“They indicated a near-uniform preference for lower charges.”
“Thanks for the revelation. When I get back the monopoly I used to enjoy, I’ll have you do your market research. Let me tell you something, Norman—there’s only one way to edit, and it’s not by sticking your finger into the wind. You’ve got to go by the seat of your pants, be decisive. You don’t want Hamlet for an editor. Othello—now there’s an editor-in-chief.” Harris looked at Andrew Burn. “You, Iago, what’s the story?”
“It isn’t good,” said Burn. “Marmon and Pierce-Arrow are thinking about doing business with Jimmy’s man unless we drop the ad rate.”
The doctored Composograph might already be yesterday’s victory, but one more glance at it emboldened Harris to raise his voice: “Go back to each of the car guys and tell ’em to take two pages in Cutaway, if they want. Jimmy Gordon will be all they can afford after a few more ideas of mine kick in. Like this one. Remember?” He went into his top drawer for Rosemary LaRoche’s perfumed, pink note accepting their lunch date. He held it up so that Burn and Spilkes could get a whiff. “Have a little patience, you two. Have a little faith. Once she’s on the cover, our line on that graph will look like Rothstein’s schvantz—on a very happy night.”
A smile wiggled onto, and then off, Spilkes’s face. “You’re right, I’m sure. ‘Rosemary and time’ will take care of things.”
Harris asked, after several seconds: “What the fuck are you talking about?”
Spilkes followed Burn out of the office, and before they could close the door, Harris yelled to Hazel: “Do you have my car ordered for the Plaza?”
“No,” she said, before cracking a piece of hard candy with her molars. “Betty says you’re too fat. You have to walk. She also says to keep your eyes above that floozy’s neck.”
“You look tired, my boy.” Nelson Merrill, the magazine’s lone surviving fashion illustrator, tried offering some grandfatherly comfort to Allen Case, as the two sat in Merrill’s corner of the Art Department, sipping cups of lemon tea.
“I did work v-very late last night,” said Allen, just above a whisper.
Their gentle exchange was interrupted by Gardiner Arinopoulos’s loud, exasperated entrance: “Where IS Mr. Lord?” he asked.
“I’m afraid I’ve no idea,” said Merrill.
“Well, then, WHERE’S Mr. ——, you know, the fashion fellow, the ONE that’s skinny as a whippet?”
“You mean Brian K-Keene,” said Allen.
“Yes,” said the photographer, no less impatient. “Where IS he? I’ve got to find some damned ascots BACK THERE, when I need to be THINKING about bulls and bears.” He left as abruptly as he’d entered.
“Is your tea too hot?” Nelson Merrill asked Allen. “You look flushed.”
“No,” said the copyeditor, whose color came from the alarm he was feeling over Arinopoulos’s mention of two new species. “It’s just … h-him.” What humiliating plans did the photographer have for bulls and bears?
“Ah, yes,” said the illustrator. “Mr. Arinopoulos—and all he represents.”
Nelson Merrill, born in 1860, could remember seeing Lincoln’s funeral procession come up Fifth Avenue when he was not quite five years old. Sixty years later, he was a roly-poly white-haired gentleman, more or less the opposite of the young male ideal he still inked onto a few of the magazine’s pages. His beautiful, attenuated drawings, much admired by the great Leyendecker, were sometimes made even more splendid with a color wash, but no longer did they appear on Bandbox’s cover, nor even with much frequency inside. The office’s only link to the pre-Harris regime, Merrill was allowed to come in late and go home early. A naturally cheerful man, he nevertheless kept to himself, as if afraid of being singed by Flaming Youth. He had confided to only a few, such as Allen and Nan O’Grady, the sorrow he felt over his replacement by the camera.
Now, as always, he kept sketching, even as he kept up his end of the conversation: “Terrible business yesterday. I felt sorry for the Columbia boy.”
“Yes,” said Allen. “The p-p-poor ocelot bit the wrong behind.”
Merrill smiled. Beneath his fast-moving hand, a soulful whippet was coming into view.
Allen went back to the Copy Department and asked Nan if she had heard anything about bulls and bears.
