Two-Thirds of a Ghost

by Helen McCloy

  Basil changed his clothes for the dinner, always a full-dress affair, then settled himself before the fire in the old library with the pith-white paneling and crimson curtains that had so many associations with past cases he had solved. None of them, he thought now, had been quite so puzzling as the deceptively simple murder of the man known as Amos Cottle.

  The tangible evidence was spread out on his coffee table, the things that he and Avery had rescued from the burning house—the ring, the purse, the thimble, the lock of hair, the first editions of Amos’s four published novels, the carbon of his unpublished novel, the scrapbooks with their clippings of reviews and advertisements and the folder with its letters and contracts.

  He had not had time to read all the five long books. While he waited for Alec, he decided to glance at Passionate Pilgrim once more.

  The fire purred, the wind rattled the window frames, the rain hissed at the panes and he read on, more and more absorbed in the dead man’s narrative. Things he had not noticed before began to take on new significance. There was a pencil in his hand. Now and then he marked a passage by drawing a light line along the margin. One paragraph sent him back to Lepton’s review of Passionate Pilgrim and he marked a paragraph in the review with a double line.

  …One of the women characters has a grandmother who was a madam in a Bowery brothel in 1898. This old woman appears only once in the story, at the moment when she is dying. And she utters only one phrase: I don’t wish him no harm—oh, no—but I wish to God he’d fall down and break his damned neck!’ What else do we need to establish the character of this woman? It is all there—the sly, salty humor, the earthy realism, the humane scorn of the sanctimonious hypocrisy of the brief, gaslit period that ended the long reign of Victoria. I can see that old woman as she must have been in her heyday, loaded with Roman pearls and rhinestones, white glace kid on her fat hands and perfumed violets at her high-corseted bosom and a flowing skirt tarnished with Bowery mud, leering from the balcony at Daly’s Theatre. Who but Amos Cottle could have written such a line today?

  Gradually Basil’s interest became tinged with amazement. The glimmering of an idea that had come to him first the afternoon he spent with Avery in Cottle’s house began to glow and swell and take on form and substance. Could this be the answer?

  He was so absorbed he forgot all about Alec until the doorbell rang downstairs. He sat up with a jerk and went into the hall to release the spring that unlocked the street door below. He stood at the head of the stair as Alec appeared below, foreshortened against the black and white marble of the vestibule.

  “Come on up, Alec. We’ve time for a drink and I have something here that will interest you.”

  Alec got rid of his wet coat and hat and approached the fire, rubbing his hands, a tall, fair, impressive person, much more English than Scots, in spite of his name.

  Basil mixed two whiskey and sodas and they sat on either side of the hearth, one fair, one dark, the coloring of each set off by the unrelieved blacks and whites of their almost archaic ceremonial dress. Anyone seeing them would have assumed they were two gentlemen of leisure spending a quiet evening together, which was not the truth at all.

  Alec had the incurable optimism of a man who has been fortunate all his life. He had inherited McLean’s from his father and he knew all the folklore of publishing on both sides of the Atlantic. He was a natural cosmopolite who passed every psychological frontier with ease, just as much at home in New York or Morocco as in London or Paris.

  Basil told him all he knew of Amos Cottle, reserving only the things he suspected.

  “I never met Cottle,” said Alec. “But I know Tony Kane. He was the chap who made all his book sales outright to England in 1940. So afraid Hitler would win, he didn’t want any royalties tied up in England. Not that he wanted us to lose. He just didn’t want it to cost him anything if we did.”

  “That sounds like Tony.” Basil grinned, “Alec, a most extraordinary idea has come to me. I want to check it with someone like you who knows the literary shop from A to Z. Indeed, that’s one reason I suggested we go to this dinner together tonight. Almost everyone involved will be there and I have a feeling that something will break loose—especially if we give it a nudge. I want you to cast an eye over these passages I’ve marked in reviews, clippings, letters and books and see if—well, if you see what I see.”

