The Hook

by Donald E. Westlake

  Bryce thought on the train Thursday afternoon, he thought in front of the television set Thursday evening and in his waking hours in bed Thursday night and at the computer Friday morning, between useless phone calls to absent weekend friends, and he never got anywhere. A character in motion. Every character he thought of, whatever profession, age, nationality, residence, sex, economic status or relationship with the law, every single character, arrived already carrying its body bag.

  That’s when he thought maybe the thing to do was go away for part of the winter, somewhere different, somewhere warm. The Caribbean, maybe, or Hawaii, or southern Europe. Not Spain; Capri, maybe.

  He was entering into the computer:

  James Bond arrived on Capri with his right arm in a sling. I recognized him from the surveillance photos, and approached with my left hand out. “Chris Dockery,” I said. “What happened to the wing?”

  “It got winged,” he said.

  Breep breep, went the phone. Bryce frowned at what he’d just typed. A novel from the point of view of a James Bond sidekick? An ambiguous fellow, without Bond’s Queen and Country stuff. An ironic contrast, a way to contemplate the issue of patriotism in a world where history has ended.

  Breep breep.

  Artificial, juvenile, unsustainable; and a mare’s nest to clear the rights.

  Breep breep.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, there you are. I left a message on your New York machine.”

  It was Wayne. James Bond’s sidekick, the more ruthless one. License to kill. “Hello, Wayne.”

  “Detective Johnson just left.”

  Bryce heard the tone of self-satisfaction in Wayne’s voice and was reassured by it. “It went okay, I guess.”

  “No problem at all,” Wayne said. “Only, I should tell you what I told him, so we both have the same story. In case he checks back with you.”

  “Very good,” Bryce said. He imagined he was on the phone with Chris Dockery, receiving some plot point information.

  “I told him we knew each other more than twenty years ago, drifted apart when I went to Italy. I figured you were calling old friends after your marriage ended, you called me.”

  “How did I know where you were?”

  “I’m in the phone book, Bryce,” Wayne said. “No reason for me to have an unlisted number.”

  “Oh, sure, sorry.” He felt embarrassed, as though he’d made some sort of faux pas with a member of the lower classes. And of course he’d found Wayne in the phone book once, to leave that message: “You’ll meet her.” Yes.

  “Anyway,” Wayne said, “you called me, and we met and had coffee a few times, and—”

  “Coffee?”

  “I don’t know, it just came out that way.”

  “We sound like an AA meeting.”

  “You could give us a few drinks, if you want, it isn’t important.”

  “Good.”

  “Anyway,” Wayne went on, “you said so many negative things about Lucie that I got interested to meet her just once, see if she could possibly be that bad. There was a play opening that you couldn’t go to, because she would be there, and I asked if I could go, and you—”

  “You asked?”

  “I was curious.”

  “All right.”

  “You called the playwright,” Wayne said, “Jack Wagner, and I went, and I asked Wagner to introduce me to Lucie. I talked with her maybe five minutes, didn’t like her, left the party early. First one to leave. Which I was, by the way.”

  “He have any problems with any of that?”

  “None,” Wayne said. “He told me he was a wannabe writer, and—”

  “Oh, God.”

  “No, it’s okay, I think he was lying. I think he wanted to know if I had any way to support myself, or if I’d become a contract killer. So I showed him the book I’m working on—”

  “A new one?” Bryce felt a twinge.

  “Didn’t I tell you? Yeah, it’s coming along pretty good.”

  “That’s nice,” Bryce said. “I figure I’ll get started on my next after the holidays. You know, it’s tough to get stuff done in December.”

  “Try impossible,” Wayne said. “Anyway, the point is, Johnson came and left and I think he’s satisfied. I think that’s the end of it.”

  “Let’s hope so,” Bryce said. “And thanks for letting me know.”

  “Well, sure, of course.”

  Bryce sensed that Wayne would have liked to prolong the conversation, but he did not. “Talk to you soon,” he said.

  “Sure,” Wayne said.

