The famous novelist-reporter leaned down to clasp John’s shoulder and offer some advice about the business of observation: “You know what to listen for when you’re someplace like this?”
John shook his head no.
“Everything,” whispered Max.
“Everything,” said John, lest he forget. He looked at Stanwick and nodded several times. He was still nodding when he at last turned to greet the countess and the judge, who drew him into a cozy foursome with themselves and Max.
A few feet away, at the same moment, Cuddles and Becky took note of Jimmy Gordon’s entry into the salon. The triplex might be packed with editors from Hearst and Nast and all the other rival companies—even Frank Crowninshield’s bobbing gray head was visible—but Jimmy’s showing up did seem a bit much in the provocation department.
“Where’s our boss?” said Becky to Cuddles.
“Relax,” he replied. “ ’Phat’ll love this.”
They watched Jimmy make his way across the room to shake hands with Spilkes and Andrew Burn. He backslapped both, and gave them a little razzing about the ad figures. “Nice to see you,” he told Theophilus Palmer, who seemed to smile for the first time tonight.
Paul Montgomery, first standing on tiptoe to make sure the coast was clear, took hold of the Wood Chipper’s elbow and propelled him toward Jimmy, as if doing the younger man a favor—making it okay for Chip to greet his former benefactor, since it was being done under the supervision of a current Harris star—i.e., Montgomery himself. Chip scowled during the brief forward march, unable to believe Paulie was so dumb as to think he hadn’t been seeing Jimmy Gordon on a regular basis these past six months.
Of course, Chip was really protective coloring for Montgomery himself, who greeted Jimmy with a big handshake and jaunty question: “Everything copacetic at the competition?”
Becky and Cuddles recoiled from this scene, even if it was a good fifteen feet away, and threw themselves into the party’s new, speeded-up phase of intoxication, which began with the arrival of three more cocktail carts—an angelus of Rob Roys, gin rickeys, and Presbyterians—as well as the piano player’s rendition of “Let’s Misbehave.”
“They’re playing our song,” said Cuddles.
“They’re playing your song,” said Becky.
“You still seem to be singing solo.”
“He’ll be here,” she replied. “Nothing wrong with working late hours. You should try it sometime.”
“I’ll bet he wears long underwear, too.”
“Keep it up and I’ll bet you get an old-fashioned in your lap.”
“Excellent. You’re an old-fashioned girl.”
They were interrupted by the approach of Stuart Newman, whose right hand loosely held his date’s, and whose left, more desperately, clutched a cream soda. The girl, with her peekaboo hat and Florida suntan, contrasted rather sharply with Stuart’s openly haggard appearance. Becky was about to ask him how his first interview with Rosemary LaRoche had gone, but—as always these days—there wasn’t enough time to gather the thought or complete the question. The party’s center of gravity was shifting, suddenly, away from the terrace and into the salon, where Joe Harris had taken up position to perform the main business of the evening: introducing Mr. Theophilus A. Palmer to his public.
Harris stood with Betty on one side and, on his other, Bandbox’s sponsored contestant in the upcoming Bunion Derby, a massively promoted cross-country footrace that would begin in Los Angeles on March 4. “The next of these affairs had better be for you,” said Harris, clearing his throat for a toast. The raw-boned, sandy-haired runner, a cousin of one of the ad salesmen, was much more Harris’s sort of fellow than this vinegar-puss Palmer, whose story he’d read only an hour ago.
An excellent judge of fiction, the editor-in-chief was stewing about how this sour, pretentious story had passed muster with sour, pretentious Sidney—at whom he now glanced, skeptically. He shot an even stronger look at Houlihan, toward whom he felt newly furious. Cuddles was a better judge of fiction than either Sidney or himself, and in his not-so-long-ago heyday would have done a fine job with this contest, no doubt eliminating Mr. Palmer in the first round. At almost every editorial meeting, Harris liked to remind his staffers that the Bandbox reader had terrible values, which he expected them to cater to. And yet, Palmer’s story of money trumping love left Harris’s own sentimental heart quite cold. At this moment he wished they’d never announced the latest competition, which they’d done a few months ago, after he’d let Spilkes talk him out of running a story they’d received in the mail from Ernest Hemingway’s thirteen-year-old brother Leicester in Oak Park, Illinois. NEW FICTION BY HEMINGWAY could have been the perfectly legal cover line. “We’re better than that,” Spilkes had said, and it was true. But what was the point of being any good at all if Theophilus A. Palmer was what you got instead of fun?
