But even Paul, for whom nothing was too shocking, shameful, twisted, harrowing, whatever-even Paul had not considered they would set a couple of hired killers on the man, and he still thought he must be wrong to think it. He'd expected them to break the contract, to get around the problem of Tom Kidd somehow. Of course, Tom would threaten to leave and take Isaly (not to mention Kidd's other writers) with him. He'd thought of other things they might do, such as framing Isaly for plagiarism. Any damage to Ned's reputation Paul would counteract by exposing Bobby Mackenzie.

Well, how to deal with the Isaly dilemma had been their problem. Except it had become his problem with this news about the "consultant" team of Candy and Karl. Jesus Christ. What had he set in motion? He'd put in a call to Sammy Giancarlo, a mob "consultant" about whom Paul had written (wearing his noir hat) a fairly moving novel. Sammy had been pleased as punch and only hoped it had been thinly enough veiled so his momma and the rest of his extended family would know it was Sammy Giancarlo.

"Two guys named Karl and Candy. I don't know if it's first or last names. Do you know them?" This was the phone call he'd made earlier.

Sammy said, "I'm not personally acquainted with them, but you know the way they work."

Paul made his forefinger and thumb into a gun and aimed it at the telephone. Why did Sammy always a.s.sume Paul knew everyone in Giancarlo's world and "the way they work"? Just because Paul had met a few in researching his books? "No, Sammy, I do not know. Else I wouldn't be calling you. Tell me, how do they work that's any different from your standard hit man?"

"Because they get to know the mark. You can't get them just to aim and fire like the rest of the palookas."

Sammy's argot was strongly reminiscent of the 1940s or even the 1930s. Paul got a real kick out of it sometimes. "Yeah. What in h.e.l.l do you mean, 'get to know' the person? That sounds like it's breaking some criminal code."

"Those guys want to know exactly what kind of person they're taking out, never mind you wouldn't think they'd want to know. I wouldn't want to, you wouldn't want to. h.e.l.l, no. I mean what if it turned out you really liked the guy? What then? It's like surgeons, ain't it? I mean if you had a kid needed a kidney you wouldn't want your wife doing the surgery, would you? If your wife was a surgeon. Anyway, these two, I know once they hung around for nearly six months and still didn't whack this guy. And those two, I'm surprised they're even on the road, they hardly ever take a job anymore. Never mind, they don't need the money. These two are top of the line. They are prime time, believe me. Now, you need somebody put on a bus to nowhere. I can help you. What-"

Paul had started yelling. "Hold it! Don't send anybody-"

"No no no no. This guy could voice your concerns is all. Or do you want me to do it personal? Never mind, for you I'd do it. Listen, we're all waiting for the-what'd'ya call it? Prequel? Like maybe Giancarlo: Learning a Trade. You know, when I was a snot-nosed kid. Pretty good, eh?"

"Yeah. Wonderful, Sammy." Paul loved that "voice your concerns is all." "Now this guy you're talking about-"

"It'll cost you; you better be ready with fifty large-I mean up front, with another fifty later. But this guy's absolutely top of the line."

"Sounds pretty much like they're all top of the line. But in that case, Candy and Karl, the two I'm talking about, they'd know him?"

"Nah. This guy's outta Vegas, just keeps a co-op here for when he visits. There's lots of them relocating. There's another good one in Santa Fe. He paints. I don't think he's working his day job no more, anyway . . ." Sammy grew reflective.

"I thought your business was kind of like the priesthood, Sam. You go where you're told."

Sammy laughed. "Priesthood, that's rich. Listen, I'll set up a meet with this guy. He lives in TriBeCa, I think. He likes to move around. I can tell you this: this one's such a good shadow sometimes I think he is one. You won't see him; they won't see him. You can meet him in one of them coffee places, maybe. I say that because he don't drink, not anymore. Only not Starbucks; Starbucks is gettin' to be worse than a spaghetti restaurant. Just last week another one of the Bransonis was blasted out of his chair in that Starbucks over on Eighth. It was all over the f.u.c.king tabloids. You read about that? Gettin' to be as bad as D.C. Anyway, he'll know what you look like even if you don't know him." Sammy described him-tall, thin, and blond. "But that won't help you much because he's like a f.u.c.king chameleon. He blends in. Never saw anyone who could blend as good as him."

"Right away, Sammy, if you can. I'm worried about this fellow Candy and Karl are, well, following, I guess."

