Manhattan Nocturne

by Colin Harrison

  “You’re referring to ‘professional conduct’?”

  “No. Next line.”

  “‘Insubordination’?”

  “Yes,” said Campbell.

  “I haven’t done anything,” I said.

  “Yes. That’s true.”

  “What do you want?”

  Campbell stared at me, then nodded vigorously, once. “We have reached the end of this part of our conversation. If you will kindly follow me …” He stood and indicated another door, which he opened. I followed him down a short paneled hallway, through a door, and then into another office, also paneled.

  There, sitting in peaceful immensity, drinking tea, was Hobbs himself. He looked up and lifted a giant arm. “Mr. Porter Wren, chronicler of the people’s woe! Good afternoon, sir, do come in!” His fingers flicked in the direction of a chair, and his green eyes followed me as I entered the room. To one side, set in the wall, were five digital clocks: HONG KONG, SYDNEY, LONDON, NEW YORK, LOS ANGELES. When I Was seated, Campbell nodded stiffly at his boss, and then drew the door shut behind him as he left. “Quite cold out, I’m told. Now then, I’m delighted that you are here and that we may discuss a certain question.” He smoothed his immense hands down the wool of his vest. He seemed like the globe itself. “I hope very much that we like each other, that we can reach a mutually agreeable understanding …” He lifted his eyebrows, as if acting out what my expression might be if I found out what would happen if such an agreement. were not reached. “I’ll get to the matter straightaway. You, sir, are having an affair with Miss Caroline Crowley, and—”

  “Look,” I protested, my anger returning to me, “this is of no—”

  “I would ask you not to interrupt!” Hobbs dropped his hands on the top of the desk, palms down, fingers spread. “A bloody awful habit of Americans. Now then, why do I claim you are having an affair? Because you are, sir. I should add that it is no matter to me. Except in that it presents an opportunity. Life is full of opportunities, no?”

  He was playing with me. “Of one sort or another,” I answered.

  “Yes, quite. This is one sort and not the other. This is an opportunity for me to get something I want and an opportunity for you not to get something you don’t want.” He tilted his head at me in such a way that I was to understand that he was irritated by his own cleverness. “Now then, Caroline Crowley is—”

  A chime sounded and Campbell reappeared. “Excuse me. You did have an appointment with the conservator,” he said.

  “What was it today?” Hobbs asked, ignoring me.

  “I believe it was masks.”

  Hobbs swirled his hand in the air. “Send him in.”

  A short, well-dressed man in his fifties appeared, pushing a wheeled display device the size of a high-school chalkboard, on which were hung about a dozen African masks, carved from ivory, faces elongated and fearsome.

  “Mr. Hobbs, we have a very excellent selection today,” he began, a butcher with his cuts. “Rather fine, I would say, these being excellent examples of sixteenth-century Nigerian—”

  Hobbs thrust out a finger. “I’ll take that one on the left and the two larger ones in the middle—”

  “Ah!” the man said, as if genuinely delighted by the choice, “the ceremonial mourning mask, a very—”

  “And the one on the bottom … yes—that one.”

  “Yes, the fertility—”

  “How much?”

  “For all of them?” the man squeaked.

  “Yes, quickly.”

  The man looked from mask to mask. “Well, fifty … and eighty-two … it would come to about two hundred and sixty thousand, I believe … yes, that is—”

  “One-seventy.”

  The man looked as if he was trying to smile while being shot in the chest “I’m very sorry, I did not—”

  “One hundred and seventy thousand for all four, take it or leave it.”

  The man nodded miserably. “You’ve been most generous.”

  “See Campbell on the way out.”

  “Why, thank you, Mr. Hobbs, I’m quite pleased that we have been able to—”

  “Good day, sir.” He turned back to me, green eyes bright “Now, I was saying … yes, Caroline Crowley is sending me videotapes, Mr. Wren. It’s the same one each time. I don’t like getting these tapes. Only by the grace of my loyal personal staff do these tapes not find their way out of my office. I personally destroy each one, and then, sooner or later, she sends me another one. Here, to this office. It makes me a bit insane, Mr. Wren, it makes me”—he paused, his cavernous mouth open, eyebrows arched—“it makes me irrational, Mr. Wren. And why? For the obvious reason, Mr. Wren. I’m afraid that one of these tapes will be out and get played on television or something. It’s quite a nasty little tape, very embarrassing, I must say.”

