New switchboard orders came through: until further notice Goldhandler was talking only to Lou Blue, Barrymore, Lahr, and Lasser; no brokers, no bankers, no bill collectors; and Mrs. Goldhandler was talking to nobody at all.
“Not even Mrs. Fesser?” I inquired.
“Not even Mrs. Fesser,” said Boyd.
Peter Quat looked grave. “You mean he won’t talk to Klebanoff?”
“Oh, yes. He’s always in to Klebanoff.”
We had been through tight times before, with such switchboard orders. Sooner or later things would loosen up, and the calls would go through again. The Goldhandlers, in the manner of the rich, were just slow pay. When a cash bind came along—as upon dropping forty-eight thousand dollars, for they had decided at that birthday breakfast to cut their loss and sell at once—the paying could slow yet more. But never, since I had come to work, had they yet shut off Mrs. Fesser.
Mrs. Fesser was an interior decorator specializing in antiques, and the penthouse was wholly furnished with bargains she had picked up from a liquidation of a big estate on Long Island. I had often wondered about those furnishings. No matter how much money Goldhandler was raking in, he hadn’t been doing it for long. How on earth could they have amassed such treasures? Simple answer: Mrs. Fesser had sold them the stuff on credit. Putting down very little hard cash, paying off a bit at a time, the Goldhandlers could live in these princely surroundings. Such things were possible in the depression. Mrs. Fesser kept urging more and more antique purchases on them, because the pieces could be bought so reasonably, and were such marvellous investments.
In fact, so Boyd once told me, a bank owned the apartment building, which had gone bankrupt (those were rough times, friends) and to inveigle a tenant into that quadruplex tower, the bank had given the Goldhandlers an enormous “concession” on the lease, I believe a whole year. In short, the Goldhandlers were really arriviste expaupers, camping out precariously in the ruins of other people’s wealth; and the penthouse was a ploika, after all, on the most fantastic imaginable Aladdin’s lamp scale, with Mrs. Fesser as genie; except that—a crucial exception—Mama never bought anything except for all cash.
This Mrs. Fesser looked something like a genie, and seemed to come and go like one. She always wore a turban with a long feather. The turbans varied in color and shape; but there was inevitably this huge plume slanting up and away, lending her an air of great dash. And she was always smiling, always bubbling, and she always talked with apostolic authority. Cutting off Mrs. Fesser was a distress signal that gravelled us all.
To wrap up that stock-market episode, it turned out that the Goldhandlers sold at the low point of a sag. Before the market closed that same day the stock recovered two points. Next day it struggled back up to the price she had paid. In two weeks it did climb eight points on a big navy order. Mrs. Goldhandler’s tip was accurate, but it required more staying power than they had. That incident, and a few others I observed at the penthouse—for neither of them could ever quite lay off the market—burned a fear of Wall Street into my soul. I have missed all the bull markets, keeping my money virtually in my sock, while my friends have made fortunes, lecturing me in vain about how inflation was shrinking my dollars. Lately my friends have been fretting and borrowing, and having strokes and ulcers, and selling off their Bentleys and Caribbean condominiums; and you still can’t get me to buy all those nice dirt-cheap stocks with my shrunken dollars.
As for Klebanoff, the Alaskan mining engineer, to whom Goldhandler was always in, he comes into the story later. Right now I have to tell the double catastrophe that burst on Goldhandler, with remarkable consequences for me.
***
Goldhandler had gone to Boston, where Johnny, Drop Your Gun was trying out. Boyd and I were hard at it early one afternoon patching up a War and Peace script, using Tolstoy snippets from several cut-up books that lay about the office, plus some Quat and Goodkind dialogue typed on loose pages. Peter had not yet come in to work. The house telephone buzzed. Boyd answered it, and said in surprise, “Mr. Barrymore? Which Mr. Barrymore? But Mr. Goldhandler is out of town…. I see. Very well.” He hung up and said to me, with a puzzled frown, “It’s John Barrymore. He’s coming up in the elevator. The doorman says he seems upset.”
“What about?”
Boyd shrugged, and lit a Melachrino. “Go down and meet him, Dave. Tell him the boss isn’t here. Feel him out a bit. Then I’ll come and handle it, whatever it is.”
“Okay.”
As I trotted downstairs I heard the elevator arrive and the doorbell ring. I opened the door, and there stood Mr. Hyde.
Mr. Hyde to the life, I tell you, stooped over in a black chesterfield, and a black homburg tipped to one side, his hands curved in claws, his eyes bloodshot and murderous, his lips writhing. “I have come to kill him,” said Barrymore, hoarsely, calmly, and distinctly.
“Who?” I stammered.
“The Jew Goldhandler,” said Barrymore. “The Ebrew Jew Goldhandler.” He stepped in and closed the door behind him, then faced me, breathing powerful whiskey fumes.
