Bandbox (37 page)

And from what he’d learned just before his walk, it might be that for a while to come.

Back inside his office, Cuddles removed his raincoat and found Harris taking up position in the doorway. The boss was in a state. “Where’s Norman?” he asked.

“I’ve no idea.”

Harris shook his head. “The pictures on his desk are gone. Is Fine around?”

“Not back from the courtroom,” said Cuddles. He realized that ’Phat was looking for friends, and that he himself still hadn’t been redeemed to the point where he was eligible to serve.

“How about your girlfriend? Is she here?”

“Do me a favor,” said Cuddles. “Tell her that’s the role life has thrust upon her.”

Harris, all need, stood there waiting. Cuddles refrained from giving him the look he deserved, and added only: “She left early.”

Harris moved his eyes to the clock, whose second hand kept falling and ticking, falling and ticking.

“You know,” said Cuddles. “You can find Jimmy and Paulie up on eighteen.”

Stung by the remark, and the realization that on this crucial evening of his life it was coming down to him and Houlihan, Harris finally asked: “Have a drink?”

Cuddles hesitated, and tried to pretend his delay came from something
other than pride, but Harris persisted: “There are two bottles of pre-Prohibition Stoli still standing—at the back of the closet, where my moose used to be.”

Once the two of them got settled on opposite sides of the big marble desk, under the gaze of Yvette and Claudine, Harris could no longer hold it in: “I’ve got twenty minutes left to pick up the phone. I haven’t heard from Boylan, and the trucks leave the plant at five-thirty.” He looked at his
EDITOR OF THE YEAR
cigarette case, and the buckram-bound back issues, and the pictures of Mae West and Walker and all the rest of them inside their simple black frames. “I’m damned either way. What am I supposed to do? Hold it back and
skip
an issue?” He knew that would be like asking the rain cycle to skip a step; the sudden downward lurch of the sales graph would resemble the thunderbolt immediately hurled by Oldcastle. “Even Betty’s taken a pass,” said Harris. “She claims she’ll love me either way.”

“Sounds good to me,” said Cuddles.

“Not to me,” Harris responded. “I’ll hate myself if I pick wrong. And hate myself worse if she still loves me after that.” He took a frustrated pause. “Christ, we came
so close
with this. I don’t know whether to kill Jimmy or kill Norman.”

Cuddles thought a moment before asking, “You know that second bottle of czarist Stoli? Wrap it up for Jimmy. And put in a thank-you card—for forcing you to the top of your game.”

Harris looked at him blankly.

“Has my judgment ever been wrong?” asked Cuddles.

It was an astonishing question. Cuddles’ absence of initiative had for so long been so total that one would no more ponder the matter of his judgment than one might worry over the walking skills of a man who’d stopped breathing.

“Call the plant,” said Cuddles. “Tell the trucks to roll.”

Harris was sweating. His own judgment and initiative were top-notch, but what he’d always had in huger measure than anyone else was nerve. He now peered at Houlihan, the last man around the campfire. To bet everything on the look in
his
eye, which hadn’t been clear since long before
Bandbox
began its slide, would take the last dollop of guts the editor-in-chief could find.

“Mrs. Zimmerman,” he said, not even realizing he’d picked up the phone. “Get me the printing plant.”

The following morning, at five minutes to six, Mukluk was barking so loud even Betty could hear him. Taking off her sleep mask, she sat up in bed and noticed that Joe was gone. She went to the window and peeked through the blinds to see whether the sun had even come up. Sixth Avenue looked barely awake. The Italian news vendor hadn’t yet opened his stand in front of the Warwick, and Betty could see a lone, too-early customer trying to extract a magazine from a bundle dropped off by a delivery truck.

She realized it was Joe, who’d been up most of the night hoping for a call from Boylan. She sighed, and stepped away from the window. “Do you think you’d like it if we all went to live in the country?” she asked the highly indifferent Mukluk.

Out on the sidewalk, dressed in his best suit for the GME breakfast, Harris continued his struggle with the bale of magazines, until he felt a tap on the shoulder.

“I was going to leave the money!” he protested.

