Travers went from pushups to situps.

  “What if he turns into a werewolf? Then we can put a funny face on him and change his voice,” he said.

  Watts growled, “Pete gobbles starlets.”

  I gestured for Watts to get off my desk and take a chair. I sat down and rather wearily rubbed my forehead.

  “I was thinking more like Pete could get grabbed by a giant bat that’s hovering around,” I said.

  Travers began sidestraddle hops. I asked him to stop. He plopped down quickly on the sofa, crossed his legs, and began swinging one foot rapidly and tapping the other.

  “What if he’s chasing the boss witch down the alley, and he gets mugged by one thousand rats. We can’t see him under the rats,” Travers said.

  “And by the time the rats are off, his face looks like dog food,” said Watts.

  “What if we dub a speech for the boss witch while she’s running down the alley,” Travers said, “and she says, ‘Satan, come suck this parasite off of me.’ And then the giant bat . . .”

  “Or a flying rhinoceros, who gives a shit . . .” Watts said.

  “. . . bangs down with a boom of lightning,” Travers said, “and Satan’s voice is like thunder in the background, and Pete is gone. Which is sudden and tragic, but the girl takes over and knocks the witches off.”

  Watts said, “What if the girl escapes from the motel just in time to see Pete jerked away by this giant bat, and she realizes what she’s got with her is the boss witch’s magic catfish bone. . . .”

  “And then since Pete’s out of range in the maw of the giant bat, she raids the coven by herself and whacks out all the witches with a perfectly formed catfish bone,” Travers said.

  “Maybe it’s shaped like a cross,” said Watts.

  I got back up and acted like I had somewhere to go.

  “You’re obviously on the track of something brilliant,” I said. “I need those pages by tonight. Now, I appeal to you as a fellow garden-clubber to be elegant and witty and make us all proud.”

  Watts and Travers moved out the door in a soft-shoe routine, singing:

  “Hear them calling . . . cross the sea! . . . For our sons of . . . Liber-ty!”

  I fell back into my chair and Arleene brought me a cup of coffee and a stack of bills from Pelham.

  Along about going-home hour, another visitor arrived. It was Julia, the lady I had met in Elaine’s a few nights earlier. Julia had one of the nicest sets of tits you would ever hope to see outside of Beverly Hills or Sydney, Australia.

  I suppose they were the whole explanation for why I had tried to meet her in the first place, or why I agreed to let her drag me off to explore a French restaurant right then, one of those places Women’s Wear had gone mad about.

  I did have to eat dinner somewhere, of course.

  Julia had honey blond hair, was covered over with expensive jewelry, and looked like she devoted most of her time to shopping and screwing deck hands.

  As I left the office with Julia, Arleene said, “How are you gonna get back down the hill?”

  The French restaurant was one of those quaint places where your table was one inch away from four dress designers and your plate pressed up against your chest. Doves cooed in cages hanging from the ceiling. Wine only. And the entree selection was limited to garni-bone and cauliflower.

  I told Julia to eat fast so we could go to dinner.

  That Monday night I was now feeling the need for three things: love, affection, and food. In moods like that, I usually asked Cooper to take me to Clarke’s, my favorite bar.

  7.

  PULLING UP TO CLARKE’S in the Silver Goblet hardly ever caused more of a stir than you would find at your average Brazilian soccer riot. This of course is P. J. Clarke’s, at Fifty-Fifth and Third Avenue. Clarke’s to a regular; P. J.’s to the tourist.

  The saloon occupies the ground floor of an old two-story red brick building on a corner. Once, all the buildings in the neighborhood looked similar, and the Third Avenue El rumbled above their roofs. Clarke’s sits there up against another minor skyscraper now. Somebody bought all the air above it, but Clarke’s stayed—a landmark to the days when the Irish sang more often than they threw bombs.

  The place is in an area of Manhattan that has become crowded with modern bars and also with movies. At night the sidewalks are festive. You can find people stumbling into an argument about subtitled art films, or stumbling out of a marriage, or just stumbling. And there are these hordes of young apartment dwellers wandering about, hoping to discover a meaningful relationship behind the frost of the next daiquiri.

