Toll Call Read online

  “Soon, Marsh,” he promised. “I’m going to shoo them off to the Café Roma in ten minutes. I’ve arranged something special for Matilda tonight—they’re pouring a new drink in her honor, named after the new book. Cointreau, cinnamon, and clotted cream; I think she’ll be pleased, don’t you?”

  I glanced at Matilda. Her pate was glistening from the warmth of her reception and she was clutching her book to her side as though its gossamer imagery would fly away if her grip loosened even slightly. The poems were about traffic, I’d heard someone say—cars and trucks and what happens when you ride around in them. The collection was entitled Gridlock, and the jacket photograph featured Matilda in a bikini and a chaise longue, recumbent on an endangered species—an empty parking space within a mile of Union Square.

  As one of Matilda’s more unctuous friends began extolling her talent at the expense of Amy Clampitt, Bryce glanced furtively at his watch. “I’ll meet you in my office at nine, Marsh; you can go on back, if you like. There’s scotch in the credenza, lower left—I know that’s more your style. But first I’ve got to try to convince a young postmodern to send her new collection to Periwinkle. She’s clearly ready to break out—with the right promotion and some suitably bizarre behavior on her part, I think I can make her the next Kathy Acker.”

  With a flip of his hand, Bryce went off to foist the Ritz on an impressively outlandish young woman who seemed more insulted than thrilled by the attention, which no doubt made her personality congruent with her prose. When Bryce was well into his spray of flattery, I surveyed my surroundings more closely, since it was my first visit to Periwinkle’s inner sanctum.

  The party was corrupting what was normally the conference room. Darkly handsome, it was furnished in the timeless style of an English men’s club, with ponderous leather chairs and heavily tufted chesterfields. Beneath the gleaming brass reading lamps suitably esoteric tomes were displayed on deeply oiled occasional tables. The wall at my back was entirely a bookshelf and its opposite was mostly glass, beyond which a leather bar and a fabricating plant mocked us from the ungentrified side of the street.

  On the wall to my right, precisely paneled squares bore framed and spotlighted covers from Periwinkle’s meager backlist, matted in a brilliant blue. Although I read my share of reviews and spent more than a few of my Saturday mornings browsing through the Recent Acquisitions section of my neighborhood library branch, few of the titles were familiar to me. Which might have explained why Margaret Chatterton had a scowl on her face when I looked her way a second time.

  When I bowed toward what looked like the standard edition of her disdain, she unexpectedly motioned for me to join her. Margaret was one of those women who demands a fealty that exceeds my understanding and is thus beyond my power to confer, which makes me feel vaguely culpable. I obeyed her summons immediately.

  “It’s been a long time, Marsh,” she said, the makings of mischief in her eye. “Are you enjoying your wallow among the literati?”

  I looked down at the gray-streaked hair, the narrow nose, the vertically striated neck, the reluctant breasts that barely disturbed the drape of her cashmere dress. “About as much as you are, I’d say.”

  Her smile turned snide. “Now you know how I felt at your Super Bowl party.”

  “I wouldn’t have been offended if you’d stayed home, Margaret.”

  “I wouldn’t have hesitated to offend you; it was Bryce I was worried about. I had to make sure he didn’t make any more of those ridiculous wagers.”

  “Well, you got the job done. As I recall, no one did anything remotely ridiculous that day.”

  She looked up at me as she fiddled with the jewel that was suspended at her throat like a drop of her husband’s blood. “I did put a damper on the whole affair, didn’t I?”

  By the time the 49ers had launched their winning drive, I had been the only one left in the room, the rest of my guests having retired to the Caffé Sport to escape Margaret’s running commentary, which made Howard Cosell’s sound like the Reverend Schuler’s. “That about covers it,” I admitted.

  She closed her book with the snap of a steel trap. “So what. Football is sadistic and its trappings are sexist. It ought to be banned.” With that burst of intellectual fascism, Margaret turned toward the crowd that continued to buzz with pleasure at nothing more apparent than its self-regard. “It’s hardly encouraging, is it, to know that the majority of people in this room think literature begins with Erica Jong and ends with Tama Janowitz.”

