Paperback Jack, page 7
It was his first time in the apartment. It was an efficiency place like his, only with a twin bed in addition to a Murphy in the wall. The kitchen appliances were spotless, the laminated table shining, with a red-and-green runner down the center and two mismatched chairs drawn up to it. The living-room area consisted of a sofa, a console radio, an overstuffed chair, and a coffee table holding up a bottle of gin and a six-pack of Coke. On the radio a tinny band played a jump tune in some ballroom downtown.
“She’s in the bathroom getting dressed. Gin rickey?” Ann got a clean glass from a cupboard and set it down next to one half-filled with pale red-brown liquid.
“Heavy on the rickey. The night’s young.” He set a gaily wrapped box on the coffee table.
She splashed Coke on top of a half-inch of gin and added two ice cubes from a bucket. “Clean hands, promise.”
He tried not to think of undertakers’ hands, clean as a whistle and pink as a monkey’s butt, and raised the glass. “A lasting peace?”
“The war ended too soon for me. Lost my job to a vet. No offense.” She drank off what was in her glass.
He wondered how long Ellen would be.
Ann sat on the sofa, crossing chubby legs. “I dated a writer: He wrote jingles. ‘R-O-L-O-F-F; roll off the dirt the Roloff way,’” she sang in a harsh contralto. Know it?”
“I was probably overseas at the time.”
“It sold about a million kitchen mops. I got a free one out of the deal.”
“Any good?”
“I used it once, then threw it away and went back to the old-fashioned rag kind. Still, it hung around longer than Henry. The jingle writer?”
He took a sip, purely to sneak a glance at his watch.
“I guess he wasn’t the McCoy. Ell says you write books. I thought you’d have gray hair and smoke a pipe.”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
She squinted. “Don’t get testy, Junior. I’m the mother hen in this arrangement. Ell lost the love of her life to the service. It’s my job to spare her from disappointment.” She poured herself another rickey.
This was news; but he didn’t want to hear it from Ann. He sat in the armchair, watching her. If she lost fifteen pounds and bleached her hair, she could pose for a Blue Devil cover, with a gat in her hand instead of a glass.
Ellen appeared in a blue cotton gown that reached mid-calf with broad shoulder straps that buttoned in front. It was the first time he’d seen her shoulders bare. They were squarish even without pads, but there was nothing masculine about them. Her hair glistened like poured gold. She stooped a little, embarrassed by her height—she was five-eight, thereabouts—and her smile was guarded.
He breathed. “You look like Carole Lombard.”
“She’s dead,” said Ann. He could learn to hate her.
But Ellen ignored her—from practice, he suspected. “You look like Jacob Heppleman, only handsomer. You were made for a dinner jacket.”
“He said he felt like Count Dracula.”
Ellen said, “Aren’t you late for your concert?”
“Holy shit!” Ann looked at her watch, strapped on the underside of her wrist. She gulped her drink, got up, snatched a fur-trimmed stole and a pillbox hat from a rack, and waggled five scarlet nails at them on her way out.
“Anyway,” said Ellen, “she’s housebroken.”
He laughed, full out and loud.
“If she’s in mourning, I’m Eleanor Roosevelt.”
Her gaze was frank. “Her dear old dad was a long-haul trucker. Turned out he had another wife and two kids in Iowa. She didn’t know until they showed up at the funeral.”
“She didn’t waste any time getting cynical.”
“Oh, she was always like that. Now she has an excuse. Is that for me?” She pointed at the box on the table.
He’d forgotten all about it. He picked it up. “This was the custom when I shipped out. You don’t have to wear it.”
She accepted the box, drew off the bow, and tore away the wrapping. The gardenia let out a puff of scent when she lifted off the top. She removed it. “Do the honors?”
He took it with an unsteady hand. The pin looked wicked. “Are you sure it’s worth a purple heart?”
“Jacob. It’s only going to be 1946 four more hours. Do you want me wearing last year’s corsage?” She closed in and placed it in his hand, cupping both of hers around it.
