The Great Pursuit (34 page)

'I had to,' said Frensic miserably. 'If I hadn't, the whole deal would have fallen through.
Hutchmeyer would have backed out and where would we have been then?'

'We wouldn't be in the ghastly position we are now, that I do know.'

'You'd have gone out of business,' said Frensic. 'Pause saved you. You've done very nicely out
of the book and I've sent you others. Corkadales is a name to be reckoned with now.'

'Well, I suppose that's true,' said Geoffrey, slightly mollified, 'but it's going to be a name
that will stink if it gets out that Piper is still alive and didn't write...'

'It isn't going to get out,' said Frensic, 'I promise you that.'

Geoffrey looked at him doubtfully. 'Your promises...' he began.

'You'll just have to trust me,' said Frensic.

'Trust you? After this? You can rest assured that if there's one thing I'm not going to
do...'

'You'll have to. Remember that contract you signed? The one saying you had paid fifty thousand
pounds advance for Pause?'

'You tore that up,' said Geoffrey, 'I saw you do it.'

Frensic nodded. 'But Hutchmeyer didn't,' he said. 'He had photocopies made and if this thing
comes to court you're going to have a hard time explaining why you signed two contracts with the
same author for the same book. It isn't going to look good, Geoffrey, not good at all.'

Geoffrey could see that. He sat down.

'What do you want?' he asked.

'A bed for the night,' said Frensic, 'and tomorrow morning I shall go to the American Embassy
for a visa.'

'I can't see why you've got to spend the night here,' said Geoffrey.

'You would if you saw her,' said Frensic man-to-man. Geoffrey poured him another brandy.

'I'll have to explain to Sven,' he said, 'he's obsessively jealous. By the way, who did write
Pause?' But Frensic shook his head. 'I can't tell you. There are some things it's best for you
not to know. Just let's say the late Peter Piper.'

'The late?' said Geoffrey with a shudder. 'It's a curious expression to apply to the
living.'

'It's a curious expression to apply to the dead,' said Frensic, 'It seems to suggest that they
may yet turn up. Better late than never.'

'I wish I could share your optimism,' said Geoffrey.

Next morning, after a restless night in a strange bed, Frensic went to the American Embassy
and got his visa. He visited his bank and he bought a return ticket to Florida. That night he
left Heathrow. He spent the crossing in a drunken stupor and boarded the flight from Miami to
Atlanta next day feeling hot, ill and filled with foreboding. To delay matters he spent the next
night in a hotel and studied a map of Alabama. It was a detailed map but he couldn't find
Bibliopolis. He tried the desk clerk but the man had never heard of it.

'You'd best go to Selma and ask there,' he told Frensic. Frensic caught the Greyhound to Selma
and enquired at the Post Office.

The sticks. A wide place in the road over Mississippi way,' he was told. 'Swamp country on the
Ptomaine River. Take Route 80 about a hundred miles and go north. Are you from New England?'

'Old England,' said Frensic, 'why do you ask?'

'Just that they don't take too kindly to Northern strangers in those parts. Damn Yankees they
call them. They're still living in the past.'

'So is the man I want to see,' said Frensic and went out to rent a car. The man at the office
increased his apprehension.

'You're going out along Blood Alley you want to take care,' he said.

'Blood Alley?' said Frensic anxiously.

That's what they call Route 80 through to Meridian. That road's seen a whole heap of
deaths.'

'Isn't there a more direct route to Bibliopolis?'

'You can go through the backwoods but you could get lost. Blood Alley's your best route.'

Frensic hesitated. 'I don't suppose I could hire a driver?' he asked.

'Too late now,' said the man, 'Saturday afternoon this time everyone's gone home and tomorrow
being Sunday...'

Frensic left the office and drove to a motel. He wasn't going to drive to Bibliopolis along
Blood Alley at nightfall. He would go in the morning.

