West 57

by B. N. Freeman

  “Of course.”

  “You know that Sonny and I talked about me doing another novel, don’t you? Hard to believe after all these years.”

  “I know. I was thrilled when I found out. And surprised, too. First Harper Lee, now Libby Varnay.”

  “Sonny and I kept it quiet. I didn’t want the weight of publicity. Everyone would be speculating about it.”

  “Sonny didn’t say a word. I only found out when Garrett showed me the contract.”

  Libby’s face betrayed her discomfort. “It felt like the right time of my life to say something new, but I’ve struggled. It’s been months. The words aren’t there.”

  “They’ll come.”

  “That’s what Sonny told me, but so far, I’ve been dry. Now, with him gone, without his inspiration, I simply don’t know if I can do it. It was a mistake even to think about it.”

  “Take your time, Libby,” I told her. “There’s no pressure.”

  I hoped that was true. I didn’t know how Gernestier would feel about an open contract with an author who showed no sign of delivering a manuscript. Even someone with the reputation of Libby Varnay. Sonny let his writers go for months, even years, on a long leash. For him, the book was the only thing that mattered, not the money. Helmut didn’t share his patience.

  Libby squeezed my hand. “Thank you, Julie. I appreciate your confidence. And your discretion.”

  “Of course.”

  She sighed as she relished the décor around us. Most New Yorkers are cynical about the Tavern, but Libby made no bones about loving its timelessness. She stroked the crystal with a slim finger. Her eyes lingered on the ceiling design, like a rose window in a medieval cathedral. “I’ve decided I need a change,” she said. “That’s the only way to get the book done.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m leaving Manhattan.”

  I was shocked. “You? I can’t imagine you anywhere else.”

  Libby shook her head. “No, no, it’s true. I’m moving. I’ve finally realized it’s the city that has been keeping me blocked all these years. I need something else. Someplace where the energy is different and the pace is slower. I’d also be lying if I didn’t tell you that the city feels empty to me without your father.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Upstate. One of my sisters lives in Ithaca. She’s not in the best of health. Drew will come with me, of course. I won’t go anywhere without him.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  I thought about what she’d said. The loss of some people left the world a grayer place. It wasn’t just by dying. It was by leaving, too. New York without Libby, New York without Sonny, was a different city than I’d known. I wondered if I could still feel at home here.

  Maybe I needed a change, too.

  “My mother wants me to move to L.A.,” I blurted out.

  Libby showed no surprise. “Cherie has wanted you there for years. She’s nothing if not determined. Are you thinking about it?”

  “I am. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  Libby leaped to the obvious conclusion. “So you’d leave West 57 in someone else’s hands?”

  “I’m not sure what I’m going to do.”

  “Gernestier?” Libby asked.

  I didn’t say anything, but she could see the truth in my face. A faint, ironic smile creased her lips.

  “I better start writing if the barbarians are taking over,” she said.

  “I told you to take your time.”

  “Don’t worry about me, Julie. You have enough on your plate.”

  “The truth is, I’m torn,” I said. “Sonny would hate the idea of my selling West 57.”

  “You have to do what’s best for you,” Libby told me. “Not what’s best for Sonny, me, your mother, or anyone else.” She added, “Having said that, I’ll put my nose in where it doesn’t belong. The book business needs people like you, more than the movie industry does. I’m old-fashioned. It’s lovely that so many people have seen the movie of Morningside Park, but the book is all that matters to me. You are a child of the book world, Julie.”

  That was true. More than that, I was also a child of Sonny Chavan.

  I was about to thank Libby for her support, but before I could say a word, her face grew alarmed. She looked over my shoulder and said: “Oh, dear.”

  “What?”

  I heard shouting. I looked toward the restaurant entrance and saw a rain-damp man in a suit. It was the same man who’d stood outside the window, watching us. His arms waved in wild, angry gestures. He ran toward us, but I realized he wasn’t coming for Libby. He wasn’t shouting at her.

  He was focused on me.