  “You’re doing something unsavory?”

  He hummed. “I am compromised by the tape, let us say that.”

  “You want to tell me what’s on the tape?”

  “Not at all.”

  “When did the tapes start coming?”

  “The first?” Hobbs frowned. “The first was about sixteen months ago.”

  “Before or after Simon—”

  “After, Mr. Wren, shortly after the death of her paramour or husband or whatever he was.”

  “Why is Caroline sending you the tape, if I may ask?”

  “Ah, an impossible thing to answer.”

  “You know her?”

  Hobbs looked at me and wheezed heavily. “I am familiar with her.” He waited for me to understand whatever this meant, exactly. “Do I genuinely know the woman? No. Is it possible for any man to know a woman? I doubt it.”

  “Do you know that she’s sending it?”

  “As a matter of documented fact, no. As a matter of extreme likelihood, yes. I know that she is aware of the existence of the tape and its contents; I know, too, that she is the only logical person I can think of who would be in a position to have it.”

  “She wants money for it?”

  “Apparently not. There has been no request made. Oh, it’s bloody fucking psychologically clever, you know!”

  He had a strange, energetic magnetism to him and for a moment I was silent.

  “Why can’t you hire some invisible people to invisibly go through her apartment or follow her around or do whatever invisible people do?”

  “Oh, we have, we have,” Hobbs said, “not that she doesn’t know it. But nothing.”

  I wondered if he knew about the rented vault in the Malaysian bank. “And so I’m here because you want me to ask her to stop sending the tape?”

  “Oh, better than that, sir.” Hobbs smoothed his hands against each other. “A good bit better. I myself have asked her to stop doing so on a number of occasions. I even offered to buy it from her, at a sum notable for its absurdity. But she always insists to me that she is not sending the tape, which, frankly, I do not believe.”

  “So I ask her about the tape and she tells me she’s not sending it.”

  Here he leaned forward malevolently. “Then you keep going, sir. You make do. A little pluck, a little luck. You improvise. I am told that this afternoon you entered a certain Malaysian bank with our Miss Crowley. She has been seen to go into this bank from time to time, and naturally I wonder if she may be keeping the tape there.”

  I looked at him. “This whole thing is crazy—”

  “That’s right, sir!” He stood suddenly and I realized that in addition to being a grotesquely wide man, Hobbs was quite tall, too. “Crazy is just the word for it! A crazy, bloody irritation to someone like me who must conduct business in thirty-odd countries. It is a point of business, Mr. Wren, nothing more, nothing less. I cannot have this tape just circulating in the universe.” He waved his meaty hands about him, and the very size of them seemed to inscribe the cosmos around his gigantic bulk. “You are my employee. I can fire you and I can fire your bosses all the way up the line. I can fire everyone in your newspaper, Mr.
Wren, and if I did, it would cause me no loss of sleep. I’d hire someone else. I’ve got a number of very good people in London this minute who would love to work in New York. Love to flit about the Manhattan candle! Talent is cheap, Mr. Wren, yours included. You think you’re the only one who can tramp around some sad little scene and hack out the requisite dose of maudlin prose? Please, sir. Please! I can throw a bone in the street and get a newspaper staff. I’ve done it in Melbourne, I’ve done it in London, and I could do it here. Now then, you are my employee and you are fucking Caroline Crowley and that means you are in her life. I want you to get that tape for me, Mr. Wren. I want that tape bloody well fast, and I’m not going to listen to any protest about it. Good-bye, sir.”

  I didn’t stand. “Hobbs, you’re out of your mind.”

  “I said good-bye, sir.”

  We stared at each other. “Hey, know what? I barely know the woman. If you haven’t scared it out of her, or stolen it from her, then I’m not going to get it. Seriously.” I held out my hands and shrugged. “Right? Plus I could spare myself the trouble and hop to another paper.”

