The Way of All Fish: A Novel (15 page)

Cindy had slung one strap of her bag over her shoulder and opened the door to see Edward Bishop just coming through the exit door. He liked to use the stairs.

He stopped. “Cindy!”

She had to admit one reason she liked him was that he made her feel she was a real treat—a sight for sore eyes, a port in a storm, a harbor. That’s enough, she told herself. “Edward! Come on in and have a drink.”

He walked toward her, smiling. “Thanks. I could use one.” He was wearing the same suit he always wore in the colder months. He had a high forehead, thinning brown hair, brown eyes, a mustache, wire-framed glasses, and no money. “You look to be going out.”

“Not right this minute. In a while. I’m just going to meet Sammy at Ray’s. Why don’t you come?”

A couple of times he had. He fitted right in. Even Ray thought he was a “good guy,” though he looked for all the world out of another decade. That suit, that mustache. Edward was a respected poet. Jimmy McKinney thought he was wonderful, that he might just be another Edwin Arlington Robinson. He had published two books of poetry, refreshing for Cindy, since the poems seemed out of an earlier era, too, one that made use of form and rhyme. Petrarchan sonnets, terza rima, sestinas.

“I can’t manage that tonight, but I’d like to come in and talk for a minute. Anything to put off the writing.”

“You mean you feel that way sometimes.”

Edward sat down in one of the armchairs. “I feel that way most of the time. It’s a kind of agony. Pardon the drama.”

The idea of Edward Bishop being dramatic made her pour more Jack Daniel’s into the glass than she’d intended. He drank bourbon, but very little. He tasted bourbon.

“Thank you. Mind?” He’d taken a pipe from his pocket, knowing she wouldn’t, and now unrolled some tobacco, stuffed it in, used his lighter.

She handed him the glass. “But how do you manage to do it for hours on end, Edward, if it’s so hard?”

“I don’t have much choice, since I do nothing else.”

“Oh, of course you do. Even Edwin Reardon—you know, the impoverished writer in
New Grub Street
—goes out walking for long periods of time.”

“Ah, but poor Reardon had the weight of the world on his shoulders. Or at least the weight of a wife and child. An unsympathetic wife, at that.”

“I hated her. I don’t think it’s fair that Edwin died and she wound up happily married to that writing-for-money Milvain at the end.”

“Perhaps that was Gissing’s final irony.”

She thought about it. “I don’t have the weight of the world on my shoulders, and I fool around most of the time.”

“You don’t carry a weight? Are you joking? I don’t see how you manage to concentrate at all with this damned agent and his godforsaken lawsuit. Yet you stay right with it.” He looked at the notebook on the side table, the pen atop it. “Today?”

“Yes, but I keep getting stuck. I don’t know enough.”

“Nobody knows enough.”

“I’ve been working on this book for two years, and I’m barely halfway through, if even this half is half. Did you know George Gissing wrote this”—she picked up
New Grub Street
—“in two months? There were three volumes; he wrote one every two or three weeks. And all of it in two months!”

“Weren’t there a lot of false starts and torn-up pages for a year before those two months?”

“Maybe, but—”

“Very probably he’d already done most of the work. I’d say Gissing’s two months were more like two years.”

For some reason, she preferred the two months. Maybe because it was something to hope for, to aim for, to admire.

Edward seemed to sense this. “You might very well be right. Perhaps he had tremendous focus and wrote for ten or twelve hours a day.”

“I think that’s it.”

The tiny movements of the fish must have caught at the corner of his eye, for he looked over there. “You’ve got a clown fish.” He rose and walked to the shelf that held the bowl, drink in hand.

Gus quickly uncurled from what had seemed a drugged sleep by the fireplace and hopped on the bench, as if he feared an interaction that he would miss out on.

“An albino clown fish, too,” said Edward. He talked for a good five minutes about clown fish, a detailed commentary on the various kinds.

“Edward,” she said, struck by his great store of knowledge. “Did you ever do drugs?”

T
hey were gathered in Bobby Mackenzie’s office—Bobby, Paul Giverney, Candy and Karl, and Clive Esterhaus. Clive had been a senior editor who was handed the plum job of publisher when Bobby went off (much against his will) to Australia, with a side trip to Dubai. He’d been gone for half the year and come back with a different view of things. Now Bobby Mackenzie liked to say, “To paraphrase Red Sanders, ‘Mackenzie isn’t everything; he’s the only thing.’ Just kidding.” Which he wasn’t.

