The Great Pursuit (23 page)

'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.'

'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.