One Good Turn

40

“Crime Writers for Lunch,” as if they were going to be eaten by their audience. “Lunch” was coffee and filled white rolls, which were free and served from a bar at the back of the Spiegel-tent. And the writers were the entertainment. Dancing bears. They used to teach bears to dance by putting the cubs on hot coals. That was humanity for you. Martin had seen a bear-not a dancing one-in St. Petersburg. It had been with its owner, out for a walk on a lead, a brown bear as big as a big dog, on a small area of grass near the Neva. A couple of people were photographing it and then giving money to the man. Martin supposed that was why the man had the bear, to make money, everyone was trying to make money in St. Petersburg, teachers with no pensions selling books, gnarled old babushkas selling bits of knitting, girls selling their bodies.

The book event was being chaired by a gaunt woman whose credentials for chairing the event seemed vague, but in her intro-duction she claimed to be a “huge fan” of “genre writing,” and, “What a wonderful privilege it was to have a group of such di-verse writers with us this lunchtime.” Clap, clap, clap, hands raised high toward the three of them, a little geisha bow of obeisance.

Martin was sharing a platform with two other writers. One was an American woman by the name of E. M. Heller who was on a book tour, “trying to break into the British market,” and who wrote violent, edgy books about serial killers. In person, Martin had expected her to be precise and severe, dressed in black with a hint of Harvard about her, but she turned out to be a slightly frowsy blonde from Alabama with yellow teeth and a general air of sloppiness. When she spoke she put her hand in front of her mouth, Martin thought it was because of her yellow teeth, but she turned to him and said, “I don’t want to open my mouth, they’ll all hate my accent,” which came out more like “Ahdantwanopnma-marth, theyolol hayet maacksent.” “No, they won’t,” Martin reassured her. But they did.

Their little trio was completed by Dougal Tarvit, who lived up north, on Nina Riley’s patch, and who wrote “psychological thrillers” that were loosely based on real-life crimes. Martin had tried reading a couple but was put off by the fact that nothing really happened in them.

The Spiegeltent was full. Martin supposed the large audience was due to the economics of it-free food, and three writers for the price of one-but in the lull before they began, it slowly dawned on him that he was the subject of the attention. People were talking to one another about him, quite loudly in some cases, as if he weren’t actu-ally present. He distinctly heard a tightly querulous Morningside voice say, “But I thought he was dead,” in a way that implied that the female owner of the voice had been cheated by his live appearance.

E. M. Heller leaned across and said, “Hey, Alex, are you okay, honey?”

Martin reassured her that he was. “My real name’s Martin,” he added. What did E. M. Heller call herself, he wondered. Not “Em,” surely?

“No.” She laughed. “It stands for ‘Elizabeth Mary’-two queens for the price of one, my mama used to say, but people call me ‘Betty-May.’ ”

“Christ,”they both clearly heard Dougal Tarvit mutter, “it’s like being trapped inside fucking Steel Magnolias.”

Tarvit, slumped in his chair as if languor and bad posture were the marks of masculinity, seemed to hold his two fellow writers in contempt-E. M. Heller for being a woman and Martin for writing “populist shite,” words that were actually thrown in Martin’s direction in the course of what turned out to be a dismayingly quarrelsome sixty minutes. (“Well, the scalpels seem to be out today,” the gaunt woman said, glancing nervously around as if marking possible exits from the Spiegeltent.)

“I thought this was just a reading,” E. M. Heller whispered to Martin. “I didn’t realize it was a debate.”

“It’s not supposed to be,” he whispered back. Dougal Tarvit glared at them both. Martin regretted now that he had refused Melanie’s offer to fly up. If nothing else, his agent was good for a scrap. Dougal Tarvit was all polemical bluster and would have been no match for Melanie. If slicing him with her tongue didn’t work, she would have beaten him to death with her bare fists.

“He’s just jealous,” Betty-May whispered to Martin. “You being involved in a real-life murder and all.”

“If you could each just read for ten minutes,” the gaunt woman said to them before they began, “then there’ll be time for lots of questions at the end.”

The audience was predominantly middle-aged and female, as usual at these events, although Dougal Tarvit’s scathing presence had attracted a younger, mostly male, element. Martin’s typical au-dience was almost exclusively women who were older than he was. He looked for Jackson and saw him standing near the bar, straight backed with his hands in front as if he were going to stop a penalty shot. All he was missing was the black suit and the ear-piece to make him look like a presidential Secret Service agent. Jackson was standing very still, alert like an intelligent sheepdog, but his eyes roamed restlessly round the room. He had the reassuring demeanor of someone who knew what he was doing. Martin felt an absurd twinge of pride in Jackson’s professionalism. He was the right stuff.