  Her words buckled with a contempt so vast it must necessarily have encompassed herself. Since there wasn’t anything else to do, and since if Bryce did plan to engage me professionally it would probably be Margaret who paid the bill, I tried to jar her out of it. “You’d prefer they were discussing Jane Austen, I take it. Or maybe Ayn Rand.”

  She scoffed. “Actually, my disposition is more a matter of money than poetics.” She gestured toward the guest of honor. “Would you like to know how much it cost me to publish Matilda’s little exercise in blank-verse egoism?”

  “How much?”

  She licked her lips. “Well, let’s see. With a standard trim size like Gridlock’s, a small page number and small printing, the figures run something like this—three thousand for the cover design plus another three for the jacket; twenty dollars per page in plate costs, times a hundred pages equals another two thousand; plus a dollar ten per unit in PP and B, plus—”

  “What’s PP and B?”

  “Paper, print, and binding. Which is another twenty-two hundred. Plus a dollar for every book we estimate we’ll sell for promotion, which is two thousand more. Plus the royalty to the author, which is ten percent of the cover price, which in this case means a dollar a book. Which gives us … what?”

  “Something over fourteen thousand dollars.”

  “Right. And that’s just hard cost, not fully allocated—I haven’t even hinted at overhead yet, which, given the size of our mortgage, is a horror I won’t bore you with.” Margaret glanced morosely at the wall across from us. “Suffice it to say, all those precious little poems and precocious little novels have cost more than two million dollars to immortalize. Net loss to me, needless to say.” She chuckled without a trace of mirth. “That’s exclusive of the cost of the stimulants necessary to revive the poor souls who decided to read them.”

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  Margaret looked at me with a glint of triumph, as though she suspected I had given Bryce the first book he’d ever read and was therefore to blame for his addiction. “Do you sense a little desperation in the air, tonight?” she asked abruptly.

  I frowned. “Not particularly. Why?”

  “This is his swan song,” Margaret said, the final words a spondee of satisfaction. “I’ve warned Bryce that at the end of the fiscal year I’m pulling the financial plug. When I do, I’m afraid his lovely little Periwinkle will rapidly begin to wilt.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said truthfully.

  “Why?”

  I thought of the hours I’d spent in the presence of nothing but a book, beginning at about age six with a boys’ biography of Kit Carson. Laid end to end, the hours would encompass years. The best years of my life, arguably. “Because books are nice things to make, I guess,” I muttered with an odd embarrassment. “And because Bryce enjoys his work more than anyone I know.”

  Margaret pointed toward the wall. “How did you like Thin Wind? That was our best seller: eighteen hundred copies.”

  “I, ah …”

  “I’m sure Bryce sent you a galley. What was your favorite part? The celebrated blizzard scene?”

  “I guess so. Sure.”

  Her laugh was the comeuppance I deserved. “Thin Wind is set on a banana plantation in Costa Rica; there is no blizzard. That is, if you discount the blizzard of adjectives that is that particular novelist’s most egregious affectation.”

  There was nothing I could say that would take us anywhere I wanted to go, but in a my
sterious shift of mood, Margaret looked up at me with uncharacteristic contrition. “Don’t be embarrassed, Marsh; actually, I’m flattered that you cared enough to lie to me. And I didn’t intend to be mean—I’ve told you this so you’ll help if Bryce starts behaving childishly after I’ve taken his toy away. I do care for him, you know,” she added as though she knew that among more than a few of her husband’s friends it was a subject of debate.

  In the echo of her final sentiment, I glanced to where Bryce was regaling a bevy of presumably would-be writers with one of the publishing anecdotes he related so irrepressibly, this one having to do with an autograph party at which no one but the author showed up. “He doesn’t look too broken up over Periwinkle’s imminent demise,” I observed carefully.

  “Because he doesn’t think it’s going to happen.”

  “Does all this have something to do with why I’m here?” I asked when she didn’t elaborate.

