Paperback Jack, page 5
“Weren’t you afraid that would kill the admiral?”
“Oh, he’s tough old Edwardian stock. It would take more than the Blitz to make a dent in those iron sides. Although I daresay if he knew I’d booked third-class he might lock himself in the wine cellar and never come out.”
Jacob smiled, thawing somewhat. He was beginning to like this man. He didn’t quite buy the port-and-polo image Elk seemed to be working overtime to sell; it was all too spot-on, like something from Evelyn Waugh. But there was a naïveté about him that put a skeptic off-guard. As well be suspicious of a child who would do anything to please.
Then again, clever confidence men seldom acted shifty.
Jacob returned his cup and saucer to the tray, then sat back, legs crossed. “I’m trying to wrap my mind around this sudden success. I was told veterans and their wives are too busy starting families to read for pleasure.”
“A judgment made in haste. There’s always confusion when the swords are being beaten back into plowshares, or however the saying goes: A period of adjustment. When I was a prisoner of war I became quite chummy with a lieutenant with your Army Air Corps.” He pronounced it leftenant. “Red Cross relief packages were few and far between—the German black market thrived on them—but I took an interest in the Armed Forces editions he received: You know the ones?”
“They were one of the things I traded cigarettes for.”
“Quite. I read them, mysteries and cowboy stories and such. Needless to say few would pass muster at Elk & Ridpath, but they helped us through a great ordeal, boredom being first and foremost. The lieutenant and I exchanged addresses. In our letters after the war we discussed those cheap paperbound books, which he said had begun to appear in American apothecaries, of all places.”
“Drugstores, yes.”
“Hm. He said Yanks were buying them straight off the racks, a half-dozen at a time, tucking them under their arms like sausages during a run on the butcher’s. They sold for a quarter, the longer ones fifty pence, so the customer could be reasonably sure there’d be no unpleasant surprise when he unloaded his plunder at the counter.
“That was the extent of my market research, but it’s a damn sight more thorough than anything my father attempted. D’you know, publishing is the only industry in the U.K. whose executives have no bloody idea who buys their product? Shameful. But try persuading those hidebound traders to re-examine their traditional methods. So I copped a Pilgrim.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Bolted, dear boy, like those stalwarts who set sail aboard the Mayflower bound for liberty and free enterprise. American investors are always looking for the next new thing; and they’re suckers for a West End accent. You aren’t offended, I hope?”
“I might be, if I were an investor.”
“I’d have done the thing on my own, but distribution is a complicated business over here. What at first looks like a bargain can put you in debt to the sort of villain who always gets his comeuppance in the final chapters of the very books we’re publishing.”
“In other words you want to steer clear of the people who own the jukebox and vending-machine routes.” Jacob bent his nose to one side with a finger.
“Succinctly put. There you have it.” Elk spread his white palms. “The reading public is insatiable. Our industry has pillaged literature as far back as Homer—remind me to send you our edition of The Iliad, abridged, of course; our Helen bears a strong resemblance to Betty Grable—and is desperate for more product. Blue Devil will be the first publisher to issue paperback originals, never before seen in print. A pioneer. And I want you aboard the flagship.”
CHAPTER TEN
Jacob laughed. He couldn’t help himself. “Are you sure you didn’t serve in the Royal Navy?”
Elk touched his bow tie. The writer would come to recognize this gesture as a sign of discomfort, and anticipate an immediate change of tone, if not subject.
“Needless to say, we require writers who are willing to join us in our enterprise. The established ones are complacent, and what they write is far too sedate for this market. Come in.” Someone had knocked.
A middle-aged man in his shirtsleeves entered carrying a large portfolio bound in tattered black cloth. A cigarette wobbled on his lower lip and sparks from it—or its predecessors—had burned tiny holes in his checked shirt. His body was a perfect tube, the shoulders as narrow as the waist, and the cheekstrap bones of the skull under his skin stood out like umbrella staves.
