The Hook

by Donald E. Westlake

  There were, it seemed to him, nine strong cinematic scenes in the novel, and the connecting matter could be condensed without a problem. He could convert this book into a screenplay in a month, less than a month. Willard Hartman had a corresponding agent on the West Coast who handled film deals for him, and to whom Willard would surely send the screenplay if it came out as well as Wayne expected it to. If it sold, wonderful. If it didn’t, it would still be his calling card, it would still show Willard’s associate out there what he could do, and that he was ready to do more.

  He knew, of course, that The Pollux Perspective was not a movie title, and the speed with which he thought of a movie title to put on it—instantaneous—struck him as a good omen. “Double Impact,” he typed, and got to work.

  * * *

  His fourth day on Double Impact, the work going even more smoothly than he’d expected, the phone rang at eleven in the morning, and it was Willard. Wayne hadn’t told him about the screenplay yet, had decided to wait until it was finished and Susan had approved of it before letting anybody else know it was in the works.

  “The first thing,” Willard said, “the Review has scheduled your Guatemala piece for the Sunday after next.”

  “Oh, great.” The shadow of The Shadowed Other would see print, while its parent sank into the cold dark water of the past.

  The next thing Willard said brought Wayne up short. “You used to know Bryce Proctorr, didn’t you?”

  A few people knew something of the current relationship between Wayne and Bryce—Joe Katz, Detective Johnson, a few others—but Wayne hadn’t gone out of his way to let people know that that particular old friendship had come back to life. Tell Willard now? But minimize it. “Oh, I still see him from time to time.”

  “You do?” Willard was surprised.

  “But we don’t really travel in the same circles.”

  “Well, the Review wants an interview with him, and they wonder if you’d be the interviewer. Because you’ve written the same sort of novel in the past. Unless you think you’re too close to him.”

  Astonished, Wayne said, “The New York Review of Books? They want something on Bryce Proctorr?” Their having taken his piece on the American literary uses of Central American political turmoil had been somewhat surprising, though not out of character for the paper, but what did they want with Bryce?

  “He’s a part of the popular culture of this moment,” Willard said, “and he has a new book coming out, his first in some time. They’d like an interview that fits him into American society now.”

  “Sure,” Wayne said. “Easy.”

  “I’ll have the publisher send you galleys of the book,” Willard said. “It’s called Two Faces in the Mirror.”

  Wayne just barely managed to cover the mouthpiece before he laughed. The publisher will send him galleys! He took a deep breath, released the mouthpiece, and said, “Good.”

  “Do you have Proctorr’s phone number? Apparently, he’s up in Connecticut somewhere, you can call him, set up a date.”

  “Sure, give me the number.”

  Willard did, and said, “I understand he used to live somewhere in the neighborhood where you’ve just moved. That would have been a lot more convenient.”

  “Oh, well,” Wayne said.

  * * *

  The final Tuesday in March, and Wayne stepped off the train at ten minutes past eleven; six minutes late. Bryce was waiting for him on the platform, looking formal, as though here to meet a foreign delegation. His smile when he greeted Wayne was fitful. “How was the trip?”

  “Easy.”

  This was the first Wayne had seen Bryce since the Pegasus-Regent Christmas party, over three months ago, and he was surprised by the change. Bryce seemed to have lost a lot of weight, maybe twenty pounds or more. His face was lined, and his clothes hung loosely on him. And as he led Wayne to the little parking lot, that fitful smile kept coming and going.

  Wayne still hadn’t told Bryce about his move to the Central Park West apartment. Would he ever? Was it necessary? What if Bryce heard about it from somebody else? Maybe, while he was here, there’d be a way to deal with that.

  Bryce stuffed Wayne’s suitcase into the backseat of a good-looking black BMW. Wayne was to spend at least one night, possibly two, depending on how long he needed to complete the interview. His tape recorder and notepads were in the suitcase.

  As they drove away from the station and out of the little town, they talked about the weather, and train travel, and conditions in New York, and how much Bryce enjoyed not being in all that hustle and bustle any more. There were a couple of opportunities for Wayne to mention where he lived now, but he kept silent.

