Now Clive had to answer the “Why?” with respect to the proposed contract for Paul Giverney. “Because he’s the hottest thing around these days. Because we want him on board. Of course.”
Tom didn’t fall for the “of course” (implying Tom would be a fool not to agree). He merely puffed at his cigar, looked at the lighted end to make sure it was, and said, “So what? He’ll never earn back that advance. It’d take sales in the millions to get it back. You’d be losing money.”
Clive laughed. “Tom, you’re such a literalist.”
“So’s money. Well, you might get him ‘on board’ as you say, but if the ship goes down you can bet Giverney will be batting the rest of you generous folks out of the way to get to the lifeboat first.”
Clive frowned. “Is that just a general statement about all millionaire authors or particular to Paul?”
Tom checked out the end of his cigar again. He didn’t answer the question except to say, “Well, never mind. As long as you’re his editor and not me.”
That gave Clive a little chill. Tom emptied the doorway of shadows when he walked away.
Clive picked up the Danny Zito book again, opened it to where the bookmark had been (and presumed Bobby must have put it there), and read.
This wasn’t one of your regular hits. People don’t realize killing is easy, I mean gets easier and easier, like the more you practice. Like roller-blading. Like the piano. I play, you know.
Now, I write.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that, Danny, old boy. The prose was torturous but Danny had insisted he be the one to write this book; he didn’t want it ghosted or “told to” some hack writer. Clive had tried to dissuade him, telling him writing a book was not fun—
“Then why the hell they do it, these guys?” He waved his arm to take in a display of books by Mackenzie-Haack writers.
A good question, really. Clive sighed and went back to reading:Write. Here’s something I never thought I’d do. I hope I live to do another one. It does something to you; I mean, your name on a jacket, your words printed on a page. Who could resist, right?
Clive shut the book, stared at the air for a moment, wondered if Bobby was really suggesting just that—that Danny write another book. It was true that this one had actually sold more copies than they ever thought it would. And it seemed to have developed some sort of cult following. But—
He picked up the phone, put it down, and picked up the book. As he walked by Amy’s desk, he told her he’d be in Bobby’s office.
“I’m finished with this?” She held up the pages of copy for the catalog.
Clive gave her a prissy little smile. “I don’t know, sweetheart. Are you?”
“Is he in?” Clive asked one of Bobby’s assistants, who was chattering on the telephone. What was her name, Polly? Dolly? Why weren’t these girls called secretaries, which was more or less their work? Probably because publishing houses had to pay secretaries whatever secretaries were worth. Editorial assistants, on the other hand, worked for a pittance and the glamour of it (some glamour!). And the hope of winding up as editors themselves (fat chance). They loved to talk shop. There was enough gossip floating around Mackenzie-Haack to keep them busy all day long. That’s probably what Polly was doing on the phone right now. She hung up and looked at him as if she wouldn’t lower herself.
“I asked you, is he in? Polly?”
“Dolly. No.” She pushed back a great wad of hair that looked as if it had been brushed by a steamroller. Then she pointed a silver-sequin-decorated nail in some direction. “He’s down the hall. In Peter’s office.” Dolly turned away.
“Peter Genero’s?”
Dolly’s smile was just this side of a sneer. “He’s the only Peter we have, isn’t he?”
All of Bobby’s assistants were big on attitude, just like Bobby; they were working for the great man himself, and who were you?
Clive walked into Bobby’s office. He liked looking at the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that lined three walls (the fourth being the glass-covered view). The shelves were full, with the newish books displayed upright, spread like a whore’s legs. As usual all the really good ones (meaning the beautifully written ones) were from Tom Kidd’s writers. There was a Grace Packard, an Eric Gruber. The other editors (himself included) had, of course, a literary writer here and there, but rarely more than one, and that one none of the editors Clive knew (again, himself included) would have the guts to edit.
