The Way of All Fish: A Novel (13 page)

Noon would mean that he would be late for his luncheon date with Madeline Crow, an editor at Quagmire whom he was trying to persuade to take on one of his client’s books, described by Bass as an “existential prizefighting novel” about two gay fighters having an affair who then find themselves in the ring together.

Madeline Crow had laughed uncontrollably and unforgivably. “Oh, fuck a duck, Bass; it’s ridiculous.”

L. Bass clenched at the gritty language; he had never been able to manage such scatological outbursts from women. “If it sounds unlikely, that’s where the existential theme comes in.”

“Tell me another. Anyway, he’s already a Quagmire author. So what’s wrong with Melody LaRue?” His present editor.

Her name, for one thing. It made him shudder. He could see her squirming around a pole. “To tell the truth, Madeline, she’s just not up to a book this profound.” To tell the truth, the author thinks you’re hot. Naturally, he did not share this with her.

“ ‘Up to’ it? What, for shit’s sake, is there to be ‘up to’ in this business?
Proust, Flaubert, Xing Ho Shit aren’t around anymore. I can’t just waltz in and take Melody’s authors away from her. Get real.”

Bass frowned. Who was Xing Ho Shit? He said, “I’m simply saying you have the intellect to handle this sort of multifaceted novel.”

She sighed heavily. “Lunch, you said?”

He was relieved. He thought of himself as a persuasive man. “Wonderful. Gramercy Tavern, say one-thirty?”

“Okay. I have to tell them how to make dirty martinis, but the food’s all right.”

All of this lunchtime drinking. How did people manage to work?

It was fifteen past noon, and Paul Giverney still hadn’t appeared. Bass was prowling his office. He stopped to realign magazines on his glass-topped coffee table. He stopped to straighten the stuffed bass. It was an eighth of an inch higher on the right end. Lack of alignment annoyed L. Bass Hess.

His father, Louis Hess, had been a first-rate bass fisherman and Bass had put the fish here in his memory. Bass fished himself when he went to the Everglades. He hated it, fishing; he hated the Everglades; but it was part of his annual visit to his aunt. Aunt Simone, whom he hated as well, and who made him shudder far more than Melody LaRue.

His intercom buzzed. He stiffened.

“Mr. Giverney is here,” said Stephanie gaily.

He fairly ran for the door, composed himself, tried on a few different expressions, and went for the one suggesting curiosity but not excitement.

“Paul! So nice to see you.”

“Bass.” They shook hands.

“Come in, come in.”

“You’ll have had your tea.”

Bass was confused. “What? Tea?”

“It’s what they say in Glasgow. ‘Come in, come in, you’ll have had your tea.’ ”

A brief silence. Then Bass said, “Have you been to Glasgow?”

Paul sank down in one of the dark leather chairs on either side of the coffee table. “You don’t get it?”

Bass assumed it was meant to be funny and laughed. The laugh was as thin as parchment.

Paul Giverney knew Hess didn’t get it. “In other words, the Glaswegians are notoriously cheap.”

Bass ran his hand over the back of his skull with its thinning red hair. “Right. Now, Paul, what can I do for you?”

“I’m thinking of changing agents.”

L. Bass Hess could hardly sit still in his chair. He wanted to bounce like a baby. To control himself, he moved an ashtray, free of ashes, and coughed into his fist. “You need an agent who can handle everything for you, I’d say. So you can spend your time writing your wonderful books.” He smiled, crookedly, charmingly, he thought.

Paul thought the smile merely looked fake, and the “wonderful books” sounded faker. Who the hell did Hess think he was patronizing?

Bass went on. “I believe your present agent is James McKinney? That isn’t working for you?”

“Jimmy’s a great agent. He just hasn’t got the time.”

The time? For Paul Giverney? Was McKinney insane? “I don’t understand. How can he not?”

“Jimmy’s more interested in representing good writers who haven’t broken out yet, or haven’t been published right, or need someone with vision.” Vision. In the publishing industry? Oddly enough, one person who did have it was Bobby Mackenzie. If only he weren’t such a bastard. “A writer like Joe Moss or—” He was dying to say Cindy Sella, but that might tip Hess off, even though he didn’t seem to be operating on a fully charged battery.

