Westlake, Donald E - Novel 42
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Authors: A Likely Story (v1.1)
A LIKELY STORY
Donald E. Westlake
PENZLER
BOOKS ·
NEW
YORK
A Likely Story.
Copyright © 1984 by Donald E. Westlake.
All rights
reserved.
Printed in the
United States of America
.
No part of this book may be reproduced in
any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address
Penzler Books,
129 West 56th Street
,
New York
,
N.Y.
10019
.
Book Design: John W. White Cover
Illustration: Chris Demarest
The characters in this story are
fictitious, and any resemblance between them and any living person is entirely
coincidental.
Library of Congress Catalogue
Number: 84-61250 ISBN: 0-89296-048-1 Trade Edition ISBN: 0-89296-099-X Limited
Edition
FIRST EDITION
Also
by Donald E. Westlake
The Mercenaries
Killing Time
361
Killy
Pity Him Afterwards
The Fugitive Pigeon
The Busy Body
The Spy in the Ointment
God
Save
the Mark
Who Stole Sassi Manoon?
Up Your Banners
The Hot Rock
Adios, Scheherazade
I Gave at the Office
Bank Shot
Cops and Robbers
Help I Am Being Held Prisoner
Jimmy the Kid
Two Much!
Brothers Keepers
Nobody’s
Perfect
Dancing Aztecs
Enough
Nobody’s
Perfect
Kahawa
Why Me?
Levine
I’ll publish, right ‘or wrong:
Fools are my theme, let satire be my
song.
—Lord Byron
The fickleness of the women I love
is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women w love me.
—George Bernard Shaw
Notice to the Reader
,
and His Attorney
THIS is a work of fiction. All of
the characters in this book are fictional, and my creation. Some of these
characters wear the names of famous real persons. I have not attempted to
describe the true personal characteristics of these famous real persons,
whom
in most instances I do not know. In each case, I have
put that famous name with what I take to be the
public perception
of that
individual. (The equivalent, for instance, of suggesting that Jack Benny the
person was really a tightwad, though in fact his public persona was that of a
tightwad while he was very generous in private life.)
I have deliberately chosen not to
follow the accepted pattern of changing the name and keeping the public
personality, to have a baseball pitcher named Jim Beaver, for instance, who led
the Mets to the World Series in 1969. I think that method is arch, crass and
deplorable.
The famous names herein are just
that: famous names. In looking behind them, the reader will not find the actual
human beings who hold those names, nor satires on those human beings. The
reader will find only what I believe is the generally held view of that famous
name’s public self.
The same, of course, is true of the
obscure characters within this book. As for myself, gentle reader, I am a
figment of
your
imagination.
This is for Justin Scott Joe Gores
Brian Garfield Hal Dresner A1 Collins and
Larry Block
and
for two
superb editors Lee Wright and Rich Barber
Contents
January 4fh
“NEVER write a novel in the
first person,” Jack told me.
“I know that,” I said. “And never
write a novel in diary form either.”
“An you shoah got to keep out ub
dialect.”
Oh, how we amused ourselves. Just a
couple of old pals having lunch together, that’s all, good old roly-poly Jack
Rosenfarb and the present speaker, Tom Diskant, chuckling over our sole
Veronique
and house chablis and letting the old real world just go hang.
A comedy team at leisure, one skinny and the other stout, I Jack
Spratt to his missus, Stan to his Ollie, Andre to his Wallace Shawn.
The reality, of course, was quite
different. Good old Jack was an editor with the publishing firm of Craig, Harry
& Bourke, the firm was picking up the check, and 1 was there, heart and
sole in my mouth, to peddle a book.
“Well, the novels dead anyway,” I
said. “I wouldn’t come here to talk to you about a novel.”
“Bless you, Tom,” he said, his merry
eyes crinkling. “You always know what to say.”
I hesitated. We both waited for me
to tell him what book I wanted him to buy. This was the moment of truth— well,
in a manner of speaking—and I hated and feared the upcoming instant of either
acceptance or rejection. What if he said no? Time was pleasant now, in the
predecision phase, wining and dining and making jokes. Outside, the world was
black and white and wet with January slush under a sky piled with round gray
clouds like full laundry bags, cars and buildings all were speckled with city
mud on a Park Avenue so dark and desolate and grim one automatically looked for
tumbrels, but here inside the Tre Mafiosi all was warm and good, gold and ivory
and pale, pale green.
