Downstairs, Joe the doorman, an imperfectly feudal retainer, said ‘Hi there, Mr Steele!’ and then, braided cap in hand, saw me out through the swing door into 77th Street. The sun was still trying to shine, but the contrast between eighty-degree steam heat and forty-degree fresh air was too marked for comfort. I stood under the red-striped canopy, buttoning up my top coat, while Joe looked towards Park Avenue in search of a cruising taxi. Waiting, we exchanged some traditional dialogue.
‘Saw you on TV last night, Mr Steele.’
‘Did you? I hope you enjoyed the show.’
‘That’s one we always watch. But my wife keeps asking, what’s he really like.’
As usual, I resisted the temptation to say, ‘Bastards don’t come any bigger,’ and answered: ‘Oh, he’s quite a character, once you get to know him.’
‘That’s what we thought. I liked the bit when he mixed up the commercial.’
A taxi, answering Joe’s raised hand, drew up alongside. As I got in, Joe put on his cap, gave a windmill salute, and said: ‘Take it easy, now.’
The master-and-servant charade was over; the one that followed it, loosely labelled ‘All New York Cab Drivers are Characters,’ now took its place. Sometimes the credit-title was true, and on a long run, say from Kennedy Airport into town, one could really enjoy a salty monologue on the state of the nation; more often than not, nature’s lovable cab drivers turned out to be just another New York myth, and the reality was crude and disobliging, preoccupied with a radio tuned to the most raucous local station of all, which was raucous indeed. This morning, I had drawn a candidate from the majority, a surly spitting man who spent a full half-minute filling in his timesheet before throwing over his shoulder the words: ‘Where to?’
Though I knew the omens were not promising, I felt like getting my money’s worth for the ride. Why should cab drivers be the only people licensed to behave like barbarians? Just as if it were normal, I answered: ‘The Court of the Sixteen Satraps.’
His head on its thick furry neck came round a fraction. ‘How’s that?’
‘Don’t you know a restaurant called The Court of the Sixteen Satraps?’
‘Jesus!’ He spat out of the side window, which should have been closed and was letting in a frigid draught. ‘What are they going to call ’em next?’
‘Thirty-eighth Street,’ I told him. ‘Between Madison and Fifth. You’re meant to know that sort of thing.’
He braked roughly to a halt for the first traffic lights, hawked and spat once more, looked at himself in the mirror, and asked: ‘What was that name again?’
‘The Court of the Sixteen Satraps. Haven’t you heard of it? It’s been open about a year.’
‘If I had to remember every nutty joint in town, I wouldn’t be driving a hack. I’d be out of my skull.’
After that, he only spoke once more, when we were stopped by the lights at 60th Street, and he jerked his head at a policeman standing on the corner. ‘See that lousy cop?’ he growled, out of the corner of his mouth. ‘He’s the meanest bastard in town.’
I said: ‘Don’t give up so easily,’ and he glared at me in the mirror; and after that, we rode in welcome silence, and I was free to enjoy – and did enjoy – the descent into the grand canyon of this city.
After a season in London, we had lived in New York for the past five years; we had liked it from the moment we first went there, for the publication of Ex Afrika, and clinched the liking when we came back for the opening of the film. (I still recalled the trio of charming, watchful, look-alike Jews who went everywhere with us on that occasion, on a twenty-four-hour, round-the-clock, escort basis. I had been much impressed by the film company’s thoughtfulness until Kate said: ‘It’s only to make sure we don’t get drunk before the première.’) After that visit, we had made the move a permanent one, leased the duplex apartment, and settled in to relish all that our bouncing hometown could offer.
It was a lot, even on an anonymous basis; and riding the crest of a book which stayed on the best-seller list for one hundred and four weeks, followed by another which lasted a full year, we had a wild and wonderful time. New York, we found, had open arms; and if sometimes they needed to be pried open first, that didn’t affect the ultimate welcome. Oysters were just the same, and just as wild and wonderful.
There was an endless amount of things for me to do in fact, too much for a writer who wanted only to write; I had to compromise, or rather I had to accept the fact, which was no hardship, that a book every three or four years was the most I could do, if I wanted to be a recognisable, available, quotable man as well. It happened that I did want that … I had made, and still did, a lot of television appearances – all the old shows and all the new, from Dave Garroway down to Johnny Carson, via Sullivan, Parr, John Daly and David Susskind. I did a lecture tour which, at the cost of staring down upon assorted seas of millinery, from Boston to San Francisco, four times a week for three months, netted me fifty thousand dollars, and a permanent distaste for Chicken Pot Pie and pineapple salad.
