Bandbox (6 page)

Hazel smirked at the Wood Chipper, who still hadn’t shed his coat. “Careful out there,” she said. “It’s hunting season.”

Spilkes, who despised Brzezinski, added a withering glance to her remark. The guy had no business being here—he didn’t take part in editorial meetings—and the managing editor wanted him to scram. Spilkes had no intention of bringing along this little operator the way Jimmy Gordon had tried to. Six months had passed since the Wood Chipper had written a word of
Bandbox
, and so long as
Spilkes was m.e., Brzezinski wouldn’t be asked to do so much as a sidebar on “the perfect shoeshine,” one of the magazine’s perennials.

“I guess I’ll go to my office and count paper clips,” said Chip, turning his back on the line and heading down the corridor.

“You don’t
have
an office,” Spilkes reminded him, loudly.

Back in the bull pen of fact-checkers’ desks, Chip decided that he
would
just count paper clips this morning, whereas his father, serving eight to twelve in Joliet State Prison for applying a tire iron to an alderman, was presumably counting the two hundred dollars he’d just made from Jimmy Gordon for photographing Leopold and Loeb to exact specifications. No one but Jimmy knew the Wood Chipper’s father was doing time.

“Is Cuddles in?” Becky asked Hazel, as quietly as she could.

“Haven’t seen him,” said Harris’s secretary over the scrape of her nail file.

Through the frosted glass, the assembled staff could see the boss standing near his window, still holding the telephone.

“I can’t help it,” he was telling Betty, as he looked down into Lexington Avenue, worried he might already see a bus carrying that terrible picture.

“Will you just put out your issue?” Betty responded from three flights down. “Why don’t you let Jimmy Gordon’s world revolve around yours for a while, instead of vice-a-versa?”

“What am I, living with Copernicus?”

“Give
who
a kiss?” asked Betty.

“COPERNICUS.”

“Stop shouting. You’re going to give yourself a heart attack. I have to go. Oldcastle’s making me go to lunch with Helena Rubinstein. I’ve got another two coats of rouge to put on between now and then if she’s going to think I’m serious about her product.”

“All right,” said Harris, replacing the receiver and finally shouting “Come in!” to the dozen of his hirelings beyond the door. “It’s
ten o’clock, for Christ’s sake! You’re standing there like we’re a bimonthly!”

The staff arranged themselves in two rows of chairs in front of his vast marble desktop. Its crystal inkpots and ornate fountain pens, bristling from brass holders, made it look like an ornamental sarcophagus.

“Where’s Houlihan?” Harris asked Becky, once everyone was seated.

No longer Cuddles’ keeper, she resented the question but lied for him anyway. “He’s probably tied up in the subway.”

Spilkes made a small notation, and Sidney Bruck issued a pitiless snort. Harris, who on occasion did some poaching of his own, had recently stolen this elegant young man, with his long Shelleyan hair and humorless wit, away from Crowninshield at
Vanity Fair
. For the past few months Bruck had been handling—or dismissing—most of the writers who’d fallen by Cuddles’ wayside.

He sat, prodigious and calm, beside Andrew Burn, the magazine’s publisher, a balding, thuggish Scot, probably the one who’d discovered the low road in and out of his native land. Burn had worked for Oldcastle in various fixer capacities for nearly a decade, before the owner gave him to Harris as a publisher. The Scot had been a major part of
Bandbox
’s turnaround, selling a vast acreage of ads against the magazine’s new editorial formula; he remained the chief bulwark of Harris’s security in the wake of Jimmy Gordon’s desertion.

“We’ve got some holes in April,” said the editor-in-chief, growling the meeting to order. “And May’s half blank. What have you got going, ladies and gents?” He looked at Paul Montgomery. “Cobb about ready?”

“
More
than ready,” said Paul. After this enthusiastic assurance, he clammed up, hoping to indicate that the stuff he’d gotten was too extraordinary to be shared yet even with his colleagues.

David Fine wasn’t buying. “Sounds special, Paulie. What’d Cobb do? Beat some colored guy to death with his bat, right in front of you?”

“For starters!” Montgomery crowed, before sealing his lips with a finger gesture.

Becky exchanged a look of revulsion with Stuart Newman, and in the process noticed the dark rings under his eyes—something more, she felt pretty sure, than routine sexual exhaustion.

“I’ve got exactly two features in the May well,” said Harris, at just below a shout. “Anybody got any ideas on how to keep this bandwagon rolling for another month?” The chronic paucity of on-hand copy was actually an indicator of the magazine’s vitality. Harris kept next to no inventory to ensure topicality and solvency. And so anxiety reigned: the produce might be fresh, but the cupboard was always bare.

