On Friday, March 2, Paul Montgomery began setting up his office at Cutaway. He’d ordered himself a new monogrammed desk calendar, and after personally picking it up at Dempsey & Carroll decided to detour past Malocchio on his way back to Lexington Avenue. Sure enough, peering in over the café curtains, he could see Harris and Spilkes sitting down to lunch. Paulie looked at his watch and figured he had just enough time to make the stop he needed to at Bandbox, so he hotfooted it down to the Graybar.
“Pssst,” he called to Chip Brzezinski from the stairwell at the back of the fourteenth floor. Daisy, sitting on the other side of the fact-checkers’ bull pen and looking rather wan, gave no sign of hearing anything.
“Hey, Chipper,” whispered Paulie to the approaching Brzezinski. He clapped him on the back. “Getting ready to have your own office?”
Chip grunted. “We’ll see.”
“The right surroundings are important,” said Paulie, easing into his avuncular mode. He’d cleaned out his Bandbox office on Monday night when nobody was around. Before leaving the building, he’d put his letter of resignation on Harris’s desk. Its text was full of gratitude and sorrow—about how terrific the last few years had been; how wonderful the opportunities he’d been granted; how, alas, his own gifts were too modest for what lay ahead: “I’m not sure I can pull my weight over the threshold of achievement this magazine is approaching.” So, he told Joe, he would retreat to more modest ventures while remaining a happy, awestruck subscriber to Harris’s monthly miracle.
On Wednesday, Jimmy Gordon had announced his hiring at Cutaway and offered to pay his English travel expenses.
“Here,” said Paulie, handing Chip two keys. “You should encourage Max to use my old office, not Newman’s, when he’s around.”
Chip looked puzzled.
“My old desk can be locked,” said Paulie. “Newman’s can’t. Give Max this key and tell him it’s because you know what sensitive stuff the Shepard search may turn up.”
“What’s the second key for?”
“A duplicate. For you. So you can check on what he puts into the desk.”
The Wood Chipper was wondering exactly how much more spying he was going to have to do for Jimmy before he got his reward. It didn’t surprise him that the answer seemed to be plenty, but he wouldn’t have figured Montgomery had the balls for this sort of thing.
Paulie read his look. “I know it seems underhanded, but Chip, I’m doing this as a citizen. One who’s concerned about how Joe and the rest of them may be defrauding not only readers but the police department, too.”
Chip snorted, before shoving both keys into his pocket.
“Good man,” said Paulie.
There was a second reason for Montgomery’s stealthy appearance on fourteen. Knowing what his shift from one side to the other must look like, Paulie needed to convince himself that he still possessed the admiration of each editor, secretary, and messenger at what was now his old magazine. Calculating that he still had some time before Harris and Spilkes returned, he beat a quiet path to the Art Department, where Norman Merrill was executing a beautiful sketch of some socks and garters.
Paulie shook his head. “You’re Daumier and Rockwell Kent rolled into one, Mr. Merrill.”
The illustrator said nothing for a moment, just went on drawing, while Paulie wondered, with some upset, whether Joe had issued an edict against anyone here even saying hello to him. But then Mr. Merrill identified the source of his mute consternation, by pointing toward the open door of the Fashion Department, where three Waldo Lindstrom lookalikes, all large, blond, and lantern-jawed—though lacking the hint of depravity that made Waldo such a success with the reader’s subconscious—were preening and posing like motorized sculptures.
“It’s a sort of audition,” said Mr. Merrill. “For the replacement.”
Richard Lord and Gardiner Arinopoulos circled the young contenders, whose aura of Michelangelene masculinity faded a bit when one of them was heard informing another, with high-pitched excitement, that his “best best friend” had just gotten a part in the chorus of Rain or Shine.
The other responded in an equally tremulous register: “That’s such a darb!”
Paulie squeezed Mr. Merrill’s pencilless hand and said: “This magazine doesn’t need any of ’em. All it ever needed was your imagination.” He waited for the illustrator to say thanks, as well as something by way of congratulation on this new job at Cutaway that everyone had been talking about. But Mr. Merrill only smiled. Unseen by Paulie, who was already looking around for other sources of approval, he began drawing a long water moccasin beside the human ankles he’d just sketched.