I made a trip to the Congo for Life Magazine, and another to London to sniff and then distil the fragrance of the Ward-Profumo-Keeler circus. I went to Hollywood to do Wrap-Around’s screenplay, and then to Cuba for one of those sober assessments of the Castro regime and swiftly out again as a suspected CIA saboteur. That didn’t do me any harm, either.
It was part of a self-projection, consistent, long-term, and highly effective. Kate didn’t like it, I did. As its result, Ex Afrika earned a swift quarter-of-a-million dollars before it started to ease off; its successor, Wrap-Around, bolstered by a monumental film deal, had already made half a million more. As far as I was concerned, there weren’t any other kinds of book, and there weren’t going to be.
$900,000 in six years was the current score, and it would top the million mark before this year was out. We still never seemed to have any money, but it was an acceptable kind of poverty; and here, as if to point the fact, was the gilded entrance to The Court of the Sixteen Satraps, home (so the ads declared) of the Gourmet Who Looks East.
A man dressed in a jewelled turban, scarlet leather jerkin, and golden-hued Turkish trousers, and flourishing a colossal two-handed scimitar (for which, I happened to know, he needed a police permit) stood sentinel outside, waiting to open the cab doors; and he was still only a minor clue to what lay in wait within.
The Sixteen Satraps, which was very much the ‘in’ restaurant that year, was predominantly Persian, with overtones from other vanished empires nearby; the bar was a copy of the Blue Mosque of Isfahan, the main dining room shaped like a Persian walled garden, complete with latticework and a control system of falling rose-petals; the checkroom and cigarette girls wore transparent veils, cut-out velvet hearts in strategic places, and were known as Persian Lambs.
Vast tapestries covered the walls; vast punkah fans waved to and fro overhead; on the tables (shaped and coloured like shining half-moons) the place mats were small Persian rugs, the plates inverted bronze shields, the knives miniature scimitars, the spoons miniature slippers, the wine-coolers miniature war-chariots. The waiters wore Turkish trousers, silk sashes, white turbans and gold slave-bangles; all the men behind the bar sported false yet formal beards of curly gold thread, copied from the tapestried warriors above. The man in charge of them was called Xerxes.
The menus were enormous, printed in Persian (small italics) translated into English (18-point Roman); at the head of each was the Omar Khayyám quotation, ‘A Loaf of Bread, a Jug of Wine, and Thou,’ and underneath: ‘You bring the Thou, we do the rest.’ The maître d’hôtel, a remote personage, was known as the Head Shah. The food, leaning towards shish-kebabs on flaming daggers, stuffed vine leaves and melons foaming sherbet at every pore, was atrociously expensive, and very good indeed.
I gave my coat to one of the Persian Lambs, a forward-looking girl of large and lavish build; indeed, her configuration, whether true or false, always seemed an architectural impossibility. If this was a lamb, it was no wonder about support prices. Accepting the coat, she said: ‘Hi, Mr Steele! Saw you on TV last night.’
‘So late? You should have been in bed.’
‘Oh, I was!’
The look in her eye would have stunned a statue. I backed away prudently towards the bar, elevated nonetheless. Somebody loved me, after all.
‘Hi, Mr Steele!’ said Xerxes the head barman, a small foxy man whose fake yellow beard made him look like a starving actor which he may well have been, after office hours. ‘Saw you on TV last night.’
‘Good for you.’ One day, someone was going to tell me they had read one of my books, and I would break down altogether. ‘Did you like the show?’
‘I liked it when he was on every night.’
I wrestled with this non sequitur for a moment, but it wouldn’t come out. ‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘Now I’m feeling thirsty.’
‘Farah Dibah?’
‘Farah Dibah.’
A Farah Dibah was a martini with a stuffed date instead of an olive.
Sipping it, I looked round the Blue Mosque bar, and through its entrance to the walled-garden restaurant, and wondered not for the first time, what strange tribal signal brought certain kinds of people to certain kinds of places at certain times of the year. The Court of the Sixteen Satraps, being the current ‘in’ eating-place, was naturally the current expense-account haven, particularly at lunchtime; it was as if someone had sounded a moose-horn in the heart of New York, and commanded: ‘All right, boys. Four Seasons, out! Twelve Caesars, out! Sixteen Satraps, in! Get going!’ And here they all were, the March of the Charcoal Greys in person.
