The House of Rumour

by Jake Arnott

  ‘But it’s a political conundrum too, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Of course it is. Like you said, a warning from the future. That’s what we should be writing, don’t you think?’

  ‘Er, yeah.’

  Along with everything else, I was politically naive at that point in my life. I had worked out that Mary-Lou was left wing and that somehow this did not necessarily mean she was pro-Soviet Russia, but beyond that I was liable to get confused. I wanted to show willing because of the way I felt about her but I was never sure I was doing the right thing. Lords of the Black Sun was meant to be anti-fascist but the illustrator had made the Nazi spaceship look so impressive that the cover issue became a favourite with the German–American Bund.

  ‘We’ve got to fight for the future, Mary-Lou!’ I declared, emboldened by the second glass of slivovitz.

  ‘That’s right, Larry. And it’s finely balanced. Just like in The Legion of Time, it could go either way. In Europe, in Africa, in Asia. In the whole world!’

  We were staring into each other’s eyes and it seemed to me like a portentous moment of epiphany, as though we shared the destiny of planet earth and the vast dominions of space beyond. I made a silent promise that I would learn more about politics and philosophy, that I would try to understand science properly so that I could share this precious wisdom with Mary-Lou Gunderson. Her eyes appeared to blaze with all the hope of some great utopian future. Then she yawned.

  ‘Sorry, Zagorski,’ she sighed. ‘I’m beat. And I need to sleep. Got to work tomorrow.’

  She had a part-time job reading scripts for one of the studios. She saw me to the door.

  ‘Thanks for trying to explain all that long-hair stuff,’ she murmured.

  ‘I’ll see if I can’t find out some more,’ I offered.

  ‘Thing is, Larry, I’m just too impatient. I want to know it all. And right now.’

  ‘Yeah, well—’

  ‘I do,’ she cut in, as if the idea had come to her at that moment. ‘I want to know everything! Goodnight, Larry.’

  She quickly kissed me on the cheek and hustled me out of the door. I staggered into the clear cold LA night. I was light-headed but, for once, steady on my feet. My mind fuzzed with ideologies, theoretical physics and plum brandy. My soul reeled in speculative fantasy. I was in love.

  I was also a virgin. Perhaps my attraction to writing about the future was that it was only there that I had any worldly experience. I was as keen to rid myself of my childlike imagination and wonder as I was to use them to generate stories. Dr Furedi had encouraged my writing as a cathartic process, though he was concerned that my obsession with fantasy and science fiction reflected my neurotic condition. He pointed out that many of the problems I’d had with it were symptomatic of an unconscious resistance within myself. Now I’d had a small breakthrough with my fiction and, I felt, had made real progress towards the possibility of a relationship.

  I was finding it hard to get on with my next story, though. ‘Lightship 7 from Andromeda’ now seemed a banal space adventure. I obsessed about my feelings for Mary-Lou and easily lost concentration when I sat down at my typewriter or would wander about in an unco-ordinated daze. At bookstores or news-stands it had long been my habit to scan the racks of the pulp magazines, for inspiration as well as just to see what was out there. The gaudy covers would often carry a female form: amazon warrior in sleek and curvaceous armour, or bound and barely clothed captives. But what had once been cheap titillation had now become a nagging reminder of an infatuation I had no idea what to do with.

  We went to the cinema together: Dr Cyclops was playing in a double feature with The Monster and the Girl. Afterwards, over a soda, we agreed that both films were absolute trash and the sort of thing that gave science fiction a bad name, but it was hardly a romantic evening. We did meet to talk about work, though. Mary-Lou had none of the problems I was encountering with output. She seemed unsatisfied with ‘Zodiac Empire’ but she could produce copy at a phenomenal rate. She dismissed it as her ‘space-opera’ (some fanzine had just come up with the term) but she did have a strong idea that she wanted to pursue: that the different planets of the solar system had specific characteristics and influences — an astrology for the future, she called it.

  Meanwhile I was trying to give myself a political education. Fascism was evil: that seemed clear enough. Capitalism was wrong, not just because it was unfair but also because it was unscientific. But Soviet communism wasn’t the answer. What was needed was some kind of socialism that wasn’t totalitarian. The pact the Russians had made with the Nazis had done a lot to discredit the USSR, but America wasn’t in the war either. Haunted by distant cataclysm, we all felt a peculiar sense of detached speculation. The world seemed as awkwardly balanced as I was.

