Bandbox (12 page)

“And you honestly think Houlihan accomplished this miracle?” asked David Fine, for the second time.

“Does it make a difference?” asked Harris.

Paul Montgomery, gathering that “no” was the right answer, vigorously said the word. Spilkes also shook his head in the negative.

“What a cover that’s going to be!” said Paul Montgomery, toasting the air with his water glass. “Rosemary LaRoche! Jimmy’s going to be green.”

Green with money
, thought Spilkes, if the ads kept moving in
Cutaway
’s direction. He looked at his watch and pressed upon the heartburn above his solar plexus, wishing among other things that Harris would get Montgomery out of town on another assignment as soon as possible. The managing editor could never take more than a couple of days of Paulie around the office, peeing all over the carpet like some exuberant puppy.

“There’s plenty more great stuff in the pipeline,” said Harris. “As soon as dawn breaks, Arinopoulos will be down on Wall Street shooting our bull and bear.”

“You still haven’t told us who’s writing the text for that,” said Spilkes, remembering to grin in tribute to the chief’s slyness. “The lineup sheet still just has ‘tk’ for the scribe.”

“You’ll see,” said Harris, leaning back and putting his arm around Betty. He scanned Fine and Montgomery’s faces for signs of competitive anxiety. He knew how to keep his men on their game, and thanks to this morning’s triumph over Jimmy, he was feeling very much on his own.

Giovanni Roma poured Betty some coffee and interjected a question: “So is Lindstrom gonna ride-a your bull?”

Harris answered: “Uh, we’re going to give Waldo a rest after the last couple of days he’s had.”

“Good!” said Roma, flourishing the silver pot. “We
like
Waldo well rested.”

“Gianni,” said Harris, tugging the maître d’s white towel. “Get us some grappa.”

“Joe,” warned Betty, “you’ve got another late night tomorrow.”

“I do?”

“The bash for the fiction-contest winner,” Spilkes informed him.

“Oh, right,” said Harris. The affair had gotten bigger every year; this time Oldcastle was throwing open his own penthouse for it. “What you don’t know is I’ve also got a big morning. Get the grappa, Gianni.”

Betty, disgusted, removed Joe’s arm from her shoulder.

He leaned back into the table. “Now let me tell you about this dame LaRoche,” said Harris, forgetting he’d already apprised the males, at considerable length, of his lunch with the actress.

“I’m all ears,” said Betty.

Harris’s face froze. Exercising his gift for quick, strategic retreat, he said, gravely, “We’re going to have to photograph her pretty carefully. She’s not nearly the knockout I’d have guessed.”

“If you drink the grappa,” Betty pointed out, “you’re not going to be able to keep lying this well.”

The sound of a waiter’s knuckles rapping sharply on the window above the checkered café curtains quieted the table. “A gawker,” he
explained, apologetically, when heads turned. The diners could see, through the glass, a sweet-faced, frightened-looking young man already beating a retreat to the other side of Fiftieth Street.

But just as quickly, Giovanni Roma headed out the door after him, scolding the waiter as he rushed past: “You never know
whose
son that might be!” Within thirty seconds, the boy was inside and getting warmed up in the vestibule.

The
Bandbox
party had already resumed listening to Harris’s revised estimate of Rosemary LaRoche’s looks, when Roma brought the pink-cheeked boy over to their table. “Mista Harris, I think you shoulda meet a very important subscriber. This here is—say your name again,
bambino
—from Greenpoint, Illinois.”

“Greencastle, Indiana, actually,” said the boy, scarcely believing the sound of his own voice, in
here
of all places. “My name’s John Shepard.”

“Hey, kid,” said Harris.

Betty could see the boy’s knees knocking. “Gianni, get the young man a chair. This is Mr. Spilkes, Mr. Fine, Mr. Montgomery. I’m Miss Divine. Sit down, sweetheart.”

Harris was generally baffled by anyone between birth and twenty, and didn’t relish turning the rest of his evening into some kind of kid’s birthday party, but he could see Betty regarding the boy with a maternal gaze she ordinarily reserved for Mukluk, who had been delivered home to the Warwick hours ago by private car.

“John,” asked Spilkes, “what is it you like about the magazine?”

Harris intervened: “Norman, let the kid drink some coffee before you turn him into a one-man customer cluster.”

