Juice (2 page)

“Of course not,” Osterman said. “She's in New York. Joe was going to talk to her.”

“Shall I have him call you?”

“Yah, please. Before six.”

Hendricks, the lawyer: Eugene, Oregon, would come in; so would Carson City, and the FCC was in the bag. Could Harrison call him back?

Schmidt, circulation: a distributors' strike was likely. Something would have to be done. Harrison would call back.

Henry arrived with the sandwiches and coffee. Miss Dumont smiled. Her torso twisted splendidly as she turned for her purse; she paid, tipped. Henry was normally goggle-eyed, a burgeoning adolescent in a world of billboards; carnal desire burned in him like an Olympic torch. He read novels, and delivery boys in novels did very well. Henry had been a delivery boy for eighteen months and nothing had happened; he was almost stupefied by anxiety. Miss Dumont was far too much for him. He fled. She laughed to herself.

She took the sandwiches to Harrison's office.

“He's coming,” Joe Harrison said.

“Sometimes I don't give a damn,” Weinstein said. “They run the paper the way they want to. But if they ask
me
to run it, they run it my way.” His stomach rumbled.

“Acute borborygmus,” Harrison diagnosed.

“Corned beef,” Weinstein agreed. “Also I want two hours for lunch. I like a good meal in the middle of the day. Peps me up for the afternoon. My grandmother always—”

“Go to hell,” Harrison said. “And a good breakfast because it peps you up for the morning. And a good dinner because fornication is heavy work.”

“All right,” Weinstein said. “My health is unimportant. I only regret that I have but one life to give to P.A.N.
De mortuis
—”

“—non disputandum est,”
Harrison finished. “Which is why I sometimes wish you
were
dead. Everybody else in this organization is flexible. Amenable. Negotiable, so to speak. Only you: complaints, miseries, you're saddled with incompetents, distribution stinks, advertising stinks, circulation stinks. Not a week goes by without a cheerful visit from Old Mort Weinstein. You're a troublemaker. A perfectionist. A subversive. We want harmony! Is that clear?” Harrison's voice had altered; he was Arthur Rhein. It was an old joke. “Adjustment. No emery dust in the lubrication. No discord. Take music. What is music without harmony?”

Lawrence MacKenzie walked in. He was administrative director of the wire service. He was thirty-eight years old, barely plump, balding, bespectacled, and unable to admit to himself that he was unhappy about his marriage, his salary, and his rank. He could not eat tomatoes or eggplant. He rarely smiled.

Weinstein was laughing. “Good afternoon,” Harrison said. “Mort has troubles.”

“Hello, Mort,” MacKenzie said.

Weinstein, still smiling, nodded.

“Mort is at it again,” Harrison went on. “You will recall his January visit. Newsprint had gone up; his budget had not. February: he suggested that we meet the union demands—they were fair, he said, in that archaic vocabulary of his—provided they would allow him to cut away some dead wood, replacing it with good men. He also proved, in his non-Euclidian way, that it would be economical. His suggestion broke the deadlock, which placed a further strain on his already overweening vanity. March: now what was it in March?”

“The new presses.” Mort smiled.

“Aha. The new presses. Buying basic machinery in a period of tight money. Weinstein is, in short, a radical. An unreliable element. Long on work, long on results, but perilously short on
group spirit.
Hell,” he said, “I can't keep this up. Mort has another problem. I want you to straighten it out, in my name, and do it Mort's way, you hear?”

MacKenzie, who had wavered between frown and smile, now frowned. “Why didn't you come to me?” he asked Weinstein.

Weinstein exhaled ponderously. “Because this thing was bigger than both of us.”

“All right,” MacKenzie said. “What's the trouble?”

“Our own wire service,” Harrison said flatly. “They hold out on the paper. They get squibs to Marshall just in time for the late TV news; they don't get them to Mort in time for his last edition. A week ago they had news on the air at seven. Mort got it officially at seven-fifty. The worst is that it's mostly local stuff. World news is duplicated anyway, on the other wires. But local stuff is more important to Mort than it is to Marshall; people don't go to the TV news for items about noodling in Santa Barbara. And because it's small stuff, it isn't worth it for Mort to replate at the last minute. He needs it when it comes in.”

