Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Amazing what was wrong with that car of ours,” Newt said to me. “Here I thought it rode pretty good.”

“Hell, I pulled in here wanting nothing in the world but a tank of gas. Maybe a quart of oil, and oil was the one thing in the world we didn’t need, or it looks like.”

“Should ride a whole lot better once he’s done with it.”

“Well I guess it should. Man’s building a whole new car around the cigarette lighter.”

“And the clock. Nothing wrong with that clock, outside of it loses a few minutes a day.”

“Lord,” Newt said, “don’t you be telling him about those few minutes the clock loses. We won’t never get out of here.”

That dude tookthe two hours we gave him and about twelve minutes besides, and then he came on over into the shade and presented us with his bill. It was all neatly itemized, everything listed in the right place and all of it added up, and the figure in the bottom right-hand corner with the circle around it read $277.45.

“That there is quite a number,” I said.

He put the big hat on the back of his head and ran his hand over his forehead. “Whole lot of work involved,” he said. “When you take into account all of those parts and all that labor.”

“Oh, that’s for certain,” Newt said. “And I can see they all been taken into account, all right.”

“That’s clear as black and white,” I said. “One thing, you couldn’t call this a nickel-and-dime figure.”

“That you couldn’t,” Newton said. “Well, sir, let me just go and get some money from the car. Vern?”

We walked over to the car together. “Funny how things work out,” Vern said. “I swear people get forced into things, I just swear to hell and gone they do. What did either of us want beside a tank of gas?”

“Just a tank of gas is all.”

“And here we are,” he said. He opened the door on the passenger side, waited for a pickup truck to pass going west to east, then popped the glove compartment. He took the .38 for himself and gave me the .32 revolver. “I’ll just settle up with our good buddy here,” he said, loud enough for the good buddy in question to hear him. “Meanwhile, why don’t you just step across the street and pick us up something to drink later on this evening? You never know, might turn out to be a long ways between liquor stores.”

I went and gave him a little punch in the upper arm. He laughed the way he does and I put the .32 in my pocket and trotted on across the road to the cafe.

The editor’s namewas Warren Jukes. He was a lean sharp-featured man with slender long-fingered hands and a narrow line for a mouth. His black hair was going attractively gray on top and at the temples. As usual, he wore a stylish three-piece suit. As usual, Trevathan felt logy and unkempt in comparison, like a bear having trouble shaking off the torpor of hibernation.

“Sit down, Jim,” Jukes said. “Always a pleasure. Don’t tell me you’re bringing in another manuscript already? It never ceases to amaze me the way you keep grinding them out. Where do you get your ideas, anyway? But I guess you’re tired of that question after all these years.”

He was indeed, and that was not the only thing of which James Trevathan was heartily tired. But all he said was, “No, Warren. I haven’t written another story.”

“Oh?”

“I wanted to talk with you about the last one.”

“But we talked about it yesterday,” Jukes said, puzzled. “Over the telephone. I said it was fine and I was happy to have it for the magazine. What’s the title, anyway? It was a play on words, but I can’t remember it offhand.”

“ ‘A Stitch in Crime,’ ” Trevathan said.

“Right, that’s it. Good title, good story, and all of it wrapped up in your solid professional prose. What’s the problem?”

“Money,” Trevathan said.

“A severe case of the shorts, huh?” The editor smiled. “Well, I’ll be putting a voucher through this afternoon. You’ll have the check early next week. I’m afraid that’s the best I can do, Jimbo. The corporate machinery can only go so fast.”

“It’s not the time,” Trevathan said. “It’s the amount. What are you paying for the story, Warren?”

“Why, the usual. How long was it? Three thousand words, wasn’t it?”

“Thirty-five hundred.”

“So what does that come to? Thirty-five hundred at a nickel a word is what? One seventy-five, right?”

“That’s right, yes.”

“So you’ll have a check in that amount early next week, as soon as possible, and if you want I’ll ring you when I have it in hand and you can come over and pick it up. Save waiting a couple of days for the neither-rain-nor-snow people to get it from my desk to yours.”

“It’s not enough.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“The price,” Trevathan said. He was having trouble with this conversation. He’d written a script for it in his mind on the way to Jukes’s office, and he’d been infinitely more articulate then than now. “I should get more money,” he managed. “A nickel a word is... Warren, that’s no money at all.”

“It’s what we pay, Jim. It’s what we’ve always paid.”

“Exactly.”

“So?”

“Do you know how long I’ve been writing for you people, Warren?”

“Quite a few years.”

“Twenty years, Warren.”

“Really?”

“I sold a story called ‘Hanging by a Thread’ to you twenty years ago last month. It ran twenty-two hundred words and you paid me a hundred and ten bucks for it.”

“Well, there you go,” Jukes said.

“I’ve been working twenty years, Warren, and I’m getting the same money now that I got then. Everything’s gone up except my income. When I wrote my first story for you I could take one of those nickels that a word of mine brought and buy a candy bar with it. Have you bought a candy bar recently, Warren?”

Jukes touched his belt buckle. “If I went and bought candy bars,” he said, “my clothes wouldn’t fit me.”

“Candy bars are forty cents. Some of them cost thirty-five. And I still get a nickel a word. But let’s forget candy bars.”

“Fine with me, Jim.”

“Let’s talk about the magazine. When you bought ‘Hanging by a Thread,’ what did the magazine sell for on the stands?”

“Thirty-five cents, I guess.”

“Wrong. Twenty-five. About six months later you went to thirty-five. Then you went to fifty, and after that sixty and then seventy-five. And what does the magazine sell for now?”

“A dollar a copy.”

“And you still pay your authors a nickel a word. That’s really wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, isn’t it, Warren?”

Jukes sighed heavily, propped his elbows on his desk top, tented his fingertips. “Jim,” he said, dropping his voice in pitch, “there are things you’re forgetting. The magazine’s no more profitable than it was twenty years ago. In fact we’re working closer now than we did then. Do you know anything about the price of paper? It makes candy look pretty stable by comparison. I could talk for hours on the subject of the price of paper. Not to mention all the other printing costs, and shipping costs and more other costs than I want to mention or you want to hear about. You look at that buck-a-copy price and you think we’re flying high, but it’s not like that at all. We were doing better way back then. Every single cost of ours has gone through the roof.”

“Except the basic one.”

“How’s that?”

“The price you pay for material. That’s what your readers are buying from you, you know. Stories. Plots and characters. Prose and dialogue. Words. And you pay the same for them as you did twenty years ago. It’s the only cost that’s stayed the same.”