The Bookmakers (2 page)

“Tommy, pick up the phone. It’s me, Mack.”

Russo leaned over and pressed the speaker button. “Yo, Mack, what’s the deal?” he said in his Brooklyn honk.

“We’ve got to talk,” said Mack excitedly. “What time are you going into the office?”

“I’m not,” said Russo. “I’m working at home for a few days.”

“You sick or something?”

“Naw, just trying to avoid the rat race.” He didn’t mention
that the rat was Herman Reggie, to whom he owed eighteen thousand dollars.

“I can’t wait a few days,” said Mack. “This is a big thing. Meet me for lunch.” The invitation was at once friendly and imperious—the tone Mack had used with Tommy Russo from the beginning.

“What kind of big thing?” Tommy asked cautiously.

“A book idea, the one I’ve been waiting for. It came to me last night.”

“A book idea,” Tommy repeated in an expressionless tone. In the old days, when Mack was a hot writer, Russo had made a lot of money on his book ideas; nowadays they just cost him drinks and lunch—and with Mack, that could be an expensive proposition. Still, he owed Mack, and Tommy Russo had been raised to respect his obligations. “I’ll meet you at one,” he said.

“Where?”

“How about the Tiger? I haven’t been there in a while.”

“I thought you hated the place.”

“I’m in a nostalgic mood,” said Tommy. The Flying Tiger would be perfect, he thought; Reggie would never think of looking for him in a dive like that. Besides, it wouldn’t cost a fortune.

“Okay,” said Mack. “The Tiger at one. And Tommy? This time I’ve really got something.”

Russo climbed from between his satin sheets and padded into the bathroom to shower. Twenty minutes later, shaved and powdered, he returned to the bedroom and stood in front of his open closet, trying to decide what to wear. In the years since Tommy Russo had left the priesthood, he had never lost his pleasure in the simple act of dressing himself as he pleased. He had Mack to thank—or blame—for that.

The Flying Tiger was nearly deserted when Mack walked in just past eleven. As usual, Otto was behind the bar polishing beer glasses and breaking rolls of quarters into the old-fashioned cash
register. The jukebox played Ray Charles’s “The Night Time is the Right Time.” Mack loved oldies, especially fifties R&B and the Tiger had a great selection, thanks to Otto, who shared Mack’s taste in music. What he thought of as their friendship had begun one night, years ago, when he overheard the bartender remark to someone that rock and roll died the day the Beatles stepped off the plane in New York.

The Tiger had a shifting clientele. The daytime customers were mostly construction workers drinking their lunches and reporters lubricating their gossip with Irish whiskey. Next came the businessmen, slurping up happy-hour courage for the miserable commute home. And then, around ten, the young writers began to arrive. Otto, a creased, rumpled man in his late fifties, ministered to them all, dispensing big drinks, greasy food and bland patter with a detatched impartiality that bespoke a fine Catholic understanding of human frailty.

When Mack first started coming to the Tiger it was as a member of the daytime journalist crowd. He was fresh from Ann Arbor, where he had been sports editor of the
Michigan Daily
, a credential that got him a reporter’s job at the
New York Post
. One day, sitting at the bar, he fell into conversation with a tattooed guy about his own age who claimed to be a Vietnam veteran. “I killed me fifty-seven gooks over there,” said the man. “If I was a pilot, that’d make me an ace, like Jimmy Doolittle and them.”

Mack looked down the bar, noticed a bottle of Heinz 57 Varieties near the man’s plate and instantly recognized it as the source of the body count. “What’re you going to do now that you’re back in civilian life?” he asked.

“I’m going to re-up, go back and get me an even hundred,” said the guy. “I promised my girl. Then I figure I might run for public office in my native Wisconsin.”

“Otto,” Mack called to the bartender, “put this man’s lunch on my tab. He’s a great American.”

That night Mack went home, sat down at his Smith-Corona
portable and began to write the story of Ace Fletcher, a good-natured, dim-witted farm boy who tries to impress a girl by joining the army and killing a hundred Vietcong. Eighty thousand words later he had a novel, which he called
Bragging Rights
.

The book came out in 1972, and it was greeted enthusiastically by critics who saw it, in the words of
The New York Times
, as “a bitingly funny satirical send-up of the war. Vietnam may have found its Joseph Heller.” The book didn’t quite reach the bestseller list, but on the strength of reviews like this it became a minor campus classic and made its author a celebrity spokesman for his generation.