MacKenzie nodded. “Any idea why?” he asked Weinstein.

“I don't know,” Weinstein said slowly.

“Womack has never liked Mort,” Harrison said. “I don't know why; I can guess. The reason is unimportant at the moment.”

MacKenzie nodded without expression. He too could guess. Womack was a narrow-minded man. MacKenzie had never thought much about Jews, but he did not like the way Mort made him feel. Mort was not handsome, to begin with, or even clean-cut. It was a question of inspiring confidence. But then MacKenzie did not like the way Harrison made him feel.

“Womack resents anybody who works hard and screams and insists on the best,” Harrison went on. “Womack thinks a paper should be like a house organ. He doesn't trust originality and he doesn't like mavericks. I know for sure he doesn't like me. But I'm too high up. So he knifes Mort. Tomorrow he knifes Larry MacKenzie. You stop him, Larry. If you have to, you can tell him everything I've said here today. You can tell him I don't care how or through whom he got his job. One more complaint like this and he's out. Tell him he's a damn fool, too; the wire-service stuff has the hour marked on it. He should know better. Tell him even if I didn't care who he feuded with, I'd be down on him because he's a damn fool. And you—” he turned to Weinstein—“don't wait a week next time. You can't handle anything like this yourself; you're not supposed to; you're not paid to; you haven't the authority. Come straight to me. You hear? The paper's the best product we have. And you—” he turned to MacKenzie—“can forget that you heard me say that. Clear? If it gets back to me you can turn in your overalls.”

“Okay,” MacKenzie said.

“Right,” Weinstein said.

“Now get out of here,” Harrison said. “I have to call a lady.” He picked up his telephone. “Get me Flavia Montrose at the Pierre.… Yes. New York.”

Weinstein waved.

“Wait a minute,” Harrison said. “You go along, Larry.”

MacKenzie left.

“Come out, Mort,” Harrison said. “Every time I see you I ask you. We'll kill a bottle of liquor and talk about the world. Bring a girl if you want. Helen likes you. You're a hero to Mike anyway. He wants a press card for his birthday.”

“I will,” Weinstein said. “I really will. I'll call you. I'll bring Mike a hat that curls up in front.”

Harrison laughed. “Good. Make it soon, will you?”

Flavia, Joe Harrison was thinking. Flavia Montrose. Jo Ann Jenks, or something, from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, or someplace. Pushing forty and oh so sleek, but the public loved her. Even Broadway hadn't seen through her. They loved her. So I must have her. Oh, yes, I must have her. If it costs twenty thousand bucks. P.A.N. brings you Flavia Montrose in her first television appearance. Sheridan: they'll love it—low-cut. Humanity, wonderful humanity. Sell their birthright for a mess of cleavage. So? What else? Utopia? Assless society? Good line: mobility of the asses. Governing asses. Working asses.

“Hello, hello,” he said. “What's the matter here?”

“I have New York,” his secretary said. “They're ringing Miss Montrose.”

“Good.”

“Miss Montrose does not answer,” a voice said.

“When will she be back?” Harrison cut in.

“I don't know, sir, I'm sorry.”

“All right. Ask her to call Joe Harrison on the Coast, will you? She has the number.”

“I'll leave the message, sir.”

“Thanks.”

“Mr. Rhein is on another wire,” Miss Dumont said.

“Good God,” Harrison said. “Put him on.”

“Joe? Joe, hello, Joe.” The old man's voice was hearty.

“How goes it, Arthur?”

“Just fine. I had an idea today.”

Harrison slumped. His eyes closed. “Arthur,” he said, “what have I told you about board chairmen with ideas?”

“Well, I know, I know,” Rhein said. “But this is a honey.”

“Those are the ones that really hurt,” Harrison said.

“I don't like that, Joe.” Rhein's voice was sharper.

“Sorry. Go ahead.”

“It's fairly complicated. Maybe I'd better save it for some other time.”

“No, no. Give it to me now. Go ahead.”

“All right,” Rhein said. “It's about the Press.”

