by Peter Corris
‘You’re a humorist.’
‘I wanted to see if I could make you smile.’
‘You failed.’
‘I’m a detective, here to see Mr Lambert. Smile at that.’
She didn’t, but she did react. ‘Oh, yes. About the Mountain manuscript; please go through there. Mr Lambert’s waiting.’
She pointed a long, thin, grey arm at the apparently blank wall at the end of the room but I didn’t obey. I leaned close down to her, not expecting any perfume and not getting any. ‘Manuscript?’ I said.
‘Oh, God, I’m talking out of turn. Please see Mr Lambert. He’ll explain everything.’
I straightened up and peered at the wall. ‘I’ve been waiting all my life for someone who could explain everything.’
‘Please!’
Two pleases was urgent stuff from the likes of her; I followed her stabbing finger, and after walking across a few thousand dollars’ worth of carpet paid for by the authors whose books I passed, I found a door discreetly hidden in the wall. I knocked and Lambert called out: ‘Come in!’ as if I was David Williamson come to sign up for life. He was half way across his office towards the door by the time I got it open. His hand came out so fast I nearly ducked and countered.
‘Mr Hardy, come in, come in.’ We shook hands and he practically donated his to me. He stuck his head through the open door and asked the woman behind the desk to bring us some coffee. Lambert’s office was a smaller version of the other room: bearded faces gazed out from dust jackets, review headlines announced biting wit and experimental irony.
Lambert was a medium-sized man with a thick waist and lank hair that was greying and thinning as if there was a race on to make him either white or bald. He didn’t help matters by wearing a spotted bow tie and a patterned vest that had food and drink stains on it. He ushered me into a chair, scooted behind his desk and plopped his glasses down in front of him. The lenses were heavily smudged.
‘Your phone call intrigued me, Mr Hardy, I must say.’
‘So I see. What’s the name of the woman outside?’
‘Maud.’
‘I’d never have guessed that. She’s very jumpy, and so are you.’
To prove he wasn’t jumpy he picked up his glasses and put them on. Then he took them off again. Before he could demonstrate any more sang froid. Maud came in with a silver tray on which sat china cups and bowls and a big pot of coffee. As she was pouring, I recalled that I’d had mainly whisky for dinner and no breakfast.
‘Would you have a biscuit or anything about?’ I said. ‘I haven’t eaten in quite a while.’ I took a thirsty slurp of the coffee. It always impresses people to tell them you haven’t eaten; it makes you look busier than them. Lambert reacted as if he would’ve sent out for steak and eggs.
‘I’m quite sure we’d have something. Could you see to it, Maud?’
Maud said she would, and I drained my cup and poured another, adding sugar and stirring. Lambert sipped his and waited. He used a napkin to wipe his glasses and only succeeded in spreading the goo around. Maud trotted back in with a plate of ginger nuts and I had two dipped and up to the mouth before she reached the door
I got the biscuits down before I started talking. ‘Bill Mountain’s writing again; he’s sent you something that’s got you all excited-a novel?’
He nodded, then he shook his head. ‘A synopsis,’ he breathed, ‘an absolutely brilliant outline of a sure-fire best seller. Amazing!’
I reached across the desk for the pot and Lambert took his bum off the seat to push it towards me; he’d have given me the pot and the tray if I’d asked for them.
‘You seem surprised that he could write a book,’ I said.
Lambert sipped his milky coffee and spilled some biscuit crumbs down his vest. ‘I thought he was washed up except for TV writing, and he seemed to be losing his grip on that-missing deadlines, messing around with the characters. He’s a terrible drinker.’
‘Was,’ I said. ‘He’s stopped.’
‘I know.’
‘How d’you know? I found out from his sister in Melbourne a couple of days ago. The news couldn’t be all over Sydney yet.’
He looked at me, and suddenly jerked his head half around. I realised that he’d done it before; it was a nervous mannerism, but it made it look as if he was afraid someone was going to grab him and send him back to New Zealand. He didn’t look particularly smart, but he was good at keeping his mouth shut. Another swallow of coffee and the penny dropped.
