The Way of All Fish: A Novel (7 page)

Cindy sighed. “Those are foreign editors. They didn’t like what I said about the changes they wanted to make.”

“What did you tell them?”

“Kind of ‘fuck off.’ ”

“Yes!” cried Candy, pumping his fist in the air, congratulating Cindy on her candor.

“Then there’s the drinking, the drugs—”

“What drugs? I take Aleve.”

Finger hooking again: “ ‘Reports from unimpeachable sources disclose use of marijuana, cocaine, other drugs.’ ”

“Where’s he getting all this? How can this be any part of a lawsuit that’s claiming I owe him commission money? The ‘mutual trust’? There was never any trust. And we never worked on my books together—”

Karl held up the chapter pages and waved them. “I assume you’re lawyered up?”

“Of course. Snelling and Snelling. It’s a big firm.”

Candy frowned. “You read that book by that lawyer called
The Firm
.”

“John Grisham. Yes.”

“That’s the kind of stuff lawyers get up to.”

Cindy smiled. “It’s probably not that bad.”

“Oh, you better believe it. We know a lotta attorneys.”

“Handling intellectual property?”

“Not exactly,” said Karl. “Other stuff. You wouldn’t want one of them.”

“What stuff?”

Karl ran his thumbnail across his forehead, thinking. “Graft, murder, like that.”

“Oh.” Cindy was looking dubious. “You never told me what it is you two do.”

Karl studied the ceiling. Candy said, “We’re consultants.”

Karl brought his eyes down. “That’s it. Consultancy.”

“About what?”

Candy shrugged, said, “People who got problems.”

Relentlessly, Cindy kept at it. “What kind of problems? Give me a for-instance.”

“Well, for instance, whoever was the target at the restaurant. He’d want to solve that little problem.”

Cindy frowned as Karl rose and said, “Another time, okay? We really gotta go.”

“Aren’t you going to give me the folder?”

“Let us keep it for a little, okay?”

Candy said, “So after you gave this Hess the heave-ho, you got another agent.”

She nodded. “Jimmy McKinney.”

“What agency’s he with?” Karl was rather pleased with himself, being able to converse so smoothly about writing and publishing.

“Just him. He’s his own agency.”

Karl nodded, said, “You mind if we go see him?”

Cindy shrugged. “No. Why?”

“Background.” Karl took a little notebook out of his shirt pocket and a stub of a pencil out of his inside jacket pocket. “What’s his address?”

Cindy gave it to him. “It’s really nice. An old brownstone.”

“What’s this agent guy doing about this?” He held up the folder.

“There’s nothing much he can do.” She smiled. “Except he did offer to kill him for me.”

“That was nice of him,” said Karl.

“Yeah. Our kind of guy,” said Candy.

They grinned. They left.

J
immy McKinney sat in his office, trying to plow through a manuscript submission from an aspiring writer about a moose who, together with some other moose(es), was taking over the town of Moosehart, Indiana, all of this a veiled satire of the writer’s own hometown, Elkhart.

Jimmy was having a hard time bringing Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief to this project. The mooselike proclivities of the characters, rendered as all too human, failed to gain empathy without any of the moose’s redeeming features, such as its huge size and its ability to trample a person, such as the writer. He heaved the manuscript onto a stack beside his desk. He hated writing rejection letters. He had another stack of manuscripts that were bad, though not moose-bad. He had received this manuscript because the writer had managed an interview with some editor at Breadloaf or some other writing conference, and the editor had suggested Jimmy as an agent.

Jimmy was popular with publishers and editors because he was, in an old-fashioned way, more interested in a writer’s ongoing career than a quick payoff. He knew he could have gotten much heftier advance money for some of his clients, including a couple of new writers who might be poised to make a big splash with their first novels—he hated the word “debut”—but Jimmy wasn’t in favor of big advances.

Agents liked to impress writers with their ability to get a king’s ransom up front. But it could turn into exactly that: ransom. And when the book didn’t “earn out,” when it sold many fewer copies than the advance warranted, the publisher might be a lot less eager to take the second book. Or down the road, just kick the writer back into the street. Huge
advances were a bad idea unless you were already a megaseller like Paul Giverney or Stephen King or John Grisham.

Jimmy was careful to explain all of this to prospective writers. Some of them wanted the big bucks—not just the money but the rush, the ego pump-up of commanding six figures. He had a print on the wall behind his cluttered desk, a sketch of Margaret Drabble, with a quote: “Writing and money have nothing to do with each other.”

