by Mario Puzo
They shook hands again as he walked Cully to the door of his suite. “I’m at the Plaza,” Cully said. “And I’m leaving for Vegas tomorrow morning. So if you could call me tonight, I’d be grateful.”
But it was Charlie Hemsi who called him. Charlie was drunk and gleeful. “Cully, you smart little bastard. I don’t know how you did it, but my brother told me to tell you that everything is OK. He agrees with you completely.”
Cully relaxed. Eli Hemsi had made his phone calls to check him out. And Gronevelt must have backed the play. He felt an enormous affection and gratitude for Gronevelt. He said to Charlie, “That’s great. See you in Vegas at the end of the month. You’ll have the time of your life.”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” Charlie Hemsi said. “And don’t forget that dancer.”
“I won’t,” Cully said.
After that he dressed and went out for dinner. In the restaurant lobby he used the pay phone to call Merlyn. “Everything is OK, it was all a misunderstanding. You’re going to be all right.”
Merlyn’s voice seemed faraway, almost abstracted and not as grateful as Cully would have liked it to be. “Thanks,” Merlyn said. “See you in Vegas soon.” And he hung up.
Chapter 22
Cully Cross squared everything for me, but poor patriotic Frank Alcore was indicted, released from active duty to civilian status, tried and convicted. A year in prison. A week later the major called me into his office. He wasn’t mad at me or indignant; in fact, he had an amused smile on his face.
“I don’t know how you did it, Merlyn,” he told me. “But you beat the rap. Congratulations. And I don’t give a shit, the whole business is a fucking joke. They should have put those kids in jail. I’m glad for you, but I’ve got my orders to handle this business and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Now I’m talking to you as a friend. I’m not pressing. My advice is, resign from the government service. Right away.”
I was shocked and a little sick. I thought I was home free and here I was out of a job. How the hell would I meet all my bills? How would I support my wife and kids? How would I pay the mortgage on the new house on Long Island I would be moving into in just a few months?
I tried to keep a poker face when I said, “The grand jury cleared me. Why do I have to quit?”
The major must have read me. I remember Jordan and Cully in Las Vegas kidding me about how anybody could tell what I was thinking. Because the major had a look of pity when he said, “I’m telling you for your own good. The brass will have their CID people all over this armory. The FBI may keep snooping around. All the kids in the Reserve will still try to use you, try to get you into deals. They’ll keep the pot stirring. But if you quit, everything should blow over pretty quick. The investigators will cool off and go away with nothing to focus on.”
I wanted to ask about all the other civilians who had been taking bribes, but the major anticipated me. “I know of at least ten other advisers like you, unit administrators, who are going to resign. Some have already. Believe me, I’m on your side. And you’ll be OK. You’re wasting your time on this job. You should have done better for yourself at your age.”
I nodded. I was thinking that too. That I hadn’t done much with my life so far. Sure, I’d had a novel published, but I was making a hundred bucks a week take-home pay from Civil Service. True, I earned another three or four hundred a month with free-lance articles for the magazines, but with the illegal gold mine closed down, I had to make a move.
“OK,” I said. “I’ll write a letter giving two weeks’ notice.”
The major nodded and shook his head. “You have some paid sick leave coming.” he said. “Use it up in those two weeks and look for a new job. I’ll stand still for it. Just come in a couple of times a week to keep the paperwork going.”
I went back to my desk and wrote out my letter of resignation. Things weren’t as bad as they looked. I had about twenty days of vacation pay coming to me, which was about four hundred dollars. I had, I figured, about fifteen hundred dollars in my government pension fund, which I could draw out, though I’d forfeit my rights to a pension when I was sixty-five. But that was more than thirty years away. I could be dead by then. A total of two grand. And then there was the bribe money I had stashed with Cully in Vegas. Over thirty grand there. For a moment I had an overwhelming sense of panic. What if Cully reneged on me and didn’t give me my money? There would be nothing I could do about that. We were good friends, he had bailed me out of my troubles, but I had no illusions about Cully. He was a Vegas hustler. What if he said he had my money coming to him for the favor he had done me? I couldn’t dispute it. I would have paid the money to keep out of jail. Christ, would I have paid it!
