West 57

by B. N. Freeman

  However, there was no banter and no bread this morning. Instead, Lionel pointed with obvious suspicion to a man sitting in a chair by the elevator.

  “That man there, he’s been here half an hour,” Lionel grumbled in a low voice. “Says he’s waiting to talk to you.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He wouldn’t tell me. You want me to roust him?” Lionel looked as if it would be an honor to pitch the man into the street, and Lionel was big enough to do the job.

  “No, I’ll talk to him.”

  I approached the elevator, and the man scrambled to his feet. He was small and skinny, though not as small or skinny as me. I figured he was in his late twenties. He wore a brown raincoat that had seen a lot of rain, but his shoes hadn’t seen polish in a long while. He had buzzed red hair and sallow skin, with a couple pimples that matched his hair. When he smiled at me, I saw crooked teeth and caught a whiff of mustard and onions; he’d had a hot dog for breakfast. His eyes were beady but sharp – a quick look up and down my body, just enough to leer, not enough to make me scream and run.

  His lack of personal hygiene convinced me that he was a reporter.

  “Ms. Chavan?” he said, reaching out a sweaty hand, which I didn’t shake. “Nick Duggan with the Post.”

  See?

  He had the accent of someone who grew up eating salt beef sandwiches and pork pies south of the Thames. He was a British reporter, which is mostly an oxymoron, like “New York Republican.”

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Duggan?”

  “I’m working on a story about King Royal,” he told me.

  “Well, then I’m sorry, I can’t talk to you. Pierce Gorgon gets the first interview with King tomorrow night. Until then, I’m embargoed. Call me after that, and I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Oh, I’m not trying to scoop Pierce,” he sneered. “I worked for him in London before he went all Hollywood. He used to call me Diggin’ Duggan.”

  “I’ll tell him you said hi.”

  I reached for the elevator button, but Duggan grabbed my wrist. His fingers were sweaty. I stared at him with a cold face until he let go.

  “Touch me again, Mr. Duggan, and I will have Lionel there throw you through the outside windows.”

  “You really need to talk to me,” he said.

  “No, I really don’t.”

  Duggan put a finger on the side of his nose. “Look, I know what smells bad, Ms. Chavan, and this whole thing with King Royal stinks.”

  “What whole thing?” I asked, a little curious.

  “The book. The advance. Hey, I knew the Soho scene in London. Everybody knew King. We called him Lord Byron because he had a fancy act, always dressed up like some Romantic poet, singing dirty songs, reciting limericks in the pubs. King had a radar for queer money, hanging out with bankers and execs. Nobody was surprised when he wound up in Irving Wolfe’s bedroom.”

  “Goodbye, Mr. Duggan.” I punched the elevator button.

  “Think about it. After Wolfe died, King was on his way back to the Soho nightclubs. He was out in the cold. And then, Holy Mother Mary, he winds up with a four-million-dollar book deal. Now why would a bankrupt publishing house like West 57 throw that kind of cash at a loser like King Royal?”

  “King’s book is going to be one of our biggest sellers in years,” I said.

  “It smells, Ms. Chavan. I’m digging into it. The FBI is looking into it, too. Did you know that?”

  I stopped. “Excuse me?”

  “That’s right. The feds and the government attorneys, they all think King’s dirty. He was neck-deep in Wolfe’s con game. You know what that means?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “It means your father was, too.”

  The elevator doors opened. I got inside. My instinct was to slap Nick Duggan, just like I slapped Bree Cox once. You do not insult Sonny in my presence. You do not lie about my father. However, I also knew enough about reporters to know that violence is exactly what they want. Violence makes headlines; violence hits the gossip pages. I didn’t want to see myself splashed across the front page of the Post.

  “Sonny was a great man, Mr. Duggan,” I told him with a patient smile. “You’re not.”

  Duggan got in one final shot as the doors closed. “Great men don’t always tell the truth.”

  4

  When I got upstairs, I saw an envelope taped to the West 57 door. It was addressed to me. I opened it and found a single theatre ticket tucked inside. No name. No note.