But Spilkes’s question worked magic. John Shepard’s jaw unlocked to pour forth a flood of consumer approval: “I must have read the January issue four times on the train! Mr. Fine, I loved what you wrote about that restaurant with the shish-kebab swordfights. I felt like I was in Constantinople!”

“His expense report looked like
he’d
been in Constantinople!” said Harris. “Where
was
that place?”

“Ho-Ho-Kus,” said Fine, who was thinking this was one smart kid who’d come in the door.

“I missed seeing you in this issue, Mr. Montgomery, but I thought that article you did last month on the family of acrobats was completely swell. Especially the part at the end where the one who was paralyzed got all choked up saying goodbye to you—”

“Sorry about this month, John,” said Paul, reaching into his pocket for one of the dozen Ty Cobb autographs he’d brought back. “Maybe this’ll explain—and make up for—my absence.”

“Tell me, kid,” said Harris, waiting for the boy’s mouth to close. “Do you ever read
Cutaway
?”

“I don’t think you can get it in Greencastle,” John Shepard replied, hoping the answer didn’t make him seem like a rube.

“Gianni, get this kid a plate of your best veal!” cried Harris.

John, however overwhelmed, remained polite enough to turn to Miss Divine and say, “My sister always reads
Pinafore
.”

“Gianni, get this boy a piece of cake,” said Betty, glad the compliment had gone into her good ear. “Now, John, tell us where you’ve been today.”

Before any of the food arrived, John Shepard downed several warm, and entirely unfamiliar, gulps of grappa, which caused him to narrate his adventures in a single loquacious rush. His dinner companions—
companions!
—were soon aware of everything that had happened to him aboard the
Cleveland Limited
, where he’d gotten no more than a couple of hours’ sleep sitting up in the club car. They also learned how he’d found himself a room for a couple of nights at the Railroad YMCA, which he couldn’t believe was actually on Park Avenue, because he knew all about Park Avenue, whereas the average person in Greencastle, even a professor like his father, still thought all the fancy people in New York lived on
Fifth
Avenue.

Harris and Betty and the rest of the table further learned about the hour John had just spent walking through Times Square, looking for the neon sign of the kitten with the spool of thread, which he’d seen pictures of but guessed must now be gone. He’d lost count of all the jewelry merchants and costume repairers and joke sellers whose windows he’d gone past—never mind the theatres!—before figuring out that New York, if you wanted to get a
real
idea of it, was better off seen from a distance than close up. So he’d ascended to the observation deck in the Shelton Hotel over on Lexington (he deliberately didn’t say “Avenue,” just “Lexington,” so he’d sound more like a native), and he’d seen the whole metropolis spread out before him. Less than an hour ago he’d been floating high above the streets, and now here he was down in the thick of things in a way he couldn’t have dreamed about! Except he
had
dreamed about it—a scene just like this—while he’d slept sitting up inside the
Cleveland Limited
.

Before long, in the presence of so much talkative innocence, Harris felt ready to call it a night. “Kid, why don’t you come by the office tomorrow? We’ll show you around.”

“Really?” said John, gaping again, despite the speedy regularity with which these treats were coming.

“Sure,” said Harris, getting up from the table. “Welcome to New York. I’m sure there’re big things in store for you.”

No one at the table had interrupted John’s excited narrative to ask why he had come to the city, or what circumstances had preceded his departure from Indiana. It was, to these diners, a simple given that everywhere else was a place you left, that each person arrived in Manhattan like an appliance ready to be taken out of its box and plugged in. This nice boy was just one more shiny creature off destiny’s assembly line.

There was another set of eyes peering into the restaurant’s windows, with more accomplished stealth than John’s had been able to
practice. Ever since quitting time, Chip Brzezinski had been pacing Midtown, dogged by Jimmy Gordon’s breakfast warning that
Cutaway
would lose interest in him if his next bit of sabotage didn’t pan out. Looking obliquely through the glass, Chip was now wondering what truck this turnip had fallen off of, and why he was sitting at that table like he’d just made his First fucking Communion. Was the kid part of some new stunt by Harris? “Bandbox Junior”? A new feature, or maybe a whole new supplement? Chip made a note of the little fellow’s kisser—so ripe for a pasting—before turning up his collar and heading into the night.

“Where are the goddamned HORNS?” shouted Gardiner Arinopoulos, rubbing his hands in the predawn cold.

The truck driver, standing in the gutter of Wall Street behind the live cargo he’d started to unload, looked from the photographer to the animal and back again. “
What
horns?” he asked. “He’s a Black Angus.”