* * *
Les Brown and His Band of Renown was playing at the Plaza. Doris Day, twenty-four years old in a liquid-silver gown, sang “Sentimental Journey” just the way it should be sung once everyone had made the journey back home. They slow-danced, Jacob’s slightly moist hand gripping Ellen’s cool dry one, the other on the small of her back.
She tilted her head to meet his eyes. “Where’d you learn to dance?”
“Did I step on your toes? I’m sorry. Too many forced marches. My calluses have calluses.”
“I meant you dance well. Answer the question.”
“USO.”
“Oh.”
“Disappointed?”
“A little. I thought it might have been some jade in a Paris brothel.”
“Everyone has such romantic notions of my service. I never got within a hundred miles of the Eiffel Tower.”
She lowered her head to his chest and they danced a few bars without speaking.
“You didn’t ask me where I learned.” Her voice vibrated through his sternum.
“I thought girls were born knowing how.”
“For a writer, you don’t know much, do you?”
“I’m beginning to find out how much I don’t.”
The conversation was threatening to become intimate. She changed the subject, as if she’d sensed possible tension. “How’s the great American novel coming along?”
“Thank you for not applying pressure.”
“Sorry. We agreed I’m not a writer. We ordinary folk don’t know what we should and shouldn’t say.”
“You’re not ordinary. It’s one of those things; like Ann calling me Shakespeare. We hacks hate that.”
“You’re not a hack. And I told you not to pay any attention to her.”
He wanted to ask about the other thing Ann had said, about Ellen having lost the love of her life to the service. “I’m curious about how you became friends.”
“She answered my ad for a roommate to share expenses. I didn’t feel one way or the other about her until she ponied up her half of the first month’s rent right on time. After that she was the sister I never had. Why don’t you want to talk about your book?” He’d told her Robin Elk’s idea for The Fence.
“There’s nothing to talk about. My source keeps teasing me with all the shady contacts he has, but he won’t say who they are or where I can find them.” He filled her in on Pickering, leaving out how they’d met. He didn’t think he’d ever know her well enough to share that story.
“Do you really need those contacts? They sound dangerous. What if they think you’re a snitch?”
“‘Snitch’? You’ve been reading too much Heppleman. I wouldn’t pump them like Boston Blackie. I’d go in as a customer, pawn my good conduct medal or something, look around, get the feel of the place.”
“Wouldn’t it look and feel like Pickering’s?”
“I won’t know that until I get inside one.”
“What’s the matter with using your imagination?”
“Pickering said pretty much the same thing. Civilians don’t understand.”
“This one doesn’t.”
“I can’t write about a fence without ever having met one in the flesh. It’s like war. You can read what all the experienced people have to write about it, try to imitate them, maybe even fool some people who’ve never seen it, but until you’ve been there yourself you don’t know the first thing about it.”
“You got out alive. Aren’t you pushing your luck?”
He leaned back to look down at her. “Are you really worried about me?”
The song ended, sparing her the necessity of answering the question, which he’d already regretted asking; peacetime was a minefield that no one had charted for him. The dancers applauded. They returned to their table as the band struck up “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time.”
His Scotch was tepid, the ice cubes floating shapelessly on top like dumplings. He ordered another and a fresh vodka-tonic for Ellen.
“How’s the job search?” he asked while they waited.
“I’ve got an interview next week, at a brokerage firm downtown. Seems they’re having trouble finding someone who can type, take dictation, do arithmetic, and spot-weld a B-29. I’ll probably be doing a lot more of the first three.”
“How’s class?”
“Over and done with. I finished with a B.”
“Been an A if you played ball with Tharp.”
“What do grades mean in the real world?”
“Maybe nothing. Something, maybe. It’s not the same world they ordered me to save. I don’t know what it is yet, but it isn’t the same.”
Their drinks came. Her eyes reflected the sparkle in her glass. “That’s good. You should write that.”
