Pocket Kings (39 page)

No, he could not. But at least he didn't keep the money.

I looked at the list of libraries and began walking. West, toward Notting Hill. In some places the snow was white, in others, black or gray, and the footing was either crunchy or icy.
Th
e quaint Georgian buildings around Regent's Park and Bayswater looked like toy houses, cars skidded or crawled along for fear of skidding, the bitter wind whistled in every direction. Tomorrow night I would—or wouldn't—read from a book, then it was back to writing again. I bent forward as I turned onto Moscow Road . . . somewhere up ahead was a library.
Th
e wind died down, but when I stood up straight, I lost my footing—it was as if an incompetent kiddie-birthday-party magician had pulled the ground from under my feet. I fell hard on my knee and thigh and very quickly seven or eight hooded, goose-downed people were looming over me, making sure I was conscious (I was) and hadn't broken anything (I wasn't so sure).

“I'm all right,” I said, looking up at their blurred forms and at the sky above them.

“
Th
at's going to hurt a lot more tomorrow,” one of them warned me.

Th
ey helped me up—I nearly fell over again—and then politely shoved me on my way, but the pain in my knee was shooting currents of abject misery down to my toes and up to my neck.

No library had my books. Either the books were out or they'd never had them.

I limped back toward Brompton Road and, on the way home, every step down into the snow sent a wicked jolt through the leg. But I bought a lamp-size bottle of Scotch on the way. In my room I looked at my knee and thought of going to the hospital, but by the time I drank a quarter of the bottle I couldn't make it to the door and my knee wasn't hurting that much anymore. I called Wifey at work and told her that no library had my books and that the fax hadn't come through.

“You're going to have to e-mail me the book
,”
I slurred, “just as like a contingency plan thing.” I was so hungry while I was talking that I was chewing on the pillowcase. “Send me
Dead on Arrival.
” She didn't utter a peep so I reminded her, “It's the last book I wrote. It's on my desktop computer.”

I gave her my password and then she said, “Hey, did you hear about Harry Carver?”

“No, what about him?”

“He sold a screenplay! For almost a million dollars!”

He sold a screenplay . . . a million dollars.
Just as I was digesting that, just as I was realizing that this was the screenplay Harry had wanted me to write with him, Cynthia added, “And he wrote it with your other friend Lonnie! Did you know that?”

No, I told her just before saying good-bye, I had no idea.

(No wonder I hadn't been able to contact either one of them when I was in Las Vegas: they were probably together writing the screenplay . . . in Las Vegas.)

Th
e bruise on my leg was the shape and color of a map of Greenland, but I was able to somehow make it to the hallway vending machine. I got some ice, limped back to my room, and applied it to my leg and my Scotch. I giggled drunkenly: the injury had been caused by ice and here I was applying ice. I drank some more whiskey and giggled again.

When I woke up the next morning, a note on Royal Brompton Hotel stationery had been slipped under the door. It must have been written by the night desk guy, whose spelling made Ross F. Carpenter look like a four-time Scripps Howard champion: “Foils cold and they sad they have copies of yor book.”

London was mostly ice now. Trees and traffic lights had fallen onto streets and parked cars from the weight of ice, and a water main in St. James had burst and you could skate on the streets there. All of Whitehall Street, empty and silent and tomblike, looked as if it had been hosed down with crystal.

Foyle's was open and mostly empty and I showed yet another different but entirely similar man there my pink form. He dis­appeared up some steps. If I read from
Love
the audience would be putty in my hands. I would kill.
Th
e London chapter of
Plague Boy
was a bit dicey but would still go over well. And I'd have all of
DOA
to read from.
Th
e man was coming back down the stairs, his hands full of paperbacks.

“Here they are,” he said. “
Th
e complete works of Frank W. Dixon.”

In his hands were books in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese.
Th
ese weren't my books! But wait . . .
they were my books!
Th
ese Brits had gotten me the foreign language editions of every book I'd ever had published, but there was no English to be seen. I stood there, my leg aching, my stomach yearning for just a teaspoon of sawdust, and thumbed through a Japanese paperback and shook my head.

“
Th
is is it?” I asked. “Nothing in English?”

“No, Mr. Beale.”

I picked up the German edition of
Plague
and leafed through it. Could he see my heart sinking? Could he tell how much I despised him? Did he know any German translators?

I bought the books, walked out, and threw them into the first trashcan I found, and even the jaws of that trashcan dripped with jagged fangs of ice.

I walked west, along Oxford Street, then went down through Kensington Gardens, which was lonely, sibilant, and fjordlike. Under the leaden sky the iced-over Serpentine and Round Pond looked as if they'd been filled with concrete, and the mostly black snow crunched underfoot. Back at the Kensington library, I asked the same librarian as the day before if the deadbeat who'd taken out
Plague
had returned it. No, the deadbeat had not.

It was coming on one o'clock and I called Wifey in New York. Seven hours to the reading. Yes, she told me, she had e-mailed
DOA.
I thanked her and she wished me luck. I thanked her again and she came up with another brilliant idea: go to the Norwich Cairn offices . . . they'd probably have copies of my books.
In English.

