Acceptable Losses (2 page)

He made himself breakfast. When Sheila was home on Sunday she fed him freshly squeezed orange juice, pancakes and bacon with maple syrup. Today he drank a cup of coffee and made do with a slice of yesterday’s bread.

His ordinary Sunday ritual was different. While Sheila was preparing breakfast he went and bought two copies of the Sunday
Times
, because both he and Sheila liked doing the big Sunday crossword puzzle without interference by the other, and they spent the mornings in amicable silence at opposite ends of the kitchen table scratching away. It was a point of honor with them to do the puzzles in ink. The two huge bundles of news, opinion, results, advertisements, praise and condemnation represented something of an extravagance, but it was a weekend treat and the quiet pleasure of the hour or so after breakfast was worth it.

He dressed and went down the dimly lit and silent stairs. His neighbors all seemed to be sleeping late. He wondered if any of them had a telephone call in the middle of the night. There were no notes in his mailbox, either.

He touched his pocket to make sure he had his keys, that he could get back into the house and went out onto the small stoop that led down to the street. It was a raw, gray day, with gusts of cold wind. Spring was late this year. He looked up and down the street. A fat woman with two small dogs on a leash and a young man, pushing a baby carriage made up the Sunday morning traffic. No ambushes there, at least as far as he could tell. For all he knew, to a trained eye the street might have been full of ominous signs. He grimaced, displeased with his nervousness.

At the kiosk he hesitated briefly, trying to decide whether to buy one or two copies of the paper. He picked up two of them annoyed, as always, with the senseless bulk and weight. He doubted that Sheila would have gotten the Sunday
Times
in Vermont and she would be grateful if she saw that he had been thinking of her in her absence and had saved a copy of the puzzle for her when she got home, even if she didn’t have time to do it. He glanced at the first page. The name
Zalovsky
was not on it. Perhaps that wasn’t his real name. Maybe his name was actually Smith or Brown and Zalovsky was his
nom de guerre
and on the inside pages there would be a story describing the many crimes he had committed, for which the police often states were now searching for him. Although adopting a name like Zalovsky, for whatever vengeance or misdeed the man contemplated, seemed, Damon had to admit, needlessly elaborate. The notion made him smile. As he made his way home he glanced at the passersby without suspicion. The morning had fallen into its ordinary Sunday pattern and when the clouds parted for a few moments and the street reflected the rays of the sun, he found himself humming comfortably as he approached his door. But when he sat down to the crossword puzzle it was with difficulty that he managed just a few lines. Either the puzzle was harder than usual or his mind wasn’t on it. He tossed the magazine section aside and opened the book review section to the bestseller list.
Threnody
, by Genevieve Dolger, was still on it. Number four. Despite the title it had been on for twelve weeks now. Damon shook his head ruefully, remembering that it was only because of Oliver Gabrielsen’s insistence that he had agreed to work on it with the author and try to sell it and that they had nearly parted company because of it.

Oliver Gabrielsen was his assistant and had been with him nearly fifteen years. He was an omnivorous reader, with a remarkable memory and a shrewd if somewhat eccentric eye for unusual material. Oliver had met Mrs. Dolger at a party outside of Roslyn, Long Island, not the kind of place in which bestsellers ordinarily were found. The author was a woman in her fifties, whose husband was the vice-president of a small bank. She had four children and had never written anything before and had begun the novel, it seemed to Damon, mostly out of boredom with her life as a suburban matron. It was a simple-minded fantasy about a poor girl who made her way up in the world by using her beauty, her body and her appetite for men and who finally came to a tragic end. It was the oldest of stories and Damon couldn’t understand why Oliver was so keen on it. Most of the time their tastes were similar, but when Oliver said, “Money. This book has money written all over it. For once, let’s get a piece of the big pie for ourselves,” Damon had shaken his head skeptically. “Oliver, my poor boy,” he had said, “I’m afraid you’re working too hard or going to too many parties.”