Next day he was up early and on the road. The sun shone down out of a cloudless sky and the
day was bright and beautiful. Frensic wasn't. The desperate resolution with which he had left
London had faded and with each mile westward it diminished still further. Woods closed in on the
road and by the time he reached the sign with the faded inscription BIBLIOPOLIS 15 MILES he
almost turned back. But a pinch of snuff and the thought of what would happen if Piper continued
his campaign of literary revival gave him the courage he needed. Frensic turned right and
followed the dirt road into the woods, trying not to look at the black water and the trees
strangled with vines. And, like Piper those many months before, he was relieved when he came to
the meadows and the cattle grazing in the long grass. But still the abandoned shacks depressed
him and the occasional glimpse of the river, a brown slurry in the distance fringed by veiled
trees, did nothing for his morale. The Ptomaine looked aptly named. Finally the road veered down
to the left and across the water Frensic looked at Bibliopolis. A wide place in the road, the
girl in Selma had called it, but she had quite evidently never seen it. Besides, the road stopped
at the river. The little town huddled round the square and looked old and unchanged from some
time in the nineteenth century. And the ferry which presently moved towards him with an old man
pulling on the rope was from some bygone age. Frensic thought he knew how why Bibliopolis was
said to be in the sticks. By the Styx would have done as well. Frensic drove the car carefully on
to the ferry and got out.

'I'm looking for a man called Piper,' he told the ferryman.

The man nodded. 'Guessed you might be,' he said. 'They come from all over to hear him preach.
And if it isn't him it's the Reverend Baby up at the Church.'

'Preach?' said Frensic, 'Mr Piper preaches?'

'Sure does. Preaching and teaching the good word.'

Frensic raised his eyebrows. Piper as preacher was a new one to him. 'Where will I find him?'
he asked.

'Down Pellagra.'

'Down with pellagra?' said Frensic hopefully.

'At Pellagra,' said the old man, 'the house.' He nodded in the direction of a large house
fronted by tall white columns. 'There's Pellagra. Used to be the Stopeses place but they all died
off.'

'Hardly surprising,' said Frensic, his intellectual compass spinning between vitamin
deficiency, advocates of birth control, the Monkey Trial and Yoknapatawpha County. He gave the
man a dollar and drove down the drive to an open gate. On one side a sign in large italic said
THE PIPER SCHOOL OF PENMANSHIP while on the other an inscribed finger pointed to the CHURCH OF
THE GREAT PURSUIT. Frensic stopped the car and stared at the enormous finger. The Church of The
Great Pursuit? The Church of...There could be no doubting that he had come to the right place.
But what sort of religious mania was Piper suffering from now? He drove on and parked beside
several other cars in front of the large white building with a wrought-iron balcony extending
forward to the columns from the first-floor rooms. Frensic got out and walked up the steps to the
front door. It was open. Frensic peered into the hall. A door to the left had painted on it THE
SCRIPTORIUM while from a room on the right there came the drone of an insistent voice. Frensic
crossed the marble floor and listened. There was no mistaking that voice. It was Piper's, but the
old hesitant quality had gone and in its place there was a new strident intensity. If the voice
was familiar, so were the words.

'And we must not (the "must" here presupposing explicitly a sustained seriousness of purpose
and an undeviating moral duty) allow ourselves to be deluded by the seeming naïvety so frequently
ascribed by other less perceptive critics to the presentation of Little Nell. Sentiment not
sentimentality as we must understand it is cognizant...'

Frensic shyed away from the door. He knew now what the Church of The Great Pursuit had for its
gospel. Piper was reading aloud from Dr Louth's essay 'How We Must Approach The Old Curiosity
Shop'. Even his religion was derived. Frensic found a chair and sat down filled with a mounting
anger. 'The unoriginal little sod,' he muttered, and cursed Dr Louth into the bargain. The
apotheosis of that dreadful woman, the cause of all his troubles, was taking place here in the
heart of the Bible belt. Frensic's anger turned to fury. The Bible belt! Bibliopolis and the
Bible. And instead of that magnificent prose, Piper was disseminating her graceless style, her
angular inverted syntax, her arid puritanism and her denunciations against pleasure and the joy
of reading. And all this from a man who couldn't write to save his soul! For a moment Frensic
felt that he was at the heart of a great conspiracy against life. But that was paranoia. There
had been no conscious purpose in the circumstances that had led to Piper's missionary zeal. Only
the accident of literary mutation which had turned Frensic himself from a would-be novelist into
a successful agent and, by the way of The Moral Novel, had mutilated what little talent for
writing Piper might once have possessed. And now like some carrier of literary death he was
passing the infection on. By the time the droning voice stopped and the little congregation filed
out, their faces taut with moral intensity, and made their way to the cars, Frensic was in a
murderous mood.

