The Hook

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Well, it was terrific,” Katz said.

  Wayne was delighted. “You think so?”

  “I had no idea Louie was a mole! Usually I see those things coming. I mean, my God, I’m an editor, I’m supposed to see those things coming, but I absolutely did not! And it was fair, too, you didn’t cheat. How’d the book do?”

  “Moderate,” Wayne said. What else was there to say?

  Katz shook his head, disliking that. “Shitty marketing, it must have been,” he said. “Don’t blame yourself.”

  “I don’t,” Wayne told him.

  Katz sat back and his feet came off the floor. “Now,” he said, “turning to today’s disaster. Bryce tells me you never did want Harry to leave that diner.”

  “Not without Ja—Eleanor.”

  “And there are ways in which you are right,” Katz told him. “If he’d never left, it wouldn’t have bothered me. But now I see we can goose that part of the book, make it better, give it a little jolt from the thruster, if we can get Henry and Eleanor back together without bending ourselves out of shape.”

  Doubtfully, Bryce said, “Maybe he could phone her the next day, apologize, grovel.”

  “Too late,” Wayne said. “By the next day, she’s cement, she’s hardened, she won’t even answer the phone.”

  Katz nodded. “I’m afraid you’re right about that,” he said, and scratched his chin. “I used to have a beard,” he explained, “and I shaved it off last year, and I still feel the damn thing. What was the point shaving it off ?”

  Bryce said, “Grow it back.”

  “Then I’d have to look at it, too,” Katz told him. “It’s bad enough to have to feel it.”

  “Anyway, you don’t have to trim it,” Wayne said, feeling they’d wandered into some conversation from Alice in Wonderland.

  “That’s it,” Katz told him. “Always look on the positive side. For instance, what can we do about our suddenly impulsive Henry?”

  “I was thinking about that on the walk up,” Wayne started, because that was the other thing he’d been thinking about.

  Katz said, “Walk? From where?”

  “West Village.”

  “Where?”

  “We’re on Perry, between Bleecker and Fourth.”

  “My God,” Katz said, “I’m around the corner from you on Fourth. I do my best thinking on that walk, back and forth, every day.” To Bryce he said, “Two people live in the same neighborhood a hundred years, walk all over the place, never meet once. That’s New York.” Back to Wayne, he said, “So what did you think, on our walk?”

  “I think he gets as far as the car,” Wayne said. “Bryce has it that he leaves the car for her to use and takes a taxi, and she stays in the diner and broods about the relationship, and then drives off. We can keep all of her thoughts, that’s the good part, but I think he only got as far as the car, and then got into the car on the passenger side.”

  “Oh, nice,” Katz said.

  “That’s the apology right there,” Wayne said. “She pays the check, she’s mad, she steps outside, he’s submissive. In the car on the passenger side, ready for her to take over.”

  Katz said, “She gets into the car. Eleanor doesn’t make flamboyant gestures like hailing a cab.”

  “No no,” Wayne agreed, “she gets into the car.”

  “And what does he say?”

  “Nothing,” Wayne said.

  Bryce said, “Wouldn’t he apologize?”

  “He won’t do anything at all until she gives him permission,” Wayne said.

  “That feels right,” Katz said. “So what happens?”

  “She puts the key in the ignition,” Wayne said, “but she doesn’t start the engine. She looks at Henry, he’s in profile, he just keeps looking out the windshield, waiting. She says, ‘Feel better now?’ He says, ‘No.’ She says, ‘Good,’ and starts the engine, and drives them home.”

  Bryce said, “We don’t have to go home with them.”

  “Bryce, you’re right,” Katz said. “They drive off, and then, when we meet them again, we know everything, we understand everything. Wayne, you’re a very productive walker.”

  “Thank you,” Wayne said.

  “Now,” Katz said, bouncing forward to get his feet on the floor so he could stand, “we still have a few more little pleats in the fabric. Bryce? Did you share these with Wayne?”

