I'll Take Manhattan (46 page)

Pavka Mayer and Barney Shore barely knew each other. Although Crescent had been the national distributor for Amberville Publications for almost thirty-seven years the sophisticated, profoundly elegant Artistic Director had had little contact with the rough-and-tumble tycoon whose chief reading material remained the
Racing Form
. Yet, three days after Maxi went to the newsstand in the Pan Am Building, Pavka Mayer found himself being taken to lunch by Barney Shore at
Le Veau d’Or
, the kind of small French restaurant in which they both felt at home, a restaurant that had surely been in business longer than either of them, a restaurant as urbane as Pavka, as down-to-earth as Barney,
an un-fancy and excellent restaurant not known to non-New Yorkers.

“I had to celebrate with somebody who’d feel the same way I do,” Barney said.

“I’m glad you called me,” Pavka agreed gravely.

“It’s been a week now and it’s sold out in every major city in the country. Nobody’s seen anything like it since that first issue of
Life
. My computers are going crazy. It didn’t do anything to make peace in the war between Fort Worth and Dallas when the Dallas ladies drove all the way to Fort Worth and the Fort Worth ladies drove to Dallas, all assuming that the other place would have copies. Couldn’t even bribe the clerks at the checkout counters … they couldn’t sell what they’d sold out. Same story in Chicago, L.A., San Diego, Boston, Milwaukee … same story everywhere. I miscalculated, should have printed five times as many … or ten. We persuaded Meredith/Burda to go back to press—they kicked and screamed and we paid double time—so you’d better keep your copy as a first edition, a collector’s item.” Barney Shore’s grin grew broader.

“You don’t happen to have any extras at your place, do you?” asked Pavka.

“Sorry, but my wife graciously passed them out to her friends, without asking me, every last one … my daughters are ready to strangle her,” Barney replied, chuckling in delight. God, he loved to follow a hunch, and Maxi had always brought him luck.

“I was afraid you’d say that. My wife’s friends never do their own shopping and when they finally resigned themselves to enter a supermarket it was too late. The gals at the office who were too blasé to be interested, who spend their lives knee-deep in magazines, are taking turns going to the newsstand in the building to be there in time when the next batch is coming in. Wouldn’t you think that Meredith/Burda might have been thoughtful enough to save a special bale for us?” Pavka’s delighted eyes and triumphant expression belied his grumble.

“My secretary had the idea of stealing one out of the folder at her hairdresser’s but the owner of the shop had already taken it home for himself and won’t bring it back.
Says his clients are all confirmed kleptomaniacs and they won’t enjoy it as much as he does anyway. Well, Pavka, here are our drinks.”

The two men raised their glasses and touched the rims briefly. Their eyes met and their smiles faded.

“To Zachary Amberville,” Pavka said.

“To Zachary Amberville,” echoed Barney Shore.

Rocco buzzed his secretary. “Where are Lefkowitz and Kelly?” he asked.

“In Mr. Lefkowitz’s office. Shall I ring them?”

“Never mind, Miss Haft, I’ll go in.”

He found his redheaded, blue-eyed partners just returned from lunch and not even out of their coats. Kelly, who slept with a copy of
Gentleman’s Quarterly
on his night table, was wearing a tailored dark gray Chesterfield overcoat with velvet lapels and a homburg, its brim curled to the side and dipped at the front and back. Lefkowitz, who had been deeply marked in his early twenties by the Belmondo movie
Stavisky
, wore a Borsalino, which, as he frequently reminded Kelly, was made by Borsalino Giuseppe e Fratello of Alessandria, Italy, and not one of your average wide-brimmed felt makers. He turned down its brim on one side only so that one would confuse him with F. Scott Fitzgerald, and he too still wore his reversible tweed raincoat from Cesarani.

“You guys cold?” Rocco asked, “or auditioning for a remake of
The Sting
?”

“Rocco, look at this thing!” Lefkowitz said excitedly.

“We almost trampled a couple of broads but we got one,” Kelly said triumphantly. “Rocco, take a look. What do you think … wasn’t it worth being half clawed to death?”

They made room for Rocco to look as they turned the pages of
B&B
, with the fine-tuned perception only possible to men whose whole lives were defined by the necessity to sell people things they had not yet realized they needed.

“Nice,” Rocco commented.

