Foul Matter (18 page)

Jamie looked. “Yeah, he’s kind of cute.”

“He and his buddy over there at the bar were in the park a few hours ago, sitting on that bench under the maple.”

“So?”

Ned said, “I saw them, too. You”—he nodded at Saul—“were sitting across the walk from them.”

Jamie said it again.
“So?”
She dragged out the syllable to register impatience.

“For God’s sakes, Jamie, don’t you have any imagination?” asked Saul.

“No,” said this writer of sinister sci-fi, this hacker of violent mysteries and hot romances.

Saul said, “Go over and talk to them. Make up some excuse.”

“
You
go over; you’re the one who thinks they’re so weird.”

“I didn’t say weird. Out of place, maybe.”

Jamie said, “That’s only because you’ve never seen them in here before. And don’t trouble yourselves. I’ll get my own beer.” Her tone was testy as she rose.

Ned always tried to be at least half a gentleman. “I’ll get—”

Jamie waved him down and went to the bar.

Saul said, his eyes still on the familiar duo, several tables away, “The thing is, I don’t think they’re a couple. Do they look Chelsea to you?”

Ned shook his head. “No. That’s almost the
last
thing they look.”

Eyes not moving, Saul drank his beer. “What’s the first thing?”

“Mob,” said Ned, leafing through his pages.

“Oh, come
on.
Mob guys don’t frequent this place. Maybe they’re terrorists.” Saul frowned. “They could be terrorists.”

“Sure. A couple of Italian terrorists in black leather.”

“But they’re reading fucking
books.
”

“You don’t think any made guys can read?”

“How do you know they’re made?”

“I don’t. It was just something to say.”

“Like ‘mob.’ ”

“No, I meant that. ‘Made’ was something
else
to say.”

“Jamie’s walking by their table.”

“Good for her. Are they announcing the jihad on Swill’s?”

“Ha, very funny.”

Jamie appeared at the table again. “Here’s something you might find interesting about these two. The tall guy’s reading
your
book.” She smirked, for no discernible reason, at Ned, as if she’d won a bet.

Ned looked over at them, narrowed his eyes, but couldn’t see enough through the fretwork of Swillians who kept moving like sea grasses, back and forth, rising up from tables, sinking down into chairs. The cover of
Solace
was easy to make out since it was white, totally white except for the word in black and his name in smaller black letters. (Tom Kidd had said, “It’s crap, but what else would we expect from Mamie Fussel?”)

“Tell him,” said Saul, “to come over and Ned’ll sign it.”

“They’re looking this way,” said Jamie. “Maybe they’ve figured that out for themselves.”

 

 

“I don’t wanna be pushy,” said Karl.

“Christ’s
sakes,
K, that’s one of the reasons for coming in here with the
book,
to get him to sign, so we can talk to him.”

Candy got up, then Karl did. They shouldered their way through the crowded room, stopping at Ned’s table, which was in a nice window position. Beyond the window, it was raining. A Mayflower moving van was parked across the street, the two moving men unhappy with the rain.

“You’re Ned Isaly, aren’t you?” Karl opened the book to the inside back jacket and the small square picture of Ned that Ned still couldn’t remember ever having been taken.

Ned smiled. “That’s right. And you’re—”

“Larry Blank. Pleased to meet you. This is—”

“Uh, Paulie Givinchy.”

Karl glared at Candy, who went on to say, “Almost like this guy, Giverney?” He held up the book he was carrying. “Only, I can’t write worth a double damn.” Candy laughed.

They smiled. Jamie said, “I don’t think I’ve seen you in here before. You live around here?” She pushed out the two empty chairs. “Come on, sit down.”

Karl and Candy sat. “We live over on Houston,” said Karl. This, actually, was the truth. The two had gone together and purchased an old warehouse in the Village and taken on an extra assignment or two to pay the extravagant sum needed for the remodeling. (Candy was fond of saying that Tony Giovanni and Fats Webber had died for that window treatment and that arrangement of Japanese screens.)

“How do you know?” said Ned.

“What? That we’re over on Houston?”

“No. That you can’t write.”

Surprised and, for some reason, pleased, Candy modestly waved away this suggestion. “Oh, please.”

