The Way of All Fish Read online

  Candy and Karl laughed and punched each other. “Dodge City! Who the hell’s the CEO? Randolph Scott?”

  Bobby smiled. “CEOs, plural. The Dubai brothers: Saad and Sahan bin Saeed.”

  “That sounds real Old West.”

  Bobby snickered. “The younger one’s into Westerns. He wears ten-gallon hats, and his horse’s bridle is studded with bullet casings from a Remington. These two thought it would be a friendly gesture to the U.S. to call it after Dodge City.”

  “Dodge wasn’t open to friendly gestures, last I heard. It had more gunfighters than anyplace. It had Wyatt Earp, too. So? You’re solid with this arrangement?”

  “Of course. As long as they keep their butts out of my business. Which they do because they’re rarely here, the Dubai boys, they’re always leaving for Dubai. I call them the Good-bye Boys.”

  Candy and Karl laughed. Karl said, “So you’re still running the show.”

  “Up to a point.” Bobby tried to be modest.

  “Where’s the point snap?”

  “Probably here.” Bobby held up the page with the catchy clause. He sank the Bluetooth around his ear, saying, “Dolly. Get me Jackson Sprague in legal— Legal? What? Legal meaning lawyer, Dolly. Sprague is Mackenzie-Haack’s senior counsel. Get him down here!” Had he been holding a telephone receiver, he could have slammed it into the cradle, but that pleasure was denied him, this being Bluetooth technology. Slamming it into his eardrum to gut the voice of Dolly would have been something, at least. Not finished, he yelled, “Dolly!”

  Dolly, whose name said it all, was blond, with bee-stung lips and a comely presence. In the open doorway, she kept her hand on the doorknob, in case she needed to slam it fast, and asked what he wanted. Now.

  “I want you to get hold of Bella Bond—”

  “Can’t. She’s gone to Block Island.”

  “Block Island? What in hell? Never mind. Get me her assistant, that Sandy something.”

  “Susie Archer. She’s not here. She’s gone to the Vineyard.” The doorknob was getting a shellacking.

  Bobby looked pained. “Then get me her other assistant. How many’s she got? A hundred and six?”

  “If you mean May Spinner, she’s not here, either. She just left for Boston.” With her free hand, Dolly held up a pink “While You Were Out” note as proof that she wasn’t inventing it.

  “Jesus. It’s only Tuesday. Do these people think Tuesday’s the new Friday?”

  Leaning against the door, Dolly gave the knob a hand job. She was not good with rhetorical questions. “I don’t know.”

  Bobby waved her away. “Just get Sprague, will you?”

  She made her exit, and the three of them agreed it was time for topping up drinks. Bobby hauled the Scotch over to Candy and Karl and poured.

  Two minutes into their drinks, Dolly reappeared. “Jackson Sprague says he’s already late for drinks at the Algonquin with an editor from, uh, Des Moines?”

  “Dubai, Dolly. They don’t have editors in Des Moines. Tell him to get his ass in here pronto or he can park it permanently at the Round Table and hope Dorothy Parker shows.”

  Dolly disappeared.

  Jackson Sprague was tall, reed-thin, and with a voice that was, in some weird way, reed-hollow, as if he were testing out flutes in his mind. His name was Jack, but how could a man of such unquenchable pretension live with just plain Jack?

  He was a fashion plate in a Ralph Lauren way—quartz suit, tiny-striped shirt with a stiff white stand-up collar that looked as if it would prefer to get down and walk around on its own. His eyes were contact-lens green, his hair a silvery wheat field with a shimmer of cornhusks.

  Jackson claimed to be English. He possessed just the sort of Britness that Monty Python was forever sending up. It was the Britness that takes generations to cultivate or a week at Wimbledon. Jackson was born in King of Prussia, PA, so there was at least that small bow to royalty.

  Bobby said, “I’d offer you a drink, but I understand you’ll be doing that two-fisted at the Algonquin.”

  Jackson curled a lip or two. “I would do, only you called me in here.”

  Without a further waste of words, Bobby said, “Jackson, what is this shit?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Bobby waggled the page like a dog’s tail.

  Jackson frowned. Frowning, he looked over the paper. “This is a standard indemnity clause.”

  “I know what it is. I’ve never seen one invoked against an author.”