The Press was Emerald House. Arthur Rhein resented, with all the indignation of the true Westerner and all the fire of the true non-reader, New York's monoply of book publishing; and being a man of action, he acted. (The task was facilitated by a fortune in eight figures.) The Press was of course Rhein's own project, and in his mind it was more important than the rest of P.A.N. Harrison knew that in the final analysis this was true; but he also knew that Rhein was incapable of final, semifinal, or even preliminary analysis. Rhein had, from some hidden store of useless and undirected imagination, produced several “ideas” for the Press. One was a play on the name: they would have a Sapphire series, a Ruby series, an Opal series, with a colored stripe on the jacket to distinguish each; the Ruby, you see, is red, the Sapphire is blue, and all on a green ground for the Emerald, and one will be poetry, another history, another fiction—you see? Do you see? How ingenious? Another of his ideas was pop-ups in a set of Dickens: Micawber, Sam Weller, Pickwick, Scrooge would rise from the page in full color, done to the life, in really fine detail, astonishing what an artist can do, that fellow who does the magazine covers, do you see?

“Go on,” Harrison said.

“I think we can really make money by co-ordinating our book publicity with our television schedule. Spot ads for individual volumes. Ten seconds each. Catch the right audience. Robert Louis Stevenson for the children's shows. Modern novels for the heavy drama. Sports, music, everything. Do you see?”

It was a sounder idea than most of Rhein's, and would lose less money. Harrison knew; he had been over the ground with a New York publisher three months before. But it would do less for Rhein than for almost anyone else; Rhein had few books, bad circulation, few good bookstore accounts, and the odd notion that the ideal book advertisement consisted of four to five thousand almost illegible words, punctuated solely by exclamation points, on a single tabloid sheet.

“Yes, I see,” Harrison said. “I've even got some figures on it for you. It won't work, you know. Not for a small outfit like Emerald, and probably not even for a large outfit.”

“Won't work? Won't work? Why won't it work? How do you know? Has it been tried? It's the best idea I've had since I set up the press. They'll send in by the thousands.”

“Send in?”

“Yes, of course. Direct sales. Three dollars: book, handling, mailing.”

“Oh, for the love of God, Arthur,” Harrison said. “And a mail-order staff, and an auditing staff, and an ad agency, and the fact that people don't send in for anything that costs them more than a quarter.”

“But how do you know?” Rhein said. “You're being stubborn. You're opposing me simply because I'm on the board. You think of yourself as a professional. You don't want amateurs coming in with new ideas, independent ideas, working for new successes. You want things as they are. You're afraid of the conflict that must accompany growth.”

“If I didn't like conflict,” Harrison said crisply, “I'd agree with you now and let this conversation drop. I think the idea's no good. I'm hired to keep P.A.N. big and healthy. To keep profits coming in. Keep the outfit growing. I don't like to lose money when I don't have to. And I've been over this problem. With Harry Bing.”

“Harry Bing? From New York?”

“Harry Bing from New York.”

“That's disloyalty. Why should you need a New York publisher?”

“Because he thinks, works hard, he's been around for years. Mostly because he knows about these things.”

“Conditions are different here,” Rhein said.

“One of them's the same,” Harrison told him, smiling. “Suppose it works. People don't read books and watch television at the same time. If your sales go up and my ratings go down, we lose money. I won't say it isn't better for Western Culture. But the board would be on my neck in a month. And your sales won't go up, not enough to make up the money.”

“You're a bullheaded man, Harrison.”

“That's three,” Harrison said. “You've called me cowardly, disloyal, and bullheaded.” His voice was cold. “Three is all I take in one afternoon. Call me another time.”

“I hope you aren't beginning to feel indispensable,” Rhein said.

“Don't be silly,” Harrison said, still coldly. “You could always replace me. A committee, perhaps: three or four men could do the job.”

“That's not only ridiculous,” Rhein snapped, “it's pompous. You're not yet fifty.”

“Mr. Rhein,” Harrison said, “you are a pearl of great price.” He hung up and laughed until the tears came.

Joseph Harrison had come to P.A.N. in 1933. He was tall, skinny, and handsome. He had no parents, brothers, or sisters; seventy-five dollars; and a college degree in dramatic arts. He was hired as an assistant script editor, at twenty-five dollars a week. He was hired by a man named Raymond who impressed upon him the liberality of the pay scale in a time of depression. “Don't forget,” Raymond had said, “you're not yet twenty-one.”