“I’m pretty sure a thousand other guys are doing just that. My agent says we ex-G.I.’s are a drug on the market.”
“And what was your agent doing while you were away fighting for flag and country?”
“Sitting tight, making money hand over fist. Not very patriotic, but it means he knows what he’s talking about. So instead of the world, I’m going to write about people who deal in hot merchandise.”
“Selling yourself short, Heppleman.”
“Holly. Jack Holly.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Sounds like a vaudeville comic.”
He was only half listening. The music was muted, the figures on the dance floor a distant blur.
“What if those people’s world is the world as it is now?” he said.
“I don’t get you.”
“Me neither.” He rose. “Let’s dance.”
She stayed put. “Why are you changing the subject?”
“When you get an idea you don’t smother it by thinking about it.”
An hour and a half later, they pressed themselves into the crowd in Times Square. Snow fell among premature scraps of confetti, the flakes frozen hard as steel shavings by the sub-freezing air; but the close-packed celebrants, wrapped in overcoats, each contributing 98.6 degrees of body heat, warmed the space between the canyon walls like steam rising from an outdoor sauna. When the ball began its jerky, pulley-driven descent from the top of the Times Tower, 1947 in electric lights blinking off and on at the summit, thousands of cheering throats and dozens of orchestras playing “Auld Lang Syne” created an ear-shattering vacuum of air like the Hiroshima bomb. Jacob and Ellen could barely move in the crush, but they wrapped their arms around each other and kissed with the violent desperation of a couple about to be separated by war.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“The ’42 Chardonnay, I think, Jeffrey. It’s chilled?” Robin Elk lifted his eyebrows at the Jamaican waiter in scarlet cutaway and white shirt, waistcoat, and breeches, reminiscent—not entirely by accident, thought Jacob—of an eighteenth-century British Army uniform.
A white-gloved hand took the menu Elk had filled out. “Since seven this morning, sir; before we opened.”
“Splendid.”
The publisher and his guest were seated in the dining room of the Staghunters Club, whose membership was made up chiefly of British subjects of a certain class living in New York. Elk had translated the Latin motto that accompanied the coat-of-arms in the foyer, a caricature of a swollen John Bull standing with one foot on the throat of a rat-faced minuteman: “Even in exile, we are victorious.”
“A gesture of colossal insecurity,” he added in an apologetic tone. “The drawing is after Cruikshank, trumpeting the burning of Washington during the 1812 war. Supply lines are long, and Yankee pot roast is far superior to beef Wellington. Some chaps can’t get past that.”
“I’m glad you said that. I was thinking of getting together with my buddies from the service to kick your butts for the third time.” He constructed his most charming smile, to draw the fangs from the remark.
He wasn’t entirely successful. Elk’s smile was wintry.
“Indeed. Well, thank God recent events have put an end to all that. Someone’s always crying to take down that monstrosity; but I’m afraid we’re stuck with it as long as a founding member yet breathes who remembers the Boer War.”
The building was a relic of old New York: Four stories of pink sandstone with corners rounded by the elements and windows with blown-glass panes offering a bulbous view of Lower Manhattan like a picture taken with a fish-eye lens. They’d passed through a reading room redolent of old leather and tobacco, books on walls and newspapers strewn on tables, the publisher leaning slightly on his cane, his feet shod in shapeless moccasins, and sat down at a small square table draped in crisp linen. This room contained a dozen others under a high coffered ceiling inside walls of English walnut. The moth-eaten head of a stag with mythic antlers glared glassily at Jacob. A monocle would not have seemed out of place.
“Suffocatingly English, Yes? Yes.” For a senior executive, Elk was unusually sensitive to the internal musings of companions. “And absurdly spot-on, like your American murder mystery films set in England, with a gun room in every house and the daily fox hunt. We use tea bags now—marvelous invention, and sure evidence of the rise of the Columbian Empire—and we can’t get enough of John Wayne. Had he been at Munich in ’38, we’d have had no need for Churchill. No reflection on Winston. My father hopes to publish his memoirs now he has time on his hands.”