  “I didn’t feel he needed to sweat them,” Bryce said. “I figured, let him think about Henry and Eleanor.” He grinned at Wayne and said, “I know you didn’t like what I did there, but you made it come out just perfect.”

  “Thanks,” Wayne said. “So we were both right, it needed the action, but it also needed to be undone.”

  Katz had gone over to his desk, and now he came back with a clipboard with several manuscript sheets on it. Bouncing into his chair again, feet off the floor, he said, “Let’s begin.”

  The next half hour contained little for Wayne to do. It was his novel they were discussing, and yet it wasn’t, and he was expected to have either no input or at best the occasional kibitzer’s remark. It was a strange position to be in, so after a while he got to his feet and spent his time instead studying the various artifacts with which Katz had filled his room.

  At one point, Katz called to him, “Shoot a little darts, if you feel like it.”

  “I’m very bad at darts,” Wayne told him.

  Katz said, “Take a look at the holes in the wall. You won’t be the first duffer we’ve had. I’m not that great myself.”

  So Wayne pulled the darts out of the board, and had added a few more holes to the wall by the time Bryce and Katz were finished. Then they both rose, Katz bouncing out of his chair again, and Katz said, “Twelve-twenty. How about lunch?”

  “I can’t, Joe,” Bryce said. “I’m supposed to meet Isabelle, we’re moving more of her stuff over to my place.”

  “By God,” Katz said, “it’s nice to see things finally begin to turn around for you, Bryce. A good woman, a good friend”—with a gesture at Wayne—“and at last a good book. How about you, Wayne? You on for lunch?”

  “Sure,” Wayne said.

  Although you couldn’t see anything on Bryce’s bland surface, Wayne knew he wasn’t happy to leave these two alone together. Wayne was ecstatic.

  * * *

  Over lunch, Wayne found himself telling Joe Katz his secret. They were in Union Square Cafe, one of the trendy lunch places that had sprung up once the publishers moved into the neighborhood, and their conversation was interrupted from time to time when Katz had to return a hello from some other passing diner, but still, in this crowded noisy public place, Wayne found himself telling another person his secret for only the second time. Bryce had been the first.

  Katz had trouble getting it. “Wait a minute, you’re Tim Fleet?”

  “Yes.”

  “But I’ve read you, you’re very good. But what’s the big secret? It’s a pen name.”

  “The publisher doesn’t know,” Wayne said. “My editor didn’t know.”

  “Didn’t know it was you.”

  “Didn’t know it was a pen name.”

  Katz shook his head. “I’m not following this,” he said. “Pitch it to me like an outline.”

  “Writer has successful novels,” Wayne told him, “sales begin to slide. The big chains’ computers turn against him, cut orders, sales get worse, finally he can’t get a decent advance, nobody wants him. He rigs up a phony identity that only his agent knows, claims to be living in Italy or wherever, submits the next book as a first novel by Tim Fleet. The computer doesn’t know Tim Fleet, so it can’t put the hex sign on him. But after a while it does know Tim Fleet. End of story.”

  “And you’re telling me your publisher has no idea it’s you.”

  “They’ve never met me,” Wayne said. “For all I know, they’ve never heard of me.”

  “That’s fantastic,” Katz said.

  “Joe,” Wayne said (they were on a first-name basis by now)
, “it’s happening all over town. It’s like the blacklist, writers hiding behind fronts, except, instead of Commie hunters, it’s the computer they’ve got to hide from. What was tragedy the first time comes back as farce.”

  “It can’t be happening all over town,” Katz said. “How many people could pull a thing like that?”

  “Joe, do you have any writers you’ve never met? They live in some remote place, you communicate by E-mail, everything comes strictly through the agent, you don’t really have a useful address for them?”

  “Well, two or three,” Katz said, “but, you know, not everybody can live in New York.”

  “More than you know can live in New York.”

  “You’re creating terrible doubts in me,” Katz said. “But why go through all that? Why lie to the publisher? Why not just do a pen name?”

