The Way of All Fish: A Novel (31 page)

Lena bint Musah was as good as her word. The little problem went away.

Wally and Rod, naturally, told each other that FWS could never in a million years have proceeded legally against them, and for the next week,
they danced around their offices with synchronized assurance and kept on with their two-hour lunches at Michael’s.

Until one day Sigourney walked into Wally’s office with an envelope that she said had been messengered over. This was a complaint filed with the Superior Court of the State of New York against defendants Wallace Hale and Roderick Reeves of the firm Snelling, Snelling, Borax, and Snelling, and against L. Bass Hess of the Hess Literary Agency for (to wit, and nineteen pages to get around to it) colluding and conspiring against plaintiff Cindy Sella in the matter of commissions said to be owing to the Hess Agency.

And it went on.

The Richard Geres looked at each other. Grounded.

I
t was as if her life were being lived elsewhere, thought Cindy, not here in her living room with the same page in her old typewriter as had been there yesterday.

Lulu had gone no further than switching off the ignition.

She sat in her car, in the dark.

Cindy had not written a word in her notebook and did not know why she was sitting in front of her typewriter reading the last paragraph of what she had written nearly a week ago. To be honest, she hadn’t written about Lulu in
over
a week. Ten days, she bet, maybe even two weeks. She had tried writing around Lulu, which was cribbing from future writing time, she knew, but she wanted to get words down and thought if she just wrote something, she could get Lulu moving again. She hadn’t. Stealing from the future.

The trouble was that Lulu had no future. She had only the present dilemma, and it struck Cindy as the most stuck a person could get, worse than being locked in a closet or even bricked up in a wall, like Fortunato in “The Cask of Amontillado.” The plight of Fortunato occupied her mind for a horrifying ten seconds, and she decided no, nothing was worse than his fate.

The point was, or the awful irony was, that Lulu had the means to escape right under her hands—the steering wheel of her Honda.

Cindy stalled by going to the kitchen for coffee. She plunked a K-Cup in her single-serving machine. The Mr. Coffee she used only if she knew she’d drink three cups in a row or if she had guests. Guests. There were the two goons; there was Edward; that was about it. When the cup was
full, she took it back into the living room, sipping as she went. She stood and watched her clown fish resting on the little leaf hammock.

As if the clown fish had jostled her memory, she picked up
Moby Dick
from the sofa, where she’d left it the night before. Ahab, the deep blue sea, and all that freedom. Fins rising from the waves like “elusive thoughts,” fleeting images that one couldn’t quite get hold of. For Ahab (or Melville, more likely), the sea was the deep blue soul.

She looked at her clown fish again, both of them bouncing around in the anemone.

Was that why Moby Dick was white? Was he a ghost whale?

After a moment’s reflection, she felt more ready to go back to her typewriter, where she watched, in her mind’s eye, a fin carving through the deep water. The thought, the words, were beneath it. She could not grasp it with words. Words. The ones that should be hers lay on the ocean floor of her mind where she couldn’t get to them, except perhaps in dreams.

Cindy sat with her fingers resting on the keys as Lulu sat with her hands on the steering wheel.

T
o get herself out of her apartment and a slowly settling depression, Cindy had taken her notebook to Ray’s coffee shop, thinking that maybe Paul Giverney would be there and she’d have somebody to talk to.

She’d ordered a toasted cheese sandwich, her particular comfort food. Trying to keep her mind occupied with getting Lulu out of the car, she kept her eyes on her sandwich or on her notebook, which had, for that day, one sentence written at the top of the page. She always made sure to do that, write a sentence—practically any sentence—so she wouldn’t have to look at a blank page.

So now she was looking at a page with one really bad sentence, and she wondered how much of a prop that was.

It was late in the afternoon, nearly four
P.M.
, so the lunch crowd was long gone and the dinner crowd not yet arrived. There were only a few customers, a few who looked familiar, most who didn’t.

One who didn’t was a youngish man—well, he could have been anywhere from twenty-five to forty—sitting at the half-moon-shaped counter, having an ice cream soda. Chocolate, it looked like. Never had she seen anyone having an ice cream soda in here; she hadn’t even known that Ray had sodas on the menu.

It was hard to take her eyes off him, he was so—she could think of no other word—cute. He looked kind of varsity, as if he had been a college football or baseball player. He was sitting on a counter stool but obviously tall. He had sandy-blond hair. Cindy couldn’t see his eyes. She felt as if she’d fallen through a hole in time, back to the forties or fifties, into some old movie filled with college kids and frat houses, parties and football games, a movie in which this fellow starred.

Apparently, he read, for he had placed a book beside him that he occasionally fingered. There was a mirror over the counter, and once in a while he appeared to look into it, though she didn’t have the feeling that vanity prompted it. How in God’s name would she know? She was making all of this up.

The waitress stopped to ask him something, or just to flirt. She was holding a Pyrex coffeepot and raised it. He shook his head and smiled. The smile was lopsided, one side of his mouth curling up, but the movement pulled the other side up a fraction, too.

If he turned his head ever so slightly, he would see Cindy looking. Just short of a stare. But he was focused on the ice cream soda, the straw, the long spoon. The kind of spoon she had always found comical; she didn’t know why.

His back was to the door, which opened occasionally to admit some customer or allow one to leave. Then she realized he was looking into the mirror only when the door opened. He must be waiting for someone. She really hoped it wasn’t a girl.

It wasn’t.

When the door opened the next time, he smiled and turned on his stool holding his soda glass.

To her astonishment, Candy and Karl, the two goons, walked in and straight over to him. He returned his glass to the counter and shook their hands. All were smiling, Karl laughing and throwing a pretend punch at the cute guy’s shoulder; he was carrying a bottle of wine in his other hand. Candy was toting a white pastry box.