“He isn’t here,” I said, “he’s in Boston.”
“I have no quarrel with you, boy,” said Barrymore. “Stand aside, and live.”
Again I said, “But he isn’t here, sir, honestly. May I ask what the trouble is?”
With a sweep of an arm, he knocked me aside. “He cannot hide from me,” he said. “His hour has come.” Stooped in that black coat, grinning maniacally, he went thumping up the stairs. I followed him, but he moved fast and got to the office ahead of me. When I came in he was approaching the desk, behind which sat Boyd, staring at him with some concern.
“I am going to kill you, Goldhandler,” said Barrymore. “Make a short shrift, my fingers long for your throat.” The talons wriggled in the air.
Boyd stood up, saying, “I’m not Mr. Goldhandler, Mr. Barrymore. I’m Boyd. I work for him, and he’s in Boston, so—”
Exactly like Hyde in the movies—this whole thing was eerily like a movie, what with the actor’s resonant diction and theatrical gestures, though it couldn’t have been more real and frightening—Barrymore went scuttling like a huge black crab around the desk, and grabbed Boyd by the throat with both hands.
“You degenerate pen-pusher! How DARE you plot and plan and propose that the Barrymores be purveyors of excrement?” He shook Boyd by the throat. “Promotors of bowel movements?” Another shake. Boyd was holding Barrymore’s hands, trying to pry them off his neck. If you ask why I didn’t intervene, all this was happening in seconds, and I was stupefied. “Hawkers of feces? Costermongers of shit? Down on your knees, and DIE!”
At this Boyd pulled off those claws from his throat and said, “Really, Mr. Barrymore, I’m not Mr. Goldhandler. I work for him. I’m Boyd. You remember, he’s much fatter, and has a tooth missing.”
Barrymore peered into Boyd’s face, blinked several times, and straightened up into a semblance of Jekyll. “Quite right. You are not the Jew Goldhandler. I owe you an apology. I am slightly nearsighted, the ravages of age. I beg you to forgive me.”
“That’s all right,” said Boyd. “Can I offer you some black coffee?”
“No, thank you. Where is your employer, Boyd? It is extremely important that I kill him.”
“Mr. Barrymore, he’s out of town with his show. In Boston.”
Barrymore shook his head as though to clear it, and blinked. “On the road? In Boston?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, what a pity.” Barrymore sank into an armchair. “That is very disappointing.” Leaning his head on a hand, he fell asleep.
“Whew!” Boyd dropped into the swivel chair. “How do you suppose he found out?”
“Did he hurt you?”
“Not at all. It was stage throttling,” said Boyd. “Not that it wasn’t a scare. I’ll have to phone the boss. He’ll take it hard.” He looked around at the mutilated copies of War and Peace. “All that work for nothing. One of those idiots at Ex-Lax must have talked.”
Barrymore opened his eyes. “Boston, you said? The Ebrew Jew Goldhandler is in Boston? Boston is a terrible place to die. Which hotel is he staying at, if I may ask?”
“I truly don’t know, Mr. Barrymore, I’m waiting for a call from him this evening,” said Boyd. “Perhaps you would care for a drink?”
“I shall return to my hotel,” said Barrymore, “throw a change of linen in a bag, and go to Boston to destroy the man.”
“Would you like me to call a cab for you?”
“My limousine is waiting,” said Barrymore.
He tried to stand, and couldn’t make it. We helped him down the stairs and into the elevator. He was pleasant and even genial, saying he needed something to eat before proceeding to Boston to kill Goldhandler, so he would lunch at the Players Club. He insisted, in a charming courtly way, that Boyd join him. He wanted to drown the inadvertence of almost strangling him in a bottle of good claret. All this happened in the elevator, and we assisted him out to the street. A large black limousine parked at the corner started toward us, but a taxicab swooped in front of it and drew up at the canopy. Out of that cab stepped Lou Blue.
“Boyd, you son of a bitch,” said Blue, not recognizing Barrymore, whose black hat was down over his face, “where’s my script? And what the hell are you doing?”
“I called the messenger service three times, Lou,” said Boyd. “The program’s up there in an envelope, waiting.” That was the truth. The envelope lay in the foyer on the settee.
Blue went into the building as we were boosting Barrymore into the limousine. “Oh, God,” said Boyd, “War and Peace is all over the place. Don’t let him go upstairs, Dave. Get him into the living room and keep him there. I’ll be right up.”
“No, you won’t,” said Barrymore. “I throttled you, and you must drink claret with me.”
I scampered into the building and saw the door of the elevator to the penthouse close. I rang and rang, but the lights kept flashing upward to the top. Then the elevator came down for me.
“Where is he?” I shouted at the poor maid who opened the door. I could see the envelope still lying there in the foyer.
She stammered, shrinking away from me, “He, he go up to de offus.”