His appearance was the first indication the rambling Victorian mansion contained more than just Elk, Alice, and the young man in the foyer.
“You wanted to see this the minute it came in.” The man untied the string on the portfolio and opened it, holding it in front of him like a sandwich board.
“Jack Holly, Skip Glaser. Skip’s our art director.”
Jacob nodded, Glaser having no free hand to shake. He couldn’t picture a man who looked less like a Skip.
“Welcome aboard.” The art director’s attention remained on Elk’s face.
Clipped to the edges of the portfolio was a flat-finish photographic print, apparently full size, of an oil painting, obviously intended for a paperback cover. Refreshingly, this one contained no women, in undress or otherwise. The man in the center was seen in full length, upside-down. His arms were splayed, one knee bent, and his mouth twisted into a rictus of terror. Behind him—beneath him, really—yawned rows of windows stacked one atop another, plummeting toward the sidewalk far below. He hung suspended, a dozen stories from death.
What struck Jacob was the sole of the man’s right shoe directly in the foreground, huge, disproportionate to the rest of his body: It seemed to stick out of the illustration in third-dimension, pleading for Jacob to seize it and haul him to safety.
“Splendid. Perhaps a bit more in the expression. He looks annoyed, as if he’s just dropped his pencil instead of twelve floors. What do you think, Jack?”
“Please call me Jacob.”
“As you wish; in private, of course. I’m genuinely interested in your opinion as an artist yourself.”
He tabled the business of the nom de plume for later. “He looks frightened enough. His predicament’s clear. Why telegraph it and insult the customer?”
“Just a bit more, I think. Thank you, Skip.”
The art director closed the portfolio and left.
Elk brushed imaginary ash from his sweater. “I understand your point of view, Jack—Jacob, pardon me. This isn’t the time for restraint. I want to make the person who sees that cover reach out automatically to catch him, the way early French cinema audiences leapt backwards when a train seemed to be thundering out of the screen into their laps.”
Once again Jacob adjusted his opinion of the publisher. He himself had wanted to do just that, save the poor wretch. It made the audience part of the drama.
Elk said, “We’re calling the book Smash Hit. Do you know Hank Stratton?”
“Not personally. I thought he was with Bannerman.”
“He was, until we told him we were starting with a print run of one hundred thousand. It will be the first paperback original featuring Lash Logan. We’re quite excited about it.”
“What’s it about?”
“Haven’t the foggiest. He hasn’t written it yet.”
“Then, how did you know—?”
“The illustration? That was Skip’s brainstorm. I’m confident Stratton will follow it up. It was good enough for Dickens. The Pickwick Papers started out as a collection of random watercolors by an artist who committed suicide. The story came later.”
He wanted to ask if the man killed himself before he read the book or after; but he was thinking of Stratton, not Dickens.
“I thought private eyes were dying with the pulps.”
“The pulps at their boldest never let the detective grapple with a naked woman, or strangle a pander to death with his bare hands.”
“Another pioneer.” This time he couldn’t hold back.
But the publisher seemed unperturbed. “When this one comes out, schoolboys across America will be reading it under the blankets with a flashlight. Eveready should pay us a dividend based on all those extra battery sales.”
“When I write about a brute and a sadist, he won’t be the hero.”
“It would never occur to me to ask you to violate your principles. Personally, I think Stratton’s cretinous, and his character’s a thumping fascist; but we need the sales. The market’s overcrowded with snoops in trench coats. The only reason he’s so popular is because he’s…” He trailed off, his grasp of American vernacular having failed him.
“Gimmicky.”
Elk beamed. “Precisely! A blatant imitation would fool no one. Even if it worked, the result would be a disaster, dividing the readership and harming sales. We must agree upon another path. That typewriter story you mentioned gave me an idea. Why not a series about an honorable thief?”
“I think Robin Hood beat you to it.”
