Toll Call Page 31

  My tools were books—Sometimes a Great Notion, Manchild in the Promised Land, The Winter People, them. And for the handful ready to face the full foulness of the truth, I offered Child of God, Last Exit to Brooklyn, A Garden of Sand.

  Some were never the same thereafter.

  Which was of course my purpose.

  Homage to Hammurabi, p. 47

  3

  By the time I fully appreciated what Bryce Chatterton was asking me to do, there was a smile on his face as broad as his belly.

  “You’re telling me you’ve got the greatest thing since Gone With the Wind on your hands,” I said, still feeling for the scope of my undertaking, “but you don’t know who wrote it?”

  Bryce clasped his hands in front of him. “That’s right.”

  “In other words, you’ve got the book but you don’t have a contract to publish it.”

  “Right again.”

  “How did you get it? Through the mail?”

  Bryce shook his head. “It just showed up one day. Bound just like it is now—with twine, not even a wrapper around it.”

  “When?”

  “About a month ago. Someone evidently came in when the receptionist was off to the ladies’ room and left it on her desk. For all I know, twenty other publishers got copies the same day. That’s one of the reasons I want you to get on this right away.”

  Bryce leaned forward in his chair. The freckles at play above his brow seemed to contract into a solid sphere. “I know I’ve let things slide between us, Marsh. I know I should have kept in touch more than I have, and that it’s shitty to call you only when I need help. But …” His excuse was encompassed in the slow cycle of a sigh. “I’m just trying to say that I’ll understand if you don’t want to get mixed up in this.”

  Bryce was right—he should have kept in touch—but, paradoxically, the token nature of our recent contacts made it easier for me to work for him. As I told his wife, I hate to mix business with friendship, but whatever Bryce and I were now, it spawned fewer conflicting loyalties than that.

  I looked at the manuscript, then rubbed the top sheet between my fingers. “This doesn’t feel like a photocopy; I think this is the original.”

  Bryce seemed relieved at my shift to a professional perspective. “I think so, too.”

  “Which means you may be the only one who has it.”

  “Maybe’s not good enough, Marsh. I’ve got to have the exclusive right to publish the book in this country.”

  “And the author has to have some money.”

  The reminder of the reciprocity of contracts seemed jarring to him. “Yes. Of course.”

  “How much?”

  Bryce fidgeted, more uneasy than uncertain. “What do you mean?”

  “How much would you pay to publish Homage to Hammurabi if the author walked in the door right now?”

  Bryce plucked a letter opener off the edge of his desk and wielded it so menacingly I was glad I wasn’t a fledgling novelist trying to negotiate a deal with him. “If Periwinkle was the only house in the game,” he speculated finally, “I’d offer an advance of five thousand dollars upon signing the contract.”

  “Pretty piddling, isn’t it?”

  “I know, but that’s about average for first novels these days.”

  “You mean that’s all he gets?”

  “No, that amount would be an advance against the usual author’s royalty of ten percent of the cover price, escalating to fifteen percent for each copy of more than ten thousand sold. I’d keep an even split of paperback and book club money, and twenty-five percent of the money from foreign sales, all such rights to be sold by me.”

  “An author only gets ten percent of the price of a book?”

  “Right.”

  “That makes it about as profitable as farming.”

  Bryce nodded. “For most writers that’s exactly the way it is. The Authors’ Guild did a study a few years back—the average annual writing income earned by its membership was less than six thousand dollars.”

  “What about movies and TV?”

  “Those rights would remain with him.”

  “Or her, as the case may be.”

  Bryce shook his head. “It’s a him. No question.”

  “You mean you think you can tell if a book was written by a man or a woman?”

  “Sure. Can’t you?”

  “I never thought about it before.”

  “It’s pretty easy to do these days, since neither gender seems to care if the other reads its stuff or not. Sexual politics is fiction’s biggest problem, I think—both sides suffer because of it. You’d think they’d want to reach out to the other sex. To enlighten them, if nothing else. But all they seem to want is applause from their gendermates.”