  Somehow, his living in Bryce’s old apartment was completely different from Joe Katz moving into Wayne’s former place. He felt that what he had done was more like an invasion, something that Bryce would have a right to resent, though why he felt that way he wasn’t sure.

  Maybe it was all about contempt. When he’d first run into Bryce in the library last year, he’d felt awkward, embarrassed, because he was at the very nadir of his life and career. Career, that was the point. They’d started out more or less even, and Bryce had become a winner, famous, rich, married to a beautiful woman, written up in People, while Wayne had faltered and stumbled and failed.

  Even in the matter of wives: Susan was right for Wayne, he knew she was, but she wasn’t glamorous. There would never be a photo of a triumphantly laughing Susan in People magazine.

  So what he’d felt in that first meeting, in the library and in the bar afterward, was that what Bryce had a right to feel toward him was contempt. Whatever he actually felt, whatever their relationship was or would turn out to be, in Wayne’s eyes Bryce had a right to be contemptuous of Wayne.

  Which he must have been, to some extent, mustn’t he, to even have made that offer. Had that shown respect, or friendship? Or had it shown contempt? “Here’s an ugly job, beneath me. You do it.”

  Nothing Wayne had done since, certainly not the Lucie thing, not anything else, had let him believe he had risen in his right to Bryce’s esteem. And now to have crept into Bryce’s old apartment, live with Bryce’s old furniture—Lucie’s old furniture, even worse—was so servile, so hangdog, as though he were living his life through Bryce, and not man enough to stand up and live a life of his own, that he couldn’t bring himself to admit to it.

  All at once, Bryce said, “Do you think about Lucie?”

  Wayne was astonished. He would have expected Bryce to stay a million miles from that topic. He knew he wouldn’t have brought it up, didn’t need the reminders, didn’t need to dwell on that horrible moment. Why should Bryce? He said, “Think what about her?”

  “Well, what happened,” Bryce said. “You don’t think about what happened?”

  “Why should I?”

  Wayne watched Bryce’s profile as Bryce stared fixedly at the road ahead, saying, “Doesn’t it stay with you? By God, it stays with me!”

  What is this, Wayne wondered. Guilt? All this time later? He said, “Why? Why does it have to stay with you?”

  “Because I wasn’t there!” This was blurted out as though it were the secret of the century, forced from him in extremis.

  “You weren’t there? Of course you weren’t there, you weren’t supposed to be there, that was the whole point, remember?”

  “Yes, yes, I know.”

  “That’s why you sent me there,” Wayne said, and was surprised to hear a tinge of bitterness in his voice. He’d thought he’d learned to deal with that.

  “But,” Bryce said, and shook his head. Wayne saw that his fingers clenched and unclenched on the steering wheel. “But I should have been there.”

  “You’d have been arrested. You’d be in jail forever.”

  “I’d know.”

  “Know what?”

  “What it was like!”

  Memory flashed, briefly, scaldingly, and Wayne shook his head. Suddenly hoarse, he said, “You don’t want t
o know what it was like.”

  “Well, if it was that bad, why don’t you think about it any more?”

  “Why should I?”

  “I have to! Why do I have to?”

  “All right,” Wayne said. “All right. You’re obsessing on this.”

  “I just want to know what it was like.”

  “It was hell.”

  “But I can’t see it! I can’t see it.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Bryce, I understand what it is.” Wayne shook his head. He almost patted Bryce’s arm, but thought better of it. He said, “I’ll tell you what it is. I was there, Bryce, and it was horrible, and you can’t imagine it, but I don’t have to imagine it. I was there. So what I have is a memory, and memories fade. All memories fade, Bryce, that’s what they do. But you don’t have the memory, all you have is imagination. And imagination never fades.”

  They drove in silence for a minute or two, and then Bryce said, “No, it doesn’t. I tried to correct that for a while, but it didn’t work out. It came close, but it didn’t work out.”

