Love Me (26 page)

“She didn’t mention you by name, she sort of inferred you—”

I was thrilled, of course, to think that the chief justice of book re viewdom was aware of
me.

“Consider the trigger pulled,” I said.

“We don’t want to open up
The New Yorker
someday and find a photograph of two guys in a boat on Lake Mille Lacs holding up a stringer of walleyes, do we?”

“No, sir.”

“Or recipes for venison sausage? The magazine that was home to Edmund Wilson and Richard Rovere, telling people how to make sausage?”

I promised to do what I said I’d do.

“We’re counting on you. Michiko’s counting on you. Jimmy. Desmond. Did I mention Barbara Bush? Her, too. Don’t hang us out to dry, pal.”

“After I kill him?”

“Yes?”

“After I kill him, could I call you John?”

“Yes,” he said. “Certainly”

I hung up and the clock said 9:08 and then I looked again and it said 11:02. There was drool on my chin. I had dozed off. How could I? I jumped up, cheeks burning, and ran out the door and crossed 44th Street and walked into the Algonquin, where the lobby was empty except for Tony Crossandotti, who was sitting under the Benchley portrait, surrounded by a couple dozen empty beer bottles and a pile of pistachio shells on the floor. He had just sprayed himself with cologne and smelled like an aging prostitute. He stood up. It was right then, standing and facing him, when I realized I’d left my pistol in my desk drawer.

“I was afraid you had deceased,” he said, “or gotten engrossed in a long book.”

“I decided not to,” I said

“You have broccoli on your lapel,” he said. He brushed it away with a pinkie. He was cool as could be. “How long since you ate? You been carrying broccoli around on your lapel since last night? I would think someone would point this out.”

“You just did,” I said, “and I’m grateful.”

“I am disappointed about the poem,” he said. “You can’t do the Crossandottis one little favor for crissake? This is unthinkable. The world runs on little favors. New York does not operate according to government. Get that through your fucking head. New York runs on favors.”

“I have great respect for the Crossandottis and in all due respect, I don’t do favors for assholes like you.”

“I don’t think I heard you clearly.” His breath smelled of beer and pistachios.

“Assholes like you, Mr. Crossandotti. People who take a good magazine and beat the shit out of it.”

“Let me give you a word of advice,” he said. “You maybe shouldn’t have come here, seeing as you’re so upset. You maybe should’ve taken the ferry to Staten Island or headed over to France on a Guggenheim for a couple years. You could easily get yourself shot in the ear hole for saying things like that. Not by me. I’m a pussycat. I wouldn’t harm a flea. But maybe some person who’s loyal to me might hear about what you said and he’d come after you and excavate your head off.” There was an odd vibrato in his voice, a sort of throbbing in the pineal gland.

“What I’m going to do for you,” he said, tapping me on the chest, “is teach you about gun safety.”

I said, “Mr. Crossandotti, what you’re going to do is leave
The New Yorker
alone. You’re not going to merge it with
Field and Stream.
You may think you are, but you’re not. It isn’t going to happen. There aren’t going to be pictures of fish, or profiles of hunters, or
Onwards and Upwards with Deer Stands. Our Far-flung Fly-
Casters. No cartoons of bears netting salmon. None of that. We like
The New Yorker
just fine as it is.”

“Hey. Thanks for the opinion. But I’m concerned about the danger of somebody banging you in the forehead. There’s a lot of that going on these days. Let me demonstrate the workings of a pistol and give you a tip or two about firearm safety. Let us step into the next room so as not to alarm the tourists.”

The lobby was deserted except for a man and a woman, English majors by the looks of them, taking snapshots of the venerable room from various angles, and stealing a few coasters.

“Fuck off!” Tony yelled. “Or I’ll rip the lungs out of your chests. Hers first.” They flapped away like terrified pigeons. Being English majors, they’d never been spoken to in such basic terms, probably.

I could see he was riled. That was my plan, insofar as I had one. Infuriate him until he was frothing at the mouth and pissing his pants and then—do something. Something sudden and violent and effective. Something unexpected. Perhaps a forefinger in the eye socket. Or something involving tripping. A sharp blow to the nose with the heel of the hand, driving the nasal bone into the frontal lobe and causing extreme disorientation. I had a number of possibilities in mind.

“Right after you teach me about gun safety, I’ll call up the Times,” I said. “I’ll inform them that plans for
The New Yonder
have been shelved and that our esteemed publisher, Mr. Crossandotti, is taking a well-deserved sabbatical.”