They were all ranged around the office: Bobby was sitting with his feet up on his desk, smoking a Cuban cigar. Paul was lying on the big downy sofa against the far wall, his drink balanced on his chest. Candy and Karl were sitting in the same chairs they had last occupied, taking advantage of Bobby’s Cubans. Clive was leaning against the sill of the big window that overlooked Madison and half of Manhattan.

Clive had been rewarded with his own imprint when Bobby returned. The gesture was uncharacteristically generous. Clive wasn’t Bobby’s fall guy any longer.

They were gathered in perfect companionable silence, which had to set a record, given what they were: publisher, writer, editor, and two hit men.

Bobby had been talking about publishing—self-publishing, Amazon, e-books, unsolicited manuscripts, over-the-transom. “. . . an antique phrase. The stuff that used to get read by editorial assistants, the old slush-pile stuff. No more. Now the reading public, they’re the keepers of the slush pile, because practically anyone who can string three words together can get published on the Internet. Or Amazon-assisted. Or
actually published by Amazon. Writers, take heart! The world is your slush pile.”

Clive grunted. “Oh, shut up, Bobby.”

“No.” To the other three, he said, “Listen. Down the hall I have a little room. It was a small office that I’ve converted into a kind of library. Except there are no books, only unsolicited manuscripts. Shelves and shelves of them, ones that were never returned to the writers for one reason or another. I’ve been collecting them for years. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, I don’t know. I even got friends at other houses to donate them.” Bobby leaned back in his chair again and swirled the Scotch in his glass. “Whenever I hear some writer whining about how he can’t write, how he’s lost it all, I boot him in there for an hour so he can leaf through a few. It’s quite a tonic.” He raised his glass. “Or whatever.”

They were all drinking Talisker except for Clive, who was a Grey Goose guy. He had been in publishing for twenty-three years, long enough to be convinced that he was dumb when he was actually pretty smart. He had known L. Bass Hess for years as a conniving, litigious agent with an ego the size and shape of the Flatiron Building.

And a cheapskate, Clive had said. You wouldn’t catch Bass Hess placing pieces of gold on the eyes of the corpse of an Egyptian king. He’d put them in his pocket.

“So what now?” said Candy.

They had all decided that running Hess out of town would be a temporary fix (and not punishment enough). They wanted something permanent.

“If Joey G-C’s guys get to him again, that’ll be permanent,” Candy said.

Karl thought for a moment. “You know, we can maybe stop that hit if we show Joey we got something worse in store for Hess, and also maybe we can get Clive here to read Fabio’s manuscript—”

“Whoa!” Clive shoved out the hand not holding his vodka, palm out. “I’ve already got Danny Zito breathing down my neck with his new book. Not another goodfella, thanks.”

Karl shrugged. “Just a thought.”

“It’s not a bad one,” said Paul, who was tapping a Scripto pen against a small notebook resting on his chest beside his drink. Every now and
then he made a note. “Fabio might appear to L. Bass in a new and dangerous light.”

“Meaning?” said Clive.

“I don’t know. I’m just mulling. One thing leads to another. What do we know about Hess? What does the guy do? You said”—Paul looked over his shoulder at Clive—“the guy goes to Florida every year.”

“To the Everglades.”

“The ’Glades?” Paul wrote something down. “Sweet!”

“Visits his uncle. His uncle or his aunt.”

Bobby took the cigar out of his mouth. “He can’t tell the difference?”

“Uncle that went through a sex change, much to Bass’s disgust,” said Clive, knocking back his vodka, helping himself to more.

“You’re shitting us. Hess visiting a transvestite aunt?”

“Not the same thing, Bobby. You should read your own Dunces series:
Sex Change for Dunces.
”

“My God, that’s not mine. That’s E-Z Books, another imprint. That was started up after some birdbrainstorming by the Dubai brothers.”

Clive said, “Whatever else the aunt is, she’s rich. She’s his father’s brother-sister, and Bass is the only remaining relative. In other words, heir. But she’s big on the Everglades, a real alligator guy-girl, and she likes to threaten him with leaving her fortune to Friends of the Everglades. So he really sucks up to her.”

“The father,” said Bobby. “Someone told me—you? him?—his father was a champion bass fisherman.”

“No, not really. He cheated,” said Clive. “He’d net some four- or five-foot bass, keep them trapped overnight, then go out and reel them in the next day. He, too, was an asshole.”