Mack was bemused by his status as an antiwar culture hero. As the only son of a widowed mother he had a draft deferment, and he hadn’t really given Vietnam much thought. He saw
Bragging Rights
as a story about a weird guy, nothing more. But if America wanted to consider Mack Green an idealist, and rich and famous, he had no objection.

With his royalty money, Mack quit the
Post
and became a full-time novelist. During the days he worked on a new book,
The Oriole Kid
, about a sportswriter from a small Michigan town who talks the Yankees into giving him a tryout and actually makes the team. At night he enjoyed his newfound celebrity as a welcome guest at boozy, druggy parties; in countless beds; and at the Young Authors’ table at the Flying Tiger. In those days he would often catch the stares of the tourists and bask in their envy, a successful young man in a glamorous profession, like a private eye or an international diamond thief.

But Mack was no longer young and nowadays he did his drinking at the bar with Otto. Sometimes, when it was quiet, they watched a few innings of a ball game together, or shot the breeze about movies. They never discussed Mack’s books because, as far as Mack knew, Otto never read books. He had been serving liquor to writers long enough to surmise that he wasn’t likely to be entertained or enlightened by their printed thoughts.

Otto Kelly had owned the Tiger as long as Mack had been going there, and he remembered the days when Mack sat with the writers. He recalled him, a good-looking, sandy-haired kid, always with a girl, singing snatches of R&B hits along with the jukebox and dancing in the narrow aisle between the tables. Mack was still good-looking—Otto thought he resembled that actor, Jeff Bridges—but he was starting to thicken around the waist and to take on the deceptively outdoor rosiness of the habitual indoor drinker.

Still, Otto was nobody’s judge. That morning he greeted Mack the same way he had for twenty years, with a smile and a wink and a friendly, “Hiya, kid, what’ll it be?”

Mack consulted his watch and ordered a Bloody Mary. “I want to ask you a question,” he said when Otto set the drink in front of him. “What would you do if you had a million dollars and one year to live?”

Otto wiped a spot off the bar and smiled. “Somebody gives me a million? I buy two Mercedes, one for me and one for Betty—a hundred thousand bucks. A house on the beach in Fort Lauderdale—half a mil. Hundred thousand in the bank for each of the two kids. And I’d blow the other two hundred on a trip around the world. That makes an even million.”

“You’ve got it all planned.”

“It’s not exactly a rare question in the bartender business,” said Otto. “You serve booze, you get a lot of what-ifs.”

“Yeah,” agreed Mack. “I guess. You must get sick of it.”

“Nah, goes with the job,” said Otto. “At least it’s better than the all-time white team.”

“What?”

“You know, who’s the greatest white basketball team in history. That’s the one gets me. I mean, I like basketball and all, but who gives a shit?”

“Right,” said Mack. He thought for a moment. “I guess you’d have to say Bird, Walton, McHale, Cousy and West.”

“Stockton. They all say Stockton instead of Cousy. Half the kids come in here these days, they never even heard of Cousy.”

Mack shook his head. “Cousy was a better outside shooter—” The door opened and Mack saw the squat, impeccably tailored reflection of Tommy Russo in the mirror above the bar. Otto scowled, not trying to hide his disapproval of the agent. “To be continued,” Mack said to the bartender, sliding off his stool. “Right now I’ve got to tell a priest about a miracle.”

Tommy Russo’s first thought was that the Flying Tiger hadn’t changed. The jukebox still played old-fashioned jigaboo music, the air stank of grease and stale beer and Otto gave him his usual Mick fish-eye from behind the bar. Mack looked the same too, dressed as always in a pair of faded jeans and a flannel shirt. Over the years Tommy often wondered how he lived the way he did, suffered so many disappointments and still looked so young. Protestant genes, he decided.

Russo himself had changed considerably. He had added forty pounds to his five-foot, seven-inch frame, weight that even his two-thousand-dollar suits couldn’t disguise. His thick black eyebrows had grown together, giving him the look of a well-groomed, roly-poly ape. And 10 percent of anything no longer seemed like a lot of money to him. He had become one of New York’s most successful agents—and, because of his passion for gambling, one of the least solvent.