“Nothing’s going to happen to you on my watch, Martin,” Jackson said laconically. Martin thought people said that only in films.

Betty-May read first, too fast and too breathless. The poor woman was stopped three times, twice by members of the audi-ence asking her to “speak up” or “speak more clearly” and once by a mobile phone suddenly playing the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth.

Tarvit, on the other hand, hammed it up like an old pro. His reading introduced the element of dramatic tension to his books that Martin hadn’t found on the flat page. He read for a long time, much longer than his allotted ten minutes, Martin glanced surreptitiously at his watch and found only naked wrist, he still wasn’t accustomed to it not being there. What had Richard Mott felt in the last minutes and seconds left to him? It didn’t bear thinking about. Why had the person who killed Richard Mott phoned him? Was he going to come back and kill him as well? Had he intended to kill him all along and only just realized that he got the wrong person?

Martin’s stomach growled so loudly that he was sure everyone must have heard it. It was a bit much to have to sit there and watch other people eat, especially when he’d had nothing so far today. Betty-May pressed a mint into his hand and gave him an encour-aging yellow-toothed smile.

Tarvit had the audience in thrall so that when he finished there was a collective sigh of deflation as if they wanted him to carry on. Please,no, Martin thought. The gaunt woman came onto the plat-form again and said, “That was wonderful, Dougal, a pretty hard act to follow, but I’m sure Alex Blake will try to live up to the challenge.” Thanks, Martin thought. “If you could cut it a bit short, Alex,” she murmured to him.

When it came to question time, hands shot up everywhere. Young people, student types, ran around with microphones, and Martin braced himself for the usual questions (Do you write with a pen or a computer? Do you have a daily routine?). Of course, he had once been on the other side of the platform, asking just those questions of the writers he admired. “Mr. Faulks, who have been your literary influences?” I was that reader, Martin thought glumly. He was beginning to wish he had never crossed over.

But to his horror there were a barrage of questions aimed at Martin’s newfound notoriety-“What does it feel like to be at the center of a real-life murder investigation?”“Has it put your own work in perspective?” “Was it true that Richard Mott was decapitated?” The gaunt woman stepped in anxiously. “Perhaps these aren’t appro-priate questions, and I really don’t think we should be talking about what is, after all, an ongoing police investigation. Let’s have some questions about the work, shall we? That’s what we’re here for, after all.”All the questions about the work were for Betty-May and Tarvit, not for Martin, except for a stout and insistent woman who wanted to know whether his faith helped his “creativity” or was it the other way round? (“Hard to say,” Martin said.)

The gaunt woman, Martin had no idea what her name was and now never would probably, clapped her hands and said, “Well, I’m sorry. That’s all we have time for, it’s been such a treat, but if you all want to make your way over to the signing tent, you will be able to buy copies of the books by our authors here and have them signed. So if you would just put your hands together, please…”

In the signing tent they sat at three identical tables. Every time an eager reader approached him, Martin felt a little knock of panic to his heart, imagining each newcomer reaching across the table as he signed his name and stabbing him with a knife, shooting him with a gun. Or, indeed, suddenly producing whatever weapon had been used to smash Richard Mott’s skull and bringing it down on top of his own. Of course, most of them were ladies of a certain age, half of them were wearing tweed, for heaven’s sake. Death Wore Tweed, Martin thought gloomily. It would be a good title for a Nina Riley book.

Jackson was standing behind him, in the same bodyguard pose as before, and after a while Martin began to relax into the rhythm of things. “And who shall I sign this to? To you? Or is it for someone else?”“Is that a ‘Clare’with an ‘i’or without an ‘i’?”“To Pam,with all best wishes,Alex Blake.”“And one for your friend Gloria? Certainly.”

When the last of the queue had dribbled away and they were making their way back to the “authors’ yurt,” Betty-May Heller caught his sleeve and said, “How about a crime writer for lunch?” Martin couldn’t help but notice the faint six o’clock shadow on her lip.

“I’m afraid he has to go,” Jackson said, taking hold of Martin’s elbow and steering him firmly away.

“Gosh,” Martin heard Betty-May Heller murmur, “your publi-cist is so strict.”