  Cooper always let me out at the side entrance on Fifty-Fifth, and then he would take the limo away and hide it somewhere, preferably underground. Or he would vanish into his own life, knowing he wouldn’t have to come back and get me for at least four hours. Or six.

  Marcie thought Clarke’s was depressing. I, however, thought Clarke’s had prevented a number of suicides, if the truth were known.

  On the sidewalks people would stop to see who might climb out of the limo. It got to where I enjoyed their puzzlement when it turned out to be me—no one recognizable—instead of a talk show host or the star of a sitcom carrying a six-pack of Emmys.

  Cooper said once, “If you’d drive and let me climb out of the rear of this thing, them folks would think they got their money’s worth.”

  In Clarke’s I sometimes liked to stand and drink for a while at what is known to an inner circle as “the garbage.” This is a spot in the middle room at the end of the bar. It isn’t really called the garbage because of the horse players, politicians, writers, detectives, actors, and TV people who assemble there. It actually happens to be where the dirty dishes are stacked up in a pan and then taken away periodically by a couple of Oriental busboys we refer to as Wong and Wong-A.

  The food is good, of course, the drinks come swiftly, and the waiters and bartenders not only know the scores of all the games, but what the latest polls show about the coming election and who the real thieves are. I guess I like the mixture as much as anything. Rich guys sit with shylocks. Guys who wrote movies for Judy Garland sit with criminal lawyers. Ex-prizefighters sit with lyricists. I’ve sat with guys in there who said they invented the ice cream scoop, and I’ve sat with guys who said it could be profitable to kidnap Carlo Gambino’s nephew.

  Like any other New York bar with age, Clarke’s has its share of lore. Most of the lore fans are the waiters. They can point to where Ray Milland stood in The Lost Weekend. A table in the darker and sometimes impenetrably chic back room is still known to many as “the Kilgallen table.” The waiters like to point to where Ingrid Bergman sat with Lena Home, where Vince Lombardi moved his chair over to join Hubert Humphrey, where Frank Gifford, Charley Conerly, and Kyle Rote sat the night after the Giants beat the Bears for the championship, where Frank Sinatra told James Jones how to rewrite From Here to Eternity—or something like that.

  They also like to point out this table by a window looking out on Fifty-Fifth where Onassis ate one of his last hamburgers in America. The waiters were afraid Onassis and Jackie might get bothered by some drunks on that particular winter’s night so they asked some regulars at the garbage to occupy a table next to them—to protect them from any possible intrusions from strangers or drunks. But the first thing they knew, one of the regulars who had sat down, a horse player named Billy, was leaning across Onassis’s lap, saying, “Is it still snowing outside, Ari?”

  It is said around the garbage that if the history of Clarke’s is ever written, the title will have to be Is It Still Snowing Outside, Ari?

  We had one drink at the garbage waiting for Cooper to stow the limo. Then we were led by the owner, Danny Lavezzo, past a line of people waiting to get into the back room. We took a large table.

  If there were fewer than the usual number of vicious remarks directed at me by the people in line, it was undoubtedly because of Julia’s tits.

  Our table in Clarke’s filled up quickly, and not just with the two bacon cheeseburgers, cup of chili, and dish of hashbrowns I requested for myself. We were joined by a TV sports commentator from my old network, a detective, a guy who worked for the governor, a girl starring in a new cosmetic commercial, and the owner himself.

  Much of the conversation around a table at Clarke’s never changes.

  “Chunk meat, not ground,” I must have said at one point. “You can’t use too much cumin seed. Throw out the tomatoes. You know who puts tomatoes in chili? Dinah Shore.”

  The detective said, “That kid with the dandruff who comes in here and drinks up all the Drambuie? His daddy owns the horses? I seen him at the track today. He gimme inside speed, but it was outside closers. I got drowned.”

  Danny Lavezzo said to Julia, “Frank seems to have a weakness for taking out deformed girls.”

  Somebody said, “In July he was the exacta king. In August he was living in a Queens Boulevard walkup.”

  Somebody else said, “How far is Monaco from Biarritz if you’re driving?”

