Acceptable Losses (7 page)

“You mean to tell me you haven’t told her you’re being threatened?” He could see Elaine meant it as an accusation.

“I don’t want to alarm her unnecessarily.”

“Unnecessarily, for God’s sake. If you’re in danger, so is she. Couldn’t you figure that out? If, for some reason whoever is after you can’t get hold of you, what do you think they’ll do—join the Boy Scouts? They’ll grab her.”

“I haven’t had as much experience in these matters as you have.” He knew that she was right, but even so he knew he sounded sulky at her rebuke.

“Just because I go to Vegas a few times a year, don’t talk as though I was the queen gun moll of the Mafia.” Her voice was tinged with anger. “It’s just common sense, for God’s sake.”

“I suppose you’re right,” he said reluctantly. “I’ll tell her.” Another great night ahead at the Damon residence, he thought, as he watched the waiter put Elaine’s hamburger down and his own filet of sole.

“Are you going to order some wine?” Elaine asked.

“Of course. What do you want?”

“What do
you
want? The host usually orders the wine and I gather that this is your lunch.”

“I don’t like to drink in the middle of the day,” he said. It had always been difficult not to sound sanctimonious around Elaine.

“A half-bottle of Beaujolais,” she said to the waiter. In the old days she would have ordered a full bottle. Perhaps, he thought, she’s tapering off.

“Zalovsky, from Chicago,” she said, almost to herself as she slathered the hamburger with ketchup. “Have you any idea what he might look like?”

“I only talked to him on the phone for a couple of minutes,” Damon said, “but actually, from his voice I made a mental picture of him. Forty-five, fifty, perhaps, a heavy man, flashy clothes, no evidence of any education.”

“What’ve you done about it so far?” Elaine asked.

“There’s nothing much I can do about it—yet. Oh, I’m applying for a permit to carry a gun.”

Elaine scowled. “I don’t think that’s such a good idea. You know what I’d do if I were you, Roger,” she said, “I’d start making lists.”

“What kind of lists?”

“People who for one reason or other had a grudge against you, nuts who’ve come into your office and been turned away, people who think you’ve cheated them somehow, ladies you’ve discarded or husbands or boy friends of ladies you haven’t discarded soon enough …” She grinned and her face was momentarily pert, ageless, again. “Boy, that would be a list. And go way back. People let things fester for years, turn neurotic as they get older—have a run of bad luck and look for someone to blame, or see a movie about revenge or about a woman scorned or God knows what else. Some crazy writer may have offered you a script that you didn’t even read and sent back with a one-line refusal and then read
Threnody
and seen it on the bestseller lists and think he’s been plagiarized. God, I haven’t been close to you for donkey’s years and even
I
could make a good-sized list without half-trying. And don’t just look for clues under Z’s. The name might mean nothing. And when you talk to the detective, his name is Lieutenant Schulter by the way, don’t be shy about your exploits. He might just catch something, a hint, that you never thought of. And …” She hesitated, fork in air. “And you might ask your wife to take a good look at her past. She’s a beautiful woman I’ve heard, or at least
was
a beautiful woman, and I’ve never known a beautiful woman who hasn’t a pot full of grief in her life or who hasn’t at least once picked a real wrong man. And she’s half-Italian and you never know what sort of connections Italians have that they don’t care to advertise.”

“Oh, leave the Italian thing out of it, please. Her uncle owned a garage in Connecticut.” This was an old battle between them. Elaine came from strict Wisconsin German stock, which explained their chastity before their wedding day, if not after, and had strong opinions about the unworthy characteristics of Italians, Greeks, Jews, airline stewardesses, the Irish and Scotch. If she had ever met a Bulgarian or an Outer Mongolian, she would probably have discovered that one couldn’t trust them, either.

Elaine watched the waiter pour the wine, her face stubborn. The waiter was dark and Mediterranean-looking. Damon hoped the waiter hadn’t caught the end of Elaine’s diatribe.

“So he had a garage in Connecticut,” Elaine said when the waiter left and she had swigged down half a glass of wine. “I bet there’s about eight other uncles who never saw a garage, but saw plenty of other things that might have interested the police from time to time.”

“I said leave the Italian thing out of this.”

“You asked me to help.” Now she was affronted. “If you won’t listen to me, what’s the sense in my telling you what I think?”

“Okay, okay,” he said wearily, “I’ll make those lists.”

