Paperback Jack, page 4
“Tharp’s right. You can’t write women.”
A female voice interrupted “White Christmas” to announce the store was closing in fifteen minutes. The buzzing on the main floor increased. The counterman rang open the cash register and began counting bills.
“What will you do now?” Ellen asked.
“I’m doing it: writing about purse-snatchings and weddings. Hoping someday they’ll coincide. A man needs ambition of some kind.”
“I think you should take your agent’s advice and write novels.”
“Paperback novels.” He already regretted having told her his professional history. “The difference between them and Muff Pistols wouldn’t buy you a seat on a streetcar.”
“Life’s what you make it, my father always said.”
“What’s he do, run General Motors?”
“He was a stevedore, until he blew out an artery at forty, unloading crates of machine parts from Cleveland. He had me primed to be the first female governor of New York. He didn’t live to see me cutting tin at Lockheed.”
“Don’t knock defense work. I keep picturing some schnook of a Jap mechanic trying to turn two wrecked Zeroes into one in flying condition, ducking for cover every time a fresh wave of tin flew over from the West.” He glanced at the counterman, who was showing inordinate interest in the watch on his wrist. “What about your mother?”
“Slinging hash at Sing Sing; no fooling. The lifers call her Ma. Makes apple pie from scratch, no cans.”
“You interest me. How’s she feel about her tin-cutting, secretarial-bound daughter?”
“‘As long as you’re happy, dear.’ I think she wants a son-in-law who’s a cross between Albert Schweitzer and J. P. Morgan. What about your parents?”
“My father died in France.”
“Fighting?”
“Food poisoning. He went there in 1919 to paint and got hold of the only bowl of bad vichyssoise in Paris.”
“Luck seems to run in your family. Mother?”
“My aunt who raised me said the influenza took her. I took her word for it; I was two. I prefer to think Mom ran away with the circus, but I’m a hopeless romantic.”
“Just a couple of orphans.”
He wasn’t really listening. “So you think I should go crawling back. ‘The Typewriter’ isn’t Saturday Evening Post material?”
“Try the Post, sure. The New Yorker.”
“And after that I’ll run for president.”
“Who said writing is the only profession where you start at the top and work your way down?”
“Whoever it was probably invented paperbacks.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Saturday Evening Post returned “The Typewriter” with a form rejection letter two weeks after he submitted it. The New Yorker took another week. When he reread the dog-eared manuscript, he no longer liked it. He circled those passages he might use later and threw away the rest.
He never used any of it, however, and in no time at all the story was forgotten. There was no place for it in his second novel.
It happened this way:
The Woolworth’s near P.S. 187 became his rendezvous place with Ellen Curry. It wasn’t on his way home from the paper, but she hadn’t offered her phone number and he was too rusty at the game to work up the courage to ask. By the time she gave it, the meetings had become a habit. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he left the office just before class let out. She would show him her latest assignment and he would make suggestions that would never occur to Tharp.
A week before Christmas, they waited twenty minutes for a booth. Standing in line, he read a descriptive piece she’d written. “You need to cut down on the adjectives.”
“How can I write description without adjectives?”
“I didn’t say don’t use any. Three per noun is less effective than one.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
“Anyway, that’s what my editors said. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence they paid by the word.”
“I should be paying you.”
“Save your money. You’re not really a writer, you know.”
“I told you that the first night.”
“I saw it the first night. I was afraid if I agreed with you, you’d slap my face.”
“Women are always doing that in your stories. I’ve never slapped anyone. I don’t know a woman who has.”
“Me neither, come to think. I wrote a lot of scenes I wouldn’t now.”
A man got up from a booth to pay his check. They took possession and waited while the counterman wiped down the table. When he left, Jacob had an epiphany. “How the hell did you get hold of my stories?”
