guard up. What did she know about the man anyway, other than the fact that he gave a helluva funeral oration? Faith had friends who’d gone into both sides of publishing. Springing for lunch, albeit not at the Four Seasons, for an unknown with merely the sketchi-est idea for a book would have been out of character for the agents Faith knew. They’d have told a neophyte to send a query letter.
“So, you’re writing your thesis about Nate—and
maybe a book?” He drank some coffee and his cup was immediately refilled.
“I came across him in some research I was doing on the radical movement and thought he’d be a compelling subject,” she lied.
Quinn nodded. “I’ve always thought he would be, and now more than ever, but if you’re seriously thinking of getting something published, you have to work quickly. He won’t be hot for long. The public has a very short memory.”
Faith nodded and asked, “At the service, you spoke about how long you’d known Nathan Fox and how you met. What was he like at that age?” Their food arrived. Quinn’s regular order turned out to be an overstuffed corned beef on rye with a side of latkes, each the size of home plate. Another waiter brought dishes of applesauce and sour cream for the potato pancakes. “Hold the coleslaw for a while,” he instructed. Faith inhaled the strong chicken flavor of her soup and cut into a matzo ball with her spoon.
Baseball metaphors abounded at places like the Stage and the dumpling was as large as what Mattingly hit out of the park, but as light as air.
After chewing contemplatively, Arthur Quinn answered her question. “Nate came to see me. No appointment. Just walked in off the street. Got my name from the phone book. As I said, he was a skinny kid, still in college—he stayed there a long time, the draft, you know—yet there was something about him. Something that made you look twice. Intense, sure. But funny, too. He had the first book right there with him—
wordy, but a catchy title, I told him. After he told me what a parasite I was, we shook hands and had a deal.”
“It was a best-seller, right?”
“Mega. There wasn’t a student in the country who didn’t sleep with it under his or her pillow, and the parents all bought it to see what their kids were up to. We made a fortune.”
Faith was curious. “What did Nate do with his money? He wasn’t underground then.”
“No, that came later. Nate was a good Jewish boy, and good Jewish boys take care of their parents. He paid off the mortgage on their house and put most of the rest in mutual funds for them, that sort of thing—
bitching and moaning about investing in a decadent system, but they couldn’t keep it all in a sock. He ra- tionalized that he was getting back what was owed them. Both his parents sweated at low-level jobs to ed-ucate him. He was an only child and he was pretty cut up when they died not too long after he’d done all this.
Then he gave everything to an aunt, Marsha and Irwin’s mother. The Fox family was very religious. Or- thodox, kept kosher. The whole bit. But Nate was a rebel from the start. Wouldn’t be bar-mitzvahed. Told them he couldn’t do something he didn’t believe in, and they respected that, although I know they were upset. His grandfather had written some kind of pamphlet protesting the pogroms and got out of Russia just as the Cossacks were about to bash in his door—and head. Nate grew up on this stuff and identified with him, even though he died before Nate was born. Nate was named for him.”
Faith had brought along a little notebook and was scribbling away. Her sandwich arrived. It could have fed an entire Russian village.
“He sounds like a romantic,” she said.
“He
In the beginning. And”—Quinn actually winked—“he certainly was one as far as women were concerned.”
“I’ve heard that,” Faith said, taking a bite of the whitefish salad. It was smoky, but not too smoky. Delicious.
“You have no idea. The guy was golden. He’d leave one of those demonstrations with his pockets stuffed with women’s phone numbers. He was like a rock star.
Then the asshole had to go and shoot himself in the foot.”
And you, Faith surmised. Out loud, she said, “The holdup?”
“It wasn’t much of a holdup. You understand this was the thing to do in those days—redistribution of the wealth, money to fund the revolution, that kind of thing. Maybe Nate was getting bored with his uptown dinner parties. Maybe he wanted to make a big splash.”
“Or maybe he really believed in what he was doing?” Faith suggested. She was supposed to be a student, after all. An idealistic one.
The agent laughed. “There’s always that possibility.
In a weird way, I think he thought he could pull the whole thing off. That he was above the law. He’d still be able to live the way he had been living. He would simply add ‘knocking off a bank’ to his list of accomplishments.”
He turned to his pancakes. The sandwich had vanished. How did he stay so trim? Hours at the gym?
Tapeworm?
“Anyway, he botched it. The other two guys surren-dered to the authorities, did some time, and live in Jersey now with mortgages and lawns like the rest of the world there. Fox had to be dramatic and disappear. Not that it didn’t help sales, at least for a while. He wrote
his biggest book—you know,
Faith had forgotten that Fox had had accomplices.
Lorraine had mentioned the driver of the getaway car, too. Were they somehow involved in all this, bearing a grudge against him, perhaps knowing about the tell-all book? But from the sound of it, at least these two were grandfathers growing tomatoes. She filed them away for future thought. She wanted to get Quinn to talk about Lorraine.
“Mr. Quinn—”
“Please, call me Arthur. I’m not that ancient.”
“Arthur,” so be it, “was Nathan Fox ever married?”
“Not that I know of—and I’d know. For one thing, a wife would have wanted to get her hands on the royalties, and no one ever did. There’s poor Lorraine, but they were never married. Too bourgeois.”
“Who was she? It could be an interesting chapter.” Faith prodded.
“Let’s say interesting, but not favorable to Nate. I saw Lorraine at his service, which reminds me that I was supposed to call her. She was a cute thing years ago. Great smile, lots of energy. Didn’t age well. Fox used her like a box of Kleenex.”
Faith hoped she could come up with less tired similes, then remembered she wasn’t actually writing a book.
“Why do you say that?”
He sighed. “Lorraine was the eternal coffee maker.
She’d do anything for Nate. Went into hiding with him and must have supported him. I always suspected she arranged for the manuscripts and occasional letters to get mailed to South America somehow. I mean, Fox couldn’t exactly walk into the post office when his pic-207
ture was on the wall. She gave up her whole life for him and he didn’t give a shit about her. Thought of her as something he was due, the handmaiden to the great man. She had a kid, not Fox’s, though. I remember going to his place once, and she was living there with the baby. First thing Nate said when I came in was that the brat—I think his name was Harold, something like that—wasn’t his. Lorraine was all teary and thankful that Fox was letting them be with him. She didn’t realize that if he could buy a machine to cook, clean, wash, and occasionally fuck him, she’d