  One afternoon on passing a news-stand Mary-Lou pointed to all the catastrophic headlines — LONDON BLITZED, THE ATLANTIC WAR CONTINUES, TANK BATTLES IN NORTH AFRICA — then to a little man who had picked up a magazine.

  ‘After all that,’ she remarked darkly, ‘he still wants Action Stories. What are we doing, writing for the pulps?’

  ‘Maybe we’re finding a solution. You see the news? What’s real now? Submarines, flying machines: that was the science fiction of a hundred years ago. What we are imagining now: that might be next century’s news.’

  ‘Jesus, Zagorski, think of the horrors we might come up with then.’

  ‘That’s why it’s important how we use our imaginations,’ I said, instinctively reaching for the latest issue of Astounding.

  ‘In dreams begins responsibility,’ said Mary-Lou.

  ‘Huh?’ I grunted, already absorbed by the glossy binding.

  ‘Don’t worry, Larry. Just quoting W.B. Yeats at you.’

  ‘Magic City’ was the cover story with a ruined Statue of Liberty rising out of a post-apocalyptic wilderness, a lithe huntress in furs standing in the foreground and a long-haired caveman crouching before her.

  ‘At least Astounding runs interesting stuff,’ I said, holding it up.

  ‘Yeah,’ Mary-Lou agreed. ‘That’s who we should be writing for.’

  It was clear to both of us that Astounding Science Fiction was by far the best and most ground-breaking of any of the pulp magazines of the time. Its new editor, John W. Campbell, had completely transformed the field, nurturing a group of exciting new writers: Isaac Asimov, A.E. van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon and especially Robert Heinlein, who lived in LA and was said to run some kind of literary circle. This was the world that we wanted to be part of.

  Mary-Lou had grown tired of the LASFS Thursday meetings and would sometimes disparagingly refer to that crowd as the ‘limeade brigade’. I still attended. I had sold ‘Lightship 7 from Andromeda’ to Fantastic Tales and it looked as if I was becoming something of a regular writer for them, so I now was shown quite a lot of respect at Clifton’s Cafeteria. Mary-Lou never said as much but I got the feeling she thought it was playing safe, mixing with them, that we should really be taking more risks with our writing rather than churning out the usual stuff. And maybe thinking of her made me bold because when Robert Heinlein walked in one night I wasted little time in making a beeline for him.

  Heinlein had a presence that was more than a little intimidating. Gaunt and saturnine, with swept-back hair and a pencil moustache, he looked very much like a gloomy Douglas Fairbanks Jnr. And he had seemed to come from nowhere. Having published his first story only a couple of years before, he was by then one of the brightest stars in the genre. There were all sorts of rumours about him: that he was a radical, that he had made his fortune silver prospecting, that he was into free love. I praised his latest story, ‘– And He Built a Crooked House –’ that had been in the issue of Astounding I’d picked up at the news-stand with Mary-Lou. It was about an architect who designs a four-dimensional house, a hypercube in the form of a tesseract that collapses in on itself after an earthquake into what appears to be a single cube. Those trapped inside ca
n still pass through the original eight rooms, all of which appear to occupy the same space, with the stairs now forming a closed loop so that on reaching what they think is the top storey, the people find themselves back on the ground floor. At one point they look down a hallway to observe their own backs. I seem to remember that I said it was like a prose version of an M.C. Escher woodcut and that Heinlein smiled and nodded. What I am certain of is that, as his attention began to drift and he started to turn away, I boldly thrust out my hand and announced:

  ‘I’m Larry Zagorski, sir. I wrote Lords of the Black Sun.’

  Heinlein laughed and clasped my palm in a firm grip. He frowned at me.

  ‘Yeah?’ He shook my hand the way a dog shakes a rabbit. ‘I saw the story. In Fabulous, wasn’t it? Made the fascists seem a bit glamorous, didn’t you?’

  ‘That was the illustrator’s fault,’ I protested.

  He laughed again.