Th
e Norwich Cairn offices were all the way in Shoreditch, many miles away, and so I limped back east. (All this walking was great for me . . . my pants
were
hanging looser. )

Norwich Cairn occupied three floors of a remorselessly non­descript flat-brick building. For an edifice so melancholy, though, everything inside was modern and bright.
Th
e carpets were orange, the furniture was magenta and sea foam. In the lobby Norwich Cairn's current titles were framed and hung on the wall; there were dozens of them and I remembered how proud I was when one of my books was up there, too.

“Hi,” I said to the waify brunette receptionist, “my name is Frank Dixon and . . .”

I wanted her to shriek and hold her hands to her cheeks and say
Oh crikey it's you I read both of your books and I luvved them they were so fanTAStic I nearly pissed me knickers!
But she looked at me vacantly and waited for me to continue.

I told her that Norwich Cairn had published two of my books. No change of expression. I told her I had a reading tonight that Greg Nolan had arranged . . . she lifted an eyebrow a tenth of an inch. I told her that Penelope Somebody had contacted me and I needed to see her right away.

She picked up her phone and I looked through the glass wall behind her, at editors, designers, salespeople, and assistants walking in the hallway, smiling at or ignoring each other. A minute later Penelope was standing right in front of me.

“Frank Dixon!” she said when she saw me.

My coat and hood were still on and I think my eyelashes were dripping melting ice.

I told her I had no book to read from, although I added that my wife had e-mailed me my latest one. “A book,” I simply had to get in, “that Greg refuses to read.” She told me to sit down and wait and that she'd go get the UK editions of
Plague
and
Love.

I sat and waited and thought of hamburgers, barbecued ribs, General Tso, hot apple pie. When Artsy got here I was going to take her out to the best places . . . I had already made reservations at six different restaurants, all of them Michelin-starred.

Penelope came back and told me I was out of luck. Norwich Cairn had, she said, “pulped both books.” What does that mean? I asked her, picturing a tall glass of orange juice with my books sinking toward the bottom. She explained that the books were out of print and Norwich had handed over the unsold copies for recycling.

“But you're okay for the reading tonight?” she asked me.

I stood and thought about it and, as I did so, saw behind the glass behind the receptionist a man who looked just like Greg Nolan, who was supposed to be at the Odense Book Fair, walk past, coming out of one office and going into another.

“We want you to read there,” she said. “People would get interested in you again.”

“Uh-huh.”

Th
e Odense Book Fair? Really? Was there actually such a thing?

It took three minutes to lay a guilt trip on me about the ad for the reading they'd placed in
Th
e Pavement
before I promised her I'd go through with it.

“And afterwards,” she said, “I really do think you ought to see a doctor.”

I must have looked like hell because I hadn't even told her anything was wrong.

I had to find a computer-and-printer setup to download
DOA
and knew just where to go: a library with internet access. It was four lousy goddam degrees outside, not including the wind chill, but I hit three libraries and four pubs. But it was like dominoes falling: the libraries were closing one by one, due to the cold weather, just as I hit them.
Th
e pubs, however, were not.

I walked back through the park. By 5 p.m. I was on Tottenham Court Road, where I got gouged for a laptop and small printer. I brought my new purchases into a pub in Soho and brooded over three more drinks—it was the happy hour and the place got respectably crowded considering it was now zero degrees out.
I'm going to get the three of us a taxi,
I slurred to my wounded and my good leg,
and take us home. Enough of this walking!
It must have been a sign I'd been drinking a lot that even my thoughts were slurred. But I couldn't find a taxi and had to drag the laptop and printer a few more miles through the flesh-splitting wind.

Back at the hotel I told the desk clerk to arrange a taxi for me promptly at 7:30.

It took me only five minutes to set up my account and get things going.
Th
e problem, though, was the Internet. Having courageously insisted on a hotel with no wifi, I was reduced to using the molasses-like modem connection and the phone's data port.
Oh God, what if Cynthia screwed up?
What if she hadn't sent me
DOA
but only thought she had?! I knew I could just recite any part of the
Trilogy
from memory and hopefully wow the trousers off the crowd. When I logged on to my e-mail there it was:
Dead on Arrival,
both as a Word document and a PDF.

When I realized I had no paper to print on, I hobbled back downstairs and told the desk guy I needed paper and saw hail the size of grapes pelting the windows in the lobby. I was given forty sheets of hotel stationery: the paper wasn't the right size and wasn't blank on both sides but it was all I had, and when I went back upstairs I took a long pull from my bottle of whiskey. I put the paper in the printer and pushed
PRINT
but the paper got jammed. I fished it out, tried again. Another jam. Another pull. I tried to print again and a page came out, but it was illegible.
Aha!
I believed I knew what the problem was and I adjusted a few things and pressed
PRINT
again. Two pages glided out as gracefully as a champion pairs dancing team taking to the ice, and then my phone rang.