Harris at last raised his glass and came to life with a graceful joke about what might happen if the cross-country contestant and the short-story writer started playing each other’s game. He did a less graceful job comparing the Palmer story’s abrupt opening to Betty’s choice of a plunging neckline for tonight’s outfit. He’d pay for this last remark—if Betty had heard it—back at the Warwick. But for the moment Harris had the whole room with him. Whenever the center of attention, he blazed up warm and crackling, his deep voice a reliable bellows for his whole personality. Harris might look like a character actor, but in his world he was a star, and on occasions like these he had star power. With his glass aloft, he paid amusing, ribbing tribute to the other writers in the room besides Mr. Palmer, and he concluded by observing how “when it comes to fiction or nonfiction, this once mere fashion magazine is the one that figured out how ‘prose makes the man.’ ” At which point he began staring at Jimmy Gordon, that thief of his own potent formula.
Jimmy smiled back and raised his glass along with everyone else. He knew that in another minute, in full view and earshot of everybody, Harris, unable to help himself, would come over and start something, a bit of repartee that would soon turn sufficiently loud and nasty to land both of them in Burton Rascoe’s column.
As the applause died and Harris shook Mr. Palmer’s boneless hand, the editor-in-chief never took his eye off Jimmy. His rage gathering, he issued, from the corner of his mouth, a summons to Stuart Newman, now only a few feet away. Was there any chance, he wanted to know, that Rosemary LaRoche might surprise them with a grand entrance, upstaging the night’s honoree? No? Too bad. It would be worth spoiling the surprise of the first female cover just to wipe the smile off Jimmy’s face.
At this same moment, Jimmy Gordon was making a sidelong query of his own, to Chip Brzezinski. “Find out who little Skippy in the Oxfords is.” He nodded in the direction of John Shepard. “I smell a rat, or at least a gimmick.” Chip had been trying all day to get the lowdown on this kid’s supposedly spontaneous arrival in New York. Newly motivated, he went out to the terrace to investigate further.
Meanwhile, Andrew Burn tried presenting a Hickey-Freeman executive to Harris, who was too busy fuming to spare a word for this important advertiser. He was now fully furious—over yesterday morning’s numbers; this sobersides of a contest winner; the apparent lack of vodka on the nearest drinks cart. He made do with a martini,and downed half of it before marching toward the terrace door with the first idea he came up with for alleviating his misery: he was going to fire Cuddles.
Seeing Harris pad across the Savonnerie carpet, as a dozen partygoers quickly cleared a path, Becky realized that the boss was up to something dire. She knew she must not allow his motive to meet its opportunity. So she pushed Cuddles into the nearest gaggle of guests, and then on through the next one and the next, until the two of them exited the enclosed part of the terrace and went out onto a stretch of it that was unprotected from the January air.
“You’ll thank me for this,” she said, shivering.
“I probably won’t,” he answered. “But it still c
ounts.”
It was too dark out here to see whether he was giving her the “look,” but when he took off his coat and put it, along with his arm, over her shoulders, Becky realized she was too cold and too lit to protest—or even to mind.
Back inside, without Cuddles to bear down upon, Harris had been left with no real destination but Jimmy Gordon, who extended his hand to his former boss.
“Jimmy,” said Jehoshaphat Harris. “You must be dog-tired from following in our footsteps.”
Jimmy, saying nothing, sat down in an antique French chair, forcing Harris to lean over and pay him court.
“It’s a little early for you to start playing Sun King,” said the older man.
“You’re off by one Roman numeral, Joe.” Jimmy tapped the arms of the chair. “This is Louis the Fifteenth. One-five. The exact percentage our ads are up and yours are down.”
“Yeah,” said Harris. “I hear you’re going to do a fashion piece on the correct rubber gloves to wear when you break into an old friend’s place and rob him blind.”
“If I do,” said Jimmy, “you can be sure I’ll get Stanwick to write it.”