“Hasn’t the all-night newsstand made it to Manhattan?” asked a familiar voice. “We’ve had ’em in Brooklyn for years.”

Cuddles Houlihan handed his boss the latest issue of
Bandbox
. In another hour Rosemary LaRoche would be kissing Shep on a thousand magazine racks across New York City.

“Jesus,” said Harris, startled more by the horrid fact of the magazine than by Cuddles. He asked if Betty had somehow dispatched him to the hotel to provide moral support.

“No,” Cuddles explained. “I knew you’d be out here. I’m just glad you’re not in your slippers. Come on, you’ve got an appointment downtown.”

Downtown! It sounded to Harris like news of his arrest.

“Trust me,” said Cuddles, who put the two of them into a taxi he directed to Centre Street.

Traveling along Broadway, Harris couldn’t stop himself from looking into the magazine’s new issue. He winced at the picture of Boylan next to the crucial, now-erroneous paragraph.

“Try the piece on
Nelson’s Loose-Leaf Encyclopaedia
,” Cuddles suggested. “It’s really got something.”

It was still not seven when they walked into Judge Gilfoyle’s courtroom—so odd an hour they couldn’t be sure whether night court or the regular daytime version was in session. Then Daisy DiDonna, glowing with maximum wattage, rose from one of the spectators’ benches to greet Cuddles with a kiss on the lips.

“He feels like a new man!” she cried, struggling to keep down the decibels of this remark about the judge.

“I knew you two had something in common,” replied Cuddles, as he sat Harris down beside the countess.

The whole scene had a disturbing, dreamlike quality for the editor-in-chief, who felt he might at any moment discover himself to be wearing pajamas or standing on a ledge. The three of them in this
back row were, aside from the bailiff and two lawyers, the only ones in the courtroom.

“All rise!”

In walked Francis X. Gilfoyle, who seemed newly magisterial, a lofty, independent jurist on the order of Charles Evans Hughes, not some small-time robe rack co-owned by Tammany and the gangs.

Daisy could not stop effervescing. “Look at him!” she whispered to Cuddles. “Not even a speck of dandruff. Those Listerine scalp rinses really work, just like the advertisements say!”

The judge banged his gavel and Daisy came to order with a smile, as if he’d given her a love tap.

“Bring them in,” Gilfoyle ordered the bailiff, with a great deal of volume and sincerity.

Captain Patrick Boylan himself led in three men for arraignment. Within two minutes the judge had read out kidnapping charges against the fellow who’d helped Eddie Diamond hustle Shep out of Oldcastle’s apartment, and assault counts against the one who’d roughed him up in the New York garage. The third man, Mr. Ivan Jones, aka Jacobs, had participated only in the California phase of this crime, but had been arrested out there by Boylan’s men on a series of outstanding New York charges.

Gilfoyle banged his gavel a second time, refusing to let the men’s lawyer—with whom he was well acquainted—say anything on their behalf. He denied the defendants bail before they could even ask for it, and kept them standing for a crisp, eloquent denunciation of the evils wrought by organized criminality in the realms of loan-sharking, sports-fixing, and even “the construction of substandard housing for the colored and the poor.” He made sure this last, pointed complaint had drilled the ears of Rothstein’s foot soldiers before actually crying, “Take them away!”

Everything the judge had said reached Harris’s ears, too—without,
however, being absorbed by his understanding. He watched the prisoners as they were led off by the bailiff and Boylan, who locked eyes with him and glared—half in anger, half in triumph. No, he hadn’t had any choice but to make the arrests, not if he didn’t want Harris’s publicity machine depicting his department as hopelessly off the ball; but Boylan could see, in the editor’s still-drooping countenance, that he’d extracted at least a pound of flesh by the torturous waiting game. Before disappearing from the courtroom, the captain narrowed his eyes still further, sending a message that he would get Jehoshaphat Harris yet.