But the thing I dreaded most was having to tell Valerie I was out of a job. And having to explain to her father. The old man would ask around and get the truth anyway.
I didn’t tell Valerie that night. The next day I took off from work and went to see Eddie Lancer at his magazines. I told him everything and he sat there, shaking his head and laughing. When I finished, he said, almost wonderingly, “You know, I’m always getting surprised. I thought you were the straightest guy in the world next to your brother, Artie.”
I told Eddie Lancer about how taking the bribes, becoming a half-assed criminal had made me feel better psychologically. That in some way I had discharged a lot of the bitterness I felt. The rejection of my novel by the public, the drabness of my life, its basic failure, how I’d always really been unhappy.
Lancer was looking at me with that little smile on his face. “And I thought you were the least neurotic guy I ever met,” he said. “You’re happily married, you have kids, you live a secure life, you earn a living. You’re working on another novel. What the hell more do you want?’
“I need a job,” I told him.
Eddie Lancer thought that one over for a moment. Oddly enough I didn’t feel embarrassed appealing to him.
“Just between you and me I’m leaving this place in about six months,” he said. “They’ll move another editor up to my place. I’ll be recommending my successor and he’ll owe me a favor. I’ll ask him to give you enough free-lance to live on.”
“That would be great,” I said.
Eddie said briskly, “I can load you up with work until then. Adventure stories, some of the love fiction crap and some book reviews I usually do. OK?”
“Sure,” I said. “When do you figure you’ll finish your book?”
“In a couple of months,” Lancer said. “How about you?”
It was a question I always hated. The truth was that I had only an outline of a novel I wanted to write about a famous criminal case in Arizona. But I hadn’t written anything. I had submitted the outline to my publisher, but he had refused to give me an advance. He said it was the kind of novel that wouldn’t make money because it involved the kidnapping of a child who was murdered. There wouldn’t be any sympathy for the kidnapper, the hero of the book. I was aiming at another Crime and Punishment, and that had scared the publisher off.
“I’m working on it,” I said. “Still a long way to go.”
Lancer smiled sympathetically. “You’re a good writer,” he said. “You’ll make it big someday. Don’t worry.”
We talked awhile longer about writing and books. We both agreed we were better novelists than most of the famous novelists making their fortunes on the best-seller lists. When I left, I was in a confident mood. I always left Lancer that way. For some reason he was one of the few people I felt easy with, and because I knew he was smart and gifted, his good opinion of my talent cheered me up.
And so everything had turned out for the best. I was now a full-time writer, I would lead an honest life, I had escaped jail and in a few months I would move into my very own house, for the first time in my life. Maybe a little crime does pay.
Two months later I moved into my newly built house on Long Island. The kids all had their own bedrooms. We had three bathrooms and a special laundry room. I woul
d no longer have to lie in my bath while newly washed clothes dripped down into my face. No longer have to wait for the kids to finish. I had the almost excruciating luxury of privacy. My own den to write in, my own garden, my own lawn. I was separate from other people. It was Shangri-La. And yet it was something so many people took for granted.
Most important of all, I felt that now my family was safe. We had left the poor and desperate behind us. They would never catch up; their tragedies would never cause ours. My children would never be orphans.
Sitting on my suburban back porch one day, I realized I was truly happy, maybe happier than I would ever be in my life again. And that made me a little pissed off. If I was an artist, why was I so happy with such ordinary pleasures, a wife I loved, children who delighted me, a cheap tract house in the suburbs? One thing sure, I was no Gauguin. Maybe that was why I wasn’t writing. I was too happy. And I felt a twinge of resentment against Valerie. She had me trapped. Jesus.
