“How about you?” Dee asked. “Still doing Spanish translation? Still living in London? I don’t know how you stand the place.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” I said. “I’m hardly ever there, anyway. I just came back from six months in Latin America.” I swung my briefcase for her to see. It was packed with manuscripts and books that I hoped to foist on reluctant publishers. “I’m on a translation panel tomorrow. One of my authors, Luisa Montiflores, is here. She’s a depressed Uruguayan, very famous in some circles. Actually, I have to meet her now. Can we get together for lunch tomorrow?”
“Great.”
The fair began with a flourish of speeches in Russian, English, with simultaneous translation into French, Spanish, Catalan, and Croatian. I looked around for a couple of hours and chatted with friends and acquaintances. Then I made my way over to Dee’s stand, which now had, like all the others, a number and a sign printed by the Russian organizers. CAOSTAL EDITIONS. Well, it was close.
When I arrived, a tall woman in a black skirt, black leather jacket, black scarf, black boots, and black hat was haranguing Dee in an upperclass British accent.
“But my books do extremely well in England,” she was saying. “My last novel was about a woman who left her husband for another woman, and it received very good reviews in the Observer and the Times.” She pulled a clipping from her Filofax and read: ‘Mrs. Horsey-Smythe treats this subject subtly and maturely, with none of the po-faced humorlessness characteristic of the so-called lesbian novel.’ So, you see, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t do well in America. My agent doesn’t understand why…”
“I’m sure your book is just wonderful,” said Dee insincerely, “but, as I’ve been trying to tell you, I’m not an American publisher. Oh, Cassandra, hello!” She looked relieved to see me. “This is Felicity Horsey-Smythe. Cassandra Reilly. Cassandra lives in London too. Peckham or someplace, isn’t it?”
Felicity gave me a smile the shape of a fingernail clipping and, pretending to see a dear friend across the hall, escaped.
“Don’t say Peckham in public,” I warned her. “Anyway, it was East Dulwich. But now I’ve moved. My bassoonist friend Nicola has offered me an attic room in the house she shares in Hampstead.”
But Dee wasn’t really listening. “Do you think I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life explaining to people that Canada is not a state of America? It even happened when the fair was held in Montreal. Felicity is fucking English—didn’t she learn any geography?”
“Probably not in ballet school or wherever she went,” I comforted Dee. “Can you leave your stand or should I get some food and bring it back?”
“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “The public doesn’t come ’til two. I’m going to need all my strength to deal with the Rooskies.”
“Has it been hard getting here?” I said. “These things are so easy for me. I just fly in and out.”
“It gets harder every year to leave Vancouver,” Dee said. “I’m not sure I’m cut out to be a jet-setting feminist.”
“What? And miss out on all the gossip?” We went past the British women’s presses, and I waved to a friend of mine at Sheba. “That’s what these things are really about. Remember a few years ago?”
Dee’s blue eyes began to sparkle. “The showdown between the Northern and Southern hemispherists?”
“Or Oslo?”
“It stayed light too late was the problem. It went to people’s heads.”
We laughed. “What about this year?” I asked. “Heard anything scandalous yet?”
Dee thought. “Well. You-know-who is here from Germany again…and…Oh, I know. Lulu Britten’s got a stand.”
“Lulu Britten?”
“The editor of Trash Out.”
“Oh, really,” I said. “That should provoke a few fireworks.”
As an American expatriate, I was usually a little behind the times, but even I’d heard of the New York-based Trash Out: A Journal for Contentious Feminists. It was a forty-page monthly, stapled, on newsprint, with a glossy cover usually featuring someone in the women’s community. Gloria, Rita Mae, Lily, Martina had been among the faces to appear on the cover. Inside was a lengthy (negative) assessment of their writing, performance, and lifestyle, spiced with innuendo and rude remarks from unnamed sources. CIA connections, drinking and drug bouts, hysterical displays of temper, peculiar sexual tastes, and, most of all, the hypocrisy of their moral public pronouncements contrasted with their sordid personal lives. It was hot and it was nasty. But that wasn’t all.
