Bandbox

by Thomas Mallon

  “What about Rosemary?”

  Harris was about to express a lack of faith in even that one supposed bright spot—Nan’s assurances still struck him as too vague to be true—when the steep soundwaves of Hazel’s voice came through the open door.

  “Hey, how are ya?” she was shouting from coast to coast. “We’d given up on you.” Short pause. “I must say you don’t sound plastered. Hold the line, I’ll get him. It’s Mr. Houlihan!”

  “Not interested!” cried Harris.

  Hazel communicated this to Cuddles before resuming private conversation with him.

  “See what I mean?” Harris asked his managing editor. “This is how they run up the bill here.”

  “Mr. Spilkes?” called Hazel. “Will you talk to him?”

  Made curious by what seemed to be Houlihan’s own insistence, Spilkes picked up Harris’s telephone.

  “We’re making tracks,” said Cuddles in his familiar murmur. “Gotten as far as Chicago already. So be ready for us when the Twentieth Century gets in. Tomorrow morning. Nine-thirty.”

  Spilkes transmitted this news to Harris, who responded: “He wants us to watch him walk down the red carpet after he’s been on a cross-country binge?” He said it loud enough that there was no need for the m.e. to repeat it.

  “Actually,” said Cuddles, “my companions and I would appreciate something like the opposite of fanfare for the special guest we’re bringing with us. If you can arrange a hood for him, that’d be good.”

  “I’m going to give you to Joe,” said Spilkes.

  Taking the telephone, Harris could feel the words rising to his lips at last: “Houlihan, you’re fi—”

  “Aboard is my Shepard,” said Cuddles. “I shall not want.”

  Harris was silent.

  “Nine-thirty,” said Cuddles. “And you’d better have a place to stash him.”

  At ten o’clock that night the Twentieth Century rolled east through Ohio. John Shepard had an upper berth, complete with a radio, all to himself, and he was listening to the Dodge Brothers’ nationwide variety hour: John Barrymore reciting Hamlet’s soliloquy; Dolores Del Rio singing a Spanish song; Charlie Chaplin telling Pat-and-Mike stories in an Irish accent. Put it all together and it was like listening to a magazine!

  Earlier, in the dining car, John had paid more attention to the glamour all around him than to Mr. Houlihan’s explanation of what had happened to him these past couple of months. Supper had been a feast, more food and heavier cutlery than you got at Grandma Chilton’s on Thanksgiving. And they’d let him have a cocktail, even if near-beer had started so much of the trouble that night at Mr. Oldcastle’s penthouse. John had forgotten all about his recent terrors, not to mention the one piece of corroborative evidence he’d managed to hide in his pocket against the faint hope of a rescue like this. Everyone in the dining car had sung “When That Midnight Choo-Choo Leaves for Alabam’ ”—twice, in fact, even though Mr. Ariwhatsisname’s odd way of hitting some of the words threw people’s rhythm off. Over dessert, John had asked if he could call his mother and pa as soon as they all got to New York, and the answer was yes, so long as they could keep a secret.

  The Negro porter woke him at seven in the morning to ask if he wanted a shave before they got to New York. The hot towel was still across his face when Mr. Stanwick came up to the barber’s chair with a fedora he’d bought in Chicago and asked him to try it on.

  “Pull it tight, kid. Better bury the whole brow.”

  Which is what he did when the train pulled into Grand Central and they all rushed down the concourse to the Graybar Building. He knew they must be passing under those ceiling paintings of airships and locomotives, but he kept his eyes on the ground, as he’d been told to. Once inside the building, Mr. Houlihan, Miss Walter, and the photographer were allowed to take the elevator, but Mr. Stanwick asked him if he could manage all the flights of stairs up to fourteen. They didn’t want anybody seeing him in one of the cars.

  “Silent as a soundproofed sarcophagus, sí?” said Mr. Stanwick as they climbed the stairs together. Unsure of what he meant, John nodded. And at the tenth floor he took off the fedora, because he was beginning to sweat.

