The Way of All Fish: A Novel (19 page)

Hess blubbered. “I know he can be irrational sometimes, but he’s a brilliant publisher.”

“You can always try somebody else.”

Hess wanted to keep on with Mackenzie-Haack because Bobby had made an (insane) offer of $3 million. For a single book. A 15 percent commission would earn Hess $450,000. It was the kind of deal an agent would jump off the Seagram Building to collect.

Paul’s mobile, which he had left on vibrate, was quivering across his desk. He grabbed it up. “Yes?”

“Bass here. Listen to Mackenzie’s latest demand. After I thought things were pretty well settled. He wants the advance paid out in twelfths. T-W-E-L-T-H-S.” Hess spelled it out. “Can you imagine?”

“Is that how you spell it? T-W-E-L-T—isn’t there an F in there somewhere?”

Paul could nearly smell the fumes coming off Hess across the wire.

“Paul, that’s—ha-ha-ha—immaterial. He wants to divide up the three mill into twelve payments.”

“I’ll be damned. Well, I guess that’s what they do with baseball players.” Paul was studying the outline of his plan. He was looking at “magician.” Beside his notebook on the desk was a copy of
The Magic Mountain,
which he fingered. It had nothing to do with the word “magician,” or at least not consciously. He crossed out “magician” and penciled in “bush.” The plan was organic; it was on the way to becoming a whole. It was like at a certain point when he was writing a book, he saw it. It. The whole picture. It really was like creating a tiny world. Maybe Wallace Stevens was right: God was the imagination.

Then again, it was like connecting the dots on those place mats they put down for children in some restaurants. Dot . . . dot . . . dot . . . until the picture came clear.

“One twelfth on signing, one twelfth on delivery of initial manuscript, one twelfth on final manuscript—that’s after copyediting—one twelfth . . .”

Paul let him ramble on. He wasn’t listening; he was leafing through Mann’s book and thinking of the idea of sanctuary.

“. . . and I’m going to demand he change this to six payouts. Six.”

“You do that, Bass.”

“And if he won’t agree?”

“That’s your job, Bass. That’s what I pay you fifteen percent for. Gotta go, dude (and if ever a dude was not, it was L. Bass Hess); someone’s at my door. Bye.”

Cindy sat watching her fish and thinking about the talk with Paul Giverney in the coffee shop.

Maybe he was going to pay Monty and the others to lure Hess into a dark alley and club him. Or maybe, when Hess was on his way to Connecticut some weekend, the four of them would wait by the side of the road and flag him down, drag him out of the car, and leave him in
a wheat field. Hess was allergic to wheat. Cindy pictured him, bleeding and staggering through the high wheat, arms out like a scarecrow, choking and sneezing . . .

She added several more not unpleasant images to this montage and hoped Paul Giverney would find the place in Sunset Park from her meager directions.

The building looked, as Cindy had said, like a warehouse, probably because it was. Paul braked, switched off the engine, and popped the trunk. He got out and went around to get the beer.

He schlepped it to the door, which opened on Monty as if he’d been waiting his whole life. He probably saw the beer and probably was.

Bub and Molloy nearly erupted off the low-slung sofa. “Whoa! What have we here?”

“Just what it looks like. Beck’s, Sam Adams. Wasn’t sure what you liked.”

“All of it, man. Come on in.” He introduced Paul to the other three.

“You’re the
writer
? Paul Giverney the
writer
?” said Bub. “Man, let me shake your hand. I got all your books down at the yard.”

“You’re wondering why I’m here. I have a reason.”

“Hey, man, you don’t need a reason.”

“I’ve got one nonetheless. For the moment, I’ll just see in what way you—each of you—fit my plan.”

“What plan?”

They had already opened beers and were settling back.

“Getting rid of Cindy Sella’s insane ex-agent. When I say ‘get rid of,’ I don’t mean bump him off. I know a couple guys who do that kind of work. No, I mean drive him crazy and out of New York.”

“Didn’t know she had an agent. She doesn’t talk much about herself. That’s cool,” said Molloy.

Paul told them about L. Bass Hess.

“Jesus!” said Bub. “Maybe I shouldn’t bother with my book, if that’s what publishing is like.”

“Cindy said you’d written one.”

“Yeah.
Robot Redux
. It’s about things falling apart. I work in a car junk yard. Auto parts, crushed cars, and like that.”

“Okay. I won’t give you details because I don’t know all of them myself. But . . . remember Scrooge?”

They all nodded. “Dickens? That Scrooge?”

“It’s kind of like that.”

“He gets visited by ghosts. You want us to play ghosts?”

“No. Anybody could do that. No. I want you to use your various fields of expertise. And since I’ll be taking up a lot of your time, I’ll be paying you a lot of money. I’m thinking in the neighborhood of five thousand.” Their eyes rounded. “Each.”

Monty dropped his beer; Bub choked on a toke he’d just inhaled. The other two simply stared.

“Let’s start with the Everglades.” Paul looked at Monty. “You’re good with boats.” He turned to Molloy and grinned. “And you’re good with alligators.”

W
e want to get him to Everglades City,” said Paul. “Into the swamp.”

“Why? And the next ‘why?’ is ‘why me?’ ”

“Because you’re a friend of Hess’s.”

“I’m not a friend,” said Clive. “I only know him through books he’s agented.”

“Is that really a verb?”

“Isn’t everything these days? We’re in constant motion. What’s your point?”

“You’re an acquisitions editor. And you’re interested in the story of his/her life.” What Clive was to be had not occurred to Paul before just that moment.

“Lives.”

“Okay. All I want is for you to get L. Bass to the ’Glades. You can be very persuasive, Clive.”

“I hate Florida.”