“And take a good look at your wife’s lists, too, while you’re at it,” Elaine said. “And I hope you’re still married at the end of it. Please”—her voice softened—“please be careful. Don’t let anything happen to you. I have to know that you’re all right and still around. Today, as always, I’m glad to see you, no matter what the reason. Let’s pretend for the rest of the bottle that this is a romantic, nostalgic lunch, and that you’re my glorious old lover whose heart has been broken for thirty years because we parted.”

She poured herself another glass of wine, lifted it in a toast toward him. “Now, let’s forget it for the rest of the meal and try to get some pleasure out of being together again and still able to eat and drink without wanting to kill each other. Now tell me, honestly, do you think I ought to have my face lifted?”

CHAPTER

SIX

H
E WALKED SLOWLY ON
his way back to the office after lunch, going over in his mind what Elaine had said to him while slugging away at the drink, hardly noticing the people around him, the names of men and women he had known in his long life not arranging themselves in his brain in orderly and manageable lists as suggested by Elaine, but swirling around in a mist and confusion of identities. Then, suddenly, he saw a slightly stooped, small old man with thick glasses, dressed in a black coat with a fur collar approaching him. There was only one man he had ever known who had a coat like that—Harrison Gray.

“Harrison!” he said and hurried to meet him and put out his hand.

The man stopped and looked at him puzzledly, half-frightened by the greeting. He put his hands behind his back. “There must be a mistake, Sir,” the old man said. “My name is George.”

Damon stepped back, blinked, shook his head to clear it. “I’m sorry,” he said, almost stammering. “You look so much like one of my best friends. I don’t know what I was thinking of. He’s dead, you know …” The man stared at him suspiciously, sniffed as though to detect prelunch martinis on Damon’s breath. “I’m not dead,” he said, offended. “As I hope you can see.”

“Forgive me, Sir,” Damon said lamely. “I must have been daydreaming …”

“At the very least,” the man said crisply. “And now if you’ll permit me …”

“Of course.” Damon stepped aside to let the old man pass him. Then, when the man had gone, he shook his head violently again and, feeling the cold sweat break out all over his body, continued on toward his office, watching his every step and being meticulously careful when crossing a street to watch out for speeding cars. But when he came to the entrance to his building on Forty-third Street, he stopped, stared dully at the people going in and out and knew that he was not going to be able to enter and take the elevator and face Miss Walton and Oliver Gabrielsen at their desks and pretend that it was an ordinary afternoon and that they could depend upon him to go through an ordinary afternoon’s routine of work.

Stopping dead men in the street. He shivered, thinking of it. Often, at this hour, he would have just had lunch with Mr. Gray at the Algonquin on the next block uptown and more often than not would move from the dining room to the bar, to which Mr. Gray was attached, by many years of quiet tippling, for an after-lunch brandy, Mr. Gray’s preferred drink.

Almost automatically, Damon walked toward Sixth Avenue, now called Avenue of Americas (Oh, amigo, what is America?) and turned into Forty-fourth Street and went into the Algonquin bar, which he had patronized rarely since Mr. Gray’s death. He liked the bar and had not permitted himself to delve into the reasons why the death of his friend and partner had been the signal somehow to avoid it.

The dead have their claims, he thought as he sat himself down at the small familiar bar; the places in which our conversations have taken place in the lull of an afternoon are reserved for them. The bar was empty except for himself and he didn’t recognize the barman. He ordered a Cognac, not his usual Scotch, remembering that Mr. Gray (strangely, after their long friendship, he thought of him as Mr. Gray instead of by his Christian name) had liked Bisquit Dubouchet. The fumes assailed his memory and for a moment Mr. Gray was a living presence at his side. The presence was not macabre, the memory not sorrowful, but warm and comforting.

The last time he had seen Mr. Gray had been on the occasion of the Damons’ tenth wedding anniversary. There had been a small party at the Damons’ apartment, with a few of the agency’s clients of whom they were particularly fond and an old friend of Damon’s, Martin Crewes, who had been a client and had gone to Hollywood, where he was now a highly paid screenwriter and had a business manager who made his deals for him. He was in New York for conferences with a director, and Damon had been pleased to hear his voice on the phone the day before. They had been good friends, and he had been an honest and gifted man and had always been good company. He had written two fine novels about the small town in which he had grown up in Ohio, but they had hardly sold at all and Crewes had told Damon and Mr. Gray as he was leaving for the West Coast, “The hell with it. I surrender. I’m tired of starving. There has to be a limit to the number of times you hit your head against the stone wall. The only thing I know how to do is write, and if somebody wants to pay me for it, God be with him. I’ll try not to write shit, but if that’s what they want, that’s what I’ll give them.” He had been a humorous and zestful man when Damon had known him, but after a few minutes over the drinks before dinner, Damon was saddened to see that his friend had turned into a solemn and pompous windbag who told dreary anecdotes about producers and directors and movie stars, punctuating his conversation with a high, nervous giggle that put Damon’s nerves on edge.

