“What’s the matter with Jacob Heppleman?”
“Guess.”
“Ira Winderspear thinks my name’s too Jewish?”
“It’s not my name on the cover. Look, everyone knows what you did over there, liberating the camps.”
“Those were in Poland. I never got that far.”
“I mean you brave guys. There are people kvetching that we went to war just for the Jews. They’re punks, but their two bits spend the same as everyone else’s. Let things settle a couple years, then you can put everything back in print: Jacob Heppleman, thirty-six-point type: writing as Jack Holly, eighteen. Jack Holly, a swashbuckler of a name. Errol Flynn wishes he had it.”
“It sounds like a card sharp. Who thought of it?”
“I came up with Jack. Holly was Robin Elk’s.”
“He could use a new name himself. Who is he?”
“Elk. You know, like the moose. He’s the money.” Winderspear tapped the upper left corner of the mock-up.
Jacob looked at an image the size of his thumbnail, a caricature of a cherubic blue demon with button horns, rocket-trail eyebrows, a naughty grin, and a dished-in nose like the swoop of a roller-coaster track. “Blue Devil Books,” he read. “Never heard of it.”
“It’s new. Elk wants to publish new work in cheap editions: Paperback originals, he calls ’em. Nobody’s ever done that. It’s less of a gamble to issue a book with a publishing history by an established author. Personally I think he’ll lose his shirt, but meantime you’ll get dough up front to stake you till you get your toe back in.”
“What happened to those million-copy sales?”
“I won’t jack you around, kid. The cancer didn’t stop with the pulps. Another Eldridge, Harbor Girl, didn’t sell through. Maybe the vets are too busy buying houses in the suburbs and going to college on the G.I. Bill to read for pleasure. Blue Devil’s looking to cut its costs by developing its own authors: Deal out the middle man, go short up front, and split the royalties fifty-fifty. Maybe he’s onto something, I don’t know. It’s a different world since you went away. Nobody’s got a handle on it just yet.” He held out That Mad Game. “Stick this in a drawer till the next war. Write another Chinese Checkers.”
Jacob left him hanging while he turned over the mock-up and read the copy on the back. The top line was printed in red, in type twice as large as the rest in black:
“I HUNGER FOR A WHITE MAN!”
Paul Matson came to Chinatown looking for a good time. The times found him, but they weren’t good; in fact, they were wicked. He had barely set foot in Ah Lo Wing’s Garden of Celestial Delights when sinuous, inscrutable Lee Sin pounced from the shadows like a panther from the Far East, with lust in her heart and evil on her mind.
“I hunger for a white man,” she purred in Matson’s ear. “Come, and I will show you the ancient Oriental ways of love.”
He was suddenly violently ill; partly from the betrayal, as much from the unexpected exposure to the blind racism of youth, before experience had opened his eyes. His face was hot. “Nix. I didn’t fight a war to land back where I started.”
“War’s over, kid. You remember those ads for trusses and hemorrhoid cream? Gap in the action. Sure, they paid the bills. All you boys paid the bills. But the public doesn’t buy toothpaste to read the label on the back. The war, it was a gap: a time-out, like in football. You turn the page, get back to the game where it left off.”
“Gee, I missed that in the recruiting posters. JOIN THE ARMY, BE A GAP.”
“What do you think people want, after all those stories of bayonetings and machine-gun massacres? It’s the flag-waving they got tired of. So you give ’em what they want, only without the brass bands. Brother, you thought the pulps were bloody, but you ain’t seen nothing yet.”
A siren wailed fifteen floors down, stopping as abruptly as it had started, as if the prowlie was testing it. A Michigan farm boy who’d shaken loose the dirt as soon as he had bus fare, Jacob had never gotten over how New York racket managed to penetrate the ritziest buildings.
“Last time I looked at my contract with Thornberry, it said I had to approve subsidiary offers. Back then it meant moving pictures and radio, but I’m sure it covers this. What’d you do, forge my signature?”
“I resent that. I traced it from the original contract.”
He knew his agent was a millionaire: His office rent was more than the government had spent on Jacob’s bed and board from boot camp on. He’d survived a Depression and a war and from the look of his belly hadn’t missed a meal at Sardi’s or 21 since before the Blitz. He was a man of means and power. So Jacob chose his words carefully.
“You’re fired, Ira.”
Winderspear blinked. His eyes were the only animated feature in that petrified-wood face. “You don’t want to do that. I’m a rabbit’s foot. Everyone who’s ever fired me wound up in Dutch, starting with Arnold Rothstein when I ran liquor for him in Jersey; clients were hard to come by, I had to make ends meet. Six weeks after he canned me, somebody put a slug in him in the Park Central Hotel.”
“You’re threatening me. I don’t believe it. What are you, some kind of gangster?”
“Christ, I didn’t shoot him. But if he kept me on, who knows? The slob might’ve missed. I got more stories, but that’s your racket, not mine. I just sell ’em.”
“I’ll risk it. And if I see so much as one copy of that piece of shit in a drugstore or bus station, I’ll tell Robin Elk what you did. If he’s any kind of businessman he’ll have you arrested for fraud.” He got up.
“I was looking after your interests. How was I to know you got religion over there? The guy that wrote this book, him I could reason with. He’d’ve jumped all over this deal.”
“He grew up.”
“Easy, Jack. Don’t go off half-cocked.”
“Why not? That’s how I came in. And don’t call me Jack!” He opened the door.
“What are you going to do?”
“Go back to school, what else? I can’t afford a house in the suburbs.” He slammed it.