“How rapidly you thought of him. He’s my namesake. Perhaps the fabulists who improved upon the scrofulous original expressed these same doubts. It wasn’t a new idea even at the time.
“But, no, that business of robbing the rich to give to the poor flies too close to Marxism for comfort. The HUAC isn’t a tiger we want to poke. Your character—what’s his name, by the way?”
“Herbert Jackdaw.” He remembered coming up with it on impulse, reversing his own initials.
Elk appeared to consider, then shook his head. “Some kind of raucous bird, named after President Hoover. That’s two strikes against it. We’ll find something better. Your character seeks redemption and reform. Why not take it a step further and have him go after his own former underworld brethren? Clandestinely, of course; the law must never know it has an ally in him. The fact that he’s wanted himself would add to the suspense. At all times he must look ahead and behind.”
“That’s the premise of The Creeper.”
“Radio-show hokum. We won’t bother about cloaks and masks and that rubbish; the comic books have already appropriated it. You must have a death wish in order to compete with them.”
“Didn’t you just say you wanted boys for your audience?”
“I said that’s who Stratton appeals to. Workingmen are the target, truck drivers and factory drones, those fellows you worked with under that contemptible foreman, who come home dragging their lunch pails and want nothing but a beer, a comfortable chair, and something to read that won’t challenge their intellects while they’re waiting for supper. Men you understand, having been one yourself.”
He wasn’t sure how to take that. Either Elk had no idea of the effect he had on people or he was smirking at him from behind a mask of innocence.
“What I want,” the publisher went on, “is a professional criminal in ordinary street dress, employing the same tactics to support the law he once used to circumvent it.”
The idea had appeal, but he wasn’t ready to cede the point. “That’s what you want. How do you know it’s what these workingmen you’re talking about want?”
“They don’t know, yet. It’s our job to tell them. You must trust me on that. It’s a publishing maxim, as old as movable type.”
“Can I think about it?”
“Please. While you do, I’d admire to read the story. Will you send it to me?”
“I threw it away. I’m not sure I kept the carbon.”
“Can you look?”
“The protagonist is nothing like the man you described. The story has problems of its own apart from that.”
“I’ll remember you said that, and withhold criticism.”
He was on the point of declaring he was sure he’d destroyed the carbon, but the beseeching expression on the Englishman’s frank features gave him pause. “I’ll see what I can do. One thing. How far along is that second printing of Chinese Checkers?”
“It’s in the chase now. Why?”
“I want to sponge out all that garbage about inherently wicked Asians. I fought side-by-side with some of them, and I can tell you they come in all packages, just like the rest of us.”
Elk kneaded the head of his stick. “That sounds extensive. We’ll have to charge you for any changes that come to more than ten percent the cost of production.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Fabulous. Let me see you out.”
As Jacob entered the outer office, Elk holding the door and leaning on his cane, Alice stopped chugging away at her typewriter to turn their way and smile, pushing her glasses up her nose. In the instant her eyes weren’t distorted by the thick lenses, all physical similarity to the young man in the foyer vanished. It struck Jacob she bore a closer resemblance to the blondes on most of the Blue Devil covers. He wondered if Elk was economizing by asking his secretary to double as a model. And he wondered how the body under the mannish suit compared to those of the near-naked women in all those shabby bedrooms. The impure thought made his cheeks burn.
“Here. No one leaves empty-handed.” Tucking the cane under one arm, Elk opened the glazed cabinet and began scooping books from inside. He shoved a stack of seven or eight into Jacob’s hands. “For your entertainment, but also for study. See what the others are doing.”
“I was under the impression you liked the way I write. If you expect me to change—”
“Good Lord, no! Montgomery didn’t stop being Montgomery when he studied Rommel’s strategy. And he certainly didn’t win El Alamein by using the same methods that worked in the Argonne wood. I want the author of Chinese Checkers. Blue Devil wants the postwar model.”