  Wayne had no idea what Bryce was talking about, but maybe that was just as well. If he explodes, he told himself, he’ll blow me up with him. I’m sitting next to him here, and I have no choice. I have to watch him. I have to be ready for . . . for whatever.

  “There’s the house,” Bryce said.

  “I recognize it,” Wayne told him, “from People.”

  * * *

  There was nobody in the house but the two of them. Bryce opened a can of soup for their lunch, and sliced some fresh local bread, and made coffee. Wayne watched him, and as they sat together at the big dining room table he said, “Bryce, don’t you have anybody working here?”

  “There’s a guy does the lawn.”

  “No, I mean inside the house. A housekeeper. Somebody to do the meals and the laundry and the cleaning and all that.”

  “There’s a woman comes in once a week.”

  “Bryce, you need somebody to live in, a housekeeper. You can afford it, and you should have it. Anybody in your position would have somebody like that.”

  Bryce looked around, vaguely, as though for the missing housekeeper. “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “We could never keep anybody in the house before, I used to have people, but Lucie always fought with them. Fired them, or they quit. I got used to not.”

  “Well, you can do it now,” Wayne told him. “And you should.”

  Slowly, Bryce smiled. It made him look younger, and healthier. “You’re right,” he said. “There’s an agency in Danbury, I’ll call them. After the interview.”

  “Good.”

  “You’re good for me, Wayne,” Bryce said, and laughed. “In so many ways, you’re good for me.”

  * * *

  After lunch, Bryce showed Wayne around the house, and Wayne found it unexpectedly similar to the apartment in New York. Spacious rooms, decorated tastefully but with some flamboyance. It was funny that Bryce could see Lucie in the New York apartment and be turned off by it, but couldn’t see the same influence here. Didn’t want to see it, probably. Wanted to like this place because he wanted to stay cooped up here.

  “That would be the housekeeper’s room.”

  “Very nice.”

  But the way Bryce had talked in the car, though, maybe it was just as well there wasn’t anybody else in the house. What if Bryce was about to go off the deep end, go running to the authorities, confess his sins so he could sleep better at night? He’d drag Wayne to hell with him. Wayne decided he’d listen very carefully over the next two days, and if there was any more of this, any further hints, it would be good to have nobody else around.

  There was an airy sunporch that gleamed like satin in the weak March sunlight, and that was where they decided to sit for the interview. Wayne brought out his materials, set up the tape recorder, and was about to switch it on to Record when he stopped, lowered his hand, and said, “No, wait. Something else first.”

  Bryce raised a polite eyebrow.

  Wayne said, “There’s a couple things you said, you got me worried, and maybe the best thing is come out with it, clear the air.”

  “Things I said?”

  “What I’m beginning to worry about,” Wayne told him, “is that you might maybe suddenly get an urge to confess. Turn yourself in, for whatever reason. You’d drag me down with you, you know.”

  Wayne was surprised to see Bryce smile at that, a sad kind of smile but a real one. “Don’t worry, Wayne,” he said. “I already went through that. I already confessed once, and I won’t be doing that again. Guaranteed.”

  Wayne stared at him. “You confessed?”

  “To Ellen.”

  The name meant nothing. “You—You told somebody—”

  “My first wife.”

  “Oh, my God. Did she believe you?”

  “Of course she believed me,” Bryce said. “Did you think she’d think I’d make up something like that?”

  “Oh, Christ on a crutch. Did you tell her about me?”

  “Not by name,” Bryce said. “Just that I, you know, arranged it.”

  “What’s she going to do?”

  Bryce’s grin was incongruous, but also real. He said, “She chewed me out, I can tell you that.”

  “Well, yes, of course she’d—”

  “For wanting to be so selfish.”

  “Yes, you could look at it—”

  “For wanting to confess.”

  Wayne looked at him. “What?”

  “I wasn’t thinking,” Bryce explained. “I wasn’t thinking about my kids, how it would mess them up. You know, they’re twenty-three, they’re twenty-one, they’re nineteen, this would just destroy their lives. You can see that, can’t you?”

  “Absolutely,” Wayne said. “Sure. Ellen said that?”

