The Hemingway Thief (6 page)

“You believe him?” I whispered, and patted my pockets for cigarettes. Grady recognized it as the signal that I wanted to bum one of his. No one actually looks for anything in their pockets by patting the outsides. He offered me one from his pack and fished one out for himself.

“I believe that manuscript is worth something,” Grady said, leaning in to use my lighter. “But I'm not sure we got the straight dope on why he got his ass handed to him yesterday. I say we go up tomorrow and check it out.”

“We?” I pinched my nose and leaned back against the adobe wall. I felt a terrible headache rising. The sweat on the back of my shirt had cooled, and it felt like a long, icy finger down my spine. “Look, Grady, I consider us friends and all, and the last month's been great, but I think this seems beyond me. I think I'm done.”

“Are you breaking up with me?” Grady said, affecting a puppy-dog look.

“I'm just saying we don't know for sure if Andy and Dell were the only ones after Milch. There could be others waiting up the road, you know?”

“They'll be looking for Milch, not us,” Grady said with a condescending sniff. “All we have to do is get to Ensenada and make an exchange with some book nerd. It'll be a cake walk.”

“I already shot a guy, Grady.”

“In the foot. Come on, you're not going to make the drop with me?” Grady asked.

“No,” I said. “And don't say ‘drop.' It's a manuscript, not microfilm of Soviet tank placements.”

“There's money in it for you.”

“I got money. So do you.”

Grady ran his hand through his hair and looked at the ceiling. “Yeah, um, as it turns out, buying a hotel in Baja cash on the barrelhead may not have been the soundest of investments,” he said.

“You paid cash?”

“Yeah.” Grady picked at a tear in his sleeve. “And apparently there are some back taxes.”

“How much money do you have left?” I asked.

“That's kind of a personal question, Coop,” Grady said, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Forget about that. Come on, it'll be fun. You're not going to let me go up there by myself, are you?”

“You just said it wasn't going to be dangerous,” I said.

“No, I said it would be a cake walk. No one wants to do a cake walk by themselves, right?” I knew trying to talk him out of going at all was a nonstarter. I saw the junky gleam in his eye. He was an ex-cop or agent or whatever. Movies and TV taught me these guys couldn't give up the action. They needed it as bad as the crackheads they busted needed their rocks. The best I could hope for was that he wouldn't make me go too.

“What the hell is a cake walk,” I said, trying to change the subject. “I hear that phrase all the time and I have no idea what it means.”

“Look, the manuscript is worth something,” Grady said. He took a long drag on his cigarette. “You see how pissed Milch was when he found out we had it?”

“We don't have it. I left it up by our lawn chairs.”

“Where do you think I sent Digby?” he said, and waved his hand absently. “And to take care of the other thing. Can't leave a body up on the side of the road, you know?”

“Yeah, the dead man isn't exactly sweetening the pot here, Grady. And if he is, um, being taken care of, and the Texan is in the hospital, then why does Milch need to make the deal? And if it's so valuable, then why is he letting us do it? He doesn't know us,” I said.

“He doesn't have a choice. Doc says he can't go anywhere for a couple of days. He needs to make the deal now. Besides mine is not to reason why.”

“There's a second line to that quote you might want to think about, pal.”

“You wanted a chance to write something gritty, right? You been bitching about that since you got here.” He put on a high-pitched voice and flailed his arms. “
I want to write something dark, Grady. Oh, Grady I want to be a real man and write something gritty.
This is it, buddy boy. This is the gritty train. Get on board. In order to write life, you need to live life. You know who said that?”

“No idea.” I wasn't falling for his line. “You really need the money, huh?”

“You ever deal with Mexican tax collectors?” he said with a grin. “Hey, look, if it's all bullshit, I'll owe you a soda.” He laughed and slapped me on the back, not giving me a chance to reply. “Meet me downstairs,” He rubbed his hands together like a greedy poker player about to collect his pot and was gone before I could say no again.