  The girl in the commercial asked Cooper if he was an actor.

  A little later, toward the end of what had been a lengthy discussion about the New York Giants’ draft choices, another chair was added to the table. Norris, the director of “Satan Takes a Bride,” sat down.

  “I think I saw David Merrick out front,” he said. “Or Hal Prince. Which one never smiles?”

  I reached in my pocket and handed Norris some folded pages of script.

  “Pete runs into a garbage grinder and gets chewed to pieces,” I said.

  “I appreciate this, Frank,” Norris said. “It’s a real boost to my career.” He grabbed a waiter and asked for a triple Gibson.

  “The girl tricks the witches into being locked inside a mobile home and drops a match in the gas tank,” I said.

  Norris put the pages away.

  Cooper said, “Old Watts and Travers are somethin’ else. I’d take ’em with me anywhere I went for a day or so. Except to funerals, maybe.”

  “You mean Watts and Travers the writers?” asked the TV model.

  “What do they write about?” Danny Lavezzo said. “Chili?”

  Cooper said, “I thought Travers was goofier than Watts at first. Walked in Frank’s office one day and Travers was standing on his head.”

  He was doing an imitation, I said.

  “Of what?” Julia asked.

  “Mussolini dead,” Cooper said.

  Julia yawned and looked out of the window.

  The man who worked for the governor asked Julia a question.

  “Is it still snowing outside, Ari?”

  Cooper said, “That damn Watts, though. Frank had this party not long ago in the apartment. And Watts all of a sudden did a striptease. He was talking to a producer about a movie plot he was working on, and the next thing anybody knew, he didn’t have no clothes on. And he started dancin’ the hula, twirling his Pukka shell necklace around over his head.”

  “Did anyone punch him?” Julia asked.

  “Naw,” Cooper said. “Most everybody just figured it was another buckaroo headin’ for the O. D. Corral.” There was a bit of commotion at the entrance to the back room, some loud voices and laughter. Herb Grant’s voice was unmistakable.

  Grant entered with two men and a girl. They followed Frankie Ribando, the maitre d’ of the back room, to a good table. Grant stuck something in Frankie’s tuxedo pocket. Judging by their blazers, patchwork slacks, and fixed smiles I guessed the two men were ad agency types. One of them had already made his load. He fell into a coat stand before he sat down. The girl wrote something in a spiral notebook and put it away.

  With his friends seated and drinks ordered, Grant came over to our table and shook hands with Danny Lavezzo.

  “Looks like everything’s under control here,” Grant said. “I don't see any splints or slings.”

  Norris got up to leave.

  “Thanks again, Frank,” Norris said. “I do like surprise endings.” He waved the pages at me.

  “Hope it wasn’t my cologne,” Grant boomed.

  “I think it was the conversation,” Danny Lavezzo said.

  Grant looked at me.

  “You ought to take a minute to come over and say hello to a couple of guys from J. Walter,” he said. “Bob Stervie’s a hell of a guy. That’s Styve Butler with him.”

  Norris disappeared.

  “Which one’s Styve?” asked the detective. “The guy who ain’t had nothing to eat but peanuts?”

  “Those aren’t his good shoes, are they?” Danny Lavezzo said.

  Herb Grant said they’d been at “the Numbers” all night. That’s what Grant called “21.”

  I had already looked at the girl at Grant’s table. To be keenly accurate, Marcie would have considered it a rather overlong stare. The girl had looked at me in return with what I chose to believe was a certain amount of curiosity.

  I asked Julia to untangle her leg from mine and let me out.

  “I’m ready to leave,” Julia said.

  I said I had to say hello to Scooper and Scuppy from J. Walter.

  As I approached Grant’s table, both agency guys hopped up in the tradition of agency guys to extend their grinding handshakes, give their names, list their clients, and tell me where they had sailed, played golf, and skied lately.

  One of them managed it okay, but the other, old Styve, knocked his chair over and poured most of a Galliano rocks on his Gucci. He straightened up his chair and sat back down and said to the girl, “Frick . . . Frank . . . Mmmmm Mackory. Tesh-o-vishin.”