Ad men, TV men, film men in from the coast; producers and directors from the Broadway musicals; agents from all over – they had all suddenly arrived at the Satraps, brandishing their meal tickets from the Diners’, Hilton Carte Blanche and American Express; and you couldn’t tell one open-handed freeloader from another. It was a curious and grisly fact that whether a man sold Chanel or Chryslers, soap or cheese, women or men, he shared this uniform look – spearheaded by the Madison Avenue brigade, all with the same cropped haircuts, the same never-still eyes, the same contempt for the customer, the same oldest young faces in the world.
Even their clothes had become a uniform. This season it was narrow-shouldered suits, cuffed sleeves, cream shirts, pointed black shoes, and those awful little hats with no brims. Next season it would be something quite different. But unless you wore the whole outfit, you were improperly dressed, like a soldier with a missing epaulette, and you suffered the same fate – the big black mark which defaced your conduct sheet forever. I was improperly dressed myself, and it was a pleasure. But I was not shamed before my own clan. At these prices, there weren’t any other writers.
A hand fell on my shoulder, a gritty voice said: ‘Hi, Tolstoy!’, and I turned to face the man I was waiting for, Jack Taggart, my agent.
He was a large, not too talkative, somewhat unfathomable man who, in the jungle world of agency, sometimes seemed more like a game warden than anything else. Agents could not afford to have split personalities; Jack Taggart came as near to it as any other man at the top of his heap. He was a born ten-per-center, a driving salesman who took whatever I sent him, judged it, categorised it, and then sold it in the precise market which suited it best, to the nearest five dollars. Yet he managed to remain curiously uncommitted; accepting without praising, acting without involvement, selling without ever declaring his critical hand.
He had loved Ex Afrika, and done his formidable best for it; he had not liked Wrap-Around at all, and never said so, and never pretended that it was anything more than the hottest piece of merchandise that had ever come into his office. But he had gone in to bat for it with the same tough skill, and come out of the game with $500,000 for me – and still no pretence of admiration.
He did not flatter me, he did not bolster me; he did not play either God or Uriah Heep. He was my agent; not my mentor, not my fool. For all sorts of reasons, some of them stemming from conscience, some not, I was very fond of Jack; and one day I would recapture his regard. But that day was not yet, and we both knew it, and we never said a word on the subject, because neither of us was going to yield, nor change our rules, nor relent.
Now I gave him a greeting of equal and agreed falsity – ‘Good morning, Svengali,’ – and we settled down at the bar. No Farah Dibah for him; plain whisky, plain water, plain ice, plain glass. It was all he needed to say, or would ever say, about stuffed dates and sawdust people.
Jack Taggart wasn’t wasting any other kind of time, either.
‘Before he comes,’ he said, as soon as his drink was poured, ‘I’d better bring you up to date. I think we have a deal, if you want one.’
‘I want one.’
‘OK. Like I said the other day, it involves you as well.’
‘What do I have to do?’
‘Write the book. Give the cues for songs, and what they should be about. You might have some ideas of your own for lyrics, but it’s not necessary – and of course no music from you.’
‘Who does that part of it?’
‘I don’t know yet. He’s probably got a team lined up already – maybe the best – but he won’t say until he’s sure of you and Ex Afrika.’
‘Sounds all right. I know how much of the story I want to use. What about the money side?’
Jack Taggart sipped his drink, as I did; the small pause before the vital statistics.
‘It’ll be a percentage deal,’ he said after a moment. ‘A cut of the box office gross, after some of the production costs have been taken care of. It’s complicated, but I’ll work all that out with the lawyers. Will you want something now, on account?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘This afternoon.’
He grinned. ‘I don’t know what you do with your money. All right. How about this? Fifteen thousand for saying yes to the idea. Fifteen thousand and expenses for writing all the non-musical side of it. That’ll make a thirty thousand advance, against your percentage of the box office. If it works out properly, and the show goes, that will mean a four or five year income.’
‘Tell me again,’ I said, mock dreamily, ‘about My Fair Lady.’
