“You know what today is, don’t you?”
Oh, dear God.
He decided not to try and bluff his way through. “I’m guessing it’s significant. Let’s get the fight out of the way so we can make up in the sack.”
They were in Ellen’s new apartment. She’d moved in a month before. That took roommate Ann out of the equation, with no objection from him. There were still things in cardboard cartons in the living room, which had come furnished in someone else’s taste; but the neighborhood was respectable and the building super was an ex-marine, with the protective instincts of a mastiff.
“Silly. I first saw you six months ago today.”
Had it been that long? Yep: He’d started writing The Fence at the end of January, and now the galley proofs were on his dining room table. “So what’d you think?” he asked.
“Good posture. I had you down for a colonel at least. One of those battlefield promotions, where someone who looks like Tyrone Power storms a machine-gun nest and takes Hitler prisoner, then comes home to sell war bonds.”
“I thought I looked like Jimmy Stewart.”
“Don’t be a goof. You had broad shoulders and lean hips. A cowboy, if not a colonel.”
“I’ve filled out a little since.”
“What’d you think of me?”
They were sitting on a red plush sofa that belonged in a shabby hotel lobby, her head on his shoulder.
“Nice legs.”
“That’s all you remember?”
“You called that instructor—what was his name?”
“Tharp.”
“Tharp. You called him a son of a bitch.”
“That was you. I called him a shit. So I had nice sticks and a potty mouth. Great first impression.”
“Is this the fight?”
“It is if you don’t kiss me right away.”
That attended to, he said, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”
“It’s henna rinse. Mouse-brown at the roots.”
“I knew that. I’ve been in your medicine cabinet.”
“You snooped?”
“I was doing research.”
“So you know all my secrets.”
“Not all.” He hesitated. “Ann told me you lost the love of your life in the war. I thought you’d been engaged or something and he was killed in action. But you never mentioned it, so—”
“Is it important?”
“I need to know who my rival is so I can compete.”
“It’s not much of a competition when he’s dead.”
“It’s worse. He’s not around to make an ass of himself from time to time so I don’t make an ass of myself running down the dear departed.”
She leaned away from him and lit a Lucky. “Ann’s quite the storyteller. I’m surprised she doesn’t write books herself; juicy ones they keep under the counter.”
“Look, if it’s too painful—”
“It is, and I’d rather not go into it now. Is that okay? I’m not trying to be mysterious.”
“Okay.”
But it wasn’t, and after a few more minutes he left.
Back in his apartment he fixed himself a drink and nursed it for an hour proofing The Fence. He hadn’t seen galleys since before the war, and had forgotten how pleasant it was to read his own writing in print, when he’d finished second-guessing himself. Now he could concentrate on typos and last-minute bursts of inspiration.
Somewhere on Long Island, a Linotypist had cast Jack Holly’s words in lead alloy, then used an ink roller to press the letters onto cheap newsprint, four pages per sheet. In the weeks to come, the corrected copy would be duplicated twenty thousand times on a cylinder press, trimmed, bound, and shipped to every retail outlet in the U.S. that contained a paperback rack. There, some browser might pick it up, intrigued by Phil Scarpetti’s arresting artwork, skim the description on the back (“He made his living off the misfortunes of others: until fate—and a blonde named Marcy—made it his dying!”), look at the excerpt on the flyleaf (“‘If you won’t buy my grandmother’s watch, what can I sell you?’ Marcy implored the fence.”), and possibly plunk down two bits to read the rest.
Jacob would never get over the wonder of it; that a grown man should make up stories, write them down, and expect sane people to buy them. It filled him with pride and shame at the same time.
His research had only begun with Irish Mickey Shannon. He’d spent weeks in the Battery interviewing dock workers, in bus stations and truck depots and taxi garages talking to drivers, buying trinkets in Macy’s and Gimbels to get salesgirls to open up; plundering the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens for authentic color. It was important to get the working class right, because Robin Elk believed it to be Blue Devil’s core market.
“Jack Holly’s” fence, Mike Moynihan (Good-bye, Herbert Jackdaw), belonged to that world. He was in a hurry to make his fortune, and the first step was to shitcan scruples. He bore little resemblance to Irish Mickey Shannon; not because Jacob feared his displeasure, but because even anti-heroes must be pleasant to look at. Elk was a stickler on that point: “It’s women who buy books, Jack; they’re the ones who go shopping.” Scarpetti’s men were slightly battered matinee idols with powerful physiques.
Mike Moynihan starts out desperate. Fresh from the war and broke, he steals a typewriter from a pawnshop hoping to turn it into cash. Caught by the owner, he repents, and moves the kindly old soul (Good-bye, Linus Pickering, hello Father Flanagan type) to take him under his wing and show him the pawnbroking business. But a sudden opportunity to profit from stolen goods leads him deeper and deeper into the black market, and higher and higher on the criminal ladder until he controls most of the contraband traffic in New York.
Jacob had moved Shannon’s base of operations to Harlem, partly to shield his source, but also for artistic reasons: No other neighborhood in the city offered so thorough an atmosphere of an alien culture, a world complete unto itself. Jacob had wanted to make his protagonist colored, but Elk vetoed that after reading the early pages: “Sad to relate, old boy, but a Negro in the lead would wipe out the market down South: Piggly Wiggly accounts for fifteen percent of sales there.” And so he was reborn shanty Irish.
There was a woman, of course: Marcia “Marcy” Elliott. In the first draft she was Ellen; but that was for his eyes only. In revision he fell back on subterfuge yet again. Women had peculiar notions about broadcasting their private acts to the world.
Marcy was Moynihan’s undoing, that was a given from the beginning, when she wandered into his shop, desperate (that word again) to sell her grandmother’s gold lapel watch to pay for her mother’s (scratch that) father’s (scratch that) brother’s (scratch that) operation (revise; it was too much like Dickens. Make it dreams of Broadway stardom, reduced to the reality of a cold-water flat on Tenth and the rent two months past due). Moynihan, callous cad, buys her virtue instead. Her revenge comes when she tricks him into buying and selling a stolen jukebox, bringing him to the attention of “Blinky” Fantonetti, the Juke King of Jersey.
On the last page Mike turned the key in the ignition of his Cadillac, and Phil Scarpetti got his explosion: a bonus panel on the back cover, a rare extra outlay on the part of Robin Elk, the Penny-Pinching King of Manhattan.
Raw melodrama, everything but the villain twisting his moustache, dished up without apology. Not David Copperfield; not even Varney the Vampire, which at least had the virtue of originality; but steps above Lash Logan, Private Eye. He was satisfied enough to put the name Holly to it; the pseudonym had by now acquired a legitimacy of its own.
Scarpetti approved. He’d even given him the original art, which hung now unframed on a wall: A dissolute-but-dashing rogue in the foreground, counting crumpled and greasy bills onto the counter of a shop filled with looted treasures, ignoring the blonde disrobing behind him, despite her center spot in the composition. On the book, THE FENCE in bulbous yellow letters, by Jack Holly in smaller type in white, with the bratty Blue Devil leering in the upper right-hand corner, the size of a penny stamp.
But what to do about Ellen? She’d kept asking to read the book, but he’d put her off, saying it wasn’t ready to show. Now here it was in print, the intimate details of their relationship public property.
Then again, she had her own secrets, didn’t she?