by Philip Kerr
Amalric tried to conceal a smile, which only encouraged me to show off a little.
‘Voltaire and Molière, he couldn’t get on with them at school, and as for history, he probably thinks Philippe Pétain was a male prostitute, or even something you say when you get cross. He’s easily amused with quite a short attention span so he reads in short intense bursts – maybe ten or fifteen minutes at a time, with a very furrowed brow, as if he’s actually doing something quite difficult, almost like he’s trying to solve a puzzle. He doesn’t read in the bath because he prefers a shower. He always rolls a book like a magazine, which probably irritates you; no one who loves books could ever treat a book the way he treats them. But then you probably don’t know that for this same reason all of Houston’s books are printed in a B or C format, with stitched binding which is more durable than just glue, so they don’t fall apart when you treat them like a football programme. He watches a lot of television – football, mostly – and he has an Xbox or a PlayStation at home, and there are certainly more than a few games he keeps on that iPhone of his: Temple Run, Extreme Road Trip – something like that. He lives out of the microwave and his favourite actors are Tom Cruise, Matt Damon and Brad Pitt. He prefers beach holidays to doing anything cultural. He never goes to art galleries or museums. He likes fast cars, big yachts, sleazy-looking women, but these are more of an aspiration than a reflection of his own life. He has a tattoo, smokes too much but still keeps himself fit. He doesn’t drink much and he’s certainly not interested in fine wine like you. His spelling and grammar leave a little to be desired. He never questions your orders or comes up with suggestions of his own, but he’s a useful man to have along in the same way that another policeman might bring a dog; after all, someone has to do the paperwork.’
‘Not bad. Not bad at all. But I doubt you got all of that from Houston’s research.’
‘Not all of it, perhaps; but most of it.’
‘He’s a good man. Policemen are like engineers, monsieur; sometimes you need a very small screwdriver and sometimes you need a wrench. Savigny is very good at applying torque to a problem.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’
‘It’s true, he did once buy the same book he read last year. And it was by John Houston. But instead of learning something from this experience, he continues to be one of Houston’s loyal readers. Which I have to say, strikes me as absurd. I confess I don’t understand why it is that Houston sells so many. The plots are all over the place and have no real point to them. The characters are one-dimensional and the dialogue absurd. To me they seem like books for people who have never read a book before.’
‘That’s right. That’s exactly what they are. It’s like what H. L. Mencken said: No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.’
Amalric nodded wearily. ‘I fear you’re right. But it’s the same with the French-speaking public. People seem more stupid than I remember.’ He shrugged. ‘In twenty years you wrote how many of his books?’
‘Almost thirty. One every nine months. Like giving birth you might say.’ I shrugged. ‘That’s what writing a book is like. A child to which you give birth. And like a child, some of them are more popular than others. I know I have a few favourites. The first one, most of all, I suppose.’
‘Didn’t it ever bother you?’ asked Savigny. ‘That Houston got the fame, the money and the kudos? By comparison with him you’re a failure, aren’t you?’
‘“What I aspired to be, And was not, comforts me: A brute I might have been, but would not sink i’ the scale.”’ I shrugged. ‘Robert Browning.’
‘But what about the money? The jet-set life in Monaco?’
‘Perhaps not all the money. I’ve been very well paid. In twenty years I’ve made almost two million pounds, before tax. True that’s not a fortune. In fact it’s chump change by Houston’s own elevated standard. But then again it’s more than I would ever have made as a copywriter. Plus, toward the end of my relationship with John I was also receiving a credit – an acknowledgement of my assistance, albeit in very small letters somewhere near the name of the cover designer and the name of the printer. And along the way I published a few more of my own novels. One or two of them were actually quite well reviewed. Working for John, I thought of it as a bit like an Arts Council grant; but for what he paid me I would have been obliged to go back to advertising and do a proper job writing commercials for toilet paper and lager. If you can call that a proper job. Oh, there are worse jobs than being an advertising copywriter, Chief Inspector; but I much prefer working from home. The commute is so much easier. And at least I had the illusion of being my own boss.’
Savigny returned to the table and for a moment he and Amalric spoke in French. It seemed that there were still no clues as to Houston’s whereabouts. The sergeant’s accent was warmer and friendlier than Amalric’s and I guessed he was from Marseille and that Amalric might originally hail from Paris.
I shrugged. ‘Like I said. If he doesn’t want to be found.’
‘You speak French?’ For a moment Amalric looked positively vulpine.
‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t say.’
‘You never asked. Besides, I think your English is better than my French.’
‘Thank you. I spent six months working with the FBI in Washington.’
‘How did that work out?’
‘Fascinating. I liked Washington. I like Americans. It’s the food I had a problem with. There’s so much of it. And so very little that’s any good. I must be one of the few people ever to live in the United States who ended up losing weight.’
I smiled. ‘They do like their chow.’
‘Your arrangement with Houston? How did that work?’
‘You might say that I was John’s maître d’. The head writer. I helped to manage the atelier. That’s what John called us – the people who worked in his ship’s boiler room – although I usually thought of it as a bit like the Pequod, because we were such a pagan bunch of misfits. At its peak we were producing four or five new books a year. And John was making between eighty and a hundred million dollars per annum.’
