The Bookmakers (15 page)

“Long as he stays with us,” said McClain. “Breaking into my own desk is a snap.”

“Excellent,” said Wolfowitz, smiling to convey admiration for the big man’s professional skills. “Send me copies say, once a week, and I’ll pass them on. That way Ephron can monitor Mack’s state of mind.”

“What happens if he, well, decides to go through with it?”

“Dr. Ephron said that Mack probably regards you as surrogate
parents”—Wolfowitz shrugged to indicate his own inability to understand such abstruse psychiatric reasoning—“and that it isn’t likely he’ll do anything rash while he’s with you.”

“You ask me, what Mack needs is a good woman,” said McClain. “He’s lonely. It comes through on every page. I was like that until I met Joyce. You married?”

“Happily,” said Wolfowitz. “Very happily. I won’t be, though, if I miss my flight back to New York.” He made a rueful, you-know-how-wives-are face and scooped Mack’s pages into his briefcase. “Just keep sending me the pages and I’ll stay in touch.”

“This Ephron, you’re sure he knows what he’s doing? I mean, some of these shrinks—”

“Relax, John,” said Wolfowitz, taking his elbow to convey manly intimacy. “Ephron’s the best in his field. He won’t let things get out of hand. Trust me on this, okay?”

“You know what they say about guys who say ‘trust me,’ ” McClain said. Wolfowitz looked at him sharply and McClain grinned. “Hey, just kidding,” he said, tapping the editor’s briefcase. “I wouldn’t be giving you this if I didn’t trust you. If there’s one thing I am, it’s a judge of character.”

The pilot announced the plane’s descent into LaGuardia. Wolfowitz fastened his seatbelt and considered his next move. He took a small, leatherbound address book from his briefcase, checked under “H” and found what he was looking for: the phone number of Walter T. Horton.

Six months ago, Walter T. had come to him begging for help. He was HIV positive, had no health insurance and was desperate for money. “I’d even be willing to ghostwrite,” he said.

Wolfowitz had nothing for him then, but he did now. Walter T. Horton was going to write a suicide diary of his own. Like Mack’s, it would be the story of an author with a year to live who goes back to his hometown and moves into his old house. Its structure, plot, even some of its characters, would be strikingly similar to
The Diary of a Dying Man
. Only Horton’s novel, published by a
small house in which Wolfowitz was a very silent partner, would be on sale before Mack Green’s diary was even due.

Naturally, Horton’s extraordinary work, given force and drama by his personal circumstances, would get a lot of publicity. Wolfowitz would discover, to his horror, that Green had stolen the idea for
The Diary of a Dying Man
from another author—one suffering from AIDS, no less. Gothic would be forced to sue, the news would, of course, leak out—and Mack Green’s career would be over; no publisher in America would ever touch one of his books again. As a bonus, the scandal would generate huge sales for Horton’s novel.

Maybe, after all that, Mack might really commit suicide—there was a morbid core to
The Diary of a Dying Man
that encouraged Wolfowitz to hope. Or maybe he’d just spend the rest of his life as a drunken, dazed pariah. Either way, Dr. Ephron wouldn’t be much help because there was no Dr. Ephron. Wolfowitz smiled, relishing the irony of inventing a fictional character to bring about the destruction of Mack Green. Maybe I should become an author myself, he thought, as the plane touched down on the runway.

Six weeks before Christmas, Herman Reggie made his annual trip to California. He stayed, as usual, with his cousin Jeff Reggie and his family in Cheviot Hills. During the day he played uncle, taking his two young nieces shopping, to the movies or out to Venice to watch the roller skaters. Evenings he spent with Jeff and his wife, Rosie, often in the company of other movie executives and producers. The only time Herman Reggie was alone was when he was asleep in the guest bedroom, and even then he made sure to keep the door open so that the sound of his snoring would be audible throughout the house.