  “You!” he bellowed. “You’re the one!”

  I watched him come and couldn’t move. I was frozen with shock.

  “How can you publish that filth? How can you profit off that son of a bitch? Do you know what he did to me? I lost everything! Everything! And now you’re putting him on the cover of a book like he was some kind of hero. You heartless bitch!”

  He added two more words, and he repeated them at me over and over again, louder and louder each time.

  I think you can guess what they were.

  The man became violent. He threw a butter knife, barely missing my face. It clattered against the conservatory glass. He was picking up a wine bottle to throw at me when Libby’s nephew, Drew, hit him with his whole body like a fighting walrus and took him down. Drew kept him pinned under his girth. I saw park security running past the entrance, too, taking hold of the man, who wriggled in their grasp. As they dragged him away, he was still screaming at me.

  “He stole my money! Where’s my money? I have nothing!”

  Then the same two words again. Definitely not “freak.”

  I felt an arm around me. It was Libby, asking if I was all right, but I found that my brain and my mouth were temporarily disconnected. The people at the restaurant were gracious, everyone wanting to make sure I wasn’t hurt. Which I wasn’t. Not physically. Even so, I was in shock. My hands quaked. I wanted to throw up.

  I heard someone asking what it was all about. The buzz floated from table to table. Did I know him? Did I know who he was?

  No, I didn’t, but I knew perfectly well what it was all about.

  This was about Captain Absolute. Irving Wolfe.

  I was publishing a book about the devil.

  7

  I spent the afternoon re-reading King Royal’s book.

  I told myself not to feel guilty. Authors write biographies of thoroughly horrifying people all the time. So what makes Irving Wolfe special?

  First, there’s the voyeur factor. Reading King Royal’s memoir is like sneaking a peek inside the diary of a Manhattan madam. Every other page, somebody rich and famous gets screwed. The feds have been tight-lipped about Wolfe’s investors, and not many high-profile victims have held press conferences to admit they were bilked out of millions. So there’s been a guessing game in the media for months. Who got fleeced? Who lost everything? As you read Captain Absolute, you keep wondering which of the celebrities traipsing through the book wound up with a goose egg on their balance sheets.

  Second, it’s not just that Wolfe was a crook. It’s the flamboyance with which he ran his scheme. The ego. The cockiness. Most thieves try to run under the radar screen to avoid getting caught, but Wolfe bragged about his wild investment returns on CNBC, as if he were daring someone to catch him at his game. For two decades, no one did. No one ever asked how he could be making so much money for his investors, even when every other fund was underwater. Maybe nobody wanted the truth. All the while, Wolfe lived the high life in the public eye: the top floor condo on Park, the yacht on the Hudson, the limo with his corporate logo crawling along Broadway.

  Third, he’s dead.

  As far as fame goes, it’s much better to die young. We have short memories. Celebrities who linger into old age wind up with awkward-looking face lifts and one-sentence obituaries in People mag
azine in the “Wow, They’re Dead!” section. No such obscurity for Irving Wolfe. With the feds tightening the noose, and rumors hitting the New York streets that Wolfe’s billion-dollar investment portfolio was all a big lie, Wolfe took a final cruise on his yacht into the cold Atlantic waters, with no one else aboard except – you guessed it – King Royal.

  And then?

  Well, I’ll let King describe it. Or rather, King’s ghost writer.

  Something awakened me at two in the morning. A swirl in the current, moving us side to side. A wave. Looking back now, I wonder if it was the sudden shift in the boat’s weight, two hundred and ten pounds shoving off into the sea. I wonder if that was the moment when he did it.

  The Captain’s side of the bed was unmade. He had never joined me. I’d left him topside at midnight, alone with a bottle of Grgich 1981 Cabernet. He’d failed to offer me a glass, but that was typical of him. For a generous man, he could be selfish about his indulgences. I think, too, it was a way of putting me in my place, reminding me who I was.

