West of Paradise (22 page)

“Why would I tell you anything?”

“You really consider that dinner party conversation?”

“Well, fortunately, he had a very pretty one, even though it got quite red in the steam.”

Sarah sipped on her Fanta. “When was the last time you saw Paulo?”

“Is this your check? Is your publisher paying?”

“No.”

“But you're going to pick it up anyway.”

“Of course. I invited you.”

“We should have gone to Cirque 2000. But then
everyone
would have seen us. And of course it can't hold a chandelier to the old Le Cirque.”

“Was Paulo bright?”

“Bright for what? Bright for a dancer? Bright for a Nobel Prize winner? Bright for a lamp that led Norman through the darkness?”

“Did he?”

“He had a genuinely sweet spirit.”

“Had?”

“Has.”

“He's still alive then?”

The waiter came with the food. “Oh, good, I'm famished,” Bunyan said, and started eating.

“You didn't answer me.”

“I'm eating,” Bunyan said.

She watched him. Waited until his plate was almost empty. “You weren't disturbed…” It was a total shot in the dark on Sarah's part. But she figured that with his extraordinary sense of plotting, both in his work and in the parlor games he was famous for playing, Bunyan might have been party to any murder scheme, and helped it along. “… by what was done to him?”

To Sarah's intense satisfaction, Bunyan went ashen, and choked on a string bean. He drank some water, and appeared quieted. But his skin was still gray. “Who told you?” he said, finally.

“I have to protect my sources,” she said. “Unlike some people.”

“I always protected my sources,” he said. “Nobody who loved me or confided in me ever had occasion to sue me.”

“They just committed suicide,” she said.

“I've had enough of you and your odious bitchiness.”

“That's redundant,” she said.

“
You
are redundant.” He got up. “But fortunately, not to be so for long. Where is the tidbit you promised me?”

“You already have it. The detached, dispassionate morsel is that Sarah Nash knows what Norman Jessup did to Paulo.”

“Give me that!” Bunyan grabbed the sack of delicatessen on the chair beside her and walked, at a running pace, really, out of the restaurant, his spectator shoes with their Fred Astaire holes beating a rapid tattoo on the peg-and-groove wooden floor.

He speed-walked all the way to Central Park, fearful he might have a heart attack, it was so far away from his usual stroll. But it was worth the risk, the pounding blood in his ears making him nearly forget about Sarah, how frightened he was of her, actually. The man was still asleep on Leona's bench, his shapely bottom rounded against the slats. “For you,” Bunyan said, setting the sack near his face, where he'd see it when he woke, careful to wedge it between the man's nose and the back of the bench, so nobody would steal it. “And your beautiful ass.”

*   *   *

For a while Perry Zemmis had been much like the departed Drayco, the good part of that hustler type, the man that went into every aspect of the entertainment industry and conquered it. But Drayco, for all his hipness and versatility, had never tried to get a foot in the music business, understanding that when you messed with those people, you ended up under the same part of the highway as Jimmy Hoffa.

Perry Zemmis, though, had a handle on music, an armhold on Berl Wilson, the prairie dog whose yelps were the most popular ones of the seventies. Perry had thrown him out of his office after Berl had made him fifty million, because tastes were changing, including Perry's own, and he'd never really liked the son of a bitch. Berl had been kind of slow to get it, since he was not too sharp to begin with and imagined there had been a mistake, and Zemmis was just kidding him, calling him a Nazi son-of-a-bitch cocksucker, just because he was blond and lived in Idaho. So he'd kept on calling. Sal, Zemmis's right-hand guy, telephoned Berl's publisher, and said, “Tell your boy not to call here anymore.” That was about as gentle a way of saying good-bye as Perry knew.

Right now he was on the phone with Washington, as he usually was a couple of times a day, since he was becoming Our Man in Hollywood, the major entertainment link to politics. In the inner office two of his assistants were strong-arming a bookkeeper suspected of manipulating figures. From time to time the man would cry out, and Perry would have to cover the mouthpiece.