He had been a solidly built, slightly fat young man but now was trimmed down to the bone and Damon guessed that he did calisthenics at least two hours a day and ate only fruits and nuts to maintain that tense, ballet dancer’s figure. His hair glistened, an unnatural ebony, and was cut in a kind of pageboy bob that completely covered his ears. He wore a black turtleneck sweater, with a thick gold chain hanging on his chest and black pants and a fawn-colored cashmere jacket. The boy from the little town in Ohio about whom he had once written had successfully disappeared.

In his first ten minutes in the room he had already told the assembled guests that the picture he had just completed had cost a cool seven and the next one was going to be epical in scope and they’d be lucky to get in under ten. It took a few moments for Damon to realize that the seven was seven million and the ten ten million.

When Mr. Gray came in, later than the other guests, he made his disapproval of Crewes plain with his first words to the man—“Ah, Stonewall Crewes has finally returned to take the salute of his ragged but loyal troops”—and Damon knew that it had been a mistake to invite the screenwriter to the party. And when Mr. Gray stepped back to survey Crewes, as though to get a better look at a painting in a museum and said, in tones of mock wonder, “Is that the Paramount uniform?” Damon knew that Crewes would never call him again, no matter how many times he came to New York.

Still, the party was agreeable; Crewes left early, after drinking only soda water with a slice of lemon in it and merely nibbling at some salad and around the edges of the slice of baked ham that Sheila had put on his plate.

The Damons were leaving the next day for a month tour of Europe and the friends who had been to Europe advised them of places they couldn’t afford to miss, and the friends who had not been to Europe told them how much they envied the travelers and Mr. Gray, in a ceremonious speech, presented Damon with a leather-bound diary in which to put down his impressions of the trip and gave Sheila a slide rule in a suede leather case with which you could figure out how to change meters and centimeters into yards and inches and foreign currencies into the value in American dollars.

The party ended late, but Damon could see that Mr. Gray was loath to leave and poured him his third brandy of the night and whispered, “Stay a while,” before saying good-bye to his other guests. Sheila went into the bedroom to do some last-minute packing, and Damon fixed himself a drink and sat down in the chair near the end of the couch on which Mr. Gray was sitting.

“I have to apologize, Roger,” Mr. Gray said, “for what I did to Crewes. After all, he was one of your guests.”

“Nonsense,” Damon said. “Anybody who comes to a party in New York dressed like that deserves what he gets.”

“I just couldn’t hold myself back,” Mr. Gray said. “You know, I have nothing against the movies,
per se.
In fact, I love them. And I have nothing against the people who make them. But when I see a man who had the talent Crewes had let himself go like that and never write a decent word in ten years, I mourn. The waste, man, the waste. There’re writers who’ve gone through our office I’ve counseled to go out there and stay there because I knew they’d be happier adapting other people’s materials and relieved of the heavy burden of creation. They’d be paid besides and I don’t underestimate the love for money some men have, and anyway the language wouldn’t be a phrase the loser by their spending their lives writing to order. And there are other men I’ve counseled to go and do one picture, for the experience, for the money, because I knew they’d come back and do the work they were born to do.” He sipped sadly at his brandy. “And in Crewes’s case it was a personal disappointment. I thought I was molding him. I saw a one-act play of his in one of those Equity Library presentations, and I sought him out and told him he was a novelist, not a playwright, and I financed him for a full year while he was working on his first book and he was one of the most promising young men ever to come into the office. Now, what is he? A suntanned cockerel, crowing in the barnyard.” His mouth twisted in distaste. “Ah, why go on about it? In our profession disappointment is the one commodity we can be sure will arrive with every morning’s mail.” He sipped his drink in silence for a few moments, staring thoughtfully into the embers of the dying fire. “Not only in our profession,” he said bitterly. “My son, for example.”