Oh, well; man does not live by lunch
alone. “It’s a Christmas book,” I mumbled, and chugged
chablis
.
Jack’s merry twinkle faded. He
looked puzzled, faintly troubled, as though afraid he was about to hear—or have
to give—some bad news. “It’s a what?” he asked.
“Christmas,” I said.
“A Christmas book.”
“Oh, Lord,” he said, laughing, but
hollowly. “Haven’t we had enough of all that? We’re getting the damn tree out
tomorrow, at long last.
Twelfth Night.
The fucking
thing is
naked
, Tom, there’s green needles everywhere I turn, they’re in
the fucking
bed."
“Christmas will return,” I said.
“Say not so.”
“But it will, Jack. Along about May,
the folks at Craig are all going to start saying, ‘What’ve we got for
Christmas? We need a Christmas book. A big glossy picture-full star- studded
Christmas-gift coffee-table book, twenty-nine fifty until January first.’”
“Thirty-four
fifty.”
“Whatever.” Talking, starting, under
way, 1 was beginning to get my confidence back. “Look, Jack,” 1 said. “We have
had Marc
Chagalls
stained glass people flying upside
down, we have had Dickens, we have had cats, we have had feminism through the
ages, we have had gnomes, we have had cities photographed from the air, we
have—”
“Please,” he said. “Not a history of
American publishing, not while Pm eating.”
“1
have
the
ultimate Christmas book,” 1 said modestly. He thought. 1 watched him think, 1
watched him realize that yes, May would come, and with it the need to define
the fall list, including one or more hot, pot-boiling Christmas books. Whether
or not Christmas itself would ever return, or ever be asked back after its most
recent behavior,
May
would certainly arrive, the need for a
fall list
was as inevitable as death and
Garfield
, and he who managed to think about tomorrow
today would anon be a senior editor. “The ultimate Christmas book,” he
murmured.
“Exactly.”
He shook himself, like a dog coming
out of water or an elephant waking up. “Its too late for marijuana,” he said,
“and the world will never be hip enough for the
Big Picture Book of Cocaine.
Orphans will continue to be out until both
Vietnam
and
Annie
have receded a bit further
into the mists of time. The big faggot book about the apostles all being gay
would probably go well at the moment, but you’re the wrong guy to do it. So
what’s your subject?”
“Christmas,” I said.
Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
He blinked, very
slowly. “You mean,” he said, “a coffee table book about Christmas.
A Christmas book about Christmas.”
“Yes,” I said simply.
“Is this a wonderful idea,” he asked
himself, “or is this a stupid idea?” Frowning at me, all attention, he said,
“Show me this book.”
I pantomimed opening the huge book.
“On this page,”
I said, “
we
have a fourteenth century Madonna and Child. On the next page we have a
Christmas story by Judith Krantz, especially commissioned. On the next page we
have a
nineteen-twenties
comic Prohibition Christmas
card. On the next page we have an original reminiscence by Gore Vidal,
Christmas in
Italy
, bedding the acolytes. On the next—”
“All right,” he said. “I see the
book. You can get these people?”
“Not without Craig, Harry &
Bourke letterhead,” I said.
“And money.” Jack waggled a playful
finger at me, as though accusing me of being naughty. “You’re talking a very
big advance here, buster.”
“I know it, Jack.”
“Excuse my saying this, Tom,” Jack
said, his fingers walking gingerly among the silverware, to show he was
pussyfooting, “but that isn’t your track record. The kind of advance you’re
talking about here, you’ve never had anything like this before.”
Of course not.
I am a journeyman writer; I will do a piece on repairing your own sink for
Ms
magazine
, sexuality among female ministers for
Cosmopolitan
,
the rapaciousness of football team owners for
Esquire.
I did the books
Coral Sea
and
El
Alamein
for
the “We Go
To
War!” subscription series. I did
Golf
Courses of America,
subsidized by American Airlines and published by Craig,
Harry & Bourke, which is how I met Jack in the first place, for whom I’ve
also done
The
bis and Outs of Unemployment
Insurance
and
Hospitals Can Make You Sick.