  Jackson’s laugh was idle, as if he were waiting by the curb for something worth a real laugh. “How often have you seen a situation like this arise?” He looked toward Karl and Candy as if they might weigh in on his side.

  Tough luck. Faces of stone.

  Jackson, who hadn’t been invited to sit, stood, one hand in his jacket pocket, thumb on the outside. Nostrils quivering slightly, he said, “Let me walk you through this, Bobby—” They could have skied down the slope of Jackson’s condescension.

  Said Bobby, “Let you not. That would take a billable hour for which Cindy Sella would have to pay. Jackson, here’s how I see this shitty deal: Cindy Sella wanted to continue being published by Mackenzie-Haack. The only way she could do this was to sign a contract that included this indemnity clause. Now, I would guess she saw very little danger in so doing, because she thought there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that her ex-agent, with whom she’s had no contact for two years, would try and collect a commission he never earned because he never worked on the book in question. But the son of a bitch does just that. In this country, you can go around suing anybody for anything, as you well know and no doubt approve of.

  “Now, seeing that Cindy isn’t willing to pay him, he goes after the publisher, us, and sues them for money he also hasn’t earned. Or money he has earned and has received but claims he hasn’t—”

  Another bit of idle laughter from Jackson Sprague. “You’re assuming, Bobby, that—”

  Slam. Bobby’s hand on his desk as he rose and leaned across it. “I’m assuming that here’s a writer who finds herself surrounded by three sets of lawyers—hers, yours, and the ones you outsourced this to. Then there’s Hess, probably demanding that she pay for his lawyers. That adds up to one writer and four sets of lawyers. Lawyers to the right of her, lawyers to the left, lawyers in front, lawyers behind.” He came around his desk, directly up to Jackson Sprague. “Is there a vision of hell, even in Dante, that could possibly compete with that?”

  Jackson Sprague stood his ground, or his remaining ground, having given over a couple of feet when Bobby advanced on him. A little anger flared up or, rather, spurted, the depth of Jackson’s emotions strong enough only to light a cigarette. “Bobby, I don’t report to you. I report to the Dubai brothers. I report to their man Tom Nix—”

  It just popped out: “Tom Mix?” said Candy.

  “Nix, Nix.”

  Oh, if only. Candy had never seen him or Hopalong Cassidy or Gene Autry, but he had seen YouTube. He felt he was back in the saddle again. “Totin’ my old forty-four . . .”

  He grinned when Jackson Sprague stared at him. Candy was solid with putting a bullet right between Jackson’s contact-lensed green eyes.

  Too bad nobody was hiring.

  15

  The Chelsea Piers, thought Karl, didn’t have the right ambience anymore. “How noir is this? Look, it’s a fuckin’ park up there? Trees, grass, where the old tracks used to be? It’s against the laws of gravity, forget nature, having a goddamned park overhead. Where’s your fog? Your foghorns? Your miasma of all kinds of crap?”

  “Your what?”

  “Crap?”

  “No, that other word.”

  “All kinds?”

  “Forget it. Anyway, you can’t see the park now, so just pretend it ain’t there.”

  It was dead dark, eleven P.M. Pier 61 was the only place Danny Zito would “take a meet.”

  “That’s what he said: ‘take a meet,’ ” Candy had said
with a snort once he was off the phone.

  “Why in hell is it so easy to call up a guy in Witness Protection?”

  “I got the number from Clive. He got it from Bobby Mackenzie. If it’s Danny’s publisher and editor, naturally, he’ll keep in touch.”

  “ ‘Take a meet,’ ” said Karl. “What is he? CEO of SnitchCO? Administrator of FannyFuckYourMortgage? President of GoldmanSachsofShit?”

  Candy snickered. “Wall Street. Talk about crooks.”

  Karl shook his head, adamant on this point. “No, no way. Those people are not your old-time crooks. It’s like I said. Those people are your retro crooks, your Night of the Undead crooks. Those people are mutants. They wouldn’t know how to rob a bank if John Dillinger came back and led the way.”

  In the distance, if the Hudson River could be said to have a distance, a foghorn sounded.

  “There you are. You got your foghorn.”

  Karl was not mollified. “Sounds fake. Look at this place. It’s got a sports center, a golf center, a fitness center, a spa. The best thing to say for it is right now it’s closed.” Karl shook his head. “After that book Zito wrote that put away half the Bransoni family, including Papa B., this guy has the brass balls to go on living in New York?”

