Gun Church (11 page)

About an hour after that, Renee, wearing only what she was when she came into the world, showed up at my office door, a faded old accordion file tucked under her arm. “What’s this, Ken?”

“What?” Still tired, I barely glanced at her. I kept peering through the curtains in my office, watching for Jim’s truck. The St. Pauli Girl walked over to me, pressing her body against my back, wrapping one arm around me. I heard the file land on my desk.

“Are you bored with me?”

“What are you talking about?” I sounded annoyed, but regretted it. I spun around and tried to hug her, but she pushed away from me and moved back by the door.

“Does Jim fuck like me?”

“What?”

“Look at me,” she said, rubbing her right hand over her breasts, letting it brush over the trim triangle of dark blond hair between her thighs. “Are you more interested in Jim than me? More interested in that book? Aren’t I enough to keep your attention?”

“Don’t be silly. Come here.”

She didn’t hesitate. I kissed her softly on the mouth and then turned her around so that her bare, muscular back rested against my chest and abdomen. I threw my right arm around her breasts, pulling her so close that not even the Holy Ghost could have slipped between us. Brushing her lush blond hair away with the point of my chin, I ran my mouth over the light down on the nape of her neck, kissed her ears. I let the fingertips of my left hand trace the curve of her hip. I slid my fingers slowly across her flat belly and down into her soft, trimmed thatch of hair. Her breaths grew short and rapid and she was already wet as I ran my fingers gently along her folds. I nudged the tip of my finger into the split at the tip of her labia. Not wanting to rush her, I made lazy, gentle passes, increasing the speed and pressure just a little with each stroke. Finally, she grabbed my wrist and pressed my fingers hard against her. Her back arched, body shuddered. She sighed and relaxed, falling fully against me.

We stood there like that for a few minutes, the tension flowing out of her body. She felt small and vulnerable in my arms. It was dawning on me that I did in fact know far more about Jim than I did about the St. Pauli Girl. I really had cut myself off from women. I’d sleep with them, but I didn’t want to know them or anything about them.

“I’m sorry about before,” I said, kissing her on top of her head. “I didn’t sleep much last night.”

“Why not?”

“Meg’s supposed to be calling soon about the book deal and the tension’s starting to get to me.”

“Oh, the publishing stuff.”

“Yeah, that.” I kissed her again, let her go, and retrieved the file from the desk. “You were asking about this.”

“I found it in bed instead of you,” she said, wrapping herself up in an old quilt thrown over the back of my desk chair.

I brushed a loose strand of hair out of her eyes, tucking it behind her ear, and kissed her on the mouth.

“What about the file?” she asked, sitting down in my desk chair.

I reached into the file. “You’ve seen me writing lately.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m writing about what’s in here,” I said, handing her a tattered spiral notebook.

“What is it?”

“It’s the diary of a murderer.”

She got a sick look on her face. “A murderer?”

I told her about being sent to do a piece on the Troubles and detailed how I’d met the man who’d hunted me down in Deptford, how he’d given me that damned notebook.

“But why you?” she asked.

“He never said anything except he heard I was looking for a different kind of story. I don’t know. Maybe he could spot a fellow lost soul.”

“Didn’t you ask?”

I laughed. “He wasn’t the kind of man to ask.”

“What makes his story so different?”

“Because he was like the slave ship captain who comes to see the tragedy of what he has done. But unlike the slave ship captain who writes ‘Amazing Grace’ because he believes there is a God to redeem him, McGuinn knows there is no God. McGuinn is so much more a tragic figure because he knows there is no redemption or forgiveness. What is done is done.”

But the book wasn’t done and when Jim called to say he’d be a half hour late, I went back to it.

Weiler’s writing was, for my money, always less than the sum of its parts. The novels were like long-form versions of Steely Dan songs: slick, well-produced, clever as hell, but rather soulless and incomprehensible.

—E-MAIL FROM HASKELL BROWN TO FRANZ DUDEK

I’d broken the mile barrier on my run that morning and felt like Chuck Yeager. The euphoria was short-lived because when Jim dropped me back off at my house, I noticed the red message-light flashing as I walked through the front door. I recited the procrastinator’s oath to myself—
Never do now what you can put off until you die
—but I wasn’t a procrastinator by temperament or nature. If I was five minutes early, I felt ten minutes late. Even when I was writing
Curley Takes Five
, possibly one of the worst books ever written, I was weeks early for my deadline. An editor at Penguin once confided in me that her definition of a perfect author was one who hands in a brilliant manuscript and then gets hit by a bus. In my case, I think Ferris, Ledoux would have settled for the bus and considered themselves lucky. Those were dark days.

That was a long time ago and the red light flashing was now. The message was a terse
Kip, call me back. Pronto! Meg
. I knew Meg Donovan. Terse messages meant things had gone badly.

I dispensed with the chit chat. “How bad is it?”

“All is not lost.”

“Said the optimistic surgeon to the triple amputee. That’s a little cryptic even for you, Donovan.”

“The rights deal is still on, no problem. They even upped the offer.”

“But the new book is off. That’s what you’re telling me,” I said.

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“Fuck!”

