CHAPTER Eighteen

It was getting on for nine that night by the time I got over to the Bum Rap. I didn’t really expect to find anybody there-except, of course, for those people you always find there, and never find anywhere else. But Henry was there, his tan beret perched on his long egg-shaped head, his sensitive fingers stroking his silver beard. He had a drink in front of him, and wore an expression of perfect repose that suggested it wasn’t his first.

“Your friend was here,” he said. “Carolyn. A charming woman.”

“Was she drinking Campari?”

“Is that what it was? She called it Lavoris. She ordered one for herself and a double scotch for you.”

“And drank my scotch and left the Lavoris.”

“You mean she’s done that before? She had a second scotch, insisting that one was for you as well, and when the waitress brought it she told her to take back the Lavoris. ‘I’m not drinking anything tonight,’ she told her. ‘Not even the mouthwash.’ Then she bought me another drink and told me if I drank too much I should have something from the Uzbek restaurant. What do they have at the Uzbek restaurant?”

“Uzbek food,” I said.

“Well, she seems to think highly of it. She finished her second drink-well, your second drink-and threw some money on the table and marched out of here. She said she had to meet somebody and straighten her out. Here’s the waitress. What would you like to drink?”

“I suppose I should stick with scotch,” I said, “since that’s what I’ve had so far, even if I haven’t had any of it for myself. Is that what you’re drinking?”

“Actually,” he said, “this is rye.”

“Oh?”

“You got me to try it last night, and I ordered it today more or less automatically.”

“And you liked it just as well today?”

“It grows on you.”

“You think it might turn out to be your regular tipple?”

“It might at that.”

I ordered rye for both of us, and raised mine when it came. “To books that change a person’s life,” I said, “for better or for worse. Why a clay factory, Henry?”

“Come again?”

“How’d the business get started in the first place? Do they dig a lot of clay around Peru, Indiana?”

“They used to,” he said. “That’s how the business got started. Then, after it had been established for many years, the clay deposits were exhausted.”

“I know how they feel.”

“So we bought the raw clay down south,” he said, “and shipped it to Peru, where we did the processing and packaging.”

“And shipped it all over America.”

“All over the world. Wherever there are little children, and carpets for them to track it into.”

I worked on my drink. We both fell silent for a long moment, and someone put a quarter in the jukebox and played a Patsy Cline record. It wasn’t “Faded Love,” but it was still terrific. Neither of us said a word until Patsy was done.

Then I said, “Cole Porter was born in Peru, Indiana.”

“He was for a fact.”

“And there’s no clay there.”

“Not anymore. The deposits-”

“Are about as exhausted as they can get, because they were never there in the first place. There used to be considerable alluvial clay deposits quite a ways east of Peru, however, near a town called Huntington.”

He thought this over. “You know quite a bit about clay,” he said, “for someone who’s not in the business himself.”

“I went to a bookstore. Not my own, but the Barnes amp; Noble on Astor Place. I wanted to check the Mobil Travel Guide, and the only travel books I carry are the kind that warn you about the toothpick fish.”

“What does a toothpick fish do?”

“It embeds itself in the olive fish,” I said, “and the two of them float around inside a martini fish. Forget the toothpick fish, all right?”

“All right.”

“There’s a clay factory in Huntington,” I said, “and according to the Mobil Guide they offer free tours of it. Anybody who wants can just show up at the front door and they’ll give him a tour of the factory.”

“There could be a clay factory in Huntington, too,” he said. “Why not? It’s less than fifty miles from Peru to Huntington.”

“It looked farther than that on the map.”

“Well, it’s not. They’re both on the same river, the Wabash. Couldn’t there be clay deposits near both towns?”

“There could.”

“And couldn’t there just as easily be a clay factory in Peru as in Huntington?”

“I don’t see why there couldn’t,” I said, “but the fact is there isn’t. There’s Cole Porter’s birthplace, and there’s the circus museum, and there’s the locomotive monument commemorating the city’s railroad history. But there’s no clay factory.”

“Maybe not,” he said, “but there could be.”

“Have you been to Peru, Henry?”

He nodded. “Pretty nice town. The locomotive monument’s pretty impressive.”

“How about Huntington?”

“It’s nice, too. I took the clay factory tour.”

“I figured you might have. Is some big conglomerate buying up the clay factory?”

“Jesus, I hope not.”

“You just made that part up.”

“Sure.”

“And you moved the factory from Huntington to Peru…”

“Well, it sounds better,” he said. “ Huntington ’s so damned generic. As a name for a town, I mean. Peru, now, that has some zing to it.”

“Zing,” I said.

“ Peru ’s a country. The Incas, the Andes, Machu Picchu. Exotic-sounding, and then you go from that to Indiana. Peru, Indiana. Plus there’s the fact Cole Porter was born there, which not everybody knows, but still, it’s a little extra flavoring. If a man’s going to have a clay factory, why not float it forty or fifty miles down the Wabash to Peru?”

“Because it sounds better.”

“Well, yes.”

“I guess Nobody’s Baby changed your life more than most people’s.”

“I guess it did.”

“Gulliver Fairborn,” I said.

“Ridiculous name.”

“Distinctive, though. More so than Henry Walden. Ray called you Henry Clay, but he tends to get names wrong.”

“Not an uncommon failing.”

“I wonder if that was in your mind when you picked the name. The story about the clay factory unconsciously led you to choose the name Henry. Or it could as easily have been the other way around.”

“So many things could.”

“Henry Walden. Henry for Henry David Thoreau? And that would lead straight to Walden Pond.”

“Where, as far as I know, there are no alluvial clay deposits.” He picked up his drink and contemplated it. “The goddam scholars pull that crap all the time,” he said. “Pick apart every sentence a man writes, looking for hidden meanings. If they ever wrote anything themselves they’d know it doesn’t work that way. It’s hard enough to get any kind of meaning into the work, never mind a hidden one. What tipped you off? It couldn’t have been the location of the clay factory.”

I shook my head. “You looked familiar.”

“To you?”

“Yes, but just vaguely, and I didn’t think about it much. But you looked familiar to other people, too. In fact one of them thought she recognized you and said hello to you.”

“That stunning black girl.”

“Isis Gauthier. You were standing with your chin in your hand, and she greeted you, and you dropped your hand and turned and she apologized for her mistake. Because once she saw your beard she knew you weren’t the man she thought you were.”

“And that set you thinking?”

“No, it takes more than that to set me thinking. But Ray had the same reaction. He thought he recognized you, and then he decided he didn’t. And that got me wondering why you’d looked familiar to me, and it was because I saw you the first time I walked into the lobby of the Paddington. You were sitting there reading a copy of GQ. It was you, except you didn’t have the beard or the beret. You were wearing sunglasses, weren’t you? And it seems to me you had a lot more hair.”

“Henry Walden,” he said. “Master of disguise.”