  ‘Only kidding with you. I liked it. But we got to be careful sometimes, haven’t we? You know, being of the devil’s party without knowing it.’

  He tapped his nose. I nodded sagely but I had no idea what he meant.

  ‘Look, kid,’ he went on. ‘We have a little soirée every now and then at my place. Call it the Mañana Literary Society. Why don’t you come along?’

  ‘Can I bring someone?’

  ‘Your girl?’

  ‘Yes,’ I blurted, then thought better of it. ‘I mean, no, I mean, well… she’s another writer. A good one.’

  Heinlein laughed once more and wrote out his address for me. He lived with his wife Leslyn in Laurel Canyon, on Lookout Mountain Avenue, a side road that twists up into the Hollywood Hills. And when I took Mary-Lou with me to our first meeting with the Mañana Literary Society, I felt that a whole new bright world was opening up for the both of us. It was the closest thing to a salon that science fiction had at that time and we were a part of it. Most of all I hoped it would mean that Mary-Lou would take me seriously and that I would be able to find the courage finally to say how I really felt about her. Oh yes, I felt really pleased with myself at the start of that evening. I thought I was so clever. But I was a fool, a complete fool.

  1

  the magician

  1 / CASINO ESTORIL

  Fleming watched Popov walk through the lobby of the Hotel Palacio with a sense of possession, that odd feeling of intimacy he derived from having seen a man’s file. It was a curiously inert experience, presenting an advantage while revealing a weakness of his own. Each person is a dossier, he mused. A bundle of half-known facts, misleading reports, document extracts, fragments. Dossier, from the old French for back, a loose binding, bracing the chaos of information into some sort of recognisable posture. Like the book with its spine holding up an unlikely story. Fleming had concluded long ago that real lives exist only in secret. But it had become his job to form impressions, to summarise. He had acquired a talent for the brief appraisal.

  So he noted the awkward line on the buttoned front of Popov’s dinner jacket and took a moment to consider what might explain the square bulge below the breast pocket. The outline of an automatic pistol, perhaps? Fleming smiled, aware that he had become known for the brash style of his memoranda. But no, he decided, it wasn’t a gun that gave the extra weight to this man’s left-hand side. No, he thought, his smile becoming a grin. It was a big, fat slab of money, the eighty thousand dollars that rightly belonged to British Intelligence.

  The ornamental gardens that surrounded the Palacio were veined with narrow gravel pathways that forked here and there, making a discreet pursuit almost impossible. Fleming was acting not so much on initiative as on compulsion, since shadowing Popov had nothing to do with his mission in Portugal. That had already been completed earlier that day with the meeting at the Café Chiado in Lisbon. Operation Mistletoe: an audacious operation to catch a top Nazi. This hastily improvised tail-job was a mere sideshow, but he found the prospect of it just as exciting as the astonishing information he had received that afternoon. For some it was the game, but for Fleming it was always the story. And here was a good one, he felt sure of it. Inspiration, yes, that’s what drove him to follow this man. Something he might use one day.

  The archives of Room 39 had furnished the sparse details of the individual he now studied at close hand: Dusko Popov, Yugoslav émigré, code-named ‘Tricycle’, posing as a spy for the Nazi Abwehr while working for the British. A lethal double act. The man was a light-footed adventurer; the one who watched him was forever weighed down by ideas. Popov was all that Fleming aspired to and sometimes pretended to be: handsome, charming, something of a playboy, whose designation Tricycle was said to refer to his fondness for the ménage à trois. Fleming stalked him in jealous fascination.

  He knew that the eighty thousand dollars were funds from the Abwehr to pay for an entirely fake spy network that Popov was running in London. He was due to hand it over to an MI6 agent the following day and had obviously decided it was better kept on his person than in the hotel safe. Unless Popov had had a better idea, such as a taxi into Lisbon and then a flight somewhere the next day. The Pan American flying boat was departing for Rio de Janeiro from Cabo Ruiva dock tomorrow morning. Popov would have enough money to disappear and live his cherished high life without any of the risks. Was that the story? A capricious choice that could change a whole lifetime. The dry tracks in the grounds of the Palacio fanned out, each path a possibility.

