The Hook

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Your publisher sent me the galleys,” Bryce said, and offered a sheepish shrug. “I don’t think I gave you a quote.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Wayne looked past Bryce at nothing and said, “I’m not sure anything matters.”

  “Well, what’s going to happen with the new book?”

  “Nothing. I said to my agent, why don’t I put my real name on it, see what happens, and he said, the computer still remembers me, nobody’s in a hurry to bring Wayne Prentice back, and besides that I’ve been gone for seven years. The computer will remember me, but the readers won’t.”

  “Jesus Christ, Wayne, what a shitty situation.”

  “I’m well aware of that,” Wayne said. “Shall we do another round?”

  “Not another Bloody Mary.”

  “Beer is also a food.”

  “You’re right.”

  They called the waiter over and decided on two Beck’s, and then Bryce said, “What are you going to do?”

  “I made a resumé,” Wayne told him. “I’m gonna try to get a teaching job somewhere. That’s what I was doing in the library, getting addresses of colleges.”

  “Well, at least it’ll keep you going for a while.”

  “I suppose.”

  The beers were brought, and they sipped, and Bryce looked at Wayne’s unhappy face. He doesn’t want to teach in some college, he thought. He wants to be a writer, the poor bastard. He is a writer, and they’ve shot it out from under him.

  What a stupid joke, to meet him at this point, when I’m not even a writer any more, when it’s dried up and I’m—

  And he thought of it. He thought of the story, he thought of it as a story. For the first time in over a year, he thought in terms of story.

  That had been the first element in his love for and fascination with the work of the novelist, that slow but unstoppable movement through the story, finding the story, finding each turn in it, each step forward. It was a maze, a labyrinth, every time, that you constructed and solved in the same instant, finding this turn, finding this turn, finding this turn.

  That’s what had been missing from his brain for the last year, more than a year, the tracking through the story, discovering the route, surprised and delighted by himself at every new vista, every new completed step forward. His life had been frustrating and boring and interminable the last year and a half because that, the motor of his existence, had been missing from it. He hadn’t had that pleasure for such a long time, and now, just this instant, it had come back.

  But not exactly a story, not something he would go home and write. Something else.

  Wayne was looking at him, curious. “Bryce? What is it?”

  “Hold it a minute,” Bryce said. “Let me think about this, let me think this through.”

  Wayne waited, his brow furrowed, a little worried on Bryce’s behalf, and Bryce thought it through. Could he suggest it? Could it work? Was it the answer?

  He thought yes.

  “Bryce? You okay?”

  “Wayne, listen,” Bryce said. “You know how you—You know, you’re working along in a book, you’re trying to figure out the story, but where’s the hook, the narrative hook, what moves this story, and you can’t get it and you can’t get it and you can’t get it, and then all of a sudden there it is! You know?”

  “Sure,” Wayne said. “It has to come, or where are you?”

  “And sometimes not at all what you expected, or thought you were looking for.”

  “Those are the best,” Wayne said.

  “I just found my hook,” Bryce told him.

  “What, in the book you’re working on?”

  “No, the life I’m working on. Wayne, the truth is, I haven’t been able to write in almost a year and a half.”

  Wayne stared at him in disbelief. “You?”

  “That’s how long I’ve been involved in this shitty shitty divorce. I should never have left my first wife,” he said, and shook his head. “I know how stupid that sounds, believe me, Ellen was Mother Teresa compared to Lucie. Lucie’s out to get everything, everything, it’s wearing me down, lawyers, depositions, accountants. She has half the copyright on everything I published during the marriage, and she wants a hell of a lot more, and it just won’t come to an end.”

  “That’s awful,” Wayne said. “There I’ve been lucky. Susan and I are still together, no problem. I’ve known other people got into that kind of thing, and I really think it’s usually more the spite and the bad feelings than the money.”

  “With Lucie, it’s the money,” Bryce assured him. “It’s the spite and the bad feelings, all right, but it is goddam well the money.”

  “I’m sorry, man.”