Galloping up the stairs, I charged into the office, and came on Lou Blue sitting in Goldhandler’s swivel chair holding our patchwork War and Peace script, staring around at all the copies of the book on the desk, and crying. Big tears were rolling down the man’s cheeks.
“Look at this! He isn’t human,” Blue sobbed. “He’s something terrible. He’s a monster. He would sell his grandmother for dogmeat. People like him shouldn’t be allowed. Look at how he lied to me! And I believed him. He’s a horrible thing, like a vampire.”
“Mr. Blue, whatever you may be thinking, you’re wrong,” I said. “Mr. Goldhandler doesn’t know anything about this. He’s in Boston.”
“What are you saying?” He brushed away tears with both fists. “Sure he’s in Boston, but so what? Don’t you go lying too, kid. Isn’t this his office? Don’t you work for him?”
I told him, making it up frantically as I went along, that Boyd and I were the traitors. We were taking advantage of the boss’s absence to do a War and Peace audition, hoping to sell it to Ex-Lax and screw Goldhandler. We deserved to be fired, but I hoped he would take pity on us and not tell Goldhandler. As Blue listened skeptically, drying his tears, in walked Boyd, carrying the envelope. “Now, Lou, all this is easy to explain, however peculiar it may look, and here’s your script,” he said.
“Well, I’m certainly willing to listen,” said Lou Blue. “Go ahead, Boyd. Explain it.”
Naturally, Boyd told a different—and much better—story. It had not occurred to him that I would attempt a Goldhandler-scale lie, and with Blue’s eyes on me, there was no way I could warn him. Ex-Lax had given Goldhandler no rest, said Boyd, pestering him for a War and Peace show. In desperation he had at last ordered us to put together a rotten script, so as to sabotage the idea and protect Lou Blue. All Lou had to do was read the script to see how bad it was. The man who had just left was John Barrymore himself. He had rejected the project, once for all. Goldhandler’s plan had worked brilliantly, and the Lou Blue show was safe at last.
Now there was a story worthy of a disciple of Harry Goldhandler. It might even have worked, but for my own amateur fibbing. As it was, Boyd was just blundering deeper into a quagmire with every word.
“Well, you are both pretty good liars,” said Lou Blue when Boyd finished, “but not like Harry Goldhandler. He is the biggest liar I have ever known. It frightens me to think what a bad man you work for. Now I want you to tell him something. Eddie Conn has got a great new classy idea for my show. Who doesn’t know that Ex-Lax is out for class? Why didn’t Goldhandler think up a classy idea for me, instead of trying to stab me in the back with War and Peace?”
“I’m sorry you don’t believe me,” said Boyd. “I’ll swear to it, Lou.”
Lou Blue picked up his script and walked to the office door. “Eddie’s idea is to do Gulliver’s Travels. None of these hokey old jokes off the cards any more. I’ll be Gulliver. I’ll have all kinds of hilarious adventures with giants, and midgets, and Japs, and Chinks, and like that.”
Oh Lord, I thought, Hansel and Gretel again.
“Lou,” said Boyd, “you can easily get another sponsor, even if Ex-Lax lets you go. You have good ratings. Don’t do Gulliver’s Travels. It’s a stupid idea.”
Lou Blue paused, his hand on the door, and looked at me. “You’re just a kid. Get away from him! Get away from these cards!” He shook the script envelope at Boyd. “You just tell him I’m switching to Eddie Conn. Our lawyers can handle the details.”
Exit Lou Blue.
Boyd and I looked disconsolately at each other over half a dozen ruined copies of War and Peace.
“I’d better take the next train to Boston,” said Boyd. “He forgot to pack some pills. I can bring him the pills.”
Boyd departed forthwith for Grand Central, leaving me drudging listlessly at an audition script. Peter Quat didn’t appear until almost dinner time.
“Where in the lousy hell have you been?” I snapped.
“Moving out of my father’s house,” said Peter. “We had the fight of our lives. I’m quitting Goldhandler.”
Well, as the fellow says, it never rains but it pours. Peter was impatient with my account of the Barrymore and Blue disasters. He paced around the office, making faces like a drunken monkey and talking a blue streak. Two of his short stories had at last been accepted, and by two very prestigious magazines, the Antioch Review and the Kenyon Review! The two letters had come in the same morning mail. He had rushed over to his father’s office, to say he would leave Goldhandler now and concentrate on literature. He had saved some money. He asked only to live at home until he got on his feet as a writer. But when Dr. Quat heard that Peter had gotten eleven dollars for one story and nothing for the other but a free subscription, he had laughed and told Peter to stick with Goldhandler for a while yet. Peter had defied his father and stormed out.
“I’ll move into a fleabag hotel or into the YMCA,” Peter fumed, “but I’m quitting this madhouse, that’s for sure. TONIGHT! War and Peace finished me. What a fraud! I’m glad it’s off. I never want to look at those cards again.”