Most of the ex-priests Tommy knew had gone sex-crazy after leaving their calling, but he was no more interested in women now than he had been at St. Fred’s. He had never married, and visited expensive prostitutes when the need arose. Luxury and high-rolling excited Tommy Russo—the thing that turned him on about sex was knowing that he was paying five hundred bucks an orgasm.

On the other hand he was willing to admit that gambling had become a real addiction. Wagering large sums of money gave him
the kind of thrill that no woman ever could. Unfortunately, he had been on a bad run lately. The eighteen grand he owed Herman Reggie was just one of his debts; he was into bookies all over the country for more than a hundred thousand bucks. He had no doubt that he could eventually pay up, and most of his creditors were willing to wait. Herman Reggie was different, though, and Tommy needed to do something about him quick.

“Father Tomas,” said Mack, taking Russo’s hand and bowing in mock reverence. He had never lost the habit of treating Tommy with the proprietary superiority of an author for one of his characters. At one time this had annoyed Russo, but as Mack’s career slipped, he had forgiven him. The arrogance was good-natured and, Tommy thought, even a little brave, like a down-at-the-heels aristocrat sporting a fresh carnation in the lapel of a frayed suit. Russo felt a genuine affection for Mack, mixed with gratitude, pity and a nagging sense of guilt. Of course it wasn’t Tommy’s fault that Mack’s books no longer sold; there was no way he could have halted his client’s long slide down. At least that was what he told himself, and usually he could make himself believe it.

“Sorry I’m late,” Tommy said. “The cab ran into a demonstration on Broadway. Reverend Abijamin and some of his homeboys are picketing the theater district and it tied up traffic for a mile.”

“No enjoyment without employment!” Russo intoned. “These rhyming shakedown preachers make me want to puke.”

“Spoken like a true man of the cloth,” said Mack. “Sit down, Tommy, have a drink. I want you relaxed when you hear my idea.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m relaxed,” Russo said as he took a seat at a table near the window.

“You want to hear some music?” Mack asked, gesturing toward the jukebox. “Little Hank Ballard and the Midnighters maybe?”

“Midnighters my ass, this is the twentieth century. Motown’s dead, in case you didn’t know.”

“He wasn’t Motown,” said Mack. “He was from Detroit, but he wasn’t a Motown artist. He came a little earlier, around the time of Little Willie John and—”

“Come on, Mack, I’m not in the mood for rock-and-roll 101 today. What’s on your mind?”

“Okay, here goes. Last night I was walking home about three, all alone, and guess what happened?”

“You got mugged,” said Russo.

“How’d you know that?”

“Are you kidding? What else could have happened at three in the morning in this city?”

“Yeah, well, anyway, this kid jumps out of a doorway and pulls a gun on me—”

“What kind of kid?”

“How the hell do I know? I never saw him before,” said Mack. “Probably a crackhead.”

“I meant what color,” said Russo. “What color kid?”

“He was black,” said Mack, “but that’s not the important—”

“Yeah, right,” said Tommy with sour irony.

“Anyway, the kid says, ‘Give me your wallet or I’ll shoot,’ something like that. At which point, what do you think I did?”

“Gave him the wallet,” said Russo. “What’s the point here?”

“Like hell I did,” Mack said triumphantly. “I grabbed the gun, knocked him on his ass and sent him home.”

“What are you, a fucking moron? You got a death wish or something?”

“That’s just it—for one split second I did,” said Mack. “I was looking down the barrel of the gun and all I was was curious what would it feel like if he pulled the trigger. In a way I even wanted him to. You ever have a feeling like that?”

“Hell no,” said Russo.

“Anyway, there I am, standing in the street with the kid’s gun in my hand and all of a sudden a whole novel popped right into my head.”

“It popped into your head,” echoed Tommy.

“Right. It begins when this guy, a middle-aged writer, gets mugged and he suddenly realizes he doesn’t give a shit if the guy shoots him or not. Only in his case it’s not just a momentary thing, it’s real. He’s burned out, beaten down and just generally tired of living. So he decides to keep a diary about his last year on earth, sell it to a publisher for a shitload of money and then, at the end of the year, actually kill himself.”

“Why would he need the money if he’s gonna kill himself?”

“Let’s say he needs it for his kids. Or maybe he just wants to blow it on a last fling. The motivation will come later. The point isn’t the money. Maybe he doesn’t even get any money. The thing is, he sells the idea to a publisher and sets out on an adventure that’s supposed to culminate in his suicide. What do you think so far?”