  I removed the ticket and saw that it was for tonight’s performance of the new Broadway adaptation of Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Front row, no less. Five hundred dollars if you can get a seat, which you can’t. Bradley Cooper and January Jones had taken over the famous Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly roles, but I’d read that Cooper was out because he’d broken his arm while rock climbing. I hadn’t heard who was taking over the male lead.

  Anyway, I am cynical enough to know that free tickets aren’t free. There’s always a catch. I just didn’t know what it was.

  I let myself into the office. I was the first person to arrive every morning, the one who turned on the lights. West 57 occupies an entire floor of the building, but we’re really a small publishing house, with only a handful of employees to handle editorial, sales, publicity, and business functions. Sonny and Garrett did most of the editing themselves, and Sonny outsourced production tasks to a stable of freelancers. The result was that West 57 was like a small family, and many of the staff had been with Sonny for a decade or more. A death in the family always brings change. Fortunately, the people here knew me and trusted me, because I was Sonny’s daughter.

  They would not trust Helmut Mischler and Gernestier.

  I went into Sonny’s office. I mean, my office. It was big, like him, the corner office with the northern view. The walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling book shelves. You could write the history of the last thirty years of the publishing industry by perusing the first editions. Sonny always said he had one brand: The Great American Novel. That was what he published; that was what he kept in his personal library. The authors all had faces to me, because I knew them, and I’d read their books. It was a list to make you laugh, cry, love, hate, cherish, despair, and marvel at what it means to be human.

  I don’t think that I’d ever told Sonny how proud I was of what he’d built at West 57. It was just one of the many regrets I had about his life being cut short.

  The same desk had been in this office from the beginning. It was cherry wood, nicked, scratched, dinged, and burned with cigarettes. I sat in his chair, which was three sizes too large for me. The leather on the arms had been worn down to the wood as Sonny read manuscripts and buffed the brass studs with oily fingers. I hadn’t had the courage yet to dig into the papers stuffed in all of the drawers. I’d kept the surface of the desk mostly the way he’d left it. The scorch-marked ashtray from Paris. Bi-focals that he swore he didn’t need. A stack of decades-old West 57 novels; he liked to go back and re-read them and see what he’d missed.

  He’d been studying Libby Varnay’s Morningside Park in the days before he died, and, as always, he’d been making notes in the margins. I opened the book at random. At the end of an early chapter, Sonny had scrawled a note: Mrs. McCall’s reaction? Too mild based on her own past abuse. Intensify and speed up dialogue. He dated all of his comments; that note had been made only two weeks before he died. This, in a book he’d published almost twenty years earlier, that had sold five million copies worldwide and been made into a movie with Denzel Washington. To Sonny, no book was ever really finished.

  I was seeing Libby for lunch today about a new book. I thought she’d be amused, getting Sonny’s copy of Morningside Park and seeing his notes. Libby was one of my very favorite people, gossipy, elegant, wealthy, and timelessly beautiful.

  “Good morning.”

  Garrett Wood smiled at me from the doorway of the office. He held a monster travel mug of coffee, which he’d brought on the s
ubway from the West Village. Garrett was a creature of routine, like me. He always stopped at the all-day, all-night Turkish coffee shop in the lobby of his apartment building. In his other hand was a paper bag, which I knew contained two cream-filled rum babas. One for him, one for me.

  He put my donut on a napkin in front of me and poured some of his coffee into the ceramic mug that Sonny kept on his desk. I’d made the mug for my father as a child in middle school. It was misshapen and atrocious, but to my knowledge, he’d used it every day of his life since I gave it to him.

  I’d already had plenty of coffee, but I love coffee, and I always had more when Garrett brought it for me. This may be why I get very little sleep.

  I held up the ticket for tonight’s performance of Rear Window. “Is this from you?”

  I was hoping he’d say yes. Instead, Garrett sat down in the chair on the other side of the desk and said, “What’s that?”

  “Someone left me a gift.”

  “Lucky you. Sorry, no, it wasn’t me.”