In addition to the “profiles” of infamous feminists, Trash Out also offered blow-by-blow accounts of women’s conferences rather in the manner of off our backs. The difference was that Trash Out rarely reported what went on during the panels and plenaries, instead giving the full treatment to cruel remarks and furious behind-the-scenes dissension. The journal also had a lengthy review section where critics slandered and dismissed feminist authors, musicians, and artists.
Feminism is in many ways a literary movement, so it wasn’t surprising that Trash Out concentrated on well-known authors, nor that it had been able to exploit a market hungry for the low-down on mentors who had gotten too famous. The journal gave a voice to critics who were tired of being forced to at least appear to be giving a balanced assessment of writers’ work and allowed the personal life of the writer to come in for as much dirt as possible. Yet the profiles, conference reports, and reviews were only part of Trash Out’s appeal. Many of its readers couldn’t have cared less why such and such famous authors fell out, or why a certain author was no longer publishing with a certain press. What the average reader looked forward to every month was the letters section where any feminist could write and complain about her sisters.
Once we had “criticism/self-criticism,” the Maoist-inspired exchange that used to come at the end of bruising political meetings. The “Trash Box” section of Trash Out was a little like that—but without the self-criticism. Women wrote in to detail the wrongs that had been done to them by ex-lovers, political enemies, feminist publishers, recording companies, theaters and galleries, and by their mothers and former best friends. In her editorials, Lulu justified this massive mud-slinging (and counter mud-slinging, because almost everybody wanted to reply) as “cathartic.”
“For too long,” she wrote, “we have been silenced by the false claims of sisterhood. We cannot live in the rarefied air of feminist solidarity. Our divisions are too deep to be mended, too harsh to be smoothed over. Only by speaking of our differences can we move forward…”
I said to Dee, “Do you think Lulu is here gathering dirt on the book fair for the journal?”
“No doubt. We’d better lie low,” she laughed.
“Oh, we’re too insignificant for her. She’s never trashed anyone outside America, has she?”
“Margaret Atwood. Though possibly she thought she was American,” said Dee. “Maybe I should sic her on Felicity Horsey-Smythe. After all, there is a certain prestige attached to being on the cover of Trash Out. It means you’re important enough to criticize.”
“It’s funny, now that I think about it,” I said. “Not only has the journal never had a non-American woman on the cover, it’s never had a woman of color. Either Lulu has decided that women of color are out of bounds, or she’s racist enough not to think they’re important enough to trash.”
“Maybe she’s planning to remedy that. Look over there.” Dee pointed across the central courtyard to where a couple of black women stood talking. Close enough to overhear, but not to be obvious, was a chunky white woman with glasses and a funny kind of topknot. She was swathed in as many scarves as a fortune teller, and her long, multicolored skirt reached her ankles. She was sucking on the tip of a pen and regarding the two women avidly.
“The woman on the right is Simone Jefferson,” said Dee, “and Madame Zelda over there is Lulu.”
“So you think Simone’s her next victim?” It would make sense. With a brill
iant first novel and a book of essays just out this year, Simone was already being compared to Alice Walker. She looked very young next to the older woman, a writer I recognized from Nigeria. “Do you think we should warn her?”
“Just a word maybe,” said Dee. “Not that Lulu lets much of anything get in her way. She went to law school and knows the libel laws backward and forward.”
The cafeteria was serving some kind of goulash. In front of us, a woman named Darcy Joanne from a feminist press in Santa Cruz, California was making a big deal about vegetarian food to the woman behind the counter.
“Macro-bi-otic,” she repeated. “You know—tofu? Tempe? Nori? What about just some brown rice and broccoli?”
The thickset Russian woman stared at her and continued to hold out the goulash.
With a sigh Darcy took it. “Nobody thinks about the culinary aspects of where we hold these things,” she complained to us. “God, remember Oslo? Twenty bucks for a seafood salad that turned out to be covered with artificial crab meat.” Without a change in her voice, she went on, “These Russians. Have you met that poet Olga Stanislavkigyovitch or something? She’s been pestering me all morning to publish a book of her poems.”
