by Mario Puzo
It wasn’t that he convinced me. It wasn’t that I believed a word he’d said. But that last phrase got to me. Only kings and emperors can say to a man, “I will make you happy for the rest of your life.” What confidence in his powers he had. But then, of course, I realized he was talking about money.
“Let me think about it,” I said, “maybe I can come up with something.”
Mr. Hemsi was nodding his head up and down very gravely. “I know you will. I know you have a good head and a good heart,” he said. “Do you have children?”
“Yes,” I said. He asked me how many and how old they were and what sex. He asked about my wife and how old she was. He was like an uncle. Then he asked me for my home address and phone number so that he could get in touch with me if necessary.
When I left him, he walked me to the elevator himself. I figured I had done my job. I had no idea how I could get his son off the hook with the draft board. And Mr. Hemsi was right, I did have a good heart. I had a good enough heart not to try to hustle him and his wife’s anxieties and then not deliver. And I had a good enough head not to get mixed up with a draft board victim. The kid had had his notice and would be in the Regular Army in another month. His mother would have to live without him.
The very next day Vallie called me at work. Her voice was very excited. She told me that she just received special delivery service of about five cartons of clothing. Clothes for all the kids, winter and fall outfits, and they were beautiful. There was also a carton of clothes for her. All of it more expensive than we could ever buy.
“There’s a card,” she said. “From a Mr. Hemsi. Who is he? Merlyn, they are just beautiful. Why did he give them to you?”
“I wrote some brochures for his business,” I said. “There wasn’t much money in it, but he did promise to send the kids some stuff. But I thought he meant a few things.”
I could hear the pleasure in Vallie’s voice. “He must be a nice man. There must be over a thousand dollars’ worth of clothes in the boxes.”
“That’s great,” I said. “I’ll talk to you about it tonight.”
After I hung up, I told Frank what had happened and about Mr. Hiller, the Cadillac dealer.
Frank squinted at me. “You’re on the hook,” he said. “That guy will be expecting you to do something for him now. How are you going to come across?”
“Shit,” I said, “I can’t figure out why I even agreed to go see him.”
“It was those Cadillacs you saw on Huller’s lot,” Frank said. “You’re like those colored guys. They’d go back to those huts in Africa if they could drive around in a Cadillac.”
I noticed a little hitch in his speech. He had almost said “niggers” but switched to “colored.” I wondered if it was because he was ashamed of saying the ugly word or because he thought I might be offended. As for the Harlem guys liking Cadillacs I always wondered why people got pissed off about that. Because they couldn’t afford it? Because they should not go into debt for something not useful? But he was right about those Cadillacs getting me on the hook. That’s why I had agreed to see Hemsi and do Hiller the favor. Way back in my head I hoped for a shot at one of those luxurious sleek cars.
That night, when I got home, Vallie put on a fashion show for me with her and the kids. She had mentioned five cartons, but she hadn’t mentioned their size. They were enormous, and Vallie and the kids had about ten outfits each. Value was more excited than I had seen her in a long time. The kids were pleased, but they didn’t care too much about clothes at that age, not even my daughter. The thought flashed through my mind that maybe I’d get lucky and find a toy manufacturer whose kid had ducked the draft.
But then Vallie pointed out that she would have to buy new shoes to go with the outfits. I told her to hold off for a while and made a note to keep an eye out for a shoe manufacturer’s son.
Now the curious thing was that I would have felt that Mr. Hemsi was patronizing me if the clothes had been of ordinary quality. There would have been the touch of the poor receiving the hand-me-downs of the rich. But his stuff was top-rate, quality goods I could never afford no matter how much babe money I raked in. Five thousand bucks, not a thousand. I took a look at the enclosed card. It was a business card with Hemsi’s name and title of president and the name of the firm and its address and phone printed on it. There was nothing written. No message of any kind. Mr. Hemsi was smart all right. There was no direct evidence that he had sent the stuff, and I had nothing that I could incriminate him with.