  At that moment, Paul Montgomery, coming down the stairs between eighteen and fourteen, was surprised to hear noise from below. Without letting himself be seen, he decided to halt until he could recognize who was coming up. Paulie was in the stairwell because, five minutes before, the Wood Chipper had called with the news that he’d better take the stairs to the rear door on fourteen if he wanted to see all the proof of a hoax that he’d ever need. “I’ll come out to the landing as soon as you knock,” said Chip, who had gotten over his own Hamlet-like indecision about the telegram and clipping.

  Paulie, who’d come up dry in his own investigations, had developed enough doubts about Chip Brzezinski to start thinking that Shep, who was now called that even at Cutaway, might really be missing. But those doubts vanished as he looked down and saw, through two iron rods of the banister, the ascending figures of Max Stanwick and John Shepard.

  “Won’t be long now,” he could hear the older man saying, not much above a whisper, to the boy. “Fame and fortune are fixed on fourteen, friend.”

  51

  During the first week of April, the papers were full of news about an apocalyptic collision, in some distant reach of the galaxy, between Nova Pictoris and another star. And as Bandbox prepared its Shep story and waited for some sort of counter-strike by Cutaway, a feeling prevailed that the universe was no longer big enough for both of them.

  John Shepard, comfortably sequestered in a room at the Commodore, squeezed his memory during long sessions with Max, who pressed for any vivid detail of his cross-country detention, while Hazel squiggled every one of John’s utterances onto her steno pad. Over in the Graybar, illustration and layout of this captivity narrative proceeded under conditions of strict secrecy: the door to the back stairwell was now locked, and Mrs. Zimmerman had received instructions not to let anyone past Reception without an escort.

  Since returning to New York, Cuddles and Becky had barely left the building. Even on Sunday afternoon, April 1, when Daniel had wanted her to go with him to a St. Cecilia’s Society concert, Becky had stayed here, working on the Hays Office piece. Monday then brought an amazing encounter with Rosemary LaRoche up at the Plaza. She’d been sweetness itself! She might have been lured back to New York by Becky’s dangling of Stuart Newman, but some team of pixies seemed to have transformed her disposition en route. She’d offered Becky chocolates and tea, and put forth a version of her life story that, if almost certainly false, was still full of usable material, especially if Daisy, lenient in these matters, did the fact-checking. When Becky asked Blanche’s question about the star’s having extra’d on The Warrens of Virginia in ’15, Miss LaRoche stayed nice as pie (“Blanche is mistaken, I’m afraid”); and when she questioned the actress as to why she’d left the set of Wyoming Wilderness, Rosemary insisted it was only “so I can be at your disposal.” The sole subject that made her bristle was Stuart Newman, whose accidental mention by Becky made Miss LaRoche ask “Who?” in a voice two registers lower than the rest of her conversation.

  On Wednesday, in his office not far from Becky’s, David Fine tried to hide his disappointment over not being involved in the high-stakes Shep piece. He paraded Joseph Siclari, the 112-pound flyweight Golden Gloves champ, before the rest of the staffers, and regaled them with predictions of how timely his Williamsburg-versus-Williamsburg piece would be, what with all the Ford and Rockefeller money now pouring into the Colonial restoration down there. Fine then canvassed everybody on whether or not they thought there’d be a good “Groaning Board” column in this vegetarian hotel somebody was opening up in Atlantic City. Maybe he should take Case down there?

  Allen was too depressed to react to the suggestion. By Wednesday morning three days had passed since Arinopoulos was supposed to stop paying for the care of the animals out in Queens. Nothing could cheer
Allen up, not even Mr. Merrill’s new pencil drawing of Canberra (cavorting among some Aborigines) or his invitation to lunch with some of the old illustrators in the Beaux Arts Building.

  There was no talk on the floor of Paul Montgomery, though now that his piece on Ty Cobb had been killed, Fine was pitching a baseball profile of his own: something on Eddie Bennett, the Yankees’ little mascot, whose humped back got touched for good luck by every player heading to the batter’s box. Sidney Bruck, whose fumble of the fiction contest had not been forgotten amidst Bandbox’s more pressing troubles, made no direct objection, though he thought this exactly the kind of tasteless piece that would put the magazine into an eccentric dotage. Behind his now-always-closed door, Sidney was still trying to get Ring Lardner to write about Waite Hoyt, a ballplayer so civilized he could also paint pictures and compose fiction.