He loved that. The writers he wanted to work with understood it.

Jimmy used to work for a high-powered agent named Mort Durban who laughed at the idea that money and writing weren’t connected. As far as Mort was concerned, money was writing’s
only
connection. Publishers were there to do battle with him about it. But Jimmy had to hand it to Mort if a publisher said, “Hell, I’m not paying that for a first novel! Don’t be ridiculous!”

“Fine. I’ll be ridiculous somewhere else. Bye.” Down crashed the receiver. (Mort liked landlines precisely for the crashing-down feature.)

Within thirty seconds the phone would ring again, nearly jumping off the desk with ringing. Mort just sat with a big cigar stuck in his mouth like a cork, waiting for the final ring, picking it up, saying “Mort Durban” as if he had no notion of who would be on the other end. Accepting the offer.

Mort loved this kind of deal-making. He claimed he always operated in the interests of his clients, but Jimmy knew better. Mort operated in his own interests.

An author would think, and with perfect reason, if he were going to fork over 15 percent of his royalties to an agent, that this agent would be working for him, looking out for his career, looking forward, making the moves now that would advance that career. A writer didn’t think of an agent having his own agenda.

Jimmy had only half a dozen clients, two successful enough to write for a living. The others had to hold down jobs and write in their spare time. Jimmy knew what that felt like, as he’d done it for years himself, writing poetry, holding down the job with the Durban Agency.

It was the writer Paul Giverney who had damned near saved Jimmy’s life by talking him into going to one of the writing colonies where you could shut the door and turn to complete silence. For a long weekend he
got away from his beautiful but shrill wife, who was seldom satisfied, and his teenage son, who never was.

At the colony were little cabins sprinkled throughout the woods. The setup was meant to give writers the freedom to turn their undivided attention to their work. The silence inside and out was so pure, it should have been distilled, as if it were a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild. The irony of the weekend was that he was continually interrupted by drunk writers wanting him to go along and party. He had little of the Château Lafite silence. But it still worked its magic. The fact that he couldn’t stand the interruptions, that he didn’t want people around, that he wanted the silence, told him just as much as if no one had knocked on his door. He knew he’d have to leave his wife and son and get a place by himself.

The marriage had gone sour years before. In the less than a year he’d been separated from Lilith, he’d written enough poetry for the second half of his second book. It had taken him fifteen years of married life to write the first half.

Right now Jimmy pulled the manuscript from a drawer and looked over the last poem. He thought maybe he was trying too hard with it. It was a sestina, so it was hard not to try too hard. He crossed out a line.

The doorbell sounded its tearful little chimes. Sighing, he got up, went to the door. Two men, strangers, stood on his front stoop. “Jimmy McKenzie?”

“McKinney.” A lot of people made that mistake. “What can I do for you?”

The taller of the two had a folder under his arm, a little too thin to be a manuscript, Jimmy hoped. And authors didn’t show up like this; they called before they came.

“We just got done talking to Cindy Sella?” The man held up the folder.

Cindy sending a prospective client? No, that wasn’t Cindy. “Come on in. And you are—?”

“Karl.”

“Candy,” offered the shorter one, who was giving the hall the once-over, looking appreciatively at the small bronze dolphin Mort Durban had given Jimmy when he signed the dreadful Myra Byington, prolific
writer of romantic thrillers. The dreadful Myra had insisted on going with Jimmy when he left the agency. “Good riddance,” Mort had said, though it was never good riddance to any commission in the six-figure zone. Myra was one of the ones who made a living from writing.

“Come into the office.”

The tall one, Karl, was stretching his neck to take in the chandelier (came with the house) and the high ceilings and old moldings. “Real nice place you got here. Prime real estate, Chelsea. And you got a whole house.”

“It’s a pretty small house.” Jimmy led them into the next room, Karl and Candy all the while scoping out the place as if they might come back to rob it. Their designer suits notwithstanding, Jimmy had the feeling that the crime rate on the block had just spiked. He waved his hand toward a crewel-work wingback chair and an upholstered easy chair that sat pretty much in tatters.

Karl said, “I guess you know about this agent, L. Bass Hess’s, complaint against her.”

