Famous Writers I Have Known

by James Magnuson

  Still, I missed him. I missed our trips knocking around Texas. I missed listening to his stories about crossing the Khyber Pass. I even missed our hearts games, seeing how happy it made him when he laid the queen of spades on me.

  When I sat down in the pew again, I felt something jab me in the rump. I tilted to one side and reached around. Something was stuck inside the hem of my blazer, something hard and the size of an arrowhead.

  The youth choir rose to sing “Faith of Our Fathers.” I undid one of my brass buttons of my coat. Some of the lining had come unstitched and, slob that I was, I’d fastened it in a couple of places with safety pins. I shook the hem of my jacket, working whatever it was around to the front.

  Some old granny farther down the pew shot me disapproving looks. I slipped my hand inside the lining, groped around, and finally found it—something egg-shaped, an inch or two long.

  The youth choir looked like angels in their white smocks. I eased my hand out of my coat, put it between my knees so no one else could see. I opened my palm. For a moment I had no idea what I was staring at. It was oblong, snarled in thread, and fuzzy with lint. Once I picked at it with a fingernail, the threads unraveled easily. My heart lurched sideways in my chest. I closed my hand tight around Cannetti’s locker key with its red plastic top.

  Sometimes God answers our prayers in mysterious ways. Somehow I made it through the rest of the service. I shared my hymnal with the dork next to me, I listened to the sermon, greeted the minister afterward, and politely refused his invitation to stay for the hour of fellowship.

  I staggered out into the snow. A wiser man would have flushed that key down the toilet. One man had already been killed for it. Goons had been crisscrossing the country to get their hands on it. V. S. Mohle had gotten the crap beaten out of him when he couldn’t come up with it. Didn’t I have any sense at all?

  That afternoon I sat in front of the TV, watching infomercials and a golf tournament from Hawaii, but all I could think about was how many lockers there had to be in New York. Five thousand? Ten? And who was to say that the locker I was looking for was even in Manhattan? It could be in the Bronx or New Jersey, and even if I did finally find it, there was no guarantee that whatever Cannetti had put in there was still around.

  Slumped in my chair, I just kept turning the key over and over in my hand. What I was considering doing was, let’s face it, incredibly stupid. At the same time, I felt as if I’d just downed four espressos. Maybe some guys aren’t cut out to be virtuous. Here I’d been an ordinary Joe, going to work every day, paying my taxes, keeping my nose clean, and all it had done was make me feel like a big faker.

  I called my supervisor that night and told him I had to take a couple of days off for personal reasons. He was a real prince about it. I spent the next two hours trying to book a flight. I finally found one for the next day and it cost me an arm and a leg, but I wasn’t worried about the money. What mattered was that I was back in the game. I felt more alive than I’d felt in months.

  I flew into LaGuardia Monday night. On the plane someone had left an old paperback copy of Schoeninger’s Continental Divide. I read a hundred pages or so, which took me from the cooling of the earth’s crust to the origin of the beaver.

  As my cab rattled across the Triborough Bridge, I found myself leaning forward, holding on to the frayed strap, staring at the lights of the city like some country bumpkin. The East River swirled below, dark as oil. My stomach was bad. I felt like I was in one of those old western movies where John Wayne creeps into the Comanche camp to cut loose the horses while all the braves are still sleeping.

  Once I checked into my hotel, I was in for the night. I had no reason to believe that anyone was actively looking for me, but there was no point in testing fate; when you’re on the streets of New York, there’s no telling who you’re going to run into. I ordered room service, read another hundred pages or so of Continental Divide, and watched a poker tournament on ESPN2. It took me a while to go to sleep; after the perfect stillness of Appleton, the horns and clatter of the city kept jarring me awake.

  The next morning I was up at the crack of dawn, scouring Port Authority, Grand Central, and Penn Station. It was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack, my search for Locker 324, and it came to nothing. In Port Authority the numbers only went up to 199. At Grand Central there was a 324, but my key didn’t fit. There was a 324 in Penn Station too, unlocked, with nothing inside.

