The Way of All Fish: A Novel (4 page)

They had tracked L. Bass Hess’s comings and goings for two weeks, and a bigger tightass they had never come across. It was the first time they’d
considered turning down a job because the mark was so boring, they didn’t want to be around him.

They could have offed this guy in their sleep; he was as routinized as a day with Martha Stewart (in or out of jail). They could have stopped in front of Saks and fired over their shoulders at Fifty-first and Fifth and dropped Hess on the pavement in front of St. Patrick’s as long as they did it at precisely 5:55 on a Wednesday, when, for some reason, he went to church. The same routine day after day, the only differences being in the people he met for lunch at the Gramercy Tavern or 21 or a new French place that had a lot of buzz going, named Arles, in SoHo. At these places, he’d meet up with clients or editors or fellow agents.

Since Candy and Karl knew in advance he’d be at one of those restaurants, they’d call and ask if he’d arrived yet. After finding out which one he was going to, they’d go there and get a table near his. They ordered whiskies and steaks, rare, and didn’t bother with the menu. The stuff on it was hardly pronounceable, much less edible. They did not want the soup de mer, the baby-greens salad, the ahi tuna (which Karl said sounded like a fish sneezing), the charcuterie pâté. They liked to watch plates being served, the saucy designs, the bright colors, the small broccoli trees, the canoes of romaine lettuce–boats that should be out on a lake somewhere, the flutes, the volutes, the drifts, the sprinkles. What the fuck was this stuff doing on a fork? It should have been on a runway. They should make plates with little legs that could walk, turn, spin, hobble back to the kitchen.

They liked the Gramercy Tavern best. They liked its straightforward fish dishes (even though the chef did like to dress up the cod and halibut with superfluous bits of this and that). They liked to listen to Hess ordering the striped bass. That gave them a kick. Hess always ate a piece of some kind of fish with a boiled potato and green peas or beans. Never strayed into the fried or the sauced. But that was almost noneating. No dessert, no booze. Drank iced tea. No wonder he was skinny as a subway rail. Candy and Karl were always happy when Hess’s writer or editor guest ordered up a double martini, rocks, three olives; this followed by food leaking butter and oil, designed back in the kitchen by some architect; then went for a bottle of Sancerre and several bolts of ice cream for dessert.

Hess really had to pay up the snout for that one. Candy and Karl enjoyed tuning in to the conversation behind them because they liked gossip about the publishing industry. As when an editor said, “The contract’s lousy. If they can’t up the payout, he’ll walk.” Or “I’m tired of being held up by these guys.”

“Okay, so he doesn’t do it. We can sign Bobby Three Winds.” “Bobby Three Winds?” “Why not? Remember that Vegas job? Steve Wynn and the Bellagio?” “It was perfect.” “Gorgeous. The guy never misses.”

It sounded exactly like listening to Joey G-C putting out a contract. The shooter he mostly wanted was a short muscle-bound guy named Ralph Double-Shoes Bono. Ralph had his shoes specially made to add another inch or so. The other guys started calling him “Double-Shoes,” and the name stuck.

“Who the hell is Bobby Three Winds?” Karl asked afterward.

“He’s that writer that’s part Sioux or Cherokee. Some Indian.”

“Native American is what you say,” said Karl.

“Okay, Native American Indian. He’s some hotshot travel writer.”

Karl snickered. “Such acrimony in publishing.”

“Very hostile people.”

So they knew their way around L. Bass Hess and the route to his office near Broadway and Twenty-third. They could have found it blindfolded.

That was where they went.

C
indy was standing on a street in Sunset Park in Brooklyn in front of a desiccated-looking building, more like a warehouse than any sort of residence, doubting her judgment in answering the ad on Craigslist for an albino clown fish. “A hundred,” the seller had said.

She had agreed and said she’d be there in an hour or a little more. She wasn’t sure how long it would take to get there. He’d told her to take the N train, so she’d walked over to Washington Square.

She was glad at least that it wasn’t dark, although it was looking pretty dusky. Still, it was only midafternoon, probably a downtime for killers, drug drops, joyriders, carjackers, rapists, kid—

“Yeah?”