“No,” said Dee feelingly. “But I had some French deconstructionist yammering away at me for an hour about translating her book.”
“Honestly,” said Darcy, moving away to join a group from the States. “Everybody knows translations don’t sell.”
Later that day, after I’d spent an exhausting hour on the translation panel and an even more punishing hour in the company of Luisa Montiflores going over the reasons why her latest book had sold so badly in England, I stopped by Dee’s stand to see how she was getting on. A very attractive young Russian woman was making her case to Dee.
“Glasnost is a farce. Everyone knows that. This fair is just another propaganda tactic. None of the real feminist or dissident writers are being allowed to participate. There is still repression, censorship, no possibility of emigration for dissidents or Jews. I say that in my poems and that is why my poems cannot be published here in the Soviet Union. They must be translated and published in English!”
“I can see your point,” Dee said. “I really can. Really. But I’m only supposed to be publishing Canadian authors. I have enough trouble just publishing women. Oh look, here’s Cassandra. She’s a translator. Maybe she has some ideas.”
I glared at Dee, but actually I did have some ideas—and some contacts in London and New York. After I’d written out a few addresses for Olga, I mentioned that she might want to keep a slightly lower profile. Just in case there were…you know…
“I am not afraid,” said Olga. “I must say now what I think. It is my opportunity.”
“Maybe she should go talk to Lulu if she wants publicity,” said Dee. “She could write the first feminist letter trashing out the KGB.”
“Who is this Lulu?” Olga demanded.
“Over there, but I was just…joking,” she added, as Olga raced off. “Well, at least she’s a good self-promoter.”
The fair was by now packed with Soviet visitors, but there weren’t many around Dee’s stand. “They don’t want to build log cabins?” I asked.
“I don’t have enough lesbian books,” Dee said glumly. “Look over there—Naiad Press is doing landslide business. Beebo Brinker’s never been on sale in the Soviet Union before.”
“Is that what’s causing the commotion?” I asked. “Is Ann Bannon making a personal appearance or what?”
“There’s too many people to see,” said Dee, straining. “But it doesn’t seem to be coming from that direction.”
The pushing grew stronger as people attempted to see what was happening, the muttering louder. Unfortunately, whatever message was being passed through the crowd was in Russian, so we were as much in the dark as ever. Suddenly we heard a siren outside, and then a phalanx of men and women in white rushed in with a stretcher. As the crowd parted, it was just possible, by standing on the chairs in Dee’s stand, to see where they were headed.
Stand 103, the sign read. TRESH OOT. A few minutes later the stretcher went by again. And Olga was on it.
That night in the Vladivostok People’s Hotel, Dee and I tried to make some sense of what had happened. According to Felicity Horsey-Smythe, who, with Lulu, was the nearest witness, Olga had been standing there talking to the editor of Trash Out. The next moment she had collapsed writhing to the floor and was dead within seconds. No one had seen anything untoward or threatening. There wasn’t a mark on her. She’d simply gasped as if she couldn’t breathe, clutched her throat, spasmed a few times, and gone down.
“And we laughed about the KGB,” Dee moaned. “Did you see how fast those security men were on the scene? They got her out of there in no time. Oh yeah, they pretended to ask people what had happened, but that was just a ploy. They murdered her because she was a dissident!”
“Rubbish!” I said. “They’d be far more likely to arrest her and throw her in prison than to murder her in the middle of an international book fair. That sort of thing doesn’t look very good.”
But Dee refused to see that. “I think they should stop the book fair. I want to go home. It’s too scary.”