“It’s on the lineup sheet,” she answered. “Some Wall Street piece that’s due in tomorrow. They’re supposed to shoot a little koala bear being chased by some big Black Angus. Optimism overpowering pessimism, I gather.” She rolled her eyes. “I heard Mr. Lord talking about it with the Greek shutterbug.”
A bull could be obtained anywhere, Allen knew, but this meant that some illegally imported koala must now be tied up, with Arinopoulos’s other exotic fauna, at that garage in Queens. What is to be done? he could hear one part of his mind pamphleteering to the other. He already knew what that was, but could not ask Nan for the help he needed; she would guess he was up to something. So he returned to the Art Department.
“Mr. M-Merrill,” he asked. “You know Queens, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes. It’s what Miss O’Grady and myself have in common. Woodside and taking care of our mothers.” In telling the story of Lincoln’s funeral, the illustrator liked to point out that the now-eighty-nine-year-old Mrs. Merrill would have been old enough to vote for Lincoln, had the ladies had the franchise way back then.
“Right,” said Allen. After a last moment’s hesitation, he reached into his pocket for a folded slip of paper. “Do you know the easiest w-w-way for me to get to this address?” He had obtained it late last night by rifling through some invoices in the Art Department. The trucker who transported the animals to and from Arinopoulos’s shoots listed their pickup point on his bill.
Merrill set the little sheet beside his penciled whippet. “That’s a street in Long Island City,” he said. “I should think I can give you pretty good directions.”
13
“Of course she’s not twenty-three,” said Becky, struggling with her scarf and gloves.
Newman put a nickel into the codcake window for her.
“Put one into the pie slot,” said Cuddles, “and I’ll bet you she coughs up LaRoche’s real name.”
“Lucille Monahan,” said Newman, as the three of them slid their trays along. “Born in Hutchinson, Kansas.”
“Nope,” said Becky.
Newman handed her a nickel, which she used to get a cup of coffee for Cuddles.
“Do I absolutely have to?” Houlihan asked, while Newman got a cup for himself.
Once the three were settled at a table, Becky brought Stuart up to speed: “She’s at least thirty, and she was doing those two-reel comedies more than ten years ago. I heard all this from a friend who writes contracts in the Paramount Building. Lucille Monahan was her first fake name. She disappeared after a couple of years in Los Angeles. My friend thinks she was in the clink—maybe for shoplifting. When she got out, she rechristened herself again. She hadn’t made enough of an impression the first time round so that anyone would notice.”
“No Parisian music master?” asked Newman. “No French?”
“No Hutchinson?” cried Cuddles. “Zut alors!” He forced down a sip of coffee.
“Nobody,” explained Becky, “knows where she actually came from or what her real name was.” She turned toward Cuddles: “You look as if you’re developing a theory.”
“No,” he said. “I’m just wondering about all these helpful old boyfriends. The Graphic, the Paramount Building—where else have you got them stashed? The boardroom of American Radiator? The Fulton Fish Market?”
“If I had one there, I’d tell him about this.” Becky pushed away the codcake. “The only other boyfriend I can think of is the current one,” she said, looking straight at Cuddles. “The ‘monk’ at the Cloisters. Remember?”
Newman lit a cigarette and glanced at the clock. He was thinking how much simpler things would be if he were just starting another “Bachelor’s Life” colu
mn: “When You Take Your Girl to the Automat.”
“Are you running late?” asked Becky.
“The opposite,” said Newman. “I’ve got another hour to kill before I’m supposed to present myself at the Plaza.”
“Try not to bring Il Duce back to the premises until after four,” Cuddles instructed Newman. “And make sure he’s well oiled.”
“So he won’t notice you’ve gone to the ‘home office’?” asked Becky, using Houlihan’s term for his couch over in Brooklyn. “Nothing doing. Not after I hauled you back up over the rail yesterday.” Putting on her scarf, she took a look at Stuart’s handsome hollowed eyes and wondered how long it would be before someone had to throw him a life preserver, too.
14
“Yessir,” said Harris. “He may be late, but there he is.” He directed Rosemary LaRoche’s attention to George M. Cohan, now sitting down at his regular corner table in the Oak Room.
