The Way of All Fish: A Novel (43 page)

Paul Giverney and Bobby Mackenzie walked in, stood, and smiled. “Hello, Bass,” said Paul, who was carrying a couple of big brown envelopes.

“You—!” What would have followed was cut off by the entrance of Candy, Karl, and Joe Blythe.

Hess looked as if he’d just been shot but was stubbornly standing.

Joe smiled and took a seat on the corner of the desk. The same corner he’d sat on before.

“Where are my books?” Bass fastened on Paul. He knew the books were the least of his worries. He just wanted to stave off the most.

“Don’t worry. They’re safely in storage. We made sure the movers were careful.”

Karl and Bobby were lounging on the leather love seats.

Candy stood at the aquarium, inspecting the fish. A brilliant yellow tang, some really smashing angelfish—a platinum, a veiled black, one with a tiger design—and a couple of clown fish. “You like your fish, Bass. We figured it would brighten up the place.”

“I hate fish.” Bass drew himself up as much as he could and said, “I’m calling security.” He was reluctant to make a move toward the phone, since Joe Blythe was sitting by it.

“Why bother?” said Paul. “We’ll be out of here as soon as we explain things.” He went on: “All of these manuscripts. We assume your old clients will have gone looking for a new agent, except maybe that cowboy, what’s his name? Creek? That sounds authentic.”

“Yeah,” said Candy, turning from the aquarium. “We heard even ol’ Dwight Staines jumped ship. That must be a hell of a commission lost.”

“So you’ll be looking for new clients.” Paul nodded toward the shelves.

“What? You think I’m going to read these stacks of paper?” Bass’s contemptuous tone wasn’t convincing. “This
slush
?”

“Ah,” said Bobby. “Music to my ears.”

“Sure you will,” said Paul. “Because there’s nothing else to read here.” He walked over to the shelf, pulled out a manuscript. “Here’s a memoir
. On Your Toes
. Writer used to be a ballerina with the Austin City Ballet. Sounds promising, doesn’t it?”

Hess squinted his eyes shut. “You’re insane if you think I’m going to waste my time on this fodder.”

As if he hadn’t spoken at all, Bobby Mackenzie said, “What you’ll be looking for is some new writer who might just be the next Salinger or Updike or Thomas Harris.”

Bass gave a bark of laughter. “You think in that pile of slush—”

“Ah, but that’s the point,” said Bobby. “There used to be slush piles; assistants were paid to go through manuscripts, and a writer could actually wrap one up and send it in, unagented. Occasionally, one of the readers would send a manuscript worthy of notice to an editor. It might’ve turned out to be
The Catcher in the Rye
or
Catch-22
or maybe another
Silence of the Lambs
. That didn’t happen often, true, but how often does it have to happen to make it worth your while? Now, with all of the crap that’s out there, unstrained and unsieved, you could say; stuff that’s never come under the cold eye of an editor or the restraining hand of a publisher, that’ll publish for a price; that or some of the self-published swill I see—is there anyone more arrogant than a bad writer?—there’ll come a time when, after we’ve all been forced to read that stuff for so long, we wouldn’t know the next Salinger if we fell over him. So go on,
Bass, find him. Find
it.
The next big thing, the next great novel. It’s there somewhere.” Bobby stopped and lit a cigar.

The face of L. Bass Hess had been flashing pink and going pale like a neon sign. Blood suffused his face and drained away. He was being lectured by one of the most arrogant, amoral, powerful sons of bitches in the industry. “You think I’m going to take orders from you, Mackenzie?”

Bobby shrugged, exhaled a bale of smoke. “From all of us. Yeah, I do.”

Bass grunted. Then he picked up his jacket and put it on. To give him credit, he also picked up his briefcase, as one does if one intends to leave the scene. “I’ll be going now. Before I go to the police, I suggest you get rid of this pig’s breakfast of—”

Wrong word. Wrong,
wrong
word.

There was barely a movement before the air whistled by Hess’s ear and the knife landed directly behind him, vibrating where its point had hit the wood shelf.