Track record, that’s all these guys
talk about. It’s one of their many ways to avoid original thought; if they can
see what you’ve done before, they know what to think about you now. I had to
get Jack past that bump in the road, and the only lever I could find was
humility. “Sometimes, Jack,” I said, “a small guy can have a big idea.”
That shocked him into consciousness.
“Tom, Tom,” he protested, “I never said anything like
that.
This isn’t
you and me, this is the
company.
I’m thinking of the people I have to
answer to, back in the office.”
“Don’t sell them
me,”
I
suggested. “Sell them the idea.” “There’s also execution of the idea,” he
reminded me. “Tom, / know you can do whatever you set your mind to, but we’ve
got
Wilson
to consider.
Bourke
himself.
I’ll level with you, Tom,” he said, leaning close, looking at
me with great sincerity. “If you were sitting there with a cute little idea,
ten grand
advance
, maybe even twelve-and-a-half, one
quarter on signature, we could do it in a flash. Within reason, I can close
deals myself up to twenty-five grand, except even then they sometimes pull the
rug out from under me.
But
this.
You’re
talking Judith Krantz, Gore Vidal, you’re talking
money.
And you need
some for yourself, for God’s
sake,
you’re not doing this
for charity.”
“Half,” I said.
He looked exceedingly blank. “What’s
that?”
“I figured that’s the simplest way
to handle it,” 1 said. “We treat it like a regular anthology. Half the advance
goes to me, the other half goes to the contributors and the research assistants
and so on.”
“Oh, come on, Tom,” he said. “For
this page, we pay Gore Vidal and we pay you the same amount? Not on.” “That’s
not what you’re paying for,” I said. “You pay Gore Vidal for that page. Me you
pay for that page and for the page with the fourteenth-century Madonna and
Child and for having thought it up in the first place and for talking Vidal
into doing it.”
“All right, possibly,” he said.
“If we decide to go forward at all.
If the
company
decides.
Then we work out the details.”
“With my agent.
I never talk details.”
“Still Annie?”
“Yes.”
“Well, she’s reasonable,” he said.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“I tell you what, Tom,” he said.
“This is a very interesting idea, I won’t deny it. Let me take it back to the
shop, talk to a couple of people, do you have a presentation on paper?”
“I can’t describe the contents
before I send out my query letter,” I pointed out. “I could do you a
two-sentence memo.”
“Well, we’ll see.”
“Jack. Jack, I came to you with this
first. I did it for two reasons. I think you and Craig are absolutely right for
it,” I lied, “and you’re almost the only person in
New York
I’d trust not to take the idea and run,” I
lied again.
“Well, we’ll see.” Behind his jolly
eyes, his brain was turning over like a submarine’s engines.
“And if I can start
now
,” I
said, “we’re talking about
this Christmas
. ”
“Tight.
Tight
schedule.”
“I know that. I’m up to it, Jack.” I
smiled at him. “What the mind of man can conceive,
this
man can do.”
“I’ll talk it up around the shop,”
he said. “And give you a call in a few
r
days.”
And that was the end of the
conversation. He didn’t seem wildly enthusiastic, but on the other hand he
didn’t reject the idea outright. And at least I’ve let him know I’m thinking in
terms of a tight deadline. I’ll give him till Monday.
Or
maybe Tuesday.
But that’s the latest.
I came home from lunch too keyed up
to sit still. Ginger was at work, the kids weren’t home from school yet, and I
couldn’t think about any of the projects currently on my desk. There was
nothing in my mind but
The Christmas Book.
Oh, if Jack would only come
through!
I phoned Annie, my agent, and got
her answering machine. “This is the literary agency of Annie Lecadeaux,” said
the luxurious voice of Roger Brech-Lees, an English client, a writer of
historical romances under various female names, and—I think—a closet queen.
“Please leave your name and a phone number, and we’ll get back to you as soon
as we can.”
Beep.
Knowing how Annie hates
hang-ups—unsatisfied curiosity eats at her vitals like the fox under the Trojan
lad’s tunic—I hung up without leaving a message, to punish her. Finally, I came
in here to the office and started to type out the story so far. Just recounting
what’s going on.