  Bryce gave me a chance to add something. When I didn’t, he went back to business. “I suppose I might pay a second five thousand upon submission of a completed manuscript as an incentive of sorts. Though in my experience, to a writer of this quality, money is seldom the prime motivator.”

  I held up the stack of papers resting in my lap. “You mean this isn’t the whole thing?”

  Bryce shook his head. “You’ll see when you read it—I’m sure there’s a final section to be added. Before committing to publish, I’d want to see the conclusion, to be sure it delivered on the promise of the first two sections.”

  I nodded, then asked a question motivated as much by my own interest in the subject as by the requirements of my job. “What if other publishers started bidding? That’s the way it happens sometimes, right?”

  “Occasionally. If the author’s lucky.”

  “So how high would you go?”

  Bryce gazed once again at the books that surrounded him. The placid look on his face indicated that over the years they had offered him the only security he had ever found.

  “I’m like the gambler who’s down to his last chip, Marsh—it’s make or break time. Which means I’d give him all I’ve got.”

  “How much is that?”

  He shrugged. “A quarter of a million, maybe.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Not at all. The big writers command lots more than that these days—Michener, Clavell, Irving; Tom Wolfe just signed with Farrar, Straus for an advance of six or seven million for a novel that isn’t written yet, and that wasn’t even the highest bid.”

  “Do the publishers make money on those books?”

  “Who knows?”

  “Then why do they pay so much?”

  “Because they think they have to, because the big-name books are the only ones stocked in the chain stores, which means they’re the only books most people read. That’s why the little literary novel doesn’t have much of a chance these days. Even if it’s published, it’s almost impossible to find an outlet that will stock it.”

  “What about The Joy Luck Club, and books like that? They seem to do pretty well.”

  “Yes, but no one knows why. That’s the problem—no one knows how to make that kind of performance happen. Sometimes it does, to be sure, but not often enough to change the assumptions and priorities of the business.”

  I held up the manuscript he’d given me. “Yet you think this one will beat the odds.”

  Bryce nodded morosely. “But I won’t get it if it goes to auction. The only way I could even come up with a quarter million is if I sold some things—my best first editions, the manuscripts I’ve collected over the years. I have the original typescript of The Glass Key, did you know that? It’s worth thousands. It would be like surgery for me to part with it. But to save Periwinkle, I would.” He made the prospect sound as barbaric as selling children.

  “How about Margaret? Won’t she back you on this?”

  Bryce shook his head. “Margaret’s out of the picture.”

  “Maybe you should let her read the book. If it’s as good as you say, she might change her mind.”

  “It would be a waste of time. Did she tell you about this wrangle she’s into w
ith her ex-husband?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, that’s absorbing all her time. She’s becoming a financial wizard trying to figure out how to stop him. Until it gets cleared up, she couldn’t finance me even if she wanted to. Periwinkle’s my baby now, Marsh. For better or worse.”

  I looked down at the pages in my lap. “How many people have handled this since it got here?”

  “Just two, as far as I know. The receptionist and me. After I read it and realized its potential, I locked it up.”

  “Do you read everything that comes in the door?”

  Bryce shook his head. “I pay a pittance to a grad student over at Berkeley to screen submissions for me. But this one gave off vibrations, maybe because of the way it looks, all tattered and torn, as though the author wrestled with it for years. Or maybe it was the way it just materialized one day, like a supernatural phenomenon.” His eyes glazed over, as though the possibility was real and not absurd. “In any event, for some reason I thought Hammurabi might be special, and after reading the first few pages, I knew I was right. You can tell after a page or two, you know, whether you’re dealing with a real writer or a hack.”

  I listened to the high whine of his excited breaths. “You really think this is hot stuff, don’t you?”

