had said you would turn out to be a boy after my own heart, I would have laughed in his face. But you’re all right, Vince. You’re too young for the offer I have in mind, but I think you might be able to handle it. Know what I’m getting at?”

  “No.”

  “Simple,” Merriweather said. “Our house is thinking of opening a Brazilian branch; dealing primarily in Brazilian securities. There’s a fortune to be made down there. They’re short of capital. The right investments will move at triple the speed of comparable investments Stateside. A Brazilian realty syndicate will pay thirty percent compared to an American ten percent. Brazilian stocks either fall flat or double every two months. It’s the perfect spot for a brokerage office. A smart man down there can get rich overnight. Or go completely broke. It’s up to the man involved.”

  Vince wisely didn’t say anything.

  “Interested?”

  “In what?”

  Merriweather smiled. “You’ll spend three months in the New York office,” he said. “You’ll make fifty dollars a week and you’ll hustle your behind off for it. Then you go down to Brazil—if you can stand the gaff.
You’ll be second-in-command of the Sao Paolo office. You’ll put in twenty hours a day for a relatively small salary. But if you play your cards right, you’ll come out of there with a fortune in your pocket. It’s all up to you, Vince. If you make money, it’s your own money. If you lose, I won’t be around to bail you out. It’s all up to you.”

  “I’ll take it,” Vince said.

  “It’s not soft,” Merriweather said. “It’s hard. I don’t know if I would take it myself, come to think of it. I don’t know if I’d have the guts.”

  “I think you would,” Vince said.

  Merriweather studied him. “I think you’ll wind up broke,” he said. “I think you’ll come out of Brazil with your hat in your hand, begging me for a soft touch.”

  “Don’t bet on it,” Vince said.

  It was the middle of January and the sun was hotter than hell. The summer in Brazil came in the middle of winter. And when it was hot, hell was no hotter.

  “I picked a winner,” Anita said. “I picked a real winner. You keep surprising me, Vince. And you keep winning.”

  “Write your father,” Vince said. “Let him know about it.”

  “He knows.”

  “It looks as though the Moreno Dam is going through,” Vince said. “We’ve got a piece of it.”

  “Good,” Anita said.

  “We’re doing all right,” Vince said. “We’re doing fine. By the way, I love you.”

  “You do?”

  “Uh-huh. Quit hogging the pillow.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Comfortable bed,” Vince said. “Comfortable girl. You busy, little girl?”

  “It’s awfully hot.”

  “It can get hotter.”

  “In this heat?”

  “I’m strong,” Vince said. “And young. Come here, little one.”

  The bed creaked and the world sang.

  A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR

  In August of 1957 I answered a blind ad, took a test, and landed a job as an assistant editor at the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, where I spent my days reading amateur work and writing encouraging rejections. (Encouraging because we wanted the authors to submit more material, accompanied by more reading fees; rejections because the stuff was, by and large, terrible.) It was a great learning experience for a writer-in-training and by the time I left there the following May, I had sold a slew of short stories and articles. The first thing I did when I got home to Buffalo, New York, was write a novel, and I wrote a batch more in the months that followed. I was by then back at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and was supposed to be writing papers for my professors. Instead I was writing soft-core sex novels for Harry Shorten of Midwood Tower.

  Around this time, Don Westlake answered the same ad, took the same test, and landed the same job. And he, too, began writing for Harry Shorten at Midwood; I first became aware of him when I read his first Midwood title, All My Lovers, by one Alan Marshall. I remember a scene where the brothers of a slum girl, who’s been led astray by a young executive type, go to the rotter’s luxurious apartment and beat the crap out of him. Then they leave and the scene closes with these lines: “They did not take anything. They were not thieves.”

  I thought that was pretty damn good and wondered who’d written it.

  A few months later Don got his first look at me, although it might have been through a one-way mirror for all I saw of him. I was in New York City on Christmas break and had gone to the Scott Meredith office, where I was now a client—though not the sort whose picture they put on the wall for all to see. There was a sliding window in the antechamber where they hadn’t put my picture, and my agent Henry Morrison and I talked through a book project. And Don was in the bullpen office on the other side of that window and saw me, although I did not see him.

  And this was the conversation he overheard:

  “That last book I delivered.”

  “A Strange Kind of Love. What about it?”

  “Is it too late to change the dedication?”

  “I’m afraid so. Why?”

  “I’m not seeing that girl anymore.”

  Well, I went back to Yellow Springs and the academic year finally ended, and in June I came back to New York and got a room at the Hotel Rio on West Forty-Seventh Street. I turned up at Scott Meredith one afternoon to pick up a check or drop off a manuscript, and I ran into a young fellow on a similar errand. It was Don, of course, who had quit editing and was freelancing, and who lived nearby himself, in a railroad flat on a very nasty block in the West Forties between Ninth and Tenth avenues.