“Yeah,” said the film star, peeking through the smilax-wrapped trellis that shielded her from too much public view. “Give my regards to Broadway. Fuck Broadway,” she declared, before putting a last bite of strip steak into her mouth.
Disappointed at the failure of what he had hoped would seem an authentic New York treat to this sun-bronzed captive of the film colony, Harris tried soothing her. “Of course,” he said, recalling a fragment of autobiography she’d imparted during the soup course. “You’re remembering those shortsighted rejections when you were trying to get started here.” He sympathetically imagined the scene. “A beautiful girl being mistreated by those Broadway wolves.”
“Wolves?” cried Miss LaRoche, tossing her napkin onto the remains of the steak. “In the whole six months I was up here, I never met one who wasn’t a nellie. I practically shoved my melons into their kissers, but you’da thought they was live grenades the way those guys would flinch. Here,” she said, extracting for a third time the small silver flask she kept in her garter. “You’re still not completely thawed.”
After his enforced walk from the office, and having puffed his way past the skaters near the fountain, Harris had arrived at the hotel exhausted. He now accepted a little dividend in what he and Rosemary and the waiter were pretending was his water glass. Her Hollywood hooch was a lot better than what he got from the countess back at the office, and when Rosemary swung her legs out from under the table to replace the flask inside her garter, there was the visual bonus of her splendid right thigh.
“Bingo,” she said, upon accomplishing the storage. Once more Harris was face-to-face with her blond bob, stratospheric cheekbones, and blazing green eyes, which were bordered by the faintest tracery of wrinkles. He was more smitten than he had imagined, or Betty had feared. For the past hour and a half, the more profane this siren got, the more courtly and avuncular he’d found himself becoming.
“Terrible, isn’t it?” he said, raising his glass. “The lengths the law makes us go to to disguise a civilized habit.”
“Sounds like you’re hoping for another flash,” said Rosemary, snapping her garter.
“No, no,” said Harris, innocently wounded. “I’m just remembering a time when you could see men come in here holding tumblers of whiskey, not pieces of ticker tape, when they sat down to their lunch.” It would soon be a decade since the adjoining Oak Bar had been turned into an E.F. Hutton office.
“Don’t knock the market,” said Rosemary. “The week I dumped that no-good-nellie husband of mine I found out that his money-man had quadrupled everything he’d been holding in the space of a month. Half and half? Hell, we split it double and double!”
Harris ignored these financial loaves and fishes. He could only marvel: Howard Kenyon—that cinematic sheik, that heroic screen doughboy, that movie-palace pirate … was a feygele? Why, he wondered, was she telling him this? Did she just assume that he’d be too scared to print any of the beans she was spilling? He tried looking further into those green eyes, and he hit an emerald wall.
“So let me tell you how you’re gonna shoot me for your cover,” said Rosemary.
Harris came out of his frightened revery. “Actually, Miss LaRoche, that’ll be up to Mr. Lord, whom you’ll—”
“You’re gonna have me on a couch with just a fancy silk sheet covering my hoohah and melons. My wrists and ankles are gonna be tied together with pearls. I got a picture called Chained coming out around the time you’ll be getting your show on the road, and I’m gonna need people to think this crummy masterpiece is a little hotter than it is.”
“Was the director a nellie?” It was all Harris could think to say.
“Worse,” said Rosemary. “A gentleman. Of course, you are, too. But in the best sense of the term. Which is why I know you’ll be square with me. I get a nickel on each thirty-five-cent copy you sell above a hundred thousand.”
Harris chose to concentrate not on the meaning, but the mere sound, of what she was saying. Where had he heard such a voice before? On the rodeo cowboy Bandbox had once let loose in the city for a babe-in-the-metropolitan-woods piece? No, it was too deep, and not quite twangy enough. On the old lady he and Betty had met last winter down at the Vinoy Park in St. Petersburg? The one who’d actually been born in Florida? No, not enough syrup. And the way Miss LaRoche said “term”—didn’t it sound faintly like “toim”? Whatever head she might have for figures, this dame didn’t add up.
“I’ll have to talk with Mr. Burn, my publisher,” Harris finally said.