I was going to go with him. I knew it. He knew it. The wind made the moth-eaten curtains on the window at the end of the hall swirl and dance like the maenad at festival time. I stared at it for a long time and I couldn't help but think this business would go poorly.

It would.

Chapter Six

Digby returned from the bluff while I was on the phone with Ox. He'd been able to convince the VW driver that Dell was involved with the cartels and was trying to shake us down. Digby gave him a bag of weed and some of the money out of petty cash for his troubles. He also made sure poor Glenn knew exactly what happens to gringos who cross the law in this part of Old Mexico. Digby had rolled Dell's body over the side of the cliff and down to the raging surf below. He'd wash up somewhere else where there wouldn't be much of an investigation. With the cartel wars raging, it was an odd day when a body didn't show up someplace.

“I need you to do me a favor,” I said when Ox picked up the phone.

“Get back to Chicago and I'll do any favor you want,” Ox said. He had the usual twang of irritation in his voice that was oddly comforting.

“You're the one who suggested I come down here, remember?”

“For a week, maybe two,” Ox sighed. “You've been there for over a month.”

“Are you going to do me this favor?” I said. I pressed my hand against the phone-booth wall and pushed my back into the opposite one, trying to stretch it out. I was still hurting from the ride in the VW.

“We need to talk about your plans for Toulouse, Coop,” Ox said. I could hear his two-day stubble rubbing against the receiver. “You are killing the proverbial golden goose.”

“Which proverb was that, Ox?”

“The one where God came down from the mountain and told the Israelites not to kill off a lucrative brand so they can pursue some bullshit artistic flight of fancy. Don't you know that a brand, a solid brand, is a gift from God?”

Oxblood had been my agent from the beginning, almost ten years, ever since he'd judged a short-story contest I had entered just after college. I'd come in third place, but Ox had championed my story about a once-ambidextrous amputee trying to make it on the professional jai alai circuit. It wasn't long before he became one of my closest friends, which put him at the top of a very short list.

“There's a precedent for killing off a pen name,” I said. “Stephen King did it.”

“You're not Stephen King,” Ox said. “And he killed off Bachman years after everyone was in on the joke. He was also already successful under his real name. No one knows who the fuck you are.”

“That's what I want to change.” I looked out the window and saw Grady standing next to my rental. It was a nice ostentatious yellow Hummer, the perfect vehicle for a covert operation in Ensenada. Grady was giving some last-minute instructions to Digby, who was nodding enthusiastically while trying to light a joint in the stiff wind coming off the sea.

“You want people to buy you drinks, is that it? Don't I buy you enough drinks?”

“I'm tired of people thinking I have a vagina,” I said.

“You whine like you do. There are more people who depend on Toulouse than just you, you know.” This was the umpteenth permutation of the same conversation we'd been having for the last month and a half. The hardest thing to achieve in publishing is a recognizable brand. There are only so many authors out there whom the average reader has time to give a shit about. To most readers, books are like potato chips; you go with the brand you like. It's why new writers clamor all over themselves to get a blurb from a recognizable author. It's why Toulouse Velour gets six-figure book deals and Henry Cooper does not. It matters not that we're the same person.

The idea to bump off Toulouse Velour had germinated last year when I was reading Klosterman's
Killing Yourself to Live
. He posited that one of the best things that could happen to a musician's career was dying. The artist's death makes his art more valuable because there won't be any more produced. Rarer is more valuable. This coupled with our species' overwhelming obsession with death and all its connotations makes shuffling off the mortal coil one hell of a marketing scheme. Look at Michael Jackson. The King of Pop was always a big seller, astronomical even, but after decades of weird scandals his sales had begun to slide into oblivion. It was his ignominious death, however, not his overhyped comeback tour, that rocketed him back into the stratosphere. Consumers are like the Irish. To them everybody is a saint after they die.

