Ithaca (30 page)

After a couple of the local beers, a clean-tasting golden yellow lager, they go across to a party hosted by a festival sponsor at one of the piers. He gets a drink, is introduced to a festival volunteer, and is entirely sincere when he tells her he is enjoying himself. They talk about the day’s sessions and his event tomorrow. Once that’s done he will be free to take in some of the other events, and he is looking forward to catching Christopher Hitchens and Peter Carey later in the week.

As the evening progresses, he takes off his name tag – he has always had a problem with identifying himself publicly – gets himself a refill, and wanders off to look at a book display in a corner of the enclosure. A gang of publishing people or festival volunteers, he has no idea who they are, are chatting animatedly next to the display; one of the women, skeletally thin, bears a startling resemblance to the figure in Munch’s
The Scream
. He is beginning to move away to somewhere less noisy when a striking woman, almost as tall as he is, introduces herself as Betsy Molloy. He is nonplussed – how does she know who he is, he doesn’t have his name tag on – and he would have noticed if she had been at the morning’s session. The mystery is explained when she says she was working as a scout in London for an Australian publisher when the first
Angels
book was published and recommended it for publication. It’s the only book she has recommended that has enjoyed such a level of success, she says; he says that is true of him as well. There is a lot he likes about her; she is easy to talk to, very attractive to look at, honey-blonde hair, blue-grey eyes, and a voice that suggests more than a nodding acquaintance with whisky and cigarettes. At any other time he would have hoped their encounter would lead to something else, but he can let nothing interfere with the delicate rebuilding of his relationship with Julia. At the point at which the conversation looks as though it might take a turn towards something more intimate he excuses himself, pleading work waiting for him back in his hotel room, now that the UK has woken up.

He walks back along the waterfront; the piers, alive with readings, parties, and music, push long, illuminated fingers
into the dark waters. It’s a glimpse of the future, he thinks; everywhere cultural festivals are proliferating, and there will come a time when the integration of music, drama, food, festivity, and literature will become commonplace, just as it was for hundreds of years – the wheel turns and turns and turns, and comes to where it once was and turns again. He is feeling good about himself, he will not deny it; the encounter with Betsy has heightened his sense of well-being, all he needs now is Julia’s voice whispering in his ear. He will sleep well; it is his third day in Australia and with his brief nap in the afternoon the jet lag is beginning to lose its potency.

Later he will think about how some of the biggest events in his life have crept up on him unawares. This one begins in Hamilton, an unremarkable industrial town not far from Toronto. When he turns on his BlackBerry in his hotel room in Sydney he finds an e-mail from Rachel saying that while there is nothing to be concerned about, he should know that the Google Alert they have switched on for
Storm of Angels
has turned up an interesting observation about the book, posted by a Hamilton blogger called Night Owl. The blog, to which Rachel has provided a link, says that Night Owl has found a few similarities between the text of
Storm of Angels
and a 1930s fantasy series about angels by an Irish writer called Eileen Keane. “Watch this space,” the blogger writes, “I might be on to something big.” Zach isn’t too worried about the post, virtually every one of the world’s biggest
writers, including J.K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer, has been accused by less successful writers of plagiarism and the charges have usually been thrown out of court. This will probably fizzle out in the same way.

It does not. A day later Night Owl blogs that she has run
Storm of Angels
, and the books that she alleges it has been plagiarized from,
God’s Messengers
and two others by Eileen Keane, through a comparison software program, and claims that approximately a third of Seppi’s book is identical to the earlier works.

On the morning of the same day, in Toronto, Simon Prescott walks into his office at
Bibliomania
after a week’s vacation at a friend’s cottage. As he switches on his laptop he is feeling a little resentful that he has had to work hard during his holiday, cleaning and cooking and running errands, but he supposes that is the reality at the lower end of cottage life, when you don’t have a staff and a cottage of your own. It could have been worse, he thinks. I could have been stuck in Toronto all summer long with all those other poor saps who haven’t yet discovered or, worse, disdain the pleasure of driving for three hours, one way, in bumper-to-bumper traffic for the dubious rewards of being eaten alive by black flies and mosquitoes and eating indifferent home cooking. Nothing much seems to have taken place during his absence, a few new deals to be reported, and a couple of personnel changes at a West Coast publisher. As he scrolls down the
mail in his in-box his Google Alerts page points him to the blog about Seppi.

Bibliomania’s
coverage of the publication of
Storm of Angels
, the biggest event in Canadian publishing in 2010, has been non-stop, and Simon is determined to wring as much juice from the story as possible. He had even tried to elicit Megumi’s comments on the Seppi phenomenon by presenting her with a copy of
Storm of Angels:
she had declined the book, saying restaurant policy prevented her from accepting gifts from customers. He was crushed but not for long; he had decided that this was pretty much his last attempt to get her interested, and that if this gambit did not work he would stay away from her. He had thrown himself back into the magazine’s coverage of
Storm of Angels
. He had done phone interviews with Caryn and Giuseppe, done an e-mail interview with Zach, and provided daily updates in the online edition of
Bibliomania
. Gradually, though, there was not a whole lot left to say. Until now.