  “She made me promise,” Bryce said, “never to tell anybody else about it, ever again. And I won’t.”

  “Because of your kids,” Wayne said.

  “They’re the innocent ones,” Bryce said. “They’re the victims.”

  “You’re right. Okay,” Wayne said, nodding. “Okay.” He knew Bryce was sincere, he knew he was safe from Bryce in that way, there was nothing he’d have to do to defend himself from Bryce’s feelings of guilt. God bless the first wife, Ellen, he thought. “Let’s uh,” he said, “let’s—Shall we start?”

  “Sure.”

  “This is the New York Review of Books, you know, so I’ve got some, I put together some questions.”

  “Shoot.”

  Wayne pushed Record, and began: “Wayne Prentice interview of Bryce Proctorr, March twenty-seventh. To begin, one consistent theme in your work that the critics have remarked on is the matter of duality, that actions not only have consequences but also contain a second, altered set of consequences that might have occurred, but did not, but nevertheless haunt what really did take place. This has reminded some critics of Borges’ ‘The Garden of Forking Paths.’ Were you influenced by Borges?”

  Bryce nodded, slowly, for some time, his eyes on the tape turning in the recorder. Wayne was wondering if he should ask something further when Bryce said, “Duality . . . is, of course, naturally it’s in all of us, opposites and the movement of selves inside the skin, and the feeling that this can’t be happening to me, but then what is? What is happening, if not what is? From that point of view, every decision has to be the right decision, every decision has to be inevitable, no way to get away from what was decided, because history then flows, you see, flows, history flows from each decision, and when we stand up here, you see, you see? when you stand up here on this hilltop this is where you are and you could not have been here if you hadn’t decided the way you did way back there. Of course, naturally, of course, if you made a different decision then, that would be the right, the correct one, the only one, the only possible, the only way you could have gone, if only you’d thought, if only you’d thought it through, and now today, you see, you do see, don’t you? today you’d be on some other
hilltop looking back and you would see that you were right and that was the only possible hilltop, that was the only possible hilltop, if only you’d been patient, and you can’t even see that hilltop from here, where you are instead, you can’t get to it, you can’t ever get to it, but you certainly know, you know now, you should have known then, you should have known, you were thinking like a madman, worse, you were thinking like a storyteller telling a story, with a hook, and you didn’t see there were other, other, there were other, oh, let’s call them scenarios, and the multiplicity of the scenarios, yes, forking paths, that’s good, I don’t know about a garden, but this multiplicity opens and then closes like stones, like giant stones closing, and all the variables, the variations, what shall we say, diversity, the multiformity narrows, constricts, strangles, until there’s only the one, and that it’s the only one is not the excuse, that it’s the inevitable is not the excuse, that it’s the only thing that could have happened only because it’s the only thing that did happen is not the excuse, and we’re left with a duality that is in the spirit, a remorse, a wish undone, a desire for a forking path, a garden, yes, a desire for a flower that does not grow, which is where I’ve always, my hand has always reached out, but the image and the reality are wrong, to bring us back to your question, the desire for another reality is what makes the writer of fiction, the teller of tales, to bring us back to your question, the liar, the one who forces his reality onto the world but the graft, to bring us back to your question, the graft can never survive on this new root, on this hilltop, this one, here. Which is I suppose what I was writing about, if I’d ever cared to pay attention. However, I’ve never read Borges.”

  * * *

  Wayne stayed just the one night, filling several hours of tape with their interview, then took the train back to New York, sat at his computer, and wrote both sides of the interview, the questions and the answers. Everybody seemed pleased by it.

  Twenty-seven

  The second week in April, and Bryce was impatient for real spring to arrive. Almost every day now, he would walk up to the pool enclosure, go inside the fence, and walk around the pool with its dark green cover littered with wet clumps of last year’s leaves. He always opened the pool early in May, even though the weather was usually still a little too cold then. But the pool was heated, even if the air was not, and there were always at least a few warm sunny days in May, before most of his neighbors had opened their own pools, when Bryce could swim and soak and work winter out of his body.