‘I doubt if there’ll be any sort of parallel. But you never know.’
‘How about an outright sale?’
Jack looked at me in surprise. ‘You don’t want an outright sale.’
‘I might.’
He was dubious. ‘You’ll lose on it. I doubt if he would go to more than fifty or sixty thousand, for all the rights, all your work, everything. You know what it costs, to put on a big show like this. They like to cut down on the authors … My way, you ought to make a couple of hundred thousand, spread over the years. It isn’t worth doing on any other basis. You’ll just be giving it away.’
I did some figuring, and agreed. ‘All right. What you said the first time.’
‘Good.’ Jack Taggart looked over the rim of his glasses towards the door. ‘There he is now,’ he said, and got down off his stool. ‘Just one thing, Johnny.’
‘What?’
‘He’s very keen on this. Try and take him seriously.’
‘“Follow that Lord,”’ I declaimed. ‘“And look you, mock him not.” All right, Jack. I’ll mock him not.’
‘That’s my boy.’
Close to, it needed very little time to see the point of the warning. It was not easy to take Erwin Orwin seriously, unless you were utterly dependent on his grace and favour; if I had wanted to produce a caricature of the world’s idea of a Broadway big wheel, this was the way I would have written him. Vaguely I had known he would be like this, since he was very much in the public eye, and his current musical, Oh My Darling Josephine, which Kate called ‘that awful Napoleon thing,’ was just completing its second year on Broadway, and looked all set for a third. But the great man himself, in the flesh, was still a surprise.
To begin with, there was a lot of flesh. Erwin Orwin was an enormously fat man, and he made a cult of it; he positively barrelled into the restaurant, wheezing and snorting, scattering other customers like so much chaff; when he shed his coat, it was like an elephant shouldering its way out of a circus tent lined with astrakhan. He was obviously well known to the Satraps; at his approach, fingers were snapped like castanets, waiters scurried like ants on overtime; even the Head Shah came down into the Persian marketplace to greet this rival potentate.
He boomed out a welcome to me: ‘Mr Steele, it’s my pleasure!’ and then he laughed uproariously, for no reason at all, and it was like a thunderclap; his jowls shook, his vast stomach heaved and swayed. I was reminded of an inverted proverb which Kate once made up: ‘Inside every fat man there’s an even fatter man trying to get out.’ Erwin Orwin seemed intent on making this come true.
At the table – and he occupied one entire banquette, while Jack and I sat opposite him, on mere four-legged chairs – he went straight into his act. His own personal bottle of whisky, which bore the extraordinary title ‘Colonel Wilberforce’s Entire Old Sour Mash,’ was brought out with a flourish, and sent away again with an even bigger one when he changed his mind about his particular mood-of-the-moment; he finally elected for a vodka martini with three drops – ‘No more, God damn it!’ – of Pernod.
Ordering lunch was an equally tremendous business; while I settled swiftly for grilled marrow bones and an odd, rather whiskery fish which I had enjoyed before, Erwin Orwin inspected dozens of dishes, from bouillabaisse to rack of venison, and consigned them all to outer hell before ordering a sixteen-ounce blood-red steak from a certain ranch in Texas where, he claimed, he had once worked as a chuck-wagon cook. (Too much TV, I thought; but it could have been true – he had the build, and the gall to match.) So it went, anyway; as well as the build, he now had money, crude showmanship, and current success; and there wasn’t a man, woman, child, or dog in the Court of the Sixteen Satraps who wasn’t made blindingly aware of all three facts.
I might have been embarrassed or angry at being mixed up with all this nonsense, but I was neither. Some children behave so outrageously that, as long as they do not hack one’s own shins, they are funny. This was one of them. Appalling as he was, I liked him.
He liked me. ‘Mr Steele, I want to make you a rich man,’ was his opening declaration, when the main uproar had subsided, the table-hopping by other extroverts dropped off, and we finally got down to business; and when I answered (feeling the need to put my own point of view) that I was a rich man already, he said: ‘And you deserve to be, God damn it! You’re a genius!’ in a voice that rang through the building. It was irresistible. I suppose it was meant to be, but I didn’t mind that, either.
Already he had lots of ideas about a musical version of Ex Afrika. ‘Let me tell you how I see it,’ was how he started the discussion, and I would as soon have interrupted Moses’ first précis of the Ten Commandments. But the principal surprise was how closely his ideas sat with my own.