  I can’t say it was unusual to wake up alone. He often stayed up all night. Even so, the sheer stillness of the boat felt different to me, and I knew he was gone. Call it the sixth sense of someone who has known abandonment and recognizes the feel of it and the smell of it. My lifeline had been severed. I was literally at sea. Drifting.

  I got out of bed. I was nude. The Captain always insisted I sleep nude for his pleasure. I emerged onto the deck and felt like a god, bare-skinned and tumescent, illuminated by moonlight, the only soul within miles of glassy ocean.

  Captain Absolute had fled. He was part of the ocean now. People call it a coward’s end, but heroes choose their moment and method to die, and I think he chose well. There would be no pound of flesh for the angry mob. There would be no jail cell, shrinking him to something smaller than he was. In death, he would remain larger than life. An enigma, a legend.

  King was right about one thing. With his dramatic suicide, Wolfe got the last laugh on his victims. You can’t get justice from a dead man. You can’t get answers. It’s like a television series that ends on a cliffhanger and then gets cancelled over the summer. Nobody was happy about it.

  His death prompted crazy rumors, too. People wondered where the money was. Had he really spent it all? Had he squirreled away millions in overseas bank accounts and island estates? Jewelry in safety deposit boxes? Nothing prompts a frenzy like a treasure hunt, and Wolfe’s untimely demise triggered a gold rush behind him. So far, no one had located a dime. Not the feds. Not his bankrupt investors. Not Diggin’ Duggan. It was all gone. That didn’t stop people from speculating that there was a fortune to be found.

  If you wanted clues, if you wanted closure, if you wanted to know why, you only had one person who could help you get at the truth. King Royal. Everybody wanted him, but Bree and I, we were the ones who had him, and we were ready to roll him out to the world. The only place left to find Irving Wolfe’s secrets was in the pages of Captain Absolute.

  Sonny had made a shrewd bet. This book was going to be huge. So why was I so uncomfortable with it?

  “I always knew what I was doing, darling girl.”

  It was that familiar voice again. Haunting me. Sonny.

  I looked up, and my father loomed over the desk, wearing the same dark suit he always wore in my odd fantasies. He breathed his usual cloud of smoke at me. I felt less lonely, having him back with me.

  Sonny paced the office like a caged tiger, stroking the spines of the books he’d published. His hands gesticulated impatiently. “People may hate Irving Wolfe. People may hate King Royal. It’s not our job to care about how people feel, Julie! It’s about the story.”

  “The story is immoral,” I said.

  “Which is why no one can resist it.”

  “It’s not Morningside Park, Sonny.”

  “Nothing will ever be Morningside Park.”

  “I’m just saying, there’s nothing here to elevate the human experience. This is exploitation, pure and simple. It’s making money off a tragic soap opera.”

  Sonny scowled. “I published books to sell them! You don’t think I opened champagne every time we hit #1 in the Times? Of course I did. When did I ever say commercial was a bad thing, darling girl?”

  “All the time,” I reminded him.

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “You said if we kept down this road, eventually the only thing anyone would publish is books by James Patterson.”

  I knew how to push Sonny’s buttons. He froze, and I expected to see foam gather at the side of his mouth like a rabid dog. The very name made him crazy. “Patterson!” he hissed.

  “He sells a lot of books. It’s about the brand.”

  “The brand!” Sonny raged. “Yes, the brand! Let’s give out a plastic toy with every Alex Cross book like some kind of freaking Happy Meal!”

  No, he did not say “freaking.”

  Sonny skewered everybody, but popular authors got the brunt of his rants. It was all in good fun, but the writers on the receiving end didn’t always appreciate his humor. I heard Stuart Woods took a swing at him once. Janet Evanovich sent him a case of rotting fish heads.

  His beet-red face softened as he saw I was teasing him. “You are wicked, darling girl. You know how to rile me up.”

  “You never change, Sonny.”

  I wished that were true, but I thought: You do change. You’re gone. You’re only in my head, and soon enough, you won’t even be there. Not like this.