  “Won’t work,” Hobbs said. “We’ll come up with some reason you were fired. Embezzling company gold, perhaps. Excessive drinking at social functions! Some very nasty, protracted lawsuit. Motions and countermotions, lawyers slavering away on my tab, lawyers slavering away on yours.” The theatricality of the conceit amused him. “You could counter-sue for litigational harassment or whatever it is called over here and then we could do the same. We could draw it out for years. Years! Or as long as your money held out. Believe me, this is not hard to do. I did it in Australia just last year, as a matter of fact. Fellow called my bluff and it went very poorly for him after that.” His expression went cold. “I know a bit about you, Mr. Wren, I know how difficult it would be for you to fend off my lawyers, even with your wife’s income. I know what you paid for that property in downtown Manhattan. Quite a bit, yes. And you did a very smart thing, sir. You took out a mortgage, which men have been doing since the fifth century. You, sir, being an educated man, have studied the interest rate cycles. You did quite well! You remortgaged your house in December of 1993, and you hit the twenty-three-year low in American interest rates. You felt quite good about that, I’d bet, and judging from the size of the mortgage, you figured the more leverage, the better. Quite clever! Every last penny, I’d bet! What did you do? Mortgage your wife’s shoes? Mortgage the dog?” And here he threw his head back and laughed at the vanities of a small man such as I. “You, sir, are carrying a mortgage of five hundred and twenty thousand dollars! A shocking amount! You need five thousand dollars a month to service that loan. By my calculations your salary goes toward the house and your wife’s covers everything else. Do you dare fall out of work for three or four months? Do you think the bank will be forgiving if you fall behind?”

  I shrugged. This was all bluster, so far as I was willing to let on. Lisa made a good salary; if need be we could live on it. The house could be sold.

  “Or we could simply let your wife know what it is you are up to.”

  This scared me, but I rubbed my eyes in boredom.

  “Or we might find that your wife had operated on someone we know and that, sadly, she did not do such a terrific job, and we could then secure an allegation of malpractice—” He saw me look up quickly. “Yes, perhaps that is what you will find motivating.”

  When two men sit in a room confronting each other, as I did then with Hobbs, their own two fathers are also there. His father had created and then built up a chain of newspapers in Australia in the 1940s, and I knew that as a boy Hobbs had sat at the knee of some of the most powerful men on that continent, being schooled in the political and financial arts. My own father, who owned two hardware stores, was the son of a potato farmer who’d had a bag of arsenic fall on him in 1947. My grandfather had sucked up a lungful of the poison and had never been the same, weakening, then losing the farm my father grew up on. Consequently, my father had conducted himself with a cautious dignity. A good man, a kind man, devoted to his motherless son but incapable of teaching me about the worldly matters of money and power, for he had none. How he would hate to see where I was then.

  “Let us understand each other, Mr. Wren,” Hobbs went on. “I would not be engaging you in this way unless I thought you were capable of fulfilling my request. I have read your file. Let’s be frank, you and I. You are a broken-down hack columnist. I have perhaps fifty men and women like you working at my papers in England and Australia and in the States. I know the type. Formerly ambitious, good for the legwork. Now? Well, hmm—now not so good. Jaded, making a lot of money—what are we paying you?” He looked down at the figure on his sheet of paper and shrugged; it was a pittance to him, shoeshine money, dandelion dust. “You’ve got some stock grammatical constructions, and some reporter’s tricks, and you’re careful with the good columns, and very clever with the bad ones, and you stay late to be sure the copy editors don’t weaken the way you’ve positioned your quotes. This sounds familiar, I know. You vacillate between deep cynicism and boundless faith. You feel beaten down by the roar. You love your wife and children, but everybody is getting a little older every day. And then along comes a woman. You figure you are not getting into so much. But this was where you were wrong, Mr. Wren. This was where you didn’t know enough. I came attached to Caroline Crowley. Imagine my delight, Mr. Wren, imagine how pleased I was to learn that Caroline Crowley’s latest lover is a trained investigative reporter! And one of my own employees!” Hobb’s face lifted into a fleshy mask of manic delight. “Here was the man who would get that tape back for me! As I said, Mr. Wren, I’ve read some of your work. And you know what? You were good … once. People would talk to you, tell you things they wouldn’t tell anyone else. You had something. Now, who knows? What are you, almost forty? That’s rather early to burn out. You need a challenge, I think. You were good once and now you’re going to have to become good again, sir. For me.”