I also had done a lot of thinking, in the past week; I had roughed out the shape of the thing, what we would have to lose, what we would have to spotlight, what we were trying to say – in short, what the author should do to the show, and what the show should do to the customer. Erwin Orwin, between gulps of raw meat and absurd commands to the waiters, produced a pattern remarkably like my own.
At one stage of this, he said solemnly: ‘It’s a work of art, of course, but I think we can lick it.’ That was the only moment when Jack Taggart, for the most part a silent witness of our exchange, looked anxiously in my direction. But I answered, with equal solemnity: ‘That’s the only way to stay in the ball park,’ and Erwin Orwin, after a brief flicker of a stare which showed that he knew he was being mocked, laughed with such all-embracing violence that a lamp over his head went out, shattered beyond repair.
It was a good match, in a lunatic sphere of endeavour, and for that single moment I didn’t mind whether I won or lost, and neither did he.
But such moments were not meant to last. With coffee and brandy, he asked suddenly: ‘What about money?’
‘As long as there’s plenty,’ I said, ‘I’ll leave all that to Jack.’
‘That’s what I like,’ said Erwin Orwin. ‘The artistic approach.’
Jack Taggart bent forward, entering, as I knew he would, exactly on cue.
‘Johnny agreed to my idea of a small advance,’ he said. ‘Against a percentage of the box office. I’ll work out the main details, and bring them along tomorrow.’
‘What’s a small advance?’ asked Erwin Orwin.
‘Thirty thousand. Half now, half on delivery.’
Erwin Orwin made a pretence of clutching his temples in agony. ‘My God!’ he said. ‘Brandy!’
Jack Taggart grinned. ‘Oh, come on, Erwin! It couldn’t very well be less, not at this level. For that, you get the name of the book and the name of the man. And all the work he’s going to do on it. Don’t forget, you said he was a genius.’
‘I didn’t know he was a genius at this … All right.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘It’s the percentages we’ll be arguing about, anyway.’
I drew on my cigar, aloof from this sordid chaffering. A woman, old, seamed, grey-blonde, with the death’s-head look of an abandoned whore and a mink coat which, in this context, had died in vain, approached our table, and was waved away by Erwin Orwin, with the brusque dismissal: ‘Not now, damn it!’ There could, in this wonderful world, be losers as well as winners … I said: ‘Who’s going to do the music and the lyrics?’
‘Same as for Josephine,’ answered Erwin Orwin. ‘Teller and Wallace. OK?’
‘Very much so.’ I was beginning to like all of this, and now it didn’t matter if I showed it. ‘I’ll have to get together with them, before too long.’
He nodded. ‘They’ll be ready. I want this thing to get rolling as soon as it can. My idea is, you work out your part of it – doesn’t matter how rough it is – so as to give them something to build on, then you can meet up for the real working sessions. Might be a good idea if you all came to stay at my place.’
I said: ‘Yes,’ not too enthusiastically. I had heard about his place, a vast, split-level, ranch-type hideaway up in the Catskills, with a barn converted into a fifty-seat cinema, and bathrooms labelled ‘Guys’ and ‘Dolls’. ‘Yes, that’s a good idea.’
‘You could bring your wife, too. I hear she’s very beautiful.’
I shook my head, Chinese-like. ‘She has some pretensions to good looks.’
‘That’s not the way I heard it.’ But he wasn’t really interested in anyone else’s world, good or bad. ‘We’ve got to find a name for this thing,’ he said. ‘That’s going to be very important.’
‘Something with Africa in it,’ I said. ‘African Song. Song of Africa. Something like that.’
‘I thought of X is for Africa,’ said Erwin Orwin.
‘Or a word with African connotations,’ I said, shying away speedily. ‘Spoor. Jungle. Safari. Drums.’
‘Safari Song,’ said Jack.
‘Notes from the Jungle.’
‘Jungle Drums.’
‘Jungle Bells.’
‘Black and White Notes.’
‘Black Melody.’
‘Black Tracks.’
‘Black Safari.’
It didn’t matter which one of us was speaking; we were gradually losing ground. The process of just thinking aloud was reaching its usual murky depths. Presently Erwin Orwin, a man of practice at such sessions, looked at his watch.