“I figure a fund-raiser in my garden,” Zemmis said into the phone. “Everyone wants to get a look at it since we bought all the Henry Moores and the Rodins.”

“But the senator has allergies,” the woman on the other end said. “We wouldn't want to place him in a position of having to sneeze. It might seem a sign of weakness.”

“I swear to Christ, I never changed any numbers,” Bruiser, the bookkeeper, was pleading.

“Can you hang on a minute, Bitsey?” Zemmis said, pleasantly, and pressed the hold button. He went to the door. “Hold it down,” he said to what might have been called his henchmen under different circumstances, but in Century City were known as personal assistants. “I'm talking to campaign headquarters.”

“You could close the door,” said one of the men.

“Then how will I know you're doing your job?”

“The same way you know I did mine,” the bookkeeper wept. “You got the numbers on the page.”

“They don't add up to enough,” said Zemmis, “considering what the Abominable Snowmen took in.”

“There were expenses. You okayed the expenses for the road trip.”

“That did not include redoing four hotel suites, Bruiser,” Zemmis said.

“You know what these groups do. They drug out of control and trash the place.”

“It's your job to keep them in line. Or it was.”

“That was never my job. My job is only to handle the money.”

“That's how you keep them in line.”

“Please,” Bruiser mewled. “Ask them. They'll tell you I always played fair.”

“How would they know, stoned as they are? Okay,” Zemmis nodded to one of his assistants. “Give them a call, ask them to fall by.”

He closed the door behind him, and concluded his conversation with Bitsey. Then he sent some e-mail to his adopted children, the ones who were able to read, playful stuff so that whoever was online, tapping in to check if Zemmis had the stuff to be ambassador should the election go their way, would see how paternal he was, how nonjudgmental, even if they were retardos and crips.

“You wanted to see us?” Yeti, the biggest of the Snowmen, his hair shagged down over his eyes to meet the tufts that grew on his cheeks, above and apart from his untrimmed beard, ambled into the office. He was followed by his sidemen, a drummer and an electric bass player carrying his instrument like a canoe paddle.

“Don't you guys ever wash?” Perry covered his nose.

“What do you want?” Yeti said. “We only came 'cause Bruiser was crying.”

“I want to know what he did with the money.”

“Spent it, I guess,” Yeti said.

“Lucky for him you're on his side,” said Zemmis. He took some papers out of the drawer and put them on his desk, one that had belonged to Kennedy that he'd managed to buy a few years before the Sotheby's auction, saving himself a bundle. “As long as you're here, your contract is up for renewal soon. We might as well get it out of the way.”

“We're not signing,” Yeti said.

“Not,” echoed the drummer. The bass player struck a chord, but as the instrument was electric, and not plugged in, it made a feeble sound. Still, Zemmis got the effect it was meant to have, a chorus.

“You boys can go home,” he said. “I'll talk to Yeti.”

“Okay?” the drummer asked.

Yeti nodded. The two sidemen left.

“Bring Bruiser in here,” Zemmis yelled.

*   *   *

Within a short time it was settled, an accord reached, signed by Yeti, notarized by a secretary who was also a notary, that Yeti would reimburse Zemmis's company for unauthorized expenditures on his last tour. The agreement had been made in the spirit of true fellowship, after one of Zemmis's assistants broke Bruiser's left kneecap, and Zemmis told Yeti what happened to the other kneecap was up to him. In spite of being unwashed and in many ways unfriendly, Yeti was, all the same, a musician, with the sweetness and generosity of spirit that usually characterized that breed. The best of them as well as the least of them understood that even when they wrote a good song, there had been Bach and Beethoven, so there was no point in a swelled head. Or in Bruiser's case, since he had always been kind, another swelled knee.

The receptionist called a paramedic to take Bruiser to the hospital. After he was gone, Zemmis, with his two assistants present, let Yeti listen to a conversation on the speakerphone with a guy named Bonafetti, who had worked for the DA in New York, confirming that they were going after the mob in the record business.

“Still, these people don't really give a fuck about you guys,” Zemmis said, when the conversation was over. “Whereas, I do. So I really think you ought to re-sign.”