This phenomenon is not limited to the music industry. In fact, it had already been perfected by the publishing world. Take J. D. Salinger, who was already using the old marketing trope of lunatic isolation to garner respect and adulation. The day he died, bookstores were inundated with people clamoring for Holden Caulfield as if they hadn't stuffed
Catcher in the Rye
in the bottom of their lockers when they were in high school. It was this example that I used to approach Ox with my plan to kill Toulouse. I brought up the multitude of manuscripts that Salinger had squirreled away in a desk drawer. Now they could be posthumously published and would fly off the shelf regardless of their quality. Hell, if they found a collection of grocery lists in his closet they'd try to publish it.

Ox was right on board with the idea at first. His eyes glazed over, and a touch of drool congealed at the corner of his mouth as he thought of the swarming mass of MacMerkin fans beating their breasts and tearing their sleeves over the loss of their beloved Toulouse. He conjured up a picture of them descending on Barnes and Noble like ants on a discarded Snickers bar, consuming every last MacMerkin crumb. He imagined parceling out Toulouse's posthumous works as each one was “found” in a fictitious attic, like a literary Tupac.

Ox's excitement lasted for two days, until he met with his mentor and former boss, Stu Weingold. Weingold had tutored Ox in the immutable laws of agency. The first rule, or one that was right up there, was “Thou shalt not fuck with a brand.” Ox, properly chastised, had been dead set against Toulouse's death ever since.

“You're a murderer, Coop. I don't know how else to characterize it,” Ox said. We had been referring to Toulouse's impending doom with such casual hyperboles for a while now. I knew he only meant it as a joke, but in the light of the last two hours it wasn't funny anymore. The phone became cold and clammy in my hand.

“Listen, Ox,” I said as calmly as I could. “Help me out with some research.”

“You think I have the time to do your research for you? You think I've got all day?” Ox said. He probably did have all day, and most of the next as well. His agency had three clients, and two of them hadn't written anything in five years. While Ox was an unabashed bibliophile, he had zero feel and even less ambition for literary-agenting. It was more of a hobby than a profession for a man whose personal wealth rivaled that of small nations. The money had been passed down for so many generations that not an Oxblood alive could remember how it was made in the first place. The most popular rumor was that an ancient Oxblood had invested in the original East India Trading Company.

Ordinarily I'm not the type to consort with a man so deeply embedded in the upper crust, but Ox had three things that appealed to me. The first is that he actually thought I was a decent writer. He liked my early work on its merits as much as my latest work for its profitability. The second was that he was also a Notre Dame alumnus, which always buys someone a place in my heart. The third reason was that the upper crust, what would otherwise be his birthright, had thoroughly rejected Ox from the time he was in diapers. They just didn't like him. He had as much insight and understanding into the mercurial world known as Society as I had, and far less interest in it. For reasons unknown to either Ox or his parents, he simply did not get it. He moved through that world with all the grace of a mule in an evening dress. On the other hand, in a twist that would make O. Henry groan, his breeding, education, and money made it nearly impossible for him to relate to anyone who's net worth was less than on par with Bill Gates.

“Do you know anybody into rare books?” I said, pressing on.

“Maybe,” he grumbled.

“Can you ask around about a guy named N. Thandy? Rare book dealer, maybe out of Atlanta.”

“I want the first draft of the new
MacMerkin
by the end of the month, and I want you to do that anthology I asked you about.”

“Those are your terms?”

“Yes.”

“Oh come on, Ox,” I said, aware of the whine in my voice. “An anthology of stories set around a celebrity reality-show contest? You really want me to do that?”

“
Dancing with the Dead
has a lot of great writers attached to it,” Oxblood said. “And they're offering a lot of money to do it. But, if you think it's beneath you, then maybe I don't have the energy to poke around about this Thandy fellow.”

“Fine,” I said. “When did you suddenly learn how to negotiate?”

“That hurts, but I'll let it go,” he said, almost giddy. “Why do you need to know about this guy?”

“Research,” I said. “For a new novel.”

“Uh-huh.”

I said good-bye and hung up. The thing to do with Ox was to get off the phone as soon as you got what you wanted.