“I’ve heard that Peggy Hopkins Joyce is dating Chrysler,” offered Spilkes. “Maybe there’s a story there.”

“And lose the car ads for three months?” asked Burn.

“He’s right,” said Paul Montgomery.

Suddenly, several voices, loud and indistinguishable, could be heard in the corridor outside. Richard Lord uncrossed his shined shoes and murmured, “The Columbia basketball team, I believe. Arriving for a shoot.”

Harris looked confused.

“You signed off on it,” said Lord. “Late one afternoon,” he added, by way of explanation for the editor’s lack of recollection. “ ‘Skyscrapers.’ The pictures will have tailors holding tape measures, with little office windows instead of inch marks, against the boys’ legs. They’re nearly all six-footers.”

“That’ll get Daisy out of her funk,” said Nan O’Grady.

“What about Cuba?” asked Max Stanwick, returning to the business of story ideas.

“What about it?” responded Harris.

“Coolidge is there this week,” said Spilkes.

“We don’t cover treaty signings in this magazine,” said the editor-in-chief.

“He means the food, I’ll bet,” said David Fine, sensing an invasion of turf by Stanwick. “You should see what the chinks down there can do with pork.”

Harris looked puzzled.

“Chinks,” explained Fine. “Cuba’s crawling with ’em.”

“I’m talking about the nightlife,” Stanwick asserted. “The gambling, the goons. Hoods hacking up the honchos back at their haciendas. Señoritas stabbing their stogie-sucking suitors.” Nan, her ears and teeth set on edge by Stanwick’s staple alliteration, chewed a small hank of her red hair. Sidney Bruck, who had he been Adam would have found the Garden of Eden a stale cliché, put in his poisoned oar. “Oh,
wonderful
,” he said. “
Here’s
a way to use Peggy Joyce. Put her on the cover, maybe in a mantilla, or
dressed up like a matador
.”

Before Stanwick could punch out his lights with a look, a great crash rattled the glass in Harris’s office door.

“Perhaps I should have a look,” said Lord, getting up from his seat.

Harris ignored the fuss to concentrate on Stanwick. “You’re too busy to go down to Cuba.”

“No, I’m not. We just closed Rothstein.”

“Not quite,” Nan corrected.

“You’re not going,” said Harris.

“You know,” said Becky, “Japan presents some—”

“Japan?” asked Stanwick.

“Sure, Japan,” interrupted Nan. “ ‘Slick samurai slices sailor with sword.’ It’s got possibilities for you.”

“I wasn’t thinking of it for Max,” said Becky. “But I’ve heard that since the earthquake, the Imperial Hotel—”

“I could do it,” Paul Montgomery rushed in to say. He was already grasping the lyric possibilities: delicate geishas who’d made teahouses
from the rubble; little Hirohito struggling with Western dress. “The Emperor’s New Clothes!” he blurted. “I could ship out in a week.”

Paulie’s long absence was a delightful prospect, but Becky had imagined the piece for a freelance, some young novelist with a bit of sensibility. She began to protest, but there was really no need. The Japan idea, like so many Monday-morning editorial notions, died out as fast as it had been uttered, drowned in the badinage of insult and conversational chaos created by the attempt to keep track of three different issues of the magazine in various stages of production.

“What about bank loans to brokers?” asked Spilkes. “They’re way up. They could make things dangerous for the market.”

“That’s a theme,” said Harris, “not a story. Come up with the guy who’s lost his shirt or gone to the clink or left some blonde holding the bag, and
then
it’ll be a story.”

“I’m getting two short pieces from Nathan,” said Sidney Bruck, like a weary magician extracting rabbits for his colleagues who couldn’t even find the top hat. After a pause, he deigned to describe the two casual essays he’d just paid George Jean Nathan, the
American Mercury
’s drama critic, to write. “One on leisure versus loafing. Another on how wisecracks are killing conversation.”

Cuddles Houlihan, who’d just entered the room, responded to Sidney as he looked for a chair. “Didn’t we already
do
euthanasia?”

“Proving Nathan’s point,” said Bruck, whose words were lost in the still-growing roar outside the office. It seemed to be coming all the way from the Fashion Department.

“Siddown,” Harris ordered Houlihan. Becky looked at her old boss and mouthed the words “Where have you been?”

“You might want to get out there,” Cuddles said to Spilkes. “One of the Columbia boys just clocked Waldo.”