  Off the phone, Bryce deleted Chris Dockery and his friend Bond, and entered:

  When my marriage ended, I was feeling kind of lonely and adrift, so I tried looking up old friends from my first days in the city, and there was Wayne Prentice in the phone book. I called him, and we met a few times, had coffee or drinks, and I guess I unloaded my dissatisfaction on him because he got curious about my ex-wife and wanted to meet her. There was a play premiere I was invited to but I couldn’t go because she would be there, so Wayne asked if he could go in my place. I arranged it, and he went and met her and I guess he didn’t much like her. We haven’t talked about it since, obviously.

  Bryce read what he had written, and he didn’t like it. In the first place, there was the fact that Wayne had no trouble saying Lucie’s name, talking about her, while Bryce found it increasingly difficult to refer to her as a real person. Shouldn’t Wayne be feeling this? But clearly he was not.

  But that wasn’t the main point. There are moments in almost any novel when it’s necessary to move a character from one position to another, so that you can go on with the story, and this was like that. Once the character is moved into the new position, everything is fine, but in order to make the transition the writer has to bend something out of shape. Some behavior is wrong, some reaction is wrong. It’s a rip in the fabric of the novel, but it’s necessary to get the story where it has to go, so the novelist merely sighs and shakes his head and does it. Other writers, reading the book, might notice the lump in the batter, but most readers won’t.

  This was one of those junctions. Once we get Wayne to the premiere of Low Fidelity, everything’s fine, everything moves along as though on rails. But the flaw is before that.

  Under no circumstances, never, would Bryce Proctorr, after the breakup of his marriage, be feeling lonely enough and nostalgic enough and sentimental enough to start looking up people he’d known twenty years ago, for God’s sake. Utter strangers to each other, by now. And who else did this Bryce Proctorr look up and phone? Just Wayne Prentice?

  A novelist would see through this, he thought. Would Detective Johnson? Probably not. Even if he felt something was just a little off in the story he’d been told, there wouldn’t be anything there to get hold of, nothing concrete. And in any case, he probably wouldn’t even notice the false note.

  So long as the New York Police Department doesn’t hire a lot of novelists to track me down, Bryce thought, I should be okay.

  Eighteen

  Christmas, which at least in theory should be the best season for a charitable organization like Susan’s, was in many ways the worst. All of the needs were increased, all of the problems were magnified, all of the requirements became more urgent, and people who could keep their egos in check very nicely the rest of the year suddenly became vastly important in their own eyes.

  Every evening, now that Detective Johnson had come and gone, now that the whole Lucie episode seemed to be finished with and fading from their minds (as well as from the media, thank God), now that Wayne’s rejected novel had found a good home (however anonymously) so that soon a great deal of money would be coming their way, Susan was spending the dinner hour each evening telling Wayne the latest horror stories and comedies and comedic horrors from her days at UniCare.

  There was rich material here. If Wayne weren’t already at work on a novel, and if in fact it weren’t the case that he had no market for any novel
at all, he’d certainly try to find a story in the varied stories Susan was telling him. The setting was both Dickensian and very modern, sentimental but still ironic; perfect.

  Finally, for the hell of it, he sat down one morning after breakfast, the week after the visit from Detective Johnson, and banged out a six-thousand-word non-fiction piece on the subject of the economics of organized charity. He welcomed the irony, and wallowed in the sentiment. He had no idea what to do with such a thing, but wrote it anyway, because it was fun, because he preferred to be writing than not to be writing, and because he seemed to have bogged down in The Shadowed Other.

  He knew what that was all about, and he wasn’t made anxious by it. There’d been a moment, very briefly, when he’d realized The Shadowed Other was grinding gradually to a halt, that he’d wondered if this were a delayed reaction to the Lucie thing. (He called it that in his mind now, the Lucie thing, knowing what he meant, all the details and the surroundings and the circumstances, and he didn’t need any further definition for himself.) But the Lucie thing wasn’t bothering him, wasn’t incapacitating him. He regretted it, of course he did, he regretted the necessity of it, and God knows he regretted the messiness of it, but it was over now, and whatever his regrets, whatever the horror of the incident itself, it was finished and they were now in the post-Lucie world, which was a much better world for Wayne.