Bass yelled, jumped back, felt the top of his head. Bloodless.

Joe Blythe smiled pleasantly.

Karl said, “I think maybe what Joe’s trying to tell you is your workday’s not over. It’s hardly noon, so you might just as well put down the briefcase.”

In the midst of this drama, Paul had walked over to the right-hand wall, picked up a random manuscript, leafed through it for five seconds, and said, “This looks promising.
A Lock and a Hard Place.
It’s about a safecracker. Don’t you just love the punning titles they think up these days?” He dropped it back on the pile. He removed the contents of the brown envelopes and stacked those pages on top of yet another stack. “Clive thought you’d get a kick out of this.” He smiled.

Ignoring Clive’s offering, Hess said, “How am I supposed to give time to my clients if it’s all to be used up in reading this pig”—quickly, he glanced at Joe Blythe—“I mean horse shit?”

“You won’t be, will you? I mean, there’s just Creek Dawson and that crazy woman, Myra or Mia. You won’t be bothering with new clients.”

If he could look any more disconcerted, Bass did. “What?” He started to move from behind his desk, saw Joe had returned to sit on it, and stopped moving. “I’m supposed to read this
entire wall
of junk scripts?”

Paul shoved away from the shelves, having positioned
Robot Redux
second down on the second shelf over. Not obviously on top nor deeply buried. “No, we’re not unreasonable.”

“Ha!” Bass sneered again, as much as a sneer as he could muster with Joe on the corner of his desk, playing with a letter opener.

Bobby ignored the sneer. “Not all of them, Bass. The deal is, after you manage to sell, say, six or seven of these manuscripts to reputable New York publishers like me”—he flashed a grin—“you’re off the hook.”

Bass sent his arm in such a wide arc that it looked meant to take in the whole wide world. “Are you mad? Sell?
Sell
this tripe! These have already been tossed in the can, and probably more than once.”

“No, no. A lot of them have just been passed over. Some have probably never been read. Most have been read by some benighted editorial assistant and then been put on the reject pile. Some might have gotten to an editor and then been rejected. Hell, Bass, in all that slush, there could be the Great American Novel.” Bobby relit his cigar.

Before Bass could answer, the door to the outer office opened, and footsteps proceeded to the inner. Bunny Fogg looked in and smiled. “Sorry I’m late.”

“Bunny, come in.” Bobby said to Hess, “Your new secretary. We know you’ll want to send out rejection letters to most of these.” He waved his arm at the shelves. “Bunny is very good; she takes dictation at the speed of light. She might even agree to look at some of these manuscripts herself.”

Hess was staring at Bunny Fogg. It was the narrowed look of a suspicious man.

Paul had told Bunny to make sure she wore white today. (“Today and every day. White. If you need more white outfits, go to Saks and Bloomingdale’s and send me the bill.”)

“Don’t I know you?” said Bass, narrow-eyed. “You look familiar.”

“I’ve been with Mackenzie-Haack for years. Probably you’ve seen me there, Mr. Hess.”

Bobby said, “Bunny will keep you on your toes. You know, in case you get distracted.” His smile was wolfish.

“So she’s the watchdog, is that it?”

Bunny’s expression was one of innocence; hurt, almost. “Not me, Mr. Hess. But I can probably help you prioritize those manuscripts.”

Bass let out a contemptuous sniff.

“You guys ready?” said Bobby.

They all got up.

Except Candy, who was already up, and to whom L. Bass was paying no attention, as he had been simply hanging around the aquarium. He was not engaged in threats or knife-throwing. “Never knew there was so many kinds of angelfish,” he said to no one in particular. “You got some nice fish in there, Bass.”

Bass threw him a lethal look and said nothing. He had nothing more to say. As they filed out, each gave Bass a smile and a thumbs-up. Candy patted the side of the tank, dribbled his fingers along it in a good-bye wave.

Oscar did not favor him with a good-bye fin.

T
he FWS burst into the paper-strewn offices of the Hess Literary Agency and presented L. Bass with a warrant, claiming he was in possession of the endangered peppermint angelfish.