  “Hiding in plain sight. Like that story about the what’s-it letter.”

  “That one by Poe I told you to read?”

  “Yeah.” Candy slapped his gloved hands against his coat. It was cold out here, with the wind blowing off the river. “Only that story kind of cheats, don’t it?”

  Karl, in the act of relighting a cigar that had fizzled, said, “Cheats?”

  “I mean that letter, it really wasn’t in plain sight.”

  “Yeah, it was. It was right there with a bunch of calling cards.”

  “It looked completely different. It was the very opposite in looks than the one this guy heard about. I do not call that in plain sight. Look, I’ll give you plain sight.” Candy pulled out his wallet, yanked out a hundred-dollar bill, and dropped it on the ground. “There’s plain sight.”

  As they argued for a fruitless moment the merits of Poe’s plain-sightedness against that of the bill lying at their feet, Danny Zito appeared out of the fog tendrils. He was dressed completely in black.

  “I’ll be damned,” Danny said, grinning. “Is it really you guys? I thought maybe somebody was shittin’ me.” He thrust out his hand. “It’s an honor. You guys, you’re a legend. ‘It was a righteous hit, but it wasn’t Candy and Karl’ is what Papa B. used to say whenever one of the mechanics he hired came around for their money. ‘It wasn’t Candy and Karl.’ He never said it to them, given their propensity for violence. You guys are the gold standard.”

  “Hardly,” said Karl. “We do okay. Listen, I thought Fallguy was a terrific book. We never wrote a book, right, C.? So you got it all over us, Danny.”

  Modestly, Danny shrugged off the compliment. “Thanks. My next one is nearly done. I need to take a meet with Clive Esterhaus. You guys know him; he’s the one contacted you. You met Clive, didn’t you? He was in Pittsburgh when you were. That job I linked you up with? How’d that work out for you?”

  “We didn’t take it. It wasn’t good.”

  “The mark was a writer, n’est-ce pas?” Danny pressed his hands against his chest.

  Christ, thought Karl. Zito was speaking French? He writes; he talks French. What was the life of a hit man coming to?

  “So did Clive bring in somebody else?” Danny hiccupped a laugh as he lit a cigarette, tossed the match. “You gotta watch your back in this business.”

  Candy said, “No, they saw the error of their ways.”

  “So. What can I do for you?”

  “We know you’re in WITSEC, but you always had connections, and we figure you still got some. Us, well, what we do, we don’t usually go looking for people; they usually come looking for us. We need somebody.”

  “Wet work?”

  “No, that we take care of ourselves. We need someone in a law office to get information about what these lawyers got on our client.”

  “Ha!” Danny dropped his cigarette and scrubbed it. “Lawyers? People would probably line up at my door.”

  The three laughed, did a little shoulder pounding.

  “So what’s this person supposed to do?”

  “The cover’s an exotic fish importer. Ornamental fish for private aquariums. Also coral. From coral reefs. You know.”

  “Hell, yeah, I know what coral is, but why the fuck’d somebody want a reef of it?”

  “Not a whole reef, Danny. Maybe for jewelry, or just pieces to display. There’s some that collect it,” said Candy. “Coral’s your most endangered aquatic species. In the world.”

  Danny had folded a stick of gum in his mouth and stopped his strenuous chewing long enough to ask, “What kinda fish we talking?”

  Candy searched his memory. “There’s your walking catfish—”

  Danny laughed. “You shittin’ me?”

  “No. There’s other walking fish, too.”

  “Huh.” He chewed more ferociously, then stopped and said, “This ain’t easy, guys.” He looked up. He looked down. He said, “Yeah. The Dragon Lady.”

  “Who the fuck’s that?”

  Danny looked all around the pier, then lowered his voice to a whisper. “Her name’s Lena bint Musah. She’s from Malaysia. Lampoor or something. Wait.” Danny removed a tiny book from his pocket, thumbed through it, got out a ballpoint, and wrote on a scrap of paper from the book. He tore it out. “Here. She’s good.”

  Karl looked at the note. “Lena bint—?”

  Danny held out his hand, palm out. “The night has a thousand ears, man.”

  “That’s ‘eyes,’ ain’t it?” Candy frowned.