  It was a little past ten by the time I finished, and I felt like a sap. How could I have overlooked the most obvious thing? In public train and bus stations, they cleared all the lockers at least once a month.

  The escalator carried me up out of Penn Station and spit me onto the street. What now? It was hard to believe I’d blown five hundred dollars on an airline ticket for this. Feet aching, I hobbled through the crowds, heading uptown. Fire trucks blared and I was getting that familiar rawness at the back of my throat. How far I had fallen. It had just been a few months before that I’d been sitting at a table, surrounded by adoring young women, discussing point of view.

  A sharp rap buckled the back of my knee. I spun quickly, ready to give somebody a piece of my mind, but it was just a pair of actresses coming out of a dance studio, swinging their gym bags.

  Funny how the mind works. Sometimes it’s like slogging through mud, and other times it’s like riding on lightning. Cannetti had had a gym bag too, just like those actresses, and one thing about gyms, they had lockers, and not the kind that get cleaned out every month.

  I found a hotel on Thirty-seventh Street and ducked into a phone booth. I went through the Yellow Pages and wrote down the names of all the gyms within a ten-block radius of Penn Station. There were fifteen of them. Not the smallest number, but I wasn’t about to lose heart now. It was time for a little shoe leather.

  The first three turned out to be total busts. One was like a eighties disco joint with mirrors everywhere, the Bee Gees playing on the intercom, and these swinger types in sweaty leotards and cycling pants scoping each other out. The second was nothing but old Chinese people doing slow-motion karate moves. And the third was like an old-fashioned Y, with a bunch of juvenile delinquents mugging one another on the basketball court.

  At each of them, I presented myself as a prospective new member, and asked if they would mind if I looked around. I checked out all three changing rooms. In two of them, the lockers used combinations, not keys, and in the Chinese gym, they didn’t have lockers at all, just big wire baskets.

  It was noon by the time I got to gym number four, the Ninth Avenue Sports Club, and I was wearing down. The place wasn’t much. Stuck between a Puerto Rican market and a Greek souvlaki stand, it looked more like a typewriter repair shop than a gym. In the front window were an array of bodybuilding magazines, a pair of barbells, and a scattering of dead flies. A bell tinkled as I pushed through the front door. A squat old guy who could have been one of the sparring partners in Raging Bull sat behind the main desk reading something in the New York Post to a black security guard. The sound of the bell made him drop the paper to his lap.

  “Can I help you?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, maybe you can. I live right around the corner and wondered if maybe you’d be interested in any new members.”

  “We’re pretty full up here.”

  “So when do you think you might have some openings?”

  “No telling. A month or two.”

  “Huh,” I said. I picked one of the brochures off the desk and glanced through it. All the photos had to be at least forty years old. I could feel the two of them watching me. “Looks great,” I said. “It would just be so convenient, you know? A gym in the neighborhood. Would you mind if I looked around?”

  He took a minute to mull over his answer. “That’s fine,” he said. He motioned with one of his busted-up hands. “Down there on your right.”

  I edged down a narrow, rickety staircase and made my way past a couple of handball courts where scrawny young toughs with
boils on their necks careened from wall to wall. Beyond the handball courts was a weight room that had seen better days. In the far corner a pail sat on a treadmill to catch a slow drip from a bulge in the ceiling. Over the stationary bicycles was a poster for a Carmen Basilio middleweight bout in 1961. I had the place nearly to myself. A couple of huge guys who looked as if they’d just returned from a hard night of hijacking semis tossed a medicine ball back and forth between them, making oofing sounds every time they took it in the belly.

  I wove my way through the rowing machines and pushed through the door marked mens. A couple of old geezers in their underwear sat on a bench, pulling on their socks and talking about their prostate operations. When I murmured hello, they barely nodded back.

  Clouds of steam hung in the air and I could hear showers running. There was no turning back now. I moseyed down the main aisle, sidestepping a patch of busted tile. The place smelled of rotten jockstraps. I scanned the lockers on both sides of me. Most of them had built-in combinations, but in the far corner of the farthest row were five that were coin-operated. Three were in use. Two were empty, with the keys still in them—keys with tops of red plastic.

