The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (18 page)

The small man nods, his
eyes closing for the briefest of seconds.

“Or,” the tall man
continues, turning back to Jack, “perhaps I might be Dr Samuel Fergusson or
Dick Kennedy — ‘a Scotsman in the full significance of the word . . . open,
resolute and dogged’ — fresh from five whole weeks travelling the skies in a
balloon.”

Jack nods at the little
man. “And him?”

“Ah, a good point,
barkeeper,” the tall man says, with a nod and a wink, and he turns to his
companion once again and adds, “which would make him Joe, Dr Fergusson’s
manservant.”

The small man nods
again, this time adding a small bow to the repertoire.

“But you’re neither of
those?” Jack Fedogan says.

“Indeed not,” the man
says. “Mayhap I’m-”

“Mayhap?”

“Yes, mayhap then I am
Phileas Fogg, a phlegmatic — even Sphinx-like — Byron with moustache and
whiskers —”

“Which would make the
little guy Jean Passepartout, yes?” says Jack.

And for a few seconds,
silence floods into the Working Day. Edgar Nornhoevan and Jim Leafman watch,
enraptured. The tall (even while he’s sitting down) black man in the end booth
lets out a smile — his first for the day — as he reaches for the pack of
Camels.

“My, oh my,” the tall
man exclaims, “I do believe, my dear Meredith, that we are in the presence of a
literary man.” Jack Fedogan shakes his head. “Uh uh, I just remember all my
classic literature — particularly Jules Verne and Thomas Hardy — from school.”
And then he says, “You could also be Michael Ardan — ‘an enthusiastic Parisian,
as witty as he was bold’ — which, moo-hepp mee-hype, could conceivably make Doberman
here Ardan’s worthy friend J. T. Maston, fretting over his telescope as Ardan,
President Barbicane of Baltimore-based Gun Club, and the industrious Captain
Nicholl undertake their journey around the moon.”

For a few seconds the
silence in the bar — the
West Coast Jazz
CD being between tracks — is absolute until the tall man slaps the
counter and lets out a throaty roar of a laugh. “Capital!” he exclaims loudly, “absolutely
capital.”

“So, whyn’t we start
right from the top,” Jack says.

The tall man’s smile is
warmer now as he holds out a hand. “In reality,” he says, “I am Horatio
Fortesque, a literary scholar of some repute — particularly within those
circles whose members appreciate the great works of Monsieur Jules Verne —
while my companion here is Meredith Lidenbrook Greenblat.”

“Lidenbrook?” Jack says,
his voice quizzical against the surety of Lou Levy’s piano on “Serenade In Blue”
as he shakes the two men’s hands.

“Jack, I didn’t know you
knew so much about books,” is what Edgar Nornhoevan says as he sidles up to the
bar, empty glass held in his bear-like hand.

The bartender shrugs,
polishes a piece of counter and pushes a couple of shot glasses first one way
and then the other. “Verne was always a favourite of mine,” he says, making a
so-what with his mouth before he adds, “along with Dick Prather’s Shell Scott
books, John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee and Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct yarns. I
guess some things you don’t forget.”

Edgar is shaking his
head, looking at Jack head-on but keeping a weathered eye trained on the two
strangers right alongside him.

“You need that filling?”
Jack asks.

“Oh,” Edgar says,
looking down in surprise at the glass —
now
where did
that
come from! —
and then, nodding, “sure, one more.”

“And Jim?”

Jim Leafman gets up from
the table and shuffles up to Edgar, planting his own glass on the counter. “Guess
I’ll squeeze another one in,” he says, turning to the tall stranger and giving
him a sly wink. The stranger chuckles.

“So, you strangers in
town?” Edgar asks, immediately feeling like a putz: after all, he silently
reasons to himself, this is no two-muddy-cross-streets shanty town circa 1850,
it’s twenty-first century New-goddam-York.