At the office I had thought that maybe I could ship the stuff back to Mr. Hemsi. But after seeing how happy Value was, I knew that was not possible. I lay awake until three in the morning, figuring out ways for Mr. Hemsi’s son to beat the draft.
The next day, when I went into the office, I made one decision. I wouldn’t do anything on paper that could be traced back to me a year or two later. This could be very tricky. It was one thing to take money to put a guy ahead on a list for the six months’ program, it was another to get him out of the draft after he had received his induction notice.
So the first thing I did was to call up Hemsi’s draft board. I got one of the clerks there, a guy just like me. I identified myself and gave him the story I had thought out. I told him that Paul Hemsi had been on my list for the six months’ program and that I had meant to enlist him two weeks ago but that I had sent his letter to the wrong address. That it had been all my fault and I felt guilty about it and also that maybe I could get in trouble on my job if the kid’s family started to holler. I asked him if the draft board could cancel the induction notice so that I could enlist him. I would then send the usual official form to the draft board, showing that Paul Hemsi was in the six months’ program of the Army Reserve, and they could take him off their draft rolls. I used what I thought was exactly the right tone, not too anxious. Just a nice guy trying to right a wrong. While I was doing this, I slipped in that if the guy at the draft board could do me this favor, I would help him get a friend of his in the six months’ program.
This last gimmick I had thought about while lying awake the previous night. I figured that the clerks at the draft board probably were contacted by kids on their last legs, about to be drafted, and that the draft board clerks probably got propositioned a lot. And I figured if a draft board clerk could place a client of his in the six months’ program it could be worth a thousand bucks.
But the guy at the draft board was completely casual and accommodating. I don’t even think he caught on that I was propositioning him. He said sure, he’d withdraw the induction notice, that it was no problem, and I suddenly got the impression that smarter guys than I had already pulled this dodge. Anyway, the next day I got the necessary letter from the draft board and called Mr. Hemsi and told him to send his son into my office to be enlisted.
It all went off without a hitch. Paul Hemsi was a nice soft-spoken kid, very shy, very timid, or so it seemed to me. I had him sworn in, stashed his papers until he got his active-duty orders. I drew his supply stuff for him myself, and when he left for his six months’ active duty, nobody in his outfit had seen him. I’d turned him into a ghost.
By now I realized that all this action was getting pretty hot and implicating powerful people. But I wasn’t Merlyn the Magician for nothing. I put on my star-spangled cap and started to think it all out. Someday it would blow up. I had myself pretty well covered except for the money stashed in my house. I had to hide the money. That was the first thing. And then I had to show another income so I could spend money openly.
I could stash my money with Cully in Las Vegas. But what if Cully got cute or got killed? As for making money legit, I had had offers to do book reviews and magazine work, but I had always turned them down. I was a pure storyteller, a fiction writer. It seemed demeaning to me and my art to write anything else. But what the hell, I was a crook, nothing was beneath me now.
Frank asked me to go to lunch with him and I said OK. Frank was in great form. Happy-go-lucky, top-of-
the-world. He’d had a winning week gambling and the money was rolling in. With no sense of what the future could bring, he believed he’d keep winning, the whole bribe scam would last forever. Without even thinking of himself as a magician, he believed in a magic world.
Chapter 12
It was nearly two weeks later that my agent arranged an appointment for me with the editor in chief of Everyday Magazines. This was a group of publications that drowned the American public with information, pseudoinformation, sex and pseudosex, culture and hard-hat philosophy. Movie mags, adventure mags for blue-collar workers, a sports monthly, fishing and hunting, comics. Their “class” leader, top-of-the-line magazine was slanted to swinging bachelors with a taste for literature and avant-garde cinema.
A real smorgasbord. Everyday gobbled up free-lance writers because they had to publish a half million words a month. My agent told me that the editor in chief knew my brother, Artie, and that Artie had called him to prepare the way.
At Everyday Magazines all the people seemed to be out of place. Nobody seemed to belong. And yet they put out profitable magazines. Funny, but in the federal government we all seemed to fit, everybody was happy and yet we all did a lousy job.