“Hey. I appreciate your interest in my company, Wyler. All what you know about publishing would about fit in a roach’s left nostril, but that’s okay. Believe me. No hard feelings. Come this way and let me show you how to wrest a .45 revolver away from a crazed attacker.”

“How about New Jersey for that sabbatical? Hoboken or Wee hawken?”

“Listen. You should know about self-defense. Life is good. You should live a long life and enjoy.”

We walked into the Oak Room and he pulled out his pistol and said, “The first lesson in how to wrestle a pistol away from a guy who is stronger than you and smarter than you and who is just about to blow a big hole in your ear is not to even let yourself be drawn into the type of situation where it’s you and him alone in a room with no other people, okay? That’s the thing you want to avoid at all costs. Number two: don’t attempt to distract him with a sudden move or coughing fit or that old trick of looking over his shoulder and saying, ‘Hi, Jim!’—that is an old trick that doesn’t work anymore if it ever did. Number three: don’t have illusions about your own strength. Some guys, from having watched Alan Ladd movies, get the idea that they could hurl themselves at somebody and knock him to the floor. In your case, this just fucking ain’t gonna happen. It would be like a parakeet hurling itself at a glass window. Strictly unproductive in the larger scheme of things.”

He was about to get to No. 4 when a man walks in with a big Leica around his neck and says, “Is this the room where Dorothy Parker and Benchley and Woollcott and George Kaufman and Marc Connelly and those people used to gather for the famous Algonquin Round Table?” And Tony yells, “Who gives a fuck! Get your ass out of here or I’ll blow it off you one cheek at a time.”

The guy says, “I’m sorry, but what are you talking about?”

“Get your ass out of here.”

The guy says, “We came all. the way from Minnesota to see the Round Table. Is that a problem? Is now not a good time?”

Tony yelled, “Get the hell out!”

“I’m sorry,” the guy said. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I just came in to take a picture. We’re
New Yorker
readers. And I love Benchley.” And then he recognized me. “Aren’t you an author yourself?” he said.

“Yes, I’m Larry Wyler,” I said. “I’m from Minnesota as well.”

“Right,” he said. “You wrote that novel about soybeans. What was it called?” He turned to ask his wife, but she was gone.

Tony held up the gun so the guy could see it. “This ain’t some book club you walked into, this is a gangland-style execution. This is something you don’t want to be a witness to. You hear me?”

“I loved the stuff about soybeans,” the guy said. “I grew up on a farm near Morris. You ever get up that way?”

“Not as often as I’d like. I wish I were there right now.”

Tony is miffed. He stamps his foot.

“Hey,” he says. “You ever hear of the Mafia?”

The guy said he had seen
The Godfather,
the first one, but thought the book was better.

“Brando was good and Duvall, but the rest of it was a piece of crap,” says Tony. “Only guy who can write about that stuff is Elmore Leonard.”

“Is he an actor?”

“Elmore Leonard?” Tony looks at me. “I cannot believe this yahoo never heard of Elmore Leonard.”

“Does he write for
The New Yorker?”
the guy said.

“You never heard of Elmore Leonard? You’re bullshitting me.”

Tony was saying something in Italian that sounded like a curse for when somebody spits in your mother’s tomato sauce. Either that, or a recipe for ground glass. And he was poking the gun in the guy’s ribs.

“Hey,” the guy said. “I can take a hint. Don’t get all hot and bothered. I apologize for the trouble. Have a nice day, okay?”

And that was when I killed Tony, when the man said, “Have a nice day, okay?” Tony sort of lost control of himself at that point. He threw his head back and snarled and his arm twitched, and I grabbed the wrist of his gun hand and he yanked with all his strength and in the process shot himself in the forehead. The room goes
boom
and Tony falls down like a load of fresh sod and the guy says, “What happened to him?”

I said, “He tripped on a wrinkle in the carpet. It happens all the time.”

“Is he all right?”

“He’s better than he’s been in a long time. He’s resting now. Let’s tiptoe out and leave him to his thoughts.”

And Tony opens one red eye and says, “You’ll never write for my magazine again, Larry Wyler.”