The single word seemed to explode through the opening of the door, and she was jolted from her fantasy. The heavy door had swung inward with a clatter as if nuts and bolts were falling out of its hinges.

She took in the flat face of the man, youngish, the ripped jeans, the T-shirt with lightning bolts and knives and other ephemera of death. This did nothing for her confidence.

When her response was slow in coming, he said it again—“Yeah?”—and looked her up and down, though in an oddly nonsexual way.

Her hand went to her throat. “Oh, I’m sorry, I must have the wrong—” She was backing off.

“Hey. You’re the lady called about the fish. I’m Monty. Come on in, come in.” He turned back into the hall and drew his arm in an arc like a discus thrower, gesturing for her to follow.

Too late now. She followed him down a narrow hall, dully carpeted, dully painted, the surface webbed in fine cracks.

He went into a room where there were three other men—or boys? they could have been anywhere from eighteen to thirty-eight—all looking glassy-eyed and vaguely smiling from smoking (she guessed) the same thing the fish owner, Monty, was. They, too, wore torn jeans, but less threatening T-shirts. One said “Now You See It.” The other T-shirt sported a smiling alligator.

The three of them squinted and nodded and smoked, sitting on a couple of dilapidated daybeds. One had wrapped himself in an Indian blanket. The other two roused themselves a little, seeing a stranger, and one of them moved his genitals from one side to another with a look of profound accommodation that had nothing to do with her.

Monty introduced them: Molloy, Graeme, and Bub. Bub was the one in the blanket.

They seemed to regard her as just one of the guys, so she stopped thinking murder and rape; yet she felt a little hurt that no one seemed to give a damn that this young blond woman had stepped into a setup that couldn’t have been more conducive to some sexual attack if it had been choreographed by Bob Fosse or whoever did
West Side Story.

Her host had retreated into a darker region and was now back. “Here we go! Here’s your fish. Albino clown fish.” The little fish was in an oversize Ziploc bag. “Cute li’l fucker, ain’t he?”

“Is it the same as a ghost clown fish?” She caught movement out of the corner of her eye, but nothing there seemed directed at her.

“You like fish?” One of them, Molloy, had spoken in a dreamy way, through a haze of smoke. Was it a real question? Was it a dream question? His T-shirt was the one with the friendly alligator. He wore a headband with
aquaria
printed on it in bouncy letters.

“Yes,” she said to him. Then again to the owner, “But is it a ghost fish?”

“Well, yeah, I guess.”

“It does look, well, not quite opaque.”

They all looked at her with varying degrees of frown.

“Well, I mean, kind of transparent orange and not quite white.” The ghost, the spirit of a clown fish, or a clown fish slowly leaving. She smiled.

He held up the bag and squinted as at a too bright sun. “Yeah, yeah.” He didn’t know anything about it.

Molloy of the alligator T-shirt said, “It’s an albino, yeah, a ghost fish, all right. Albino clown fish.” He spoke with some authority. Cindy wondered if Aquaria was a shop that sold fish and fish tanks and so forth. She wondered if he worked there.

“See?” Monty brushed his brown hair off his forehead and looked at her out of innocent eyes. He looked six years old.

That was what seemed familiar to her, what she recognized from childhood: her little brother in an old shed out back with three or four of his friends. It was their club. It could have been them transplanted from the Kansas fields right here and now in Brooklyn. It made her so sad, she was afraid she’d cry if she didn’t get out.

She opened her bag and brought out the two fifties she’d folded into one of the little pockets inside. “A hundred, right?”

“A hundred? A hundred for that there little bitty fish? Monty, you cheatin’ this gal?” This came from the one she thought was Graeme. The introductions had been hastily performed.

Cindy held up her hand. “No. He isn’t. This kind of clown fish sells for even more some places.” She didn’t know whether it did or didn’t. “It’s a fair price.”

Monty went back to smiling at the money she handed over. He set it on a table with a glass to hold it down, as if the winds were roaming.