The chief editor, Eddie Lancer, had gone to school with my brother at the University of Missouri, and it was my brother who first mentioned the job to my agent. Of course, Lancer knew I was completely unqualified after the first two minutes of the interview. So did I. Hell, I didn’t even know what the backyard of a magazine was. But with Lancer this was a plus. He didn’t give a shit about experience. What Lancer was looking for was guys touched with schizophrenia. And later he told me that I had qualified highly on that score.
Eddie Lancer was a novelist too; he had published a hell of a hook that I loved just a year ago. He knew about my novel and said he liked it and that carried a lot of weight in getting the job. On his bulletin board was a big newspaper headline ripped out of the morning Times: ATOM BOMB WAR SEEN BAD FOR WALL STREET.
He saw me staring at the clipping and said, “Do you think you could write a short fiction piece about a guy worrying about that?”
“Sure,” I said. And I did. I wrote a story about a young executive worrying about his stocks going down after the atom bombs fall. I didn’t make the mistake of poking fun at the guy or being moral. I wrote it straight. If you accepted the basic premise, you accepted the guy. If you didn’t accept the basic premise, it was a very funny satire.
Lancer was pleased with it. “You’re made to order for our magazine,” he said. “The whole idea is to have it both ways. The dummies like it and the smart guys like it. Perfect.” He paused for a moment. “You’re a lot different from your brother, Artie.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “So are you.”
Lancer grinned at me. “We were best friends in college. He’s the most honest guy I ever met. You know when he asked me to interview you, I was surprised. It was the first time I ever knew him to ask a favor.”
“He does that only for me,” I said.
“Straightest guy I ever knew in my life,” Lancer said.
“It will be the death of him,” I said. And we laughed.
Lancer and I knew we were both survivors. Which meant we were not straight, that we were hustlers to some degree. Our excuse was that we had books to write. And so we had to survive. Everybody had his own particular and valid excuse.
Much to my surprise (but not to Lancer’s) I turned out to be a hell of a magazine writer. I could write the pulp adventure and war stories. I could write the soft-porn love stories for the top-of-the-line magazine. I could write a flashy, snotty film review and a sober, snotty book review. Or turn the other way and write an enthusiastic review that would make people want to go out and see or read for themselves what was so good. I never signed my real name to any of this stuff. But I wasn’t ashamed of it. I knew it was schlock, but still I loved it. I loved it because all my life I had never had a skill to be proud of. I had been a lousy soldier, a losing gambler. I had no hobby, no mechanical skills. I couldn’t fix a car, I couldn’t grow a plant. I was a lousy typist, and not a really first-rate bribe taker government clerk. Sure, I was an artist, but that’s nothing to brag about. That’s just a religion or a hobby. But now I really had a skill, I was an expert schlock writer, and loved it. Especially since for the first time in my life I was making a good living. Legitimately.
The money from the stories averaged four hundred dollars a month and with my regular Army Reserve job brought me to about two hundred bucks a week. And as if work sparked more energy, I found myself starting my second novel Eddie Lancer was on a new book too, and we spent most of our working time together talking about our novels rather than articles for the magazine.
We finally became such good friends that after six months of free-lance work he offered me a magazine editor slot. But I didn’t want to give up the two to three grand a month in graft that I was still making on my Army Reserve job. The bribe-taking scam had been going on for nearly two years without any kind of hitch. I now had the same attitude as Frank. I didn’t think anything would ever happen. Also, the truth was that I liked the excitement and the intrigue of being a thief.
My life settled down into a happy groove. My writing was going well, and every Sunday I took Vallie and the kids for rides out in Long Island, where family houses were springing up like weeds, and inspected models. We had already picked out our house. Four bedrooms, two baths and only a ten percent down payment on the twenty-six-thousand-dollar price with a twelve-month wait. In fact, now was the time to ask Eddie Lancer for a small favor.