“Don’t take it out on me.”

“I said fuck, Meg, not fuck you.”

“Look, Kip, this isn’t all bad. By us throwing a demand for a new book into the mix, we gave Travers Legacy an out, but they didn’t take it and sweetened the pot. They want those books. If the new editions of your books sell well, they might be amenable to tossing you a bone next year.”

“And this tossing me a bone notion is based on what exactly, my horoscope?”

“I had lunch with Mary Caputo last week,” she said. “Mary Caputo is Franz Dudek’s assistant at Travers Legacy. Franz Dudek is the publisher.”

“And … ”

“And Mary told me Dudek was definitely willing to give you a one-book deal, a small deal, but a deal. Before you go bonkers, Kip, you should know it wasn’t a wholly artistic decision on his part. He loves your old stuff, but he was willing to take a flier on the new book for the same reasons he’s including you in the rights deal.”

“The dead kid.”

There was a brief silence on Meg’s end of the phone. “That’s right, the late Frank Vuchovich. You understand the value of free publicity. Well, it’s even more important now than it used to be. Publishing is about to get swept away by the social media/e-book tsunami just like the music industry got wiped out by digital downloads.”

“So what happened?”

“Haskell Brown happened. He put the kibosh on the new book. He never wanted any part of you to begin with. He was pressured by Dudek to include your books in the retro package. That was as far as Haskell was willing to go and he wasn’t very willing to go that far, if you get my meaning. He let Dudek know he would quit if push came to shove and Dudek wasn’t going to push or shove any further for you.”

“What the hell did I ever do to Haskell Brown? Did I bone his wife at a party or something?”

“Haskell’s gay.”

“What, he thinks I would have boned his wife if he were straight?”

“I told you, Kip, people here remember the Kipster. Haskell worked as an assistant editor for Moira before she died, so he heard all the dirt about you and how impossible it was for Moira to deal with you at the end. So I’ll send the rights contract down for you to sign.” It wasn’t a question.

“Nope. Tell them I want two weeks to think it over.”

“Two weeks! What the hell for?”

“Because I’m disappointed. Because I’m angry. Because I’m a foolish, self-destructive prick. Take your pick.”

“Why not ask for two months or two years?”

“Don’t give me any ideas, Meg.”

“Don’t be an asshole, Kip. You’ll blow this.”

“It won’t be the first thing I’ve fucked up, will it?”

“The list is long and apparently still growing.”

“You know the funny thing about playing chicken with me these days, Meg?”

“What’s that?”

“I’ve got nowhere else to fall and nothing left to lose.”

“Except this deal,” she said.

“No, the rights deal is something to gain, not to lose. Seems like two different things from where I’m sitting. Tell them two weeks.”

“If you promise me something.”

“Depends on what.”

“That if they call your bluff when the two weeks are over, you’ll sign.”

“I might.”

“Fuck you, Weiler.”

“I love you too, Donovan. Talk to you in fourteen days.”

Click.

I was dead quiet during most of our ride up into the hills and, for the first time since we began this routine, Jim Trimble seemed off balance. He didn’t know what to make of my sullenness or how to react to my silence. It reminded me that in spite of his big ideas and his prowess with guns, he was just a goofy kid who thought the world outside Brixton was what he saw when he surfed the net or what he’d read in the pages of my books—the poor dumb schmuck. He’d seen less of the world than Patty Duke:
But Patty’s only seen the sights a girl can see from Brooklyn Heights …
For weeks now, I’d acted the prized pupil to his wise and benevolent master. It didn’t feel that way today. Nothing felt the same. The falls and rapids didn’t seem quite so majestic. Yet when the kid handed me the .25 Beretta, something changed.

I took off the safety, swung the little automatic around, and put the entire clip into the trunk of a tree about thirty feet away from me. If ever there were such things as angry bullets, I’d just pumped them into that pine. I tossed the gun down in disgust as Jim ran over to the tree.

“Holy shit, Kip! Come over here and look at this. Check this out!” he said, poking his index finger in and out of the tight grouping of holes in the flesh of the tree. “It’s not like one bullet’s on top of the next, but it’s pretty damned good. Hell, you’ve never shot like that. What got into you?”

“Anger and self-loathing must do wonders for my shooting.”

He tilted his head, staring up at me like a confused puppy. “What happened to piss you off so bad?”

I’d told him previously about my conversation with Meg and about my asking for a new book contract. Jim had been totally with me—a real shocker—and thought my risking all that money was further vindication of his choosing me as the focus of his hero worship. Christ, you should have seen him. In the blink of an eye, my standing up to Stan took a backseat to my taking on the big bad world of New York publishing.

“They turned me down.”

“Who did?” he asked, still kneeling by the tree.

“Haskell Brown, the editor at Travers Legacy. They want my old books, but it looks like a new book’s out of the question.”

“He’s crazy. How could he not want a new book from you?”

Jim wasn’t putting me on either. He was utterly sincere and seemed bewildered and hurt about it. It was kind of sweet, really, to have him hurt on my behalf. Because I had managed to alienate everyone from my past who might have taken up my cause, it had been a long time since anyone felt connected to me in this way.