The Way of All Fish: A Novel (22 page)

She plugged a cigarette into her long holder, saying, “That’s quite all right, only how would his spending a week here accomplish that? Wouldn’t he just return to New York and get right on this person’s back again?” She held out her cigarette for a light and then said, “Or were you going to ask me to kill him?”

Clive guffawed and picked up the ornate cigarette lighter. “We have a small plan which includes the Everglades.”

“And who is we?”

“Several acquaintances.”

“So Bass has ticked off a number of people, and they’re out to get him. Is his wife among them?”

Surprised, Clive raised his eyebrows. “No.”

“She can’t stand him, either. Poor woman. Her name’s Helen. It should be Joan of Arc. Now, shall we have dinner? I know a fabulous little restaurant in Naples. It’s a drive, but it’s worth it.” She rose from the sofa.

“By all means.” Clive was almost glad to leave the rest of his drink undrunk. Perhaps only the first one had been the equivalent of three. So
it was only really four or five. He wasn’t sure he could lift himself out of the chair, but he made it.

She returned to find him looking into the glassed-in room full of plants: orchids and succulents. “That’s my orchid room. I guess that’s obvious. Would you like to go in?”

Not really, but he did.

They passed between cluttered tables of bromeliads and birds of paradise, plants that Clive had never admired. Succulents had always given him the creeps. The very name conjured images of plants smacking their lips over food he would rather not think about. They looked tough, as if they meant business. Simone pointed out a creeping fig terra, then a walking iris, which made him shudder all the more. He had never gotten over
The Day of the Triffids.

“Do you like orchids?”

He nodded. Depends, is what he wanted to say, as they stood by a table on which orchids stood in their customary histrionic postures and theatrical colors. “They require a lot of attention, don’t they?”

“Not really. The temperature is important, of course. One I’ve always wanted is the ghost orchid. It grows in the Everglades. It’s quite rare. I actually went out on an expedition with a guide, but I hate walking through sucking mud, don’t you? Anyway, I would never take one; it’s illegal in the Everglades. I just wanted to see them.”

Clive thought for a moment and said, “What you ought to do is send your nephew. Send Bass to search for this ghost orchid.”

She considered, smiled broadly, and clapped her hands. “What a
magnificent
idea! He’d go mad at the thought of it. Except I wouldn’t want him to get one.”

“He wouldn’t, would he? I doubt he’d give it much of a try, beyond having you think he did. Certainly not if they’re so difficult to find. Anyway, that’s not the object; the object is simply to get him into the swamp.”

“I can’t imagine what you have in mind. It sounds awfully amusing.”

“Um. Perhaps we’re being too hard on him.” As if.

“No, we’re not. Shall we go to dinner?”

“Lead on. I’m starving.”

They went back into the living room, where she donned a lightweight coat. Pale pink and white and yellow flowers on a pale blue background.

Manet?

Jasper screeched.

Outside, Clive inquired about the tree held fast by the thin entwining arms of some paler tree. “Oh, that? That’s a strangler fig.”

“Strangler fig?”

She nodded.

This place would have him for dinner if they weren’t quick about it.

Clive hurried Simone up the walk.

A
t about the same time Clive was on his way back, L. Bass Hess was talking about Florida.

“Florida?” said Paul Giverney, feigning surprise. “Why in hell would you go to Florida?” He knew why. Because Hess’s aunt Simone had demanded that he come. Given Clive’s description in the call from Miami International, Simone sounded like quite a gal/guy.

Paul and Bass sat on opposite sides of Hess’s coffee table with tiny little cups of espresso. His secretary had ground the beans.

“I go every year to see my aunt. In November, for Thanksgiving. It’s her kind of ritual, you could say. This time it appears she’s quite ill. Dying, she claims.”

“God, I’m sorry. You two are close, I guess.” No, he wasn’t, and no, they weren’t. It was all going according to plan. Paul felt quite proud of himself as he plunked another sugar cube into his cup of bitter-as-hell coffee. The cubes were tiny, too. He could have been taking his coffee with Munchkins.

“Quite close, yes. Peas in a pod, really. Regrettable.” Bass tented his fingers.

Given L. Bass’s perky little smile, it was clear that regret had gone south, to be followed by Bass the next day.

Paul drank his sugared-up, sludgy coffee. “You’re flying to—?”

“Miami. I’ll rent a car and drive to Everglades City.”

Everglades City was a point on the map that Bass would happily drive a stake through. But if the damned woman
were
dying, and Bass suspected
he—or rather she—was telling the truth, then Everglades City would soon be a thing of the past.

All that money! He could leave the big, drafty house in Wilton, along with Helen and his incorrigible stepdaughter, Esme; he could pay back the money he’d had to beg Helen to invest in the agency; he would never have to see another writer again; and he could go to the South of France. He could kiss all of these ego-driven writers good-bye. Oddly, given his phenomenal success and all his money, Giverney was not beset by the monstrous ego that Bass found in so many writers, but he was being impossible when it came to negotiating this contract that Bass himself had been slaving over. Giverney and Mackenzie deserved each other, both with their impossible demands and their idiotic terms.

“Exactly what do you want, Paul? We’ve got three million, e-book rights, bonuses if the book stays on the list longer than twelve weeks, again if it’s on the list for five months, cover approval—and did I ever have to fight for that!—what else to you want?”