What could he be doing with the two goons? He was shoving his arms into a lightweight military-looking field jacket he apparently had been sitting on.

They were on their way to the door when she realized that, after all, this was part of her life, and she could make her presence known. As she was getting out of her booth, the door opened again, and she was further astonished to see Paul Giverney walk in. The tall blond fellow shook his hand enthusiastically, said something, and held out the book he’d brought, along with a pen. Paul laughed, took the proffered pen, and signed it.

Was this a book-signing party? Wine, cake?

Paul’s presence gave her even more reason for walking over to them.

And so she did. She hitched her bag up on her shoulder and walked over to the little group, held her hand up in a “hi” sign and said, “Hi.” If she’d only washed her hair.

The tall, cute one smiled crookedly, turning on her eyes so deeply blue that all she could think of was the ocean washing up on a beach in Oahu (where she had never been), or Ahab’s sea (where she probably had). She stood there, much as she had in middle school, blushing and letting her book bag drag down the sleeve of her shirt as she gazed up at the handsomest boy in the eighth grade.

“Cindy,” said Karl.

“Cindy!” said Candy.

“Cindy,” said Paul.

“This,” said Candy to Cindy, “is Joe Blythe.”

“This,” said Karl to Joe, “is Cindy Sella.”

More astonished than at anything so far, she saw Joe Blythe look at her with real interest. “Really?
You’re
Cindy Sella?”

“Well, yes, I am.” She smiled, she hoped, brilliantly. Had he read one of her books?

Karl was checking his watch. “Listen, we got to go. We got an appointment.” They said good-bye.

Except for Paul, who apparently wasn’t included in the appointment. Cindy thought, Good. I can ask him questions. “Who’s Joe Blythe? What’s he doing with them?”

“Joe? Dunno. I just met him. I don’t know anything about him. Want a coffee?”

I
t had taken a lot of talk and a certain level of friendship to drag Joe Blythe away from his pigs and his farm and back to Manhattan. He had forty acres of land, a big farmhouse, a big barn, and ten pigs. Although it was simpler to call it a pig farm, it wasn’t, really. Joe didn’t raise the pigs for meat but for themselves. He had always loved farmland and pigs. He had been raised on the Great Plains. He liked space.

Although he looked like a college kid, Joe was way past college. He had cultivated the ingenuous look, the blue-eyed gaze, the crooked smile. He figured if he looked innocent enough, the people he had to deal with would think there was no harm in him. He was big but amiable; some had made the mistake of thinking him docile and easily led. They soon found out how wrong they were.

Joe knew Candy and Karl because he was in the same business: He was a contract killer. What made him different was that in his nearly two decades of work, he had killed only one person, a small-timer named Frank Blow. This had happened through a queer confluence of events. A half second after the knife had left his hand, a bullet had come from a doorway—a bullet meant for the same mark—but misguidedly hit the knife so that both bullet and knife had teamed up to get to Frank.

Another knife had left Joe’s hand two seconds after the first and pinned the sleeve of the shooter’s topcoat to the doorframe. This faceless killer—Joe had no idea who he was—had dropped his gun and yanked free of his coat just before the third knife would have nicked his ear, had the coat still been on his back.

It wasn’t that Joe had any particular compunction against killing; he
just thought that if you threw knives, you shouldn’t have to kill. There was something about coming within an inch of death four times in ten seconds that worked as a marvelous deterrent.

He was a great admirer of Candy and Karl, both for their skill and for their insistence that they would kill only those whom they thought deserved it.

Joe lived a solitary life. He had never married. He said he didn’t know why; he must not have found a woman who could stand to live the way he wanted to.

At a party in Manhattan that Candy and Karl had attended years ago, some damned fool was busy with this subject of Joe’s solitary life and the possible reasons for it, strongly implying that Joe was gay, perhaps castrated “like that Hemingway guy, what’s-his-name.” He himself was seated in a thronelike mahogany chair, slipped down on his spine, and with his legs widely spread, meant to display what he clearly took to be the crown jewels. “You should settle down, buddy” was the last thing this man said in Joe’s presence.

The knife came out of seeming nowhere. Nobody saw it until the point twanged into the wooden seat, directly where the legs were spread and just missing the jewels by an eighth of an inch.

“Is that settled down enough for you?” said Joe with his crooked smile.

Candy and Karl disliked upstate New York as much as Joe disliked Manhattan. They were hoping that he would see this as a measure of their need.

“I don’t do that stuff anymore, you guys.”

“You got a target set up on the barn that doesn’t speak to that fact,” said Karl. “Can we take it that the marks have not been made by a bull?”

Joe laughed.

They were sitting—lounging, more—around his kitchen table, a beautiful piece of wood with acanthus legs he had carved himself. The room was warmed by a flagstone fireplace, made golden by sunlight slanting across the silky rug, and made fragrant by something either in the oven or recently removed from it. It was the perfect storybook kitchen.

Except for the small pig standing by the Viking stove, looking at them and yawning.

Joe turned. “Come on over here, Junior,” he said, making what must have been a pig sign with his fingers, for the pig came and sat down like a dog, hindquarters lopsided against the oak floorboards. Joe scratched behind his ears.

“I never knew pigs would come when you called.”

“Anything will come when you call if you call right.”

“I got a fish. It won’t.”

“It will. You just haven’t figured out the right signal.”

“What kind of signal?”

Joe shrugged. “Maybe he likes Jimi Hendrix.”

Candy tried to process this advice, squinting at Joe.

Joe looked at the long case clock with the sun and moon on its face. “I’ve got to feed the pigs. You come, too. Out to the barn. It’s relaxing.” He looked at their feet. “Those shoes look like they just came off some cobbler’s bench. You need some boots. It can get real muddy.” Now he was out in the mudroom, tossing things around.