Donald E. Westlake
A Likely Story
I’ll publish, right or wrong:
Fools are my theme, let satire be my song.
The fickleness of the women I love is only equalled by the infernal constancy of the women who love me.
This is for
Justin Scott
Joe Gores
Brian Garfield
Hal Dresner
Al Collins
and
Larry Block
and for two superb editors
Lee Wright
and
Rich Barber
Notice to the Reader,
and His Attorney
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters in this book are fictional, and my creation. Some of these characters wear the names of famous real persons. I have not attempted to describe the true personal characteristics of these famous real persons, whom in most instances I do not know. In each case, I have put that famous name with what I take to be the public perception of that individual. (The equivalent, for instance, of suggesting that Jack Benny the person was really a tightwad, though in fact his public persona was that of a tightwad while he was very generous in private life.)
I have deliberately chosen not to follow the accepted pattern of changing the name and keeping the public personality, to have a baseball pitcher named Jim Beaver, for instance, who led the Mets to the World Series in 1969. I think that method is arch, crass and deplorable.
The famous names herein are just that: famous names. In looking behind them, the reader will not find the actual human beings who hold those names, nor satires on those human beings. The reader will find only what I believe is the generally held view of that famous name’s public self.
The same, of course, is true of the obscure characters within this book. As for myself, gentle reader, I am a figment of your imagination.
Books by Tom Diskant
The Pink Garage Gang (novel)
Coral Sea
El Alamein
Golf Courses of America
The Ins and Outs of Unemployment Insurance
Rumble Seats and Running Boards: The Wheels of Yesteryear
Hospitals Can Make You Sick
The Films of Jack Oakie
The Christmas Book
Tuesday, January 4th
“Never write a novel in the first person,” Jack told me.
“I know that,” I said. “And never write a novel in diary form either.”
“An you shoah got to keep out ub dialect.”
Oh, how we amused ourselves. Just a couple of old pals having lunch together, that’s all, good old roly-poly Jack Rosenfarb and the present speaker, Tom Diskant, chuckling over our sole Veronique and house chablis and letting the old real world just go hang. A comedy team at leisure, one skinny and the other stout, I Jack Spratt to his missus, Stan to his Ollie, André to his Wallace Shawn.
The reality, of course, was quite different. Good old Jack was an editor with the publishing firm of Craig, Harry & Bourke, the firm was picking up the check, and I was there, heart and sole in my mouth, to peddle a book.
“Well, the novel’s dead, anyway,” I said. “I wouldn’t come here to talk to you about a novel.”
“Bless you, Tom,” he said, his merry eyes crinkling. “You always know what to say.”
I hesitated. We both waited for me to tell him what book I wanted him to buy. This was the moment of truth — well, in a manner of speaking — and I hated and feared the upcoming instant of either acceptance or rejection. What if he said no? Time was pleasant now, in the predecision phase, wining and dining and making jokes. Outside, the world was black and white and wet with January slush under a sky piled with round gray clouds like full laundry bags, cars and buildings all were speckled with city mud on a Park Avenue so dark and desolate and grim one automatically looked for tumbrels, but here inside the Tre Mafiosi all was warm and good, gold and ivory and pale, pale green.
Oh, well; man does not live by lunch alone. “It’s a Christmas book,” I mumbled, and chugged chablis.
Jack’s merry twinkle faded. He looked puzzled, faintly troubled, as though afraid he was about to hear — or have to give — some bad news. “It’s a what?” he asked.
“Christmas,” I said. “A Christmas book.”
“Oh, Lord,” he said, laughing, but hollowly. “Haven’t we had enough of all that? We’re getting the damn tree out tomorrow, at long last. Twelfth Night. The fucking thing is naked, Tom, there’s green needles everywhere I turn, they’re in the fucking bed.”
“Christmas will return,” I said.
“Say not so.”
“But it will, Jack. Along about May, the folks at Craig are all going to start saying, ‘What’ve we got for Christmas? We need a Christmas book. A big glossy picture-full star-studded Christmas-gift coffee-table book, twenty-nine fifty until January first.’”
“Thirty-four fifty.”
“Whatever.” Talking, starting, under way, I was beginning to get my confidence back. “Look, Jack,” I said. “We have had Marc Chagall’s stained glass people flying upside down, we have had Dickens, we have had cats, we have had feminism through the ages, we have had gnomes, we have had cities photographed from the air, we have—”
“Please,” he said. “Not a history of American publishing, not while I’m eating.”
“I have the ultimate Christmas book,” I said modestly.
He thought. I watched him think, I watched him realize that yes, May would come, and with it the need to define the fall list, including one or more hot, pot-boiling Christmas books. Whether or not Christmas itself would ever return, or ever be asked back after its most recent behavior, May would certainly arrive, the need for a fall list was as inevitable as death and Garfield, and he who managed to think about tomorrow today would anon be a senior editor. “The ultimate Christmas book,” he murmured.
“Exactly.”
He shook himself, like a dog coming out of water or an elephant waking up. “It’s too late for marijuana,” he said, “and the world will never be hip enough for the Big Picture Book of Cocaine. Orphans will continue to be out until both Vietnam and Annie have receded a bit further into the mists of time. The big faggot book about the apostles all being gay would probably go well at the moment, but you’re the wrong guy to do it. So what’s your subject?”
“Christmas,” I said.
Tick. Tock. Tick. He blinked, very slowly. “You mean,” he said, “a coffee table book about Christmas. A Christmas book about Christmas.”
“Yes,” I said simply.
“Is this a wonderful idea,” he asked himself, “or is this a stupid idea?” Frowning at me, all attention, he said, “Show me this book.”
I pantomimed opening the huge book. “On this page,” I said, “we have a fourteenth century Madonna and Child. On the next page, we have a Christmas story by Judith Krantz, especially commissioned. On the next page, we have a nineteen-twenties comic Prohibition Christmas card. On the next page, we have an original reminiscence by Gore Vidal, Christmas in Italy, bedding the acolytes. On the next—”
“All right,” he said. “I see the book. You can get these people?”
“Not without Craig, Harry & Bourke letterhead,” I said.
“And money.” Jack waggled a playful finger at me, as though accusing me of being naughty. “You’re talking a very big advance here, buster.”