I looked at Jill; she looked at me.
“This place is owned and operated by Quakers,” he said.
“Quakers?” I said.
“Quakers?” Jill said.
“Quakers,” Curt said. “You know — like the oats.”
“Nixon was a Quaker,” I said. “He drank.”
“Not here,” Curt said. “The hotel — which insists on calling itself a ‘mountain house,’ by the way, because the Quakers who originated the place didn’t want to own anything so decadent as a ‘hotel’ — has no bar, the rooms have no televisions, and there are no double beds. With that in mind, feel free to have as much fun as you want.” He checked his watch. “They’re serving supper now.”
“They do have food here, then?”
Curt grinned. “Sure, after you say grace,” he said, and went out.
I followed, and Jill hesitated at the door, locking up, then followed me.
“I’ll show you to the dining hall,” he said. Then he nodded to room sixty-two as we passed and said, “We’re neighbors, by the way. Feel free to knock for a cup of sugar anytime Kim and I aren’t in the room.”
Kim was Curt’s wife, a lovely woman in her late twenties, an actress.
“How did you do in the city?” Curt asked me.
“Well, I don’t have an agent anymore.”
“Jake Kreiger finally got to you, huh? What the hell, you’re due for a change.”
Jill said, “Maybe you could talk to your agent for Mal—”
I said, “Jill, please—”
Curt grinned. “My agent’s Jake Kreiger. Lack of tact doesn’t bother me much — I’m a native New Yorker.”
“Woops,” Jill said.
“Mal, forget all that career crap — the point of this place is getting away from it all,” Curt said, gesturing with both hands, walking fast. He seemed a little keyed up from all the responsibility. “Away from the modern world into something more peaceful.”
As he said this, three women in deerstalker caps scurried by, chattering like magpies.
“Right,” I said.
“Of course,” Curt said, as we followed him up the wide stairs to the dining hall, “there’s nothing like a little old-fashioned murder to liven things up a bit...”
3
The dining room was an expansive, pine-paneled affair with an open-beamed ceiling that went up a couple of stories, and would have seemed austere if not for the usual Mohonk soft yellow lighting from chandeliers. The scores of small tables with white cloths and hard wooden chairs were attended by young men, in gold jackets, and young women, in black dresses with white aprons, whose serving counters were built around support beams, coffee steaming, condiments awaiting someone’s need. It was like a Protestant church with food.
And the food was good, if surprisingly no-frills Midwestern in style. I was reminded of the many fine family-style restaurants at the Amana Colonies back in Iowa, where bowl upon bowl of basic but quite wonderful food is brought to your table till you say “when”; and those of us from farm stock take our good sweet time about saying “when,” too. Mohonk was the same dang deal — homemade bread and rolls, fruit, steaming parsley potatoes and mixed vegetables, and your choice of two meats, tonight fried chicken and roast beef, medium rare.
After two days in New York, lunching and supping with editors and my ertswhile agent at expensive hole-in-the-wall Manhattan eateries (I’ve always wanted to use that word in a sentence) serving haute cuisine and sushi and the like, my middlebrow, middle-west taste buds were delighted to greet something so plainly, so purely food.
The heavy-set gentleman sitting opposite me — a barrel-chested man with short gray hair, gray eyes, and a startling tan, rather spiffily dressed in a blue blazer and open-collared peach-color shirt with a single gold chain at his throat — seemed to agree with me. He, too, was chowing down.
We had already introduced ourselves — he was Jack Flint (and I was Mallory, remember?) and I said I was pleased to meet him, and I was: he was one of my favorite writers in the genre, one of the handful of modern “tough-guy” practitioners that I kept up with.
Flint was in his mid-forties — and was that rarity among mystery writers: he had at one time been a private detective in what we laughingly refer to as “real life.” His detective novels were private-eye procedurals, dealing with such real P.I. practices as skip tracing and process serving, and were written in a beautifully understated manner worthy of Joe Gores.
“How does this compare to California-style fare?” I asked, knowing Flint was from San Francisco.
The pleasant features of his rather full face all seemed to smile at once, particularly the gray eyes. “It beats sprouts,” he granted me.
His wife, Janis, sitting next to him, was an unassumingly attractive blonde, wearing a white, yellow, and orange print dress and no makeup. She seemed to be eating only salad and such.
“This menu does play hell with a vegetarian,” I said to her.
She smiled shyly and nodded.
Jill, next to me, said, “I’m a something of a vegetarian myself, only I allow myself chicken and fish.”
Also hot dogs, tacos, and pepperoni pizza, if truth be told, but why spoil the spell?
Janis Flint said, “I eat fish too.” And smiled. She seemed almost painfully shy, but if anybody could bring her out, it would be Jill.
In fact, Jill began trading information with Janis — who, it turned out, was a grade-school teacher and who was involved in educational television, which gave cable maven Jill something to latch onto — while I questioned Flint.
At first I unashamedly told him about my agent problems, and he recommended his own guy — “He’s British and long on tact” — and wrote the info down on the back of one of his cards, telling me to feel free to mention his name. He had made a friend forever.
Actually, I was a little embarrassed by his straightforward kindness and, so, we ate in silence for a while after; silence but for Jill talking with Janis, who had loosened up some. I told you so.
“Haven’t seen a book from you in a while,” I said to him, finally.
Flint took time out from the breast of chicken he was working on to shrug and reply. “I’d like to, but the money is so much better in Hollywood.”
“Why, uh, have you moved there...?”
He smiled. “No, but I’ve been writing for them. A couple of Mike Hammers and a Magnum, last season; a Riptide coming up. And the screenplay for Black Mask.”
Black Mask was Flint’s most famous novel — a historical fantasy about a murder committed at a dinner attended by all the famous pulp writers of the thirties; Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett team up to solve the crime, which turns out to have been committed by Carroll John Daly. A movie had been in the works for years; Spielberg himself had optioned it. Big bucks.
“Is that movie going to happen?”
He shrugged. “They’re in so-called preproduction now. Spielberg has one of his film-school cronies on it. The shooting script doesn’t have much to do with my book or my script.”
“That must be disappointing.”
“No. It’s just Hollywood.”
“Well, I sure hope your Case File novels get going again.”
He raised an eyebrow. “After what the critics did to the last one, how dare I?”
“Don’t be silly. The critics love your books.”
“Well, the last Case File didn’t even rate a New York Times review... and that little S.O.B. Rath savaged it. Library sales were pitiful. The paperback bailed us out a little.”