“I can’t think why he was voted out of office.”
“It’s the old case of the working mastiff versus the fighting bull terrier, like your man Patton. There simply was no place for him in peacetime. But we’re talking about the war once again. Here is Jeffrey, come to our rescue.”
The waiter, all articulated bone beneath café au lait skin, balanced his tray on one hand and set out their food and wine. Jacob studied his shellfish, fanned out in thin shingled slices on a bed of pink horseradish sauce: Uncle Haiyam, forgive me; I don’t keep kosher.
Elk, for once, misinterpreted his reaction. “A tough fish, as some might persuade you. Here, however, the chef’s burly assistants beat it with mallets and whatnot until it runs up the white flag like”—he glanced around and dropped his voice to a whisper—“General Cornwallis. It’s silken to the palate.”
He nodded—appreciatively, he hoped. Five years of Spam and powdered eggs had left him indifferent to food.
Still, the abalone was everything his host said it was and the greens and dessert worthy of the surroundings.
The incomparable Jeffrey brought a selection of cigars banded in red and gold foil. Jacob declined. Elk chose one carefully, after passing the first two below his nostrils and rustling them next to an ear. The waiter ignited it with a gold lighter and withdrew.
It all seemed so well rehearsed it left the observer with an inflated sense of his own importance, as if it had been performed for him alone. Come off it, Jake, m’boy; you’re just another horse in the stable.
“I asked you here,” Elk said at last, “outside the formal confines of the office, because I sense you’re troubled. I’ve yet to see pages, and I know from your history you’re no laggard. Is it the dreaded Block?”
“I wish everyone wouldn’t use that word as if it were capitalized, like the Plague. It gives it a gravity it doesn’t deserve. I’ve never heard of a plumber’s block. It’s just a fancy phrase for laziness.”
“I fail to see the comparison. A plumber looks at a leaky pipe or a stopped drain, identifies the source of the problem, and attends to it. Artists require inspiration.”
“Inspiration’s cheap. Any child can tell an elaborate lie and get out of a spanking.”
“What motivates you?”
“Rent.”
Elk’s smile was almost broad. “Capital answer! I was prepared to sit through a lecture on art and significance. More than ever I’m convinced I was right in selecting you to lead our line. Which is why I’m concerned.”
“I’m stuck, that’s all. It’s not psychological. My research source has been uncooperative.”
“If it’s a question of money, I may be able to shake something loose from the discretionary fund.”
“That’s arranged. Anyway, he’s not poor, just wary. He has reasons not to trust me that I won’t go into.”
“You’re certain you need him?”
“Yes.”
“How can I help?”
“You can’t; unless you have connections to the underworld.”
Jeffrey came to clear the table. When they were alone, Elk produced a crocodile notebook and a fat green fountain pen. He began writing. Jacob stared.
“This is the address of our best illustrator, Phil Scarpetti.” Elk tore off the sheet and gave it to him. “He lives and works in a loft in the lowest part of the Village—and you thought I was a cliché. He’s doing the cover for The Fence; we hope. He’s in the way of being a genius, but we overlook that because he’s never missed a deadline and his covers sell more books than the bylines. We’d sack the rest of the staff and use him exclusively, except he’s temperamental. He accepts only those assignments that appeal to him. He’s turned down Saroyan and Aldous Huxley; ‘derivative,’ he called them. Yes, he actually reads the books we send him. I think you’ll benefit from his acquaintance.”
Jacob looked at the sheet. It was just a name, a number, and a street. “‘Temperamental’ usually means pain-in-the-neck.”
“Oh, he is. Our first art director resigned rather than work with him again. Went into the seminary.”
“I told you I’m not looking for inspiration. If I were, do you think I’d find it in some artist’s idea of what I’m going to write before it’s written? Most of the time they don’t get it right even after.”