“More,” Paul said. “I want interior design approval.”

“What?
What?
You mean the way the words appear on the page?”

“I believe that would be the design of the interior, yes.”

“God! Nobody asks for that!”

“I do.”

“You mean you’ve had design approval before?”

“No. But I regretted it. You have no idea how they can fuck up a page.”

“All right, all right. I’ll discuss it with Mackenzie.”

Paul took his feet off the coffee table. “I want it in the contract, not just a verbal agreement. Bobby Mackenzie’s a thief and a liar—”

Which was exactly what Bobby Mackenzie had said about Paul.

“—and he’ll fuck me over just because he can. He can if it’s not in the contract.”

“Why do you want him to publish you, then? Do you want another publisher?”

Paul snorted. “Don’t be ridiculous. The industry is not a world of nuance. Better the devil.”

A world of nuance? Better the devil? The man spoke in tongues.

But the money!

A four-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar commission for one book, and since Paul Giverney regularly produced a book a year, Bass was looking at a fortune. He could drop every other client and deal exclusively with Paul. He’d be making four or five times what he was pulling in now. He could do it, dear God!, from the South of France!

And he could say good-bye forever to Simon/Simone. Either way, L. Bass Hess was looking at a windfall.

“Florida?” This was Bobby Mackenzie speaking.

“He’s leaving tomorrow,” said Paul.

They were sitting that evening in Bobby’s office. Bobby had his feet on his desk, tumbler of Scotch in one hand, Cuban cigar in the other. Same as always.

Paul sat opposite him, mirror image on the other side of the desk. “He’ll come back a changed man. Well, ‘changed man’ for any normal person. For Hess, he’ll come back at least off-center.”

“What in hell did you cook up this time?”

“Not as good as what
you
cooked up, Bobby, last time.”

“Come on. You were the engineer. I was just chugging along behind.”

“Yeah. The Little Engine That Could. That’s why you do things, Bobby. You don’t have any motive; you don’t have any reason. You do things because you can.”

Bobby blew a smoke ring, then another went gliding through the first. “Yeah.” He grinned as he pressed down on the intercom and spoke: “Bunny, can you come in here for a moment?”

The woman who must have been Bunny stuck her head in the door. Paul thought, What wondrous hair. It was such a pale blond that it looked almost white. White hair with lowlights. When the rest of herself followed her head, he was even more struck, not so much by the shape but by the shape being dressed in what some would call winter white.

Bobby was holding the ill-fated book-jacket mockup in his hand.
“Take this up to art, will you, and ask them if anyone there’s ever actually seen Venice? Or at least pictures, photos of Venice? Or could this art have more to do with the Venetian in Vegas?”

Bunny came up to the desk and took the artwork and smiled at Paul on her way out.

“Who’s that?” asked Paul.

“Bunny? Bunny Fogg. She’s the best steno in the whole building. She more or less free-floats around.”

Paul smiled as he imagined Bunny Fogg free-floating.

B
ass Hess was writing marginalia on the document he had placed on the tray table. He and his lawyer had rehashed the various causes of action that comprised the complaint against Cindy Sella.

That ungrateful little bitch. Bass could not understand why she hadn’t folded the moment the complaint was served. Buckled under and just paid him his commission on the last book. True, he hadn’t been the agent who
sold
the book, but the option clause was in the old contract for books he
had
been agent for, so he figured she owed him.

There was nothing new in this argument, the one he was making marginal notes on, his answer to the answer served up by Cindy Sella’s new lawyer. No, this was merely a reworded thicket of the sixty-nine causes of action in the original complaint, all of which were described in rococo detail, a rechurning of the first complaint, hoping it would turn it to butter. He had spent many hours working on this with his lawyer, Phil Ffizz. Ffizz was no attorney for anything as straightforward as, say, divorce. No, Ffizz was a havoc lawyer, the sort who enjoyed chaos so that he could then chime in with irrelevancies and leave judges negotiating the flotsam in the stream. Yes, Ffizz fit beautifully.

Hess enjoyed reading such long-winded documents; he belonged to the school holding that you could and should bolster your argument by using twenty words where ten (or even five) would make the point. He believed in hiding things under cotton batting, wearying the opponent to the point where she would throw up her hands and say, The hell with it.

The only thing Hess enjoyed reading more than a long-winded legal document was a book contract. The minutiae of a book contract made
writers give up reading after they’d checked the payout. Yes, the fine print that would drive any ordinary man mad was ambrosia to L. Bass Hess. He was like a surgeon; he could build up tissue with ever thinner layers until the underlying structure was barely recognizable. At times he felt the scalpel he used to slice through the standard contract was more sword than knife, was Excalibur rising from the water and he himself King Arthur. He knew he was a legend in the world of publishing. He made publishers want to run as if from burning buildings. It was exhilarating to have that kind of control.

Control! That was always Bass’s aim: control the publishing world as if it were made up of enemy U-boats and he were Alan Turing, clicking away, decrypting the Germans’ Enigma codes. He could feel it right down to his fingertips: control.

And the reason he loathed Simone (in addition to the awful sex change) was that she was controlling
him
. Blood suffused his face just thinking about her. How could anyone be controlled by so ludicrous a person? Simone, she who was once Simon. He shuddered.