Jacob gained some insight in that moment. Whenever Robin Elk spoke of Blue Devil Books as if it were separate from himself, something vaguely unpleasant was in store.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
They saw It’s a Wonderful Life at The Rialto, a neighborhood theater not far from her apartment. Ellen thought James Stewart was good-looking, which answered Jacob’s questions about what she saw in him (“gangling” was the adjective he heard often). He walked her home afterward. The lights of the marquee went out and foot traffic fell off as they left the block. They passed dimly lit store windows with Christmas displays behind them.
A light snow fell, but it was a mild evening for December and the flakes dissolved when they touched down. He was comfortable in his wool-felt hat and light topcoat, she fetching in a knitted beret and red suede jacket with a monkey collar. He held her gloved hand in his bare one.
“I was actually disappointed at the end,” he said. “Pottersville looked like a fun place on a Saturday night.”
“It was Gomorrah. I’ll take Bedford Falls.”
“Great place—for ninety minutes. I went to school in a town just like it. Couldn’t wait to get out, just like George Bailey. Worse happened there than in Pottersville.”
“There is no Pottersville.”
“Sure there is.”
“I think you missed the point of the movie.”
“Tarzan’s chimp couldn’t have missed the point of that movie.”
They walked a block in silence. “Tharp asked me out again.”
“Don’t let him take you to It’s a Wonderful Life. He’ll just say Frank Capra stole it from Dickens.”
“You know I turned him down.”
He squeezed her hand. “What’s your roommate up to?”
“In bed, spraying germs like Flit. She’s got a cold.”
“Rats. I was going to ask if you had eggnog.”
“Just some old buttermilk. A shot of bourbon might kill the taste, but what will we do with Ann?”
“If we were characters in a book and Robin Elk were publishing, we’d be plotting her murder right now.”
Her building was a brownstone with a globe glowing above the front door. She slipped off a glove to use her key. He took the hand, put it behind his neck, and kissed her. When he finished, she nestled her head under his chin. “When are you going to show me where you live?”
“When I’m living someplace better.”
“As bad as that?”
“It belongs on the cover of a Blue Devil book.”
* * *
He’d taken an apartment eight blocks from The Greenwich Clock. It was smaller than the one he’d moved out of, so he’d set up the Remington Streamliner on the kitchen table on a straw mat, which he could shove aside when he ate, and used the oven for a file cabinet. The racks kept folders vertical. He’d found the carbon of “The Typewriter” in one, put it in a stamped envelope, and sent it to the Queen Anne house from the box on the corner.
Whoever had used the stove before him had lived on a steady diet of cauliflower and cabbage. The stench was ineradicable. In winter with the windows shut, it mixed with the scorched-metal smell from the radiator; an evil blend. But rents in the Village were reasonable, and walking to and from work saved bus fare. The money from Chinese Checkers was in the bank, earmarked for expenses. There was no telling how long his job would last, and despite Elk’s assurances, he didn’t expect another check in six months or ever.
The place was comfortable enough. The cockroaches weren’t overbold, and the El was far enough away the glasses stayed put on the shelves when the train rumbled past. But it was no place to entertain a young woman.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to. Four years spent no more than a yard apart from another human being (particularly the G.I. variety that snored and farted in its sleep and griped incessantly when awake) made a man jealous of his privacy. He laughed at corny jokes on the radio, played the same dumb tunes he’d enjoyed before the war on a secondhand phonograph, and when he woke up at midnight realizing he’d forgotten supper, threw a gristly ham steak into a pan and stank up the joint further, without apology. Modern comforts aside, it was a caveman’s life, and none of the fossils left behind showed signs of depression or suicide.
He knew it wouldn’t last, this satisfaction with existence on his own terms, but he meant to get everything out of it before it staled. He’d never be able to explain it to Ellen in terms she’d understand; to women, “alone” meant “lonely,” and anyone who said he enjoyed solitude was either a liar or a selfish jerk. That was one bridge he wouldn’t burn. He’d want company eventually.