  Alec sipped his drink, lit a cigarette and began to read. The fire sighed softly, the windows rattled again. It wasn’t long before Alec put down the books and paper and looked at Basil with a sharp, bright eye. “Fantastic! Impossible! And yet—by Jove, it could be.”

  “Could it?”

  “Why not? Can you think of any good argument against it?”

  “Let’s make sure we’re talking about the same thing. Suppose you tell me the points you think are significant. Or should I say meaningful and richly rewarding? Or perhaps just queer?”

  Alec chuckled. “Nothing queer about old Cholmondeley? Hell, there are at least ten things damned queer about this when you put them all together.”

  “Ten?” said Basil. “Let’s see if I’ve got that many:

  “1. The name Amos Cottle.

  “2. Cottle’s failure to answer the first question when we played Two-Thirds of a Ghost.

  “3. The arm-breaking scene in Passionate Pilgrim.

  “4. The gap of three months between Tony’s first letter to Cottle and the publication date of Retreat.

  “5. Tony’s apple woman story.

  “6. Gus’s war service.

  “7. Lepton’s ignorance of anatomy.

  “8. The fact that Cottle stopped working when Vera was living with him.

  “9. The fact that Avery said Cottle’s work was a pastiche of all the bad novels of the last thirty years.

  “What’s the tenth? You’re one up on me.”

  Alec smiled. “Leppy’s love of malicious mischief. All this is fascinating, Basil, but we still don’t know who murdered Amos Cottle.”

  Basil returned the smile. “I can guess. Can’t you?”

  “Yes.” Alec’s face sobered. “I’m afraid I can. Poor devil, what a waste!”

  “Come to think of it, there’s an eleventh point,” mused Basil. “Lepton’s father was a bookbinder…. Another drink?”

  “A quick one. Then let’s get on to this dinner. I wouldn’t miss it for anything now. Quite like the old days in Germany. How are we going to run this show?”

  “You can help me cut him out from the crowd. Then meet us outside his place in a taxi. If we don’t come down in thirty minutes, you’d better come up.”

  The Bookbinders’ Association had rented a dining hall and reception room in one of the largest hotels. When Basil and Alec arrived, people were just beginning to drift from the bar in the reception room to the reserved tables in the dining hall. At Basil’s suggestion, Alec had secured two seats at a mixed table next to the table reserved for Sutton, Kane and Company.

  Alec recognized Tony and Lepton and smiled at them. “Who are the others there?” he asked Basil in a low voice.

  “Philippa, Tony’s wife, beside him. Then Gus Vesey, Cottle’s agent, and his wife, Meg. Who is that woman between Lepton and Tony? Oh, I know. One of the Vesey stable of authors, Ellen Gabor.”

  The diners plowed through, a five-course dinner served by a multitude of waiters at an inexorable speed that outdistanced their appetites. As coffee appeared, a man rose at the long, head table facing the room and tapped on his glass with his spoon.

  “Coming here this evening, through the drizzling rain, I was reminded of a little story…”

  After ten minutes even the weariest anecdote must wind its way to the sea. The audience’s relief was expressed in scattered applause.

  “And now, ladies and gentlemen…’’ The speaker paused. There was a moment of agonizing suspense. Would there be another little story? Several diners signaled waiters surreptitiously for brandy.

  “…as President of the Bookbinders’ A
ssociation, it gives me great pleasure, to introduce the Chairman of the Awards Committee, Miss Hermione Feather-stone, who is also Chairman of the English Department at one of our most distinguished women’s colleges. I am sure you all know Miss Featherstone’s exquisite little novella, The Sandpiper and I, to say nothing of the many delightful essays she has contributed to the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s. Miss Featherstone.”

  Loud applause. Miss Featherstone rose and spoke in a high, clear voice with a cutting edge. Gray-haired, her hard face reddened by the rigor of New England winters and her lean body dressed in the fashions of twenty years ago, she was known as one of those careerists who claw their way to the top of the academic world, which is almost as jealously competitive as the theatrical world, especially among women. Obviously this was one of the high moments of her career. It brought her out of the cloisters, where the higher the marks she gave her students, the more certain their stories were to be rejected by editors, into the heady, exotic world of real publishers and real authors who got things printed and paid for.