“I’m not suggesting a pep talk.” Elk broke a half-inch of cigar ash into a heavy silver tray. “Scarpetti’s an ex-convict, on parole from a ten-year sentence for armed robbery. He may be in a position to put you onto the people you seek.”
“She’s in the bathroom getting dressed. Gin rickey?” Ann got a clean glass from a cupboard and set it down next to one half-filled with pale red-brown liquid.
“Heavy on the rickey. The night’s young.” He set a gaily wrapped box on the coffee table.
She splashed Coke on top of a half-inch of gin and added two ice cubes from a bucket. “Clean hands, promise.”
He tried not to think of undertakers’ hands, clean as a whistle and pink as a monkey’s butt, and raised the glass. “A lasting peace?”
“The war ended too soon for me. Lost my job to a vet. No offense.” She drank off what was in her glass.
He wondered how long Ellen would be.
Ann sat on the sofa, crossing chubby legs. “I dated a writer: He wrote jingles. ‘R-O-L-O-F-F; roll off the dirt the Roloff way,’” she sang in a harsh contralto. Know it?”
“I was probably overseas at the time.”
“It sold about a million kitchen mops. I got a free one out of the deal.”
“Any good?”
“I used it once, then threw it away and went back to the old-fashioned rag kind. Still, it hung around longer than Henry. The jingle writer?”
He took a sip, purely to sneak a glance at his watch.
“I guess he wasn’t the McCoy. Ell says you write books. I thought you’d have gray hair and smoke a pipe.”
“Sorry to disappoint.”
She squinted. “Don’t get testy, Junior. I’m the mother hen in this arrangement. Ell lost the love of her life to the service. It’s my job to spare her from disappointment.” She poured herself another rickey.
This was news; but he didn’t want to hear it from Ann. He sat in the armchair, watching her. If she lost fifteen pounds and bleached her hair, she could pose for a Blue Devil cover, with a gat in her hand instead of a glass.
Ellen appeared in a blue cotton gown that reached mid-calf with broad shoulder straps that buttoned in front. It was the first time he’d seen her shoulders bare. They were squarish even without pads, but there was nothing masculine about them. Her hair glistened like poured gold. She stooped a little, embarrassed by her height—she was five-eight, thereabouts—and her smile was guarded.
He breathed. “You look like Carole Lombard.”
“She’s dead,” said Ann. He could learn to hate her.
But Ellen ignored her—from practice, he suspected. “You look like Jacob Heppleman, only handsomer. You were made for a dinner jacket.”
“He said he felt like Count Dracula.”
Ellen said, “Aren’t you late for your concert?”
“Holy shit!” Ann looked at her watch, strapped on the underside of her wrist. She gulped her drink, got up, snatched a fur-trimmed stole and a pillbox hat from a rack, and waggled five scarlet nails at them on her way out.
“Anyway,” said Ellen, “she’s housebroken.”
He laughed, full out and loud.
“If she’s in mourning, I’m Eleanor Roosevelt.”
Her gaze was frank. “Her dear old dad was a long-haul trucker. Turned out he had another wife and two kids in Iowa. She didn’t know until they showed up at the funeral.”
“She didn’t waste any time getting cynical.”
“Oh, she was always like that. Now she has an excuse. Is that for me?” She pointed at the box on the table.
He’d forgotten all about it. He picked it up. “This was the custom when I shipped out. You don’t have to wear it.”
She accepted the box, drew off the bow, and tore away the wrapping. The gardenia let out a puff of scent when she lifted off the top. She removed it. “Do the honors?”
He took it with an unsteady hand. The pin looked wicked. “Are you sure it’s worth a purple heart?”
“Jacob. It’s only going to be 1946 four more hours. Do you want me wearing last year’s corsage?” She closed in and placed it in his hand, cupping both of hers around it.
