Stained Glass

by Ralph McInerny

  He took a deep breath, suppressing a sigh. Just think of what his depression would be if it were not for the book of Angelo Menotti’s windows. Then, before his spirits could rise, he had a terrible vision. A magnificent book, a superlative book, a book that any knowledgeable person would praise, and there it languished on the shelf like these copies of Sacred Art.

  Someone beside him reached out and took a copy of Sacred Art. Carl was frozen in place, scarcely breathing. Would the same hand return the copy to its nine companions? There was the sound of tearing, and Carl turned. The man was removing the shrink-wrap from the magazine.

  “Now you’ll have to buy it,” Carl said, hardly recognizing his own voice.

  “I intend to.” The man was turning the pages. “I’ve never seen this before. It seems excellent all around.”

  “I am the editor,” Carl said. At least he formed the words, but they issued silently from his constricted throat. “And publisher.” These words were audible.

  “I beg your pardon?

  The young man seemed more amused than put off by Carl’s incomplete sentence.

  “I said I am the editor and publisher.”

  “Here to monitor sales?” An engaging smile. The young man reminded Carl of a Leonardo sketch.

  Carl laughed. “That’s right, and yours is the first.”

  “Let me pay for this and give you a cup of coffee.”

  Watching the man hand over his credit card, then sign the slip and take the magazine, Carl’s spirits rose.

  The young man put Carl at a table and then went to fetch the coffee. He had left the issue of Sacred Art on the table. Carl turned it so passersby could see it. The man returned with their coffee.

  “I am Carl Borloff.” He held out his hand.

  Before taking it, the man sat, opened the cover of the magazine, and checked. “How do I know you are Carl Barloff? Perhaps you lurk here impersonating editors.” He said it so gently, it would have been impossible to take offense.

  Carl got out his driver’s license and handed it to the man. After a moment, they were shaking hands.

  “And you are?” Carl asked.

  “You can call me Charles Ruskin. Actually, I am here on the same mission as you.”

  “How is that?”

  “I am a publisher, and I’m gratified to say that our entire allotment has been sold.”

  “Congratulations.”

  Charles Ruskin picked up the copy of Carl’s magazine and might have been weighing it in his hand. “This excellent publication represents perhaps ten percent of the task. Warehouses are full of wonderful books, books that will never have readers. At least the copies in the warehouse won’t. Other books, books of far less ambition and accomplishment, fly off the shelves, in the phrase. What is the difference?”

  “Luck?”

  Ruskin nodded. “Of course luck is a factor, it always is. There is good and bad luck, though. It is unwise to trust to luck in either of its forms. The artist will find it vulgar, the poet winces, but novelists as a rule are less likely to fight the truth that ninety percent of their success is due to salesmanship. Hustling, as they say, to save their pride. A small example. Your magazine sits on a shelf among how many other competing publications? Only a discerning eye would notice it.” He smiled away the autobiographical implication. “My books are in display cases in the aisle, impossible not to notice and, as I have just gratefully learned, and not for the first time, impossible not to buy.”

  “Are you located in the Chicago area?”

  “In the area, yes.”

  “What is the name of your firm?”

  “Argyle House.” He studied Carl, his blue eyes twinkling. “Don’t say you’ve heard of it.”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t.”

  “That is because there is no need to know the publisher. The publisher is selling not himself but his authors. Perhaps you find all this irrelevant to your own efforts?”

  Carl thought for a moment. What harm could there be in telling this man? He was a publisher; he seemed to be immersed in the world of books. “I am preparing a book myself.”

  If he had expected surprise, if he had imagined delight, if he had sought for interest, he would have been sorely disappointed. Ruskin looked away. “I suspect that every other customer in this store has a similar project.”

  “Mine is subsidized. It will be done and it will be published.”

  Ruskin sat back with a pensive expression. He turned over the copy of Sacred Art. Then he smiled. “The Devere Foundation!”

  “How did you know?”

  “I make it a practice to study the reports from foundations. Yes, yes, I remember the item. I thought your name was familiar. Tell me about it.”

  Carl hunched over the table, and words poured from him. Suddenly he was eloquent, authoritative, a man who knew exactly what he was talking about. He had Ruskin’s undivided interest now. No need to conceal the amount of the grant that Jane Devere had given him. This man would already know. Carl spoke of his interviews with possible photographers, his visits to pastors in whose churches Menotti windows were to be found.

  “I hope you don’t intend to publish it yourself.”

  “I haven’t gotten that far yet.”

  “A self-published book, even if the self is an entity such as this.” Again he lifted the copy of Sacred Art from the table. “A self-published book is like a letter to oneself. Even so special a publication as you no doubt plan becomes, when you are done, a commodity. Then other skills and expertise must be called into play. Let me recommend an exercise. Go to the section of remaindered books and look at all the art books there. You will find many excellently done, yet there they are, discounted, humbly asking to be taken for a pittance. That need not have been.”

  “Has Argyle House ever published art books?”

