Bandbox (16 page)

Looking, half-gratefully, like Jiggs after a swat with the rolling pin, Harris withdrew. Jimmy Gordon waved goodbye to his rival, his hand’s dismissive flutter seeming to signal that, in any case, his levee was at an end. Baron de Meyer, the
Bazaar
photographer, never got the picture he’d hoped the onetime patron and onetime protégé would pose for together. Joe and Betty were out the door at 10:25, well before the party’s population came close to peaking.

During the next half-hour, guests continued to come off the elevator onto the twenty-sixth floor; Jeffrey Holmesdale gave odds that his boss Woollcott would yet show up before midnight, after the curtain had dropped and he’d filed his review over the telephone. Someone put “O, for the Wings of a Dove” onto the Victrola, and the celestial, million-selling voice of Ernest Lough, that choirboy phenomenon, plunged the salon into cheerful absurdity. As eleven o’clock neared and the intake of alcohol accelerated, most of those present grew increasingly oblivious.

A few, however, became more purposeful: tired of trying to penetrate Daisy’s foursome, where little Tom Sawyer still chattered away, Chip Brzezinski made off to the kitchen, where he’d earlier spotted the kind of girl he liked for a single night: one who was mopping her angry brow as she wiped the dishes. This was not a maiden holding out for Barrymore or Howard Kenyon.

Ever alert to the duties of reception, Mrs. Zimmerman had subconsciously spent much of the evening near the elevator, and when three gentlemen got off it around 10:55, she asked if they were looking for anyone in particular. Only after inquiring did she recognize the youngest and best-looking of the three as Becky’s boyfriend, Daniel Webb.

“She’s out on the terrace, I’m pretty sure.”

Daniel thanked Mrs. Z and ventured into the apartment’s vast interior, leaving her with the other two gentlemen, each quite a bit rougher hewn than himself.

“I’m lookin’ for the duchess,” said the one who had trouble stifling a cough. “And for her daddy.” After an explosion of hacking, he identified himself as Eddie Diamond. Mrs. Zimmerman never did get the name of his companion, but she led the two of them into the salon and pointed toward the terrace, where she remembered last seeing Daisy. Without even a grunt, the men ventured off in that direction.

On the way, they passed Nan, who’d been depressed tonight by each sight of Newman’s pretty date. She was wondering if it wasn’t time to catch the subway home, and curious whether the koala bear in Mr. Merrill’s basement had gone to bed. The two men also brushed by Waldo Lindstrom, who was threatening to jump from the open part of the terrace if Gianni didn’t give him the cabfare to go up to Small’s Paradise in Harlem.

A few feet away, Max Stanwick was now huddled with Stuart Newman, who wanted to know how one went about securing somebody’s police record from another state.

“For a story?” asked Max.

“No,” said Newman, who hadn’t mentioned Rosemary LaRoche. “For personal protection.”

Eddie Diamond, far more boiled than Joe Harris had been a half-hour ago, finally noticed Daisy and the judge. It was the latter for
whom he had a message. “Hey, Your Magistrate, you’d better get your carcass down to Centre Street, toot sweet.”

Daisy’s expression pleaded for further details.

“We got a problem,” said Eddie. “And it needs immediate attention. Out at the Juniper development”—he couldn’t name the project without sneering—“it seems that one of Mr. Wellman’s contractors was just found very dead in a ditch. The foreman’s been nabbed for it, and he’s makin’ noises about connecting The Brain to this little incident if he doesn’t make bail pronto. Which is where you come in, Your Excellency.” He poked the judge’s shoulder. “We gotta get you downtown.”

Gilfoyle gave Daisy’s forearm a reassuring squeeze, but his face betrayed considerable anxiety.

“You don’t get time to think this over,” said Eddie, who nonetheless gave the judge a few seconds to squirm. Diamond used the time to take a quick survey of Oldcastle’s lair, or as much as he could see of it from out here. Only when he directed his eyes to a griffin gargoyle jutting from the terrace’s exterior did he notice what he’d up to now overlooked: a face as open and sunny as the gargoyle’s was menacing.

“You been here the whole time?” Eddie asked John Shepard, who after seven near-beers had been steadying himself against the edge of a small metal table.

“Yessiree,” said John, still happy to make one more improbable acquaintance.

“Tell me, kid. What’d you just hear?”

“Everything!”
exclaimed John, raising his glass, proud of having committed Max Stanwick’s lesson to memory.