He crossed the hall and entered the Church of The Great Pursuit. Piper was putting the book
away with all the reverence of a priest handling the Host. Frensic stood in the doorway and
waited. He had come a long way for this moment. Piper shut the cupboard and turned. The look of
reverence faded from his face.

'You,' he said faintly.

'Who else?' said Frensic loudly to exorcize the atmosphere of sanctity that pervaded the room.
'Or were you expecting Conrad?' Piper's face paled. 'What do you want?'

'Want?' said Frensic and sat down in one of the pews and took a pinch of snuff. 'Just to put
an end to this bloody game of hide-and-seek.' He wiped his nose with a red handkerchief.

Piper hesitated and then headed for the door. 'We can't talk in here,' he muttered.

'Why not?' said Frensic. 'It seems as good a place as any.'

'You wouldn't understand,' said Piper and went out. Frensic blew his nose coarsely and then
followed.

'For a horrid little blackmailer you've got a hell of a lot of pretensions,' he said as they
stood in the hall, 'all that crap in there about The Old Curiosity Shop.'

'It isn't crap,' said Piper, 'and don't call me a blackmailer. You started this. And that's
the truth.'

'Truth?' said Frensic with a nasty laugh. 'If you want the truth you're going to get it.
That's what I've come here for.' He looked across at the door marked SCRIPTORIUM. 'What's in
there?'

'That's where I teach people to write.' said Piper.

Frensic stared at him and laughed again. 'You're joking,' he said and opened the door. Inside
the room was filled with desks, desks on which stood bottles of ink and pens, and each desk
tilted at an angle. On the walls were framed examples of script and, in front, a blackboard.
Frensic glanced round.

'Charming. The Scriptorium. And I suppose you've got a Plagiarium too?'

'A what?' said Piper.

'A special room for plagiarism. Or do you combine the process in here? I mean there's nothing
like going the whole hog. How do you go about it? Do you give each student a bestseller to alter
and then flog it as your own work?'

'Coming from you, that's a dirty crack,' said Piper. 'I do all my own writing in my study.
Down here I teach my students how to write. Not what.'

'How? You teach them how to write?' He picked up a bottle of ink and shook it. The sludge
moved slowly. 'Still on the evaporated ink, I see.'

'It gives the greatest density,' said Piper but Frensic had put the bottle down and turned
back to the door.

'And where's your study?' he asked. Piper led the way slowly upstairs and opened another door.
Frensic stepped inside. The walls were lined with shelves and a big desk stood in front of a
window which looked out across the drive towards the river. Frensic studied the books. They were
bound in calf. Dickens, Conrad, James...

'The old testament,' he said and reached for Middlemarch. Piper took it brusquely from him and
put it back.

'This year's model?' asked Frensic.

'A world, a universe beyond your tawdry imagination,' said Piper angrily. Frensic shrugged.
There was a pathos about Piper's tenseness that was weakening his resolve. Frensic steeled
himself to be coarse.

'Bloody cosy little billet you've got yourself here,' he said, seating himself at the desk and
putting his feet up. Behind him Piper's face whitened at the sacrilege. 'Curator of a museum,
counterfeiter of other people's novels, a bit of blackmail on the side and what do you do about
sex?' He hesitated and picked up a paperknife for safety's sake. If he was going to put the boot
in there was no knowing what Piper might do. 'Screw the late Mrs Hutchmeyer?'

There was a hiss behind him and Frensic swung round. Piper was facing him with his pinched
face and narrow eyes blazing with hatred. Frensic's grip tightened on the paperknife. He was
frightened but the thing had to be done. He had come too far to go back now.

'It's none of my business, I daresay,' he said as Piper stared, 'but necrophilia seems to be
your forte. First you rob dead authors, then you put the bite on me for two million dollars, what
do you do to the late Mrs Hutch '

'Don't you dare say it,' shouted Piper, his voice shrill with fury.

'Why not?' said Frensic. 'There's nothing like confession for cleansing the soul.'

'It isn't true,' said Piper. His breathing was audible.

Frensic smiled cynically. 'What isn't? The truth will out, as the saying goes. That's why I'm
here.' He stood up with assumed menace and Piper shrank back.