  We introduced ourselves, and walked out of that office and into a friendship that lasted for fifty years. And that is why A Girl Called Honey, the first book in this triple volume and itself our initial collaborative effort, bears this dedication: “For Don Westlake and Larry Block, who introduced us.”

  I had one year to go at Antioch College, but it was not to be. Sometime that summer I got a letter from the school saying they’d come to the conclusion that I’d be happier elsewhere. And I knew they were right. I was already doing what I wanted to do, and I figured I’d keep on doing it.

  But by the end of the summer I’d decided against doing it in New York, at least for the time being. I moved back to my parents’ house in Buffalo, and I went on writing books for Bill Hamling of Nightstand Books and Harry Shorten and writing crime fiction for magazines. Don was doing much the same in New York. He and his wife and infant son were living in an awful block in Hell’s Kitchen when we met and moved to the upper flat in a two-family house in Canarsie, Brooklyn, a ten minute walk from the Rockaway Parkway stop at the end of the Canarsie Line.

  We stayed very much in touch. I don’t think it ever occurred to either of us to pick up the phone; long-distance calls were for emergencies, or when somebody died. We wrote letters and probably put more creativity into that correspondence than into our work.

  And somewhere along the way we discussed the possibility of collaborating. I wrote the first chapter of A Girl Called Honey. I sent a carbon copy to Don, and he wrote chapter two and sent it to me, and we continued in that vein until the book was done. We never discussed the plot or the characters. At one point I tired of a character he’d introduced and killed him off, whereupon Don retaliated by getting my character arrested for murder.

  Damn, that was fun.

  The lead’s name was Honour Mercy Bane, and Don thought we should call the thing Piece without Honour, and maybe we did. Who knows? We sent the manuscript to Henry, who sent it to Harry Shorten, who published it with the title it bears now. We split the money and decided we’d have to do it again sometime.

  And did, before too long. The second book turned out to be So Willing, and Shorten published that one, too. I don’t know what we called it, but it may have been The Virgin Hunt, or something like that. This time Don wrote the first chapter, and we tossed it back and forth until we had a book. I may have moved back to New York by then. Or not.

  One of Don’s chapters began, “Oh well, what the hell, there was always Adele.” But when the book appeared some idiot at Midwood changed Adele’s name to Della. God knows why. My best guess is that his mother’s name was Adele, and he took umbrage.

  If he were here, I’d tell him what he could do with his umbrage. And one of the first things that occurred to me when Bill Schafer proposed reprinting these books was that good old Adele could have her name back. She wasn’t even my character, it wasn’t even my line, but I’ll tell you, it’s very satisfying to have it the way it was supposed to be.

  The third book was Sin Hellcat, and it was brought out by our other mutual publisher, Bill Hamling at Nightstand Books. The first two books we wrote together were published “by Sheldon Lord and Alan Marshall,” and that’s the byline we tacked on Hellcat. But Hamling was having none of it. The book was published “by Andrew Shaw.” I’ve no idea what our title may have been, but I’m sure it wasn’t Sin Hellcat—not that there’s anything wrong with it . . .

&nbs
p; I blush to admit it, but I’m uncommonly proud of Sin Hellcat. If one writer had produced it, it would qualify as a tour de force; as the work of two pairs of hands, you could call it a tour de force majeure. As you’ll see, it’s a first-person narrative telling one story in sequential order, with other episodes of the narrator’s prior life recounted one per chapter along the way.

  What I like most about it is that it’s no mean trick to tell which of us wrote a particular chapter. If I flip the book open and start reading, I can’t necessarily tell myself. Somehow, without ever talking at all about the book during its writing, we matched our styles to a remarkable degree.

  Oh, I could tell you now who wrote which chapters. But then I’d have to kill you.

  Don and I never collaborated again after Sin Hellcat. Hal Dresner and I wrote a book called Circle of Sinners with a structure inspired by the film La Ronde: the viewpoint character in the first chapter has it off with someone, who becomes the viewpoint character in chapter two—and so on. Hamling published the book by either Andrew Shaw or Don Holliday, Hal’s pen name. And I think we may have done a second book as well, but if so I can’t recall anything about it.

  Somewhere along the way, I collaborated with Bill Coons, a college friend of Don’s who moved from Syracuse to New York to write Andrew Shaw novels. (He used my pen name and I vetted the books and took a cut.) At one point I started a book of my own, wrote three chapters, and hated it, so I took it around to Bill. “I can’t stand what I’ve written here,” I said, “so would you like to make it a collab? Write three chapters, and then we’ll write alternate chapters until we have enough for a book, and we’ll split what we get for it.”

  Bill agreed and tossed the manuscript on a table, and we went out for a drink. When he got home his wife had read the three chapters, the ones I said I couldn’t stomach and assumed logically enough that Bill had written them. “I think you’re really getting better,” she told him. “This is far and away the best thing you’ve ever done.”