It was the last thing anybody would have remembered him saying—if anybody besides Eddie Diamond and his colleague had heard him say it; but Daisy and Francis X. Gilfoyle were too preoccupied with urgent conversation about the judge’s trip downtown.

And Becky and Cuddles, still unaware of Harris’s departure or Daniel Webb’s arrival, were far out of earshot, hiding in the library, which they’d been able to enter from the unheated stretch of the terrace.

John Shepard himself, still in love with New York and the magazine and near-beer, failed to understand how his simple reply to a straightforward question soon led to his being stuffed—quite discreetly—into Hiram Oldcastle’s dumbwaiter, and then, a few minutes later, into the trunk of Mr. Diamond’s car.

BUTTON UP YOUR OVERCOAT
.

Harris read the cable from Betty and tossed it into the hotel-room wastebasket. It was curious how the two of them reversed behavior whenever he made the annual trip to London. Suddenly Betty felt the need to send two or three wires a day, in fair approximation of his own compulsive telephoning from floor to floor of the Graybar Building. When traveling, he liked to forget about everything back home, even her; for a week or two he relapsed into something like his bachelor days, surrounded on the upper deck or in the hotel bar by only his crew of male cronies. Good as Betty’s advice could be—even about the overcoat; it was freezing over here, and the crossing had been worse—Harris decided he would once more let her telegrams go unopened and unanswered. This had become his standard practice while abroad, and she didn’t object. The wires, which never contained much of importance, had performed their function as soon as she sent them: behaving like Joe made her feel he was still around.

Harris and his men always had to cross at this frigid time of year if they were going to fill the summer issues with the kind of English outfits even the new
Bandbox
reader wanted to see—all the garden-party and boating stuff that, in truth, didn’t change much from year to year. While scouting it, the editors also had British motorcars and the Prince of Wales to catch up with, neither of which much impressed Harris.

But he liked being here. In London he felt exotic and secure all at once. The hotels, thank God, got more Americanized every year; on his first trip over he’d had a bathroom down the hall. This time out Andrew Burn had booked the
Bandbox
party into the slick, modern Berkeley—part of the relentless effort to keep the editor-in-chief up-to-date. The Berkeley’s daily tea dance was filled with pansies and girls even skinnier than Hazel, and there was too much chrome everywhere, but even so, Harris was content.

As he waited for it to be 5:30, the time appointed for Fine, Montgomery, and Spilkes to meet him in the bar downstairs, Harris took a sip of hock and made a mental review of the last few weeks. The overnight editorial retreat at his house up in Dutchess County, held only five days after the party at Oldcastle’s, had produced a few good ideas, marred though it had been by Malocchio’s atrocious catering. Gianni had sent up less than half the food they required, and those meager rations had nearly poisoned those in attendance. They’d finally had to scare up a box of hot dogs and two buckets of beans from a roadhouse in Millbrook; David Fine had still been throwing up, not from the ocean but from Gianni, on the way over here.

Harris preferred not to imagine what had Gianni so off the beam. Most other matters had been on the upswing by the time they embarked from New York. Termagant though she was, Rosemary LaRoche appeared, from what little he’d seen and heard, to be smitten with Newman. Both text and layout of the bulls-and-bears piece had ended up in tiptop shape. And there’d been good ink in the trades and gossip
columns for Mr. Palmer, months before his short story would even run. Oldcastle had sent a handwritten note congratulating Harris on the party’s success, which he’d inferred from the amount of shrimp-tail and broken glass vacuumed up from his carpets.

Still, Harris was nagged by the feeling he’d forgotten to take care of something before setting sail. And yet what could it be? He’d settled Stanwick’s contract for the coming year; had had a drink, at Burn’s insistence, with the Hickey-Freeman executive; had even signed the industry letter to the Postmaster General protesting higher rates for printed matter. Damned if he could think of anything he’d missed; besides, if there really had been a loose end, Spilkes would have remembered to tie it up. They wouldn’t be gone long, in any case. If you added up the voyage out and the one back, they’d be spending more time on the water than over here. In the mere several days they had, Richard Lord would buy up the clothes; Fine would compose a send-up of college dining; and Montgomery would write about having a bespoke suit made on Savile Row. He’d also interview some English skiers departing for the Winter Olympics in France.

Spilkes was along to make sure everybody did what they were supposed to be doing. And yet, at 5:30, down in the Berkeley bar, the managing editor was the only one missing. Lord might be excused from the nightly bonhomie, but for Spilkes it remained mandatory. Harris looked at his watch, scowled at Fine and Montgomery, and ordered a single-malt.

