The Great Pursuit

'But I thought you said they were weighted down like with concrete,' said MacMordie, 'and if they are...'

'Never mind what I said, MacMordie. What I'm saying now is we've got to think positive about Baby and Piper.'

'Isn't that a bit difficult? Them being dead and missing and all. I mean...'

'And I mean we've got a promotional set-up here that can put Pause right up the charts.'

'The computer says sales are good already.'

'Good? Good's not good enough. They've got to be terrific. Now the way I see it we've got an opportunity for building this Piper guy up with a reputation like...Who was that bastard got himself knocked off in a car smash?'

'Well there've been so many it's a little difficult to...'

'In Hollywood. Famous guy.'

'James Dean,' said MacMordie.

'Not him. A writer. Wrote a great book about insects.'

'Insects?' said MacMordie. 'You mean like ants. I read a great book about ants once...'

'Not ants for Chrissake. Things with long legs like grasshoppers. Eat every goddam thing for miles.'

'Oh, locusts. The Day of The Locust. A great movie. They had this one scene where there's a guy jumping up and down on this little kid and '

'I don't want to know about the movie, MacMordie. Who wrote the book?'

'West,' said MacMordie, 'Nathanel West. Only his real name was Weinstein.'

'So who cares what his real name was? Nobody's ever heard of him and he gets himself killed in a pile-up and suddenly he's famous. With Piper we've got it even better. I mean we've got mystery. Maybe mobsters. House burning, boats exploding, the guy's in love with old women and suddenly it's all happening to him.'

'Past tense,' said MacMordie.

'Damn right, and that's what I want on him. His past. A full rundown on him, where he lived, what he did, the women he loved...'

'Like Miss Futtle?' said MacMordie tactlessly.

'No,' yelled Hutchmeyer, 'not like Miss Futtle. She won't even come to the poor guy's funeral. Other women. With what he put in that book there've got to be other women.'

'With what he put in that book they'll have maybe died by now. I mean the heroine was eighty and he was seventeen. This Piper was twenty-eight, thirty so it's got to have been eleven years ago which would put her up in the nineties and around that age they tend to forget things.'

'Jesus, do I have to tell you everything? Fabricate, MacMordie, fabricate. Call London and speak to Frensic and get the press cuttings. There's bound to be something there we can use.'

MacMordie left the room and put through the call to London. He returned twenty minutes later with the news that Frensic was being uncooperative.

'He says he doesn't know anything,' he told a glowering Hutchmeyer. 'Seems this Piper just sent in the book, Frensic read it, sent it to Corkadales, they liked it and bought and that's about the sum total. No background. Nothing.'

'There's got to be something. He was born some place, wasn't he? And his mother...'

'No relatives. Parents dead in a car smash. I mean it's like he never had an existence.'

'Shit,' said Hutchmeyer.

Which was more or less the word that sprang to Frensic's mind as he put the phone down after MacMordie's call. It was bad enough losing an author who hadn't written a book without having demands for background material on his life. The next thing would be the press, some damned woman reporter hot on the trail of Piper's tragic childhood. Frensic went into Sonia's office and hunted through the filing cabinet for Piper's correspondence. It was, as he expected, voluminous. Frensic took the file back to his desk and sat there wondering what to do with the thing. His first inclination to burn it was dissipated by the realization that if Piper had written scores of letters to him from almost as many different boarding-houses over the years, he had replied as often. The copies of Frensic's replies were there in the file. The originals were presumably still in safe keeping somewhere. With an aunt? Or some ghastly boarding-house keeper? Frensic sat and sweated. He had told MacMordie that Piper had no relatives, but what if it turned out that he had an entire lineage of avaricious aunts, uncles and cousins anxious to cash in on royalties? And what about a will? Knowing Piper as well as he did, Frensic thought it unlikely he had made one. In which case the matter of his legacy might well end up in the courts and then...Frensic foresaw appalling consequences. On the one hand the anonymous author demanding his advance, and on the other...And in the middle the firm of Frensic & Futtle being dragged through the mud, exposed as the perpetrators of fraud, sued by Hutchmeyer, sued by Piper's relatives, forced to pay enormous damages and vast legal costs and finally bankrupted. And all because some demented client of Cadwalladine had insisted on preserving his anonymity.

Having reached this ghastly conclusion Frensic took the file back to the cabinet, re-labelled it Mr Smith as a mild precaution against intruding eyes and tried to think of some defence. The only one seemed to be that he had merely acted on the instructions of Mr Cadwalladine and since Cadwalladine & Dimkins were eminently respectable solicitors they would be as anxious to avoid a legal scandal as he was. And so presumably would the genuine author. It was small consolation. Let Hutchmeyer get a whiff of the impersonation and all hell would be let loose. And finally there was Sonia, who, if her attitude on the phone had been anything to go by, was in a highly emotional state and likely to say something rash. Frensic reached for the phone and dialled International to put through a call to the Gramercy Park Hotel. It was time Sonia Futtle came back to England. When he got through it was to learn that Miss Futtle had already left, and should, according to the desk clerk, be in mid-Atlantic.

'"Is" and "above",' corrected Frensic before realizing that there was something to be said for American usage.

That afternoon Sonia landed at Heathrow and took a taxi straight to Lanyard Lane. She found Frensic in a mood of apparently deep mourning.

'I blame myself,' he said, forestalling her lament, 'I should never have allowed poor Piper to have jeopardized his career by going over in the first place. Our only consolation must be that his name as a novelist has been made. It is doubtful if he would ever have written a better book had he lived.'

'But he didn't write this one,' said Sonia.

Frensic nodded. 'I know. I know,' he murmured, 'but at least it established his reputation. He would have appreciated the irony. He was a great admirer of Thomas Mann you know. Our best memorial to him must be silence.'

Having thus pre-empted Sonia's recriminations Frensic allowed her to work off her feelings by telling the story of the night of the tragedy and Hutchmeyer's subsequent reaction. At the end he was none the wiser.

'It all seems most peculiar,' he said when she had finished. 'One can only suppose that whoever did it made a terrible mistake and got the wrong person. Now if Hutchmeyer had been murdered...'

'I would have been murdered too,' said Sonia through her tears.

'We must be grateful for small mercies,' said Frensic.

Next morning Sonia Futtle resumed her duties in the office. A fresh batch of animal stories had come in during her absence and while Frensic congratulated himself on his tactics and sat at his desk silently praying that there would be no further repercussions Sonia busied herself with Bernie the Beaver. It needed a bit of rewriting but the story had promise.