Except even this couldn’t keep me feeling content. Everything was going so well. And the pleasure you took in children was so commonplace. They were so disgustingly “cute.” When my son was five years old, I had taken him for a walk through the streets of the city and a cat had jumped out of a cellar and almost literally sailed in front of us. My son had turned to me and said, “Is that a scaredy-cat?” When I told Vallie about it, she was delighted and wanted to send it in to one of those magazines that pay money for cute little stories. I’d had a different reaction. I wondered if one of his friends had taunted him with being a scaredy-cat and he had been puzzled by what the phrase meant rather than insulted. I thought of all the mysteries of language and experience my son was encountering for the first time. And I envied him the innocence of childhood as I envied him the luck he had in having parents he could say that to and then have them make a fuss over him.
And I remembered one day when we had gone out for a family Sunday-afternoon walk on Fifth Avenue, Valerie window-shopping for dresses she could never afford. Coming towards us was a woman about three feet tall but dressed elegantly in suede jerkin and white frilly blouse and dark tweed skirt. My daughter tugged at Valerie’s coat and pointed to the dwarf lady and said, “Mommy, what’s that?”
Valerie was horrified with embarrassment. She was always terrified about hurting anyone’s feelings. She shushed my daughter until the woman was safely past. Then she explained to our daughter that the woman was one of those people who had never grown taller. My daughter didn’t really grasp the idea. Finally she asked, “You mean she didn’t grow up. You mean she’s an old lady like you?”
Valerie smiled at me. “Yes, dear,” she said. “Now don’t think about it anymore. It only happens to very few people.”
At home that night, when I told my kids a story before sending them to bed, my daughter seemed to be lost in thought and not listening. I asked her what was wrong. Then, her eyes very wide, she said, “Daddy, am I really a little girl or am I just an old lady who didn’t grow up?”
I knew that there were millions of people who had stories like this to tell about their kids. That it was all terribly commonplace. And yet I couldn’t help the feeling that sharing a part of my children’s lives made me richer. That the fabric of my life was made up of these little things that seemed to have no importance.
Again my daughter. One evening at dinner she had infuriated Valerie by continuingly misbehaving. She threw food at her brother, deliberately spilled a drink and then knocked over a gravy boat. Finally Valerie screamed at her, “You do one more thing and I’ll kill you.”
It was, of course, a figure of speech. But my daughter stared at her very intently and asked, “Do you have a gun?”
It was funny because she so obviously believed that her mother couldn’t kill her unless she had a gun. She knew nothing yet of wars and pestilence, of rapists and molesters, of automobile accidents and plane crashes, clubbings, cancer, poison, getting thrown out of a window. Valerie and I both laughed, and Valerie said, “Of course I haven’t got a gun, don’t be silly.” And the knot of worried concentration disappeared from my daughter’s face. I noticed that Valerie never made that kind of irritated remark again.
And Valerie astonished me too sometimes. She had become more and more Catholic and conservative with the years. She was no longer the bohemian Greenwich Village girl who had wanted to become a writer. In the city housing project pets had been forbidden, and Value never told me she loved animals. Now that we owned a house Valerie bought a puppy and a kitten. Which didn’t make me too happy, even though my son and daughter made a pretty picture playing with their pets on the lawn. The truth is that I had never liked house dogs and cats; they were caricatures of orphans.
I was too happy with Valerie. I had no idea then how rare this was and how valuable. And she was the perfect mother for a writer. When the kids fell and had to get stitched up, she never panicked or bothered me. She didn’t mind doing all the work a man usually does around the house and which I had no patience for. Her parents now lived only thirty minutes away, and often in the evenings and on weekends she took the car and the kids and went there without even asking me if I wanted to go. She knew I hated that kind of visit and that I could use time alone to work on my book.
But for some reason she had nightmares, maybe because of her Catholic upbringing. During the night I would have to wake her up because she gave little cries of despair and wept even while sound asleep. One night she was terribly frightened and I held her close in my arms and asked her what was wrong, what she’d dreamed about and she whispered to me, “Never tell me that I’m dying.”