Clive’s literary plum was Jennifer Schiffler. She was close to being on a par with Gruber and Packard and Isaly. Rarely did Clive see her, and when he did, he wasn’t sure he was “seeing” her. She was one of those writer-wraiths who gave the impression she was merely engaged in a corporeal visitation that could end at any second. Once he had taken Jennifer to lunch, expecting her merely to pick at her food, and ended up wondering how she had managed to consume all of her blini without seeming to chew or even swallow.
Looking at all of these books, Clive sighed, feeling a pang of guilt for Jennifer and writers like her, knowing he had come a long way from books such as hers and by back, not main, streets.
“Clive!”
Clive jumped at the sound of Bobby’s voice. Bobby came in and sailed around his lakelike desk, then settled into his leather swivel chair, feet on desk as if he were wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He wasn’t. Bobby had his own tailor who had made him a dozen suits (at two or three thousand per), all of them the same design in different wools and silks, but the colors were so muted it looked as if Bobby always wore the same suit.
“What’ve you got?”
“This?” Clive was afraid he was beginning to put every statement in the form of a question, like Amy.
Bobby sat back, smiling in a way that was meant to be mysterious but ended up being merely cocksure. He laced his hands behind his head and rocked back toward the huge window and beyond it, into space. “You found it.”
“Were you trying to hide it? In the center of my desk?”
“What do you think?”
“About what?” He decided that if Bobby wanted another Mafia exposé, he’d have to bring it up himself. Clive wasn’t helping him.
“Didn’t you read the page I marked?”
“Yes, I read the page you marked. He—Danny—carried on about the writing life. Danny, more than anyone, would know, of course.”
Turning his chair back and forth like a kid, Bobby smiled. “That and other stuff.”
Clive frowned. “ ‘Other stuff’?”
Bobby stopped turning and leaned forward, lowering his voice. “Don’t you remember what we were talking about this morning? Have you forgotten already?”
“Of course, I remember. It was about Paul Giverney, mainly.”
“Didn’t you just love that bit about killing getting easier with practice, like roller-blading?” Bobby grimaced. “I was thinking maybe you should look up Danny Zito.”
Clive gave a choking laugh. “Zito’s gone into the great beyond of witness protection. You talked about it yourself. The man doesn’t want to be found.”
Bobby pulled over his Rolodex, fingers spilling over it like a card shark, plucked out one of the little punched cards, and shoved it across to Clive. “Here’s his unlisted number.” Bobby rat-tat-tatted on his desk with his hands. “He doesn’t want to be found by his old buddies, or by his wife, or by his girlfriend. Who would? But by his publisher? Come on.” Bobby made a blubbery sound with his lips. “You might lose track of your bookie or your fence, but your publisher? No way.”
Clive rose, walked around the desk to peer out of the window, down at Madison Avenue. He turned, brows knotted. “Bobby, why in hell would we want another book from Danny Zito?”
“We don’t. But he probably does.”
“So?”
“So he knows people.” Bobby folded his arms hard against his chest and waited.
“ ‘Knows people.’ ” Clive was trying to resist the same unpleasant knowledge he had tried to resist that morning. He sucked in
breath, felt it tighten in his chest. He wasn’t so young anymore that he couldn’t have a coronary. “You want me to get some information from Zito about taking care of this little problem Paul Giverney has set?”
Bobby gave him one of those exaggerated who-me? shrugs.
Then Clive said, “How in hell do you think we could trust Danny Zito, anyway? He’s obviously the biggest snitch around. If he’d take on the Bransoni family, why do you think he’d keep quiet over a deal with us?”
Bobby slowly shook his head. “Bransoni didn’t promise him a book contract. Only the other kind.” Bobby found this a real howl. When he’d finished laughing, he said, “Come on, Clivey. Just do it.”
Clive left Bobby’s office, wishing people would stop fucking calling him that.
EIGHT
Clive was back at his desk again, looking (again) at the Zito book.
Fallguy. Clive remembered the book proposal: one page, outline form.
It had been Danny’s contention that the best way to introduce the reader to the life of a Mafia hit man was to use the format of a twelve-step program.
