The Great Pursuit

Chapter 16

In Maine the Van der Hoogens' mansion was shuttered and shrouded and empty. As Baby had promised their departure had passed unnoticed. Leaving Piper alone in the dim twilight of the house she had simply walked into Bellsworth and bought a car, a second-hand estate.

'We'll ditch it in New York and buy something different,' she said as they drove south. 'We don't want to leave any trail behind us.'

Piper, lying on the floor in the back, did not share her confidence. 'That's all very well,' he grumbled, 'but they're still going to be looking for us when they don't find our bodies out in the bay. I mean it stands to reason.'

But Baby drove on unperturbed. 'They'll reckon we were washed out to sea by the tide,' she said. 'That's what would have happened if we had really drowned. Besides I heard in Bellsworth they picked up your passport and my jewels in the bags they found. They've got to believe we're dead. A woman like me doesn't part with pearls and diamonds until the good Lord sends for her.'

Piper lay on the floor and found some sense in this argument. Certainly Frensic & Futtle would believe he was dead and without his passport and his ledgers...'Did they find my notebooks too?' he asked.

'Didn't mention them but if they got your passport, and they did, it's even money your notebooks were with them.'

'I don't know what I'm going to do without my notebooks,' said Piper, 'they contained my life's work.'

He lay back and watched the tops of the trees flashing past and the blue sky beyond, and thought about his life's work. He would never finish Search for a Lost Childhood now. He would never be recognized as a literary genius. All his hopes had been destroyed in the blaze and its aftermath. He would go through what remained of his existence on earth posthumously famous as the author of Pause O Men for the Virgin. It was an intolerable thought and provoked in him a growing determination to put the record straight. There had to be some way of issuing a disclaimer. But disclaimers from beyond the grave were not easy to fabricate. He could hardly write to the Times Literary Supplement pointing out that he hadn't in fact written Pause but that its authorship had been foisted on to him by Frensic & Futtle for their own dubious ends. Letters signed 'the late Peter Piper'...No, that was definitely out. On the other hand it was insufferable to go down in literary history as a pornographer. Piper wrestled with the problem and finally fell asleep.

When he woke they had crossed the state line and were in Vermont. That night they booked into a small motel on the shores of Lake Champlain as Mr and Mrs Castorp. Baby signed the register while Piper carried two empty suitcases purloined from the Van der Hoogen mansion into the cabin.

'We'll have to buy some clothes and things tomorrow,' said Baby. But Piper was not concerned with such material details. He stood at the window staring out and tried to adjust himself to the extraordinary notion that to all intents and purposes he was married to this crazy woman.

'You realize we are never going to be able to separate,' he said at last.

'I don't see why not,' said Baby from the depths of the shower.

'Well for one simple reason I haven't got an identity and can't get a job,' said Piper, 'and for another you've got all the money and if either of us gets picked up by the police we'll go to prison for the rest of our lives.'

'You worry too much,' said Baby. 'This is the land of opportunity. We'll go some place nobody will think of looking and begin all over again.'

'Such as where?'

Baby emerged from the shower. 'Like the South. The Deep South,' she said. 'That's one place Hutchmeyer is never going to come. He's got this thing about the Ku Klux Klan. South of the Mason-Dixon he's never been.'

'And what the hell am I going to do in the Deep South?' asked Piper.

'You could always try your hand at writing Southern novels. Hutch may not go South but he certainly publishes a lot of novels about it. They usually have this man with a whip and a girl cringing on the cover. Surefire bestsellers.'

'Sounds just my sort of book,' said Piper grimly and took a shower himself.

'You could always write it under a pseudonym.'

'Thanks to you I'd bloody well have to.'

As night fell outside the cabin Piper crawled into bed and lay thinking about the future. In the twin bed beside him Baby sighed.

'It's great to be with a man who doesn't pee in the washbasin,' she murmured. Piper resisted the invitation without difficulty.

The next morning they moved on again, following back roads and driving slowly and always south. And always Piper's mind nagged away at the problem of how to resume his interrupted career.

In Scranton, where Baby traded the estate for a new Ford, Piper took the opportunity to buy two new ledgers, a bottle of Higgins Ink and an Esterbrook pen.

'If I can't do anything else I can at least keep a diary,' he explained to Baby.

'A diary? You don't even look at the landscape and we eat in McDonalds so what's to put in a diary?'

'I was thinking of writing it retrospectively. As a form of vindication. I would '

'Vindication? And how can you write a diary retrospectively?'

'Well I'd start with how I was approached by Frensic to come to the States and then work my way forward day by day with the voyage across and everything. That way it would look authentic.'

Baby slowed the car and pulled into a rest area. 'Let's just get this straight. You write the diary backwards...'

'Yes, I think it was April the 10th Frensic sent me the telegram...'

'Go on. You start 10 April and then what?'

'Well then I'd write how I didn't want to do it and how they persuaded me and promised to get Search published and everything.'

'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.

'It all seems most peculiar,' he said when she had finished. 'One can only suppose that whoever did it made a terrible mistake and got the wrong person. Now if Hutchmeyer had been murdered...'

'I would have been murdered too,' said Sonia through her tears.

'We must be grateful for small mercies,' said Frensic.

Next morning Sonia Futtle resumed her duties in the office. A fresh batch of animal stories had come in during her absence and while Frensic congratulated himself on his tactics and sat at his desk silently praying that there would be no further repercussions Sonia busied herself with Bernie the Beaver. It needed a bit of rewriting but the story had promise.