Final Edit (20 page)

Conceivably one of these hapless victims of Parker’s spleen might like to do him in; more likely they might follow Alexander
Michaelson and turn their guns on themselves.

Anyhow, it was time to get back to work. I had an important call to make.

“Claire Bunter speaking.”

“Oh good, I found you in. It’s Nick Barlow, Claire.”

“Nick.” Her voice fell off perceptibly. Apprehension? Suspicion, perhaps?

I had already prepared my script.

“If you’re calling for Harry—”

“No.”

“—or about Harry—”

“Neither, Claire. I’m calling about you.
Your
work.”

“Okay. Go ahead, Nick.”

“Look,” I said, “your personal life is really none of my business, but you were one of Parker Foxcroft’s authors, after all,
which makes you one of Barlow and Company’s authors.”

“And?”

“Parker wasn’t our only editor. I have at least three people on staff, starting with Sidney Leopold, who would love to do
your next book. Won’t you at least talk with me about it?”

“Well?” I could detect a gradual warming of the atmosphere at her end of the phone.

“Have you,” I asked, with just a touch of wistfulness, “signed with any other publisher?”

“No, not yet. Though I’ve been thinking—”

“So you do have a new book?”

“Or will—soon, Nick.”

“I’m delighted to hear that. We did well with” (what the hell was the name of that book?)
“Newport Nights”
(that was it!).

“I know.”

“So would you let me lunch you, Claire, so we can talk about your next book?”

“I don’t do lunch much, Nick. Not when I’m writing.”

“I understand. The work always comes first. But you must break at the end of the day…”

“Usually.”

“So,” I said, not one to take no for an answer—or even maybe—“would you meet me for a drink at The Players?”

“When?”

“Just a moment, Claire.” I ran down my appointment calendar. No parties, no dates. Even Susan wasn’t on the calendar. We had
agreed to hold off a few days before meeting again. “Anything wrong with tomorrow?”

“That’s Wednesday?”

“Right.”

“Well…” The word trailed off into a sigh. “All right, Nick. But please don’t try the hard sell, okay?”

“I? The hard sell?”

“Don’t try the soft sell, either. Let’s just have a pleasant drink.”

“My pleasure, too. Six o’clock?”

“Six-fifteen,” she said, and rang off.

Quite some time later, I looked at my watch and saw that it was well after closing hour.

Walking down the hall, I saw no one, not even Sidney, who almost always works late. I peeked into Foxcroft’s office. It was
dark. Poole, too, had left.

Some people, I believe, find an empty office ominous. I rather like the peace and quiet. All those computers sleeping soundly
in their stations; the phones and fax machines gone silent; the occasional squawk as our night answering machine kicks in
to tell some importune caller what our business hours are; these things impart a sense of shutting down, like the ceremony
of tattoo in the military service, or as nature shuts down when twilight slides almost imperceptibly into darkness.

It was getting dark. I was about to switch on a light when I heard the click of a lock snapping open.
Crack.
The lock I had installed after Parker Foxcroft’s murder. The lock that was supposed to keep anybody out there
out.

“Jesus,” I whispered. I backed up, ever so slowly, seeking the darkest corner of the hallway.

Suddenly the hall was flooded with light, almost blinding me, and I was looking into the mean black mouths of a double-barreled
shotgun—and above it a hulking figure in a fatigue jacket and a black ski mask.

“Freeze! Police!”

Ski Mask’s command was quite unnecessary; I was already as good as paralyzed. I am as brave as the next man in a fair fight,
but a shotgun pointed at my midsection makes the odds against me unfairly high. I obeyed.

“Put your hands against the wall and bend over.”

I didn’t have much choice but to carry out that order as well. I did think, however, that I might be permitted to speak.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Shut up.”

In as much time as it takes to recall the moment, I was patted down and relieved of my wallet.
What was this, anyway?

“Nicholas Barlow,” said the voice behind me, obviously reciting from one of my IDs.

“I am.”

“We had a report this office was being burglarized.”

“Not as far as I know.”