“My roommate’s father died recently. When she went home to help her mother clean out his things, she found boxes of magazines in the garage. He was saving them for the paper drive, but then the war ended. Ann was going to throw them away, but I asked if I could have them. I had a hunch. My favorite is ‘Dead Before Dawn.’”
He smiled. “Mine, too. It’s the only time an editor used my title.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“After I’ve had a chance to cool off, nothing I write satisfies me. By then it’s too late, because the story’s already in print and the check’s cashed.” He paused. “I threw away the typewriter story.”
“Oh, you shouldn’t have done that!”
“I should never have sent it out. At least this time I spared myself public embarrassment.”
“What you’re saying is I’m a lousy critic.”
“You didn’t read the story I had in mind when I wrote it. Nothing ever turns out the way I want.”
“You’re too hard on yourself.”
“Tell that to the Post and the New Yorker.”
“They’re not the only magazines in the world.”
“They will be, if things go on the way they have. Want to see a movie sometime?”
She paused in the midst of lighting a cigarette, shook out the match. “Did you just ask me for a date? You said it so fast I’m not sure.”
“It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid; one shrill scream and you’re in the clear.”
“I’d love to. Feel free to scream any time.”
Someone cleared his throat: A man waiting in line with a woman at his side. Jacob and Ellen had finished eating.
As he helped her on with her coat, a familiar-looking color scheme caught his eye. He turned for a better look.
“Son of a bitch.”
She turned her head to stare. “What? My arm’s tangled in the sleeve.”
“Not you.” He went to the wooden rack that had replaced the pulp magazines at the end of the counter and snatched out one of the gaudy books on display. It was the Blue Devil Books edition of Chinese Checkers, “by Jack Holly.”
* * *
“Hey, hey!” Ira Winderspear rose into the awkward crouch diners at 21 assumed to greet visitors to their booth. He had a bloody steak in front of him and a napkin tucked under his chin.
Jacob didn’t shake his hand. “Talk fast, Ira. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t call the Bunco Squad.”
“Hell, kid. I’ll give you a thousand.” The agent dropped back onto his seat, reached inside a breast pocket, and handed him a check made out to Jacob Heppleman in the amount of $1,089.84. It was signed by Winderspear.
“Your first royalty, kid. I took out my ten percent.”
He stared at the check in his hands. “How can there be royalties already? I never got any the first time around.”
“Different world, kid. It’s almost 1947. Book’s in its third printing.”
“I never authorized a first.”
“That’s the thing. I didn’t get around to asking Elk not to publish. Where would I start? ‘Heppleman didn’t exactly sign the contract’? Un-fucking-professional.”
Jacob felt all kinds of a fool, seething in a public place with money in his fist. Still … but Winderspear was first to fill the gap in the conversation.
“Listen, kid, I got a meeting uptown like I said on the phone, so we’ll save time and say you said you’re sorry and I said buy me a beer sometime.” He produced a pencil and notebook, scribbled something on a sheet, and tore it off. “He’s expecting you at two. Here’s the address.”
“He who?”
“Jeez, you sound like a cross between a jackass and a hoot owl. Robin Elk, that’s who. He’s Blue Devil Books.”
“You made an appointment without asking me?”
“He wants the meeting. I’ve been stalling him a couple weeks. Your old number’s disconnected. You forgot to give me your new one.”
“Why would I fire you and then give you my phone number?”
“How should I know? I told you I’m not used to getting canned. Your luck went south right after, didn’t it? Fess up.”
He had the evidence of Ellen to refute that; but he wasn’t about to share that information. Winderspear misread his silence. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“What have I got to talk about with Elk? It’s your job to dicker with publishers, not mine.”
“That’s pre-war thinking. These days the writer’s part of the package. Look at this guy Stratton, writes the Lash Logan private eye books? Got his ugly kisser on a million back covers. That could be you.”
“Who says I want that?”
“So tell Elk. Get going or you’ll be late. You don’t want to make a bad impression first shot out of the box.”
