“He lost his self-respect,” I said, “getting involved in this scam. Didn’t you know that would happen?”
She laughed. Bitter little laugh. “He didn’t have any self-respect left. Not until he finished writing Hammett’s book….”
“And reminded himself how good he was.”
She laughed again. Sardonic little laugh. “That’s right. The Secret Emperor gave him his self-respect back….”
“And took it away, at the same time.”
Mae sighed. “I loved him, Mal. I didn’t mean for it to go this way.”
“What way?”
“For him to… drink himself to death.”
“Oh. You mean get drunk and drown himself in the tub. Accidentally.”
“Or whatever. It was suicide, in a way.”
“You were convinced it was murder, yesterday.”
“I… I don’t think it was. I’ve been thinking. Having second thoughts. I just don’t think those wet towels mean anything. We were clutching at straws….”
“Or damp towels.”
Firmly, resolutely, she said, “I think we were wrong, Mal. I think Roscoe just… died. Hard to accept, I know. Probably hard for you to accept your hero being involved in a… scam, as you call this. But he was. He was. Life doesn’t work out like it does in books… does it, Mal?”
“Rarely,” I said.
“Do you think less of Roscoe, for what he did?”
“No.”
“Do you… think less of me?”
“Mae,” I said, “I hardly think of you at all.”
Tears ran down her cheeks. She bit her lip and turned and went into the bathroom and sat on the stool and wept.
Suddenly Gorman’s hand was on my shoulder. The last time he did that, I punched him in the stomach.
This time I just turned and looked into his grinning face; it gave me a much closer look at that food-flecked goatee and those yellow teeth than I ever hoped to have. The beady buglike eyes were moving back and forth. He was smiling. He’d had a revelation.
“How’d you like a piece of the action?” he said.
I smiled and shook my head. Unbelievable.
“How ’bout some action?” he went on. “Then you can keep your idol’s name clean and make a few bucks on the deal, to boot. Why not. Let’s say ten grand now, and another ten six months after the book’s published-assuming everything’s goin’ as planned.”
“Is this hypothetical?”
“Yeah, sure. You want ten hypothetical grand or not?”
I looked at his nervous, grinning countenance, and then at Mae, sitting on the stool in the bathroom looking up now, tear-streaked face otherwise blank, but the eyes were appraising me. Kathy was standing by the door; frozen.
“I’ll think about it,” I said.
“Good,” Gorman said.
“Good,” Mae said, smiling bravely.
“The awards ceremony is at two,” I said to her. “Don’t forget.”
She nodded. “I won’t forget.”
I turned back to Gorman. “You going to be there?”
“Sure,” he said. “I’m a speaker.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah. PWA asked me to say a few words about this important Hammett book we discovered.” And he smiled at me buddy-buddy and put his hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t do that,” I said. “Even if I take your ten grand, don’t do that.”
His smile disappeared and he backed off. “You got no soul, Mallory. No heart and soul.”
“I had ’em removed in childhood,” I said, “along with my scruples.”
From the bathroom, Mae in a monotone said, “Gat Garson. Chapter Four, Trouble Wears a Skirt.”
“Correct, Mae,” I nodded to her, and took Kathy by the arm and got the hell out of there.
17
We went to the Artistic Cafe for lunch, again, and Kathy questioned me about The Secret Emperor. I told her the novel’s plot was pretty much as indicated in the 5000-word fragment Hammett had left of it.
The action begins in San Francisco but quickly moves to Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. Hammett’s nameless detective, the Continental Op, is sent east to trace a stolen document, a seemingly nondescript assignment. In the course of the case he soon becomes involved with the exotic daughter of millionaire Sheth Gutman. Gutman, frustrated that he can never hope to run for the presidency because he’s a Jew, plans to become “secret emperor of the United States,” by getting his own man, a crooked senator, elected president. The Op is drawn into a labyrinth of corruption on high levels-in political, military and industrial circles. The finale, a paraphrase of a Hammett short story, “The Gutting of Couffignal,” and a foreshadowing of the conclusion of The Maltese Falcon, has the Op rejecting the advances of Gutman’s daughter, who has betrayed him, and turning her over to Secret Service agents.
“In short,” I told her over cheeseburgers, “it’s the best novel Hammett never wrote.”
“Was the Gutman name in Hammett’s fragment?” she asked. “Or was that an embellishment of Roscoe Kane’s?” Gutman, of course, was also the name of the famous, villainous “fat man” of The Maltese Falcon.
“That was in Hammett’s fragment,” I said. “I’ve never read the fragment, incidentally, but it’s been summarized in articles and in various Hammett biographies-including Cynthia Crystal’s. As I recall, the detective hero of Hammett’s version wasn’t the Op, though. That, apparently, was a Roscoe Kane embellishment.”
“I wonder why he did that?”
I swallowed a bite of cheeseburger, sipped some Coke through a straw and answered. “Actually, it’s one of the tip-offs that the book’s a fake. Hammett had begun the book with a different protagonist, a hero who doesn’t appear in any of his other stories or novels. But since the fragment was only five thousand words, there wasn’t much for another writer to pick up on and run with, where the character was concerned. Better to treat the fragment as a false start, and rework it, substituting an established Hammett hero.”
She nodded, seeing it. “The Op’s the hero of dozens of short stories and several novels. That gave Kane a lot to draw from. Gave him a frame of reference.”
“Right. And don’t forget, Roscoe was a real Hammett fancier. He was intimate with the Op tales. Knew ’em by heart.”
“Why were you so suspicious, Mal, even before you read the manuscript?”
“Well, Gorman’s involvement, on principle. But keep in mind that Gorman’s a publisher himself-as if I had to remind you; he’ll plead that he felt Mystery House was too small to properly publish the Hammett book, hence the need to sell it off to a major publisher. Which is twaddle. A book like that would’ve made Mystery House a major publisher. Gorman was after a quick financial kill. Also, the fact that the Hammett estate is getting ‘a piece of the action,’ as Gorman puts it, made me wary.”
“Surely you don’t mean to imply the estate’s involved in the hoax….”
“No! They’re its victims, like everybody else. But Gorman had hold of an unpublished manuscript by a dead author, for which he owned certain publishing rights outright. Now, if my rudimentary understanding of copyright is correct, Gorman could’ve copyrighted that work himself and left the Hammett estate out in the cold.”
“What’s the point of Gregg giving the estate a share when he could’ve had it all for himself?”
“That is the point. The estate getting a share in the proceeds legitimizes the book-and is an incentive for the estate to not question the ‘experts’ whose opinions authenticated the work-which is by any standards a brilliant forgery.”
“But when you read it, you saw right through it.”
“Sure.”
“What element of the plot was it that you recognized?”
“Huh?”
“You told Mae and Gorman you recognized elements from that unpublished novel of Kane’s.”
“Oh, that. That was a lie.”
She dropped her sandwich and her jaw. “A lie?”
“Sure. Roscoe never gave me an unpublished book of his. He had a rule: if it’s bad, burn it. He didn’t leave any false starts or unsuccessful manuscripts behind, believe me.”