He frowned out the cab window. “Are you sure this is the address?”
“It’s the one you gave me, Mac. Do I look like the Manhattan Directory?”
He paid the driver and got out in front of a rambling Queen Anne house in a neighborhood of them. It was the only one without a FOR RENT sign in any of its windows. There was no commercial sign to identify it as a business.
A typewritten three-by-five card perched above an old-fashioned bell-pull told him to RING THEN ENTER. The bell made a rusty jangle when he tugged on it.
Inside was a foyer, with squares of black and white marble laid corner to corner at his feet and mahogany fretwork carved into swirls suggestive of cinnamon rolls. A young man in horn-rimmed glasses looked up at him from behind a desk lit by a banker’s lamp with a green glass shade. He wore a sacksuit and a white shirt buttoned to the neck, no tie. At his elbow was a telephone console with a row of square buttons like accordion keys.
Jacob introduced himself. The young man lifted the handset and tapped a key. He spoke with a slight New England drawl. “Jacob Heppleman for Mr. Elk. Yes.” He hung up. “He’s expecting you; top of the stairs, first door to the right.”
The staircase curved gracefully between polished banisters, with an Oriental runner so thick the treads made no noise under his feet. The door stood open. At a desk sat a woman who might have been related to the young man. She wore a serge business suit, pulled her light brown hair back into a bun, and smiled at him tentatively behind glasses with clear frames. “Go right on in, Mr. Holly.”
“Heppleman.”
“Of course.” She turned to a battleship gray Smith-Corona on a drawleaf and began typing at Sten gun pace.
A glazed cabinet stood next to the door behind her desk. The covers of uncirculated paperbacks leered out through the glass, beetle-browed men watching frowzy women taking off their clothes in one seedy hotel room after another, usually with a fully erect handgun present. Chinese Checkers occupied the central position.
Subtle.
The door was paneled, with a brass plate engraved PRIVATE. He twisted the knob and opened it.
He’d fully expected something crude behind the elegant front, a creature sprung from the same gene pool as the Cro-Magnons in the glass case, with a cigarette pasted to his lip and soup stains on his tie.
“This is indeed a pleasure, Mr. Holly. I’ve been looking forward to it ever so long.”
The man who stood to greet him was so unexpected he forgot to correct the use of names. Robin Elk was his age—possibly a year younger—and spoke with an upper-class British accent. He wore his blond hair in a pompadour, but shaven close at the temples, and Harris tweeds over an argyle sweater and a bow tie. He came out from behind his desk and they shook hands. The publisher’s grip was strong, but not competitive. He gripped a cherrywood cane with a silver handle. Jacob noticed he wore paper slippers and shuffled slightly when he walked. “You served in the American armed forces, I understand.”
“The army. Yourself?”
“RAF. Shot down over Cherbourg in ’43, spent the next two years in a Stalag. Flatirons.” He tapped one foot gingerly with the cane’s rubber tip. “You’d think the buggers would’ve updated their methods after the first go.”
“Whatever brought you to the States?”
“Your postwar prosperity. It’s an American invention. Back home they’re still queuing up before dawn for a bit of ham. No future there for a fellow with ambition and bad memories. Can I interest you in a bracer?” He shuffled back to the desk and flipped the switch on an intercom. “Alice, what’s in the larder?”
“A bit early for me, thanks. Coffee, if you have it.”
“Right-o. Cream and sugar?”
“A little of both.”
“Coffee, the works,” Elk told Alice.
“Two cups?” The voice belonged to the woman in the outer office.
“Please.” He switched off, winked at his guest. “If it weren’t for the damned tea, we’d still have an empire.” He waved him toward a sitting area that resembled the reading room in a gentlemen’s club. Leather armchairs shared a walnut smoking stand next to shelves of gold-stamped volumes on the wall.
They sat. Nothing about the room indicated it belonged to a publisher of two-bit paperbacks. A framed panoramic photograph of young men in fleece-lined jackets standing and kneeling in front of a British Spitfire at some aerodrome hung above a stone fireplace with logs crackling on the grate. Elk charged a blackened brier pipe with coarse tobacco and set it burning with a bundle of matches. A sweetish, tarry scent permeated the room. “What’s your pleasure? A bowl? My own blend. Cigars? Cigarettes? My God, I sound like the girl in a nightclub.”
“Thanks. I don’t smoke.”
Blond brows rose. “You’re the first Yank I’ve met who came back without the craving. What did you do with the cartons that came with your K rations?”
“Traded them to smokers for extra rations.”
“And Napoleon called us a nation of shopkeepers. Well, we shan’t compare war stories. Tell me a bit about yourself. In turn, you can ask me anything you like.”
There wasn’t much to tell, he learned as he told it: Raised on a farm, which he hated. Parents deceased. The fight with the foreman that led him to the drugstore periodicals section. His enlistment, discharge, the unwanted war novel.
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” Elk said to that. “I’m sick of the subject myself. How are you paying the bills?”
“Newspaper work.”
“Where would I find your byline?”
“Nowhere.” He explained his job on the rewrite desk.
“No new attempts at fiction?”
“One. You wouldn’t be interested. No one else was.”
“Try me.”
He told him about “The Typewriter,” leaving out the truth behind the idea.
“Hm.”