“A noble calling for Jimmy.” To avoid going along with nobility himself, Bass said, “I screen potential clients carefully. That’s why I have only eight or nine.” Actually, it was six or seven, and he badly needed more, screened or unscreened.

As if disturbed by Hess’s apparent unpopularity, Paul looked at the door, giving the impression that he might make a break for it. He said, frowning deeply, “That’s not very many.”

Quickly, Bass said, “I want to be able to give my full attention to each one.”

“You couldn’t do that with twenty writers? What would you be giving them? Your half-attention?”

“No, that’s not exactly what—”

“So what are your criteria?”

A blank look. “Criteria?”

“You said you screen carefully.”

“Oh, yes. I would be looking for writers who were, say, on the same wavelength as myself.”

As
I
. Or even
me.
People were always saying “myself” instead of “me” because they were so damned afraid of sounding like they hadn’t graduated from high school. Why was Hess representing writers?

“I have no idea what that means, the same wavelength. You mean temperamentally twinned or something like that?”

“Beautifully put!”

Oh, Christ. This guy would be chewing his cuffs in a minute.

Hess went on, without the chew: “A suitable temperament, nonmercurial, you know what I’m saying . . .”

As Hess droned on, Paul rose and walked over to the bookshelves against the wall, stuck his hands in his pockets, and studied the titles, not listening. There was a framed photo between two Don DeLillo novels of Hess lounging against a Mustang. How un-Hess-like, thought Paul. He could not imagine Hess in a Mustang. He noticed one of the quarter panels was deeply dented.

“. . . but what I mean about temperament is, I really don’t want, you know, any of your highly volatile, easily upset writers.”

Paul turned reluctantly from the books. “Bass—” He held up his hands, pushing back this absurdity, and said with as much condescension as he could muster, “This is the publishing world we’re talking about. These are writers. Volatility is the order of the day all around. Levelheadedness is not what you get unless you’re looking for an astronaut or Obi-Wan Kenobi or Michael Jordan. Or—” It was fun, trying to think of guys who had it so together that even taking an ax to them wouldn’t separate flesh and bone, but he guessed he should stop. Hess was looking pretty
limp. He nodded toward the photo of the Mustang. “That your car? Nice.” Cars bored Paul.

“It’s a ’64. It was in a small accident. Needs a new partial panel. But you know how hard it is to find parts for a ’64 Mustang. Naturally, I park it in Connecticut.”

Naturally. I park mine in front of 30 Rock. “I don’t have a car.” Paul sat down again, leaned his head back to stare at the ceiling. “Maybe I should just handle my own books.”

That got a quick response. With a look of near-wild desperation, Bass inched forward in his chair. “Paul, that could spell disaster. There are too many different things to handle. You’ve got subsidiary rights, which grow more complicated almost daily. Then there are the foreign rights and spin-offs from them. Film, TV, not to mention electronic . . .”

He went on to pile right after right, searching for as many as he could come up with. He was stepping all over squishy ground in moorland rumored to be full of quicksand. Oh, for the hound of the Baskervilles! L. Bass on his back, throat ripped open. Paul’s imagination was hotfooting it all over Dartmoor when he decided to break the subrights spell. “What sort of agency clause is written into the contract?” he asked suddenly.

“Agency? It’s merely the standard—”

“Show me.”

“Now?”

“Of course.”

There was no spring in L. Bass’s step as he rose and went to his desk. He shuttled drawers in and out, found a contract, and handed it to Paul.

Paul zipped to the last page, read it. “This right to see the next manuscript is going to have to come out.”

“That? Oh, but that’s just routine, a matter of form. Means nothing.”

“If it means nothing, why is it in here? Standard? Routine? Matter of form? You know as well as I do the other guy’s lawyers are just waiting for the defendant to invoke ‘standard’ and ‘routine.’ No way.” Paul got up with the air of one about to leave.

Bass got up like a shot, wild-eyed, as if he had just viewed the hound coming over the hill. “Paul, I’m sure that clause could be reworded to your satisfaction.”