“I’ve always loved Las Vegas,” I told Eddie. “I'd like to do a piece on it.”
“Sure, anytime,” he said. “Just make sure you get something in it on hookers.” And he arranged for the expenses. Then we talked about the color illustration for the story. We always did this together because it was a lot of fun, and we got a lot of laughs. As usual Eddie finally came up with the effective idea. A gorgeous girl in scanty costume in a wild pelvic dance. And out of her navel rolled red dice showing the lucky eleven. The cover line would read “Get Lucky with Las Vegas Girls.”
One assignment had to come first. It was a plum. I was going to interview the most famous writer in America, Osano.
Eddie Lancer gave me the assignment for his flagship magazine, Everyday Life, the class magazine of the chain. After that one I could do the Las Vegas piece and trip.
Eddie Lancer thought Osano was the greatest writer in America but was too awed to do the interview himself. I was the only one on the staff not impressed. I didn’t think Osano was all that good. Also, I distrusted any writer who was an extrovert. And Osano had appeared on TV a hundred times, been the judge at the Cannes Film Festival, got arrested for leading protest marchers no matter what they were protesting against. And gave blurbs for every new novel written by one of his friends.
Also, he had come up the easy way. His first novel, published when he was twenty-five, made him world-famous. He had wealthy parents, a law degree from Yale. He had never known what it was to struggle for his art. Most of all, I had sent him my first published novel, hoping for a blurb, and he never acknowledged receiving it.
When I went to interview Osano, his stock as a writer was just slipping with editors. He could still command a hefty advance for a book, he still had critics buffaloed. But most of his books were nonfiction. He had not been able to finish a fiction book in the last ten years.
He was working on his masterpiece, a long novel that would be the greatest thing since War and Peace. All the critics agreed about that. So did Osano. One publishing house advanced him over a hundred grand and was still whistling for its money and the book ten years later. Meanwhile, he wrote nonfiction books on hot subjects that some critics claimed were better than most novels. He turned them out in a couple of months and picked up a fat check. But each one sold less. He had worn his public out. So finally he accepted an offer to be editor in chief of the mo
st influential Sunday book review section in the country.
The editor before Osano had been in the job twenty years. A guy with great credentials. All kinds of degrees, the best colleges, an intellectual, wealthy family. Class. And a left-handed swinger all his life. Which was OK except that as he aged, he got more outrageous. One sunny, horny afternoon he was caught going down on the office boy behind a ceiling-high stack of books that he had built as a screen in his office. If the office boy had been a famous English author, maybe nothing would have happened. And if the books he used to build that wall had been reviewed, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But the books used to build that wall never got out to his staff of readers or to the free-lance reviewers. So he was retired as editor emeritus.
With Osano, the management knew it was home free. Osano was right-handed all the way. He loved women, all sizes and shapes, any age. The smell of cunt turned him on like a junkie. He fucked broads as devotedly as a heroin addict taking a fix. If Osano didn’t get his piece of ass that day or at least a blow job, he’d get frantic. But he wasn’t an exhibitionist. He’d always lock his office door. Sometimes a bookish teenybopper. Other times a society broad who thought he was the greatest living American writer. Or a starving female novelist who needed some books to review to keep body and soul and ego together. He was shameless in using his leverage as editor, his fame as a world-renowned novelist and what proved to be the busiest bee in his bonnet, a contender for the Nobel Prize in literature. He said it was the Nobel Prize that got the really intellectual ladies. And for the last three years he had mounted a furious campaign for the Nobel with the help of all his literary friends, he could show these ladies articles in classy quarterlies touting him for the prize.
Oddly enough Osano had no ego about his own physical charms-his personal magnetism. He dressed well, spent good money on clothes, yet it was trim he was not physically attractive. His face was all lopsided bone, and his eyes were a pale, sneaky green. But he discounted his vibrant aliveness that was magnetic to all people. Indeed, a great deal of his fame rested not on his literary achievement but on his personality, which included a quick, brilliant intelligence that was attractive to men as well as women.