  I glanced over my shoulder. The two old guys were out of my line of sight now, though I could still hear them muttering about how many times they had to get up at night.

  I ducked into the row to take a closer look. The number on the three lockers in use were 320, 321, and 324. I squatted, hand to my eyes, and tried to peer through the ventilated slats of 324. It was hard to make out much, but what I could see was enough. A curved section of a stitched leather handle pressed against the slats.

  I stood up and felt my trousers pocket for my key. As I did, pipes groaned and then I didn’t hear the sound of water anymore. I turned. An old man the size of a sea lion stepped cautiously out of the shower, one hand on the wall for balance. He didn’t see me at first and for five or six seconds I stood there watching him retrieve his towel and begin to scrub at his elbows.

  When he finally looked up he wasn’t so much startled to see me as offended. You would have thought I was some kind of pervert. He lifted one foot, teetering, and wiped his toes, glowering at me. The man had to weigh at least three hundred and fifty pounds, a planet of pink flesh. I couldn’t imagine him using that stairway; they must have lowered him down here with a crane.

  I patted my trousers pockets again, front and back. “Seem to have lost my car keys.” I said. “You haven’t seen an extra set anywhere around here, have you?”

  “Uh-uh.” For all I knew, the man could be Cannetti’s uncle.

  “Well, I guess all I can do is hope I somehow left ‘em at the office.”

  The man made a sound in his throat like he was clearing phlegm. I gave him a one-finger salute and sauntered out of there as coolly as I could. Upstairs, the desk clerk and the guard took turns banging the sides of an old TV.

  “Nice place you’ve got here,” I said. “I’ll come back later and see if I can get myself on a list, okay?”

  The desk clerk was in no mood for conversation. He gave me a glance and then went back to whacking the balky television.

  I wandered the streets in a daze. It was unbelievable. How could Cannetti possibly store whatever it was in a day locker for six months and no one touches it? On second thought, maybe it wasn’t so hard to believe. What better place to stash something than a mob gym? It was like walking in Little Italy—safest place in New York because no one dares mess with anybody else.

  The locker must have been some kind of drop. Cannetti must have left the bag in there, with the arrangement being that he would meet the sellers later, give them the key in exchange for whatever they were selling. When it turned out he didn’t have it (because I had it), things probably turned ugly. Trust me, I know these people.

  I suppose it should have made me feel guilty, but I wasn’t in the mood for shedding any tears over Cannetti. I had plenty of problems of my own. The last thing I wanted was to end up like him. The trick was going to be how to get back into that gym and out again, without arousing suspicion. The good news was that the place had not been that busy, even at noon. My guess was that by midafternoon it would be pretty dead. What I needed was to give it a rest and come back later to check things out.

  I blew an hour nosing around midtown. It was sort of like old times. The figurines of the Statue of Liberty were still for sale in the souvenir shops and a man in a clown suit passed out flyers in front of the Peep-O-Rama.

  I bought a New York Post and found a bench in Bryant Park. Leafing through all the editorials about Rudy Giuliani’s wars on the squeegee men, I stumbled onto a piece about Rex’s memorial. There was a long quote from Rex’s literary agent. “For all the terrible things V. S. Mohle said about him, in the end Rex won hands down. He was a better person and a more dominating presence. Mohle will certainly occupy a very particular, if perhaps precious, place in the literary firmament, but Rex Schoeninger conquered the world.” According to the article, the service was to take place at two o’clock at the Founders Club.

  A guy with a bad haircut and thick-soled shoes sat on a bench directly across from me. I asked him if he had the time. He looked annoyed, but fished into his pocket for his watch. Ten past one, he said.

  I took a moment, rubbing the ink off my fingers, trying to decide what to do. The Founders Club, if I remembered correctly, was in the low Sixties, just off Fifth. No more than twenty blocks away. I wasn’t crazy enough to think I could actually attend the service, but how great it would be to be a fly on the wall. Maybe there was a way, if I was careful enough. There was no telling who was going to be there. Ramona, maybe, and maybe even good old Wayne.

