The Way of All Fish Page 2

Did anyone call the police? No cops came. Of course, no one was shot, and they were all busy saving the fish. There’d been around thirty fish and twenty diners; some had saved more than one.

  Frankie was too busy calling the emergency fish service to call the police. And when the fish were safely swimming in their separate goblet seas, Frankie had hurried around the room hugging and shaking hands and talking so fast in Italian or Spanish that it should have crippled his tongue.

  Then it struck Cindy that she hadn’t the faintest notion, the least idea, nor did anyone else in the Clownfish Café, what had been happening. If they’d all started turning cartwheels on the floor while the ceiling flew away, it couldn’t have been stranger. A calamitous evening: Like the paint, like the song, it had made no sense.

  Only one fish had gone missing: an albino clown fish. “Ghost fish,” Frankie called it. “My poor ghost fish.”

  Had it been swept away by the water into some dark corner where it had lain, flopping back and forth, suffocating, turning even ghostlier, turning a whiter shade of pale?

  That night she dreamed she was Dorothy (without pigtails), and in place of the dog, Toto, stood Gus.

  They were in their small house when the tornado came waltzing—literally—into Kansas, “Tales from the Vienna Woods” playing in the background.

  Everything was blowing to kingdom come; the winds were sawing and sawing away on the reedy marsh. But where had there ever been a marsh in Kansas? Even in dreams, she couldn’t stop editing. This marsh had ducks bobbing and rising and flying and guns going off, missing everything they aimed at. The little house pinwheeled, floor to ceiling, ceiling to floor, and they went head over heels with it, doing cartwheels in the sky.

  Awake, Cindy smiled and watched the ceiling fly away.

  Really awake this time, she saw the ceiling was (sadly) intact. Gus wasn’t on the bed, so he was out there in—

  She rolled out of bed and ran to the living room.

  The bowl was still on its shelf, clown fish intact. Gus was lying below it with his paws encircling his chest, watching.

  She went back to the bedroom and drew on her blue chenille bathrobe and trailed its sash into the kitchen.

  On the white (well, white-ish, though no calamity) Formica counter lay yesterday’s mail, topped by a letter from her lawyers telling her more about her crazy ex-agent’s unfolding plot, the fifty-page complaint he had filed with the New York state court, his convoluted plan to get his commission out of her for a book he hadn’t agented. She’d fired him years before.

  She put water and Dunkin’ Donuts regular coffee into her Mr. Coffee machine and switched it on. She shoved the letter aside, not wanting to know what act this was in L. Bass Hess’s play, though really, it had never gotten beyond Act One, had it? It had never really gotten out of rehearsals. The same old stuff was sorted through and moved around and mulled, argued, intrigued over.

  Finally, Mr. Coffee dispensed his brew, and she filled one of her thick white mugs. This she took into the living room to join Gus. She sat down on the sofa as she had the night before. But she found herself thinking about the L. Bass Hess charade, and she would have to short-circuit such thinking. How she dealt with things she didn’t want to think about was either to get down Proust and read a few pages, or allow herself a definite, limited time period in which to think. This morning she decided on sixty—no, thirty—thirty seconds. She watched the second hand on her watch as she thought:

  Awful person, awful agent control freak, sociopath—perhaps psychopath?—no, sociopath because (she struck “because,” reminding herself not to use unnecessary words) cold as Alaska—thirty seconds! Stop!

  She drank her coffee and wondered if what she’d just done was a kind of anti-obsession. Was it like, say, Lady Macbeth allowing herself only one hand-wash?

  Finished thinking about L. Bass Hess, she rested her eyes on the clown fish, who was darting (as well as could be darted) back and forth in his little water world. She thought over the problem of getting him another fish or two for company. There shouldn’t be a problem if it were another clown fish, surely? What would be nice would be to get Frankie to sell her another of his fish, but she was pretty sure he wouldn’t do it. It would be nicer for her fish if the new fish were familiar to him.

  She sat up. She knew how to get another fish from Frankie!

  3

  Am I gonna have to put up with you obsessing about that goddamn fish?” Karl was reading the arts section of the Times. He rattled the page just to get Candy away from C.F. That was the name Candy had settled on for his rescued fish—C.F. Karl had said helpfully that it was the dumbest name he’d ever heard. Candy had said, “No kidding. What fish names have you heard?”