  “If we had, I can assure you they would not end up as remaindered books.” He sipped his coffee. “Each of our products—no, that is an exaggeration. Put it this way, the majority of our products represent ventures into territory we have never before occupied. The correct answer to your question as to whether we have published art books would be, not yet.”

  A silence fell over the table. The conversation had reached a critical point. Ruskin took out his billfold and extracted a card, which he handed to Carl, rising as he did so. “I am so delighted to have met you.”

  Carl half rose, but Ruskin had turned and started away. “Wait. You forgot this,” Carl said urgently.

  “Good heavens!” Rudolph cried, taking the copy of Sacred Art. “Our conversation has distracted me.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Carl still sat at the table, holding Ruskin’s card. Kenosha? Well what difference did that make, he chided himself. Once publishers had clustered in New York or elsewhere on the East Coast. Now they were scattered across the country. What a tremendous piece of luck. Of course, Ruskin had not made any overt remark, but it seemed clear that he could become interested in the Menotti book.

  His coffee had cooled. He put down the container. Then dark thoughts came. How accidental had his meeting with Ruskin been? The man had known of the Devere grant. Had he read it with the eye of a predator? Even to formulate the thought was sufficient to dismiss it. So far as Ruskin knew they might never meet again.

  The next time they met was in Kenosha. “Welcome to Argyle House,” Charles said. “You see, it actually is a house. Unlike Random House.”

  They went around a corner of the porch to another entrance. The interior was humble, but there were books everywhere and piles of what must be manuscripts that would compete for the interest of the publisher. Charles led him to a desk where a woman sat. A nameplate before her read J. J. RUDOLPH. She smiled away apparent annoyance at being interrupted. Charles said, “And this is Jo Jo. Jo Jo, did I mention running into Carl Borloff in a Chicago bookstore?”

  “The art book?” She was perhaps fifty years of age, heavyset, her hair cut closely to her head. Large liquid eyes looked up at him ov
er her half-glasses. “I have yet to do an art book.”

  16

  Only Madeline Schutz knew how anonymous a bestselling author could be. Her novels with their shiny glitzy covers beckoned to travelers in every airport of the nation, they were a staple of the book displays in supermarkets, she herself had seem them, dog-eared and supple as an evangelist’s Bible, in the hands of dreamy-eyed youths of all ages, but no one made a connection between her and the M. X. Schutz on those covers. They were paperback originals, published by a small firm in Kenosha that decided to take a plunge into science fiction. They had yet to get more than a perfunctory notice in Publishers Weekly. The longest review she had ever had, of the third of the Empyrean Chronicles, Miranda and the Moonlet, had been in a Nashville paper, and the reviewer spent most of the time discussing an alternative plot. Perhaps if her high sales had spelled wealth, Madeline could have been more philosophical about this, but the contract she had signed with Argyle House—for ten books—had been carefully drawn, and Madeline received only a small share of what must be the enormous profits.

  At the time, she had been so eager to get into print, to be a published author, that she had hardly glanced at the contract before signing and sending it back to Kenosha lest the publisher change his mind. It had been a sacred moment when she held a copy of the first chronicle in her hand and felt that her dreams had at last been realized. A year later, after she had sent in the second chronicle, she had yet to receive a royalty report. She wrote a timid letter of inquiry and received a phone call in return. J. J. Rudolph turned out to be a woman, and she was effusive with her praise. Madeline was assured that her series had surpassed all the expectations of the house. She asked when she would receive her royalties. There was a long pause.

  “Do you have a copy of your contract there, Madeline?”

  “Should I get it?”

  “No need for that if you can remember the main points. Your royalties will be based on the second and later printings.”

  “Not on the first?”

  Ms. Rudolph was patient. She outlined for Madeline the risks a publisher took in launching a series aimed eventually at ten volumes. Placing titles with the distributors who alone could make or break a book was not the work of a summer day. “You realize that your books are available everywhere.”

  “Yes, I know that.”

  “You will be delighted to learn that arrangements are being made for second printings of both the first and second chronicles.”

  “How many copies are there in the first printings?”

  “Three hundred thousand! You can imagine what that costs us.”

  “I don’t seem to be on Amazon.com or the other online book sites.”

  “We have had our disagreements. Our board has voted not to do business with them.”

  “Will the second printings be as large?”

  “One hundred thousand copies each.”

  Later Madeline could not remember how the conversation had ended. After hanging up, she had got out her contract with Argyle House and for the first time read it carefully. She could not believe she had signed such an agreement. No, that wasn’t true. She could very easily believe it. At that point in her career, she would have paid to get her book in print. A week after her phone call, she received a check for twenty thousand dollars, which was described as an advance against royalties for the second and later printings of the first two chronicles. Madeline doodled on a pad trying to establish what her royalty on one hundred thousand copies would be. Her royalty was 10 percent but, she noticed, not of the cover price of the novel but of the net earnings of Argyle House. J. J. Rudolph responded to her next letter promptly and briefly. There was a 60 percent markup on her titles. Madeline joined the Authors Guild and immediately sought their advice on her arrangements with Argyle House. The answer was not comforting.