Monitoring the conversation, Spilkes decided to summon help from Gianni Roma and David Fine. Like a delegation from the League of Nations, the three men approached Harris and urged him to call it a night, at least here at Oldcastle’s.
“Come on, Joe,” said Fine. “Let’s go to a speako. I’ve got all these paid-up memberships going to waste.” He extracted a half-dozen cards for the “Pen and Pencil,” “Artists and Writers,” and the like. His suggestion proved indirectly effective: once Betty saw the cards come out of Fine’s wallet, she decided to intervene herself. “Joe, you’re boiled enough. Let’s go. Home.”
Looking, half-gratefully, like Jiggs after a swat with the rolling pin, Harris withdrew. Jimmy Gordon waved goodbye to his rival, his hand’s dismissive flutter seeming to signal that, in any case, his levee was at an end. Baron de Meyer, the Bazaar photographer, never got the picture he’d hoped the onetime patron and onetime protégé would pose for together. Joe and Betty were out the door at 10:25, well before the party’s population came close to peaking.
During the next half-hour, guests continued to come off the elevator onto the twenty-sixth floor; Jeffrey Holmesdale gave odds that his boss Woollcott would yet show up before midnight, after the curtain had dropped and he’d filed his review over the telephone. Someone put “O, for the Wings of a Dove” onto the Victrola, and the celestial, million-selling voice of Ernest Lough, that choirboy phenomenon, plunged the salon into cheerful absurdity. As eleven o’clock neared and the intake of alcohol accelerated, most of those present grew increasingly oblivious.
A few, however, became more purposeful: tired of trying to penetrate Daisy’s foursome, where little Tom Sawyer still chattered away, Chip Brzezinski made off to the kitchen, where he’d earlier spotted the kind of girl he liked for a single night: one who was mopping her angry brow as she wiped the dishes. This was not a maiden holding out for Barrymore or Howard Kenyon.
Ever alert to the duties of reception, Mrs. Zimmerman had subconsciously spent much of the evening near the elevator, and when three gentlemen got off it around 10:55, she asked if they were looking for anyone in particular. Only after inquiring did she recognize the youngest and best-looking of the three as Becky’s boyfriend, Daniel Webb.
“She’s out on the terrace, I’m pretty sure.”
Daniel thanked Mrs. Z and ventured into the apartment’s vast interior, leaving her with the other two gentlemen, each quite a bit rougher hewn than himself.
“I’m lookin’ for the duchess,” said the one who had trouble stifling a cough. “And for her daddy.” After an explosion of hacking, he identified himself as Eddie Diamond. Mrs. Zimmerman never did get the name of his companion, but she led the two of them into the salon and pointed toward the terrace, where she remembered last seeing Daisy. Without even a grunt, the men ventured off in that direction.
On the way, they passed Nan, who’d been depressed tonight by each sight of Newman’s pretty date. She was wondering if it wasn’t time to catch the subway home, and curious whether the koala bear in Mr. Merrill’s basement had gone to bed. The two men also brushed by Waldo Lindstrom, who was threatening to jump from the open part of the terrace if Gianni didn’t give him the cabfare to go up to Small’s Paradise in Harlem.
A few feet away, Max Stanwick was now huddled with Stuart Newman, who wanted to know how one went about securing somebody’s police record from another state.
“For a story?” asked Max.
“No,” said Newman, who hadn’t mentioned Rosemary LaRoche. “For personal protection.”
Eddie Diamond, far more boiled than Joe Harris had been a half-hour ago, finally noticed Daisy and the judge. It was the latter for whom he had a message. “Hey, Your Magistrate, you’d better get your carcass down to Centre Street, toot sweet.”
Daisy’s expression pleaded for further details.
“We got a problem,” said Eddie. “And it needs immediate attention. Out at the Juniper development”—he couldn’t name the project without sneering—“it seems that one of Mr. Wellman’s contractors was just found very dead in a ditch. The foreman’s been nabbed for it, and he’s makin’ noises about connecting The Brain to this little incident if he doesn’t make bail pronto. Which is where you come in, Your Excellency.” He poked the judge’s shoulder. “We gotta get you downtown.”
Gilfoyle gave Daisy’s forearm a reassuring squeeze, but his face betrayed considerable anxiety.