“It all fits together!” cried Daisy. “Just like Scanties!” It was unclear to Harris which part of this puzzle corresponded to the panties, or the girdle, or the brassiere of that detestably unseductive piece of modern apparel. But then Cuddles told him what he’d told Daisy and Becky late last night—that Tuesday’s noontime delivery to Rothmere Investments had been a single sheet of paper Shep had heard about and then taken from Mr. Jones’s desk out in the San Rafael Valley: a few columns of spectacularly incriminating facts and figures that Shep then kept hidden on his person at all times, including the moment of his rescue by Max. Amidst the glamour of the dining car and the Commodore, he’d forgotten, until Sunday night, about this piece of paper whose handful of details made most of Rothstein’s better-known operations, from the Black Sox to Juniper, look like a summertime chautauqua.

Yesterday afternoon, just before his errand at the Commodore, Miss Freda Rosenberg had called to thank Cuddles for the document, in exchange for which, Mr. Rothstein agreed, Max Stanwick could live out his life in good health and Judge Gilfoyle consider his judicial independence restored.

That everything had bounced like a double-play ball from Tinker to Evers to Chance began to dawn on Harris even more brightly than the morning sun, now established in the sky above the courthouse.

“We’d better get to the Biltmore,” said Cuddles, once they were out on the sidewalk. “You don’t want the porridge getting cold.”

Harris didn’t hear him. Fully reanimated, he was striding toward Patrick Boylan, determined to reach the captain before he got into his squad car.

Holding aloft his silver-pencil trophy, Jimmy Gordon looked down from the dais and decided that the applause, sweet as it might be, couldn’t compare with the sight of the empty
Bandbox
table down front. Its only occupant was an identifying centerpiece, a fishtailed stack of the magazine’s brand-new mendacious issue. Jimmy had imagined what it would feel like watching Joe listen to his speech, but the absence of his vanquished rival—
too scared to show!
—felt even better.

He looked out across the whitecaps of napery in the ocean-sized dining room. Everyone was here: the bespectacled old brass of the
Saturday Evening Post
and
Century;
the upstarts, nearly as young as himself, from
The New Yorker
and
Time
. Four years working for Joe had kept him one of the crowd; eight months on his own had him up at this lectern.

“Cutaway,”
he intoned, “will shine its light not only on the fashionable and famous, not only on the achievers and the record-breakers, but also on the sad overreachers who drag down our age with their dishonest graspings.”

As he ladled these words over the industry assembled at his feet, a squad of well-tailored young men infiltrated the four dozen breakfast
tables, passing out the just-printed May number of
Cutaway
, which Jimmy had not wasted on a centerpiece, but held in reserve for this moment.

THREADBARE!

shouted the cover line.

JOE HARRIS AND
BANDBOX
CREATE A TAILOR-MADE FRAUD

A Special Investigation by Paul Montgomery

Jimmy continued his slow, sonorous remarks while the diners flipped to the opening graf of the lead article, which read:

Jimmy took a long pause to let everyone scan the accumulated evidence, as well as Paulie’s brief peroration against “an alliterating fantasist’s corruption of youth, and a whole magazine’s mockery of the once-proud NYPD.”

The susurrus in the ballroom became a loud buzz; editors sprinted to the
Bandbox
centerpiece to see just what Joe Harris had perpetrated. Jimmy watched the commotion and felt he was making commercial and artistic history. People would be talking about this occasion years from now, the way they still recalled the Armory Show and
The Rite of Spring
’s premiere. He waited for the noise to
die down enough that he could tell everyone how
Cutaway
now stood as “the
only
magazine in this new awards category.” And while he waited, he could see, just outside the room, through two open doors, the smoke from a photo flash.

The buzzing did not abate, but the smoke quickly cleared, and once it did Jimmy’s eyes were greeted by the sight of the Shepard kid leading a three-man parade through the ballroom, all the way to the
Bandbox
table, which had been denuded of its May issue. Behind the kid marched the unmistakable form of Joe Harris, and behind that a figure recognized from the newspapers as Captain Patrick Boylan.

“There’s no centerpiece,” said Joe. He was taking note of an opportunity, not a lack. “Shep, get up there.”

John Chilton Shepard, by now accustomed to orders of the most inexplicable kind, bounded up onto the tablecloth in his newly shined shoes. The crowd, not knowing what to think, began to quiet down.

“Captain?” said Joe, pressing his luck. “Want to make Commissioner someday?”