  “Thank you. I’m almost a year past my deadline on the next book, the editor’s calling me, little gentle hints, I’m lying to him, it’s coming along, wanna be sure it’s right. And meantime the lawyers and all the rest of it are eating up what money I have, and I don’t get the next big chunk until I deliver a manuscript.”

  “You’ve got to have some kind of cushion.”

  Bryce grinned at him. “You think so? Three kids in college at the same time, none of them with Lucie, thank God, plus the lawyers and the accountants and the alimony to Ellen and the house in Connecticut and the apartment in the city and the maintenance she gets every month.”

  “Well, every divorce has to end sooner or later,” Wayne said. “This is only temporary.”

  “Well, it seems permanent,” Bryce told him. “But now I’ve got my hook, my narrative hook. All of a sudden, I’ve figured it out. I know how to get past this place. And you’re getting past it, too.”

  Wayne shook his head. “What do you mean?”

  “You have a book and no publisher,” Bryce reminded him. “I have a publisher and I don’t have a book.”

  “What?” Wayne half-grinned, saying, “You’re joking, you’re putting me on.”

  “I am not. I remember The Doppler Effect, it was good, I remember thinking, this guy writes kind of like me. Suspense, action, but with the big picture. This manuscript of yours, what’s the story?”

  “There’s a businessman,” Wayne said, “he’s had some dealings with a senator. Nothing shady, nothing important. But now a special prosecutor is investigating the senator, and his staff keep sniffing around the businessman, thinking he has something for them. He doesn’t, but he does have shady stuff elsewhere, environmental shit he’s pulling, and he doesn’t want them to find that when all they need is the goods on the senator, which he doesn’t have. He has to make the investigation go away.”

  “So what does he do?”

  “He kills the senator,” Wayne said.

  Bryce shook his head. “That’s a short story.”

  “It’s the first hundred pages. There’s a lot more, a lot about Washington, about deep-sea pollution, and Wall Street. Your book Two of a Kind, if you described the setup on that, anybody would say it’s just a short story.”

  Bryce smiled. He knew it was going to be all right. “You see? We can make it work.”

  “No,” Wayne said. “You aren’t serious about this.”

  “Of course I am. Who’s seen your manuscript?”

  “My wife and my agent and my former editor.”

  “Send it to me,” Bryce said. “I’ll give you my card. Send it to me, and if it’s what I think it is, I’ll fiddle it around a little, send it in as my next book. Wayne, my advance is a million one.”

  Wayne looked impressed, but nodded and said, “I thought it was in that area.”

  “I split it with you,” Bryce said. “Before commissions and taxes and all that, we’ll work out all those details, that’s five hundred fifty thousand for each of us. That’s seven times what you would have gotten if your publisher had stuck with you.”

  Wayne said, “Bryce, this is crazy.”

  “No, it isn’t. Wayne, what does it matter to you what name goes on the book? You were never gonna be able to claim it anyway, it was gonna be Tim Fle
et.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “This way, we both get a breather, we both have money in the bank, we both have time to organize our lives.”

  “You’d have a book out there,” Wayne told him, “with your name on it, that you didn’t do.”

  “I don’t give a shit,” Bryce said. “It wouldn’t be the first time in the history of publishing that happened, and it won’t be the last, and I don’t give a shit.”

  Wayne sat frowning, trying to find objections. “If anybody ever found out . . .”

  “That’s my worry, not yours.”

  “I suppose, I suppose you could . . .” Wayne frowned and frowned, then shook his head and gave Bryce a quizzical grin as he said, “It could work, couldn’t it?”

  “It’ll save my bacon. It’ll save your bacon.”

  Thoughtfully, Wayne said, “I was never gonna be a good college teacher.”

  “You’ll send me the book.”

  Wayne nodded. “I’ll mail it in the morning.”

  “And we have a deal.”

  “We have a deal.”

  “With one condition,” Bryce said.

  Wayne looked at him. “There’s a condition?”

  “Just one.”

