The Great Pursuit (13 page)

'I will not give the patient...' said the nurse but MacMordie had grabbed the bottle and was
wrestling with the cap.

'You don't even know his blood group,' the nurse yelled as the cap came off.

'No need to,' said MacMordie and emptied most of the bottle over Piper's head.

'Now look what you've done,' bawled Sonia. Piper had passed out.

'Okay so we resuscitate him,' said MacMordie. 'This is going to make Kildare look like
nothing,' and he clamped the oxygen mask over Piper's face. By the time Piper was lifted out of
the ambulance on a stretcher he looked like death itself. Under the mask and the blood his face
had turned purple. In the excitement nobody had thought to turn the oxygen on.

'Is he still alive?' asked a reporter who had followed the ambulance.

'Who knows?' said MacMordie enthusiastically. Piper was carried into Casualty while a
bloodstained Sonia tried to calm the nurse who was having hysterics.

'It was too terrible. Never in my whole life have I known such a thing and in my ambulance
too,' she screamed at the TV cameras and reporters before being led away after her patient. As
the crimson stretcher with Piper's body was lifted on to a trolley and wheeled away, MacMordie
wiped his hands with satisfaction. Around him the TV cameras buzzed. The product had got
exposure. Mr Hutchmeyer would be pleased.

Mr Hutchmeyer was. He watched the riot on TV with evident satisfaction and all the fervour of
a fight enthusiast.

'That's my boy,' he yelled as a young Zionist flattened an innocent Japanese passenger off the
ship with a placard saying 'Remember Lod'. A cop tried to intervene and was promptly felled by
something in drag. The picture joggled violently as the cameraman was hit from behind. When it
finally steadied it was focused on an elderly woman lying bleeding on the ground.

'Great,' said Hutchmeyer, 'MacMordie's done a great job. That boy's got a real talent for
action.'

'That's what you think,' said Baby, who knew better.

'What the hell do you mean by that?' said Hutchmeyer, momentarily diverted. Baby shrugged.

'I just don't like violence is all.'

'Violence? So life is violent. Competitive. That's the way the cookie crumbles.'

Baby studied the screen. 'There's two more cookies just crumbled now,' she said.

'Human nature,' said Hutchmeyer, 'I didn't invent human nature.'

'Just exploit it.'

'Make a living.'

'Make a killing if you ask me,' said Baby. 'That woman's not going to make it.'

'Shit,' said Hutchmeyer.

'Took the word out of my mouth,' said Baby. Hutchmeyer concentrated on the screen and tried to
ignore Baby. A police posse with Piper came out of Customs.

'That's him,' said Hutchmeyer. 'The motherfucker looks like he's pissing himself.'

Baby looked and sighed. The haunted Piper was just as she had hoped, young, pale, sensitive
and intensely vulnerable. Like Keats at Waterloo she thought.

'Who's the fatso with MacMordie?' she asked as Sonia kneed a Ukrainian who had just spat on
her dress.

'That's my girl,' shouted Hutchmeyer enthusiastically. Baby looked at him incredulously.

'You've got to be joking. One bounce with that female Russian shotput and you'd bust your
truss.'

'Never mind my goddam truss,' said Hutchmeyer, 'I'm just telling you that that baby there is
the greatest little saleswoman in the world.'

'Great she may be,' said Baby, 'little she ain't. That Muscovite doubled up with lover's balls
knows that. What's her name?'

'Sonia Futtle,' said Hutchmeyer dreamily.

'I could have guessed,' said Baby, 'she's just futtled an Irishman now. He'll never ride
again.'

'Jesus,' said Hutchmeyer and retreated to his study to avoid the disillusionment of Baby's
commentary. He put a call through to the New York office for a computer forecast on predicted
sales of Pause O Men for the Virgin in the light of this great new publicity. Then he got through
to Production and ordered another half million copies. Finally a call to Hollywood and a demand
for another five per cent in TV serial takings. And all the time his mind was busy with wanton
thoughts of Sonia Futtle and same natural way of killing what remained of Miss Penobscot 1935 so
that he wouldn't have to part with twenty million dollars to get a divorce. Maybe MacMordie could
come up with something. Like fucking her to death. That would be natural. And this Piper guy had
a hard-on for old women. Could be there was something there.