  “I’m trying to figure out the catch.”

  “Does there have to be a catch, Julie?”

  “No, but there usually is.”

  “Maybe you have a secret admirer.” He took a bite of his rum baba. Some of the cream filling oozed onto a finger, and he licked it clean. He meant nothing by it, but I found the gesture erotic. “How was your night?” he added.

  “Fine.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Takeout Thai. Yankees.”

  That was a lie, of course. On any given night, it would be true, but not last night. The meeting with Helmut was my secret. No one knew, other than my mother. I wanted to tell Garrett, but the idea of Gernestier acquiring West 57 would have horrified him. To Garrett, Gernestier represented corporate publishing at its worst. Bureaucratic. Money-driven. Soulless.

  I’m a terrible liar, but if Garrett suspected I was being untruthful, he was discreet enough not to say anything. Instead, he asked, “Are you still seeing him?”

  I knew who he meant. Sonny. Garrett was the only person to whom I’d mentioned the odd way my father had haunted me for the past month. As if Sonny and I had unfinished business.

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe he’s a ghost,” Garrett speculated.

  “Or maybe I should see a shrink,” I said.

  Garrett smiled. Some people smile, and you can see all the way down into their hearts, and you know it is a warm place, like a field where you lie down and close your eyes and feel the sun. That is Garrett’s smile. “I wouldn’t worry, Julie,” he told me. “You loved him, and you aren’t ready to let him go. That’s all it is. It’s a gift.”

  He had a way of making me feel better.

  Let me explain. Garrett is a few years younger than me. More than a few, actually. He is about as close to thirty in the rear-view mirror as I am to forty through the windshield, so call it seven years between us. I don’t feel the age difference, and he is more mature about life than I’ll ever be. As young as he is, Garrett has worked for Sonny for more than fifteen years, going back to when he was a high school intern. Sonny liked Garrett’s eye right from the start. In college, Garrett became Sonny’s screener on manuscripts, poring over submissions from agents like me, finding the jewels that deserved more attention. Sonny hired Garrett full-time after college, and Garrett has been at West 57 ever since. He obtained a master’s and doctorate in literature during his evenings and weekends. If he wanted to leave publishing and teach, he could have done so, but his loyalty to Sonny was fierce. I think Garrett missed him and grieved for him every bit as much as I did. He felt the same protectiveness for West 57, too.

  Yes, I respected Garrett as an editor. However, if you think I’m leaving something out, I am. There is more between us, but I don’t know what it is. We have never dated. We have never kissed. He has never said a word to lead me to believe he is interested in me. During that time, I have seen other men, slept with other men, nearly married other men. Well, two, actually. Thad Keller. Kevin Stone. More about them later.

  What I mean is that Garrett has never pursued me, and I’ve never pursued him, but even so, we have danced around each other for years. There have been times when I’ve sent him manuscripts I knew he had no intention of buying, just so I could invite him to lunch. Whenever I came to see Sonny at West 57, I saw Garrett, too, and sometimes we talked for hours. I think Sonny always believed I was there to see Garrett, not him. Maybe he was right.

  He has brown eyes that sparkle with intelligence. His eyebrows wrinkle when he is teasing me. He has unruly black hair, parted on the side, with a cowlick that you want to reach over and gently smooth. His face is kind. It’s the kind of face where you notice its parts: his discreet sideburns, his chin scar, his ski-slope nose. He has young skin because he is young. He has long, lean legs; we look crazy together, him as tall and lean as a basketball player, me an Indian leprechaun. He dresses casually but makes jeans and a sport coat look as dressy as a tuxedo.

  The maddening thing is that I feel like he knows exactly what I’m thinking when he stares at me. It makes me want to shout: “If you can read my mind, why aren’t you kissing me?”

  Is that what I want?

  I don’t know.

  “So what aren’t you telling me?” Garrett asked.

  See? Wherever I’m going, he gets there ahead of me.

  I shrugged. I didn’t want to tell Garrett about Gernestier or ask him the questions that were in my head. How did you get that scar? What will you do if I sell West 57? Are you in love with me?