Still, to keep peace in the office and because it was a slack time when everybody was out of New York for the summer, he had worked with the woman, who was a placid and undemanding soul, on making the book at least presentable, toning down the more explicit love scenes and the surprisingly rough language and correcting the grammar. She had been easy to convince about everything except the title. Although he had warned her that
Threnody
was the sort of title that emptied book stores, she had been obdurate and deaf to all argument. He had sighed and given in. To her credit, after the book’s success she had never taunted him about his doleful prediction. Unprofessional in everything she did, she had insisted upon his taking 20 percent of all her earnings on the book instead of the usual agent’s 10 percent. Half-jokingly he had warned her to keep this act of wanton generosity absolutely secret, since if the news got out, she risked being boycotted for the rest of her life by every writers’ organization in the country.

It was not the sort of book that either he or his old partner Gray had ever bothered with before. For the most part they had devoted themselves to discovering young writers and nursing them along to good reviews and modest sales, often keeping the writers alive out of their own pockets while they were finishing their books or plays. Neither of them had ever made a great deal of money, and a disappointing percentage of the young men and women they had helped had turned out to be one-book writers or had taken to dope or drink or had disappeared in Hollywood.

He had had small hope for Mrs. Dolger’s book and was almost relieved when a half-dozen houses had turned down the novel in quick succession. He had been ready to call the lady in Roslyn and tell her, with polite regret, that the book was unsaleable when a small publishing house took it, paying an infinitesimal advance for a small first printing. It had risen quickly to the top of the bestseller list, had sold to the paperbacks for a million dollars and had been bought for Hollywood.

His commissions were, for him, astronomical. For the first time, his name had been mentioned in the newspapers and his office was being flooded with manuscripts by well-known and highly paid writers who were dissatisfied with their current agents for one reason or another and most of whom he had never even met in his long career in the business.

“The roll of the dice,” Oliver had said complacently. “Finally we had to come up with a seven.” He had demanded that his salary be doubled and that his name be put on the door as a partner. Damon was pleased to be able to accede to both requests, had changed the name of the firm to Gray, Damon and Gabrielsen and had merely asked Oliver to attend fewer parties. But he had firmly refused to move out of what Oliver described as their sorry two-room excuse for an office to more splendid and what Oliver considered in their new affluence, would be more appropriate quarters. “Face it, Roger,” Oliver had said, “when anybody walks in here, they think we’ve furnished this place as a set for
Bleak House
and they look to see if we’re still using quill pens.”

“Oliver,” Damon had said, “let me explain myself, although by now you’ve been with me for so long I shouldn’t have to. I’ve put in almost my whole working life in what you call this sorry excuse for an office and I’ve been lucky here and loved coming to work here in the morning. I have no wish to become a tycoon and I’ve made a decent living, although perhaps not by what modern young people think are proper standards. I have no wish to look out over a sea of desks and know the people at them are working for me and demanding that I hire them, fire them, judge them and pay their social security and pension plans and God knows what else. The case of
Threnody
is a freak, lightning striking once. To tell the truth I hope nothing like it ever happens again. I cringe when I pass it in a book store window and my weekends have been ruined by seeing it on the list every Sunday in the
Times.
I have gotten infinitely more pleasure out of ten brilliant lines in a manuscript by an unknown young writer than I ever will out of the royalty statements on
Threnody.
As for you, my old friend, you are young and as in the custom these days, rapacious.” This was a bit unfair and Damon knew it, but he wanted to make his point. Oliver Gabrielsen was not as young as all that—he was approaching forty—and was as devoted to the service of decent writing as Damon himself and when he had asked for raises, he had done so almost apologetically, and Damon knew that if it weren’t for his wife’s salary Oliver would be living close to the poverty line. He also knew that Oliver had often received offers to work as an editor in publishing houses at much higher wages than he received from Damon and had turned them down because of what he considered the unbridled commercialism of the big houses which could afford what must have seemed like princely wages to him after the iron rations he received from Damon. But the unexpected tide of money that was rolling through the office seemed to have temporarily unhinged him and the percentage of the commissions which he now received as a partner had noticeably changed the fashion in which he dressed and the restaurants in which he lunched, and he had moved from a dingy apartment on the West Side to a small address in the East Sixties. Damon, as was to be expected, blamed Oliver’s wife, Doris, who had given up her job and now appeared from time to time in the office in a mink coat.