* * *
Les Brown and His Band of Renown was playing at the Plaza. Doris Day, twenty-four years old in a liquid-silver gown, sang “Sentimental Journey” just the way it should be sung once everyone had made the journey back home. They slow-danced, Jacob’s slightly moist hand gripping Ellen’s cool dry one, the other on the small of her back.
She tilted her head to meet his eyes. “Where’d you learn to dance?”
“Did I step on your toes? I’m sorry. Too many forced marches. My calluses have calluses.”
“I meant you dance well. Answer the question.”
“USO.”
“Oh.”
“Disappointed?”
“A little. I thought it might have been some jade in a Paris brothel.”
“Everyone has such romantic notions of my service. I never got within a hundred miles of the Eiffel Tower.”
She lowered her head to his chest and they danced a few bars without speaking.
“You didn’t ask me where I learned.” Her voice vibrated through his sternum.
“I thought girls were born knowing how.”
“For a writer, you don’t know much, do you?”
“I’m beginning to find out how much I don’t.”
The conversation was threatening to become intimate. She changed the subject, as if she’d sensed possible tension. “How’s the great American novel coming along?”
“Thank you for not applying pressure.”
“Sorry. We agreed I’m not a writer. We ordinary folk don’t know what we should and shouldn’t say.”
“You’re not ordinary. It’s one of those things; like Ann calling me Shakespeare. We hacks hate that.”
“You’re not a hack. And I told you not to pay any attention to her.”
He wanted to ask about the other thing Ann had said, about Ellen having lost the love of her life to the service. “I’m curious about how you became friends.”
“She answered my ad for a roommate to share expenses. I didn’t feel one way or the other about her until she ponied up her half of the first month’s rent right on time. After that she was the sister I never had. Why don’t you want to talk about your book?” He’d told her Robin Elk’s idea for The Fence.
“There’s nothing to talk about. My source keeps teasing me with all the shady contacts he has, but he won’t say who they are or where I can find them.” He filled her in on Pickering, leaving out how they’d met. He didn’t think he’d ever know her well enough to share that story.
“Do you really need those contacts? They sound dangerous. What if they think you’re a snitch?”
“‘Snitch’? You’ve been reading too much Heppleman. I wouldn’t pump them like Boston Blackie. I’d go in as a customer, pawn my good conduct medal or something, look around, get the feel of the place.”
“Wouldn’t it look and feel like Pickering’s?”
“I won’t know that until I get inside one.”
“What’s the matter with using your imagination?”
“Pickering said pretty much the same thing. Civilians don’t understand.”
“This one doesn’t.”
“I can’t write about a fence without ever having met one in the flesh. It’s like war. You can read what all the experienced people have to write about it, try to imitate them, maybe even fool some people who’ve never seen it, but until you’ve been there yourself you don’t know the first thing about it.”
“You got out alive. Aren’t you pushing your luck?”
He leaned back to look down at her. “Are you really worried about me?”
The song ended, sparing her the necessity of answering the question, which he’d already regretted asking; peacetime was a minefield that no one had charted for him. The dancers applauded. They returned to their table as the band struck up “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time.”
His Scotch was tepid, the ice cubes floating shapelessly on top like dumplings. He ordered another and a fresh vodka-tonic for Ellen.
“How’s the job search?” he asked while they waited.
“I’ve got an interview next week, at a brokerage firm downtown. Seems they’re having trouble finding someone who can type, take dictation, do arithmetic, and spot-weld a B-29. I’ll probably be doing a lot more of the first three.”
“How’s class?”
“Over and done with. I finished with a B.”
“Been an A if you played ball with Tharp.”
“What do grades mean in the real world?”
“Maybe nothing. Something, maybe. It’s not the same world they ordered me to save. I don’t know what it is yet, but it isn’t the same.”
Their drinks came. Her eyes reflected the sparkle in her glass. “That’s good. You should write that.”
“I’m pretty sure a thousand other guys are doing just that. My agent says we ex-G.I.’s are a drug on the market.”
“And what was your agent doing while you were away fighting for flag and country?”