  “Whatever.”

  “So what is it she does?”

  Danny looked from Karl to Candy in exaggerated disbelief. “What is it? You pay her; she does it.”

  “What we mean is,” said Karl, “does she know anything about fish?”

  “It don’t make no difference, she knows it; it’s whether your mark knows she knows it. Good talking to you guys again.”

  Danny melted back into the fog.

  16

  L. Bass Hess was nearly wetting his pants.

  Paul Giverney was coming to see him at noon, which was now. This must mean that Paul Giverney was looking for a new agent. L. Bass could taste the commissions coming his way from a Paul Giverney contract. Even for just one book, the commission would come in at, let’s see, $225,000. Just one book. Any book by Giverney netted the writer $1.5 million. The thought of it was so heady that Bass Hess sank into his chair.

  Noon would mean that he would be late for his luncheon date with Madeline Crow, an editor at Quagmire whom he was trying to persuade to take on one of his client’s books, described by Bass as an “existential prizefighting novel” about two gay fighters having an affair who then find themselves in the ring together.

  Madeline Crow had laughed uncontrollably and unforgivably. “Oh, fuck a duck, Bass; it’s ridiculous.”

  L. Bass clenched at the gritty language; he had never been able to manage such scatological outbursts from women. “If it sounds unlikely, that’s where the existential theme comes in.”

  “Tell me another. Anyway, he’s already a Quagmire author. So what’s wrong with Melody LaRue?” His present editor.

  Her name, for one thing. It made him shudder. He could see her squirming around a pole. “To tell the truth, Madeline, she’s just not up to a book this profound.” To tell the truth, the author thinks you’re hot. Naturally, he did not share this with her.

  “ ‘Up to’ it? What, for shit’s sake, is there to be ‘up to’ in this business? Proust, Flaubert, Xing Ho Shit aren’t around anymore. I can’t just waltz in and take Melody’s authors away from her. Get real.”

  Bass frowned. Who was Xing Ho Shit? He said, “I’m simply saying you have the intellect to handle this sort of multifa
ceted novel.”

  She sighed heavily. “Lunch, you said?”

  He was relieved. He thought of himself as a persuasive man. “Wonderful. Gramercy Tavern, say one-thirty?”

  “Okay. I have to tell them how to make dirty martinis, but the food’s all right.”

  All of this lunchtime drinking. How did people manage to work?

  It was fifteen past noon, and Paul Giverney still hadn’t appeared. Bass was prowling his office. He stopped to realign magazines on his glass-topped coffee table. He stopped to straighten the stuffed bass. It was an eighth of an inch higher on the right end. Lack of alignment annoyed L. Bass Hess.

  His father, Louis Hess, had been a first-rate bass fisherman and Bass had put the fish here in his memory. Bass fished himself when he went to the Everglades. He hated it, fishing; he hated the Everglades; but it was part of his annual visit to his aunt. Aunt Simone, whom he hated as well, and who made him shudder far more than Melody LaRue.

  His intercom buzzed. He stiffened.

  “Mr. Giverney is here,” said Stephanie gaily.

  He fairly ran for the door, composed himself, tried on a few different expressions, and went for the one suggesting curiosity but not excitement.

  “Paul! So nice to see you.”

  “Bass.” They shook hands.

  “Come in, come in.”

  “You’ll have had your tea.”

  Bass was confused. “What? Tea?”

  “It’s what they say in Glasgow. ‘Come in, come in, you’ll have had your tea.’ ”

  A brief silence. Then Bass said, “Have you been to Glasgow?”

  Paul sank down in one of the dark leather chairs on either side of the coffee table. “You don’t get it?”

  Bass assumed it was meant to be funny and laughed. The laugh was as thin as parchment.

  Paul Giverney knew Hess didn’t get it. “In other words, the Glaswegians are notoriously cheap.”

  Bass ran his hand over the back of his skull with its thinning red hair. “Right. Now, Paul, what can I do for you?”

  “I’m thinking of changing agents.”

  L. Bass Hess could hardly sit still in his chair. He wanted to bounce like a baby. To control himself, he moved an ashtray, free of ashes, and coughed into his fist. “You need an agent who can handle everything for you, I’d say. So you can spend your time writing your wonderful books.” He smiled, crookedly, charmingly, he thought.