‘That much?’ Savigny whistled quietly. ‘Just from writing books?’
I nodded.
‘Incredible; perhaps I should write a novel about the Sûreté Publique,’ said Savigny. ‘In Monaco.’
‘I think an Italian author already did,’ I said. ‘Not that something like that should ever stop you, Sergeant. Lots of cops become writers: Joseph Wambaugh for one. And some of the most successful writers steal their best ideas from other writers. The book world calls that kind of thing an hommage. But mostly it’s downright theft. It happens every day and no one ever goes to prison for it.’
‘Je prends mon propre partout où je trouve,’ said Amalric.
‘I believe you’ve already met John’s agent, Hereward Jones. A year or so ago he negotiated a fifteen-book, world English rights deal with VVL – that’s John’s US publishers, Veni, Vidi, Legi – which the Wall Street Journal reported was worth $170 million. It’s a little hard to connect this with how things were in publishing twenty years ago. When John told his then UK publishers what he was planning to do – write and publish more than one new book a year – they were appalled. It’s said they actually thought of ending his contract there and then. At least they did until they saw the sales of his first book. Before that moment they had been living in a little Bloomsbury bubble with writers who were rather unworldly Angus Wilson types who smoked pipes, and wore tweedy jackets with leather elbows. They turned out a book every couple of years and generally did what they were told. Yes, there were a few writers like Jeffrey Archer and Dick Francis who were a bit more commercially minded than the rest of the field, but John Houston was really the first writer to come along and tell them that he was first and foremost a businessman whose business was writing and selling books.
‘He came up with the stories, and we, his collaborators, wrote the books. He pref
erred having English writers. For one thing he said we were cheaper than Americans. And for another he said he didn’t have to explain his jokes to us. For all of John’s love affair with America he thought the English easier to edit and more in awe of his power and wealth, he’d say, in a way that Americans never are. Over the years the ghost-writers came and went, with some working out more successfully than the others. One or two went on to be quite successful in their own right: C. Boxer Revell, for one and Thomas Chenevix for another – although Chenevix himself denies he was ever contracted to write one of Houston’s books and is inclined to sue anyone who says he did. They hate each other and famously came to blows in a London club called The Groucho with John punching Tom Chenevix down a flight of stairs; the police were called and both men were cautioned.’
‘What was the fight about? And when?’
‘Four years ago? Five? John rejected Chenevix’s manuscript. You see the way John usually works is that he sees material every four weeks. Like maybe ten or fifteen chapters. Chenevix had missed one of those meetings and had eight weeks’ worth of work that John rejected out of hand, which Chenevix – who has a very high opinion of his writing – took very personally. He called John all sorts of names and took a swing at him. More than one if the reports are correct. Pissed probably – Chenevix, I mean. John never drank very much. I’ve never seen him drunk, at any rate.’
‘This man, Chenevix. I should like to speak to him.’
‘I believe he lives in France. Somewhere in Provence. But I couldn’t tell you where. You could ask his publishers – HarperCollins. They’d probably know.’ I shrugged. ‘That was probably the last time John came to London to meet someone from the team. Soon after that he moved to Monaco and opened the Houston office in Paris. That’s what he called it. In fact, it wasn’t an office but a rented house in the western suburbs of Neuilly-sur-Seine – a pretty fabulous sort of place. Exquisitely furnished. Beautiful pictures.’ I frowned. ‘With one insightful exception.’
‘Yes?’
‘In the conference room where we had our meetings there was a large framed photograph of lots of chimpanzees in a library; all of the chimps were seated at desktop computers, as if they were writing something. John had seen the original – which was by a photographer called Louis Psihoyos – in National Geographic magazine, as the illustration for a feature about the information revolution. One or two of us thought it was insulting but John thought it was very funny. I think he meant that it should remind those of us who were part of the atelier of our true status in the Houston publishing empire. And it did. Certainly he used to think of us like his children and, in the case of some of his writers, that wasn’t so very wide of the mark. Some of these characters need careful handling. But John was good at that. It was only Chenevix who fell out with him badly. And perhaps Mike Munns, who also hit him.’
‘This was at the Houston office?’
‘Yes. Me, I’d have fired him. But Houston showed great restraint and kept him on. He said that writers are passionate and that sometimes you have to respect that.’
I paused and drank some more of the excellent Burgundy. The bottle was empty and Amalric was already beckoning another from the sommelier. I had to hand it to Amalric, he was very different from the kind of policemen we were used to in London. It’s not many cops who have a taste for Vosne-Romanée and Hermès ties, and who can quote Molière and Voltaire.
‘Tell me more about the Houston office,’ he said.
‘You mean before he closed it down?’
Amalric nodded; Savigny checked the Marantz recorder and then replaced it on the table.