“Sitting tight, making money hand over fist. Not very patriotic, but it means he knows what he’s talking about. So instead of the world, I’m going to write about people who deal in hot merchandise.”
“Selling yourself short, Heppleman.”
“Holly. Jack Holly.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Sounds like a vaudeville comic.”
He was only half listening. The music was muted, the figures on the dance floor a distant blur.
“What if those people’s world is the world as it is now?” he said.
“I don’t get you.”
“Me neither.” He rose. “Let’s dance.”
She stayed put. “Why are you changing the subject?”
“When you get an idea you don’t smother it by thinking about it.”
An hour and a half later, they pressed themselves into the crowd in Times Square. Snow fell among premature scraps of confetti, the flakes frozen hard as steel shavings by the sub-freezing air; but the close-packed celebrants, wrapped in overcoats, each contributing 98.6 degrees of body heat, warmed the space between the canyon walls like steam rising from an outdoor sauna. When the ball began its jerky, pulley-driven descent from the top of the Times Tower, 1947 in electric lights blinking off and on at the summit, thousands of cheering throats and dozens of orchestras playing “Auld Lang Syne” created an ear-shattering vacuum of air like the Hiroshima bomb. Jacob and Ellen could barely move in the crush, but they wrapped their arms around each other and kissed with the violent desperation of a couple about to be separated by war.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“The ’42 Chardonnay, I think, Jeffrey. It’s chilled?” Robin Elk lifted his eyebrows at the Jamaican waiter in scarlet cutaway and white shirt, waistcoat, and breeches, reminiscent—not entirely by accident, thought Jacob—of an eighteenth-century British Army uniform.
A white-gloved hand took the menu Elk had filled out. “Since seven this morning, sir; before we opened.”
“Splendid.”
The publisher and his guest were seated in the dining room of the Staghunters Club, whose membership was made up chiefly of British subjects of a certain class living in New York. Elk had translated the Latin motto that accompanied the coat-of-arms in the foyer, a caricature of a swollen John Bull standing with one foot on the throat of a rat-faced minuteman: “Even in exile, we are victorious.”
“A gesture of colossal insecurity,” he added in an apologetic tone. “The drawing is after Cruikshank, trumpeting the burning of Washington during the 1812 war. Supply lines are long, and Yankee pot roast is far superior to beef Wellington. Some chaps can’t get past that.”
“I’m glad you said that. I was thinking of getting together with my buddies from the service to kick your butts for the third time.” He constructed his most charming smile, to draw the fangs from the remark.
He wasn’t entirely successful. Elk’s smile was wintry.
“Indeed. Well, thank God recent events have put an end to all that. Someone’s always crying to take down that monstrosity; but I’m afraid we’re stuck with it as long as a founding member yet breathes who remembers the Boer War.”
The building was a relic of old New York: Four stories of pink sandstone with corners rounded by the elements and windows with blown-glass panes offering a bulbous view of Lower Manhattan like a picture taken with a fish-eye lens. They’d passed through a reading room redolent of old leather and tobacco, books on walls and newspapers strewn on tables, the publisher leaning slightly on his cane, his feet shod in shapeless moccasins, and sat down at a small square table draped in crisp linen. This room contained a dozen others under a high coffered ceiling inside walls of English walnut. The moth-eaten head of a stag with mythic antlers glared glassily at Jacob. A monocle would not have seemed out of place.
“Suffocatingly English, Yes? Yes.” For a senior executive, Elk was unusually sensitive to the internal musings of companions. “And absurdly spot-on, like your American murder mystery films set in England, with a gun room in every house and the daily fox hunt. We use tea bags now—marvelous invention, and sure evidence of the rise of the Columbian Empire—and we can’t get enough of John Wayne. Had he been at Munich in ’38, we’d have had no need for Churchill. No reflection on Winston. My father hopes to publish his memoirs now he has time on his hands.”
“I can’t think why he was voted out of office.”