Herman’s California routine was calculated to give the impression of a bachelor enjoying some time with relatives. In fact, he came to LA for an alibi. The weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas were always a rough time in his business. People were more reluctant than usual to part with their money, especially
when it was supposed to go for Johnny’s new bike or Susie’s new dollhouse. But a debt was a debt, and Herman Reggie wasn’t Santa Claus. An unusual amount of coercion was needed during the holiday season, and sometimes accidents happened. It was a good time to be three thousand miles away from New York, surrounded by respectable citizens who could vouch for his whereabouts.

Still, Herman genuinely enjoyed the time he spent with his relatives. The little girls were well-behaved and Jeff and Rosie were old friends as well as family; they had all grown up together in the same Jersey neighborhood. For a while, years back, Herman and Rosie had been the couple, not Rosie and Jeff. Herman didn’t hold it against her that she had chosen his cousin. Rosie was a smart handicapper, which he respected. Her choice had set her up for life in a big house with a pool and lemon trees in the yard, his-and-hers Porsches and a live-in couple from El Salvador to do the dirty work.

All this luxury had been provided by Jeff Reggie. At fifty-one he was two years younger than Herman, although the two cousins, with their bald, oval heads, pinched features and soft, pear-shaped bodies, looked enough alike to be brothers. Jeff was a successful and well-regarded producer of schlock movies—kick-boxing epics, made-for-TV tearjerkers about kids with fatal diseases, cheap sci-fi and the like—and he also did a flourishing side business in porno. He didn’t need the money from the skin flicks, but he had never prepared himself for a life of virtue, and his unexpected respectability left him feeling somehow unfulfilled.

Herman understood this—his cousin was, after all, a Reggie—and it served as the basis for collaboration. From time to time, Jeff introduced Herman to high-rolling Hollywood customers. In return, Herman provided New York outlets for some of his cousin’s raunchier porno movies. The deals weren’t favors—each Reggie scrupulously took his percentage of the action—but there was a sense of family solidarity and trust to the transactions that Herman appreciated.

“I want your opinion about a property I own,” he said to Jeff one evening as they sat, dressed in baggy wet bathing suits, sipping white-wine spritzers and snorting lines of coke by the side of the piano-shaped pool. “It’s a book. I wonder if it’s worth anything.”

“A book? Since when do you need my advice about making book?”

“No, a real book, a novel. By an author named Mack Green. Ever heard of him?”

Jeff tilted his head and shut his eyes, trying to remember the name. “Yeah, Paramount bought a baseball story by him a while back,” he said. “Nothing ever came of it as I recall. What do you mean, you own his book?”

“Not all of it, 10 percent. His agent owed me some money and I took his cut instead.”

“No kidding? Who’s the agent?”

“Fella by the name of Russo, in New York.”

“Tommy Russo?”

“That’s right, Tommy Russo. You know him?”

“Sure I know him. In this business, everybody knows everybody. You gotta be careful with this guy, Herm. He could be connected. Maf.”

“Maf,” scoffed Reggie. “The man’s afraid of midgets.”

Jeff looked at his cousin closely but said nothing—he had long ago stopped trying to understand Herman’s enigmatic remarks.

“Anyway, I was wondering if maybe this book might not make a good movie,” Herman continued. “And if so, how I go about selling it.”

“What’s it about?”

“I’ll tell you the story,” said Reggie. “See what you think.” Slowly he recounted the plot as Russo had explained it to him in New York.

“Not bad,” said Jeff. “It’s what they call high concept. Guy decides to kill himself, one year to live, that’s good. And author movies are hot these days. How’s the book?”

“Green’s still working on it,” said Herman. “Russo says he’s out in his hometown in Michigan.”

“Nice touch,” said Jeff. “Hero goes back to his hometown. Maybe he decides not to kill himself after all, the thing’s got a happy ending. Happy endings are best.”

“Well, they can change it around for the movies, no matter how he writes it,” said Herman. “That’s what they do, right?”

Jeff nodded. “Make it more commercial, yeah.”

“So? What can I get for it?”

“Right now? Nothing. If it’s a good story, maybe ten, twenty grand on an option. Of course a best-selling novel goes for seven figures. But that’s a longshot.”

