Mort Ziff Is Not Dead

by Cary Fagan

  OTHER PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE CANADA BOOKS

  BY CARY FAGAN

  Master Melville’s Medicine Show Series

  The Boy in the Box

  The Show to End All Shows

  The Kaspar Snit Series

  The Fortress of Kaspar Snit

  Directed by Kaspar Snit

  Ten Lessons for Kaspar Snit

  Wolfie and Fly

  PUFFIN

  an imprint of Penguin Canada Books Inc., a Penguin Random House Company

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Canada Books Inc., 320 Front Street West, Suite 1400,

  Toronto, Ontario M5V 3B6, Canada

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published 2017

  Copyright © 2017 by Cary Fagan

  Cover design by Lisa Jager

  Cover art by (flamingo) © Bluedarkat/Shutterstock.com; (hat) © Dragance137/istockphoto.com; (billboard) © Miloart/istockphoto.com

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Fagan, Cary, 1961—, author

  Mort Ziff is not dead / Cary Fagan.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 9780143198475 (hardback). —ISBN 9780143198499 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8561.A375M67 2017  jC813′.54  C2016-905208-7

                     C2016-905209-5

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016948507

  Visit the Penguin Canada website at www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  v4.1

  a

  For my father, Maurice Fagan, with much love

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Penguin Random House Canada Books by Cary Fagan

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1: Counting Doozy Dots

  2: Blue Chip

  3: Vault

  4: Ha, Ha, Ha

  5: Funny Haircuts

  6: My Big Announcement

  7: The Sky-High Travel Agency

  8: The Runway

  9: Just Picked

  10: The Black Suit

  11: Horvath, Horvath and Horvath

  12: The Quest 3000

  13: Grilled Cheese

  14: White Shoes

  15: The Grim Reaper

  16: Ooh-Ooh-Ooh

  17: Cheese Asteroid

  18: Alligator Ballerina

  19: The Penthouse

  20: Snort Dinko

  21: A Disgrace to the Family

  22: Reservations

  23: Everybody’s Royalty

  24: Last Look

  A Note from the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Counting Doozy Dots

  My brothers were only one and two years old when I was born, but even so, it was as if they got together and decided that three was a crowd. Who needs another brother? At least that’s how it felt, because I never really fit in with them. And they never made it easy for me.

  For example, it was always a mistake to compete with them. If I got suckered into having a bicycle race, Marcus (the older one) would secretly let half the air out of my tires. If I agreed to a match of miniature golf, Larry (the middle one) would bump my arm while I was putting. If I refused to play cards or Monopoly, the two of them would beg me on their hands and knees, promising not to cheat. Then, of course, they did. Making me lose was to them the funniest thing in the world. They never got tired of it.

  Which was one reason it was so fantastic that I won the “Guess the Doozy Dots” contest at Shoppe Heaven Mall.

  Doozy Dots were these little candies with funny faces on them that fizz and pop in your mouth. At the mall there was a special promotion. Women in green elf outfits were standing around a giant glass jar of Doozy Dots. It must have been ten or twenty feet high. You had to guess how many candies were in the giant jar.

  This happened on the last Saturday in October, a super-beautiful day, maybe one of the last nice days before winter. I wanted to be outside, flying the balsa-wood airplane that I had just finished building. It had a rubber-band motor and a plastic propeller, and I couldn’t wait to try it. But my parents thought that this was the perfect day for me and my brothers to buy new shoes. Not running shoes even, but ugly leather shoes that had, in my mother’s immortal words, “healthy arch support.”

  So there we were, pushing our way through the crowds to where the green elf women were handing out forms and little pencils. On the form, you were supposed to write down your guess, along with your name and address.

  “I’m going to win this for sure,” Marcus said, holding the paper against a post and squinting as he filled it in.

  “Don’t get too excited, Marcus,” Dad said. “Nobody wins these things.”

  “Well, I am. I’m picking my number right now. I’m going to guess ten billion and eight.”

  “That might be a little high,” Mom said.

  “No, it isn’t. It’s exactly right. I calculated.” He tapped the side of his head with the little pencil.

  “How did you calculate it?” Larry asked. He hadn’t filled out his form yet. He always thought Marcus was right. He thought Marcus was a genius.

  “You think I’d tell you, flea-brain?”

  “Okay then,” Larry said. “I’m going to put down the same number. Ten billion and eight.”

  “You can’t do that! Mom, Dad, tell Larry he can’t.”

  “Never mind,” Larry sang, printing carefully. “I’ll put down ten billion and nine.”

  Marcus began to chase Larry, but Larry managed to stuff his form into the slot in the plastic container made to look like a box of Doozy Dots. I filled out my own form. I put down a smaller number. I put down 4,243. I didn’t calculate at all. I just pulled it out of the air.