  “Because of the sales staff,” Wayne told him, “and publicity and advertising, all those people you need behind you. If they know Tim Fleet is Wayne Prentice, even though it’s supposed to be a secret outside the publishing house, it has that stink of failure on it already. But if they think Tim Fleet is Tim Fleet, really think that, and he’s brand-new, and he’s never failed because he’s never been tested before, they can be excited. They can do wonders, when they’re excited.”

  Katz nodded. “You’re right about that,” he said. “I’ll tell you truthfully, Wayne, if I have a reconstituted virgin somewhere on my list, I’d rather not know about it. I’m sorry you told me as much as you did.”

  “It’s probably not as prevalent as I think,” Wayne reassured him. “I’m aware of it, you know, because I did it.”

  “And what of Tim Fleet now?”

  “Dead,” Wayne said.

  Katz was startled. “Really? But he’s very—you, I mean—you, he, whoever you are, you’re very good.”

  “Sales aren’t.”

  “You have a new book?”

  Wayne almost said, I did have, but you have it now. Instead, he said, “Part of one. But my publisher doesn’t want it.”

  “Let me not promise you anything, Wayne,” Katz said, “but this afternoon, when I get back to the office, let me crunch some numbers, talk to some people in sales, see if there’s anything we can do.”

  “That’d be great.”

  “No promises,” Katz said. “You know, I can’t argue with the computer, either.”

  “Why did we give up autonomy, do you suppose?” Wayne asked.

  “I hate to say it,” Katz told him, “but it’s too late to ask that question.”

  * * *

  When he walked home, Wayne felt as though he were floating above the sidewalk. What a great guy Joe Katz was! And how many good things he’d said about Wayne’s own work! If there was any way at all to get around the computer, Wayne knew, Joe Katz would be his next editor. He could hardly wait for Susan to come home, tell her about his fantastic day.

  The answering machine light was blinking. He pressed the button, and heard, “This is homicide Detective Arthur Johnson, trying to reach Wayne Prentice.” He left a phone number, and said he would try again.

  Fifteen

  Isabelle had changed her mind. When Bryce got to her place, a one-bedroom, elevator building, third floor, no view, furnished minimally and decorated with travel posters, she was seated on the sofa, drinking coffee, and had done no packing. “We have to talk, Bryce,” she said.

  He said, “Don’t you have to get back to work?”

  “Eventually. But first we have to talk.”

  He looked around the room. “You haven’t packed anything.”

  “It isn’t working out,” she said.

  “What isn’t working out?”

  “You and me. When I thought about actually moving over there, out of here, I realized it. It isn’t working.”

  He sat beside her on the sofa. She looked at her coffee rather than at him, and he tried to think of what he should say.

  It was true, they’d been growing farther apart, but he had no idea why. She seemed to be holding herself aloof from him, in a way that hadn’t used to be true. He said, “Is it because I talked about moving to Spain?”

  She smiled, sadly, and shook her head, still not looking at him. “It’s nothing at all,” she said. “It’s you and me, it’s everything.” Now she did look at him, and he saw that she was sad but also remote. She said, “It stopped being good when Lucie died. I know it should have worked the other way, but it didn’t. The . . . whatever it was we had, it seemed to need Lucie to keep it going.”

  He knew at once that she was right, though he hadn’t realized it before, had very successfully managed not to notice, and couldn’t begin to understand why it should be true. He said, “Isabelle, we can’t let Lucie come between us now.”

  “But she is between us. You dream about her, lying in bed with me.”

  “I do? No, I don’t.”

  “In your sleep,” she told him, “you moan and you make muttering sounds, never words, and you thrash around as though you were hitting somebody.”

  “Me?” He hadn’t been aware of that. He’d known he was feeling more tired lately, less alert when he woke in the mornings, but he didn’t remember bad dreams. He’d known they were there, really, the dreams, but he never remembered them. He said, “Why do you say it’s about Lucie? If I don’t say words.”

  “Who else would you be beating?”

  “Beating?” He sat back, as far from her on the sofa as he could get. “Isabelle,” he said, “you know where I was when Lucie died.”