“You’re right there,” said Herman. “Green’s track record lately has been pisspoor.”

The two men sat in silence for a while. Then Herman Reggie said, softly, “But what if he really did it?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, supposing this suicide diary turned out to be real? Supposing he wrote it and then went ahead and killed himself?”

“Why would he do that?”

“I’m only asking what if,” said Herman.

“A genuine snuff diary by a well-known author? With the right promo, it could be bigger than the Kennedy assassination. Bestseller, movie, TV series, it might be worth fifty million. Hell, these days the sky’s the limit.”

“I could retire.”

“Keep dreaming,” Jeff said.

“That’s my right as an American.” There was another silence and then Herman turned to his cousin and said, “Would you be interested?”

“Like I told you, it depends on how the book does. I don’t buy unpublished novels.”

“What about if it comes with a corpse? Would that interest you?”

“Herm, this is heavy stuff—”

“Look,” said Herman, lowering his voice, “here’s how I see it. Green’s writing the diary one way or the other. The only question is, will he be alive or dead when it’s finished? You care if Mack Green lives?”

“I’ve never even met Mack Green,” said Jeff.

“I rest my case,” said Herman. “If you saw in the paper that Mack Green dropped dead tomorrow, you wouldn’t even bother reading his obituary. Am I right?”

“Yeah, but he’s not going to drop dead.”

“Yes he is,” said Herman. “For that kind of money, he’s going to kill himself, guaranteed.”

“Okay, I’ll ask again. What’s in it for him?”

“That’s not the question,” said Herman. “The question is, what’s in it for you? Half of fifty million bucks is the answer.”

“Why half?” asked Jeff.

“Because I’d be in for the other half,” said Herman. “Plus my 10 percent agent’s fee. But the flick, the TV, anything else, we’d go down the middle. Green delivers the book, I deliver the body and you take care of the show biz.”

“They have capital punishment in California,” said Jeff. It was a statement of fact, not an objection.

“Michigan doesn’t. Besides, that’s only for murder. Green’s going to commit suicide.”

Jeff Reggie rose laboriously from his deckchair, walked around the pool gulping large lungfuls of lemon-scented air and then returned to his seat, lowering his large behind into the pool of water he had left. “Okay, yeah. If this’s all I need to know, I’m interested,” he said.

“Good. Set us up a production company, something that can’t be traced directly to the name of Reggie. Get a front man. Can you do it?”

“No problem. I got a Jew lawyer could set up a phony country if he had to.”

“You and your damn ethnic stereotypes,” Herman said. “What difference does it make if the lawyer’s a Jewish-American?”

“None, none,” replied Jeff impatiently. “Forget I mentioned it.”

“Okay. I’ll sell you the film rights, television, the whole package for, say, a hundred thousand dollars. That sound about right?”

“For an unfinished Mack Green novel? It’s outrageous.”

“Good, that means it’ll motivate him to finish quickly. From what I understand he’s a quitter.”

“Why not wait until he’s dead?”

“Because I need his signature on the contracts, otherwise we could get tied up in all kinds of probate problems. Oh, and make the offer through Tommy Russo. I don’t want anybody knowing I’m connected to this.”

“Except Tommy. He’ll know.”

“I’ll deal with Tommy.”

“You’ve really thought this through, haven’t you?” said Jeff with admiration. “Tell me, how’s Green going to kill himself?”

“Does it matter?” asked Herman. “I mean, as far as the movie’s concerned?”

“Not really,” said Jeff. “I’m just curious.”

“Don’t worry about it, then,” said Herman, draining the last of his spritzer and daintily wiping a speck of coke from one nostril with the back of his plump, liver-spotted hand. “He’s a writer. He’ll be creative.”

Mack sat at his desk watching the cold autumn drizzle run down the window, remembering the last time he made love to Linda Birney, here in this room, more than twenty years before. It had been raining then, too, a warm, sexy summer rain. He could see himself lying naked next to her, eyes closed, running his hands over her soft skin, and he felt a great surge of tenderness for the young man on the bed, which was interrupted by the jangling of the telephone.