“Nice?” Rap Kelly snorted. “Thank God we made
those page buys at the right price. ‘Nice’ is all Rocco finds to say. Do I detect a little jealousy, pal?”

“Come off it, Rap. Why the hell should you think a dumb thing like that?” Lefkowitz asked.

“Man Ray, let’s face it, the look of this book is very, very special. I haven’t seen anything that comes within light-years of it. Christ, just look at that use of white space, at that typography, those graphics, the layout … maybe you guys think that all I know how to do is get new business, but I’m not blind.”

“I said it was nice,” Rocco repeated heatedly, looking at the pages he’d laid out for Maxi, pages he could never now claim as his own, at the risk of looking an absolute fool.

“He said it was nice, Rap, what more do you want?” Lefkowitz said hurriedly. “Listen, Rap, back when Rocco was doing magazines, he was at least as good as the guy who laid out this book, easily as good, anybody will tell you.”

“Yeah,” said Kelly, “if there’s anybody who still remembers.”

Justin, dressing rapidly, hours late for Maxi’s office party, to celebrate the success of the first issue, didn’t hear the first knock on the door of his modest, walk-up apartment. The second knock was louder, more impatient.

“Open up, police.”

What the hell, Justin thought, and hurried to open the door. Two men, casually dressed, stood there.

“You Justin Amberville?”

“Yes. Why?”

They showed him their badges. “New York City Police. We have a warrant to search your apartment.”

“Search? What for? What’s going on?” Justin said in surprise, moving swiftly to block them from coming into his apartment. Expertly they shouldered him aside and when he fought back violently with all his sinewy strength it took both detectives to pin him to the wall. “Harry,” one of them said to the other, “you look the place over. Justin here thinks he’s pretty tough and he has objections, so let’s make sure we really give the place a going-over he won’t
forget. Here’s the warrant, Justin baby. Cool it.” The scorn in his voice when he said Justin’s name was blatant, provocative, but at the sight of the paper Justin realized that there was no point in struggling with the man and, in any case, he had nothing to hide.

He watched, momentarily silenced by sheer disbelief, in the muteness of a dreamer, as the first policeman rapidly searched his living room, slitting open all the couch and chair pillows, sweeping all the books off the shelves, taking apart the speakers of his stereo. Still immobile against the wall he listened to the noisy, exhaustive wrecking of his bedroom. Harry came out. “Not there, Danny, unless it’s under the floor. I’ll try the other room.”

“That’s my darkroom. There’s thousands of dollars of valuable stuff … for Christ’s sake, be careful.”

“Sure thing, Justin. That’s what we’re here for, to be careful,” Harry sneered. He flung open the darkroom door, turned on the light and started his search, violently flinging down everything that didn’t interest him. One by one Justin watched his Nikons hit the floor, their lenses shattered. As the third camera was tossed out he broke Danny’s strong hold in a single swift, fluid movement and went after Harry, easily tossing the heavy man on his back. Harry grunted in pain, unable to move for a moment. “Bastard!” Justin spat and turned quickly to face Danny. His kick shattered Danny’s elbow. The fight that followed was short, ugly and brutish. Without their illegal saps the detectives would both have found themselves doubled up, on the floor, unable to breathe, but instead it was Justin who was finally beaten into semiconsciousness, and handcuffed.

“Harry, you missed that little closet,” Danny gasped, nursing his elbow. “This slick fucker has to have the stuff somewhere.” The second detective, panting from the damage Justin had inflicted, jerked down a pile of boxes from the closet shelf and riffled through the photographs that had been carefully filed in them. He unbuckled Justin’s empty camera cases and threw them away in disgust. Finally he unzipped the duffel bag that Justin had put away after his last trip.

“Pay dirt,” he grunted, lifted the bag and put it down on the floor so that the other detective could see its contents.
“How much does it look like to you, Danny? Whataya say, Justin, huh, whataya say, creep?” He kicked Justin hard in the ribs. “Looks like about three kilos of blow to me, the whole fucking side pocket’s jammed full of the stuff. Millions of bucks worth, on the street. He must have thought he found the perfect hiding place. Too obvious to bother about, huh, Justin? Come on, Danny, I’ll take him in, read him the Miranda. You just get downstairs. I’ll come back for the bag. You gotta be hurting bad.” Viciously he pulled Justin upright by his handcuffed wrists.