“Peter, don’t be a fool,” I said. “Work to the end of the week and get paid. One thing you need now is money.”
“Where will I sleep tonight?”
“Come home with me. Sleep in Lee’s room. She’s visiting her future in-laws in Miami Beach.”
Peter groaned, “We’ll see. What are you working on?”
***
About midnight Boyd called from Boston. “Is Peter there? Put him on.”
“I’m on,” said Peter, at the switchboard.
“Peter, were you with us when we did Lord Piffle?”
“Lord Piffle? Sure. I did the draft with Eddie Conn.”
“Okay. Dig out Lord Piffle, and read the scripts over, both of you.”
“What’s up, Boyd?” I asked, on the other phone. He sounded ebullient.
“He’s done it!” Boyd exclaimed, laughing joyously. “He’s pulled it out! He’s the bloody champ. But I can’t go into it now. Just read over Lord Piffle, and start thinking about Leslie Howard.”
Peter and I stared at each other across the office, and we said with ludicrous simultaneity, “Leslie Howard?”
And Boyd did go into it. He was bursting with the news, with relief, and with adulation for Goldhandler.
The reader has seen old Leslie Howard movies on television, and knows what a charmer this suave British star was; not flamboyant like Barrymore, but talk about class! He was then at the height of his vogue. Like many an actor whose forte is light comedy, he had attempted Shakespeare; nothing less than King Lear, which had opened in Boston, and was about to close down after bad notices and poor business. On getting Boyd’s calamitous report, Goldhandler had clapped on hat and overcoat, had trudged in a snowstorm to the theatre where King Lear was playing, and had talked with Leslie Howard backstage about going on the radio. The star, so heavily out of pocket, had been receptive. At the disclosure that the sponsor might be a laxative, he shrugged. As long as he didn’t have to read the commercials, he said, what did it matter who paid for the show?
Thereupon Goldhandler had rushed back to the hotel and telephoned a Mr. Menlow, the president of Ex-Lax, to tell him that he could get Leslie Howard to replace Lou Blue. This was a lucky shot. Menlow was such an admirer of Howard that he had put some money in the Lear production, and still insisted that Leslie Howard was a great Lear.
“It’s in the bag,” Boyd exulted. “Howard wants it, the sponsor wants it, and the money will be fantastic. Now all we need is a show. The boss thinks Lord Piffle will work fine. So get hot, boys, and update a couple of scripts.”
The Lord Piffle programs had been hectographed in purple on a slick paper that had turned brownish. The jokes were as aged as the script, and the idea was just as aged: a silly-ass lord and an impudent butler trading wheezes, nothing more.
“Who on earth were Rawlins and Stone, Peter?”
“Oh, a couple of British vaudevillians. They did a few weeks on sustaining and flopped.”
“No wonder. The stuff’s garbage.”
Peter swept both arms around at the office. “It’s all garbage.”
“Goldhandler’s forgotten,” I insisted, “how crude this material is.”
“Oh, what does he care? Christ, he could do something with Leslie Howard, too. Something Noël Cowardish, an international jewel thief working the ocean liners or something, charming the rich ladies, stealing their bracelets and their panties. Anything like that, something light, something gay. If he’d once forget about these damned cards! He’s a good writer!”
“Peter,” I said, “let’s try that.”
“Try what? The jewel thief?”
I rolled a sheet of paper into the typewriter. “Let’s just draft it out. No jokes. No cards. You dictate. Let’s see what happens. Lord Piffle can’t work. It’s nothing.”
“Dave, it’s one o’clock in the morning.” Peter sounded peevish, but his face took on life. “Anyway, I don’t give a shit about any of this, you know that—Goldhandler, Leslie Howard, Ex-Lax, the whole nightmare. You do it if you want to. He should narrate it, Howard himself. It should be like the memoirs of Raffles, just dramatize the high points.”
“Are you sleepy, Peter?”
“No.”
“Come on, then. I can’t do it myself. Lord Piffle is worthless, and I’m not quitting Goldhandler.”
Reluctantly, Peter said, “Well, I’ll help you get started, then I’m passing out on that couch, and when you’re ready to go home, wake me.”
At three o’clock Peter was still dictating, pacing in his stocking feet, in his hunched posture of concentration. We had both pitched in, and the idea of a competing beautiful woman thief was mine, but Peter had done much of the draft; all very obvious stuff, but better than Lord Piffle, and even—I thought—with a bit of class to it.
“Liebowitz,” I interrupted him, “let’s go out for a cup of coffee.”
He stopped in his tracks, looked at me, and broke out in a wry laugh. “Why, you serpentine little bastard.”
We ate at Lindy’s, then went back to the penthouse; worked till dawn, and finished the script without a card joke in it.