I ignored her wails. “Don’t you think it’s a strange coincidence that Olga keeled over right in front of Lulu’s stand? It might make you think that…”
“Think what?” Dee was looking for bugging devices under the night table, in the closet. Soon her paranoia would have her taking the telephone apart, and turning up the radio while we talked.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
Felicity Horsey-Smythe was in a room down the corridor. When we knocked and entered, she was on the phone trying to get through to her agent in London. “That’s Philip Fox-ton-ffoulkes,” she was shouting to the operator, “ffoulkes, not Vooks. What do you mean he won’t accept the charges?” She slammed down the receiver and said to us, “They’re hopeless down there in reception. This is the eighth time I’ve tried to reach him today.”
“Felicity,” I said. “Do you remember what Olga was doing just before she died?”
“Oh, please, let’s not go into that. I’ve spent the last two hours with a Russian detective, and my nerves are absolutely shattered. Olga wasn’t doing anything. She was just standing there writing down something for Lulu, some address or something.”
“Maybe Olga was trying to pass her a message and they had to kill her,” suggested Dee.
“Nonsense,” I said. A sudden memory of Lulu standing in the courtyard listening to Simone and sucking on her pen came back to me. I said casually, “So, whose pen was it anyway?”
“What do you mean? Well, Lulu’s, I suppose. Yes, she picked up a pen lying on the stand table.”
I tossed Felicity a pen from my pocket. “Could you just show me how Olga was standing, what she was doing?”
“Oh really,” Felicity said. But she stood up and, holding the pen, she touched it thoughtfully to her mouth. “I told you, she was just standing there, thinking.”
“Oh well,” I said. “Thanks anyway.” I nodded to Dee and we left.
Out in the corridor I could hardly contain my excitement. “That’s it, don’t you see?”
“What? Felicity said Olga wasn’t doing anything.”
“She was doing something. She touched the pen to her mouth, and the pen had poison on its tip.”
“Oh my God.” Dee leaned against the corridor wall. “Then Lulu poisoned Olga. But why? Is Lulu a KGB agent?”
I shook my head impatiently. “It’s more likely that Lulu was the target. Someone knew about Lulu’s habit of sucking her pens and substituted one with poison for an ordinary one. Olga was killed by mistake. The poison was really meant for Lulu!”
Dee stared at me. “Do you think we should tell her?”
“I think she may know. Did you see her face when they were taking Olga’s body away?”
“But who could have wanted to kill Lulu?”
“That’s the trouble. There are probably dozens.”
“But only some of them are here at the fair.”
Half an hour later we’d come up with a list of five names. Four of them had been featured on Trash Out covers in the past year. They were:
1. Jean Winthrup, a veterinarian who had written a popular book on lesbian sexuality and who had become a sort of sexual pundit/entertainer. An article in Trash Out had revealed that Jean’s personal sexual habits weren’t all that normal (she could only do it in a large kitty litter box) and had quoted a number of ex-lovers.
2. Monica Samson, a feminist poet who had won all sorts of major awards and who taught at Yale. Trash Out had exposed her work as unoriginal and accused her of plagiarism. The anonymous piece, possibly written by her rival Lois MacGuire, claimed that one of Monica’s most famous books had whole lines lifted from an obscure Swedish woman poet of the nineteenth century.
3. Davis McKee, an influential feminist linguist/philosopher who had given lesbianism a whole new vocabulary of invented words. Detractors said she was like a kid who’d gone crazy with Pig Latin; admirers carried her dictionary around like the Bible. Trash Out had unleashed a scathing account of her financial holdings in South African companies.
4. Casey Walters, a prolific anthologist. For the past ten years, Casey had put together anthologies of poetry and prose on every conceivable subject that had to do with women. The Trash Out feature had parodied her by including “excerpts” from a supposed new anthology, Feminist Chimpanzee Stories, and its companion volume Women and Parakeets: An Anthology.
The fifth suspect, as yet unprofiled in Trash Out, was Simone Jefferson.
“I’d say she’s the most likely,” I said, “because she hasn’t been trashed yet.”
“But we don’t know for sure that Lulu was planning to trash her,” Dee said.
I looked at my watch. “It’s only half past ten. Why don’t we pay a visit to Lulu?”
There were voices in Lulu’s room, but they stopped when we knocked. “Come in,” said Lulu, a little unsteadily.
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