“You do that, ’Phat. Otherwise we got no deal. Hel-lo,” she then uttered, without a pause to mark the shift from business to pleasure. “What have we here?” She parted the smilax once again. Harris stretched his neck to get a look at the gentleman checking his overcoat with the girl at the entrance. A good-looking fellow, even if he was in need of a hair-combing and—
Rosemary LaRoche had him so agitated that it took several seconds to realize he was looking at Stuart Newman.
“That’s your writer, Miss LaRoche. I asked him to join us for coffee.”
Staring at Newman with her fierce green eyes and smile, the actress said to the editor: “You’re goddamned right it is.”
Newman approached the table, trying not to recall a long-ago bender that had ended here at the Plaza in a broom closet on the eleventh floor.
“Stuart!” cried Harris. “Come meet Rosemary LaRoche.”
Newman took his last steps with a certain hesitation, trying to guess why the boss was looking at him as if he’d already accomplished something wonderful.
The actress put out her hand. Newman, uncertain for a moment what to do, finally took hold of it and brought it to his lips. Harris thought this tough-talking cookie might swallow his man in two bites, like a second order of strip steak. But in a soft little voice, creme-filled with vowels from yet another indeterminate part of the country, Rosemary LaRoche purred: “Mr. Newman is très, très charmant.”
15
Around other tables here at Lindy’s, the showgirls outnumbered the fighters and newsmen and producers who were buying them supper. So Daisy felt grateful for the odds where she was: two to one, the one being herself, seated between Eddie Diamond and Judge Francis X. Gilfoyle. The numbers would only improve once Arnold Rothstein arrived at his usual spot, though perhaps it was the absence of his rather glum presence that had made this evening, so far, a little gayer than the one she’d spent at 912 Fifth Avenue a few weeks ago, shortly after Carolyn Rothstein’s departure for Europe.
She knew that long-standing marital troubles had dictated that bon voyage, but she now decided to go ahead and ask if there had been any word on how Mrs. Rothstein was getting on over there. The response, from Judge Gilfoyle, was appropriately circumspect, since it concerned, as Daisy was coming to understand, his boss’s wife.
“She’s cabled that she’s doing quite well,” said the judge. “I’d say better than one might expect. You have to understand that Mrs. Rothstein is a nervous creature—” He paused to come up with a suitable softening. “Delicate. Refined
.”
“Oh, I’m sure she is,” said Daisy, with a great deal of breathy sympathy.
“As he likes to say himself,” the judge went on, “Mr. Rothstein usually keeps the lady ‘in a glass case,’ so perhaps this European excursion will prove liberat—”
Eddie Diamond’s lungs erupted with wet, wheezy laughter. A tubercular past, thought Daisy; one found it in many men in his line of work.
“A glass case?” cried Eddie. “She’s lucky he don’t stop up the air holes!”
Noting the distress this remark provoked in the judge, Daisy pretended it had never been uttered. She liked Francis X. Gilfoyle. There was something reassuring about his florid face and advanced age. (The most dreadful revelation inside Max Stanwick’s article was the fact that Rothstein was only two years older than herself.) She liked the whole ensemble that was the judge: the old-fashioned homburg; the three-quarter part in the thinning hair; the dandruff that needed a woman’s cheerful brushing from the lapels. Put him in a lineup of her recent escorts—all those sharp-edged characters who came right to the point—and she’d have no trouble picking him out.
“And where is Mr. Rothstein tonight?” she finally asked.
“Out in Maspeth,” said Judge Gilfoyle, who Daisy had learned was the third senior justice in Manhattan Criminal Court. “Looking over the progress on a grand housing development he’s got a hand in. It’s called Juniper Park. Two hundred modest homes—”
“That he’s gonna have trouble sellin’ to coons!” declared Eddie Diamond, who coughed his way so hard through the next couple of sentences that his two big ears shook. “You should see this ‘development,’ Duchess. They put the hot-water heaters in the front hallway! If ‘The Brain’ is out there, he’s probably tryin’ to keep the whole slum from bein’ condemned before it opens.”
Appalled at this sarcastic use of Mr. Rothstein’s best-known nickname, Daisy looked toward her escort, who appeared positively frightened. Had she misjudged Eddie Diamond the night he drove her home from 912 Fifth? Had there perhaps been a deterioration in his business relationship with “The Brain”?
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