“You may be too young, Oliver,” Damon continued, enjoying the opportunity of lecturing on a subject on which his old employer, Mr. Gray, had often expanded, “to know the comfort of modesty; the arrogance, even, of rejoicing in moderate aims and even more moderate worldly achievements, to know that the things that other men are pressuring themselves into the grave to reach are of no consequence to you. I have never had a sick day in my life and I’ve never had an ulcer or high blood pressure or visited a psychiatrist. The only time I’ve been in a hospital it was because I was hit by an automobile while crossing the street and was laid up with a bad leg.”

“Knock wood,” Oliver had said. “Better knock wood.”

Damon could see he was not taking the lecture graciously.

“I’m not suggesting we rent the Taj Mahal, for Christ’s sake,” Oliver went on. “It wouldn’t kill us if we each had a room for ourselves and a decent place where we could put another secretary to help with all the damned mail. And with all the calls we’re getting these days it’s pretentious to have only one telephone line. Just last week a guy at Random House told me he dialed our number for two days before he could get through. The next time he wants to communicate with us he said he was going to use tom-toms. Putting in a switchboard wouldn’t mean that everybody thought you were surrendering your soul to the Philistines. And it wouldn’t be sinful luxury if we had windows that were washed once every six months. Here, if I want to know what the weather is outside I have to listen to the radio.”

“When I’m gone,” Damon said, purposely sonorous, “you can hire a floor at Rockefeller Center and have the winner of the Miss America contest for your receptionist. But while I’m still here, we’ll conduct our business as usual.”

Oliver sniffed. He was a diminutive blond man, almost an albino, and to make up for it he carried himself very erectly, with his shoulders militarily squared. Sniffing was uncharacteristic for him. “When you’re gone,” he said. “You won’t be gone for a thousand years.” They were good friends, as they had to be, working in their shirt-sleeves so close to each other day after day, and there was no ceremony between them.

“As I’ve told you repeatedly,” Damon said, “I intend to retire as soon as possible and catch up on reading all the books I haven’t had time to read keeping this office going.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Oliver said. But he smiled as he said it.

“I promise never even to visit you in your palatial new quarters,” Damon said. “I’ll be satisfied merely to collect the quarterly checks you’re bound by our contract to send me and trust that you haven’t found yourself a thieving accountant to doctor the books.”

“I’ll cheat you out of your back teeth,” Oliver said. “I promise.”

“So be it,” Damon said, patting him on the shoulder. “And now let’s leave it at that. As a concession to your sensibilities I’ll pay a man myself to wash the windows tomorrow.”

They both laughed then went back to their work.

Sitting in the cluttered living room, with the Sunday bells still ringing and the book review open before him to the bestseller list, he recalled the conversation with Oliver and Oliver’s words—“Money. Money is written all over this book.”

Oliver had been right. Regrettably right.

Damon also remembered what Zalovsky had said—“I read the papers like everybody else.” What Zalovsky didn’t know was that a good part of the commissions had gone to pay off long-standing debts and to make the necessary repairs on the small house on Long Island Sound in Old Lyme, Connecticut, that a doting and childless uncle of Sheila’s had left her in his will. They spent their summer vacations there and an occasional weekend, when they could manage it, trying to ignore its ramshackle condition. Now it would have a new roof, new plumbing and a new paint job. It would be ready for him when Damon found it was time to retire.

A simple case of attempted blackmail or extortion, Damon thought, the price of a few lines in some newspaperman’s column on a slow day. Or was it as simple as that?

Still, it was a clue. He dialed the number in Roslyn. “Genevieve,” he said when the lady herself answered the phone, “have you seen the
Times
this morning?”