  She was assured that most contracts were eminently fair to authors, but there were rare exceptions, and, alas, Argyle House was one of them. Hers was not the first complaint they had received. If she had sought advice before signing the contract, she would have been advised to take her work to another publisher.

  Another publisher! How many had turned her down before that bright day when Argyle House had expressed interest in her work. The tragic truth was that even now, knowing what she did, having received the letter from the guild, she would have gone ahead and signed the contract.

  She had always written quickly. Now her pace became quicker still. Her only hope of release from the servitude of the contract was to finish the ten chronicles and then hope to find an honest publisher.

  Then the body had been found hanging in a garage in Fox River and identified as hers. One of her purses was missing and some clothing.

  Her first crazy thought was that it was a warning from Argyle House. They had somehow learned of her inquiries at the Authors Guild. Perhaps the guild had contacted them. Madeline left her apartment and drove to Elmhurst and took a motel room using her mother’s maiden name, paying cash to avoid any question about her credit card. For several days she cowered in dread. She had not even brought her computer. She never traveled without a computer, but she would have been incapable of rocketing off into outer space in her present mood. She watched the news; she read the newspapers. On the fourth day she became angry. She would go to the police and explain that that was not her body they had found hanging in the garage.

  What a relief it had been to pour out her story to Agnes Lamb. The interview with Tetzel the reporter not so much, since he seemed to resent most of what she told him.

  “The Empyrean Chronicles?” Agnes had cried. “I have them all. I love them.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ve never met a real live author before.” Agnes reached out to touch Madeline’s arm as if to see if she was real. “You know what I kept thinking when Mr. Mintz let me into your apartment and I saw the manuscript on your desk? I thought, that is the last chronicle.”

  “I wish it were.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “Sometime I’ll tell you all about being a famous author.”

  She did tell her, later, all of it, feeling like a fool as she described it all. Agnes listened to her with a stern expression. Then she began to take notes.

  “Agnes, what if there is some connection between Argyle House and the woman found hanging in the garage?”

  “The thought is bound to occur,” Agnes said.

  17

  Cy had Pippen read him her complete report on the woman found hanging in the garage of Amy Gorman’s apartment, as much for the information as for the pleasure of the company of the lovely and inaccessible assistant coroner. That she was a strikingly beautiful woman would have been obvious to anyone with eyes to see; that she was inaccessible, at least to Cy, stemmed from the fact that she had a husband—the ob-gyn man, or Ojibwa, as Cy thought of him—and that there was a Mrs. Horvath, the love of his youth and middle age, till death do they part and all the rest. Still, in the case of Pippen, Cy was incapable of custody of the eyes.

  “I miss the phrase ‘ritual killing.’”

  “I looked it up. It doesn’t apply. Unless Elizabethan practices were ritual killings.”

  Cy waited. Pippen loved to explain. When Henry VIII or Elizabeth hanged someone, the victim was cut down while still alive, then drawn and quartered. This victim, no longer Madeline Schutz, had been mutilated while she still hung.

  “Probably after she was dead. Have you identified her yet?”

  “Agnes is working on it.”

  They were seated in the cafeteria on a middle floor of the courthouse, accessible to cops, coroners, and clerks of court. Pippen wore her lab coat over a black turtleneck with a medallion adorning her bosom. From time to time, she tossed her head and her ponytail responded.

  “Did you find a knife?”

  “No.”

  “It probably wasn’t a knife. Do you know that instrument that looks all handle with a razor blade that can be released
by pressing a button? I don’t know what they’re called.”

  “Why not a knife?”

  “These were incisions, not cuts.”

  “A deranged surgeon?”

  Pippen shrugged. Cy drove from his mind the instruments that Pippen used on bodies when performing an autopsy. “How will Agnes go about making an identification?”

  “She’s open to suggestions.”

  “There was paint under the fingernails.”

  “Under?”

  “Oil paint. Maybe she was an artist.”

  “Not a housepainter?”

  “You could have it analyzed.”

  Pippen closed the report and laid a long-fingered hand upon it. She might have been displaying her rings, except that Cy was certain that she had no idea of the moral war that raged within him whenever they were together. No one knew but his confessor, who was puzzled by Cy’s story.

  “Impure desires?”

  “Not really.”

  “What, then?”

  “Carelessness about the occasion of sin?”

  “I think you’re being scrupulous.”

  “I hope so.”

  Temporary relief came with absolution and lasted until the next time he saw Pippen.

  When they left the cafeteria, they descended in the elevator to Pippen’s refrigerated quarters in the basement of the building. Her ostensible boss, Lubins, a political hack, was seldom there. Cy collected a specimen of the paint from beneath the fingernails. The clothing that had been found in the trash can in the garage was already in the lab, along with the purse. All that had been stolen from the real Madeline Schutz. The paint beneath the fingernails would not give them an identification, only an occupation or maybe a hobby.