“Lindstrom showed up?” asked Harris. “Good.”

“If you say so,” answered Cuddles, who at last found a chair next to David Fine.

Over the exterior noise, Harris told Montgomery he’d like something on Billy Durant, the motorcar manufacturer who’d lost all interest in making anything but stock-market killings. The head of Durant Motors now even lived in Deal, New Jersey, from which he engaged in marathon speculation. “We could pose him next to a rusting car,” said Harris. “Have him sitting on a solid-gold ticker.”

“Good,” said Andrew Burn. “I can sell Studebaker against the pages.”

David Fine, pouting over the offer of something this flashy to Paul Montgomery, leaned toward Cuddles and asked him what the hell was going on outside.

“Well, Waldo’s
here
,” Cuddles explained, “but not exactly all there. He looks like he just put two medicine balls’ worth of cocaine up his nose. Eyes like Cantor’s. He was getting made up and saw a couple of the court kings taking off their pants. He apparently thought he was somewhere else and dropped to his knees.”

“The rusty car and the solid-gold ticker!” exclaimed Paulie. “That’s swell.”

An agonized cry and some animal howling—plus the fleeing shadows of two shrieking girls beyond the frosted glass of the office door—finally made it impossible to continue the meeting. Spilkes went out to the corridor and hastened past Chip Brzezinski, who was again lurking beside Hazel’s desk. Once inside Fashion, the managing editor found the Columbia center holding his behind and screaming to high heaven. Gardiner Arinopoulos, being pulled along by some leashed creature of uncertain species, rushed past Spilkes while Richard Lord, with the merest suggestion of his fingertips, propelled Waldo Lindstrom in the opposite direction. Once both photographer and model were ten yards distant from the Columbia center, Daisy
commenced the gentle application of what she called an old Italian remedy to the boy’s rear end. While massaging him with her drugstore cold cream, she explained to Spilkes that the mishap had occurred when Mr. Arinopoulos’s ocelot, which he’d brought from Queens for his shoot with Lindstrom, had attacked the center, but only after the hoop-shooter had attacked Lindstrom, of whom the animal seemed unaccountably fond. It would have been much, much worse, Daisy explained, had Allen Case, with some soothing words and fearless petting, not coaxed the animal’s teeth out of the boy’s behind.

In fact, as Daisy narrated these events to Spilkes, the young athlete was offering to buy Allen a thick New York steak as a token of thanks. The copyeditor appeared not even to hear him; he was staring in the direction of Gardiner Arinopoulos, with something like murder in his eyes.

“You can keep the suits,” Spilkes told the Columbia squad. The boys would have been given them in any case, ocelot or no ocelot, but they seemed surprised, and placated, by such generosity.

“See,” said Spilkes, satisfied he had taken charge of the situation. “Everybody wins.”

—Are you looking at my knees?

—No, I’m way above that
.

Cuddles listened to the two Burns and Allen imitators who were closing the first half of the Palace’s afternoon bill. With half-blue stuff like this it was no wonder he hadn’t had to dodge any scalpers
on the way in. He’d escaped from the editorial meeting just half a minute after Gardiner Arinopoulos’s noisy departure. The photographer and his ocelot had still been on the sidewalk waiting for their car when Cuddles exited the Graybar Building. Except for a quick detour to Manking, where Takeshi unlocked his vodka bottle for several fortifying snorts, he’d taken a direct route to the theatre.

Having slept through Taylor Holmes’s monologue from
Ruggles of Red Gap
—the sort of thing, no, the
exact
thing Holmes had been doing here since ’13—Cuddles now decided to drift off for the rest of the afternoon. He slumped further into his seat and cast his half-closed eyes up to the vast chandeliers and plaster rosettes that had once made this gigantic enclosure at Broadway and Forty-seventh a heaven beyond Brigham Young’s most wingèd, wild imagining. Now, of course, every burg half the size of Schenectady was getting its own lowercase movie “palace,” and you couldn’t deny that some of them were the equal of this tired paradise. Cuddles began, once more, to doze.

It would be untrue to say he had neglected giving the picture of Leopold and Loeb any thought this weekend, but equally false to claim that the minutes he’d spent pondering it had yielded any approach fresher than the time-honored, though frequently fallible, if-you-can’t-lick-’Em-join-’Em approach. He’d imagined hoisting Jimmy Gordon on his own petard in a first-thing-Monday-morning pitch to ’Phat: “It
would
make a great ad!”
So Good It’s Criminal
was the line of copy he’d considered telling Harris to stick beneath the photo of the canoodling killers.