  Yet for a few moments they were all looking up to her and deferring to her critical judgment. Something they would never have done if the issue at stake had been risking money on publishing a first book by an unknown writer instead of the bestowal of an honorary award that didn’t cost them anything since it was financed by endowment.

  True, there had been others on the committee with her—Maurice Lepton, the critic, and Tony Kane, the publisher, and Ellen Gabor, the novelist, and Sloan Severing, President of the Bookbinders’ Association. But she had been the chairman and it was her name that had been most widely blazoned in the press. “Prestige stuff,” as Tony’s publicity man had explained to her.

  The trade in postprandial brandy grew rather brisk as Hermione Featherstone, who was used to a captive audience, took her listeners through a comprehensive survey of the literature of the English-speaking peoples starting with the Venerable Bede. Most of the guests were on their third brandy when the chairman whispered that it was later than she thought. She shot by Thomas Hardy with a side glance at Henry James and plunged into her dramatic peroration.

  “Your committee felt that there was only one author in the contemporary literary scene who had the sure artist’s touch in portraying humane compassion for people as people, the noble gift of wringing music from the plainer, simpler words of our language, and the lofty feeling for man’s grandeur as well as his pathos, which we expect of our foremost novelists. It is a tragic disappointment to the committee that, owing to an unforeseen catastrophe, he cannot be here with us tonight to receive his award in person. But, in his absence, I shall ask his publisher, Mr. Anthony Kane, to step forward and accept the award for the inspired and dedicated chronicler of our times—Amos Cottle.”

  This time brandy and thankfulness that the long ordeal was over at last lent real enthusiasm to the applause. Miss Featherstone smiled and bowed and sat down trembling visibly with gratification.

  “Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen.” Tony’s voice seemed unusually rich and resonant after her thin, cutting tones. “It is a great honor for me to accept this award in the distinguished name of Amos Cottle. I will not dwell on the tragic circumstances of his sudden death. I will only say that if Mos Cottle could have been here with us tonight, I know it would have been the proudest moment of his life.”

  Tony’s voice shook and thinned on the last sentence, as if there were tears in his eyes. There was real sympathy in the warmth of the applause. Only Basil and Alec suspected that Tony’s perturbation had another cause than grief for the death of Amos Cottle.

  The moment for last drinks and table-hopping had come. As guests began to circulate from table to table, a whisper ran through the crowd, like wind through a field of wheat. Alec, who had gone to another table to greet old friends, came back to Basil with the news.

  “Some reporter heard it on TV just before he came in to cover the speeches after dinner. Cottle’s wife, Vera Vane, was found dead in the street a little while ago. Apparently someone had choked her and forced cyanide into her mouth. Who could have foreseen that?”

  “She must have tried blackmail,” said Basil. “There’s a vacant seat at Tony’s table now. Gabor’s gone home. We’d better get over there before they break up.”

  Tony received them exuberantly. “Basil! And Alec McLean! You must join us for a last drink. Take this seat, Alec, and I’ll grab another chair for Basil. What will you have?”

  “Nothing at the moment, thank you.” Basil looked around the table. Apparently the rumor hadn’t reached this side of the room yet, but one of these five knew that Vera was dead—the one who had killed her.

  “Alec, I’ve got a book on my spring list you’ll want to publish in England, if I know you as well as I think I do. It’s a French book we’re doing in translation but the English rights are still open. My translator couldn’t think of a selling title and then I had an inspiration—we’ll use a French title Bonsoir, Maîtresse. Get it? It’s a combination of Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Good Morning, Miss Dove and Bonjour Tristesse—just like Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog—only it has sex, too. And snob appeal. People who don’t know enough French to read it in French are going to be awfully flattered by having a simple French title on an edition printed in English. Like cartoons with French captions in American papers. Why just going into a bookstore and asking for a book called Bonsoir, Maîtresse will bring a thrill into a lot of drab lives.”