"You got it. I'm makin' a note. So what are you doing, Paulie, you're messed up with Candy and Karl? You been seein' too many Francis Ford Coppola movies?" Sammy laughed at his own little joke.

" 'Fraid so. What's this fellow's name?"

"Arthur Mordred. And for G.o.d's sakes, don't call him 'Art.' He hates it people call him 'Art.' "

Paul wondered just how much Arthur hated it.

The meeting with Arthur Mordred was held in one of those crepe and cappuccino cafes in SoHo off Broome Street. Paul usually avoided such places, just as he avoided the center of Greenwich Village.

The coffeehouse was a yuppie hangout. Paul looked the room over. There were perhaps fifteen customers; he looked at each one of them. Finally, a man at a corner table whom Paul had pa.s.sed over several times-somehow seeing and not seeing-raised his hand. Arthur Mordred looked like just another yuppie. Paul would never have picked him out. He had a narrow head, a thin mouth, seal-gray eyes, and flaxen hair so lightweight it looked ruffled by the air stirred up by the erratically circling fan overhead. His ears lay so flat against his head they looked cut and pasted there.

"I can't say how thrilled I am to meet you," said Arthur Mordred. "I've read every one of your books." Arthur fit his chin into his hand a little like a cupcake and looked volumes at Paul. Before him sat a big cup of cappuccino. Arthur tapped it. "Want one?"

Paul shook his head, pulled the brown envelope containing fifty thousand dollars out of an inside pocket of his raincoat, and handed it to Arthur, who took it with the same soigne manner in which he probably (Paul thought) did everything, including shooting people. Paul's notion of hit men was obviously antediluvian. Clearly your man didn't always run to muscles, no manners, and few words.

Because Arthur seemed only to want to talk, as if he'd been locked up for years-well, maybe he had-and was just getting his first taste of freedom. As he peeked into the envelope he asked, "Are you working on a new book?"

Paul didn't care for the way Arthur was eyeing him. He didn't want to get trapped in a Stephen King situation. Misery. "Not at the moment, Arthur. At the moment I'm sitting here with you." Perhaps one shouldn't be so free with the sarcasm around Arthur. So Paul flashed him an I'm-only-jesting smile.

But Arthur simply thought he was being droll. "Where am I to go, Paul?"

"Wherever this guy goes." From the same pocket the money had been in, Paul brought out the dust jacket for Solace, turned it to the back flap and the small picture. "Ned Isaly, another writer."

Arthur was impressed. "My goodness, this is what you might call the literary event of the year, not to mention the top ten hits." He laughed at his little joke, his voice chirrupy. "Maybe we ought to put out a little magazine, you know-"

"Look, Arthur. Let's be sure we're on the same page here: what I want is for you to keep this person from getting shot. A couple of guys might be aiming to do that even as we speak. I can't believe they really are, but I don't want to take chances."

Arthur pursed his lips. "You mean you want a bodyguard."

"Well . . . yeah, I guess . . . yeah, exactly. A situation has simply gotten out of control. I'll summarize it for you: a publish-"

Arthur shut his eyes, squinched them shut, and fanned his hands palm out like a metronome. "No no no no! I don't want to hear the whys and wherefores, tell me nothing I don't absolutely have to know. Mention no names if you can help it." He looked at the dust jacket again. "Quite a handsome bloke, this Isaly. I never got around to reading that book. I'll certainly read it now."

Bloke? Did people still say that? It sounded like an old Terry-Thomas movie. "I guess you're really good when it comes to, uh, shadowing people?"

"Ordinarily, I don't have to. It's usually not necessary, is it?" Arthur beamed a smile at Paul.

The implication of which made Paul extranervous. "Here it is: there are two guys who always work together who are after him-" Paul tapped the photo with his forefinger. "Sammy said you'd know them. Names are Can-"

Again, Arthur shut his eyes, flapped his hands, made a little moue of distaste. "No names. Describe them."

"I can't. I've never seen them. Sammy knows them. Says everyone does. In the business, I mean." His voice even lower, Paul said, "Kar-"

But Arthur was adamant and even put his hands over his ears.

"Oh, for G.o.d's sakes! Wait a minute." Paul rose and walked over to the gla.s.s-enclosed counter by the register. To the girl attending it, he said, "Give me one of those, will you?"

She plucked the Mars bar from a box and took the money.

Back at the table, Paul set it down before Arthur.

"How delicious! I love chocolate."

"Chocolate what?"