  They’d been arguing about the fish not being a clown fish, anyway. Karl had snapped open a colorful book he’d picked up that morning on tropical fish. “It’s like one of these symphon-whatever. It’s completely different.”

  Candy insisted it was striped, so what?

  “For God’s sake, it’s red squiggles. It don’t look anything like a clown fish.”

  The fish tank had been purchased at midnight from a “colleague” with a warehouse. The tank was big. The colleague had tossed in a bag of pinkish stones, some gravel, some coral, other junk like a miniature deep-sea diver. It had taken upward of an hour getting back to East Houston and their own warehouse; the upper spaces of this one, however, had been converted into two very large apartments. The makeover for each floor had been one and a half mill. The interior designer, Lenny Babbo, was awed by the space he had to work in and the money he had to work with.

  “You’re feeding it too much, anyway,” said Karl. “Frankie would be horrified.” Karl had given up on the fish book and was reading a review of a new book.

  Candy was watching his fish, considering a new name. “You think maybe we ought to go to Frankie’s, see how he’s doing? After last night,” he ended vaguely.

  “Dunno. Listen to this: It’s a review of a book by some asshole writer calls herself Angel. What is this one-name shit? Only ones deserve that are Elvis and Frank.”

  “Frank Giacomo?”

  “Sinatra, fuck’s sake.”

  “Yeah. Ol’ Blue Eyes. So how about Madonna?”

  Karl shook his head. “No. See, that’s a different kind of thing. She was always Madonna. Who is she, Madonna Jones? No, always one name. She didn’t earn the right to use just one name. Not like Elvis. He was Elvis Presley before he got famous. He earned that one-name treatment. Like Sinatra.” He tossed the paper down. “What the hell. The book looks like a real freak job.” He slid down on Candy’s white leather sofa. “How in hell does this twat get a publisher?”

  Barnes & Noble had become one of their main hangouts ever since Candy and Karl had a run-in with Mackenzie-Haack’s publisher, Bobby Mackenzie, who’d come up with the novel scheme of getting rid of a writer named Ned Isaly by hiring a couple of contract killers. To do Bobby the little credit he deserved, the idea did not originate with him but with mega-bestselling author Paul Giverney, whom the avaricious Bobby Mackenzie wanted to publish, and who would agree only if Ned Isaly were terminated. Nobody knew why Paul wanted him gone, including the hit men. It was fortunate that Candy and Karl had “standards,” the chief one being that they always got to know the mark before they offed him, insisting that they be the ones to decide whether the guy goes or stays. Two years ago the “guy” had been an award-winning writer named Ned Isaly. Now the guy was New York agent L. Bass Hess, whom they had been following around Manhattan for a couple of weeks.

  Books had added a new dimension to their lives. Books were to die for. Literally. They were things you got killed over. Candy and Karl knew New York, licit and illicit, better than half the Metropolitan police and as well as the other half. How would they ever have guessed the publishing world was so shot through with acrimony that they’d just as soon kill you as publish you?

  Their experience up to the time Danny Zito had thrown thi
s job at them was Danny Zito himself. Danny had rushed headlong into hell by writing a tell-all (“meaning tell-some,” Karl had said) book about the Bransoni family. (“Danny can write?” Leo Bransoni had snickered. “Danny can’t even fucking spell.” “Probably he had a ghost,” Candy had said. “Probably he’ll be a ghost inside forty-eight hours,” Leo had answered.)

  Danny had gone into the Witness Protection Program by hiding in Chelsea. WITSEC had strongly advised against it. “In plain sight,” Danny had told them. He wrote books and painted. There were so many galleries in Chelsea now.

  Joey Giancarlo, or Joey G-C, as people called him, had asked Candy and Karl, three weeks before, to do a hit on a guy named L. Bass Hess, of the Hess Literary Agency over on Broadway.

  “My son, Fabio, he’s got this book he wrote. It’s a novel about Chicago in the thirties, a time with which he got no speakin’ acquaintance, but it’s fiction, so what the hey?” Joey shrugged shoulders so meaty that his neck disappeared into them. “So Fab, he talks to Danny Zito—”

  “Danny’s in WITSEC. How’s Fabio get to talk to him?”