  “Bryce thinks he’s found a substitute for me,” Margaret muttered, her gaze fixed on her husband, her injured feelings obvious. “Or for my money, at least.”

  So Bryce has a mistress, I thought. Good for him, I thought next, then wondered why I wasn’t ashamed of myself. “An investor, you mean?”

  She shook her head. “A book.”

  I was confused. “What book?”

  “A new one. Not yet published. Something Bryce feels could be a true best seller.”

  I felt myself redden. “There are already plenty of books about San Francisco private eyes,” I demurred insincerely. “Both real ones and imaginary ones.”

  I expected her to try to convince me otherwise, but Margaret’s cockeyed squint meant I was refusing an offer that hadn’t been made, which made me redden even further. I had blurted the unnecessary disclaimer because the reference to a mysterious masterpiece had exposed my deepest secret—a secret I’d kept even from my secretary and Bryce Chatterton: some day I wanted to write a novel. Hatched during the reading rampages of my college years, the desire apparently remained so strong some three decades later that it had led me to grasp at an opportunity that wasn’t real and indulge myself in images of dust jackets decorated with my photo and book spines resplendent with my name.

  Margaret seemed telepathically attuned to my discomfiture. “Bryce doesn’t want you to write a book; he wants you to read one.” Her smile turned thuggish. “You do read books, don’t you, Marsh?”

  “Once in a while,” I said, angry at myself for my irrational fantasizing, angry at Margaret for so readily rebuffing me. “But what I get paid for is reading people.”

  She raised a brow. “Oh? And what do you read in me?”

  “A mystery,” I said roughly. “Gothic, I’d say.”

  “Heavens,” Margaret Chatterton replied airily, then made as if to probe the assessment further.

  But I didn’t give her the chance. Before she could question me again, I excused myself and headed for a mood modifier more reliable than punch, put to a pathetic rout by the resurrection of what was at once the most persistent and arrogant of my ambitions.

  Before it was summarily stolen from me, I considered teaching the most noble profession of them all. Though now I am in many ways its victim, I still think that: the most noble; and the most treacherous. Perhaps that is nobility’s essence, that it cannot exist without peril. Which would explain why, in a society that so maniacally seeks to obviate risk, a champion is so seldom seen.

  Homage to Hammurabi, p. 31

  2

  The office was much smaller than the conference area, in its relentless clutter and confusion less a room than a cavern carved out of a mountain of books and manuscripts. The only items of decor not related to publishing and Periwinkle were a stack of Bang & Olufsen components in a cabinet behind the desk and an array of photographs of a young woman that was on display in the many nooks and crannies of the room.

  After examining the stylized stereo close enough to decipher how to turn it on, I pressed some buttons until I got the tuner locked on KJAZ and the opening bars of a James Moody ballad, then got comfortable in the desk chair, feeling exalted and at home in the cozy room. To pass the time I leafed through a recent Newsweek, stopping only to read the cover story on the delectable Michelle Pfeiffer and a review of the new novel by Richard Russo. I put down Newsweek and picked up Publishers Weekly. An article listing the American media companies now owned by foreign corporations lent further support to a common prognostication—that by the end of the century America will be little more than a satellite of foreign powers, vulnerable to their policies and preferences, significant solely as a market for their wares.

  The radio shifted to the Brecker Brothers, and I grew as restless as their rhythms. After discarding the dregs of the Sunday Punch in a pot of pansies and filling the void with Bryce’s Black Label, I left the desk and wandered around the room, pulling books off the shelves as I went, taking the best measure of a man there is next to examining his diary or his tax returns.

  Most had been written by well-known Bay Area authors, present and past, from Frank Norris and Dashiell Hammett to Herb Gold and Anne Rice. Almost all were first editions and many were inscribed to Bryce with sentiments ranging from careful courtesy to effusive thanks. After three or four examples of the latter, I found myself taking pleasure in the fact that so many eminent people shared at least one of my opinions—that Bryce Chatterton was a nice guy.