“You don’t know unless you try.”

Karl and Candy looked at each other. “You’re sayin’ anyone tries can do it?”

“No. I’m just saying you don’t know whether or not you can.”

To get them off the subject of Candy’s potential as a writer, Karl went back to
Solace.
“This is a pretty sad story, you know? These two just don’t get the breaks, do they?”

“I guess not,” said Ned.

“Me,” said Candy. “I’m reading this. It’s a best-seller, right?” He held up the book, front out.

“The new Giverney book,” said Saul. “It’s a best-seller, all right; all of his books are.”

“It’s number three on the list. I saw it in Barnes and Noble,” said Candy. “And it’s only just been published. Now,
that’s
impressive. How many books’d you say are sold any given day? Thousands?”

“More like hundreds of thousands,” said Ned.

“To be three from the top. Makes me wonder what the first two are, all right.”

Saul said, “The Bible, Shakespeare. Giverney’s a little melodramatic for my tastes.”

“No kiddin’?” said Candy. Feeling slightly abashed, as if it were personal, he looked down at his book. “To me, it’s got a lot of suspense in it.”

Ned said, “He’s a much better writer than he gets credit for being.”

Already, Candy liked him. He moved his chair a little closer.

Saul laughed. “Come on, Ned.”

“He is. He’s been locked into the thriller genre—”

“Because he writes fucking thrillers, that’s why,” Saul said. He relit his cigar. Swill’s lax smoking policy favored just about everybody except those whose tastes leaned toward crystal meth.

“I’ve read the first half of this,” Ned said, nodding toward
Don’t Go There.
“It’s not a thriller.”

Candy’s forehead crinkled like a fan. “It ain’t? It’s this woman lost her memory, no, more her memory, it’s not telling her what it should. So nothing looks familiar to her, not even her house. I mean, it’s creepy stuff. That says thriller to me.”

Ned shook his head. “It’s something else. It’s way outside genre.”

Karl said, “You know him, Giverney?”

“I’ve talked to him a couple of times at publishing parties. But I wouldn’t say I know him.”

“Oh, well, look,” Candy opened the back flap to the biographical note. “He’s from Pittsburgh. It says so here.”

“So are you,” said Karl. Then, realizing his tone might be slightly accusatory, he smiled and added, “Some coincidence, I guess. So we thought maybe you guys might have known each other like in high school or something.”

“Nope. At least not as far as I remember. I suppose I could have run into him and not remembered.”

“Huh,” said Candy, not knowing how far he could take this. He looked at Karl, who nodded. Candy didn’t know why. “Man, when I think back . . .”

All the while Candy had been talking, Karl had watched Ned. He was searching out some reason the world would be better off without him. Arrogance? Isaly had plenty of reason to be, being a published writer who’d won prizes and all. But he didn’t seem to be arrogant.

Well, it was too early to tell, wasn’t it? Through the window, he watched as the movers dropped what looked like a valuable piece of furniture, a small, delicate table. He saw at least one leg snap off. Fuckheads. Karl disrespected anyone who couldn’t do his job 100 percent.

“What do you two do? What line of work are you in?”

Candy and Karl were so taken aback by the question that Candy almost slipped and told him. “Uh—”

Karl’s eye flicked to the movers across the street. “We’re in removals.” Candy smiled. Karl wished he wouldn’t. “You know, like so—” He nodded toward the window. “Sort of like them.”

Ned and Saul turned to look. Saul said, “Moving furniture.” He turned back. “Funny, but you don’t seem the type.”

Karl laughed. “There
is
one? A type that moves things around?”

Saul said, “Not exactly. Or maybe you have your own company.”

“We’re strictly independent,” said Candy. “We don’t work with nobody else. Then they can’t get in the way.”

“They also,” Karl said, eyes still on the moving van, “can’t drop stuff. They also can’t leave evidence—see that table leg?” (He caught himself.) “Lying all over the bloody street.”

Saul said after he’d sucked in on his cigar again, “Evidence. Interesting way of putting it.” He smiled.

Karl cut a look toward Saul. He wondered if maybe that asshole Mackenzie was interested in putting out a contract on this guy, too. Here was arrogance. Saul got right up Karl’s nose.