  Another shrug. “Who cares. Danny got his book published—”

  Karl laughed. “Which is why he’s in Witness Protection.”

  Joey ignored this. “So Fab figures Danny can give him some pointers who to publish the book, but Danny says, ‘No, first you get an agent.’ ‘What the hey?’ says Fab, he’s like, ‘Agent?’ ‘The agent sells the book,’ says Danny, ‘the writer don’t.’ Danny gives him the name of this guy Hess. Well, Fabio goes all the way into Manhattan down to Broadway—”

  The present conference was taking place behind the eight-foot stone wall surrounding a five-acre estate on the Jersey shore.

  “—and the guy won’t see him. Won’t see him.” Joey removed the Cuban cigar from his mouth and spat out a tiny piece of tobacco as if spitting in the eye of L. Bass Hess. He continued: “This bleach-head old ho that’s sittin’ in the outer office behind a counter says for him to leave his manuscript with her and they’d get back to him. Well, Fabio don’t much like leavin’ it, but he does. And does this asshole agent get back to him? A month, a friggin’ month, goes by until the ho calls, says”—here Joey changed his voice, upping it several decibels—“ ‘Mr. Hess says the manuscript is not marketable in its present form. Sorry.’ ” Joey shook his head slowly again and again. “Let me tell you, I never seen Fabio so down. You know the kid—”

  They did, a real jerk.

  “—always the smile, always the sunny side showin’, Fabio. A regular sunset kinda guy.”

  Key West has sunsets, maybe Santa Fe, but not Fabio. Fabio dragged his bad mood around like a cart horse pulling life’s bleak side.

  His cigar gone cold, Joey struck a match on his thumbnail and said out of the corner of his mouth, “It’s a personal insult to the family. Get him.”

  “You know the way we work, Joey: Follow the mark around, get to know him, see how he goes about things—”

  “Christ sakes, Karl, I just told you how the sumbitch goes about things . . . Yeah, yeah, okay, I know you got conditions. But you’re the best, so get on it.” Joey removed a fat envelope from his inside pocket.

  They refused it. “No money up front, Joey. Only if we take the job.”

  Joey G-C rolled his eyes. “You guys.”

  From his office promptly at twelve-thirty, L. Bass Hess ventured forth for lunch every day at 21 or the Gramercy Tavern; these were the restaurants where he took clients or met up with editors or other publishing people. During the week, he stayed at his pied-à-terre on the Upper East Side and ventured downtown for dinner at Bhojan on Lexington (which surprised Candy and Karl, Hess eating Indian food, but then it was cheap, too). But Bhojan was closed for a few days, and that was when he decided to go to the Clownfish Café. Again, much to Karl and Candy’s surprise.

  Beside the sofa where Karl sat was a stack of magazines, mostly trade, like Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Kirkus. They liked to keep up, but they got behind sometimes. Karl had picked up a several-weeks-old Publishers Weekly off the top of the pile and was leafing through it.

  Candy had picked up a couple of National Geographics early that morning in an ancient coffee shop that stashed them. Candy had been reading aloud from the one that had a photograph of coral reefs on its cover until Karl told him to shut up, just let him drink his coffee.

  They both thought e-books were terrible. They thought the Kindle was cretinous; you read, you want to read a book, not a slab of hardware. Hardware was something that shot bullets.

  Candy had managed to get out of P.S. 111 with body and brain intact, but with no books in it, as it were. Karl, on the other hand, had gone to college and read Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald before that fracas with the dean of students. He was only a month short of graduating (a fact that stunned Candy, who had never known anyone within light-years of finishing any school) when he’d signed on to do a job on the dean. Nothing serious, no wet work, just a warning, a little shin-busting, when a couple of guys had stepped out of the shadows—another dean, a phys ed department head—guys who were teaching our youths, can you believe it, stepped up with guns, teachers with guns!, and gave me no choice, right?

  Candy had never been clear on the details, like who was paying Karl or why. The dean of arts and sciences landed in a heap, and Karl had taken off from the college, from the town, with nothing but his .38, his bolt-action Browning, and a copy of The Great Gatsby.