  The essence of a threat: a task is demanded of one; if the task is performed, the threat is removed. If the task is not performed, the one who has made the threat chooses whether or not to enforce the punishment, and he understands that if he does not enforce it, then soon no one will believe his threats. I know this. I know this in a thousand ways, not the least of which is as a parent. Husbands and wives also threaten each other, although usually not so overtly. An eyebrow will do. A muttered response. Lisa takes a breath and holds it and then glares. I learned long ago that her threats, though rare, are to be respected; after all, here is a woman who regularly presses a scalpel into human flesh. I take her threats as gravely as I did those of my high-school football coach, a bona fide sadist who used to promise us “whistle laps,” a dreaded punishment in the August heat, if we didn’t “look sharp” in practice. His was a system of interlocking, escalating threats, not just to one’s immediate threshold of pain but to one’s very seventeen-year-old male essence. At the Champlain Valley Athletic Conference championship game, played in Plattsburgh, New York, on December 2, 1977, with everyone in the world I knew and loved sitting in the grandstands, my coach threatened to have me “folding towels on the bench” if I didn’t put the hit on the opposing team’s wide receiver, a black guy named Pernell “D.J.” Snyder, who was on his way to a full scholarship at USC in part because he ran the hundred-yard dash in 9.4 seconds—exactly one second faster than I did. D.J. was terrifying my coach with his blazing, high-stepping sprints down the sideline. “Do you love towels, Wren?” my coach screamed. “Do you love soft little white towels that you can fold?” D.J., getting warm with the game, was becoming faster and, sensing my fear, had started trash-talking me in his deep voice: “Yo, boy, I’ma catch one on you, boy.” Only the ineptitude of the opposing quarterback had thus far saved me. If D.J. actually caught the ball, he was gone—I could grow wings, I could beg God, nothing would let me catch him. Then, in the fourth quarter, with our team clinging to a three-point lead, the ball was finall
y thrown accurately to D.J., and as I watched it spiral across the blue sky—as I saw D.J.’s hands reach out, his black fingers wiggling—I understood that I had a choice to hit him cleanly under the knees or administer some real hurt. I went high and hard, with everything in my one hundred and seventy-eight pounds. D.J. dropped the ball and grunted as he was knocked out. I dislocated my shoulder, damaging it forever. Both of us lay still on the cold field. I was penalized, but we won the game. That night, whacked out on painkillers, I lay in the front seat of my father’s pickup truck with my girlfriend. She was a sweet girl named Annie Frey, and I used to beg her to wear her seat belt because I thought she drove too fast. She couldn’t see the threat of her own recklessness, however, and she rolled her car over four months later and bled to death on a dark stretch of road that I have purposefully never returned to.

  Yes, I understand what a threat is and that is why I do not understand why I dallied for four or five days after Hobbs threatened me. No doubt I resented his intrusion into my affairs—my affair. Instead I fished around for a column. There was all manner of mishap in the city, but none of it seemed remarkable. Shoot-’em-ups, sex murders, money-laundering rings—nothing clicked. The city editor kept changing the page-one story, flipping between national and local stories. No celebrities were getting arrested, collapsing onstage, or otherwise being outrageous. The TV guys abandoned their Richard Lancaster death-watch and he promptly died. No one cared. The criminals were nickel-and-diming it. The politicians were all in the islands. The firemen were saving everybody. The city’s snow-removal budget was spent. My editor looked at me once or twice, his expression meaning Got anything good? but he could tell I wasn’t turning up the right cards. I floated a lame piece of ha-ha about an old guy who was retiring from the Coney Island freak show because kids were no longer interested in seeing him bang nails up his nose or swallow smoking cigarettes. They preferred the freak shows on the Internet. Irony, ha-ha. I was wasting time. I see now that those precious days could have made a difference, but I let them slide by, as if paralytically contemplating the insertion of a long needle, the injection of which would jolt me into frenetic activity. On those mornings, I retrieved the newspapers piled in front of our gate and flipped through the business sections with a sick fascination, seeking news that showed Hobbs was preoccupied with topics other than me. As his secretary had said he would, Hobbs had flown west, and I was able to track his movements from Los Angeles to Hong Kong, where he was meeting with Chinese authorities about the broadcast capabilities of his television network, and then on to Melbourne and New Delhi. In each instance he commented on whatever deal was pending or completed, or on the general direction of his company, and in reference to some South Korean officials who were slow to respond to a $900 million offer he’d made, he was quoted in the Asian Wall Street Journal as saying, “I don’t wait for others to see it my way; I state my case and then proceed, thank you.” The words weren’t about me, but nonetheless I gaped anxiously at them. Isn’t the measure of the man in the smallest utterances as much as in the grandest gestures?