‘I get it. He talks about drying-out in the synopsis. The book’s autobiographical.’
He nodded.
‘Jesus, does a man get killed up in the mountains? Does the hero buy smack in Marseilles’?’
More nods.
‘This is important, Mr Lambert. If you have any way of contacting him you must tell me. His life’s in danger.’ Nothing changed in Lambert’s expression and I realised that it was like telling someone about a film they’d already seen. ‘You know that.’
He put some more fingerprints on the lenses of his glasses. ‘The protagonist speculates about the retribution that awaits him-compelling stuff.’
‘How does it end?’
He lay back in his chair. His head tilted and I could see the dark bags of sleep debt under his eyes. He pulled at the silly bow tie and it came undone untidily down the front of his shirt.
‘Wouldn’t have a cigarette, would you?’ he said.
‘I gave it up.’
‘So did I, years ago when I first came here. I was so glad to be here. I felt 1 could do without, them and I did, until now. I don’t know how it ends-the synopsis doesn’t end. He runs the story on to about… I’m guessing here, five chapters from the end? It’s a masterly piece of work… I’ve read thousands… I could get, a quarter of a million advance from a top publisher, maybe more.’
Apparently I was expected to be impressed by the sum of money. I was. I gave the sort of nod you give to a quarter of a million bucks.
‘All right, Mr Hardy, I’ve put you in the picture. What’s your interest?’
‘I was hired by the owner of the used car firm.’
It was as if we were speaking in a code, mutually mastered. ‘I see.’
‘I’ve met some people connected with the organisation behind the car thefts.’
‘Rough?’
‘Pretty rough. The honours are all their way at the moment.’ I realised that I couldn’t tell Lambert too much, couldn’t tell him, for example, that I’d sell his writer in a flash to get Erica back.
‘Mountain describes them as killers; is he exaggerating?’
I thought about it. ‘Does he describe himself as a killer?’
‘The protagonist kills a man in self-defence.’
‘Uh huh, well, I don’t know of anyone they’ve killed. There’re two men in a bad way in hospital who offended them, and they’d have done the same or worse to me if it had turned out that way. They certainly intend to kill Mountain.’ I threw that in to keep Lambert on his toes-I assumed that a synopsis is worthless. I knew that dead men don’t write novels.
‘If you think you can prevent that I’ll be happy to co-operate in any way. Funds are not a problem.’
‘I’m trying. Why haven’t you gone to the police?’
‘The outline came in the post with a note in which Mountain said he would cease to be my client if I called the police into the matter at any point. Literary agents have no contracts with their clients, you know. It’s a gentleman’s arrangement, cancellable by either party, at any time.’
‘That right? Sounds a bit like my work. You’re on ten per cent, are you?’
‘Dearly earned, believe me.’
‘Okay. Well, I’ll have to see the note and the outline, of course, and I’ll take some more coffee if you’ve got it.’
He jerked his head over his shoulder and fiddled with his glasses.
‘No more coffee?’
‘Of course there’s more coffee. It’s letting
you see the synopsis…’
‘Anything to help-your very words.’
‘I don’t want it shown about. A lot of the impact would depend on the novelty, the element of surprise…’
‘You’re beginning to worry me, Mr Lambert. I wouldn’t send the thing to Random House. All I want is to find Mountain; I have to see what he’s written. That’s flat!’
‘I don’t know.’
He looked so perturbed that I had to soften the blow a little. ‘Would you like me to say that we’ve got a gentleman’s agreement that I’ll keep the thing totally confidential?”
‘That would help.’
He nodded. I stacked the cups on the tray, picked it up and went to the door. Maud had put a chair within earshot of the door and was doing some filing with the antennae fully extended. She started when I opened the door.
‘It’s okay,’ I said. ‘Everybody’s interested. Could you let us have some more coffee, please?’
She took the tray and headed towards wherever they kept the Andronicus. Lambert had got up from his desk and was turning a key in a filing cabinet lock. He pulled out a drawer, extracted a manila folder and slid it across the desk towards me. I’d expected him to make more of a ritual of it. I opened the folder and found a stack of A4 size photocopy sheets. I closed the cover.