Agent Pasco (the redhead) deftly removed the so-called peppermint angelfish from the aquarium and deposited him into a cute little fish hotel.

They left with L. Bass Hess in custody.

Hess, without legal counsel, sat in the Fish and Wildlife Service’s office on Houston Street with Agents Pasco, Morton, and Graeme, voicing his outrage about the illegality of all of this, claiming the fish had been placed in his office without his knowledge—

Whereupon Agent Pasco gave a snort of derision while she placed the rescued fish in her large tote bag. “They always say that, don’t they?”

Within the hour, another FWS agent, Agent Molloy, came to the door and was admitted together with a dark-haired woman in red, who lit up a thin brown cigarette and looked at L. Bass Hess. She nodded. “Yes, this is the one. This is Miles Mutton.”

C
live Esterhaus paid a visit to Simone Simmons and learned that her nephew, L. Bass, had been rushed to the ER to get twenty-five stitches in his hand following Jasper’s attack after Bass thrust his hand into the birdcage.

“God knows what the man was doing.”

“God knows,” said Clive.

Simone was making fresh changes to her will, leaving the bulk of her money to Friends of the Everglades and the Everglades Foundation, and her cottage to her houseboy, Bolly. “I can’t trust Bass to take care of anything. He seems completely mad.”

As they drove toward Naples and the same little restaurant, Clive told her the disposition of her fortune sounded like an excellent idea, with Clive earnestly hoping he had not walked himself into the sequel of
Some Like It Hot
.

“Incidentally, Simone, just what does that L stand for? What’s Bass’s first name?”

“His father was a bass fisherman, after all.”

Clive waited. Nothing further. “And?” he prompted.

“You mean you haven’t worked that out?” She gave a sniffy laugh over the top of her commuter-cup martini.

1.

R
obot Redux
was fast-tracked through publication by the venerable house of Swinedale and became a
TBR
instant bestseller. This took the publishing world by storm and left speechless a dozen publishers who had turned down the submission. Sam Driscoll, Swinedale’s publicity director, laughed. “This wasn’t exactly searching for a bestselling book in a dark alley on a moonless night, was it? I mean, not if you know the market.”

“Sure. Everybody knows the market after it happens,” said Mackenzie-Haack’s publisher, Bobby Mackenzie.

Suzie Moon, Swinedale’s executive publisher, was, according to
Publishers Weekly,
“a visionary who predicted the collapse of vampire-themed books and the rise of robots. Said Ms. Moon with a wicked smile, ‘Bots are big.’ ”

Bub Biggins, the author of
Robot Redux,
is at work on the next book in his Robot series and is still employed at Gio’s Auto Salvage. He has no plans to quit. According to Gio Beauchamp, owner of the auto salvage yard, his business has quadrupled since the publication of
Robot
. “This is one real guy; Bub ain’t changed one friggin’ bit in spite of all his success.”

2.

L.
Bass Hess sued Bub Biggins for the commission he claimed was owing for
Robot Redux
. Biggins’s attorneys stated in a countersuit that, since Hess did not agent the book, he would not be entitled to a commission.

Judge Owen Oglethorpe ruled in Biggins’s favor.

“I will appeal,” said Hess.

3.

A
nother surprise success, this in the nonfiction field, was the e-book
Silence, All: Where Shakespeare Went Wrong,
by Shirlee Murphee. One of the new Basic Classics line,
Silence
has gained a surprisingly hefty readership among high school students, explaining, as it does, in simple prose exactly how Shakespeare failed to establish the reason for Hamlet’s delay. (Ms. Murphee generously acknowledged a debt to T. S. Eliot in this regard. She was also quick to point out “where Eliot went wrong.”)

4.

L.
Bass Hess sued Shirlee Murphee for a finder’s fee for
Silence, All,
claiming that the so-called nonfiction book was a thinly disguised work of fiction by this author originally titled
How (Very) Happy We (Never) Were,
that title having been changed to
The Rest Is (Almost) Silence
. This former fictional treatment had been “found” by the Hess Agency.