  I headed up Fifth Avenue, zigzagging through the crush of grim-faced shoppers. It didn’t take me long to get there. By a quarter to two I was stationed across the street from the Founders Club, munching on a Sabrett hot dog. Office workers sat on the low walls of a huge plaza, eating lunch and soaking up the sun.

  One by one the limousines began to arrive. Under the cover of the Sabrett stand umbrella, I watched the great and the near-great emerge, elderly men in thousand-dollar suits and razor-thin women who looked like they ran things. Two groups of stylish young women, all dressed in black, converged on foot. They twittered and swirled on the sidewalk like a flock of starlings before disappearing inside. A couple of shady-looking characters in badly fitting trousers and scuffed shoes—writers, I figured—snubbed their cigarettes out in the gutter before trudging up the steps.

  My stomach churned. The hot dog had been a mistake and the sauerkraut an even bigger one. Wiping mustard off my chin, I watched the last stragglers disappear inside the club. Two doormen stood talking, hands clasped behind their backs. Fuming, I crossed the street. As I passed the club, I took a sidelong glance. Shadows flitted behind frosted glass. One of the doormen, a hard-eyed man who I suspect must have been charged with war crimes in one country or another, gave me the kind of glare you’d give to a stray dog looking for scraps.

  I kept walking, playing it casual, and didn’t stop until I was halfway down the block. When I looked back, both doormen had disappeared. Don’t be a fool, I told myself. This is not the time to be doing anything rash. I had business to tend to, important business. All the same, what harm could it do to poke my head in? This was not the kind of opportunity that comes along every day.

  I retraced my steps. When I came to the club entrance, I peered in through the decorated glass. Everyone seemed to have vanished. Cracking the door open, I took another look. The two doormen, backs turned, were helping a pair of white-jacketed black waiters set up tables at the far end of the lobby.

  I slipped inside, using my hand to keep the door from closing too abruptly. Up the stairs I went, head down, trying to look as if I knew where I was going. To my left, beyond a wide marble staircase and some faded tapestries, was a larger room where people sat dutifully in rows of straight-backed chairs.

  Three or four men lounged in the doorway. I jo
ined them, peeking over their shoulders. The room was decorated with portraits of various nineteenth century robber barons, stout as walruses in their dark suits. A mirror that must have been swiped from the court of a French king loomed overhead.

  The guy at the podium was a slender fellow in his mid-fifties with a colored handkerchief in his breast pocket and the offhanded ease of a talk show host. Leaning forward on his elbows, he went through a list of Schoeninger’s accomplishments—best-selling author of all time, philanthropist, champion of education, racial tolerance, and international understanding.

  No one seemed to be paying any particular attention. I could see three or four reporters in the crowd, writing pads on their laps, but one of them was studying the fancy molding above the high windows and another was checking messages on his cell phone. An older man with a gleaming bald head was already snoozing, his wingtips firmly anchored in the legs of the chair in front of him. All the young women in black passed notes like junior high school girls. I figured they had to be secretaries from various publishing houses, given an hour off to make sure there was a respectable turnout.

  The MC took a seat while two videotapes were played, one sent by Tom Brokaw, the other by Jimmy Carter. Brokaw apologized for not being able to attend—he was in Milan reporting on the World Trade Organization meetings—but he said what a great friend Schoeninger had been and told a story about how they’d met on a dogsled during the filming of an NBC special in Alaska. Jimmy Carter was also sorry not to be there—he was visiting North Korea, trying to talk the dictator out of nuclear testing—but he too remembered Schoeninger with fondest regard and had always appreciated everything Rex had done for Habitat for Humanity.

  One by one, other speakers trooped to the podium—the director of a museum of western art in Missoula, a decrepit old actress who’d starred in The Sands of Vanuatu some forty years before, New York’s most powerful real estate mogul in a suit so shimmery it seemed to be made of sharkskin. The museum director talked about the size of his endowment, the tiny actress sang a few bars of “Good-bye Yankee-Boy” in a crackly voice, and the real estate magnate let us know what a great guy he was, flying Schoeninger here and there, putting him up in his big hotels in the Caribbean, lining him up with the top cardiologists in Manhattan.