CHAPTER NINE
He frowned out the cab window. “Are you sure this is the address?”
“It’s the one you gave me, Mac. Do I look like the Manhattan Directory?”
He paid the driver and got out in front of a rambling Queen Anne house in a neighborhood of them. It was the only one without a FOR RENT sign in any of its windows. There was no commercial sign to identify it as a business.
A typewritten three-by-five card perched above an old-fashioned bell-pull told him to RING THEN ENTER. The bell made a rusty jangle when he tugged on it.
Inside was a foyer, with squares of black and white marble laid corner to corner at his feet and mahogany fretwork carved into swirls suggestive of cinnamon rolls. A young man in horn-rimmed glasses looked up at him from behind a desk lit by a banker’s lamp with a green glass shade. He wore a sacksuit and a white shirt buttoned to the neck, no tie. At his elbow was a telephone console with a row of square buttons like accordion keys.
Jacob introduced himself. The young man lifted the handset and tapped a key. He spoke with a slight New England drawl. “Jacob Heppleman for Mr. Elk. Yes.” He hung up. “He’s expecting you; top of the stairs, first door to the right.”
The staircase curved gracefully between polished banisters, with an Oriental runner so thick the treads made no noise under his feet. The door stood open. At a desk sat a woman who might have been related to the young man. She wore a serge business suit, pulled her light brown hair back into a bun, and smiled at him tentatively behind glasses with clear frames. “Go right on in, Mr. Holly.”
“Heppleman.”
“Of course.” She turned to a battleship gray Smith-Corona on a drawleaf and began typing at Sten gun pace.
A glazed cabinet stood next to the door behind her desk. The covers of uncirculated paperbacks leered out through the glass, beetle-browed men watching frowzy women taking off their clothes in one seedy hotel room after another, usually with a fully erect handgun present. Chinese Checkers occupied the central position.
Subtle.
The door was paneled, with a brass plate engraved PRIVATE. He twisted the knob and opened it.
He’d fully expected something crude behind the elegant front, a creature sprung from the same gene pool as the Cro-Magnons in the glass case, with a cigarette pasted to his lip and soup stains on his tie.
“This is indeed a pleasure, Mr. Holly. I’ve been looking forward to it ever so long.”
The man who stood to greet him was so unexpected he forgot to correct the use of names. Robin Elk was his age—possibly a year younger—and spoke with an upper-class British accent. He wore his blond hair in a pompadour, but shaven close at the temples, and Harris tweeds over an argyle sweater and a bow tie. He came out from behind his desk and they shook hands. The publisher’s grip was strong, but not competitive. He gripped a cherrywood cane with a silver handle. Jacob noticed he wore paper slippers and shuffled slightly when he walked. “You served in the American armed forces, I understand.”
“The army. Yourself?”
“RAF. Shot down over Cherbourg in ’43, spent the next two years in a Stalag. Flatirons.” He tapped one foot gingerly with the cane’s rubber tip. “You’d think the buggers would’ve updated their methods after the first go.”
“Whatever brought you to the States?”
“Your postwar prosperity. It’s an American invention. Back home they’re still queuing up before dawn for a bit of ham. No future there for a fellow with ambition and bad memories. Can I interest you in a bracer?” He shuffled back to the desk and flipped the switch on an intercom. “Alice, what’s in the larder?”
“A bit early for me, thanks. Coffee, if you have it.”
“Right-o. Cream and sugar?”
“A little of both.”
“Coffee, the works,” Elk told Alice.
“Two cups?” The voice belonged to the woman in the outer office.
“Please.” He switched off, winked at his guest. “If it weren’t for the damned tea, we’d still have an empire.” He waved him toward a sitting area that resembled the reading room in a gentlemen’s club. Leather armchairs shared a walnut smoking stand next to shelves of gold-stamped volumes on the wall.