  “Somebody really should write a book called Lincoln’s Doctors Dog,” remarked Leppy.

  Basil looked around the table. “There’s a question I’d like to ask you.”

  “Yes?” Tony was still smiling and self-confident, but the others looked wary.

  “A quite simple question,” Basil went on quietly. “Who really wrote the books that were signed Amos Cottle?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Tony’s face darkened. “I don’t know what you mean. I…”

  “Don’t deny it.” Basil spoke wearily. “There’s far too much evidence for you to deny it now. The letter you are supposed to have written Amos, accepting his first book, was dated January, 1952. The book was published March, 1952. Three months between acceptance and publication. Improbable before 1939, but quite impossible today. It takes six months or more to produce a book since the last war. The rare exceptions are books of especial timeliness commissioned from known writers. Amos’s was a first novel by an unknown.

  “I suspected that Cottle had medical training when he identified the Islands of Langerhans correctly while we were playing Two-Thirds of a Ghost. Now I know that before he lost his memory the man you knew as Amos Cottle was a young doctor named Alan Sewell. His identification of the Islands of Langerhans proves that he had retained his intellectual memories. His amnesia was personal and emotional as amnesia usually is. Yet in Passionate Pilgrim this passage occurs: ‘As I bent his arm behind his back with all my strength, I heard the dry crack of his tibia.’ No doctor, however inexperienced or incompetent, would ever write a passage in which the arm bone is described as the tibia. That happens to be a leg bone.

  “Cottle was from New England, but passages in his last novel suggest a Middle Western origin. Certain turns of phrase like the hero’s last words: I want to tell you good-bye.’ On the eastern seaboard we say, ‘I want to give you good-bye,’ or ‘I want to say good-bye.’

  “During that same game of Two-Thirds of a Ghost, Cottle failed to identify Byron as the author of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Whoever adopted the name Amos Cottle as a pen name must have known that poem and its author very well for there are two lines in it:

  ‘Oh, Amos Cottle! Phoebus! What a name

  To fill the speaking trump of future fame!’

  “The first Amos Cottle, Byron’s contemporary, was a writer now forgotten who pandered to the reading public of his day with a mishmash of all the commonplaces of the era, just as the later Amos Cottle did in our day, according to Emmett Avery. Someone with a
sense of mischief was gambling on the idea that a generation brought up in progressive schools, both public and private, where, thanks largely to Billy Phelps, more contemporary novels are studied than classics, would never recognize a name taken from one of the great classics of English letters. And how right this gambler was, for no one—not even Avery—recognized the name Amos Cottle. Today English Bards and Scotch Reviewers is one of those things students hear about and never read.

  “No wonder Avery felt Cottle’s work was a fad and a fraud, a pastiche of every bad novel of the last thirty years. The whole Amos Cottle personality was a pastiche and a fraud, one of the great literary hoaxes of all time, and heaven knows literature has produced more colossal hoaxes than any other art or profession—Ossian, Chatterton, Sainte-Beuve. The very device of the pen name incites such trickeries as Moll Flanders and The Young Visiters, and the girl writer who more recently pretended to have been a sailor before the mast and the man writer who claimed he’d been an Intelligence officer in Germany when he hadn’t. The literary mind has a flair for plots and deceptions that is hard to keep within the boards of a book. The psychological similarity of the lie and the tale are acknowledged by children who call a fib a story.

  “No wonder Cottle-Sewell didn’t do any writing during the three months when Vera lived with him. He had never written anything in his life but a few letters and school exercises. No wonder Tony had to get Vera a job in Hollywood to break up that marriage. No wonder her return threw you all into such a state of dismay. If she lived with Cottle-Sewell for any length of time, she was sure to discover that he was not writing at all and she was the kind of woman who would have blackmailed Cottle-Sewell and the man who was running the racket as soon as she discovered who he was. You had to keep her from finding out the truth.