She sat staring at him for a long time.
And after that long time she said, simply, “You prick.”
Harry nodded with resignation. “Right. I’m a prick. A tired old prick, little miss. And there’s an awful lot of your Daddy in you. But at least now we’ve been properly introduced.”
And he put it in gear, moved it off the shoulder, got it up to cruising speed, and went to Raleigh.
And after he let her out on a street corner in downtown Raleigh, and after she gave him the finger as the rig moved away from the curb, Harry Fischer with a c returned the truck to the company that had bonded him, picked up his paycheck, and went home to his wife and kids.
Sixteen: Tired Old Man
The hell of it is, you’re never as tough as you think you are. There’s always somebody with sad eyes who’ll shoot you down when you’re not even looking, when you’re combing your hair, tying your shoelace. Down you go, like a wounded rhino, nowhere near as tough as you thought.
I came in from the Coast on a Wednesday, got myself locked up in the Warwick to finish the book, did it, called the messenger and had him take the manuscript over to Wyeth the following Tuesday, and I was free. Only nine months late, but it was an okay piece of work. It was going to be at least three days till I got the call telling me what alterations he wanted — there were three chapters dead in the middle I knew he’d balk at — I’d cheated on the psychiatric rationale for the brother-in-law’s actions, had held back some stuff I knew Wyeth would demand I flesh out — and so I had time to kill.
I’ve got to remember to remind myself: if I ever use that phrase again, may my carbons always be reversed. Time to kill. Yeah, just the phrase.
I called Bob Catlett, thinking we’d get together for dinner with his wife, the psychiatrist, if he was still seeing her. He said we could set it up for that night and by the way, why didn’t I come along for the monthly meeting of The Cerberus Club. I choked back a string of uglies. “I don’t think so, man. They give me a pain in the ass.”
The Cerberus is a “writers’ club” of old pros who’ve been around since Clarence Buddington Kelland was breaking in at Munsey’s Cavalier . And what had been a fairly active group of working professionals in the Fifties and Sixties was now a gaggle of burnt-out cases and gossips, drinking too much and lamenting the passing of Ben Hibbs at the Saturday Evening Post . I was thirty years past that time, a young punk by their lights, and I saw no merit whatsoever in spending an evening up to my hips in dull chatter and weariness, gagging on cigarette smoke and listening to septuageneric penny-a-word losers comparing the merits of Black Mask to those of Weird Tales .
So he talked me into it. That’s what friends are for.
We had dinner at an Argentinian restaurant off Times Square; and with my belly full of skirt steak and bread pudding I felt up to it. We arrived at the traditional meeting-place — the claustrophobic apartment of a sometime-editor who had once been a reader for Book-of-the-Month Club — around nine-thirty. It was packed from wall to wall.
I hadn’t seen most of them in ten years, since I’d gone to the Coast to adapt my novel, THE STALKING MAN, for Paramount. It had been a good ten years for me. I’d left New York with a molehill of unpaid bills the creditors were rapidly turning into a mountain, and such despair both personally and professionally I’d half accepted the idea I’d never really make a decent living at writing. But doing four months’ work each year in films and television had provided the cushion so I could spend eight months of the year working on books. I was free of debt, twenty pounds heavier, secure for the first time in my life, and reasonably happy. But walking into that apartment was like walking back into a corporeal memory of the dismal past. Nothing had changed. They were all there, and all the same.
My first impression was of lines of weariness.
Someone had superimposed a blueprint on the room and its occupants. In the background were all the moving figures, older and more threadbare than the last time I’d seen them gathered together in a room like this, moving (it seemed, oddly) a good deal more slowly than they should have been. As if they were imbedded in amber. Not slow motion, merely an altered index of the light-admitting properties of the lenses of my eyes. Out of synch with their voices. But in the foreground, much sharper and brighter than the colors of the people or the room, was an overlay of lines of weariness. Gray and blue lines that were not merely topographically superimposed over faces and hands, and the elbows of the women, but over the entire room: lines rising off toward the ceiling, laid against the lamps and chairs, dividing the carpet into sections.
I walked through, between and among the blue and gray lines, finding it difficult to breathe as the oppressiveness of massed failure and dead dreams assaulted me. It was like breathing the dust of ancient tombs.
Bob Catlett and his wife had immediately wandered off to the kitchen for drinks. I would have scurried after them, but Leo Norris saw me, shoved between two ex-technical writers (each of whom had had brief commercial successes twenty years before with non-fiction popularizations of space science theory) and grabbed my hand. He looked exhausted, but sober.
“Billy! For God’s sake. Billy! I didn’t know you were in town. What a great thing! How long’re you in for?”
“Only a few days, Leo. Book for Harper. I’ve been all locked up finishing it.”
“Well, I’ll say this for you, the Scott Fitzgerald Syndrome certainly hasn’t hit you out there. How many books have you written since you left, three? Four?”
“Seven.”
He smiled with embarrassment, but not enough embarrassment to slow the phony camaraderie. Leo Norris and I — despite his effusions — had never been close. When he had already been an established novelist, a fact one verified by getting one’s name on the cover of The Saint Detective Magazine , I was banging off hammer murder novelettes for Manhunt , just to pay the rent in the Village. There had been no camaraderie in those days. But Leo was now on the slide, had been for the last six or eight years, had been reduced to writing a series of sex/spy/violence paperbacks: each one numbered (he was up to #27 the last time I looked), pseudonymous, featuring an unpleasant CIA thug named Curt Costener. Four of my last seven novels had been translated into successful films and one of them had become a television series. Camaraderie.
“Seven books in what — ten years? — that’s damned good.”
I didn’t say anything. I was looking around; indicating I wanted to move on. He didn’t pick up the message.
“Brett McCoy died, you know. Last week.”
I nodded. I’d read him, but had never met him. Good writer. Police procedurals.
“Terminal. Inoperable. Lungs; really spread. Oh, he’d been on the way out for a long time. He’ll be missed.”
“Yeah. Well, excuse me, Leo, I have to find some people I came with.”
I couldn’t get through the press near the front door to join Bob in the kitchen. The only breeze was coming in from the hallway and they were jammed together in front of the passage. So I went the other way, deeper into the room, deeper into the inversion layer of smoke and monotoned chatter. He watched me go, wanting to say something, probably wanting to strengthen a bond that didn’t exist. I moved fast. I didn’t want any more obituary reports.