"With almonds and marshmallow."

Paul shut his eyes against such thickheadedness. "No, Arthur. I mean as a cla.s.s of things."

Arthur raised his translucent brows in question.

"It's a clue, Arthur. The whole thing, not the separate ingredients."

Arthur bit his lip, then snapped his fingers. "The Big Sleep. Don't you love Hammett?"

"What in h.e.l.l are you talking about?"

"The villain. Eddie Mars. Isn't that who you're talking about?"

Paul jumped up again and returned to the counter and came back with a b.u.t.terfinger and a Hershey bar. "Okay. Take all three together. What do you call them?" Paul glared.

Arthur shrugged, looking at Paul with an expression that begged Paul's forbearance. "Chocolate bars?"

Paul brought his fist down on the table, jumping the b.u.t.terfinger. This was harder than writing a f.u.c.king novel. The couple at the table next door jumped at the thud. Paul marched back to the counter and purchased a roll of Necco wafers.

This he slammed down on the table and waited.

After a moment or two of earnest thought, Arthur said, "I've got it! Can-"

Paul waved his hands this time. "You know the name of the second one?"

"I should say so. Those two. Somebody must really have wanted a b.u.t.ton-you know. And had the money to get it. Those two do not come cheap." Arthur studied the photo. "What the devil's he-No, don't tell me. I'm just naturally curious, I guess. How long have they been, you know, on the job?"

"I don't know. A week?"

"Well, that's a good sign. At least they didn't hate him on sight."

Paul rolled his eyes ceilingward, studied the eccentric fan. "Praise be."

THE OLD HOTEL.

TWENTY-ONE.

They headed for the Old Hotel whenever they got serious, or desperate (which amounted to the same thing). It was a place which, unlike Swill's, was a destination, not, like Swill's, a stop along the way. It was actually two different places, the bar and the sw.a.n.k restaurant above it, where the diners could look down and measure the success, or lack of it, of the various customers.

They could not afford the restaurant. That is, Ned and Sally couldn't. Saul had taken all four of them there several times to celebrate birthdays and holidays, and Jamie had taken them whenever one of her books was published, so they ate at the Old Hotel fairly frequently. It was odd, Sally sometimes thought, that these three were not jealous of one another. More than odd; it was extraordinary. They appeared to know and appreciate one another's worth.

What the four of them often mentioned, as if freshly surprised, was that none of this looked phony or faux hotel. It was a large prewar brownstone and they wondered if it had actually been a hotel once. That perhaps it was a hotel turned into a bar and restaurant, rather than a bar and restaurant called a hotel.

Ned liked to talk about what might have gone on here and make up stories about guests who might have come here. "Manhattan in the forties, the thirties."

The bar, the Lobby, had its name written on a small wooden sign above its doorway. It did resemble one. There were a lot of easy chairs and love seats covered in linen and faded cretonne, and gathered around small tables. The wallpaper was dark red and flocked, and a dozen or more Gibson Girl tinted drawings hung against it. And then there were the G.o.dey's Lady's prints, women in wide hats, cosseted waists, rucked sleeves. Clouded light diffused from sh.e.l.l-like wall sconces. There was a fireplace and big, bra.s.s-k.n.o.bbed andirons. The air was scented with mint, and they had attempted to track it to its source, but couldn't, until Ned, going up to the bar to get another drink, reported back that the bartender had a reputation for the best mint juleps just about anywhere, and customers from Kentucky, Georgia, and the Carolinas p.r.o.nounced this to be true.

Then they had all ordered mint juleps and had gone to the bar to sit on stools and watch them being made. It was a prodigious undertaking, and no wonder they cost more than twice as much as any other drink.

The last one to be told of this place was Jamie. She had walked into the Lobby's minty environs, looked around with large, wide eyes, and had said she had never seen anyplace so much like her aunts' rooming house in Savannah. "It's awesome; it's uncanny. I mean, of course this is bigger and there's a lot more furniture and stuff, but it still looks just like Aunt Eloise and Aunt Jeb's."

Her eyes wide and wondering was a look rarely seen on Jamie's face, whose sense of wonder had been vastly depleted by the unwondering, squint-eyed, skimpily clothed worlds she inhabited every day.