He sends Night Owl an e-mail saying he would like to cover her story. She replies immediately and by that afternoon he is on a GO train to Hamilton. From the station he takes a bus to the address that Night Owl has given him. It turns out to be a housing development of identical two-storey, red-brick row houses with minuscule, unkempt front yards. Night Owl turns out to be a woman in her thirties with long, dishevelled black hair. She is dressed in a flowing purple caftan. She is vague about what she does for a living but he gathers she is some sort of freelance computer programmer. The air in her living room smells musty and he can
see why: it appears as if the windows have not been opened for a long time.

He clears a pile of books off the only sofa and sits down as she takes a seat at her desk, pops open her laptop, and begins a monologue in a high-pitched voice about the outrage being perpetrated on the fans of Eileen Keane and Massimo Seppi. She tells Simon that she has been visited by angels since she was three, glowing naked men with tremendously developed pectorals. Her face is flushed and she sprays him with spit as she talks about her obsession (
sexual?
he types into his laptop). At the age of thirteen she discovered a long out-of-print book by Eileen Keane at a neighbourhood garage sale and was overjoyed at having found a soul sister. Her greatest regret was that Miss Keane had been dead twenty-two years so there was no chance of meeting her. But she tracked down every one of the nine books (three on non-angelic themes) Keane had written, devoured every word, and communed with the object of her adoration through dreams.

She takes him through the angels’ hierarchies, and he wishes he had brought a recording device along with him. He isn’t sure he is getting all these names down properly, who would have thought angels lived in such a complicated world! He makes a joke, and Night Owl, whose real name is Jennifer (she forbids him to use it, either while speaking to her or in his article) glares at him and says with the rage of the true jihadi that he must
never ever
make light of angels, that they are capable of wreaking the most horrific vengeance. He assumes a contrite expression and the interview goes on. She has read every book written about angels, fiction and non-fiction, and
he records this fact dutifully in his laptop, although part of his mind wonders if that is even possible, given her description of the wide world of angels – a world that stretches across religions, races, time. Surely she couldn’t have read everything there is about angels in Arabic or Urdu.

He snaps his wandering mind to heel. Night Owl is talking now about Seppi. When
Angels Rising
appeared she was overjoyed; here was the new master, the guru who would take her by the hand and help her negotiate the labyrinth of angels. Seppi’s reclusiveness was a problem; she had travelled to Toronto every time she learned of an author event, a reading, a bookstore signing, or a fantasy convocation that featured him, but the closest she had ever got was a brief hello when he signed her books after a reading. And then, as his fame grew,
Angels
events simply stopped featuring him, to her frustration. But as long as the books kept coming, at least that was some consolation. She was devastated when he died. But incredibly, there was talk of a new book, and finally she had experienced the thrill of holding
Storm of Angels
in her hands. One hundred and seventy pages into the novel, disillusionment began to set in. By page two hundred she was sure. After that it was simply a matter of feeding all the words of Seppi’s new novel and the novels of Keane into a comparison software program and her suspicions were confirmed. Of the 278,000 words of
Storm of Angels
97,742 were identical to various passages in Eileen Keane’s angel books.

As he read and compared the work of the two writers, Simon could see there was no mistake: entire paragraphs, in one case a chapter, had been lifted from the one and
transposed into the work of the other with only the names and locales changed. His mind was beginning to seize up with excitement.

For a moment he wondered if he should approach the
Globe and Mail
or
Maclean’s
with the story, perhaps even the
New York Times
, but out of loyalty to his own publication he decided to write the story for
Bibliomania
. He knew what people said about his paper – that it was read by all of six people including its staff of four, that its value if anyone ever wanted to buy it would barely max out the credit card of a grad student, that it got its facts wrong constantly. He would show them all what was what when he broke the literary story of the century. He would have to move fast, for all he knew the other papers were already on to the story; at least he had got to Night Owl first. He would phone Caryn Bianchi when he got back to the office, and also see if he could get a reaction from the publisher of Litmus.

“You’ve done an astonishing thing, Night Owl,” he says sincerely. “I’m putting you on the front page of my magazine.” He does not tell her that
Bibliomania
does not exist anymore in print form but he does not think that would matter to a blogger.

“Cool,” she says, “Eileen would be pleased.”

“Do you know if she has any family?” he asks, wondering if he should fly to Dublin, interview surviving family members. Not enough time, he thinks, even if he could scrape together the money for the airfare. He gets Night Owl to e-mail the text comparisons to him and takes a taxi to the train station
with his last remaining dollars. During the long ride back he prepares a rough draft of the story.

It’s past seven when he gets into the office, and it’s in darkness. He gets settled at his desk, phones Caryn, and gets voice mail. Now what? he thinks, as he puts the phone down without leaving a message. She could be out of town on holiday or merely be away from home for a few hours, what should he do? He decides to write the article, leaving openings for quotes from Caryn if he is able to get hold of her before the midnight deadline he has imposed upon himself. As he writes the story he thinks that Caryn’s quotes aren’t necessary for it to hold up, unless she is prepared to be absolutely honest about the deception.