  Individual anxieties were reaching a zenith. Daisy, happy to have helped Cuddles and Max, tried not to imagine the consequences to herself, but she did fret over how the information she’d supplied, traced back to its source, might kill the messenger. And the messenger was, she’d decided, not such a bad fellow. (She’d seen him twice more.)

  Nan, whose pencil holder now contained cuttings of palm that she’d gotten at church this past Sunday, continued, for all her success with Rosemary, to worry about having tricked Waldo Lindstrom, whose only payoff so far had been Nan’s sending his son one of the autographed Eddie Bennett baseballs that David Fine had in his office. Tense over this and Stuart, she flipped through the newspaper as she drank her coffee, dodging the avalanche of advertised remedies against dandruff, constipation, cough, rupture, cramps, weak blood, sore gums, coated tongue, and gas. Burn and Harris had tried to keep these unappetizing products out of Bandbox—who wanted the wheezing and the ruptured among one’s readers?—but if the magazine survived the current crisis in some badly wounded state, Nan supposed they’d have to start running notices for this stuff in the back of the book. Editors like Sidney would have to get used to a little less class and a little more mass.

  Nan had been seeing such ads all her life, but the current run of them was different from the depressing displays that used to fill the papers during her childhood before the war. Back then each remedy promised the purchaser only enough relief that he could rejoin, for one more day, the losing battle of life. Today the touted elixirs seemed intent not only on alleviating the targeted malady but—more important—on masking the affliction from everyone who might discover the sufferer’s breath to be as imperfect as his knowledge of current events or the turkey trot.

  Here she was in a world of appearances, trying to win the heart of a fellow prettier than she was. The thought compounded her nervousness with despair—a mortal sin, she reminded herself. She decided, for the sake of calm, to attend the noon Lenten service at the Palace. Heading out to it, she joked with Cuddles about the theatre’s ecclesiastical transformation whenever the calendar took a religious turn.

  “By the way,” she asked, “what have you given up for Lent?”

  “Giving up,” he answered, after a couple of seconds’ thought.

  ——

  That same day, over lunch at Malocchio, Spilkes had to talk Harris out of an idea the boss had to dress up some bums who’d recently been rousted from “Mr. Zero’s Tub” on St. Mark’s Place. (The city’s health commissioner had developed some momentary zeal about flophouse conditions.)

  “Have Lord put ’em in tuxedos and we’ll run their pictures next to some guys from the Yale Club,” Harris had proposed. “Challenge the reader to pick out the real swells from the down-and-outs. We’ll print the answers upside down, in small type, at the bottom of the page.”

  Spilkes dissuaded him with an argument that the magazine’s more “sensitive” readers might find a certain cruelty in all this. Harris asked him just who could be called sensitive in this day and age, and while Spilkes had no real answer for that, his use of the word had served to remind Harris that he, in fact, beneath the bombast and the current blood sport with Jimmy, still retained an earlier era’s spirit of fair play. Soon Harris was thinking: Why humiliate those poor Sterno-drinking souls? Even if there was a free suit in it for them.

  What Spilkes really needed the boss to change his mind about was Max’s article-in-progress. The m.e. had developed a considerable fear over one aspect of the situation. “If the police department sees us making ourselves out to be heroes,” he argued, “Boylan may be all over you. Only five days ago he took the head off that reporter who asked him how come there’d been no progress finding Shep.”

  “Norman, I’d like to point out that we did find him. Even if Houlihan was heading up the ‘we.’ ” With things still so uncertain, Harris had decided there was no reason yet to forgive Cuddles, though he’d had to take back his pink slip. “So what would you suggest?”

  “Let the cops go out there and capture Rothstein’s guys. Make that the climax of Max’s story.”

  Harris poured himself more olive oil and asked if Spilkes had ever heard of such a thing as a calendar. “We’ve accelerated the print run. I begged Oldcastle to change the schedule for every magazine in the company so that we could have an earlier press time this month.”