  He saw that my laughter was fading to grief, and he folded his arms over his chest, which was as big as a barrel you could ride over Niagara Falls. “I love seeing you behind that desk,” he told me. “It’s where I always wanted you to be, Julie. You belong there.”

  “No, you belong here, Sonny.”

  He had nothing to say to that. He went over to the office window and looked out at the city. It was dark outside. I’d been reading for hours. Manhattan was a carnival of electric light, except for the black rectangle of the Park.

  “I used to worry about running out of stories,” he mused. “Months would go by, and I wouldn’t be excited by anything coming across my desk. I’d think, that’s it. We’re done. All the great novels have been written. Then I would stand here and think about the streets below this window. I’d think about Libby saying that all you had to do was scratch the surface with ordinary people, and you’d find tales of tragedy, triumph, grace, loss, cowardice, and heroism. You just had to find someone who knew how to write them down. It always seemed like the very next day, something crossed my desk that got me excited again. Something that made it all worthwhile.”

  “I understand,” I told him, because I did.

  He glanced down at me, that self-satisfied grin on his face. “That’s why you’re here in this office.”

  “I’m here because you did something stupid, Sonny. You died.”

  “Maybe that was my secret plan,” he said. “How else could I get a stubborn girl like you into West 57?”

  “You could have asked.”

  Sonny gave me a belly laugh. “Like my daughter would ever do what I asked!”

  He had me there. It was true. The Chavans are all too stubborn to do what anyone tells them to do.

  I closed the cover on Captain Absolute. Sonny watched me.

  “So why did you do it, Sonny? Why did you pay King Royal all that money for this book?”

  I waited, but he didn’t answer me. That was because, in my head, I had no idea what he would say. Instead, he leaned over the desk and silently crushed out his cigarette in the Parisian ashtray. I was about to chide him, but when I looked down, I saw that the pretty ceramic dish with its painted image of the Moulin Rouge was empty. No ash. No cigarette. Nothing.

  I was alone.

  It was time to meet Bree.

  8

  “King’s drunk,” Bree said.

  We were at a swank hotel bar on 47th. I’d never been here before. I’ve lived in New York my who
le life, but Bree always seems to scout the hot places before I do. She is a whore for New York, as she put it so delicately in her own book.

  “Already?” I asked.

  Bree shrugged. “It was a long plane ride from Heathrow. Our boy was drinking mimosas by the pitcher for five hours. He started reciting The Canterbury Tales in middle English from memory, which is actually pretty impressive.”

  “Shouldn’t we be babysitting him?”

  “Relax, he’s unconscious. I left him in his suite at the Gansevoort to sleep it off. He won’t cause any trouble tonight.”

  We clinked our martini glasses and slurped down the remnants of our first cosmopolitans. I learned my lesson from Xanadu that most Broadway plays go down better if they’re lubricated by several drinks before the curtain.

  “Still hate me?” Bree asked.

  “Yes.”

  She ordered a second round.

  We were inside, but Bree wore sunglasses. I remember her telling me that celebs wear shades to avoid being recognized, so if you want people to think you’re somebody, keep the sunglasses on. She had her smartphone on the table in front of her, and she was a slave to her text messages.

  Me, I hate texting. I like talking to actual human beings.

  The drinks arrived. Cold, frosty, pink. They went down smooth. Bree ordered appetizers, and I wondered if I was in a Telluride ski lodge. Hellfire wings. Bison sliders. Rocky Mountain Oysters. For a London girl, she had a redneck appetite. I told her I wasn’t going to eat balls, and she grinned and murmured something about “spits or swallows.”

  Her phone rang.

  “Oh, darling, how are you?” she answered. “Yes, I’m here with Julie, actually. We were just discussing the technical specifics of blow jobs.”

  “Who is that?” I asked.

  “It’s your mother.”

  Wonderful.

  “Yes, I suspect it has been a while,” Bree said into the phone, with a grin and a flick of her eyebrows at me. “No, no, I can’t say the same, but this is me, after all. Well, of course, darling, we all like being on the other end.”