“So you pretty much work for yourselves?” Ned said.

“That’s it,” said Karl, who looked at the tablet under Ned’s arm. “You could say—though I don’t want to sound too arrogant”—he sent a quick look Saul’s way—“our job is kind of like yours.” He held up both hands, palms out, as if staving off potential criticism. “I mean because we work alone.”

“Yeah, we’ve had enough weird experiences to write a book. Right?” Candy shoved his fist into Karl’s shoulder.

Karl nodded. “It’s a thought.”

J
immy McKinney sat at his desk in the Durban Agency eating a cheese sandwich (how anachronistic could a person be?) and wondering (for the gazillionth time) why he kept on working for Mort Durban, a man who was a complete prick, not to mention a bandit. Most of his writers didn’t earn back their advances half the time, and that meant they were in danger of having their publishers drop them; but Mort still went on insisting on big advances because it was such a coup to be able to get a quarter-million advance for a debut (God! but Jimmy hated that word!) novel from a writer who had never, until now, tested the publishing waters. The undertow took a number of them down, leaving Mort himself splashing in the shallows. Mort managed never to endanger himself.

What Jimmy had done before he married and had a kid was write poetry—good poetry, too, though there wasn’t much of it: one book he’d published ten years before; he hadn’t turned out enough good poems since then to make up another collection. He was still managing to place a poem here and there in the quarterlies, though.

But how many times had Lilith—“
with her famous hair
”—( Jimmy couldn’t help it; lines of poetry—Frost, Robinson, Dickinson—were always popping into his mind, one to fit nearly every thought he had)—said,
“We can’t live on air”?

“No,”
Jimmy had said,
“not if the air is being funneled in from Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman’s.”

That
had earned him an abrasive look. Most things did, coming from Lilith (
“not even Lilith, with her famous hair . . .”
).

He found the lines comforting. He always found poetry comforting. And prose, too, words, even. Jimmy supposed it was one of the reasons he’d taken this job—just to be around words.

As he ruminated on this, finishing up his sandwich, the outer door opened and Paul Giverney walked by Jimmy’s office, tossing him a wink and a salute.

Mort was always saying what an “arrogant bastard” Paul Giverney was. As Jimmy couldn’t imagine anyone more arrogant than Mort himself, he could only question this assessment. Mort was the least self-aware person Jimmy had ever encountered. Publishers hated him because he gouged them for such huge advances, but Jimmy had no sympathy for the publishers, not a scrap; if Random House (and all its little Randomettes) were willing to pay these over-the-moon advances to get a writer they wanted, or else engage in an auction—a pissing contest to see who had the biggest set of brass ones—then why blame Mort for going around with a mask and a gun?

Paul Giverney could afford being as much of a bastard as he liked because he was on the top tier of authors who breathed the rarefied air of seven-digit advances. Giverney’s last two-book contract had been for $6.2 million. His current contract with Mackenzie-Haack, for $8 million, was as yet unsigned and would remain so “until certain conditions were met.”

“What the hell conditions?”
Mort had asked Paul awhile back.

“You don’t need to know, Mort,”
Paul had said.

“What? I’m your
agent
for God’s sakes.”

This enigmatic estimate of Mort’s worth was followed by Paul’s thumbs-up, not to Mort but to Jimmy, who’d brought in the promotion plans for Paul’s new book,
Don’t Go There.

It was this book that Jimmy was reading now at his desk. It had taken him completely by surprise. He had always thought Paul Giverney was better than he was given credit for being, but with this last book the writer had hit the ball way, way out of the genre ballpark. Yes, it was still a page-turner, a sinfully readable book, even more so than the others, at least the two Mort Durban had been agent for. Something was going on in this new book that certainly bore thinking about, something ineffably sad. It was more than anxiety (and why not fright? If familiar surroundings had turned foreign, why wasn’t this woman scared as hell? She seemed merely confused and questioning).

Jimmy loved the book. If he had been Paul’s agent, he would have swept aside the extra million advance and forced its publisher, Queeg and Hyde, to produce a promotional campaign that would take the book to another level. People should realize just how good Paul was.