In the emergency theatre at the Roosevelt Hospital doctors and surgeons struggled to save
Piper's life. The fact that appearances led them to suppose he had bled to death from a head
wound while his symptoms were those of suffocation made their task more complicated than it might
otherwise have been. The hysterical nurse was no help at all.

'He said he was a bleeder,' she told the chief surgeon who could see that already, 'he said he
had to have a transfusion. I didn't want to do it and he said he didn't want one and she told him
not to and he got at the blood bank and then he passed out and then they put him on resuscitation
and '

'Put her on sedation,' shouted the surgeon as the nurse was dragged out still screaming. On
the operating table Piper was bald. In a desperate attempt to find the site of the wound his hair
had been clipped.

'So where the fuck's the haemorrhage?' said the surgeon, shining a light down Piper's left ear
in the hope of finding some source for this terrible loss of blood. By the time Piper revived
they were none the wiser. The scratch on his hand had been cleansed and covered with a Band-Aid
and through a needle in his right wrist he was getting the transfusion he had dreaded. Finally
they cut off the supply and Piper got off the table.

'You've had a lucky escape,' said the surgeon. 'I don't know what you're suffering from but
you want to take it easy for a while. Maybe the Mayo could come up with an answer. We sure as
hell can't.'

Piper wobbled out into the corridor bald as a coot. Sonia burst into tears.

'Oh my God what have they done to you, my darling?' she wailed. MacMordie studied Piper's bald
head thoughtfully.

'That doesn't look so good,' he said finally and went into the theatre. 'We've got ourselves a
problem,' he told the surgeon.

'No need to tell me. Diagnostically I wouldn't know.'

'Yeah,' said MacMordie, 'it's like that. Now what he needs is bandages round his head. I mean
he's famous and there's all those TV guys out there and he's going to come out looking like Kojak
and he's an author. That isn't going to improve his image.'

'His image is your problem,' said the surgeon, 'mine just happens to be his illness.'

'You cut his hair all off,' said MacMordie. 'Now how about a whole heap of bandages? Like
right across his face and all. This guy needs his anonymity till his hair grows back.'

'No way,' said the surgeon, true to his medical principles.

'A thousand dollars,' said MacMordie and went to fetch Piper. He came reluctantly and
clutching Sonia's arm pathetically. By the time he emerged and went outside with Sonia on one
side and a nurse on the other only two frightened eyes and his nostrils were visible.

'Mr Piper has nothing to say,' said MacMordie quite unnecessarily. Several million viewers
could see that. Piper's bandaged face had no mouth. For them he could have been the invisible
man. The cameras zoomed in for close-ups and MacMordie spoke.

'Mr Piper has authorized me to say that he had no idea his great novel Pause O Men for the
Virgin would arouse the degree of public controversy that has marked the start of his lecture
tour of this country...'

'His what?' demanded a reporter.

'Mr Piper is Britain's greatest novelist. His novel Pause O Men for the Virgin published by
Hutchmeyer Press and available at seven dollars ninety '

'You mean his novel caused all this?' said an interviewer.

MacMordie nodded. 'Pause O Men for the Virgin is the most controversial novel of this century.
Read it and see what has caused this terrible sacrifice on Mr Piper's part...'

Beside him Piper swayed groggily and had to be helped down the steps to the waiting car.

'Where are you taking him to now?'

'He's being flown to a private clinic for diagnostic treatment,' said MacMordie and the car
moved off. In the back seat Piper whimpered through his bandages.

'What's that, darling?' Sonia asked. But Piper's mumble was incomprehensible.

'What was all that about a diagnostic treatment?' Sonia asked MacMordie. 'He doesn't need
'

'Just to throw the press and media off the trail. Mr Hutchmeyer wants you to stay with him at
his residence in Maine. We're going to the airport. Mr Hutchmeyer's private plane is
waiting.'

'I'll have something to say to Mr Goddam Hutchmeyer when I see him,' said Sonia. 'It's a
wonder you didn't get us all killed.'

MacMordie turned in his seat. 'Listen,' he said, 'you try promoting a foreign writer. He's got
to have a gimmick like he's won the Nobel Prize or been tortured in the Lubianka or something.
Charisma. Now what's this Piper got? Nothing. So we build him up. We have ourselves a little
riot, a bit of blood and all and overnight he's charismatic. And with those bandages he's going
to be in every home tonight on TV. Sell a million copies on that face alone.'