Alice came in carrying a tray with a silver carafe, a matching creamer, sugar cubes in a china bowl, and two cups and saucers with the same pattern, a coat-of-arms of some kind, all of which she set on a low table with claw feet. Her skirt was knee-length, a new development in fashion. Muscular calves. “I’ll be mother,” said Elk, when she raised the carafe. She put it down and took herself out, not before gifting Jacob with a reassuring smile.
He took advantage of the break while Elk poured to ask a question that had been vexing him. “Why a blue devil?”
The publisher chuckled and sat back cradling his cup and saucer. “We started with red—the shock effect, you know. Edgy. Can’t impress a postwar readership with the same staid tactics that worked in the past. The first design looked like something out of Bosch; fire shooting from the nostrils, that sort of rot. But it smacked of the Plague and the Inquisition, and after six years of conflict and pestilence it wasn’t the way to go. Also there was the Catholic Church to consider.
“So we changed his color and extinguished the flames. Baby blankets are blue; so are skies and the little boy under the haystack. Also we made the horns smaller. Looks like Bambi, don’t you think? Yes.”
“What happened to edgy?”
“You’ve seen our covers. Why beat a dead horse?”
Jacob sank two cubes in his coffee and colored it with cream. “There’s no torture scene in Chinese Checkers.”
“But there was! You’ve forgotten the story the old Mandarin in the junk shop told, about coming to this country to flee the Tongs.”
“He’s a minor character. He has one scene.”
“And an excellent scene it was. I quite liked the book. So do the readers. You got your royalty check?”
“I thought at first it was a mistake. How many copies do you have to sell at two bits a pop to pay the author a thousand dollars?”
“Twenty thousand. The first printing was ten. That’s why we went back to press. Six months from now you’ll receive another check, and if it isn’t bigger than the first, I’ll go back home and work for the admiral.”
“The admiral?”
“My father. He was dead set on my joining the Royal Navy. But sons are placed on this earth to disappoint their fathers. He owns a publishing firm in Knightsbridge, cranking out matched sets of Dickens and Thackeray bound in half-calf; the sort of rot freshly knighted war profiteers buy by the yard to appear literate. The plan for me was to return from the jolly old high seas with the rank of commander, apprentice to the editor-in-chief for a year or two, then put the old boy out to pasture—with a pension, of course—and move into the big office overlooking the V-and-A. Instead I sank my trust fund into a third-class steamship ticket and this barn, with a bit left over for staffing and a printing plant on Long Island.”
“Weren’t you afraid that would kill the admiral?”
“Oh, he’s tough old Edwardian stock. It would take more than the Blitz to make a dent in those iron sides. Although I daresay if he knew I’d booked third-class he might lock himself in the wine cellar and never come out.”
Jacob smiled, thawing somewhat. He was beginning to like this man. He didn’t quite buy the port-and-polo image Elk seemed to be working overtime to sell; it was all too spot-on, like something from Evelyn Waugh. But there was a naïveté about him that put a skeptic off-guard. As well be suspicious of a child who would do anything to please.
Then again, clever confidence men seldom acted shifty.
Jacob returned his cup and saucer to the tray, then sat back, legs crossed. “I’m trying to wrap my mind around this sudden success. I was told veterans and their wives are too busy starting families to read for pleasure.”
“A judgment made in haste. There’s always confusion when the swords are being beaten back into plowshares, or however the saying goes: A period of adjustment. When I was a prisoner of war I became quite chummy with a lieutenant with your Army Air Corps.” He pronounced it leftenant. “Red Cross relief packages were few and far between—the German black market thrived on them—but I took an interest in the Armed Forces editions he received: You know the ones?”
“They were one of the things I traded cigarettes for.”
“Quite. I read them, mysteries and cowboy stories and such. Needless to say few would pass muster at Elk & Ridpath, but they helped us through a great ordeal, boredom being first and foremost. The lieutenant and I exchanged addresses. In our letters after the war we discussed those cheap paperbound books, which he said had begun to appear in American apothecaries, of all places.”
“Drugstores, yes.”
“Hm. He said Yanks were buying them straight off the racks, a half-dozen at a time, tucking them under their arms like sausages during a run on the butcher’s. They sold for a quarter, the longer ones fifty pence, so the customer could be reasonably sure there’d be no unpleasant surprise when he unloaded his plunder at the counter.
“That was the extent of my market research, but it’s a damn sight more thorough than anything my father attempted. D’you know, publishing is the only industry in the U.K. whose executives have no bloody idea who buys their product? Shameful. But try persuading those hidebound traders to re-examine their traditional methods. So I copped a Pilgrim.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Bolted, dear boy, like those stalwarts who set sail aboard the Mayflower bound for liberty and free enterprise. American investors are always looking for the next new thing; and they’re suckers for a West End accent. You aren’t offended, I hope?”
“I might be, if I were an investor.”
“I’d have done the thing on my own, but distribution is a complicated business over here. What at first looks like a bargain can put you in debt to the sort of villain who always gets his comeuppance in the final chapters of the very books we’re publishing.”
“In other words you want to steer clear of the people who own the jukebox and vending-machine routes.” Jacob bent his nose to one side with a finger.
“Succinctly put. There you have it.” Elk spread his white palms. “The reading public is insatiable. Our industry has pillaged literature as far back as Homer—remind me to send you our edition of The Iliad, abridged, of course; our Helen bears a strong resemblance to Betty Grable—and is desperate for more product. Blue Devil will be the first publisher to issue paperback originals, never before seen in print. A pioneer. And I want you aboard the flagship.”