“Come on, Clive. Florida isn’t a state anyone can hate.”

“Why don’t you go yourself? It would make more sense. It’s your idea, after all.”

“Bear with me, Clive. I’ve got a plan I’m working on.”

“Your plans make me nervous, Paul. My mind keeps returning to your plan for Ned Isaly.”

Paul sighed. “That was not
my
plan. That was Bobby’s plan. I’m not responsible for what he does.”

“He couldn’t have done it if you hadn’t made your contract contingent on getting rid of Ned. So it might just as well have been your plan.”

“Clive, only Bobby Mackenzie is nutty enough to hire a hit man.”

“And only you are nutty enough to give him a reason to do so. Okay, I’ll get the address in Everglades City. I’ll be your goon. I’ll go to Florida.”

A
ngelfish,” said Lena bint Musah. “The Clipperton isn’t illegal to import, but one has to have special permission to do so. There was a dealer who smuggled about fifty Clippertons into the U.S., claiming they were blue passer fish. They resemble Clippertons, but not so much that anyone with knowledge would mistake one for the other. The USFWS certainly knew the difference.”

“So how much is this fish worth?” asked Karl.

“You could sell one for ten thousand dollars.”

“What? That means this guy had half a million worth of these fish?”

They were all sitting in Lena’s living room—Karl, Candy, and Arthur Mordred—having a little of Lena’s coffee and a lot of Lena’s cigarettes. The dog lay quietly, this time at Arthur’s feet.

“Jesus, these are something,” said Arthur. “It’s as good as a couple shots of Glenfiddich.” He inhaled, slowly exhaled. “Make that three shots.”

“You’re in A.A.,” said Candy.

Arthur shrugged and inhaled. “For the most part.”

“A.A.’s not in parts. You either are or you aren’t.”

Lena continued, “There’s the peppermint angelfish. There are only two in captivity. One would cost you up to twenty thousand dollars.”

“My God,” said Arthur, leaning down to rub the old dog’s neck. The dog did not respond.

“A further obstacle to owning one is that they are extremely difficult to take care of. They refuse food.”

“What? They don’t eat, they die,” said Arthur. “Why in hell would someone shell out twenty large for a fish that’s likely to die on him?”

“Serious collectors are often obsessed, hugely competitive, and egoistic.
Such a fish would be worth that amount just to say you have one. What do we do with these elegant fish?” She looked from Candy to Karl.

Karl, who’d been lounging in his chair with his legs stretched out, said, “These are the fish the U.S. government is after you about. I mean, that’s what you say.”

“If there are only two of these peppermints in the world—”

“Not in the world, Arthur, in
captivity
. Do you think these ridiculous lawyers have ever heard of such fish?” Lena gave a small feminine snort.

“Right, you are right,” said Arthur, helping himself to another fantasy cigarette. “What I’m wondering is what happens to Cindy Sella if this book of hers gets around? I mean, wouldn’t the Bluefish Alliance put her on their dead-even-as-we-speak list?”

Both Candy and Karl swerved off course in lighting up fresh cigarettes. Candy said, “Arthur, there ain’t a Blue
fin
Alliance. That is a made-up fiction.”

“Meaning you don’t really exist,” said Karl, laughing through smoke.

“Yeah. Right. But neither does the fucking book.”

Lena asked, “And does Miss Sella know that?”

“Know what?”

“That she’s not writing this book.”

“What would she have to know about a book she’s not writing?”

“It’s not impossible—indeed, not improbable—that these lawyers would call her and ask about it.”

That was too many “nots” for Candy. He had to translate. “You’re saying the Richard Geres might call her up and ask about it.”

Lena nodded and sipped her coffee.

“What about this?” Arthur said, getting back into the swing of things. “What if, say, Herbie Fosdick, who’s a big-time—”

“Who the hell’s Herbie Fosdick?”

“No one. I just made him up to try and make a point.”

“Arthur, just call him John Smith, will you?”

“What difference does it make if it’s a made-up name?”

Candy exhaled a bale of smoke through his nostrils. “Because it gets us off track; because if you’d just said John Smith, I’d of known it was not a real person.” Candy opened his arms wide. “Capice?”

“Stop with the ‘capice’ crap. That’s the only Italian you know.”

Lena sighed. “Gentlemen, you keep on getting sidetracked. Continue, Arthur, with your question about this Fosdick person.”

Arthur scratched his neck “I forgot.”

Candy and Karl inhaled simultaneously some more forget-everything smoke and laughed.

Lena ignored them and said to Arthur, “You were saying that he is a big-time something before you were interrupted.” She gave Candy and Karl a veiled look with knives behind it.

Arthur thought. “A big-time exotic fish collector, that’s what I was going to say. So here’s Cindy Sella writing an exposé of the illegal importing of fish. What if Fosdick thinks he’s in danger? Would he come after her? There doesn’t have to be a book, just the rumor of a book.” He sat back, rather proud of the way he’d put that.

Candy said, “I see what you mean. Like the Richard Geres could leak it.”

Karl slapped his forehead. “Look, this is not exactly the Mob going after this book. Fosdick is not some made man and not one of those jerks that sprayed the Clownfish Café. We are talking about fish, guys and gals. F-I-S-H.”

Candy said, “Hey, hold it, K. You’re the one talked about this Bluefish—”

“Blue
fin,
” Karl said, correcting him.

“—being as bad as the Mob.”

Karl sat back. “Yeah, that’s true.”

Arthur said, “Look, don’t we need some illegals instead of just a failure to get legal permission to import these fish?”

Lena answered, “We’ve got the arowana and some corals.” Here she took some glossy pictures from the folder and placed them on the table. “In addition, the Clipperton angelfish can only be found in one place: an atoll not far from Hawaii.”