  Also, he had begun to suspect that the only way he could have done the Lucie thing was the way it had happened, by surprising himself, forcing the issue, creating a situation where there was no way to turn back. His vague plans about traveling to some southern state to buy a gun, then track Lucie anonymously through the canyons of New York, had all been a fantasy, a daydream. He couldn’t have done it that way. Shock himself into action; that was the only possible route he could have taken.

  So it wasn’t the Lucie thing that was blocking The Shadowed Other, it was Joe Katz. After the holidays, Joe Katz would have a conversation with Wayne about his potential future at Pegasus-Regent. If it were thumbs-up, The Shadowed Other would spring immediately back to life. If not, not.

  That evening, Wayne showed “Charity Begins in the Out Basket” to Susan, who had a couple of small corrections to suggest but otherwise thought the piece terrific. So he made the changes, and the next day he called Willard Hartman, his agent, with whom he had not spoken since the dooming of The Domino Doublet.

  “Wayne! Good to hear your voice, my friend. Happy holidays.”

  “And you, Willard. I thought I should warn you . . .”

  “Yes?” Said in jolly fashion, but with wariness underneath.

  “I seem to have descended into the sinks of fact,” Wayne said. “I’ve done some sort of article about the charity biz, based on stuff Susan told me.”

  “Aimed where?” Willard asked, sensibly.

  “I haven’t the vaguest idea,” Wayne admitted. “I don’t know that world. I just want to mail it to you, Willard, and if there’s no market for it, you’ll know better than me.”

  “Well, I’ll certainly enjoy reading it, Wayne, I know that much,” Willard told him. “You know I’m a fan of your stuff. I just wish there were more of us out here.”

  “Me, too, Willard,” Wayne said, and the next day sent him a copy of the piece, with a note reading, “Think of this as a Christmas card.”

  Nineteen

  Early in December, Christmas settles over New York City, and refuses to permit anything else to be talked about or thought about. Bryce took the train in to the city three times in search of Christmas presents for his kids, and for Joe Katz, and for Jerry Mossman, his New York agent, and for Gregg, the groundsman who mowed the lawns in Connecticut in the summer and kept an eye on the place the rest of the year, when Bryce—and before that Bryce and Lucie—were less often there.

  But this year he was more often there. He found the apartment uncomfortable, didn’t like to spend the night there, but twice he had to, once after Pegasus-Regent’s Christmas party, an annual event he had no choice but to attend. The probable reason that he drank too much at the party this year, a thing he didn’t normally do, was because Wayne was present.

  He hadn’t expected Joe to invite Wayne, who wasn’t after all a Pegasus-Regent author. (In a way, of course, he was, but not in a way Joe Katz could know about.)

  “Well, hello,” Bryce said, walking over to where Wayne stood, a plastic glass of pink punch in his hand. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  Wayne was very happy, maybe a little high. “To tell you the absolute truth, Bryce,” he said, “I feel like Cinderella. This isn’t my real gown, and that isn’t my real coach outside, and I wasn’t really invited to the ball.”

  “Don’t tell the prince that,” Bryce advised him, “and things could work out for you.”

  Wayne was tipsy enough to be sincere, in a way Bryce found crude, almost ghoulish. “I want to thank you, Bryce,” he said. “You made all this possible.”

  “You made a lot possible, too,” Bryce reminded him.

  But Wayne was off on a voyage of his own, looking past Bryce, gazing at all the people at the party, book people chatting about books. “God, I love this,” he said.

  Bryce knew what he was thinking. This is his world, he belongs in this world because he doesn’t belong in any other, doesn’t fit anywhere else. The teaching-in-college fantasy had been just that, a fantasy, and one way or another it would have ended badly. This is the only pond in which this fish can swim.