‘At the Houston office he employed a couple of secretaries – both English and rather fetching – and a couple of webmasters, who were Dutch. They did all the things that VVL didn’t do for John; which isn’t much. But he liked to keep a close eye on his public image. Whenever John wanted a meeting with one of the writers, which was probably once a fortnight, we would get the Eurostar to Paris – standard-class, John could be a tightwad with the expenses like that – and meet him there; he would drive up from Monaco, or from some location where he’d been doing research for a book, in his latest supercar. A Lamborghini. A Ferrari. An Aston Martin. You name it, John drove it. Usually he drove back to Monaco in a different car from the one he’d arrived in. That was part of the fun. John liked to have fun. And he loved that drive. He used to see how fast he could do it, of course, and try to beat his previous record. I think eight hours was about the record. I did that drive with him a couple of times and it scared the shit out of me. He tended to use the plane only to fly straight to London, or to Corfu where he had a place. Anyway, we would meet him – sometimes there were two or three of us there at the one time. He would read through what we’d written, making notes, and we’d wait for his comments, a little anxiously. It was like being back at Cambridge, for your supervisor’s assessment of an essay you’d written. If he was pleased with your progress he would take you out to lunch or dinner. Somewhere expensive. La Grande Cascade, Lapérouse, Alain Ducasse, La Tour d’Argent. John liked his food almost as much as he liked his fast cars. You could always tell just how much he liked what you’d written by the price of the wine he ordered.
‘At other times, when he was too busy to come to Paris, or had used up his tax-free visits – John was very scrupulous like that – I, or one of the others, would fly to Nice, hire a car and drive to Monaco for a meeting there.’
‘Which is why you had to stay in Beausoleil.’
I nodded. ‘Sometimes he went to London from Paris, on the Eurostar. To see his children. He was close to them. Tried his very best for them. But quite frankly, they’re a shiftless, idle lot. Sometimes I look at them and think how lucky I am that I don’t have any kids myself. John’s children have always got their hands out for something. The ex-wives aren’t much better. I once heard John lament that he had brought up the largest family with the smallest disposition for doing anything for themselves. In that respect at least he’s rather like Charles Dickens, whose sons all inherited their grandfather’s Micawberish trouble in handling their finances. But John has always tried his best for them. They all had trusts and flats and cars, and a few had expensive drug habits, too. For example, his eldest son, Travis, got a place to study history at Queens’ College, Cambridge; but after a failed career as a rock star he’s now in rehab at some place on the island of Antigua founded by Eric Clapton that costs $24,000 a month. He’s been there for a while now. All paid for by his pa.’
‘So, what went wrong?’ asked Savigny. ‘Why did he decide to stop writing books?’
‘He didn’t,’ I said. ‘He just decided to stop producing as many. To change his whole modus operandi.’
‘All right,’ said Savigny. ‘Why did he do that? Give up on the big money. His agent said Houston just walked away from being the richest writer in the world. He said he thought that Monsieur Houston had suffered a midlife crisis, perhaps.’
I laughed. ‘I’m afraid John was a little too old for one of those. If it comes to that, so am I.’
‘Or a nervous breakdown,’ suggested the sergeant.
I shook my head. ‘That’s another cute explanation. People like the easy explanations that you can fit into a magazine headline. It restores a sense of order in the universe to think that things can be so easily explained philosophically, I tend to adhere to the A. A. Milne explanation of the universe which goes something like this: “Rabbit’s clever,” said Pooh thoughtfully. “Yes,” said Piglet, “Rabbit’s clever.” “And he has a brain.” “Yes,” said Piglet. “Rabbit has a brain.” There was a long silence. “I suppose,” said Pooh, “that that’s why he never understands anything.”’
Savigny was looking blank but Amalric was smiling. ‘That’s wonderful,’ he said.
‘With all due respect to Hereward Jones, it’s more complicated than a midlife crisis or a nervous breakdown.’ I shrugged. ‘John is a complicated man. And you might say that it was an exist
ential choice, although I hesitate to argue such a thing before two Frenchmen.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Savigny.
‘I have to go to the bathroom, first.’
*
On my way to the men’s room in Claridge’s I checked my phone for text messages and thought a little about what I had just said and tried to remember exactly what John had told me before telling everyone else that he was closing the atelier. I wanted to get it right for the cops; as Raymond Chandler might have said in The Long Goodbye – more realistically, perhaps – it’s advisable not to invent too much when you are talking to them.
I drank some water from the tap – quite a lot – to help keep my head clear; I wouldn’t have put it past the wily Chief Inspector to try to loosen my tongue with fine wine. A mixture of Louis Roederer and Vosne-Romanée was an excellent way of doing it, too; what writer could ever have resisted something as subtle as that? And looking like a fox as much as he did, I didn’t doubt that Chief Inspector Amalric could probably smell a lie with almost as much certainty as he would recognize the bouquet of a good red. Two bottles of hundred-quid Burgundy were probably a much more cost-effective means of conducting an interview than paying someone to operate a polygraph machine.
I drank some more water and then washed my face.
It wasn’t that I was lying – not exactly – but then I’d hardly been honest either because, in spite of what I had told the Chief Inspector, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that before very long John Houston would telephone me; nor did I have any doubt that I would never have betrayed him to the Monty cops.