‘Well, back to the salt-mines,’ he declared. He levered himself up, quickly enough for so vast a man; when it was time to move, he moved. ‘Mr Steele, I’ll be waiting to hear from you. Jack, call me tomorrow morning. We can probably do this by phone.’
Jack smiled. ‘I would doubt that.’
‘Well, we can try on a few hats.’
We left the Sixteen Satraps on a swirling tide of other people’s goodwill. The Head Shah bowed to us – or rather, he bowed to Erwin Orwin, gave me a distinct if distant nod, and ignored Jack Taggart, an anonymous man who doubtless had hardly any money at all. In the foyer, the Persian Lambs closed in, coats and all else at the ready. Largesse was distributed like oversize confetti. Erwin Orwin, laughing loudly once more, was whisked away in a chauffeured Rolls-Royce which had the word ‘his’ embossed on the nearside door; and Jack Taggart and I were ushered into a taxi by the Turkish-style doorman, who bowed, touched his fingertips to his forehead, flourished his scimitar in formal farewell, and said: ‘Come back real soon.’
Riding back up town with Jack Taggart, whom I was to drop off at his office in Rockefeller Centre, I was well content. Lunch had been excellent, the drinks very adequate, the company just right for the occasion; if all lunches were as good, with a cash bonus of $30,000 at the end, this would be a happy life indeed for the dedicated man of letters … I threw away the last of my cigar, and gave the credit for all this where it really belonged.
‘Thanks, Jack. Another win for the old pro … I liked Orwin, in spite of all the snow. He ought to be an easy man to get along with.’
‘Don’t fool yourself. When he gets exactly what he wants, he’s as sweet as pie. Otherwise–’ he gestured, ‘–a heart as big as all indoors. He can be the toughest man in this fair city.’
‘Will there be much wrestling about that box office percentage?’
‘No.’
‘It didn’t sound that way.’
Jack Taggart smiled. ‘Oh, that’s just part of the act. I know what he’ll give, he knows what I’ll take. The figures happen to coincide. End of drama.’
I sighed. ‘Thank God I don’t understand any of this.’
‘Now don’t go into your act … That was good news about Teller and Wallace. They’re right at the top of their form now. It must have cost Erwin a fortune to get them. Which means that he’s really serious about this.’
‘How will they be to work with?’
‘Strictly professional. You’ll have to run to keep up. It’s Erwin who takes his own sweet time.’
‘How so?’
‘He likes other people to work fast. Then he looks at the result, and tears it all apart, and sends it back for repairs, again and again. It’s the only thing he ever wastes money on, and he can afford to, with what he’s got going for him. He breaks all the rules. I’ve known him take a year producing a show. Josephine was nearly five months in rehearsal. But that doesn’t mean you can dawdle. Your rules aren’t breakable.’ Our taxi was slowing for the lights of 49th Street, and Jack Taggart leant forward. ‘I’ll get out here … How’s the book coming along?’
‘Oh, fine.’
‘Shouldn’t it be finished about now?’
‘It’s turning out longer than I expected.’
The taxi was stopped. ‘I don’t want to hurry you, Johnny, but Hobart Mackay shouldn’t have to wait forever.’
‘Has he said that?’
‘No. He would never press you. But it’s in the air, just the same.’ Jack decided not to get out, and the taxi moved on a block, caught in sluggish traffic. ‘It really is time for that third novel.’
It was now my turn to say: ‘Haven’t they made enough money out of me?’
‘I’m not arguing on that. But they did advance forty thousand, and that was two years ago.’
‘This musical will take care of the rent.’
‘I’m not arguing on that, either.’ The taxi was stopped again, between streets, and he opened the door, prepared to make the necessary suicidal dart for the sidewalk. ‘But we want to take care of you, too. You’re a writer, with books in your head. Remember?’
I sighed again, more genuinely. ‘You and Kate. You ought to set up as Authors Anonymous.’
He laughed. ‘Give her my love, and tell her I’ll sign up for that, any time.’ The door slammed, and he was lost to view, in the moving cars and thronging people of Fifth Avenue.
‘Your friend just fractured a city ordinance,’ said the cab driver, a nice young man, a spectacled Negro with a copy of the Saturday Review clipped to his sun-vizor. ‘But I see no evil. Where to, now?’
‘The Sherry-Netherland.’
I was not quite ready to meet the other charter-member of Authors Anonymous.