They sat. Nothing about the room indicated it belonged to a publisher of two-bit paperbacks. A framed panoramic photograph of young men in fleece-lined jackets standing and kneeling in front of a British Spitfire at some aerodrome hung above a stone fireplace with logs crackling on the grate. Elk charged a blackened brier pipe with coarse tobacco and set it burning with a bundle of matches. A sweetish, tarry scent permeated the room. “What’s your pleasure? A bowl? My own blend. Cigars? Cigarettes? My God, I sound like the girl in a nightclub.”
“Thanks. I don’t smoke.”
Blond brows rose. “You’re the first Yank I’ve met who came back without the craving. What did you do with the cartons that came with your K rations?”
“Traded them to smokers for extra rations.”
“And Napoleon called us a nation of shopkeepers. Well, we shan’t compare war stories. Tell me a bit about yourself. In turn, you can ask me anything you like.”
There wasn’t much to tell, he learned as he told it: Raised on a farm, which he hated. Parents deceased. The fight with the foreman that led him to the drugstore periodicals section. His enlistment, discharge, the unwanted war novel.
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” Elk said to that. “I’m sick of the subject myself. How are you paying the bills?”
“Newspaper work.”
“Where would I find your byline?”
“Nowhere.” He explained his job on the rewrite desk.
“No new attempts at fiction?”
“One. You wouldn’t be interested. No one else was.”
“Try me.”
He told him about “The Typewriter,” leaving out the truth behind the idea.
“Hm.”
Alice came in carrying a tray with a silver carafe, a matching creamer, sugar cubes in a china bowl, and two cups and saucers with the same pattern, a coat-of-arms of some kind, all of which she set on a low table with claw feet. Her skirt was knee-length, a new development in fashion. Muscular calves. “I’ll be mother,” said Elk, when she raised the carafe. She put it down and took herself out, not before gifting Jacob with a reassuring smile.
He took advantage of the break while Elk poured to ask a question that had been vexing him. “Why a blue devil?”
The publisher chuckled and sat back cradling his cup and saucer. “We started with red—the shock effect, you know. Edgy. Can’t impress a postwar readership with the same staid tactics that worked in the past. The first design looked like something out of Bosch; fire shooting from the nostrils, that sort of rot. But it smacked of the Plague and the Inquisition, and after six years of conflict and pestilence it wasn’t the way to go. Also there was the Catholic Church to consider.
“So we changed his color and extinguished the flames. Baby blankets are blue; so are skies and the little boy under the haystack. Also we made the horns smaller. Looks like Bambi, don’t you think? Yes.”
“What happened to edgy?”
“You’ve seen our covers. Why beat a dead horse?”
Jacob sank two cubes in his coffee and colored it with cream. “There’s no torture scene in Chinese Checkers.”
“But there was! You’ve forgotten the story the old Mandarin in the junk shop told, about coming to this country to flee the Tongs.”
“He’s a minor character. He has one scene.”
“And an excellent scene it was. I quite liked the book. So do the readers. You got your royalty check?”
“I thought at first it was a mistake. How many copies do you have to sell at two bits a pop to pay the author a thousand dollars?”
“Twenty thousand. The first printing was ten. That’s why we went back to press. Six months from now you’ll receive another check, and if it isn’t bigger than the first, I’ll go back home and work for the admiral.”
“The admiral?”
“My father. He was dead set on my joining the Royal Navy. But sons are placed on this earth to disappoint their fathers. He owns a publishing firm in Knightsbridge, cranking out matched sets of Dickens and Thackeray bound in half-calf; the sort of rot freshly knighted war profiteers buy by the yard to appear literate. The plan for me was to return from the jolly old high seas with the rank of commander, apprentice to the editor-in-chief for a year or two, then put the old boy out to pasture—with a pension, of course—and move into the big office overlooking the V-and-A. Instead I sank my trust fund into a third-class steamship ticket and this barn, with a bit left over for staffing and a printing plant on Long Island.”