The two assistants picked Yeti up by the ankles and dangled him from the terrace, twenty-two stories above Century Park East. “Jack Benny used to live in the apartment building over there,” said Zemmis, like a tour guide. “You can see his pool. I guess if you live long enough it makes sense to take a condo. That way you don't have to worry about keeping the place up. But maybe you won't get old enough to have those kinds of worries.”

“Okay, okay,” Yeti choked, so much blood having rushed to his head he could hardly get the words out. “Let me have the papers.”

They brought him in and let him sit, giving him a pen. “Can I at least read it?” he asked Zemmis.

“Not much point,” Perry said. “It's kind of an offer you can't review.” He laughed at the pun he'd made, walked Yeti to the door of the office, and shook his trembling hand.

Right after that, Zemmis tried to call Kate Donnelly to tell her he was waiting for the Fitzgerald manuscript, but she wasn't home. He left a message on her machine.

*   *   *

“I have these pictures from when he was a little boy,” Lila said, opening a weathered leather album that Kate had helped her get from the bottom of her suitcase. “Look how beautiful he was.
Goldeneh
curls. Like an angel.” She started singing.
“Die goldeneh hairelach. Die tsener vi Perelech.”

“In this picture he was a choirboy?”

“Shiksa,” Lila said. “Jews don't have choirs. Goyim and angels have choirs.”

“You said he was an angel.”

“Not officially then,” she said. “Maybe now.”

“You believe in an afterlife?” Kate stretched her legs, silkily clad in panty hose for the important appointments she had imagined might be coming this day, semisprawled on the bed catercornered to the one where Lila half lay, making herself comfortable, as the older woman with her broken leg couldn't.

“Certainly,” Lila said. “You don't go through all this shit and struggle to be a good person without there's a payoff.”

“What if you're a bad person? Do you go to hell?”

“He wasn't a bad person,” she said hotly. “He was smart. People are jealous of that, resentful, so they put labels on you.”

“Like embezzler?”

“Everybody steals in business,” Lila said. “Larry was just a little more direct about it. I need to go to the bathroom.”

Kate helped her. The two of them were anxious, awkward. The newly acquired crutches supporting Lila's ponderous weight made the trip to the toilet an ordeal. The telephone rang, and Kate went to answer it.

“Mrs. Darshowitz?” A woman's voice.

“She's indisposed,” said Kate.

“To whom am I speaking?”

Kate had to think about it for a moment. A friend? Not really. A passing cormorant looking for material? A good samaritan, involuntarily? But it was shame that she didn't care more that had made Kate go get Lila, as shame made her be present now. Guilt made her stay, guilt that she wasn't really concerned with the woman's plight. And a plight it certainly was, sorry and old-fashioned, a difficulty that would better have been set on some gloomy moor. Alone and aimless, deserted by a man who had seemed to love her, but loved a place with an empty heart more. “I'm sort of an acquaintance,” Kate said.

“This is Anita Streng,” the woman said. “I'm Larry Drayco's estate attorney. We've had a hard time locating Mrs. Darshowitz.”

“How did you happen to find her here?” Kate asked, interested in the tracks that lawyers followed, interested, as it was turning out, in the tracks that everyone followed. It was all starting to seem such an elaborate tangle to her, truth, lies, revelations, and fire departments.

“One of the parking attendants at Puck's remembered her saying she was going there.”

“He must have telescopic hearing,” said Kate, who could herself recall only a barely discernible drunken mumble from Lila leaving the wake about where she was staying. But probably the boys working the lot were like moles in the Cold War, paid to keep extra alert, in their case by scandal mags, or
Inside Edition,
tips that could sustain them better than tips.

“When do you think she'll be able to come to my office?” Anita said.

“She can't. She's broken her leg. I just brought her back from the emergency hospital.”

“What did you say your name was?”

“Kate Donnelly,” she said, wondering if she wouldn't be better off making one up. It was, after all, a land of pseudonyms and acronyms, sounds that supposedly made things easier to remember, though she was starting to wish there was something that made things easier to forget, to hide.