“Say what you will about this country,” he pronounced. “A man can still order a drink here without committing a crime.” This was his annual toast to John Bull, made as he sliced into a small wheel of cheese atop the table.

“Don’t use a knife on that,” said Fine. “Stilton takes a scooper. Let me get the waiter.”

“For Christ’s sake,” said Harris. “It’s cheese, not pistachio ice cream.”

Fine, who hated having his gastronomic pedagogy cut short, frowned at the boss. “Just be glad we’re not eating dinner here. I had a gander at the kitchen, and it makes Gianni’s look like a surgical table. You know, I’m
still
not completely recov—”

“What’s the matter with Gianni, anyway?” asked Paul Montgomery. “Does anybody really know?”

Harris and Fine both had their theories and fears, mostly centered on Gianni’s sordid nightlife, but neither one said anything. Paulie did not reside in Harris’s innermost circle, and thus it wasn’t really his place to talk about Malocchio’s owner. Letting him ask about Gianni would be like letting him ask about Betty; it was too weirdly intimate and, even worse, might create some expectation of reciprocity. Harris had no interest in the wives and children of his staff, and no record of ever asking about either. Did Montgomery even
have
a wife, let alone some towheaded Paulie Jr.?

The editor’s momentary effort to recall this information was suddenly swamped by a wave of nostalgia for Cuddles and Jimmy Gordon, who both used to make this trip. God, would he have to invite Sidney Bruck next year, just to replenish the ranks? An awful thought. But what alternative existed? Newman was ineligible for obvious reasons, and you couldn’t ask Burn: he’d be too close to having a home-court advantage when the conversation turned competitive.

Paulie never pressed his inquiry into Gianni’s distraction. In truth, he was more worried about
Joe
being off his game. Maybe the magazine really
was
as shaky as it had begun to seem through most of January? Paulie had taken to wondering if his bridge to Jimmy Gordon was burnt or merely singed. He hadn’t had enough time to test it at the Oldcastle party, but all the way across the Atlantic he’d been trying to decide whether he should have gone over to Jimmy last spring, right at
Cutaway
’s start-up.

Spilkes, ten minutes late, entered the hotel bar.

“Where have you been?” asked Harris.

“The National Gallery,” said the managing editor, sitting down. “Sorry.”

Harris looked at him as if he’d said he’d been held up at a convention of lepidopterists. On his four trips to this city, the editor-in-chief had never seen the inside of St. Paul’s, or the Tower of London, or even a theatre, let alone the National Gallery. Spilkes, by contrast, had an almost touching devotion to the professed
Bandbox
ideal of well-roundedness and self-improvement—a sound mind in a sound body in a good suit—and he always squeezed visits to a museum or monument into those moments he was allowed outside Harris’s clubland cocoon of hotel bars and hired cars. David Fine had once, on his own, wandered up to Scotland for a couple of days, claiming to be giving thought to a story about haggis. When he got back, Harris told him never to do it again.

Who needed Scotland? Right here in London they were all, more than ever, lairds to his king. Every long dinner stretched their waistbands and reaffirmed their fealty. Tonight, once the car had covered the distance between the Berkeley and the Strand, they settled down to eat at Simpson’s. Harris declined the table beneath a plaque paying tribute to Dickens, apparently once as much a regular here as Cohan in the Oak Room; he preferred a spot by the open fire, where they could smell the chops and mutton saddles while eating a long, haphazard meal that included, along with the slowly sizzling viands, some hare soup, pudding, cheese, and trifle. Trifle of
what
? Harris always wanted to ask the waiter, but every year he stopped himself, lest Fine override the server with his own long lecture on the subject.

Finished eating, they loosened belts and braces and continued to sit beside what now seemed a campfire. Montgomery and Fine quietly argued over whether Dempsey and Tunney would fight a third time, Paulie taking Dempsey at his word that they wouldn’t, Fine taking
Dempsey’s pledge no more seriously than he did Tunney’s book-learning and pretensions to poetry. The argument might have ended in a draw had Paulie not thrown in the towel and proclaimed Fine “probably—no, absolutely—right.” Spilkes predicted that the Fed would soon rein in the market, and Harris told him he was wrong, that Mellon would keep the party going. When the four of them had exhausted these topics, they embraced nostalgia, that traveler’s refuge, retelling the stories of how each had come to join the others: the fateful lunch at Malocchio when Fine talked to Harris about Christy Mathewson and the 1912 cabernet; the first piece Montgomery wrote for the magazine, so full of similes Harris was moved to ask whether it was a story or a reversible raincoat.