  “It’s a big week,” I said.

  “Is that all it is?”

  “That’s all it is. I’m stressed. Sonny never worried about anything. Me, I’m a worrier.”

  “Things look good for Captain Absolute,” he said. “Orders are up. Publicity is strong.”

  “I know.”

  Garrett watched me run my fingers along the grains of the wood in Sonny’s desk. I hadn’t touched my rum baba. “How bad is it?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “Money.”

  “Bad,” I said. “I’m meeting with our banker tomorrow. Sonny was making deals like the business was going to turn around, but it’s not. We’re running out of time and cash.”

  “I’m sorry,” Garrett said. “I’ve never been a numbers guy. I’m all about the books. I guess that doesn’t help you much right now.”

  “That’s okay.”

  Fortunately, as an agent, most of my life was about numbers. Unfortunately, I felt like CC coming into the game in the ninth inning, with the score already 10 – 0 against us.

  Garrett stood up and gave me that smile again. “If it makes you feel better, everyone here believes in you.”

  I wondered if that would still be true when they heard about Helmut and Gernestier. Garrett headed for the office door, but I stopped him by saying, “Hey.”

  He turned back. “What is it?”

  “Did Sonny ever talk about why he did such a big deal for King’s book?”

  “No, but you know Sonny. He made up his mind, and he went for it.”

  “It just seems over the top even for him.”

  “Maybe, but it looks like he was right,” Garrett said. “We’re going to sell a lot of books.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  Garrett left me alone. I felt small again, sitting in the big chair. I had a lot to do, but I started reading more of Sonny’s notes in Libby Varnay’s Morningside Park instead. It made my father feel closer, seeing his scrawl on the pages. No more than five minutes passed, with my head down, before I heard the rat-a-tat-tat of fingernails tapping like a machine gun on my door. I assumed it was Garrett again, but when I looked up, I saw multi-colored highlights streaked through a mop of blond hair. The woman in my doorway wore sky-high heels and as much leather as a dominatrix. She’d added a diamond stud in her nose since I’d last seen her. Her cocked arm was balanced on her hip.

  She gave me a wicked grin with her
vampire-red lips. “The bitch is back, darling.”

  It was Bree Cox.

  5

  “I’m sorry, the escort service is located next door,” I told her.

  Bree slinked her way into my office and sat in the chair across from my desk. She slumped sideways and draped a bare leg over the chair in a not-very-ladylike fashion. “Nice to see you, too, Julie.”

  I looked her up and down. “You know what would go with that outfit? A dog collar and a whip.”

  “What makes you think I don’t have them?” she asked with a wink. “I rather fancy the occasional spanking.”

  “Okay, bend over,” I said.

  Bree wagged a burgundy-nailed finger at me. “As funny as ever, darling.”

  “What are you doing here, Bree?”

  “You’re not prepared for my arrival? No champagne? No caviar? Don’t worry, I forgive you.”

  “I expected you later today with King Royal.”

  “Yes, I flew in a day early. Got here last night. Lots of meetings. Lots of deals. An agent never sleeps. Besides, it’s New York. It’s my favorite city.”

  “Naturally.”

  “I’m a best-selling author now,” Bree added. “We sold Paperback Bitch in ten languages.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “We’re doing a film, did I tell you? What a hoot. The hard part is casting myself. I need the perfect actress to play me.”

  “Is Judi Dench available?”

  I was proud of that zinger, but if the insult stung, Bree gave no evidence of it. “Oh, Julie, you are deadly.”

  “Have you found someone to play me?” I asked. “Or should I say, Julia Charon?”

  “Do you want an audition? I can get you one. I assume you have no problem with tasteful nudity.”

  “Well, you’ve never had a problem with tasteless nudity.”

  “Ouch! White flag, darling. I surrender. You win, you win.” Bree looked around the office as if it were an old friend. She’d been here many times; every agent in the business knew Sonny. Her face grew sad. “Hard to imagine this place without him,” she said.