Paulie thought about going into Copy, but his better instincts made him doubt the reception he would get from Nan. So he decided it was time to ascend the stairs from fourteen to eighteen, and after one last quick look around he was gone.
Had he summoned the courage to enter Nan’s department, he would have found Allen Case nervously watching the clock. It was almost time for him to slip across the East River for his appointment inside that warehouse of cruelty. His friend from the American wouldn’t pledge to do a story, but he’d at least promised to be waiting for Allen outside the place’s wire fence.
Allen paid no attention to Nan, who was on the telephone with Stuart, telling him not to bother with any more Dew-ol’s tonic but to make sure he had some of the milk and pie she’d brought over late yesterday afternoon. “And I’ve got some really good news,” she added. “Art Murphy over at Catholic World will be happy to see you next week. He says they can use somebody for a couple of months to fill in for a man who’s having a gallstone removed. The atmosphere there is very quiet, and I said you’d be wonderful at the work.”
After Stuart’s weakly grateful reply, she asked if he’d like her to bring down the last pass of page proofs for his Washington column. She could come straight from work on the subway; it would be no trouble. Waiting for him to respond, she tried to convince herself there was no risk of disappointment. Even if Stuart didn’t reciprocate her feelings, worrying about him was nicer than worrying about the subway strike (pending), the subway slasher (caught), or the subway fare (soon sure to go to seven cents).
“You would?” said Nan, rather surprised. “Oh, grand, I’ll bring them.”
The prospect of this errand was still not so delightful as what occurred next: Stuart’s asking how her cousin, the one with the new baby, was getting on. Blushing with pleasure over the personal, cozy nature of the question, Nan answered: “May’s just fine. The two of them come home from the hospital tomorrow.” She chatted on for a few minutes about the baby’s prodigious lung power and May’s older boy, almost ready for school, and how she still couldn’t—could he?—get used to the idea of hospital-born babies. She was amazed by how at ease she’d begun to feel talking to Stuart, almost as comfortable as she felt talking in front of Allen, who even when not preoccupied, as he seemed to be today, tended to ignore words emanating from a species he regarded as largely unimportant.
At this exact moment, however, his ears pricked up, not over Nan’s spoken goodbye to Stuart, but at the sudden noisy passage through the hall of Gardiner Arinopoulos and the new It Boy apparent. “Meet the NEW face of YOUR magazine!” the photographer was telling Sidney Bruck’s secretary. “THIS is Mr. Bonus Corer, whose face will SOON launch a HUNDRED THOUSAND subscriptions.”
Mr. Corer, who spoke with a soft, rural accent, in deeper tones than the competition he’d just defeated, matched Arinopoulos’s enthusiasm, if not his volume. “I’ve got to tell you, sir, I just love animals, and I thought that picture you did of the fella wearin’ the snake along with the tie just about beat all. I can’t wait for the chance for us to do somethin’ like that.”
“No, NO, Mr. Corer,” the photographer said. “My vision for myself—AND for YOU—is not mammals but MACHINES. I’ve been seeing them in my dreams for WEEKS now: pylons instead of pythons. New York Edison coils! RADIO TOWERS to mimic the LINES and CONSTRUCTION of the clothes you’ll be wearing. Which is to say, no more CRITTERS! I told their landlord, just yesterday, on the phone: I’m CANCELING the rest of my shoots with them. No NEED for him to supply them with any more SPACE out there in Queens once their room and board’s UP at the end of the month. Maybe between now and then somebody PASSÉ will discover a need for them, but I told him he WON’T be hearing from me or anyone HERE. No, Mr. Corer: MACHINES! Vroom-VROOM!”
Arinopoulos pushed the new, nearly deafened model down the corridor, while Allen Case looked at Canberra’s photo on the bulletin board and realized he would never be gaining entry to the warehouse this afternoon. All of the koala’s old friends would probably be dead by the thirty-first.