“I want you to do me a favor,” he said, turning to face the wall. “I want you to open the box and see what’s inside it. If there’s a doll inside, I don’t want to know. No dolls.”
Kossweiller carefully opened the box, peered in. There was indeed a doll inside, a cloth doll, handmade. It had button eyes, its lips drawn with Magic Marker. Its hair was made of yellow yarn. Its fingers were not fully articulated, simply indicated by sewn strands of black thread. The words “Love from B” were written on a card pinned to its chest.
“Is there a doll?” asked Cinchy.
“Um,” said Kossweiller.
“Don’t tell me,” said Cinchy. “If there’s a doll, I don’t want to know.” He waited for a long moment. “Is there a doll?” he finally asked again.
“No?” said Kossweiller, closing the box.
“Good,” said Cinchy. He turned around, very slowly. “Right answer. No dolls. Never any dolls. Take that empty box away and burn it, Karsewelder.”
“I have something I need to say,” said Kossweiller.
“Not yet,” said Cinchy, looking nervously at the box. “Take the box and hold it outside the door.”
Kossweiller went to the doorway, stood with his hand outside of it.
“Farther,” said Cinchy, “farther,” until Kossweiller had only his face inside Cinchy’s office. “Good,” Cinchy finally said. “What is it?”
“I’m quitting,” said Kossweiller.
“Quitting?” said Cinchy. “You can’t quit.”
“I’m not happy.”
“What’s happy?” said Cinchy. “You’re not allowed to quit. You’re running one of the most popular mystery series going and you want to quit? You’re not trying to take Verenson to another house, are you?”
“I want to do literary books,” said Kossweiller. “En Masse. I want to do En Masse.”
“No literary books,” said Cinchy. “No en fucking masse. We know how you get once you start doing literary books, don’t we? And no quitting. You’re not a quitter, Koss. I won’t let you quit.”
“But—”
Cinchy raised his hand. “I don’t want to hear it, Koss. You’ll work for me or you won’t work. And no literature. It’s bad for you. It rots the teeth and then you don’t eat the rest of your meal.”
Kossweiller stared at him.
“No arguments,” said Cinchy. “I may be the boss of the people but I’m still the boss.”
Not knowing what else to do, Kossweiller brought the box back into the room. Cinchy, he saw, immediately began to sweat.
“What are you doing, Koss?” he said.
“I quit,” said Kossweiller.
“You can’t quit,” said Cinchy. “And don’t threaten me with that empty box.”
Kossweiller began to open the box, giving Cinchy a glimpse of the doll’s hand. Cinchy let out a terrified shout, his features shivering like water, and then crouched behind the desk. It was a horrible thing to watch. Kossweiller quickly tucked the hand away.
“Is it gone?” Cinchy asked.
“It’s gone,” said Kossweiller.
“Is it outside?”
Kossweiller turned around and put the box outside the door. “It’s outside,” he said.
“All right,” said Cinchy. He stood up, smoothing his shirt with his hands. “I’ll let you go. You can find yourself another house and I won’t do anything to interfere. But first you have to do two things for me, Koss. Otherwise I’ll ruin you. You’ll never work in publishing again.”
“What things?”
“First, take that box out and burn it.”
“All right,” said Kossweiller.
“Second,” said Cinchy — and here he seemed to regain his usual bearings—“ninety over ninety. Do that and you’re free to go.”
All right, he had said, ninety over ninety. How bad could it be? He would steel himself and do it, prepared for anything to happen. If he was steeled, how bad could it be?
But it quickly became clear how bad it could be. Kossweiller’s ninety over ninety was to put together an anthology of work by ninety people over the age of ninety, and to continue with the Verenson project and other things in the meantime. Literary quality didn’t matter, Cinchy said. All that mattered is that the contributors were all over ninety and that there were ninety of them. “And I want proof,” said Cinchy. “Driver’s licenses, nursing-home records, birth certificates.”
“This is crazy,” said Kossweiller.
“It’s your price,” said Cinchy. “Your ninety over ninety, if you ever want to work in publishing again.”
So he set out. He started with assisted-living facilities, found very few people over ninety, then went to nursing homes and hospices. When he was allowed in, he occasionally found someone ninety or above who was still, loosely speaking, coherent and who could give him something: a dirty joke, a recipe, a story from an episode of their life. Some of them even had poems. The poems were awful, things that made him wince, but what did it matter, what did he care? It was the price of his freedom.
By the time he finished with the nursing homes close to Manhattan, more than a month had passed. He had only twenty-three entries, not a literary moment among them. He scanned newspapers for notices of birthdays, spent a week in Boston, trying nursing homes there, gained a few more names.
Back in New York, people in the office, realizing he was on his way out, stopped talking to him. Even Anders offered him only a scattered and occasional word. H. H. refused to have anything to do with him face-to-face, sending him designs and marketing information for the next Verenson book by interoffice courier. He responded in kind. Only Cinchy went out of his way to talk to him, needling him about the progress of his ninety over ninety.
He went door-to-door in the older neighborhoods. Out of the smattering of the eligible geezers he finally met, only a small fraction could do him any good. He took sick leave and flew to the retirement communities in Florida, was dismayed to find that while nearly everyone was over sixty, very few were over ninety. Here and there, he gained a few more names. One woman actually died while she was talking to him, suddenly fluttering her eyes and stopping speaking. He wrote the rest of her entry — on a rural Nebraskan childhood — himself, culling heavily from Willa Cather.
Four months in, he was nearing seventy-five entries. He was exhausted, ready to be through with his ninety over ninety and free of Cinchy for good. He was going door-to-door in an old neighborhood in Queens, no longer looking for nonagenarians so much as trying to buy driver’s licenses of deceased relatives who, if they had still been alive, would have been over ninety. It had been a good evening; he managed to get two for around twenty dollars each. He would photocopy them and then write up an entry or two himself on their behalf, if he could bear it.
He knocked on a door and when it opened was surprised to see Bubber. The man was looking as run-down as ever, still fat, still pale. His hair, greased back earlier in the day, was still plastered down in places, beginning to sprout up in others. He was wearing a worn plaid robe over an undershirt and a paint-spattered set of trousers, a pair of filthy terry-cloth slippers.
“Kossweiller,” he said. “I wondered when I’d see you again. Won’t you come in?”
He turned around and shuffled back into the house, leaving the door ajar, as if there were no question but that Kossweiller would accept.
Kossweiller followed him through his living room and to a rickety table in the kitchen. They both sat down. Bubber pushed the cup in front of him across to Kossweiller, filled it with tea, reached another cup off the counter beside for himself.
“You’re still with Darbo?” asked Bubber.