I heard a second, muffled voice in the background; obviously
Ski Mask had been joined by somebody else. I gathered from the little I could make out that they—whoever
they
were—were deciding what to do with me. It was clear to me by this time that they were not cops, but baddies.

“Lie down on the floor, Barlow.”

“The floor?”

“You heard me. Lie down on the fucking floor. Facedown.”

This was beginning to get undignified, but I did as I was told.

“Now,” said my bogus policeman, prodding me in the back with the barrel of his gun, “just stay right there until I tell you
not to.”

He placed the gun barrel against the back of my neck, and I thought:
Is this the way it happens? Is he going to kill me?
Images of violent death flooded my mind: bodies lying on bloodstained floors just like this one. Victims of bank robberies
and gas station stickups, their flesh mangled and covered with blood. I fought off fear and nausea as best I could. Should
I pray? Prayer didn’t seem appropriate in the circumstances; only weddings and funerals ever got me into church, and then,
like King Claudius, “my words fly up, my thoughts remain below. Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

Shakespeare.
My comfort on any occasion. How did those lines go? “I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death. He that dies
this year is quit for the next.”
Henry IV, Part II.
Oh God, I’d still rather stick around—and not just for another year, either…

It was a short while later that I realized I no longer felt the pressure of cold metal on my neck; and sometime after that
I had the feeling that I was alone in the room. Still, I couldn’t be sure, so I waited perhaps five or six minutes
longer, and then, very slowly, turned my head so that my left cheek rested on the floor, and by craning my neck, I could see
a small part of the room. No one in sight.

Feeling as foolish as I’m sure I looked, I put my hands flat on the floor and pushed myself up to a kneeling position. Nothing
happened, so I got to my feet and looked around. I was alone. My face was damp with sweat, and I could feel my shirt sticking
to my back. I leaned against a nearby desk for a moment to clear my head, which was still beset by a morbid band of fancies.

It occurred to me that the police ought to be notified, and I had picked up the phone to call the Thirteenth Precinct station
and report a holdup, when I heard a commotion out in the hallway: footsteps pounding down the hall, the sound of male voices,
and then, moments later, someone was pounding on my office door.

“Come in,” I shouted.

The door flew open and two uniformed officers appeared, both of them holding police specials aimed at me.

“There’s been a burglary on this floor,” one of them said.

“Oh no—not again.”

“Oh yes, there sure has.”

“You two?” I said. I recognized them at once: the two cops who had been in my office once before, and in my front parlor;
it was during my first brush with crime: the Jordan Walker murder. The pair were Artie, a good-looking black patrolman, and
his partner Buster, a pint-size patrolwoman.

“Never a dull moment, right, Mr. Barlow?” said Buster.

“Not in this office, I’m afraid.”

I told them what had happened, and they clucked sympathetically during my recital.

“You should have known they weren’t cops,” was Artie’s first comment.

“Don’t you guys sometimes go undercover and dress like hoods?”

“Even so, we have to flash a badge,” said Artie.

“He flashed a shotgun, and that was enough for me.”

“What kind of shotgun?”

“How would I know?”

“Well,” said Artie, “what did it look like?”

“It had a short barrel. That’s about all I remember.”

“How was the guy holding it?”

“In his right hand.”

“A pistol grip? Probably a Remington 870,” said Artie.

I shrugged. “It’s all the same to me—just a shotgun. No matter what it was, I wasn’t about to question it.”

Artie was persistent, just as I remembered him. “Can you describe the perp for me?”

“All I saw was a black ski mask. I don’t even remember the color of his eyes. I believe he was a white male. Sorry. That’s
all I can give you.”

Artie put his notebook away, and shrugged.

It was Buster who filled me in on what had happened. Down the hall was the office of a jewelry importer. Burglars had broken
in, cracked the safe, and when they got at the jewels and cash that were there, they set off an alarm at police headquarters.

“They didn’t get all that much,” said Buster. “Apparently they grabbed what they could and took off like big-ass birds. There
was still quite a bit of stuff in the safe.”

“But why did they break in here?” I asked.

“Probably they saw a light in your office, and thought you might figure out what was going on, so it was best to keep you
quiet.”