“I ASKED for a bull! What KIND of bull has no horns?”

“The Black Angus kind,” said the driver.

“Oh, Christ. SHEA!”

The photographer’s assistant was standing beside a second, smaller, truck parked in front of the Subtreasury Building. He walked over to his boss.

“How are we GOING to get horns on this thing?” cried Arinopoulos—who soon had a brainstorm. “Get into a taxi and GO up to the studio. There’s that pair of skinny megaphones STANDING in
the corner. You know where I’m talking ABOUT? Strap them together and BRING them down here. Instantly!”

“What about the koala?” asked Shea, pointing to the smaller truck.

“I’LL watch the fucking bear,” the photographer declared. “And YOU stay HERE,” he ordered the driver of the Angus.

Looking a few feet down the sidewalk, Arinopoulos could already make out the time on the Seth Thomas clock that stood like a solemn lollipop on the sidewalk. Real daylight would arrive within fifteen minutes. After that he’d have perhaps another fifteen to get his picture, before the street’s eager beavers started showing up to open their offices and get in his artistic way. So the moment Shea commenced his northward dash Arinopoulos began setting up his camera.

He took no notice of the young man standing across the street. About an hour ago, Allen Case, a cap pulled low across his face, had taken up position between two deep scars on the façade of the J. P Morgan Building. These reminders of the 1920 anarchist attack had prompted Allen to look over at the now-famous spot where the bay horse got blown to bits by a bomb inside the wagon it had been forced to pull. It might be too late to save that poor creature, but it wasn’t too late to save the koala, somewhere inside that second truck, from indignity, and worse.

Nelson Merrill had provided accurate directions to Long Island City, but when Allen got there several hours ago he’d found the warehouse of exotic animals protected by barbed wire, as well as a German shepherd even he couldn’t charm into unbaring its teeth. Knowing Arinopoulos’s schedule, he had retreated here, intent on rescuing one abused beast if not the whole imprisoned arkful. Shivering in his short jacket—he couldn’t let a long coat get in the way of the maneuvers he was ready to perform—Allen looked across the street at the two different trucks, certain that the ordinary Angus had come from somewhere other than the Queens warehouse, whose strange, wonderful odors he could smell even now, as he wondered
what sadists besides this photographer patronized that tragic menagerie. Its existence only confirmed Allen’s belief that John Scopes had, in fact, been guilty, of at least presumption, since neither God nor nature would ever have allowed the evolution of charming monkeys into terrible men.

The sun had come up, if just barely. It was glinting off the face of the clock when Arinopoulos’s assistant, still fashioning a ridiculous contraption from the two megaphones he’d fetched, got out of the returning taxicab.

“It’ll HAVE to do,” said the photographer, grabbing the fake horns. “There’ll be a bit of a blur, in ANY case, once he’s charging. Here,” he ordered the truck driver. “Put THIS on him.”

The Black Angus was soon snorting, more from bafflement than any real aggressive impulse. “Excellent!” said Arinopoulos, seeing the steam emerge from the animal’s nostrils. “This goddamned cold is good for SOMETHING. Shea! Get the bear.”

Idiots
, thought Allen Case. It’s not a bear; it’s a marsupial.

“Tell me what exactly’s supposed to happen?” the truck driver asked, once he’d finished crowning the Angus.

“As soon as my man sets DOWN the koala, your hornless wonder is going to CHASE it. Get the bull to the top of the steps and have him come down THROUGH two of the columns. With any luck I’ll get old George into the shot, TOO.” The trucker was already leading the Angus up past the statue of Washington. “Where’s the koala supposed to end up?” he called back.

“Under a BUS? I couldn’t care less. He’s BOUGHT and paid for, not rented,” explained Arinopoulos, now confident enough of success to be laughing. “I’m not exactly COUNTING on his survival. Shea! Get that jug-eared furball OUT here!”

Allen took the scrape of the panel truck’s door as his signal. He dashed across the street. In a single movement he knocked down the
photographer’s assistant and scooped the terrified koala into his arms. Running toward the subway, as fast as he could with twenty-five pounds of marsupial clinging to his bony torso, he put a cough drop into the creature’s mouth. It had been too late last night, and too early this morning, to get hold of any eucalyptus leaves for the animal to eat. Maybe the lozenge would satisfy until she was safely hidden and Allen could lay in a supply of the foliage from a flower shop he knew on Sixth Avenue.