Paul smiled. “Then reword it and call me.”

He thanked Stephanie and walked to the door, which he would have continued walking through, except he saw the big photos of writers lined up on screens.

Cindy Sella. The bastard was suing her and using her to advertise at the same time.

T
he provenance of the woman who answered the door was not the Bronx or South Jersey.

They were expecting a small woman, wrinkled and nutlike. This one was tall, onyx-eyed, dark-haired, the hair pulled back so tightly it had the finish of mahogany. She wore a jade-green dress of some damask-like silk whose small covered buttons went up to the neck.

Very Asian, thought Karl. Well, that’s what she was—Malaysian, wasn’t she?

Candy stuck out his hand, then withdrew it, unsure. She gave no sign that she’d noticed the withdrawal or that she did or didn’t mind the appearance of two strangers at her door who were probably neither CIA nor FBI operatives.

“Miss—” said Candy.

“Madam bin Musah—” said Karl.

“That would be ‘bint’ for a female,” she said. “ ‘Bin’ is the male form.”

Before Karl could step on his foot, Candy said, “Like bin Laden.”

Her smile was ironic. “An unfortunate example, but that is correct. And you are?” She made a very small sweep of her hand to take them in.

What surprised Karl was the excessive politeness in her tone and in the little gesture. They introduced themselves, Candy adding, “Danny Zito, uh, recommended you.”

“Ah. Mr. Zito.”

They could not remember ever hearing Danny referred to as “Mr.”

Another sweep of her hand, somewhat broader, gesturing them in. Her fingers were long and slim and ended in tapered nails with colorless polish. “Then I infer you’re in the same line of work?”

“As Danny? You could say that,” said Karl.

She smiled. They entered. The elaborate formality made Karl feel like he was walking on stilts.

They moved from a dimly lit foyer into a dimly lit living room that would have served well as a stage set for
Miss Saigon,
or what he imagined it must have been like, never having seen it. It was all dark reds, dark golds, and browns, and the whole of it seemed to shimmer in the lowered lights beneath silky-looking shades and in the glow of the even silkier fire.

“Please sit. Would you care for a little espresso? I was just having some.”

They both nodded, Candy thinking she could have offered a cup of poison and he’d have accepted. Some dame. As she poured into two little cups that had appeared miraculously from a drawer-like enclosure in the coffee table, he said, his memory tumbling over something that ended in “-pore” that Danny had mentioned, “You’re from Singapore, right?”

“No, not quite. I believe you mean Kuala Lumpur. Singapore has always been in China, very close to Malaysia’s border. Many people make that mistake.”

Jesus, thought Karl, this dame should be secretary of state. She knows fucking well “many people” didn’t make that mistake, because “many people” knew where Singapore was but didn’t trot out Kuala Lumpur at a moment’s notice. Until he’d looked in the Eyewitness guide, he hadn’t even known where the hell Malaysia was.

A thin brown cigarette, smoke pleasantly pungent, burned in a bronze ashtray beside a small soapstone Buddha. She picked up the cigarette, tapped off the ash, and lifted a silver-plated box from the table. This she passed to them. “Smoke? These are quite good, much more interesting than the usual.”

They each took one, and she closed the lid and replaced it. “Now, what can I do for you?”

“We need someone to pose as an importer of exotic fish,” said Karl. He lit his cigarette and sat back, slightly light-headed.

“An illegal,” Candy added.

“Illegal fish?” she said, her black eyes moving from one to the other.

“No, wait,” said Karl. “What we’re looking for, see, is information. The ‘importer’ pose, that’s just a cover to get you into their offices.”

“Or their good graces,” she said. “Interesting. What lies behind this?”

Candy and Karl took turns telling the story.

“Good heavens,” she said, and exhaled a stream of pungent smoke. “How banal.”

Candy wondered about banal. That was a new take on the situation. Anyway, the cigarette was getting into his bloodstream, and the effect was not unpleasant. He was melting into his chair. He studied the soapstone Buddha and wondered if he was becoming One with the universe. He preferred to remain Two. Hadn’t Woody Allen said something like that?