“Come on, Mr. Amberville, we’ve got a date downtown.”

After Justin had been booked for possession of cocaine, with suspicion of intent to sell, fingerprinted and photographed, he was allowed one phone call. Bewildered, dazed, hurting badly, instinctively reaching out to the one person he dared to call, he dialed Maxi’s number.

When the phone rang she had just finished putting a woozy Angelica to bed. Maxi sat at her desk, weary in every bone, yet so euphoric, so utterly content that she didn’t want to go to bed herself and end the celebration that had lasted until long after dinner.

“Justin! Why didn’t you come to the party? We all waited … What?
What
! No, it’s impossible … I don’t understand … of course, I’ll be right down. Jesus, Justin, shall I bring a doctor too? A lawyer then? No? you’re sure? All right. I promise I won’t say anything to anybody. I’ll be there as fast as possible … yes, my checkbook. Just hang on, I’m on my way.”

It was after eleven when Maxi reached the Midtown North precinct house, yet only a quarter of an hour after she left her apartment; a quarter of an hour of nightmare, nightmare conjecture, nightmare streets glimpsed from the taxi window, a quarter of an hour in which the precise conditions of a nightmare were duplicated; something hideous, not quite known, yet long dreaded had happened. It was more than the fact of Justin’s arrest; it was the feeling that somehow she had expected it for reasons she had avoided looking at. There was a revolting whiff of the familiar, something of the half-understood, the half-suspected, the unseen that had been hidden, just out of sight, deliberately,
even scrupulously unacknowledged, something more frightening than anything she had ever thought about in the light of day. Her thoughts weren’t clear and she shivered uncontrollably in spite of her fur coat. Her checkbook. It was in her handbag, the one solid reference point in the universe.

In the crowded, confusing station Maxi finally located the sergeant who was in charge.

“No, ma’am, no way you can get him out on bail. Bail hasn’t been set yet. He’s not here, ma’am. After booking he was taken down to One Police Plaza to await arraignment before a judge. The man should have called his lawyer, not his sister. What’s the charge? Possession, it says here, and suspected dealing. How much drugs? Enough, a lot more than enough. That’s all I can tell you. No, of course you can’t see him. Not till arraignment. And bring a lawyer with you. What’s that? He doesn’t want one? Well, you listen to me, lady, he needs one. Bad.”

After another half hour of fruitless quest in the police station for someone who might be able to tell her more, Maxi was stopped by a young stranger.

“Miss Amberville? I understand that your brother was arrested tonight …” the man said sympathetically.

“Who are you?” Maxi demanded.

“Perhaps I can help. I saw him brought in. He definitely needed medical attention and I thought you should know.”

“Who are you?”

“Apparently a large amount of cocaine was found in his apartment. He claimed that it wasn’t his, that it must belong to somebody else. Do you have any idea who could have put it there? Could it have been someone he trusted, some acquaintance, some friend, somebody—”

“Go away,” Maxi screamed. She raced down the stationhouse stairs, waving frantically for a taxi. A friend? An acquaintance? Someone who hid cocaine in that apartment where even she had never been invited, where Justin guarded his privacy as though it were a fragile, infinitely precious object.
Oh, Justin, what kind of people do you call friends
? Who knows you better than I do? Poor, sweet, lost Justin … I’ve tried so hard not to guess. Wasn’t that what
you wanted, more than anything else in the world, that none of us should guess?

There was no help for it, Maxi thought, as she picked up the phone by her bed to telephone Lily. The only lawyers Maxi herself could contact immediately specialized in divorce. Justin obviously needed the highest-powered law firm that Amberville Publications could summon and, in any case, Lily would have to be told as gently as possible before she read about Justin’s arrest in the newspaper tomorrow.

“Hello, Mother.”

“Do you have any idea of the time, Maxime?” Lily’s voice said drowsily.

“Yes, it’s after midnight. I’m terribly sorry to wake you but … something’s happened, something … no,
nobody’s
been hurt, Mother, it’s something else, Justin’s been arrested.”

“Let me take this on another phone,” Lily whispered. In a few seconds she had picked up another extension. “I didn’t want to wake Cutter. Where is Justin now?”

“He’s in jail. They’ve taken him down to One Police Plaza.”

“What did they arrest him for, Maxime? Was it … was it soliciting?” Lily asked in a low, terrified tone.

“My God, Mother!”