I tried to think of a witty retort—Oh.“
Really? Who died and made you editor?
—and his head rolled to the side and he was out of here, he’d left the building. A powerful publishing tycoon murdered by a second-rate writer. Accidental, in a way, but in another way, quite deliberate. I certainly had bossicide in mind when I entered the Algonquin, but the manner in which it happened was unintended. So probably it’d be second- or third-degree manslaughter. My defense lawyer would argue that Tony was the one with the intent and the weapon—that Tony, in resisting my attempt to disarm him, had caused his own demise, and the jury would deliberate for ten minutes and I’d go scot-free. And that very afternoon, after stopping at the deli, I’d be waylaid by a van full of shooters and my bullet-riddled body lie on 90th Street, with punctured containers of chicken salad and tabouli strewn from hell to breakfast.

“Should we call an ambulance?” the guy says.

“The hotel will take care of it.”

I leaned down and opened Tony’s jacket and got the roll of bills out of his breast pocket. No sense leaving it for the cops. “Just making sure he’s got cab money,” I say to the guy. I’d never seen ten-thousand-dollar bills before. I didn’t know Reagan’s picture was on them. “I sure never expected something like this,” the guy says to his wife, and then remembered she wasn’t there, so he went to look for her.

The money came to $128,656. I stuck it in my pocket and thought to myself, This whole thing would make a good story, except I’d change it and make the murder more deliberate. I’d have the writer struggle with the tycoon and trip him and the tycoon’s noggin would bonk the leg of the sideboard and the tycoon eyes glaze and the writer snatch up the pistol and kill him. Or hold him until the cops arrive. Or maybe kill him, but with a fork. And I wouldn’t have me be a writer. Maybe a choreographer or composer. A more lethal line of work.

I walked out through the lobby. A bellman had locked the front door and pulled the drapes, and waiters had put up partitions to shield the brunch crowd in the Rose Room. “Someone dropped a sofa,” the maître d’ announced. A man in a black suit got off the elevator pushing a wheelbarrow. He went in and got Tony and covered him with a tablecloth and took him out to the curb and laid him in the backseat of a taxi and gave the cabbie some bills and away he went. The janitor tore up the carpet Tony died on and laid a black rug there and set a table on the rug. The place was back in business in ten minutes. That’s New York for you. When we die, we leave a hole behind, a hole so large it takes them less than half an hour to fill it. I turned left on 44th Street and there was my man with the sign FORMER NEW YORKER WRITER DOWN ON LUCK and I dropped the wad of money in his lap. “What’s this?” he said. “Your ship came in,” I said. “Why are you doing this?” he said. “Consider it back pay,” I said. “Thank you,” he said. “My pleasure,” I replied.

 

 

 

When I walked in the front door of my apartment, the phone was ringing—it was Updike. He said to meet him at Zabar’s.

I waited in the cheese section, right by the entrance, where there’s more traffic. He arrived, looking cool as could be, in a black raincoat. He said, “We’re grateful to you, Larry. Alfred and Michiko and Helen and the Academy—All of us thank you for the way you took care of business. The Crossandottis are gone. I’m taking over
The New Yorker.
Mr. Shawn is going to LA with Joni Mitchell. And you’ll be heading back to St. Paul.”

“St. Paul?”

“That’s your home, isn’t it?”

“Mr. Updike, I’m a writer. A citizen of the world. The English language is my home.”

He laid his hand on my shoulder. “You’ll be happier in St. Paul. You’re not a New York guy.”

“Hey. Come on. I just killed somebody!”

I told him that I couldn’t be happier than I was right now. That while I, as a Christian, am opposed to homicide, nonetheless the death of Tony Crossandotti was for the good of journalism—and that while I, as a friend of Mr. Shawn‘s, would miss him, nonetheless, as a realist, I would toady up to whoever was editing the magazine.

“I’d love to keep you, but if I do, I’ve got the rest of the publishing Mafia after me. The Murdochs, the Newhouses, the Forbeses, the Grosvenors, the Hearsts, the Gucciones and Hefners, DeWitt and Lila Wallace. They’d be sending goons after me by the busload. They’d turn 43rd Street into Beirut.

“This is a big city but it’s naked,” he said. “You’re safer in St. Paul. Nobody’s going to go looking for you there on account of they’re not sure exactly where it is. They keep getting it mixed up with Omaha.” He stuffed a ticket in my pocket. “And besides, your writing is a little on the feminine side, kid.” And he slapped me. Playfully, but it hurt. “Nice knowing you,” he said. “Enjoy your winter.” And he was gone.