A female voice interrupted “White Christmas” to announce the store was closing in fifteen minutes. The buzzing on the main floor increased. The counterman rang open the cash register and began counting bills.
“What will you do now?” Ellen asked.
“I’m doing it: writing about purse-snatchings and weddings. Hoping someday they’ll coincide. A man needs ambition of some kind.”
“I think you should take your agent’s advice and write novels.”
“Paperback novels.” He already regretted having told her his professional history. “The difference between them and Muff Pistols wouldn’t buy you a seat on a streetcar.”
“Life’s what you make it, my father always said.”
“What’s he do, run General Motors?”
“He was a stevedore, until he blew out an artery at forty, unloading crates of machine parts from Cleveland. He had me primed to be the first female governor of New York. He didn’t live to see me cutting tin at Lockheed.”
“Don’t knock defense work. I keep picturing some schnook of a Jap mechanic trying to turn two wrecked Zeroes into one in flying condition, ducking for cover every time a fresh wave of tin flew over from the West.” He glanced at the counterman, who was showing inordinate interest in the watch on his wrist. “What about your mother?”
“Slinging hash at Sing Sing; no fooling. The lifers call her Ma. Makes apple pie from scratch, no cans.”
“You interest me. How’s she feel about her tin-cutting, secretarial-bound daughter?”
“‘As long as you’re happy, dear.’ I think she wants a son-in-law who’s a cross between Albert Schweitzer and J. P. Morgan. What about your parents?”
“My father died in France.”
“Fighting?”
“Food poisoning. He went there in 1919 to paint and got hold of the only bowl of bad vichyssoise in Paris.”
“Luck seems to run in your family. Mother?”
“My aunt who raised me said the influenza took her. I took her word for it; I was two. I prefer to think Mom ran away with the circus, but I’m a hopeless romantic.”
“Just a couple of orphans.”
He wasn’t really listening. “So you think I should go crawling back. ‘The Typewriter’ isn’t Saturday Evening Post material?”
“Try the Post, sure. The New Yorker.”
“And after that I’ll run for president.”
“Who said writing is the only profession where you start at the top and work your way down?”
“Whoever it was probably invented paperbacks.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Saturday Evening Post returned “The Typewriter” with a form rejection letter two weeks after he submitted it. The New Yorker took another week. When he reread the dog-eared manuscript, he no longer liked it. He circled those passages he might use later and threw away the rest.
He never used any of it, however, and in no time at all the story was forgotten. There was no place for it in his second novel.
It happened this way:
The Woolworth’s near P.S. 187 became his rendezvous place with Ellen Curry. It wasn’t on his way home from the paper, but she hadn’t offered her phone number and he was too rusty at the game to work up the courage to ask. By the time she gave it, the meetings had become a habit. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he left the office just before class let out. She would show him her latest assignment and he would make suggestions that would never occur to Tharp.
A week before Christmas, they waited twenty minutes for a booth. Standing in line, he read a descriptive piece she’d written. “You need to cut down on the adjectives.”
“How can I write description without adjectives?”
“I didn’t say don’t use any. Three per noun is less effective than one.”
“I never thought of it that way.”
“Anyway, that’s what my editors said. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence they paid by the word.”
“I should be paying you.”
“Save your money. You’re not really a writer, you know.”
“I told you that the first night.”
“I saw it the first night. I was afraid if I agreed with you, you’d slap my face.”
“Women are always doing that in your stories. I’ve never slapped anyone. I don’t know a woman who has.”
“Me neither, come to think. I wrote a lot of scenes I wouldn’t now.”
A man got up from a booth to pay his check. They took possession and waited while the counterman wiped down the table. When he left, Jacob had an epiphany. “How the hell did you get hold of my stories?”
“My roommate’s father died recently. When she went home to help her mother clean out his things, she found boxes of magazines in the garage. He was saving them for the paper drive, but then the war ended. Ann was going to throw them away, but I asked if I could have them. I had a hunch. My favorite is ‘Dead Before Dawn.’”