(It was Saul who had talked about Jamie's writing worlds in this way: romance, mystery, science fiction. It was very strange, he'd said. Here was subject matter-murder, romance, altered reality-that should free up any writer's imagination, subjects to bring the muse to heel, and yet it didn't work that way.) Ned had often said he bet Jamie worked harder than he did, possibly harder than any of them did. It infuriated him when some hack over a pint of Corona at Swill's said all Jamie had to do in her mystery series was toss the characters up in the air and record their descent. It was said, of course, with a contemptuous smile.

But Saul said, no, that's not what he was talking about. Far from enjoying the wide-open s.p.a.ces of country where no rules applied, Jamie was stuck in a small airless room with the constant threat of the walls' closing in. "That's what makes it genre fiction, not the subject matter itself. It's writing in the service of nothing. The world is hedged and trimmed back until it fits whatever generic rules you're applying."

Saul had got wound up and drunk and harangued on this subject. His voice was rich and deep and soothing, even more so after he'd poured a good deal of single malt whiskey down his throat. Ned stopped listening, getting drowsy with bourbon and thinking about Nathalie. Thinking about what she was doing and feeling and realizing he didn't have to worry whether what she did would "fit." He opened his eyes, then, and said to Saul, "You're right."

Yes, they quarreled and occasionally ranted but it was different. Jamie might criticize Ned's revisionist theories about early days in Pittsburgh, but she didn't carry such criticism over into his work, into his plans for Nathalie. (She did not know this name because Ned never talked about what he was writing. Jamie had to refer to his "protagonist, or whatever.") Tonight, there was a quarrel, and it was started by Sally. Ned (who, Sally noted, seemed to have entirely forgotten her bad news) said he was going to Pittsburgh. He was to take three or four days off from writing and do this. And they'd better not (he warned) lay on him a lot of sentimental or pseudocynical c.r.a.p about not being able to go home again.

"That's not what Wolfe meant, anyway," said Jamie.

Saul took his cigar from his mouth as if that would make him see her better. "Don't be ridiculous. Of course that's what he meant. Wolfe was a sentimentalist. I don't mean that necessarily as being wrong."

"Oh, stop being such a pompous a.s.s," exclaimed Jamie.

Saul blushed a little. He did tend to be pompous, he knew.

Jamie turned to Sally, sitting there stuffing cashews into her mouth. "Why are you so mad?" Jamie asked, snapping shut her old Ronson lighter.

Sally inclined her head toward Ned. "Something's going on at the house. I think they're going to try to get out of their contract with him." Sally told Jamie about what she had overheard in Bobby Mackenzie's office.

Jamie found it hard to believe. "That's crazy. Ned?"

He had been studying the Gibson Girl drawings, wondering if the one with the upswept red hair had been his model for Nathalie a long time ago and he'd forgotten.

"Ned!"

He lurched in his seat. "What?"

Sally put her head in her hands and moved it back and forth. "He won't listen; he won't take it seriously." This came muted from behind her hands.

"Sure, I do. I sure as h.e.l.l do. Yes, I do."

"If you have to say it three times," observed Saul, "you probably don't."

Ned said, "There's nothing much I can do, is there? All I can do is ask Tom Kidd."

"Tom wouldn't know."

"How do you know that?"

"Because if he was supposed to"-Sally said this through gritted teeth-"he'd have been there."

"He'd have to know sometime."

Sally was about to respond when the waiter came over to take their order. He knew what they wanted; they always had the same thing, the same drinks, except for that fling with the mint juleps. Saul and Jamie martinis, Sally some icky-looking cordial, Ned bourbon. The waiter smiled and left. Saul always left him extravagant tips.

Perhaps one reason they liked to come here was that things seemed muted in the Old Hotel. It was not an "arty" hangout. It was on some lesser known street on the fringe of the Village, a half street that dead-ended at a whitewashed church. But the patrons only sometimes looked as if they came from Chelsea or the Village or SoHo. And as a group they changed nightly, or seemed to. Sometimes they looked like they came over from Queens, blue collar and conservative. And then there were the nights filled with the Uptown people: Central Park West, the East Sixties, Sutton Place. It was always switching. It looked tonight as if they'd all organized themselves in the lobby of the Dakota and come downtown en ma.s.se.

How had they found the Old Hotel, these Uptown emigrants? These thin and high-strung women in their filmy, flowing clothes; like b.u.t.terflies, with their iridescent lips and nails? The dining room wasn't even-heavens above!-in Zagat. How it could have been missed was a mystery. Its food was good and not too expensive, but it was the ambience that was thrilling. Saul said it was because Nina and Tim Zagat had been turned away. That's what he'd heard.