“Does Hess fish when he’s there?”

Clive nodded. “Pretends to like it. The uncle-aunt adored the father, so Bass has to imitate him.”

Paul said from his prone position, with notebook, to Candy and Karl, “You guys have been tracking him for how long?”

“Three weeks,” said Candy. “Guy’s like a zombie. Ought to be down at the mall with the rest of the Undead, shopping. He meets up with clients or editors or whatever at the stroke of one at the Gramercy Tavern or 21 or that French place, Arles. He doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke,
doesn’t eat nothing but fish and peas and a boiled potato. We could tell you where he’ll be every damn minute. Once we got to Gramercy Park three minutes early, checked our watches, said ‘Now!,’ and here he comes around the corner.”

“He lives where?” said Bobby.

“Upper East Side, during the week. But his home’s in Connecticut. Wife and daughter live there. Second wife. I think the daughter’s hers, not his. They live in Darien—no, Wilton. Wilton, Connecticut.”

Bobby gave a small whistle. “You can’t even look at a house there for under a million. He must be getting a helluva lot in commissions.”

Clive shook his head. “His wife has money. I think she sank some of it in the agency when it wasn’t doing so well.”

Karl got up to top up his drink, said, “Every Wednesday on the way home, he stops off at St. Patrick’s.”

Paul looked up. “Yeah. Is he actually a Catholic, though? Or does he just like the cathedral?”

Karl shrugged, sat down again. “Dunno.”

“But you followed him in.”

“Sure. It’s only been the three times. We just sort of case the joint. Pretend we’re tourists.”

“What’s he do? I mean, does he genuflect? Do a little knee dip?”

Candy said, “No. He sits in a pew for maybe ten minutes, trying to work out another way to screw Cindy Sella.”

Paul said, “Fabulous. You guys are good.” He made another note.

Through air that was bluing over with smoke from cigarettes and cigars, Karl frowned at Paul. “You got an idea? I’m not so sure I like your ideas.”

Paul just smiled.

So did Clive. “What we need,” he said, “is another Pittsburgh.”

Candy and Karl exchanged glances. “You mean like another situation where nobody knows what the fuck’s going on.”

“ ‘Men with guns,’ ” said Paul. “That’s what my wife said when she saw it on the news. Or ‘goons with guns.’ ” He sat up. “Clive’s right. What we need is another Pittsburgh.”

“He’s from there. Sewickley, I think.”

“Hess is?” said Paul. Clive nodded.

“What the hell happened in Pittsburgh?” Bobby hadn’t been there and was feeling the lack of less than utter control.

“Stuff,” said Karl.

“Of course,” said Clive, “we could just try to give L. Bass a hell of a scare.”

Candy shook his head. “That’s what we were just saying would only be temporary.”

“With him, it might not be; I think Bass scares pretty easily.”

“It’s not very original,” said Paul, getting up and going to the table where Bobby kept his excellent selection of liquors. Paul picked up the nearly empty bottle of Talisker, poured a mite for himself.

“Original? Who the fuck cares it’s original?” said Candy.

Paul ignored that as he looked out at the swiftly coming darkness. “Unless you use the scare tactic to soften him up.”

“What do you mean?” Clive joined him to look out at the funky geometry of the BOA building, its turquoise spear rising in a sky turning quickly to boot-black.

“You know. You beat somebody up awhile, and it’s easier to get him to accept whatever you’ve got in mind.”

Candy and then Karl wandered over to the window. Bobby was the only one still seated. Feeling left behind, he got up, too. “So,” he said around his cigar, “what have we got in mind?”

“I’m thinking,” said Karl, “Joe Blythe.”

Candy looked at him. “Joe? He don’t still work.”

“Depends, I guess,” said Karl.

“Who the hell’s Joe Blythe?” said Bobby.

Karl picked a bit of tobacco from his tongue. “A guy.”

The five of them stood there looking out the wide window at the Chrysler Building’s silver-scaled heights, the gilded pyramid of New York Life, the neon greens and blues of the Empire State. They watched silver and gold and sapphire lights swimming in the enormous New York City sky, careless as a bunch of old-time crooks with nothing in mind but to steal Manhattan blind.

Y
ou don’t remember me, I guess? Cindy Sella?” She was on the phone, holding the bit of paper on which she’d written the number from Craigslist.