  “Sure. What is it?”

  This was it, now. Bryce looked levelly into Wayne’s eyes. “My wife must be dead,” he said.

  Two

  Susan wasn’t home yet, which was just as well. Wayne wanted to think some before he told her about today. He wanted a clear head. He wasn’t used to a Bloody Mary and a bottle of beer in the middle of the afternoon, it left him buzzy, with a vaguely upset stomach. And he also wasn’t used to offers like the one from Bryce Proctorr.

  Did I like him, in the old days? He could barely remember the Bryce of back then, because of course he’d been so aware of the changing Bryce over the years. Book after book on the best-seller list, interviews on television, op-ed pieces in the New York Times. He’d done a magazine ad for BMW. So it was hard to remember back twenty years when they’d both been young writers in New York, scuffling, hanging out with similar friends, all of them in that soft world before the triumphs and the defeats.

  Wayne hadn’t wanted to say so, but he’d read about Bryce’s marriage trouble in People, about eight months ago. There was a picture in the magazine of Bryce and Lucie “in happier times” sprawled grinning together on a red velvet chaise set out on the green lawn in front of their big white-columned Connecticut home. He’d thought then that Lucie, a narrow-faced blonde, looked beautiful but dangerous, as though she might be slightly unbalanced.

  Wayne sometimes talked to himself out loud in the apartment, because Susan worked away and he worked at home, so he was alone a lot in these rooms, wandering around them when not at the computer, saying his thoughts aloud, sometimes surprised to hear what he was thinking, often not even bothering to listen. Now, walking through the apartment toward the kitchen, hoping there was some buttermilk left, thinking buttermilk would ease the jumpy stomach and help clear away the buzziness in his head, he said, “It takes a rich man to think that way. He’s a rich man now. And if you’re a rich man, you find somebody to do your dirty work.”

  There was a third of a carton of buttermilk in the refrigerator; he drank it straight from the carton, standing in the middle of the kitchen. It was a large kitchen for Manhattan, in a rather large six-room apartment on Perry Street in Greenwich Village. Susan couldn’t have children, so it was really too big an apartment for them, but it was rent stabilized. If they went anywhere else, they’d pay more. And they liked having the space, having one room that was the equivalent of an attic, another rarity in Manhattan. When times were good, they saw no reason to move to a better place, and when times were bad—were they bad now? or not?—they hung on to this nice inexpensive roomy cave in the city.

  Standing in the kitchen, holding the empty carton, looking at the neat array of spice bottles and boxes on the open shelf near the stove, alphabetized by Susan, Wayne said, “Why does he think I’d do a thing like that? He doesn’t even know me. I’ve never so much as hurt anybody, I don’t—When was the last time I even had a fight? Grade school, must be. I’m not the person for this! It’s insulting!”

  He threw the carton away, in the bag under the sink, and when he straightened he saw himself in the window there. The kitchen and second bath were the only interior rooms in the apartment, both with windows onto the airshaft, six stories from roof to ground, they on the fourth floor of this walkup. By day, what they saw out this window was grimy black bricks and the window of another kitchen, that one always with its yellowish shade drawn. By night, they either saw the yellow light of that window or, if that other kitchen was dark, they saw themselves, reflected in the glass.

  It was just dark outside, no one home in the apartment across the way, and Wayne saw himself. He looked frightened, like someone who’s been almost hit by a car. Or doesn’t know if there’s another car coming.

  He turned away from that image. He never spoke aloud when he could see his reflection. Now, his back to the sink, he said, “He doesn’t know he’s insulting me. He doesn’t know or care anything about me. I’m just a tool he might use. What the rich man might use. Five hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”

  He shook his head and left the kitchen and moved on to his office, the smallest of the bedrooms, what the families in apartments like this called the nursery. He liked its snugness, the array of pictures and cartoons and notes and book jackets and oddments on its walls, the desk he’d made years ago out of two low metal filing cabinets and a solid door from the lumber yard.