  When Marcus gave up trying to catch Larry, he came over to look at my form. “Are you kidding me?” he said, and proceeded to laugh his head off. Actually, I wish he had really laughed his head off so that it rolled all the way down the length of the Shoppe Heaven Mall.

  I put my form into the box and we all went to the shoe store. Marcus and Larry begged for loafers but Mom insisted we get three identical pairs of lace-up shoes. My brothers immediately began to scuff them up on the way back to the car. We drove our creaky old Buick home, by which time I had to start my chores and couldn’t fly my balsa-wood airplane.

  All of us forgot about the Doozy Dots contest. We forgot about it for a whole month.

  Blue Chip

  “Hey, Wormy, there’s a letter for you. May
be it’s from some girrrl…”

  It’s a Jewish tradition to name kids after a dead relative, and I was named Norman—Norman Fishbein—after my great-grandfather Nachman. All I knew about Nachman was that he had seven children and a long beard, and when he wasn’t hunched over a cobbler’s bench making shoes, he was at the prayer house.

  But I lived in the new world, in Toronto, Canada. And it was the year 1965, the modern age. We had telephones and televisions (color!) and transistor radios. An astronaut named John Glenn had gone around the earth in a space capsule. Our own prime minister, Lester Pearson, had won the Nobel Peace Prize. My dad wished that he could drive a Mustang convertible, and my mom thought that we should start eating some new health food called yogurt, which came from Sweden or some place like that.

  All of this is why my name was Norman. My parents sometimes called me Normy, which was okay as long as nobody from school was around. But I hated the nickname that my brothers called me. Wormy.

  We were hanging around the living room when Marcus came in, Mom and Dad reading the newspaper on the sofa and Larry and I in the comfy armchairs. “A letter?” said Larry, looking up at Marcus, who was holding an envelope in his hand. “Who’d be writing to you, Wormy? Maybe it’s a new pen pal. Maybe it’s some kid in Iceland or Borneo who smells just as bad as you.”

  “I still think it’s a girl,” Marcus said, waving the envelope around. “Some girlfriend with the cooties who wants to smooch with you.”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend or a pen pal,” I grouched. The only letters I got were from the Boy Scouts, asking me if I wanted to rejoin. I had lasted in the Boy Scouts exactly two weeks.

  “Come on, boys,” Dad said without looking up from the newspaper. “Give Norman his letter.”

  But Marcus didn’t give it to me. He took a step forward and peered at it, straightening a pair of imaginary glasses. “Let me see. It’s from Blue Chip Promotions. Tell us, Wormy, do you know anybody named Chip?”

  Larry got up and snatched it from Marcus’s hand. “I think it’s a parking ticket. Tell us, Wormy, did you leave your tricycle near a fire hydrant?”

  This whole time I just sat in the armchair, not even trying to get it. I’d had long experience with my brothers holding back something that was mine. I just had to wait for the right moment, which was right…now! I lunged forward, stretching over the coffee table to grab the letter.

  I also knocked over Mom’s mug of tea.

  A lot of shouting and finger-pointing followed, but my parents tried not to pick sides. They said we were all at fault, even as the three of us wiped up the spill with some rags that I got from the kitchen. Of course, Marcus and Larry shoved each other the whole time.

  At last, peace returned, more or less, and I returned to the armchair. I used a butter knife to slice open the envelope and then pulled out the letter. Silently I read it to myself.

  Blue Chip Promotions

  136 Brockton Street, Suite 1120

  Ottawa, Ontario

  November 27, 1965

  Dear Mr. Fishbein,

  Congratulations! Your guess of 4,243 Doozy Dots for our promotional contest was correct! You may be interested to know that you are the only person ever to guess the exact number!

  Thank you for participating in another Blue Chip promotion! We hope that you will continue to enjoy the flavor-bursting fun of Doozy Dots!

  Yours truly!

  Geoffrey Klinker,

  Vice-President

  My first thought was that Geoffrey Klinker sure did like using exclamation marks. My second thought was: I won?

  I said it out loud.

  “What’s that?” Dad asked. “You’re whispering, Norman.”

  “I said that I won.”

  “That’s nice,” Mom said. “What did you win, sweetheart?”

  “The Doozy Dots contest. The one in the mall, remember?”

  Everything stopped. Everyone looked at me. “No way,” Marcus said. “With that lame guess?”

  “What did you win?” Larry asked. “A stupid baseball hat? A pencil case?”

  “Well done, Normy,” Dad said. “What did you actually win? If it’s a carton of candies, you can’t eat them all at once. They’ll make you sick.”

  I didn’t know what I had won. I looked again at the letter but it didn’t say. And then I noticed something else in the envelope, a slip of paper. It was a check. I knew what a check looked like because every year on my birthday I got one for five dollars from Uncle Shlomo. But this one wasn’t for five dollars.

  I tried to speak.

  “Norman?” said my mother.