But the tall man doesn’t
seem perturbed by the question, and he shakes his head. “I’ve lived in
Manhattan most of my life,” he says, his voice softening out a little and
losing some of the clipped precision he’d sported earlier against Jack. “Come
from south American stock,” says Horatio Fortesque, “Bolivia to be exact, and
my name was originally Bill,” he says. “Martinez — William Martinez,” he says. “Horatio
Fortesque seemed altogether a wholly more appropriate name for someone so
immersed in the literary world,” he says, aiming the words to nobody in
particular and up into the air above the counter.

“Edgar Nornhoevan,
Horatio,” says Edgar, holding out his hand. “And this here’s my good friend Jim
Leafman,” he says as the stranger shakes first Edgar’s hand and then Jim’s. “We
drink here pretty much all the time.”

“I’m delighted to make
your acquaintance,” Fortesque gushes . . . with just a little too much butter
on the bread as far as Edgar is concerned.

“So, how about your
friend?” Edgar says, nodding to the Peter Lorre lookalike standing just in
Horatio Fortesque’s shadow.

“I made Mister Meredith
Lidenbrook Greenblat’s acquaintance through the internet,” Fortesque says,
imbuing the word ‘internet’ with almost W. C. Fields-like pomposity. “In a chat
room,” he adds.

Jack Fedogan places two
beers on the counter in front of Edgar and looks over at the two strangers.
Picking up the slack, Edgar says, “Buy you a beer?”

“Certainly, that’s most
kind of you,” Fortesque trills.

Then, to Jack, “Do you
have imported beers?”

Jack nods as he presses
the eject button on the CD player behind him. As he consigns the
West Coast
Jazz
CD into its case and removes one of the disks from
Time Signatures,
the four-CD Dave Brubeck retrospective, he says over his shoulder, “What
did you have in mind?”

“Something English,”
Peter Lorre chirps up, the phrase hissed out rather than actually spoken, and
then, correcting himself, “Something British, I mean.”

“I spent some time in
England,” Jim Leafman says, reaching for his beer.

“I got Tetley’s on tap,”
Jack says, “plus in bottles I got Old Peculier, Black Sheep, Marston Moor, Landlord,
Cropton’s Two —”

“Landlord,” says Lorre,
drooling.

“Tetleys is fine for me,”
Fortesque says and then, turning to face Jim, “Whereabouts?”

“Pardon me?”

“In England. Whereabouts
did you stay?”

“Oh,” Jim says, taking a
deep sup of his beer as he casts his mind back to the days before he worked at
the Refuse Department (“Sanitation”, he tells most folks) . . . the time he now
regards as BC — Before Clarice — before he parked up his ‘74 Olds that, at the
time, was two parts yellow and eight parts rust (the rust is now winning the
battle), parked it up outside the travelling salesman’s apartment building with
the .38 sitting in his lap . . . and then seeing the guy walking along the
street, the guy who was sticking it to Clarice behind Jim’s back, seeing him in
his fancy shoes and his fancy pants, fancy shirt and fancy sports jacket,
knowing that he smelled of expensive cologne and not sewage the way Jim smelled
. . . maybe even, down behind the zipper, smelled a little of Clar —

“It was a long time ago,”
Jim says, emerging from the beer and the memories, licking his top lip at the
residue of the former and blinking his eyes hard three times at the latter.

“I said
where,”
Fortesque
says, with just a hint of irritation in his tone.

“York shire,” Jim says,
splitting the word into two, the second part sounding like the areas where the
little folks lived in those
Lord of the Rings
movies. “Leeds,” he adds.

“How long were you
there?” asks Fortesque.

In
your eyes,
sings
Carmen McRae, Brubeck tickling the ivories, Eugene Wright on bass and the
indefatigable Joe Morello handling the drums. They sound so close they could be
right here in the bar and, just for a second, both Jack Fedogan — who knows the
song well, and the original album it comes from
(Tonight Only!) —
and
Fortesque turn around momentarily before settling back to what appears to be a
genesis of conversation.

“Oh, around six maybe
eight months I guess.” Jim looks down at his beer and, without looking back up,
he says softly, “I was twenty years old.”