“You don’t get time to think this over,” said Eddie, who nonetheless gave the judge a few seconds to squirm. Diamond used the time to take a quick survey of Oldcastle’s lair, or as much as he could see of it from out here. Only when he directed his eyes to a griffin gargoyle jutting from the terrace’s exterior did he notice what he’d up to now overlooked: a face as open and sunny as the gargoyle’s was menacing.
“You been here the whole time?” Eddie asked John Shepard, who after seven near-beers had been steadying himself against the edge of a small metal table.
“Yessiree,” said John, still happy to make one more improbable acquaintance.
“Tell me, kid. What’d you just hear?”
“Everything!” exclaimed John, raising his glass, proud of having committed Max Stanwick’s lesson to memory.
It was the last thing anybody would have remembered him saying—if anybody besides Eddie Diamond and his colleague had heard him say it; but Daisy and Francis X. Gilfoyle were too preoccupied with urgent conversation about the judge’s trip downtown.
And Becky and Cuddles, still unaware of Harris’s departure or Daniel Webb’s arrival, were far out of earshot, hiding in the library, which they’d been able to enter from the unheated stretch of the terrace.
John Shepard himself, still in love with New York and the magazine and near-beer, failed to understand how his simple reply to a straightforward question soon led to his being stuffed—quite discreetly—into Hiram Oldcastle’s dumbwaiter, and then, a few minutes later, into the trunk of Mr. Diamond’s car.
21
BUTTON UP YOUR OVERCOAT.
Harris read the cable from Betty and tossed it into the hotel-room wastebasket. It was curious how the two of them reversed behavior whenever he made the annual trip to London. Suddenly Betty felt the need to send two or three wires a day, in fair approximation of his own compulsive telephoning from floor to floor of the Graybar Building. When traveling, he liked to forget about everything back home, even her; for a week or two he relapsed into something like his bachelor days, surrounded on the upper deck or in the hotel bar by only his crew of male cronies. Good as Betty’s advice could be—even about the overcoat; it was freezing over here, and the crossing had been worse—Harris decided he would once more let her telegrams go unopened and unanswered. This had become his standard practice while abroad, and she didn’t object. The wires, which never contained much of importance, had pe
rformed their function as soon as she sent them: behaving like Joe made her feel he was still around.
Harris and his men always had to cross at this frigid time of year if they were going to fill the summer issues with the kind of English outfits even the new Bandbox reader wanted to see—all the garden-party and boating stuff that, in truth, didn’t change much from year to year. While scouting it, the editors also had British motorcars and the Prince of Wales to catch up with, neither of which much impressed Harris.
But he liked being here. In London he felt exotic and secure all at once. The hotels, thank God, got more Americanized every year; on his first trip over he’d had a bathroom down the hall. This time out Andrew Burn had booked the Bandbox party into the slick, modern Berkeley—part of the relentless effort to keep the editor-in-chief up-to-date. The Berkeley’s daily tea dance was filled with pansies and girls even skinnier than Hazel, and there was too much chrome everywhere, but even so, Harris was content.
As he waited for it to be 5:30, the time appointed for Fine, Montgomery, and Spilkes to meet him in the bar downstairs, Harris took a sip of hock and made a mental review of the last few weeks. The overnight editorial retreat at his house up in Dutchess County, held only five days after the party at Oldcastle’s, had produced a few good ideas, marred though it had been by Malocchio’s atrocious catering. Gianni had sent up less than half the food they required, and those meager rations had nearly poisoned those in attendance. They’d finally had to scare up a box of hot dogs and two buckets of beans from a roadhouse in Millbrook; David Fine had still been throwing up, not from the ocean but from Gianni, on the way over here.
Harris preferred not to imagine what had Gianni so off the beam. Most other matters had been on the upswing by the time they embarked from New York. Termagant though she was, Rosemary LaRoche appeared, from what little he’d seen and heard, to be smitten with Newman. Both text and layout of the bulls-and-bears piece had ended up in tiptop shape. And there’d been good ink in the trades and gossip columns for Mr. Palmer, months before his short story would even run. Oldcastle had sent a handwritten note congratulating Harris on the party’s success, which he’d inferred from the amount of shrimp-tail and broken glass vacuumed up from his carpets.
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