  “Hey, C,” said Karl from the couch, “check this out: This friggin’ agent we been following around. The asshole’s suing one of his former clients for a commission on a book the writer says he had nothing to do with; says she had a new agent that worked on it.” Karl put down the magazine, thinking. “Maybe it’s time we did a face-to-face with Hess.” They always did a face-to-face before they decided if the mark was worth the bullet. Karl swung his legs off the sofa.

  “You mean, like, now?”

  Karl was getting into his “I Am Not Available” Arfango loafers. “Yeah, now.”

  “Bass Hess,” said Candy. “Sounds like a snake hiss.”

  They had tracked L. Bass Hess’s comings and goings for two weeks, and a bigger tightass they had never come across. It was the first time they’d considered turning down a job because the mark was so boring, they didn’t want to be around him.

  They could have offed this guy in their sleep; he was as routinized as a day with Martha Stewart (in or out of jail). They could have stopped in front of Saks and fired over their shoulders at Fifty-first and Fifth and dropped Hess on the pavement in front of St. Patrick’s as long as they did it at precisely 5:55 on a Wednesday, when, for some reason, he went to church. The same routine day after day, the only differences being in the people he met for lunch at the Gramercy Tavern or 21 or a new French place that had a lot of buzz going, named Arles, in SoHo. At these places, he’d meet up with clients or editors or fellow agents.

  Since Candy and Karl knew in advance he’d be at one of those restaurants, they’d call and ask if he’d arrived yet. After finding out which one he was going to, they’d go there and get a table near his. They ordered whiskies and steaks, rare, and didn’t bother with the menu. The stuff on it was hardly pronounceable, much less edible. They did not want the soup de mer, the baby-greens salad, the ahi tuna (which Karl said sounded like a fish sneezing), the charcuterie pâté. They liked to watch plates being served, the saucy designs, the bright colors, the small broccoli trees, the canoes of romaine lettuce–boats that should be out on a lake somewhere, the flutes, the volutes, the drifts, the sprinkles. What the fuck was this stuff doing on a fork? It should have been on a runway. They should make plates with little legs that could walk, turn, spin, hobble back to the kitchen.

  They liked the Gramercy Tavern best. They liked its straightforward fish dishes (even though the chef did like to dress up the cod and halibut with superfluous bits of this and that). They liked to listen to Hess ordering the striped bass. That gav
e them a kick. Hess always ate a piece of some kind of fish with a boiled potato and green peas or beans. Never strayed into the fried or the sauced. But that was almost noneating. No dessert, no booze. Drank iced tea. No wonder he was skinny as a subway rail. Candy and Karl were always happy when Hess’s writer or editor guest ordered up a double martini, rocks, three olives; this followed by food leaking butter and oil, designed back in the kitchen by some architect; then went for a bottle of Sancerre and several bolts of ice cream for dessert.

  Hess really had to pay up the snout for that one. Candy and Karl enjoyed tuning in to the conversation behind them because they liked gossip about the publishing industry. As when an editor said, “The contract’s lousy. If they can’t up the payout, he’ll walk.” Or “I’m tired of being held up by these guys.”

  “Okay, so he doesn’t do it. We can sign Bobby Three Winds.” “Bobby Three Winds?” “Why not? Remember that Vegas job? Steve Wynn and the Bellagio?” “It was perfect.” “Gorgeous. The guy never misses.”

  It sounded exactly like listening to Joey G-C putting out a contract. The shooter he mostly wanted was a short muscle-bound guy named Ralph Double-Shoes Bono. Ralph had his shoes specially made to add another inch or so. The other guys started calling him “Double-Shoes,” and the name stuck.

  “Who the hell is Bobby Three Winds?” Karl asked afterward.

  “He’s that writer that’s part Sioux or Cherokee. Some Indian.”

  “Native American is what you say,” said Karl.

  “Okay, Native American Indian. He’s some hotshot travel writer.”

  Karl snickered. “Such acrimony in publishing.”

  “Very hostile people.”

  So they knew their way around L. Bass Hess and the route to his office near Broadway and Twenty-third. They could have found it blindfolded.

  That was where they went.

  4

  Cindy was standing on a street in Sunset Park in Brooklyn in front of a desiccated-looking building, more like a warehouse than any sort of residence, doubting her judgment in answering the ad on Craigslist for an albino clown fish. “A hundred,” the seller had said.