  After enjoying an elegantly brief tribute to Bryce from the pen of Alice Walker, I turned my attention to the manuscripts. There was a yard-high pile of them beside the desk. I selected one entitled Rampage. The postmark indicated it had been mailed to Periwinkle some three months before, from a man in Hobbs, New Mexico. I thumbed aimlessly through the bright, crisp typescript, wondering if the author rushed to the mailbox each day awaiting word of its fate, wondering if Bryce had become too jaded to marvel any longer at the dreams that lay pressed as hopefully as four-leaf clovers between the pages he so routinely received and presumably, in all but the rarest of cases, dispatched with a rote thumbs down.

  I stopped at page 251: “The blood from her breast spurted onto my face like wine from a goatskin, and was thick in my throat as I drank it.” For some reason the image made me laugh. Mercifully, the door to the office opened and spared me a further dose of what Faulkner might have become if he’d tried to sell as many books as Stephen King.

  Although I was expecting her husband, it was Margaret who succeeded me behind the desk. “Bryce will be in shortly,” she informed me as she rummaged through the pile of papers in front of her, her features dense with preoccupation. “The herd has finally been sufficiently fattened and he’s driving them toward the exits.”

  “Good.”

  When she didn’t find whatever it was she was looking for, she looked up. “I want to apologize if I seemed uncharitable in there,” she said, looking less apologetic than crafty. “I’m still not certain I’m going to shut Periwinkle down; it all depends on my ex-husband.”

  “Why him?” I asked without much interest in the answer.

  Margaret raised a brow. “I assumed Bryce told you that Marvin’s money paid for all this.”

  I shook my head. “Marvin who?”

  “Gillis.”

  My interest turned real—I knew Gillis a little, less personally than by reputation; I had even done some work for his law firm, though not on the corporate side of which Gillis was top gun, but rather for the lowly litigators.

  “I thought everyone knew,” Margaret was saying. “Actually, I thought my divorce settlement was in the nature of a scandal.”

  “I guess I skipped the columns that week.”

  She bristled in self-defense. “Marvin made lots of money. It was only fair that I was given a share of it.”

  Margaret had put it mildly. Marvin Gillis specialized in incorporating new ventures and taking a block of stock in return as his fee. Thanks to the law of averages and Marvin’s participation in the zoom of high tech down in Silicon Vall
ey, portions of that stock were eventually worth millions. At one point I heard that only Jobs and Wozniak had a bigger bite in Apple than Marvin did, but I didn’t know if it was true. I did know that if Margaret Chatterton had been awarded even 10 percent of her ex-husband’s rumored accumulation, she had enough to float Periwinkle over the next century.

  “Marvin is still being a grouch,” Margaret was saying, “even after all this time.”

  “How?”

  “He’s overextended himself in the past few years, so he’s trying to finesse me out of my holdings, refinancing and reorganizing this company and that, issuing Class C stock and nonsubordinated debentures and other nifty instruments that have the sole purpose of diluting my stake in his companies. My lawyer says he’s being fiendishly clever. If I can’t stop him, Periwinkle will go down the drain.” She closed her eyes. “But that’s not your concern, is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She didn’t hear me. “I’m sure you have more important things to worry about. I know I do.”

  “Like what?”

  She blinked. “It’s really none of your business.”

  I shrugged. “You look the way a lot of my clients look, Margaret—that you need to talk to someone about something.”

  She tried to smile. With Margaret, that’s as good as it gets. When Bryce first introduced us, I kept trying to decide what I’d done to annoy her. I finally realized that it had nothing to do with me, that Margaret simply resented her husband’s interest in anything other than herself.

  “Perhaps I should try idle conversation at this point,” she said glumly. “I’ve tried everything else.” She paused for effect. “I’m worried about my daughter.”

  “Jane Ann?”

  She nodded.

  I recalled the snapshots of his brand-new stepdaughter Bryce had brought by the office several years before. After I’d approved in spades, he’d presented me with a cigar in honor of the occasion. Cuban, in fact. The next day I gave it to Charley Sleet. He said it was the best he ever smoked. Since Charley’s a cop, he also said they were illegal.