  Popov made a play of doubling back at a corner junction, passing by Fleming without looking at him but with a half-smile on his lips. Fleming stopped. He could hardly change direction now without giving the game away. Yes, it was definitely the game for Popov. And Fleming would be hard pressed to beat him at it. Paperwork, not fieldcraft, was his forte, he concluded gloomily. But cold analysis had its uses. He might have lost his quarry for now, but he had a very good notion of where he was headed.

  Where else but the House of Games? The Estoril Casino, its grey, melancholy walls skulking amid more serene surroundings, looking like an office building or a workshop. Which indeed it was: the bureaucracy of bad luck, the sweatshop of short odds. The perfect setting, thought Fleming, as he passed through the vestiaire into the gaming rooms. He entered a theatre of calm excitement, filled with the repetition of muted sounds and stifled gestures. A static impersonal space, where anxiety and relaxation could be enjoyed in equal measure. A collective trance: where all are actors, all are audience to both shared and private dramas.

  The Estoril Casino was the very hub of an enclave of neutrality where all sides in the war rubbed shoulders. It was peopled by many exotic species, which Fleming divided into flora and fauna. The flora were the refugees, various types from many nations. Some were wealthy beyond measure and squandered their money as if there was no tomorrow (as, indeed, there might not be). Others were so poor that they would gamble what little they had and sell anything, which usually meant themselves. The rest came to move unnoticed among them. What the flora had in common was that they were all waiting. Waiting for transport elsewhere, anywhere away from occupied Europe, and where better to wait than in the Casino.

  Then there were the fauna: those who preyed on the flora. Businessmen, international officials, racketeers. And spies, of course. Agents and informers of all hues and natures. This was Popov’s world, where he so often operated. Fleming looked for him at the roulette table, knowing that it was here that Popov would go to get directions for a meeting with his German handlers. A female Abwehr agent would, at a prearranged moment, play the table three times, the numbers indicating consecutively the date, hour and minute of the rendezvous. She would then bet on either zero or thirty-six, the former directing him to a safe-house in Estoril, the latter to one in Lisbon. An expensive code, one that appealed to Fleming’s imagination. But Popov was not there. The chef de partie of the roulette table kept a tally of the numbers that had come up since the start of play that afternoon. Fleming studied it for a moment, wondering if any sense could be made of
this list of arbitrary figures. Luck is a code without a key. As he looked up from it he spotted the Yugoslav making his way to the baccarat table.

  Fleming had always preferred the familiarity of playing cards to the impersonal turn of the wheel. They offered some sort of meaning beyond mere chance. A sense of order: the Devil’s Bible with fifty-two pages (fifty-four if you included the jokers). He approached the crescent of players and spectators that surrounded the dealer. Bloch, a short, pug-faced Lithuanian, held the bank, which gave him the power to determine the stakes for the next play. Obscenely wealthy and arrogant, Bloch liked to dominate the card tables and was known haughtily to declare, ‘Banque ouverte,’ indicating that there was no upper limit and that the players could bet whatever they wished. It was suspected that the Lithuanian was a Nazi sympathiser who channelled illicit funds to bankroll Abwehr operations. Popov had taken a vacant seat at the table. Fleming stood behind him at his left shoulder.

  ‘Banque ouverte,’ Bloch announced.

  ‘Les messieurs debout peuvent jouer,’ called the croupier.

  Popov reached into his jacket pocket and as he did so turned his head so that Fleming could see his sharp profile. It was as if he was acknowledging his shadow. The Yugoslav then swiftly pulled out his thick sheaf of banknotes.

  ‘Fifty thousand dollars,’ he said calmly and began to count out a pile of notes on the table.

  The baccarat table at once became the focus of the whole casino, a hush sucking in sound from all corners of the room. Soon there was silence but for the clatter of the roulette ball and the whispered oaths of countless languages. Everyone watched as Popov slowly laid out his stake in one-thousand- and five-hundred-dollar notes. Fleming felt a slight swoon in his stomach, a brief euphoria at this dramatic moment, this coup de théâtre. Then nausea at the prospect of reporting how Agent Tricycle had lost a small fortune of government money at a gaming table. Bloch squirmed in his seat, clearly outbid and humiliated. Popov turned to the croupier.