  “Detective Johnson thinks we were there on purpose.”

  “Johnson? He talked to you? When?”

  “Tuesday. Day before yesterday.”

  “I thought he was done, I thought that was all over.”

  “I think it’s just starting, Bryce.”

  “But why? You know I didn’t have anything to do with Lucie’s death!”

  “But I don’t know it,” she said. “Nobody knows it, because nobody knows what really happened. They’ll find out, the police will find out, and then maybe it’ll be all right again. But now . . . Bryce, you’re frightening, with those dreams, your shoulders moving, punching under the covers, muttering, frowning. And when you’re awake you’re depressed, there’s no joy in you. Not since we came back from California.”

  “That’s why I want to go away for a while,” he said. “Somewhere warm. It doesn’t have to be Spain.”

  “I can’t go away with you,” she said. “I can’t live with you. I’m sorry, Bryce, I’ve been thinking about this all week, and I think about moving into that apartment with you, and it’s like I’m moving into a grave.”

  “Oh, God, Isabelle, don’t say something like that.”

  “It’s what I feel.” She put down her coffee cup at last and held his left hand in both of hers. “We have to stay away from each other for a while,” she told him. “There’s something you have to work through, I don’t even know if you know what it is yourself but you have to work through it, and I can’t be there. Later, when you feel better, when Detective Johnson knows what really happened, then maybe we can get back together. I’d like to. We had fun a lot of times. The weekends . . .” She trailed off, looking away from him, but still holding his hand.

  He’d never told her he loved her, because he wasn’t sure he did, and he was afraid of what the word might entail. He almost said the word now, but stopped himself, knowing it wouldn’t be real, it would only be a tactic to try to hold on to her. And knowing, too, that she would see it for what it was, and turn away from him even more.

  He said, “Isabelle, the idea of not seeing you—”

  “For a while.” She looked at him again, squeezed his hand. “I hope, for just a while.”

  He looked around the small characterless room. This is where she preferred to be. He said, “We were going to have lunch.”

  “I’m not really hungry, Bryce, I’m sorry.”

  He smiled a little and shook his head. “I don’t
think I am, either. First time in my life, I bet, I’m not hungry for lunch.” He looked at her again. “I’m going to miss you.”

  “I already miss you,” she told him. “The you from before.”

  Suddenly restless, realizing he was becoming angry, not wanting to be angry, not wanting Isabelle to know he was angry, he pulled his hand from hers and abruptly stood. “I miss the me from before, too,” he told her. “God knows I don’t want Lucie back, but I want something back. Is it okay if I phone you sometimes?”

  “I hope you will,” she said.

  He nodded. “Maybe we could date, after a while. Dinner and a movie.”

  “And a kiss goodnight,” she said.

  He laughed. “Oh, I think just a handshake at first.”

  She stood. “I wish you’d kiss me now,” she said.

  He kissed her, holding her too tight, aware of her struggle to breathe, and finally forced himself to let go. Her eyes looked frightened, but she still smiled as she said, “I’ll see you.”

  “See you,” he said, and left, knowing, at the end there, he’d wanted to hit her. The way Lucie was hit.

  * * *

  Three-thirty. He sat at his computer, in the apartment, trying to think of a story. Two Faces in the Mirror was virtually finished now, once he did the little Henry-Eleanor insert and a few other things. Half a day’s work, he’d probably do it in Connecticut this weekend. Alone in Connecticut this weekend, but to be alone here would be even worse. He had weekend friends, sometimes dinner invitations on the Saturday. Nothing this weekend, but somebody could still call. And in the city, on the weekend, nobody would call.

  What he had to do now was think of the next book. It had been over a year and a half since he’d written anything—the rewriting of Wayne’s book didn’t count—and he felt all those muscles were stiff now. He had to get limber again.

  Most books began for him with a character abruptly being put into motion. Sometimes the setting was important, too, but the main thing was to find a character, somebody he could stay with for six hundred pages, and give that character a reason to get moving. So what he was doing at the computer now was trying to find that character, the entry, the starting point.