  “I won…I won…a thousand dollars.”

  Silence. Marcus and Larry had their mouths open. My parents both looked as if I’d just told them that I had been selected for the next space launch.

  I put the check back in the envelope. “I guess I’m rich,” I said.

  Vault

  Everybody wanted to look at the check. Marcus and Larry even argued over it, grabbing the check from each other until they tore the corner. I got so upset that I used a word not allowed in our house, but my parents were just as mad at them and didn’t notice.

  Dad got the Scotch tape and fixed the corner, assuring me that it was still good. But I knew that check wouldn’t be safe until I put it in the bank. Dad said the bank was closing in half an hour but I insisted. So the five of us drove in the clanking Buick to the stone building with big pillars on either side of the doors. We waited in line, Mom and Dad and Marcus and Larry behind me, until finally it was my turn.

  The bank teller was a man with a little mustache. “May I help you?” he said.

  I slid my bankbook across the marble counter. “Can you tell me how much money I have in my account?” I asked.

  “Of course. As it says in your book, you have seven dollars in your account.”

  I slid the check toward him. “I wish to make a deposit.”

  “Very good.” The bank teller got a slip of paper and began to fill it in. He asked me to sign the paper and then he stamped it. He put my account book into a machine that began to bang away like a typewriter. He took it out again. He put the slip of paper and the check in a drawer under the counter.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Can you tell me how much I have in my account now?”

  The teller looked at me. Then he opened my account book. “You now have one thousand and seven dollars in your account.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Would you please put the check into the vault?”

  “I assure you, that check is perfectly safe.”

  “But if a bank robber came—”

  “Please, sir,” he interrupted. “We prefer not to mention such things out loud.”

  “I’d really be happier if you put it in the vault.”

  “I’ll have to get the manager.”

  “I don’t mind waiting.”

  By now there was a considerable line of people behind me, all trying to do their banking before closing. But I didn’t move from my spot. The teller took the check and walked over to a man who must have been the manager, and the two whispered with their heads close together. The teller pointed to me. The manager frowned. At last the manager went over to the enormous steel door of the vault, dialed the combination, put in a large key that he kept on a chain and opened the big door. It must have been three feet thick. The two of them walked into the vault and disappeared. A moment later they came out again and the manager shut the enormous door.

  The teller returned. “It is now in the vault. I hope, sir, that you are satisfied.”

  “Perfectly satisfied,” I said.

  We got into the car and drove home again.

  Ha, Ha, Ha

  “I think,” Mom said, “we shouldn’t talk about that money for a while.”

  No doubt she was responding to my brothers, who kept whining about how it wasn’t fair and that I should be splitting the money with them. I was afr
aid that my parents might agree, but instead they insisted that Marcus and Larry just stop. “Norman won it,” Dad pronounced. “Simple as that. It’s his money.”

  Not talking about it didn’t mean that nobody thought about it. My brothers were so resentful that for the next two days they were extra mean to me, running ahead so that I had to trudge to school on my own, never passing to me during ball-hockey games in the driveway. At the dinner table, whenever I said something Marcus would say, “Did you hear a noise?” and Larry would answer, “It must be a fly buzzing around.”

  Fine, I thought, I didn’t need them either. That weekend I took my balsa-wood airplane to the park so that I could fly it at last. It was cold—Dad had said that he could smell an early snow coming. A wind was blowing, never good for flying, but if it did snow, then I wouldn’t be able to try again until the spring. Carefully I turned the propeller, winding the heavy rubber band inside the fuselage. I cocked back my arm and launched it upward. The propeller whirred, pulling the plane higher, over the teeter-totter and the swings, high into the cloudy sky.

  “Yahoo!” I cried, running behind as the plane veered to the right and began to circle up. A gust of wind from behind pushed it higher until it was almost vertical, and then it tipped downward. It took a moment for me to realize the plane was heading right toward me. I covered my head with my arms and ran.

  Crack! The plane missed me by a couple of feet, smacking the hard ground. Picking it up, I saw that the nose was pushed in and the struts of one wing had shattered like the thin bones of a bird.

  “Another disaster,” I said out loud. Then I put it on my shoulder and carried it home. In the house, I put the broken plane in the closet beside my three other wrecked planes. Outside my window a few large flakes of snow came down. I wondered what some of my friends from school were doing. Like Daniel Tamber, whose dad was a dentist and made a lot more money than my parents. Daniel went to tennis camp every summer and had even been to France. Or Jessica Garwin. Jessica’s parents were land developers, whatever that meant. She took horseback riding lessons and said that when she turned sixteen she was going to get her own horse. My dad was a plumber and general repairman and my mom worked part-time doing the accounting for her sister’s dress shop. Dad could have gone to college but he preferred to work with his hands and went to vocational school instead. He said he was like a doctor, except that instead of working on people he operated on toilets and put bandages on walls.