Admit to being helpless in the face of the Bransoni family.
Bobby had (and no wonder) thought Danny Zito was kidding and gulped back laughter all the way down the page until he got hiccups.
Clive wasn’t so sure. Danny Zito could be as inscrutable as the Las Vegas Luxor. He had a poker face that could clean out the casino at Caesars Palace. Danny had said he couldn’t figure out the approach his book should take: should it be the twelve-step program offered in the bloody garb of the Bransoni family? Or the Bransoni family reported upon in the guise of the twelve steps?
Danny and Bobby had stayed closeted for two hours in Bobby’s office discussing this.
The book was insane, but wait a minute—no one, reviewer or critic, had been able to work out whether this was true or whether it was a hell of a send-up both of the Bransonis, all of the twelve-step programs that had wound their way into everything people did, and, therefore, satire. Clive personally thought it more evidence of Danny’s ego, total lack of talent, and ignorance of everything except what he did best: kill people.
But most of the celebrity books put out there you could say the same thing about, the worst of them often becoming instant best-sellers. Some of these success stories Bobby had given the go-ahead to. And one or two he’d told to get lost; ones that had appeared at first to be surefire hits had, in the end, gotten lost.
Clive sat staring at the jacket. By all that was right and holy, Peter Genero should have been the editor to handle this book. Genero was the celebrity maven, “celebrity” here including hit men, political assassins, tennis players, serial rapists, anyone who’d ever lived in L.A., leaders of coups, offshore banking, anybody with a scam or a dirty story to tell. These author manqués were the ones who thought they were already wonderful enough and didn’t need to write their own books.
This was right up Peter Genero’s street, this job. But Genero was probably busy shoveling lunches into the mouths of his celebrity “projects,” people who, having become recently famous, assumed what they should do is write a book about it. About their recent fame.
Clive detested Genero. It was not in the same way that he hated Tom Kidd. Even though he wished Tom would just vanish, he had a lot of respect for him, envied him for still keeping alive the old fire of publishing. Kidd was in his book-tiered office every day, sometimes on weekends, early morning until darkness settled. Peter, on the other hand, was hardly ever in. He conducted his editorial commitments—his projects—from an Upper East Side apartment or a spread in Great Neck. He clearly felt he was too prime time to be handcuffed to a desk, to inhabit anything that smacked of a nine-to-five working world.
He shared his luxury real estate with a brace of wolfhounds that he enjoyed dragging around Central Park and into his office when he did come in, and sometimes to Petrossian, where he liked to lunch when he had a “project” to manipulate.
Clive used to wonder how Genero had pulled the wool over Bobby’s eyes. Then one day he realized Peter hadn’t. Bobby had him doing exactly what Peter was good at, what he was fabulously good at (Clive had to admit), and that was to curry and nurture these instant celebrities until they swelled up like balloons to float over Central Park. They would then do what Peter Genero wanted them to do: not get drunk as a skunk before appearing on the Larry King show; not hire PR people and trumpet their books before Mackenzie-Haack had set its own show in motion; and most important, not attempt to write their own books.
There wasn’t one amongst them who wasn’t convinced he could write War and Peace over the weekend. When Peter was working on selling his celebrity-writers on how much Mackenzie-Haack valued them, how absolutely great it considered them, he was very careful never to say that their greatness encompassed any kind of talent for writing. “What we want from you is your story. You had to live it, why should you have to write it? Leave the writing to the hacks! (Toss back that third martini, baby.) It’s all they’re good for!”
Almost always, this worked. When it didn’t, another of Genero’s gambits—reserved for those hard-core budding Thomas Manns that he couldn’t convince before dessert—was to go along with them: absolutely! If you want to write the book yourself, that’s great! Let me have a chapter by Monday because, you know, we’re bound by this ridiculous production schedule. By Monday, the Thomas Manns would call up and tell him he was right and to get one of the hacks to do the actual shit work; they had more important things to do.
Because there was no doubt about it. Writing was shit work.
