The Great Pursuit

The next morning they moved on again, following back roads and driving slowly and always south. And always Piper's mind nagged away at the problem of how to resume his interrupted career.

In Scranton, where Baby traded the estate for a new Ford, Piper took the opportunity to buy two new ledgers, a bottle of Higgins Ink and an Esterbrook pen.

'If I can't do anything else I can at least keep a diary,' he explained to Baby.

'A diary? You don't even look at the landscape and we eat in McDonalds so what's to put in a diary?'

'I was thinking of writing it retrospectively. As a form of vindication. I would '

'Vindication? And how can you write a diary retrospectively?'

'Well I'd start with how I was approached by Frensic to come to the States and then work my way forward day by day with the voyage across and everything. That way it would look authentic.'

Baby slowed the car and pulled into a rest area. 'Let's just get this straight. You write the diary backwards...'

'Yes, I think it was April the 10th Frensic sent me the telegram...'

'Go on. You start 10 April and then what?'

'Well then I'd write how I didn't want to do it and how they persuaded me and promised to get Search published and everything.'

'And where would you finish?'

'Finish?' said Piper. 'I wasn't thinking of finishing. I'd just go on and...'

'So what about the fire and all?' said Baby.

'Well I would put that in too. I'd have to.'

'And how it started by accident, I suppose?'

'Well, no I wouldn't say that. I mean it didn't did it?'

Baby looked at him and shook her head. 'So you'd put in how I started it and sent the cruiser out to blow up Hutchmeyer and the Futtle? Is that it?'

'I suppose so,' said Piper. 'I mean that's what did happen and...'

'And that's what you call vindication. Well you can forget it. No way. You want to vindicate yourself that's fine with me but you don't implicate me at the same time. Dual destiny I said and dual destiny I meant.'

'It's all very well for you to talk,' said Piper morosely, 'you're not lumbered with the reputation of having written that filthy novel and I am...'

'I'm just lumbered with a genius is all,' said Baby and started the car again. Piper sat slumped in his seat and sulked.

'The only thing I know how to do is write,' he grumbled, 'and you won't let me.'

'I didn't say that,' said Baby, 'I just said no retrospective diaries. Dead men tell no tales. Not in diaries they don't and anyhow I don't see why you feel so strongly about Pause. I thought it was a great book.'

'You would,' said Piper.

'The thing that really has me puzzled is who did write it. I mean they had to have some real good reason for staying under cover.'

'You've only got to read the beastly book to see that,' said Piper. 'All that sex for one thing. And now everyone's going to think I did it.'

'And if you had written the book you would have cut out all the sex?' said Baby.

'Of course. That would be the first thing and then...'

'Without the sex the book wouldn't have sold. That much I do know about the book trade.'

'So much the better,' said Piper. 'It debases human values. That is what that book does.'

'In that case you should rewrite it the way you think it ought to have been written...' and amazed at this sudden inspiration she lapsed into thoughtful silence.

Twenty miles farther on they entered a small town. Baby parked the car and went into a supermarket. When she returned she was holding a copy of Pause O Men for the Virgin.

'They're selling like wild-fire,' she said and handed him the book.

Piper looked at his photograph on the back cover. It had been taken in those halcyon days in London when he had been in love with Sonia and the inane face that smiled up at him seemed to be that of a stranger. 'What am I supposed to do with this?' he asked. Baby smiled.

'Write it.'

'Write it?' said Piper. 'But it's already been '

'Not the way you would have written it, and you're the author.'

'I'm bloody well not.'

'Honey, somewhere out there in the great wide world there is a man who wrote that book. Now he knows it, and Frensic knows it and that Futtle bitch knows it and you and I know it. That's the lot. Hutch doesn't.'

'Thank God,' said Piper.

'Right. And if that's the way you feel, just imagine the way Frensic & Futtle must be feeling now. Two million Hutch paid for that novel. That's a lot of money.'

'It's a ludicrous sum,' said Piper. 'Did you know that Conrad only got '

'No and I'm not interested. Right now what interests me is what happens when you rewrite this novel in your own beautiful handwriting and Frensic gets the manuscript.'

'Frensic gets...' Piper began but Baby silenced him.

'Your manuscript,' she said, 'from beyond the grave.'

'My manuscript from beyond the grave? He'll do his nut.'

'Right first time, and we follow that up with a demand for the advance and full royalties,' said Baby.

'Well, then he'll know I'm still alive,' Piper protested. 'He'll go straight to the police and...'

'He does that he's going to have a lot of explaining to do to Hutch and everyone. Hutch will set his legal hound-dogs on him. Yes sir, we've got Messrs Frensic & Futtle right where we want them.'

'You are mad,' said Piper, 'stark staring mad. If you seriously think I'm going to rewrite this awful...'

'You were the one who wanted to retrieve your reputation,' said Baby as they drove out of town. 'And this is the only way you can.'

'I wish I could see how.'

'I'll show you,' said Baby. 'Leave it to momma.'

That evening in another motel room Piper opened his ledger, arranged his pen and ink as methodically as they had once been arranged in the Gleneagle Guest House and with a copy of Pause propped up in front of him began to write. At the top of the page he wrote 'Chapter One', and underneath, 'The house stood on a knoll. Surrounded by three elms, a beech and a deodar whose horizontal branches gave it the air...'

Behind him Baby relaxed on a bed with a contented smile. 'Don't make too many alterations this draft,' she said. 'We've got to make it look really authentic.'

Piper stopped writing. 'I thought the whole point of the exercise was to retrieve my lost reputation by rewriting the thing...'

'You can do that with the second draft,' said Baby. 'This one is to light a fire under Frensic & Futtle. So stay with the text.'

Piper picked up his pen again and stayed with the text. He made several alterations per page and then crossed them out and added the originals from the book. Occasionally Baby got up and looked over his shoulder and was satisfied.

'This is really going to blow Frensic's mind,' she said but Piper hardly heard her. He had resumed his old existence and with it his identity. And so he wrote on obsessively, lost once more in a world of someone else's imagining and as he wrote he foresaw the alterations he would make in the second draft, the draft that would save his reputation. He was still copying at midnight when Baby had gone to bed. Finally at one, tired but vaguely satisfied, Piper brushed his teeth and climbed into bed too. In the morning he would start again.

But in the morning they were on the road again and it was not until late afternoon that Baby pulled into a Howard Johnson's in Beanville, South Carolina, and Piper was able to start work again.

While Piper started his life again as a peripatetic and derivative novelist Sonia Futtle mourned his passing with a passion that did her credit and disconcerted Hutchmeyer.

'What do you mean she won't attend the funeral?' he yelled at MacMordie when he was told that Miss Futtle sent her regrets but was not prepared to take part in a farce simply to promote the sales of Pause.

'She says without bodies in the coffins...' MacMordie began before being silenced by an apoplectic Hutchmeyer. 'Where the fuck does she think I'm going to get the bodies from? The cops can't get them. The insurance investigators can't get them. The fucking coastguard divers can't get them. And I'm supposed to go find the things? By this time they're way out in the Atlantic some place or the sharks have got them.'