He smiled. “Mine, too. It’s the only time an editor used my title.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“After I’ve had a chance to cool off, nothing I write satisfies me. By then it’s too late, because the story’s already in print and the check’s cashed.” He paused. “I threw away the typewriter story.”
“Oh, you shouldn’t have done that!”
“I should never have sent it out. At least this time I spared myself public embarrassment.”
“What you’re saying is I’m a lousy critic.”
“You didn’t read the story I had in mind when I wrote it. Nothing ever turns out the way I want.”
“You’re too hard on yourself.”
“Tell that to the Post and the New Yorker.”
“They’re not the only magazines in the world.”
“They will be, if things go on the way they have. Want to see a movie sometime?”
She paused in the midst of lighting a cigarette, shook out the match. “Did you just ask me for a date? You said it so fast I’m not sure.”
“It’s like ripping off a Band-Aid; one shrill scream and you’re in the clear.”
“I’d love to. Feel free to scream any time.”
Someone cleared his throat: A man waiting in line with a woman at his side. Jacob and Ellen had finished eating.
As he helped her on with her coat, a familiar-looking color scheme caught his eye. He turned for a better look.
“Son of a bitch.”
She turned her head to stare. “What? My arm’s tangled in the sleeve.”
“Not you.” He went to the wooden rack that had replaced the pulp magazines at the end of the counter and snatched out one of the gaudy books on display. It was the Blue Devil Books edition of Chinese Checkers, “by Jack Holly.”
* * *
“Hey, hey!” Ira Winderspear rose into the awkward crouch diners at 21 assumed to greet visitors to their booth. He had a bloody steak in front of him and a napkin tucked under his chin.
Jacob didn’t shake his hand. “Talk fast, Ira. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t call the Bunco Squad.”
“Hell, kid. I’ll give you a thousand.” The agent dropped back onto his seat, reached inside a breast pocket, and handed him a check made out to Jacob Heppleman in the amount of $1,089.84. It was signed by Winderspear.
“Your first royalty, kid. I took out my ten percent.”
He stared at the check in his hands. “How can there be royalties already? I never got any the first time around.”
“Different world, kid. It’s almost 1947. Book’s in its third printing.”
“I never authorized a first.”
“That’s the thing. I didn’t get around to asking Elk not to publish. Where would I start? ‘Heppleman didn’t exactly sign the contract’? Un-fucking-professional.”
Jacob felt all kinds of a fool, seething in a public place with money in his fist. Still … but Winderspear was first to fill the gap in the conversation.
“Listen, kid, I got a meeting uptown like I said on the phone, so we’ll save time and say you said you’re sorry and I said buy me a beer sometime.” He produced a pencil and notebook, scribbled something on a sheet, and tore it off. “He’s expecting you at two. Here’s the address.”
“He who?”
“Jeez, you sound like a cross between a jackass and a hoot owl. Robin Elk, that’s who. He’s Blue Devil Books.”
“You made an appointment without asking me?”
“He wants the meeting. I’ve been stalling him a couple weeks. Your old number’s disconnected. You forgot to give me your new one.”
“Why would I fire you and then give you my phone number?”
“How should I know? I told you I’m not used to getting canned. Your luck went south right after, didn’t it? Fess up.”
He had the evidence of Ellen to refute that; but he wasn’t about to share that information. Winderspear misread his silence. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“What have I got to talk about with Elk? It’s your job to dicker with publishers, not mine.”
“That’s pre-war thinking. These days the writer’s part of the package. Look at this guy Stratton, writes the Lash Logan private eye books? Got his ugly kisser on a million back covers. That could be you.”
“Who says I want that?”
“So tell Elk. Get going or you’ll be late. You don’t want to make a bad impression first shot out of the box.”