They drove to the airport and Sonia and Piper climbed aboard Imprint One. Only when they had
taken off did Sonia remove the bandages from Piper's face.

'We'll have to leave the rest on till your hair starts to grow again,' she said. Piper nodded
his bandaged head.

From Maine Hutchmeyer phoned his congratulations to MacMordie. 'That scene outside the
hospital was the greatest,' he said, 'that's going to blow a million viewers' minds. Why we've
made a martyr out of him. Like a sacrificial lamb on the altar of great literature. I tell you,
MacMordie, for this you get a bonus.'

'It was nothing,' said MacMordie modestly.

'How did he take it?' asked Hutchmeyer.

'Well he seemed a little confused is all,' said MacMordie. 'He'll get over it.'

'All authors have confused minds,' said Hutchmeyer, 'it's natural with them.'

And Piper spent the flight in a confused state of mind. He still wasn't sure what had hit him
or why and his mixed reception as O'Piper, Piparfat, Peipmann, Piperovsky et al. added to the
problems already confronting him as the suppositious author of Pause. And in any case as a
putative genius Piper had assumed so many different identities that past personae compounded
those of the present. So did shock, MacMordie's bloodbath, suffocation, resuscitation, and the
fact that he was wearing a turban of bandages over an unscathed scalp. He stared out of the
window and wondered what Conrad or Lawrence or George Eliot would have done in his position.
Apart from the certainty that they wouldn't have been in it, he could think of nothing. And Sonia
was no great help. Her mind seemed set on making the financial most from his ordeal.

'Either way we've got him over a barrel,' she said as the plane began to descend over Bangor.
'You're too sick to go through with this tour.'

'I absolutely agree,' said Piper.

Sonia crushed his hopes. 'He won't wear that one,' she said. 'With Hutchmeyer it's the
contract counts. You could be on an intravenous drip and you'd still have to make appearances. So
we sting him for compensation. Like another twenty-five thousand dollars.'

'I think I would rather go home,' said Piper.

'The way I'm going to play it you'll go home with fifty grand.'

Piper raised objections. 'But won't Mr Hutchmeyer be very cross?'

'Cross? He'll blow his top.'

Piper considered the prospect of Mr Hutchmeyer blowing his top and disliked it. It added yet
another awful ingredient to a situation that was already sufficiently alarming. By the time the
plane landed he was in a state of acute anxiety and it took all Sonia's coaxing to get him down
the steps and into the waiting car. Presently they were speeding through pine forests towards the
man whom Frensic in an unguarded moment had spoken of as the Al Capone of the publishing
world.

'Now you leave all the talking to me,' said Sonia, 'and just remember that you're a shy
introverted author. Modesty is the line to take.'

The car turned down a drive towards a house that had proclaimed itself by the gate as 'The
Hutchmeyer Residence'.

'No one can call that modest,' said Piper staring out at the house. It stood in fifty acres of
park and garden, birch and pine, an ornate shingle-style monument to the romantic eclecticism of
the late nineteenth century as embodied in wood by Peabody and Stearns, Architects. Sprouting
towers, dormer windows, turrets with dovecotes, piazzas with oval windows cut in their
latticework, convoluted chimneys and angled balconies, the Residence was awe-inspiring. They
drove under a porte-cochere into a courtyard already crammed with cars and got out. A moment
later the enormous front door opened and a large red-faced man bounded down the steps.

'Sonia baby,' he bawled and hugged her to his Hawaiian shirt, 'and this must be Mr Piper.' He
crunched Piper's hand and stared fiercely into his face. 'This is a great honour, Mr Piper, a
very great honour to have you with us,' and still holding Piper's hand he propelled him up the
steps and through the door. Inside, the house was as remarkable as the exterior. A vast hall
incorporated a thirteenth-century fireplace, a Renaissance staircase, a minstrels' gallery, an
excruciatingly ferocious portrait of Hutchmeyer in the pose of J. P. Morgan as photographed by
Steichner, and underfoot a mosaic floor depicting a great many stages in the manufacture of
paper. Piper stepped cautiously across falling trees, a log jam and a vat of boiling wood pulp
and up several more steps at the top of which stood a woman of breathtaking shape.

'Baby,' said Hutchmeyer, 'I want you to meet Mr Peter Piper. Mr Piper, my wife, Baby.'