Yes, Peter Genero was good at what he did.
Clive had stared at the dust jacket long enough to commit it to memory for all time. What he should have done was walk into Bobby’s office and tender his resignation.
What he did do was look at the Rolodex card and pick up the phone.
NINE
Swill’s was an ordinary bar that had achieved café status (if such is an achievement) by the positioning of three or four metal tables outside that, in summer, were sometimes occupied by tourists who thought they were in the Village. The regulars in Swill’s disdained, even complained about the tables as being at odds with the ambience inside. They especially detested the espresso machine, brought into play largely for the customers sitting outside. As for ambience, the owner (named Jimmy Longjeans) said he no longer believed that less is more, having had to deal with the regulars all of these years, where less was indeed less.
Swill’s was a stripped-down, workingman’s bar whose decor consisted of a blaze of beer ads like ships’ insignia over the long mirror behind the bar. The bar itself had a copper top and was both beautiful and unusual. There was nothing else that garnered comment, the rest of the room being filled with ordinary wooden booths and tables and mismatched chairs that had never intended to match and were consequently thought to be chic.
This was Chelsea, not the Village. But then Ned thought Greenwich Village wasn’t even the Village anymore. Thirty, forty years ago you could have drowned in a sea of writing talk in the old Greenwich Village. MacDougal Street. Greene. Houston. Swill’s was patronized by a number of novelists and poets, a few painters, and the unknown person who played “A Garden in the Rain.” Swill’s still had a fifties-style jukebox, containing a wealth of forties- and fifties-style singers. Johnnie Ray was the star performer here, at least to the writer who played “Cry” over and over again.
Swill’s had its regulars, but so does any bar that keeps its doors open for five minutes every day. It had nothing to do with loyalty, only with habit. Still, the ones who had been coming there for years liked to complain about the ones who hadn’t. Lately, or over the past year or so, men wearing suits and carrying briefcases had drifted in after five o’clock, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by women wearing suits and carrying briefcases. The regulars didn’t know who they were or why they were there, as if the place were off-limits unless you had a personal invitation
from Jimmy Longjeans, who didn’t care anyway as long as you had the money up front.
Somehow, word had gotten around that Saul Prouil had won all of these awards for one book and was possibly the only writer who ever lived to do so. This was why the table in the window at the front was known as Saul’s table, and, by virtue of being both a writer and his friend, Ned’s table, and by further extension, Sally’s. Sally worked at Mackenzie-Haack, assistant to Ned’s editor. But they had not met there, oddly. Saul and Ned and Sally had met in the little park when a page of Ned’s manuscript had kited away in a stiff wind, and Sally, walking toward them, had made the most acrobatic jump they’d ever witnessed and caught it.
Every once in a while someone would shamble up to the table with a copy of the nine-year-old book and a request that Saul sign it. Most of these people had never gotten through an entire book in their lives and for the most part, such intellectualism was looked upon with deep suspicion. But having this award-winning writer in their bar, one in whom they had a proprietary interest, well, that was different. Saul had thus achieved a kind of Swillian celebrity.
There were the other writers, but none of them well known and most of them as yet unpublished, at least in book form. Three of these were poets: b. w. brill (who disdained a capitalized name, in the fashion of e. e. cummings, whom he resembled not at all), Alison Andersen, and John Laughlin. b. w. brill had actually published a book of his own and won a lesser known award. Before the prize he had been a pack-a-day Camel smoker. Now he smoked a pipe and wore corduroy jackets with leather elbows. The other two, Andersen and Laughlin, had thus far published only in little magazines and anthologies. It was therefore left to b. w. brill to steer the poetry table in the right direction. They flocked together in the back like pigeons to annoy one another. They talked about Stanford and Iowa and Bread Loaf and Yaddo.
Ned was thinking of this when he saw b.w. waving his pipe in the air either by way of saying hello or gesturing for him to come to the poets’ table. Ned preferred to interpret it as the first and waved back.
Foul Matter Page 5