CHAPTER NINE
He frowned out the cab window. “Are you sure this is the address?”
“It’s the one you gave me, Mac. Do I look like the Manhattan Directory?”
He paid the driver and got out in front of a rambling Queen Anne house in a neighborhood of them. It was the only one without a FOR RENT sign in any of its windows. There was no commercial sign to identify it as a business.
A typewritten three-by-five card perched above an old-fashioned bell-pull told him to RING THEN ENTER. The bell made a rusty jangle when he tugged on it.
Inside was a foyer, with squares of black and white marble laid corner to corner at his feet and mahogany fretwork carved into swirls suggestive of cinnamon rolls. A young man in horn-rimmed glasses looked up at him from behind a desk lit by a banker’s lamp with a green glass shade. He wore a sacksuit and a white shirt buttoned to the neck, no tie. At his elbow was a telephone console with a row of square buttons like accordion keys.
Jacob introduced himself. The young man lifted the handset and tapped a key. He spoke with a slight New England drawl. “Jacob Heppleman for Mr. Elk. Yes.” He hung up. “He’s expecting you; top of the stairs, first door to the right.”
The staircase curved gracefully between polished banisters, with an Oriental runner so thick the treads made no noise under his feet. The door stood open. At a desk sat a woman who might have been related to the young man. She wore a serge business suit, pulled her light brown hair back into a bun, and smiled at him tentatively behind glasses with clear frames. “Go right on in, Mr. Holly.”
“Heppleman.”
“Of course.” She turned to a battleship gray Smith-Corona on a drawleaf and began typing at Sten gun pace.
A glazed cabinet stood next to the door behind her desk. The covers of uncirculated paperbacks leered out through the glass, beetle-browed men watching frowzy women taking off their clothes in one seedy hotel room after another, usually with a fully erect handgun present. Chinese Checkers occupied the central position.
Subtle.
The door was paneled, with a brass plate engraved PRIVATE. He twisted the knob and opened it.
He’d fully expected something crude behind the elegant front, a creature sprung from the same gene pool as the Cro-Magnons in the glass case, with a cigarette pasted to his lip and soup stains on his tie.
“This is indeed a pleasure, Mr. Holly. I’ve been looking forward to it ever so long.”
The man who stood to greet him was so unexpected he forgot to correct the use of names. Robin Elk was his age—possibly a year younger—and spoke with an upper-class British accent. He wore his blond hair in a pompadour, but shaven close at the temples, and Harris tweeds over an argyle sweater and a bow tie. He came out from behind his desk and they shook hands. The publisher’s grip was strong, but not competitive. He gripped a cherrywood cane with a silver handle. Jacob noticed he wore paper slippers and shuffled slightly when he walked. “You served in the American armed forces, I understand.”
“The army. Yourself?”
“RAF. Shot down over Cherbourg in ’43, spent the next two years in a Stalag. Flatirons.” He tapped one foot gingerly with the cane’s rubber tip. “You’d think the buggers would’ve updated their methods after the first go.”
“Whatever brought you to the States?”
“Your postwar prosperity. It’s an American invention. Back home they’re still queuing up before dawn for a bit of ham. No future there for a fellow with ambition and bad memories. Can I interest you in a bracer?” He shuffled back to the desk and flipped the switch on an intercom. “Alice, what’s in the larder?”
“A bit early for me, thanks. Coffee, if you have it.”
“Right-o. Cream and sugar?”
“A little of both.”
“Coffee, the works,” Elk told Alice.
“Two cups?” The voice belonged to the woman in the outer office.
“Please.” He switched off, winked at his guest. “If it weren’t for the damned tea, we’d still have an empire.” He waved him toward a sitting area that resembled the reading room in a gentlemen’s club. Leather armchairs shared a walnut smoking stand next to shelves of gold-stamped volumes on the wall.