‘This is a photocopy, I want to see the original.’
‘Why?’
I leaned forward and whispered. ‘Because there might be something written on the backs of the sheets.’
‘I didn’t think of that.’ Back to the filing cabinet, out with the key, twiddle, twiddle, scrape and another folder appeared. The typeface was the same as on Erica’s card and there were probably signs of the same ‘fist’ and the identical displacement of the ‘e’ if you cared for those sorts of things. I looked at the backs of the sheets, but there was nothing on them. I hadn’t expected anything, but you never know. Lambert had stood, hovering, with his hands out, and I gave the folder back.
‘Thanks. I’d like to see the note, too.’
Maud came in with the coffee and I smiled at her. She looked at me in awe and I realised that it was because I was holding a copy of it in my hands. I smiled at her and she smiled back. All I needed was something worth a quarter of a million and she was a pushover.
Lambert watched her walk out and passed me the note. It was brief and simple; I asked Lambert for a copy of it and he dug one out. We both swilled down a cup of coffee. I tapped the edges of the paper straight in the folder and got up.
Lambert looked alarmed. ‘Ah,’ he said. The head flicked left.
‘Yes?’
‘Aren’t you going to read it now? It’s not long. Tell me what you think…?’
‘Haven’t you read any books? I need a blonde, a bottle and a dark room.’
He shook his head and sighed.
‘Don’t worry, Mr Lambert, look on the bright side.’ I moved to the door.
‘And what’s that?’
‘You’ve got other clients.’
I heard his groan through the closed door.
17
It was hard work appearing confident to Lambert. If he’d known how desperate things really were, he’d probably have risked Mountain’s ire by calling in the cops; and if he really knew his business, he could have made a deal with any other agent Mountain might defect to. That sort of thinking made me wonder what Mountain would do if he knew Erica was a hostage-maybe he’d do nothing, maybe he’d just write about it, adjusting his program whatever that was, or maybe it would send him crazier than he was already. Mere speculation. I had no way of telling him about it, and if he was close enough to the action to know I’d be running into him soon.
On the drive back to Glebe, with the folder on the seat beside me, I realised that I hadn’t asked Lambert about the delivery or posting of the outline. There might have been something to learn from postmarks or dates. Probably not, but I clearly wasn’t at the top of my form. I had the bad feeling of being manipulated by events, and a worse one of being flat out of ideas.
I had had the sense to look for a tail on the drive to Haddington in case Grey thought I was about to do something decisive and I checked again on the way back. No tail. I didn’t like the idea of Grey spooking Lambert into handing over the synopsis, and it would have been a pity to let Peroni get to work on the bone china.
The cat was out, the letter box was empty, there were no dishes to wash-there was no excuse for delaying an inspection of Bill Mountain’s opus, or outline of opus. I made myself a sandwich and took it, the folder and a flagon of wine out into the imitation of a backyard. Hilde had introduced some plants and done something with bricks and planks of wood, which meant that there was somewhere to sit out there other than on the toilet which had been my pre-Hilde perch. A couple of the plants looked sick as if they missed Hilde too. The afternoon sun was warm; I took off my shirt, poured some wine and got to work.
The note was unremarkable; Mountain was a neat, accurate typist:
Dear Keith,
This synopsis will give you a cockstand. The first draft is well underway; I’m not drinking and I’m writing thousands of words a day. Read it, talk to publishers, but don’t show it to anyone. Put together the best deal you can. Say one word to the police and this is all you’ll ever see of it. Ten per cent of zero is zero. Do it the way I say. I’ll be in touch. yrs.
The signature was a scrawled ‘B’. I drank some wine, ate some sandwich and began to read the typescript.
I’m not the fastest reader in the world, and synopses are not the easiest things to read. I’d had to plough through a lot of them in my brief career as a law student and I never found them much fun. It took me an hour and several glasses of wine to work through Mountain’s forty pages. When I’d finished I was sitting in shadow and should have been cold, but I didn’t notice. The book was a knock-out.