  And so, he has to be telling himself, whatever I had to do to be here is all right. To stay here where I belong, not to strangle in some alien world, simply to get what I deserve, the bare minimum I deserve; to be in my own world. Nothing is too much to do, to get that.

  I did this to him, Bryce thought. I made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. If no price is too high to pay, then the price I charged him wasn’t very high at all, was it?

  Bryce too looked around the room, trying to see it through Wayne’s eyes, but knowing his own eyes saw differently. He did belong in this world, his bona fides were proved, and he had not done anything. Yet he felt he was the outcast. Why should that be? Why should the loser be lapping this up like cream, while the acknowledged winner feels like the interloper, the nobody, Caliban, the bumpkin rubbing elbows with his betters?

  “Maybe this is a masked ball,” he said, but was immediately glad that Wayne was inattentive and didn’t pick up on that. Because he knew at once what would be beneath Wayne’s mask: openness, eagerness, sincerity. But what would be beneath Bryce’s mask?

  “Oh, I want you to meet Susan. Susan? Come here, meet Bryce Proctorr.”

  Bryce turned, and she offered him a cool hand and a cool smile. “How do you do? Wayne has told me so much about you.”

  Has ever a stock bit of dialogue contained such gross subtext? Jesus Christ, Bryce thought, what a horrible secret we three share, in the middle of this party, we three and nobody else.

  He and Susan Prentice took an instant dislike to one another, and Bryce could see her recognizing it as much as he did. She was a good-looking woman, he supposed, but too controlled, her light brown hair too much of a helmet to her head, her body too neatly trim, as though it had been pruned like a Christmas tree, her movements all too small and careful.

  “Merry Christmas,” he said, and showed his party smile, and toasted her with his glass of punch.

  “This is really a lovely party,” she said. “Much better than Romney.”

  Romney had been Wayne’s first publisher, years ago. Tim Fleet, Bryce knew, had been published by Antelope, but of course if Antelope hosted any parties—not all publishers did—Tim Fleet could not have attended. What a strange thing it must have been to be Tim Fleet.

  Bryce said, “Pegasus is the only publisher I’ve ever had, so I have no basis for comparison.”

  Surprised, Wayne said, “Is that true? Most writers switch sooner or later.”

  “Jerry, my agent, did some saber rattling a couple times,” Bryce told him,
“but Pegasus always came through. And I’ve been happy here. My first editor was great, and when he retired Joe took over, and that’s twelve years, and I’d never leave Joe. If he ever went, I’d go with him.” If I had a book to give him, he thought.

  Turning away from that thought, he said to Susan Prentice, “What was wrong with Romney? Their Christmas parties, I mean.”

  “They were very cheap,” she said, “and it was always in their offices, and it didn’t really work, and they’d just order deli stuff and the cheapest possible white wine, and all their A-list writers stayed away in droves.”

  Wayne laughed, though shrilly, and said, “That was it, right there, if only I’d noticed. If you found yourself at Romney’s Christmas party, you knew you weren’t A-list. You knew you were mid-list.” Grinning at Bryce, he said, “You know my definition of mid-list? No pulse.”

  Lucie! Crumbling backwards to the ground, punching, punching: no pulse. Bryce closed his eyes, and opened them. “I’ve been lucky,” he said, “and I know it. And I’d better circulate, if I want to go on being lucky. Nice to meet you, Susan.”

  “And you.”

  Bryce wandered the party, but found no one else to have a good conversation with, and soon left. Looking back from the door, he saw Wayne deep in happy conversation with, among others, Joe Katz.

  * * *

  There were as many parties up in the country in December as in the city, and he felt more comfortable at the country parties. The people he knew there were much more diverse, not all writers and editors and agents. The weekenders in the hills around him, who’d become casual friends and party hosts over the years, included lawyers, advertising workers, doctors, the owner of a chain of garden nurseries, a newspaper columnist, even a couple of actors. He felt at ease with these people because they cared more about pool services and deer repellents than about publishing mergers and the vagaries of the New York Times Book Review.