They sat. Nothing about the room indicated it belonged to a publisher of two-bit paperbacks. A framed panoramic photograph of young men in fleece-lined jackets standing and kneeling in front of a British Spitfire at some aerodrome hung above a stone fireplace with logs crackling on the grate. Elk charged a blackened brier pipe with coarse tobacco and set it burning with a bundle of matches. A sweetish, tarry scent permeated the room. “What’s your pleasure? A bowl? My own blend. Cigars? Cigarettes? My God, I sound like the girl in a nightclub.”
“Thanks. I don’t smoke.”
Blond brows rose. “You’re the first Yank I’ve met who came back without the craving. What did you do with the cartons that came with your K rations?”
“Traded them to smokers for extra rations.”
“And Napoleon called us a nation of shopkeepers. Well, we shan’t compare war stories. Tell me a bit about yourself. In turn, you can ask me anything you like.”
There wasn’t much to tell, he learned as he told it: Raised on a farm, which he hated. Parents deceased. The fight with the foreman that led him to the drugstore periodicals section. His enlistment, discharge, the unwanted war novel.
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” Elk said to that. “I’m sick of the subject myself. How are you paying the bills?”
“Newspaper work.”
“Where would I find your byline?”
“Nowhere.” He explained his job on the rewrite desk.
“No new attempts at fiction?”
“One. You wouldn’t be interested. No one else was.”
“Try me.”
He told him about “The Typewriter,” leaving out the truth behind the idea.
“Hm.”
Alice came in carrying a tray with a silver carafe, a matching creamer, sugar cubes in a china bowl, and two cups and saucers with the same pattern, a coat-of-arms of some kind, all of which she set on a low table with claw feet. Her skirt was knee-length, a new development in fashion. Muscular calves. “I’ll be mother,” said Elk, when she raised the carafe. She put it down and took herself out, not before gifting Jacob with a reassuring smile.
He took advantage of the break while Elk poured to ask a question that had been vexing him. “Why a blue devil?”
The publisher chuckled and sat back cradling his cup and saucer. “We started with red—the shock effect, you know. Edgy. Can’t impress a postwar readership with the same staid tactics that worked in the past. The first design looked like something out of Bosch; fire shooting from the nostrils, that sort of rot. But it smacked of the Plague and the Inquisition, and after six years of conflict and pestilence it wasn’t the way to go. Also there was the Catholic Church to consider.
“So we changed his color and extinguished the flames. Baby blankets are blue; so are skies and the little boy under the haystack. Also we made the horns smaller. Looks like Bambi, don’t you think? Yes.”
“What happened to edgy?”
“You’ve seen our covers. Why beat a dead horse?”
Jacob sank two cubes in his coffee and colored it with cream. “There’s no torture scene in Chinese Checkers.”
“But there was! You’ve forgotten the story the old Mandarin in the junk shop told, about coming to this country to flee the Tongs.”
“He’s a minor character. He has one scene.”
“And an excellent scene it was. I quite liked the book. So do the readers. You got your royalty check?”
“I thought at first it was a mistake. How many copies do you have to sell at two bits a pop to pay the author a thousand dollars?”
“Twenty thousand. The first printing was ten. That’s why we went back to press. Six months from now you’ll receive another check, and if it isn’t bigger than the first, I’ll go back home and work for the admiral.”
“The admiral?”
“My father. He was dead set on my joining the Royal Navy. But sons are placed on this earth to disappoint their fathers. He owns a publishing firm in Knightsbridge, cranking out matched sets of Dickens and Thackeray bound in half-calf; the sort of rot freshly knighted war profiteers buy by the yard to appear literate. The plan for me was to return from the jolly old high seas with the rank of commander, apprentice to the editor-in-chief for a year or two, then put the old boy out to pasture—with a pension, of course—and move into the big office overlooking the V-and-A. Instead I sank my trust fund into a third-class steamship ticket and this barn, with a bit left over for staffing and a printing plant on Long Island.”