Here and there Mountain had inserted short passages of dialogue and descriptive bits among the bare bones of the story. To my jaded and untutored eye the writing seemed crisp and dramatic but unobtrusive. It wouldn’t hold up the action, and there was plenty of that. The protagonist, as Lambert had called him, was a thinly-disguised version of Mountain himself, except that he was a film-writer, not a TV hack. More marketable, see, right off the bat. His name was Morgan Shaw. This writer gets drawn into the car-stealing business more thoroughly than he wanted. Initially, he was just doing some research for a script. Shaw writes the movie in scene break-down form as he lives it-including the taping of the instructions and the filming of the car pick-up. He gets addicted to the danger and baits his employers by leaving a taped message himself in the locker at Central Railway, where he picks up the papers that secure him the Audi.
In Mountain’s book there was to be a long chapter on the killing at Blackheath where Morgan Shaw had gone to indulge his two great weaknesses-women and booze. The killing was in some way cathartic.
All this, except the catharsis, was pretty familiar territory, but a new element entered the story-a journalist whom Shaw contacts to get information about heroin in Sydney. This character, given the name of Andrew Hope by Mountain, is full bottle on the subject, and the source of technical detail on the opium poppy, processing and marketing, as well as local colour, a la Forsythe and Elegant. The travel to Marseilles, Nice and along the Riviera would be there as a strong selling point, and a harrowing ‘lost weekend’ section where the writer kicks the booze.
I found myself reading and re-reading passages with interest and enjoyment. Mountain had made Morgan Shaw a more attractive character than himself, wittier and more compassionate. Ruthless and capable too, but the Mountain I knew and disliked seemed to be scoring pretty high on those counts. The sample scenes from the movie included in the outline were dramatic and direct, and held the thing together. Another selling point-it was half way to being a movie already.
The most alarming thing was that the manuscript ended with Shaw back in Sydney with a large supply of pure hero
in and cocaine and some useful contacts. He has a plan to establish a drug empire and use the profits to fund pornographic films, rock bands and counter-culture communes. But the writer himself becomes addicted to heroin very quickly, and the signs were of a disintegration of some kind being held together by fantasy. The last scene broached a new subject:
‘He looked at the heroin for a long time. There was enough for him to make his exit through a tunnel of warm pleasure. He’d have time to sit in a padded chair and say a long, sweet goodbye and wait for the flash that would mean the doors to the tunnel were opening.’
The warm pleasure was being imparted by various women whom Mountain must have conjured up partly from his imagination and partly, if Erica had it right, from memory. At the point where the outline broke off, our Morgan had a lot of irons in the fire; he was plotting the set-up of his network, still baiting the car thieves with copies of false documents and real tapes, and playing around with the idea of suicide. Lambert, reading the stuff as autobiographical, must have been able to hear his knees knock. His ten per cent couldn’t have seemed very safe.
I flicked through the pages looking for clues, slips, conscious or unconscious signposts to where Mountain might be. No luck. Place names were potent and well-chosen, but fictitious. The typewriter he was using had a correcting function, so that if he had had second thoughts about identifying places too closely and made changes there was no record of it in the typescript. It was like reading a deposition by someone who had sworn to tell the truth but had no inhibitions about committing perjury. On the last page, Shaw was in a hotel not far from the heart of a major city, which could mean that Mountain was in a private house somewhere in the backblocks.
I made a list of the apparently important things in the manuscript, and checked it against other information I had. Nothing happened; there were confirmations of the obvious things like the alcohol cure and the heroin purchase, but nothing on the movements or locations or the suicide idea. Small comfort in that. Next I listed the characters, and entered the few remarks and descriptions allotted them in the synopsis. This amounted to little more than a thumbnail sketch in most cases, but provided more confirmation. Mai was recognisably there as ‘Eddie’, the writer’s first contact with the criminal world; poor Miss Mountain was there, her fragile, suburban respectability brutally etched. Other characters were either heavily disguised or fictitious but the portrait of the journalist, Andrew Hope, rang some bells. My notes on him read: Andrew Hope, 35, dark, heavy build, journalist, ex-football player, practical, joker, gambler, experimental drug user.