Cindy adjusted her shoulder bag and smiled at them and said good-bye. She held up the bag as if giving the fish its chance to say good-bye.

They all nodded or grinned through the smoke scrim, held up their hands in a powwow fashion. Indians around a campfire.

Now she wished she’d brought a lot more, for she had a sudden yearning to enlist their help.
If I pay you five hundred, would you go to Manhattan and beat up some people for me? Or even a thousand? I’d really appreciate it.

They would put their heads together.
Yeah, okay. Where we find this dude?

Dudes. More than one dude. There are lawyers and a literary agent.

Hell, yeah.
They’d high-five all around.

Then she would tell them how to find them—her lawyer, Wally Hale, and the Mackenzie-Haack counsel and L. Bass Hess—put the five hundred on the table with a glass to keep it down, and leave before the ceiling flew away.

She did not want to walk to the Thirty-sixth Street station carrying a fish in water. She found a cab on the corner and, on the long drive back to Grub Street, sat in a peaceful frame of mind, wondering about the world Monty and his friends inhabited.

She sat thinking about them, riding back to Manhattan with the watery bag on her lap.

T
here was no one in the outer office of the Hess Literary Agency, so Candy and Karl just walked in unannounced (and uninvited).

Candy attested to surprise that the outer door wasn’t dead-bolted and security-locked. This was, after all, New York.

There was a curved desk at the other end of the room for the secretary or receptionist, neither of whom was present. The two long walls held shelves of books—lots of books. Prominently displayed were big photographs, a couple almost poster-sized, the subjects presumably L. Bass Hess’s clients. These big pictures appeared on tiers to the left and right of the door.

The most prominent was a famous High Desert writer named Creek Dawson, in a ten-gallon hat and neckerchief with a rope slung over his shoulder, a toothpick in his mouth, and a stable full of horses way behind him. He had a lined, weathered face and eyes squeezed tight to blue slits.

“Ever read him?”

“Hell, no. I like Louis L’Amour. He lived in a real place. Durango.”

“This desert ain’t a real place?”

“It’s California, C. California’s California. Hey, look.” Karl indicated a photo of a dark-haired, youngish man posed with half-shut eyes and one arm wrapped like a scarf about his neck, a pose meant to look smoldering. “Dwight Staines. Remember, the guy was in Pittsburgh same time we were?”

“Mr. Idiot, yeah. Hess and old Dwight, that sounds like a good match. Pair of pricks.”

Beside Creek Dawson was affixed a photo of Mia Pennyroyale, wearing gold hoop earrings you could have rolled down Seventh Avenue if you had a stick. She wrote things called romans à clef.

Then there was a bronzed-god-like guy with the snappy name of Harve Hanks who wrote a series about an L.A. private eye “in the great tradition of Raymond Chandler.”

“Yeah, sure,” said Karl. “Only guy that writes in the great tradition of Raymond Chandler is Raymond Chandler.”

Candy snorted. Karl read a lot more, but Candy was catching up.

Fifth and last was a girl or woman, hard to say, with burnished-to-gold hair that looked like she’d cut it herself, raggedy as it was, and calm gray eyes and an unsmiling mouth. A kind of silent face.

Candy’s mouth dropped. He punched Karl on the arm, saying, “Christ, K., it’s her, the girl in the Clownfish.”

“Huh?” Karl leaned closer. “She’s kinda cute.”

“It’s her, one that started saving the fish. Same girl!”

Karl was reading the brief text. “Jesus.” He turned to look at Candy. “This is Cindy Sella. This”—he flung his thumb over his shoulder at the photo—“is Cindy Sella, for fuck’s sake!”

It was then that the receptionist/secretary breezed in from a side door and fitted herself behind her desk. “Oh!” she said. “So sorry. Yes, gentlemen, you’re his three o’clock.” She checked her watch. “You’re twenty minutes early, but I think Mr. Hess can see you.” Her smile was near beatific.

Karl was about to respond that they weren’t his anything, they didn’t have an appointment, but Candy said to him, “Gift horse. Mouth.”