“You might have been killed,” Artie said. “You run lucky, don’t you, Mr. Barlow?”

Yeah. A murder and a holdup in my office
—
all in a space of two weeks. What next?

“Anyway, thanks for dropping by, guys. I feel much safer knowing you’re on the job.”

Artie gave me a raised-eyebrows, “Are you kidding me?” look.

“No, I’m serious, really.” I spread out my hands. “Look, no irony.”

“Good night, Mr. Barlow,” said Buster. “See you around.”

And so to bed, to an uneasy sleep, punctuated with bad dreams and ghostly thoughts.

The next morning I felt more like staying in bed, nibbling on chocolate candy and watching daytime game shows, instead of
going in to the office, but a sense of having been reprieved somehow, or, putting it another way, of having been offered another
chance to redeem myself, gave me the impetus I needed to get up and get on with the day.

As usual, I first read through both the
Times
and the
Daily News.
Both had brief squibs about the burglary in my office building; neither, thank heaven, made any mention of me. My public relations
person, one Georgia Nussbaum, is hired, not to get me in the news, but to keep me out of it if at all possible.

At the office, Hannah beckoned me over to her desk.

“You got a call from the manager at The Players.”

“Oh?”

“She said it was quite urgent, Nick.”

Evelyn Randall is the manager of the Club. She is the very nerve center of the place—also its generator, the engine that runs
it, and also its chief communicator. She flutters over the members like a benevolent mother hen.

I rang her up immediately. Randy, as we call her, is always busier than any two or three of us publisher-members, and it is
difficult enough sometimes to reach her on the phone; consequently one does not ignore one of
her
calls.

“What is it, Randy?”

“Fred Drew is in jail, Mr. Barlow.”

“What?”

“He’s in the Tombs. He told me they arrested him on suspicion of murdering your editor—Parker Foxcroft, wasn’t it? He wants
you to come and see him—to help him if you can.”

“Good God—Fred Drew?”

“He didn’t sound all that happy about it on the phone, either.”

“Why do you suppose he didn’t call his lawyer?”

“I don’t think he has one.”

“Well—I’ll see what I can do. Thanks for calling me, Randy.”

“Anytime.”

Two hours and a mess of red tape later I was seated at a conference table in the Tombs, facing Frederick Drew, perhaps America’s
unluckiest poet. He was too old for the Yale Younger Series of Poets Award, too idiosyncratic for the Pulitzer Prize or National
Book Award people; neither Jewish, nor gay, nor a feminist, and thus left out of every poetic cult. And now he was in jail,
accused of murder. One thing I felt sure of: he was not François Villon reincarnate.

I had been passed through a metal detector machine, frisked, and subjected to a barrage of questions as to why I was there.
I insisted that I was Drew’s publisher, which didn’t seem to mean much to the guardians of the Tombs, who would have preferred
that I be a lawyer, God forbid,
until I added that Drew and I were also distant relatives, second cousins twice removed. It could be possible; everybody is
related somehow to virtually everybody else, in my opinion. Anyhow, I was finally allowed to talk to the prisoner, in the
company of a strapping big guard, who hovered near us.

Drew’s head was bowed when I entered; his shoulders hunched. When he saw me, he straightened up and attempted a smile, which
somehow fell short of its intention.

“Ah,” he said in a somber voice, “ ‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan,’ I presume.”

“’Kinch,’ “ I replied, “ ‘you fearful Jesuit.’ Happy Bloomsday.”

“The same to you, brother.”

It was Bloomsday, all right—June 16. On that day in 1904, as the historians tell us, James Joyce met his Nora Barnacle, and
when he wrote
Ulysses,
the saga of a single day in Dublin, that is the day he re-created in the book. It is celebrated in New York literary circles
by a marathon reading of the novel at Symphony Space on upper Broadway—a reading by dozens of actors, writers, and assorted
publishing folk that lasts all of twenty-four hours or more. I myself read a section of it one year. However…

“What are you doing in here, Fred?” I asked Drew.

“What are you doing out there, Nick?” he said in reply.

“I suggest we skip the small talk, Fred. Also the literary allusions. Let’s talk seriously.”