“Yes, certainly. Trying to collect a commission on her last book, one Hess didn’t even represent. It’s been tried before, but either the writer paid or the agent gave up. It’s never been carried this far for the simple reason that it’s an absurd claim.”

“So how come this Bass Hess thinks he’s got a case against Cindy Sella?”

“Revenge.”

“Jesus,” said Karl. “Don’t authors have the right to get rid of agents they don’t like?”

“Of course they do, happens all the time. But Hess is so egotistical, he thinks nobody leaves him, nobody. Kind of like a Mafia boss, if you know what I mean.”

Both of them nodded soberly. “Yeah, we know,” said Karl.

Jimmy went on. “He also thinks Cindy Sella owes him, like he saved her career and other such shit. He’s an egocentric, self-deluding, out-of-touch, self-absorbed son of a bitch.”

“So, personally, what do you think of him?” asked Candy.

Jimmy grinned. “He could’ve been a good agent, maybe was at some time. He’s hell on contract language. Which has him picking
over contracts like a gibbon searching for fleas, and that’s what makes him think he can twist the option clause to his advantage. It’s in every contract, purely for the benefit of the publisher, a right of first refusal. There’s absolutely no benefit for the writer, which is the irony about this situation. If an agent’s doing something to help an author, he should try to take the damned clause out. If Hess really worked hard on it, he’d have gotten it taken out.” He nodded toward the folder. “What’s in there?”

“It’s the documents in the case.”

“That’s a book by Dorothy L. Sayers.”

“Hell, does everybody know that but us?” Karl handed Jimmy the folder. “Anyway, this is the Hess take on it. We happened to go to his office. What it is, is a lot of stuff about Miss Sella’s personal conduct and behavior. He claims he’s got the goods on her: drugs, drinking, et cetera. And of course how bad she acted, firing him out of the blue, forcing the publisher to keep back money owed him, twisting her foreign agents to do her bidding.”

Jimmy was looking at the papers. “Not Cindy, definitely not Cindy. She’s the most legit person I know. Sits in her little apartment in what she calls Grub Street and writes.”

Candy frowned. “Lives on Grove. What’s Grub Street?”

Jimmy looked up from the papers, smiling. “A novel by George Gissing called
New Grub Street.
Grub Street was a part of London inhabited by hack journalists, novelists willing to sell out for money—it was the turning up of commercialism in writing, a street dedicated not to art but to money. Cindy makes money, spends hardly any. Why am I telling you this?”

“Oh, kindred souls and shit like that.” Karl flashed a smile. He had teeth that looked like an ad for Sonicare.

Jimmy’s eyes narrowed. “What do you guys do, anyway? You’re not writers.” Then, thinking he sounded snobbily dismissive of them, he added, “
Are
you writers?”

Candy had just folded a stick of Doublemint into his mouth, so his tongue was a little clotted when he said, “We might be thinkin’ of a book, yeah.”

Karl yukked. “Oh, sure, with all our free time.”

They seemed to have it. Jimmy asked again, “Why did you go to Bass Hess’s office, anyway?”

Karl said, “A client-author had some questions he wanted answered.” They both looked at Jimmy.

He looked back. “Client? You guys aren’t in the publishing world, are you?”

They laughed. “Sometimes it sure feels like it,” said Candy, his chewing gum under control.

“Why did Hess give you his papers?”

“He thought we were Hale and Reeves.” Candy sat forward and picked up the brass paperweight that had been holding down some manuscript pages. “A case of mistaken identity.”

“So Hess never saw you before and didn’t ask you for ID?”

“He told us who we were,” said Karl. “He thought we were the guys he was expecting. Thought we were his three o’clock.”

Candy chortled. “Dumb prick. It’s what you was saying before. Anyone that’s so—” He twirled his hand in the air in a dancer’s gesture. “Whatever you said, wouldn’t that kinda person think everything’s going according to plan because it’s his plan?”

Jimmy rested his chin on his fist and looked at Candy. It wasn’t a bad analysis of the incident, after all.

Karl said, “I’d be willing to bet he even believes all this crap he’s put together. Me, just gimme an old-time crook any day. A fraud that knows he’s a fraud. A pair of frauds like in
Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.
Michael Caine and Steve Martin. A couple of straight-up, old-time crooks. Guys that know damned well they’re stealing the socks off their grannies. Like if I rob somebody at gunpoint, I don’t say, ‘Hey! It’s what you owe me, scumbag.’ ”