  His nod was fervent. “It’s amazing, Marsh. The story isn’t all that new—hell, there are only a dozen plots in the world, anyway; everything’s basically a variation. But the depth, the symbolism, the unconscious levels of meaning. I was enthralled the whole time I read it. And the proof of its greatness is, when I read it a second time, it seemed to speak to me in an entirely new voice.”

  Bryce drew a deep breath. “I really want to publish Hammurabi, Marsh, and not just for financial reasons. Think of the stories that will be coming out of Eastern Europe now that the lid is off. For every Kundera who left, there must be a dozen like Havel who stayed behind. Maybe not as brave as Havel, or as talented, but nonetheless with stories to tell of struggling to maintain some level of spiritual and intellectual integrity in a brutally repressive society. They could be thrilling testaments, Marsh; I’d kill to publish them. I’m so certain Hammurabi could make that possible, even if you don’t find the author for me, I may publish it anyway.”

  I raised a brow. “That’s risky, isn’t it? I mean, there are laws against that, as I recall from the course in copyright I took in law school.”

  Bryce grimaced. “What are they going to do, shoot me? If I lose Periwinkle, I’ll be as good as dead anyway.”

  For the merest moment I envisioned Bryce still and silent in a casket, in a freshly fashioned grave beneath a granite stone that was etched with tiny flowers.

  I shook the vision from my head. “Do you have a Xerox machine around here?”

  “Of course.”

  I held up the manuscript again. “Could someone photocopy the first five pages of this for me?”

  “Sure. I’ll do it myself.”

  I untied the twine and gave Bryce the sheets off the top and he disappeared through the door behind me. I put the remainder of the manuscript on the floor and helped myself to a second jigger of Black Label. The photograph on the corner of the desk—a young girl in a sweater with a large letter S on the front—watched me with a cencorious frown, implying I’d already had enough.

  I downed half the scotch in spite of the tacit temperance lecture and was about to return to the bookcase to browse some more, when I heard a noise, low and grating, so out of place in the customary quiet of the library that it took me a second to conclude there must be a private elevator to the office from the street below and that someone must be using it. A moment later, the chugging stopped. After a glitch of silence, a door in the corner of the room slid open and two people entered the office.

  The young woman looked enough like her pictures to identify her as Bryce’s stepdaughter. But the resemblance to the fresh-faced youngster in the snapshots was at best tenuous. Live, her expression was dour and sunless, fiercely guarded, without a trace of the eagerness of youth. Her hair, formerly neat and pertly coiffed, was a clump of frizzy, fuzzy blonde brush, as though each strand had been set with a live wire. Her peasant blouse and short black jerkin topped a miniskirt of acid-washed denim. The black stockings that swathed her legs disappeared into black ankle boots that were fringed and tipped with silver—appropriate were she sitting on the back of a horse. The shine in her eyes was of the sort that used to indicate panic or passion but now can indicate anything from a dalliance with drugs to a new pair of contact lenses.

  Her mate was even taller, so thin as to seem fleshless, also blond, also with silver tips on his shoes, which wouldn’t have been appropriate anywhere I had ever been. His long black coat covered everything between the silver-tipped shoes and the wrap of a red knit scarf that, in the crepuscular light of the office, allowed me to think for a moment that his throat had just been slashed. Still and silent, he remained by the elevator, toying with a curl that fell in a perfect drip of insolence across his blue right eye. The other eye was on me.

  For her part, Jane Ann floated toward me like a ghost, her skin colorless, almost albino, an effect I hoped was a triumph of sunscreen or Elizabeth Arden rather than symptomatic of disease. The shadows in the room allowed her to be sitting behind the desk and reaching for a lower drawer before she even noticed me. And even then it took a word from her friend to warn her.

  “Chill out,” he said, the meaning obvious, at least to the girl.

  Her hand froze in midair, as her eyes met mine. “Oh. I didn’t … Who the hell are you?”

  I told her.