  I heard it while the other guy, old Bob, who wouldn’t turn loose of my hand, was saying, “We must have met once back when I was with Bates and you were at CAU in Philly. Used to love to come in there and get Red and Bunky and Jumper and go around Merion. Hell of a bunch of guys in Philly. Hell of a town. Hell of a golf course.”

  I got my hand back and slid into the table next to the girl as I’d planned.

  “Bob and I have had a few laughs together,” Herb Grant said. “Right, Bob? How about that knitwear convention down at Greenbriar?”

  “Oh, Christ,” Bob said. “Just the thought of having to listen to your harmony again . . .”

  Old Bob turned to me. He said, “Hell of a track record in News, Frank. I mean, the space shots, the hearings, the whole bag of tricks.”

  Herb Grant said, “Let me tell you what this goose Bob did one day when he was handling Cadillac. He left the damn ninety-second opening commercial locked up in his office on a Saturday. And we were on the back nine at Maidstone when they found him. And he had to get some Pinkertons or somebody to break in and rush the damn can over to the broadcast center just in time for the spot.”

  “Fun days, Herb,” said Bob. “Really were.”

  Bob came back to me.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” he said. “All that stuff from Nam. I mean, Christ. Here I sit with the guy who practically fucking invented Indochina, television-wise.”

  Styve woke up.

  “How you feel about ficking Indichina, baby?" he said to the girl.

  She smiled and said, “I hear they show it on real statues over there, just like pieces of sculpture or something.”

  I shifted toward her.

  “My name’s Frank Mallory,” I said.

  “I know,” she said.

  “If you had ever written a best-selling collection of magazine pieces, your name would be Sally Hawks,” I said.

  She looked at me through a pair of large, lightly tinted glasses. Her hair wasn’t parted. It was dark blond, full, and it cascaded down past her shoulders. Even behind the glasses you noticed her eyes. She wore a snug silk blouse that stood open and exposed her neck and collar bones, and she fit it very nicely if you were talking about a league in which Julia would be ineligible. I had the height at five seven. And I had the age at twenty-eight but was willing to miss it by two years on the up side. For a girl, she was more than pretty. For a writer, she was a goddam showstopper.

  “You recognized me from the Carson show,” she said.

  “Book jacket,” I said.

  The agency guys struck again.

  “Hey,” old Bob said. “Guess you’re getting some of the flab worked off now that you’re prime-timing it, huh? Hell of a move this winter, by the way—hell of a move—throwing ‘Lopez’ in the hammock on Wednesday night.”

  Agency guys love to use programming talk. To throw something in the “hammock” means to schedule a new show and maybe one you aren’t sure of, between two shows with good shares that are roughly of the same nature. It’s a device to keep the “audience flow.”

  For the second thirteen-week season I’d juggled some trash I’d inherited. “Lopez and Dusty” was rancid. A couple of hitchhikers finding mild adventure every week amid a repartee of ethnic jokes. The Big Guy liked it. He liked jokes about poor Mexicans.

  I couldn’t cancel “Lopez” and keep my limo, but I could improve on the taste of the scripts in the “second season.” It had picked up higher shares when I put it in a hammock between “Murder Patrol” and “Woody Bean: Narc.”

  The Big Guy also liked “Patrol” and “Narc” because they taught kids how to kill and rat on their friends.

  I had future plans for some members of the “Patrol” to get murdered themselves, and for the “Narc” to be suddenly stricken with a humiliating sense of guilt about his activities.

  “Lish, Frank,” said Styve, from a slump. “Biggie gosh you pishin in a purr smoll pan, doan?”

  Herb Grant stopped a waiter and told him to bring Styve some beef barley soup, a hamburger, and a glass of milk.

  “And type up a new résumé for him,” I said.

  Styve hit himself in the chest with his chin.

  An abnormal quiet swept over the room. Julia had risen and was walking toward the door. I looked around in time to receive her glare. Then I watched the waiters and customers admire Julia’s heaving tits as they led her out.

  Sally Hawks said, “I think your date is taking her two best friends home.”