“Quite a journey for a
young man to make,” Horatio Fortesque says, reaching for his pint glass of
Tetleys and nodding first to Jack, then to Edgar, and finally to Jim Leafman,
unsure as to whom he owes the gratitude.

“Yeah, I guess,” says
Jim.

The Lorre-lookalike
snakes out a hand and grasps the bottle of Landlord, pours it into the glass
alongside it. “You want to sit down?” Edgar asks.

Fortesque and Lorre nod
and the quartet move over to where Edgar and Jim were sitting just a few
minutes earlier.

“But it was nothing like
a journey I saw a man take night after night,” Jim says, sliding his beer
around on one of Jack’s Working Day coasters. “Every night,” he says, “right up
until —” And his voice trails off.

“I’d been up in Leeds
maybe around a week, maybe a little less,” Jim Leafman says, glancing around
just in time to see Jack move his counter polishing a little closer to their
table. Edgar settles back on his chair and glances at the two strangers, who
seem relaxed about Jim’s story. He looks across at the tall black man, smoking
— always seems to have a cigarette on the go — and back at Jim.”Got a little
job at a newsagent store — little more than a newsstand — in the city and
rented a small apartment. They call them flats,” Jim explains to his audience
and receives nods and blinks to let him know they all understand.

“The place I lived was
called Headingley — maybe three miles from the town centre — a big student
area: the Leeds University campus is enormous. Anyway, because it was — still
is, I guess — such a big student dormitory, Headingley was a really fun place:
cheap supermarkets, charity stores filled with used books and record albums —
this was before CDs,” he says.

More nods, more blinks.

“But best of all were
the pubs. There were stacks of them — the Original Oak and the Skyrack, right
across from each other next to St Michael’s Chur—”

“Just keep to the point,
Jim,” Edgar says. He’s listened to Jim Leafman’s stories before, of course.

Nodding and contrite,
Jim carries on. “Anyway, this one night I’m in the pub with this English guy —”
Jim is about to attempt remembering the guy’s name (it’s Phil, a medical
student, but he won’t remember that until two full weeks have passed and this
evening in the Working Day has assumed legendary status) but he thinks better
of it. “So, anyway,” he says, waving an arm dismissively, “this guy comes in
and walks right up to the bar. He’s a little guy —” He turns to Meredith
Lidenbrook Greenblat and says, “No offence,” to which Greenblat leans over the
table and nods sagely.

“He’s a little guy,
balding, skin that looks like he’s just shaved, pant legs that could cut steak,
shirt collar tight around his neck, buttoned up with a necktie, knot perfectly
in place, sports jacket showing linked cuffs . . . the whole works. You notice
that kind of get-up, plus the guy looks like one of the two brothers in the
Tintin books . . .”

“The Thompson twins,”
ventures Jack from over behind the bar.

“Seems you know a lot
about all kinds of literature,” Fortesque says and Jack shrugs
self-deprecatingly, polishes another spot.

“Yeah, right — the
Thompson twins,” Jim Leafman says with a big grin. “Anyways, the guy doesn’t
say anything but the bartender pulls him a half-pint and the guy passes him the
money for it. Then the guy downs the drink — in maybe three or four swallows —
wipes his mouth and strides right out “But he paid him, right?” Jack Fedogan
asks from the counter.

Edgar says, “He paid for
the drink, Jack — let’s just get on with the story here.”

Jack mutters something
Nigel Bruce-style and returns to his polishing.

“Anyway,” Jim says after
taking a sip of his beer, “I didn’t really think anything of it at the time. It
was just, you know, a little unusual, right?”

Everyone seems to agree
that such action was unusual and Jim continued.

“But it happened again.”

“The same night?” the
little Lorre-lookalike whispers sibilantly.

Jim shakes his head.

“Another night — maybe
the next one but certainly no more than two nights later. And it was a
different pub.” He stops and shrugs at Edgar’s frown. “Okay, we drank most
nights — twenty years old for crissakes.”

Edgar sits back in his
chair and holds up a hand. “I didn’t say nothing.”

“You looked,” is what
Jim says to that.