  “I … are you supposed to be here? Bryce has some valuable stuff around; I don’t know if—”

  “He was just here,” I interrupted. “He went to copy some things for me. We were taking a meeting.”

  My show-biz slang and my claim to legitimacy left her flustered. “Sorry I barged in; I didn’t think anyone …” She gestured meekly in my direction.

  “No problem.” To give her time to calm down, I glanced from her bemused countenance to the photograph on the desk and back again. “You’re Jane Ann, aren’t you?”

  “Do we know each other?”

  “Not since you were about this size.” I held my hand at waist level.

  She frowned. “Tanner. I remember. You’re the detective. You had a grimy little office on an alley near the Pyramid and you bounced me on your knee.”

  “Yep.”

  “And gave me all those licorice whips.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Bryce used to talk about you all the time. He’d tell my father to be sure to let him know if I ever ran away, so he could hire you to bring me back.”

  Jane Ann laughed at a joke known only to herself while I enjoyed her secondhand tribute to my tracking skills. Then, in a sudden twist of mood, Jane Ann’s countenance turned grave. “Is he in some kind of trouble?”

  “Bryce?”

  She nodded.

  “What makes you think so?”

  I’d reversed our roles and she resented it. “How should I know?” she countered brusquely, then sensed her tone was inappropriate and quickly softened it. “It’s just … he’s seemed sort of strung out lately is all. He and Mom tiptoe around each other like they were afraid of catching herpes or something. It’s gotten pretty weird around here. Which makes it weird squared.” She paused, then glanced toward the young man, who seemed to belie the notion that humans can’t sleep standing up. “And now there’s a private eye in his office,” she added when no instructions had been forthcoming. “That’s pretty weird in itself.”

  “As far as I know, your dad’s not in any trouble. Not that I—”

  “He’s not my dad,” Jane Ann corrected quickly. “He’s my step-dad.”

  “Right. Lucky for you, Bryce doesn’t seem to feel that’s an important distinction.”

  The ensuing silence embarrassed both of us. Jane Ann bristled from what she concluded was an insult as I tried t
o manufacture an apology for an implication I neither intended nor understood.

  “So what are you doing these days, Jane Ann?” I managed finally.

  She shrugged. “This and that. Taking some art courses, fixing up a loft on Jefferson Street, living with a pit bull and a saxophone player.” She glanced to the sentinel by the elevator once again, as though to be sure she hadn’t gone too far. Reassured by something invisible to me, she met my eye. “Trying to keep from growing up is how my mother puts it.”

  I smiled. “How do you put it back?”

  “That as far as I can see, growing up doesn’t make you anything but drab. But you look pretty fresh. What do you do for giggles? I haven’t seen you around the SoMa clubs, I don’t think.”

  I shook my head. “I doubt if we patronize the same establishments.”

  “So where do you hang out?”

  “Mostly where it’s quiet.”

  “Sounds terminal.”

  “I suppose it depends on the company.”

  “Yeah? For instance? A significant other? Herb Caen? Huey Lewis? Who?”

  “Mostly just with me.”

  She rolled her eyes in obvious disappointment. “I get it. The well-examined life, and all that. Didn’t you hear, Mr. Detective—that went out with the seventies. Life’s a cabaret again. Glitz and glamor is what it’s all about; everything else is a nuisance.” She glanced at her companion once more, and this time got a thin grin of agreement.

  Jane Ann’s smile was more endearing than her sociology. “I’ll try to pick up the pace, just for you,” I said, hoping Bryce would return and get me out of wherever Jane Ann was trying to put me. “But you’ll have to help—is sushi in or out these days?”

  “Sushi who?” Jane Ann was saying with a wonderfully supercilious smirk just as her stepfather came back to the office.

  “Jane Ann,” Bryce gushed when he saw her. “I didn’t know you were coming by tonight. You should have gotten here earlier, so you could meet Matilda.” His delight in the young woman sitting at his desk was obvious. Jane Ann’s feelings were less scrutable.