  He sat at his desk, and did nothing at first, simply absorbed the sense of the room. Then he switched everything on, and rested his fingers on the keys.

  My wife must be dead.

  What? What do you mean?

  In order for this to work, Wayne, Lucie has to die. If she doesn’t die, the deal’s off.

  Are you asking me—

  Wayne, Wayne, no, I’m not asking or suggesting anything. But just this is the situation, Wayne. The divorce isn’t done yet, we’re still married. If I turn in this book, she’ll want half. The law says she gets half. And I’m giving you half. What does that leave me?

  But—Why did you suggest it if you—If you can’t do it!

  We can do it, Wayne. We can do it. There’s just one simple thing. Lucie has to go.

  You want me to—

  Wayne, I don’t want you to do anything but send me the manuscript. Then we’ll see if it’s possible to work something out, like I suggested.

  But not if your wife’s alive.

  There’s no point in it, Wayne, you can see that yourself.

  (silence—long silence—Bryce looks at Wayne—Wayne tries not to look at anything)

  I have to meet her. I have to talk with her.

  Wayne? About what?

  The weather. Connecticut. Anything.

  Not to say, You know, Lucie, your husband just put a price on your head.

  No, no, that’s not what I was thinking at all.

  Then what were you thinking?

  You say she’s a bad person, spiteful and greedy.

  Oh, trust me, Wayne.

  Well, no, I don’t want to. I want to know she really is as bad as you say.

  You mean, if she’s the witch I think she is, it’d be easier.

  Bryce, I don’t even know if it’s possible.

  No, neither of us does. I understand this is a brand new thought for both of us, it isn’t easy.

  I have to meet her.

  I don’t think that’s a good idea.

  Why not?

  She’s everything I said, every bit the bitch I say she is, but she can come on like something else. Wayne, reflect a minute. I fell in love with her once. Maybe you’ll fall in love with her.

  No.

  How can you be sure?

  Susan.

  You’ve never—

  Not for a second.

  Not e
ven thought about it?

  What for? Were you catting around? While you were married to Lucie?

  No, I wasn’t. But the instant she left, boy . . .

  Susan isn’t leaving me.

  You’ve been married, how long?

  Nineteen years.

  Kids?

  No.

  Just the two of you.

  That’s all we need.

  That’s wonderful, Wayne, I envy you that.

  Thanks.

  That’s what I want, next time. Do it right at last.

  I wish you the best.

  Thank you. I’ll figure out some way for you to meet her.

  Good.

  And send me the book.

  Oh, I will.

  Wayne read the dialogue over and over. Sometimes he read parts of it out loud, both his lines and Bryce’s. He made Bryce sound insinuating, manipulative. He made himself sound innocent, vulnerable. When he heard Susan’s key in the front door, he looked at the wall clock to the left of his desk. Six-fifteen. He’d been in here an hour and ten minutes. He moved the cursor to the X in the upper right corner of the screen, clicked. The boxed message appeared: “Do you want to save changes to Document 1?” Cursor to No: click.

  All gone.

  * * *

  Susan worked for UniCare, a kind of umbrella organization for charities, funded mostly by New York State and partly by the tobacco companies. Not a charity itself, its job was to move the available funds around, to match resources with needs. The people with the money were for the most part soulless bureaucrats, who had no real interest in what they were doing, while the people running the charities were for the most part sentimentalists with their hearts on their sleeves, forever on the brink of tears at the thought of their “clients.” These two groups could not possibly talk to one another under any circumstances. Susan, who could talk to both sides without losing her temper, was invaluable. She’d started with UniCare as a secretary fourteen years ago, and was now assistant director; that invaluable.

  She was also invaluable to Wayne. He knew that his life was devoted to fiction, to the unreal, and he thought sometimes, if it hadn’t been for Susan’s solid linkage to the factual, he wouldn’t have survived this long. He believed that might be the reason so many writers fell into drink or drugs; at the end of the day, they just didn’t want to have to go back to that drabber world where everybody else had to live.