“It’s the old case of the working mastiff versus the fighting bull terrier, like your man Patton. There simply was no place for him in peacetime. But we’re talking about the war once again. Here is Jeffrey, come to our rescue.”
The waiter, all articulated bone beneath café au lait skin, balanced his tray on one hand and set out their food and wine. Jacob studied his shellfish, fanned out in thin shingled slices on a bed of pink horseradish sauce: Uncle Haiyam, forgive me; I don’t keep kosher.
Elk, for once, misinterpreted his reaction. “A tough fish, as some might persuade you. Here, however, the chef’s burly assistants beat it with mallets and whatnot until it runs up the white flag like”—he glanced around and dropped his voice to a whisper—“General Cornwallis. It’s silken to the palate.”
He nodded—appreciatively, he hoped. Five years of Spam and powdered eggs had left him indifferent to food.
Still, the abalone was everything his host said it was and the greens and dessert worthy of the surroundings.
The incomparable Jeffrey brought a selection of cigars banded in red and gold foil. Jacob declined. Elk chose one carefully, after passing the first two below his nostrils and rustling them next to an ear. The waiter ignited it with a gold lighter and withdrew.
It all seemed so well rehearsed it left the observer with an inflated sense of his own importance, as if it had been performed for him alone. Come off it, Jake, m’boy; you’re just another horse in the stable.
“I asked you here,” Elk said at last, “outside the formal confines of the office, because I sense you’re troubled. I’ve yet to see pages, and I know from your history you’re no laggard. Is it the dreaded Block?”
“I wish everyone wouldn’t use that word as if it were capitalized, like the Plague. It gives it a gravity it doesn’t deserve. I’ve never heard of a plumber’s block. It’s just a fancy phrase for laziness.”
“I fail to see the comparison. A plumber looks at a leaky pipe or a stopped drain, identifies the source of the problem, and attends to it. Artists require inspiration.”
“Inspiration’s cheap. Any child can tell an elaborate lie and get out of a spanking.”
“What motivates you?”
“Rent.”
Elk’s smile was almost broad. “Capital answer! I was prepared to sit through a lecture on art and significance. More than ever I’m convinced I was right in selecting you to lead our line. Which is why I’m concerned.”
“I’m stuck, that’s all. It’s not psychological. My research source has been uncooperative.”
“If it’s a question of money, I may be able to shake something loose from the discretionary fund.”
“That’s arranged. Anyway, he’s not poor, just wary. He has reasons not to trust me that I won’t go into.”
“You’re certain you need him?”
“Yes.”
“How can I help?”
“You can’t; unless you have connections to the underworld.”
Jeffrey came to clear the table. When they were alone, Elk produced a crocodile notebook and a fat green fountain pen. He began writing. Jacob stared.
“This is the address of our best illustrator, Phil Scarpetti.” Elk tore off the sheet and gave it to him. “He lives and works in a loft in the lowest part of the Village—and you thought I was a cliché. He’s doing the cover for The Fence; we hope. He’s in the way of being a genius, but we overlook that because he’s never missed a deadline and his covers sell more books than the bylines. We’d sack the rest of the staff and use him exclusively, except he’s temperamental. He accepts only those assignments that appeal to him. He’s turned down Saroyan and Aldous Huxley; ‘derivative,’ he called them. Yes, he actually reads the books we send him. I think you’ll benefit from his acquaintance.”
Jacob looked at the sheet. It was just a name, a number, and a street. “‘Temperamental’ usually means pain-in-the-neck.”
“Oh, he is. Our first art director resigned rather than work with him again. Went into the seminary.”
“I told you I’m not looking for inspiration. If I were, do you think I’d find it in some artist’s idea of what I’m going to write before it’s written? Most of the time they don’t get it right even after.”
“I’m not suggesting a pep talk.” Elk broke a half-inch of cigar ash into a heavy silver tray. “Scarpetti’s an ex-convict, on parole from a ten-year sentence for armed robbery. He may be in a position to put you onto the people you seek.”