Which scared the hell out of me. I had visions of her having gone to the doctor and receiving bad news. But the next morning, when I questioned her about it, she didn’t remember anything. And when I asked her if she had been to see the doctor, she laughed at me. She said, “It’s my religious upbringing. I guess I just worry about going to hell.”
For two years I wrote free-lance articles for the magazines, watched my kids grow up, so happily married that it almost disgusted me. Valerie did a lot of visiting with her family, and I spent a lot of time in my basement writing den, so we really didn’t see that much of each other. I had at least three assignments from the magazines every month, while working on a novel I hoped would make me rich and famous. The kidnapping and murder novel was my plaything; the magazines were my bread and butter. I figured I had another three years to go before I finished the book, but I didn’t care. I read through the growing pile of manuscript whenever I became lonely. And it was lovely watching the kids grow older and Valerie happier and more content and less afraid of dying. But nothing lasts. It doesn’t last because you don’t want it to last, I think. If everything is perfect, you go looking for trouble.
After two years of living in my suburban house, writing ten hours every day, going to a movie once a month, reading everything in sight, I welcomed a call from Eddie Lancer asking me to have dinner with him in the city. For the first time in two years I would see New York at night. I had gone in during the day to talk over my magazine assignments with the editors, but I always drove home for dinner. Valerie had become a great cook, and I didn’t want to miss the evening with my kids and my final nightcap of work in my den.
But Eddie Lancer was just back from Hollywood, and he promised me some great stories and some great food. And as usual he asked me how my novel was coming. He always treated me as if he knew I was going to be a great writer, and I loved that. He was one of the few people I knew who seemed to have a genuine kindness untouched by self-interest. And he could be very funny in a way I envied. He reminded me of Valerie when she had been writing stories at the New School. She had it in her writing and sometimes in everyday life. It flashed out every once in a while even now. And so I told Eddie I had to go into the magazines the next day to get an assignment and we could have dinner afterward.
He took me to a place called Pearl ’s that I had never heard of. I was so dumb that I didn’t know it
was New York ’s “in” Chinese restaurant. It was the first time I had ever eaten Chinese food, and when I told Eddie that, he was amazed. He did a whole routine introducing me to different Chinese dishes while pointing out the celebrities and even opening up my fortune cookie and reading it for me. He also stopped me from eating the fortune cookie. “No, no, you never eat them,” he said. “That’s terribly unsophisticated. If there’s one valuable thing you’ll get out of this night, it’s learning never to eat your fortune cookie in a Chinese restaurant.”
It was a whole routine that was only funny between two friends in the context of their relationship with each other. But months later I read a story of his in Esquire in which he used that incident. It was a touching story, making fun of himself making fun of me. I knew him better after that story, how his good humor masked his essential loneliness and estrangement from the world and the people around him. And I got a hint of what he really thought about me. He painted a picture of me as a man in control of life and knowing where he was going. Which amused the hell out of me.
But he was wrong about the fortune cookie business being the only valuable thing I would get out of that night. Because after dinner he talked me into going to one of those New York literary parties, where again I met the great Osano.
We were having our dessert and coffee. Eddie made me order chocolate ice cream. He told me that it was the only dessert that went with Chinese food. “Remember that,” he said. “Never eat your fortune cookie and always order chocolate ice cream for dessert.” Then offhandedly he asked me to come to the party with him. I was a little reluctant. I had an hour and a half drive out to Long Island, and I was anxious to get home and maybe get in an hour’s work before I went to bed.
“Come on,” Eddie said. “You can’t always be an uxurious hermit. Make a night out of it. There’ll be some great booze, good talk and some nice-looking broads. And you might make some valuable contacts. It’s harder for a critic to knock the shit out of you if he knows you personally. And your stuff may read better to some publisher if he’s met you at a party and he thinks you’re a nice guy.” Eddie knew that I had no publisher for my new book. The publisher of my first book never wanted to see me again because it had sold only two thousand copies and never got a paperback.