  Calendars being more or less his specialty, Spilkes took one out from his wallet. “The pages go to the printer on the thirteenth. If you act today, there’s still time. Tell Boylan the situation. His men will have three days to get out there, three days to get back—and three days in between to make arrests.”

  “The thirteenth is a Friday,” said Harris, looking at the tiny calendar. His mind went back to Leopold and Loeb. “How the hell does that happen twice in four months?”

  Spilkes ignored the objection. “You can still be on the stands by the twentieth. The issue’ll leave the printing plant on the nineteenth.”

  “Keep your voice down,” said Harris, hearing mention of this other unpleasant date—the one for Gianni’s sentencing. The restaurateur had given the editors no more than a curt nod this afternoon, before retreating into his kitchen.

  Spilkes waved away this problem, too. “The nineteenth is also one day before the GMEs. But so what? You need to concentrate on what’s important here.”

  Harris was so concerned about the magazine’s collapse that he had in fact forgotten all about the GMEs. Since that day on the sixteenth floor, Oldcastle had been more silent than Coolidge, offering only his knife blade of a smile whenever the editor saw him in the elevator.

  “All right,” said Harris, willing to consider Spilkes’s approach. “But suppose California lets Boylan’s cops make the collar, and suppose it even extradites Rothstein’s thugs. What’s to say Boylan’ll keep it out of the papers until we can get onto the stands?”

  “Because that’s the arrangement you’ll offer him: he gets credit, but from us. He’ll take the deal.”

  “Now tell me how you keep Rothstein from killing Max, once his guys are in a New York jail.”

  Spilkes sighed. “Max seems willing to take the risk. You know, sales for Ticker Rape weren’t up to his usual level. His publishers have concluded that no one can associate the stock market with pain. He’s ready for the new burst of publicity this will give him. He’ll hide in plain sight.”

  “If he’s not hidden in some landfill first.” Harris took another sip. He’d also been wondering what might happen to the kid—and, for that matter, to all the rest of them, too.

  He consoled himself with the thought that these gangsters might settle for an atrocity against Mukluk. And he told Spilkes okay.

  Up on eighteen, Paul Montgomery was preparing the short counter-article wanted on newsstands at exactly the moment Bandbox’s Shep story hit. What Paulie had been asked to compose—a straightforward exposé, deduced from the chain of the Wood Chipper’s evidence—was not at all suited to his talents. In place of his usual lyric enthusiasm there would be numbered points, as well as photographs of what Chip had taken from Max’s desk (and then put back, before Ma
x could find it missing). Jimmy still hoped Cutaway might somehow get a picture of the Shepard kid on the Bandbox premises, maybe lounging against the water fountain, but he could do without that if need be. More important was knowing Joe’s speeded-up production schedule, which he did, now that the Wood Chipper had seen it on Hazel’s desk. It was the last thing, Jimmy promised, that Chip would ever be required to copy, swipe, or even overhear.

  Down on fourteen everyone was too busy to notice how little Chip was around. Sick of waiting for his reward, he’d gone on an extended shopping spree, running up bills for French ties from Sulka’s, a half-dozen silk shirts, and a fur-collared overcoat like the mayor’s.

  When Hannelore saw him in this last garment, she knew it hadn’t come from the Bandbox Fashion Department. She gave Mr. Brzezinski a long look that mixed skepticism with—rather to her own surprise—lust.

  John spent Wednesday afternoon in his room at the Commodore, ordering another hamburger from the kitchen and almost beginning to miss the walks and horseback rides he’d had on the ranch. Outside his window, the Chanin Building, growing higher every day, resembled a craggy mountain ridge he would never be allowed to wander past. He told himself he’d just have to be patient and consider the plus side: Miss Snow, who was really pretty, kept treating him like a fellow who’d just come back from the war, bringing over more magazines and crossword puzzles than he could handle. He’d also been promised Sunday dinner at Mr. and Mrs. Stanwick’s in Brooklyn, and a late-night movie in Times Square after that. And he’d finally gotten to make that telephone call to his parents, who were overjoyed to hear from him but unable to understand why they had to keep news of his discovery a secret. “Is this quite on the level, young man?” his father had asked, making John wonder, for a moment or two, whether he might not be in worse trouble now than before.