4

I always have the same feeling when I go to New York. There was a bad joke about a man who married a beautiful woman and couldn't wait for the wedding night to get to her. But then when the time came, she pulled a blond wig off her bald head, unscrewed her wooden leg, and took the false teeth out that made her smile so alluring. She turned to him coyly and said, "I'm ready now, darling." That's me and New York. Whenever I come into the place – be it in a plane, train, or car – I can't wait to get there. The Big Apple! Shows! Museums! Bookstores! The Most Beautiful Women in the World! It's all there and has been waiting for me all this time. I zoom out of the train and there's Grand Central Station or Port Authority or Kennedy Airport – the heart of it all. And my heart's doing a conga: Look at the speed! The women! I love it! Everything! But that's where the trouble begins, because everything includes the bum wobbling into a corner to vomit and an obnoxious fourteen-year-old Puerto Rican kid on transparent rocket-ship high heels asking (threatening) me for a dollar. On and on and on. There's no need to elaborate on it, but I never seem to get it through my head about the place because every time I come, I half-expect to see Frank Sinatra come dancing by me in a sailor suit, singing "New York, New York." And in fact a man who looked vaguely like Sinatra did dance by me once in Grand Central. Danced right by and started to pee on the wall.

So now I've got it down to a science. I get off the train in high spirits. Then until the first terrible thing happens I'm great and loving every minute of the place. As soon as the terrible arrives, I let all of my hate and disappointment come flying out of me, and then I go on about my business.

This time it was a cabdriver. I flagged him down when I got out of the station and gave him the Fifth Avenue address of the publisher.

"Parade on Fift' tudday."

"Yes? So?" His license card said that his name was Franklin Tuto. I wondered how he pronounced it.

I saw his eyes in the rearview mirror sizing me up. "So I gotta go down Park."

"Oh, that's all right. Excuse me, but do you pronounce your last name Toot-o or Tut-o?"

His eyes were in the mirror instantly, drawing a head on me before he answered this dangerous question.

"What's it to you, hey?"

"Nothing. I was just interested." Fool that I am, I thought I'd try to be funny. "I thought you might be related to the Egyptian Tuts."

"Like hell you did. You were checking me out, weren't you?" He grabbed hold of the bill of his checkered golf cap and pulled it around and down farther onto his head.

"No, no, you see, I saw your name there on the card –"

"You're another inspector! God damn you guys! I got the friggin' renewal already, so what the hell else do you want from me, blood?" He pulled over to the curb and told me that he didn't want me in his fucking cab – that I could fucking suspend him if I wanted, but that he was sick of "us guys." So we all got out of his cab, waved good-bye to Franklin Tuto as he screeched away, and sighing, hailed another.

The pilot of this one was named Kodel Sweet. I'm a great one for reading the names of cabdrivers. Scenery usually bores me. He had on one of those funky black velvet hats that look like something fell out of the sky onto his head and decided to stay. For better or worse he didn't say anything the whole trip except "Check it out" when I again gave the address of the publisher. But then when I was getting out of the car he said, "Have a nice day," and it sounded like he meant it.

The building was one of those all-glass Brave New World things like a huge swimming pool turned up on end without the water flowing out. The only time I've ever liked architecture like that is when it's one of those brilliantly sunny days in the spring or fall and the million windows reflect light everywhere.

I was surprised to find that a number of the floors of the building were offices of this publisher. Floors and floors of people working on books. I liked that idea. I liked the fact that Kodel Sweet had told me to have a nice day. There was a nice smell in the elevator, of some woman's sexy perfume…. New York's okay.

As I went up in the elevator, I felt a funny jump in my stomach to think that in a few minutes I'd be talking to someone who actually knew Marshall France. I've been plagued all my life with people asking me what my father was like, and I've always hated it, but now I had fifty zillion questions that I wanted to ask about France. As I came up with a zillion more, the elevator doors slid open and I walked out in search of David Louis's office.

Louis was no Maxwell Perkins, but he had a big enough reputation so that you'd hear about him now and then. When I reread the articles on France, they said that Louis had been one of the few people France was in contact with when he was ahve. He had also edited all of the France books and had been made executor of the writer's will. I knew nothing about will executors (when my father died I went into total hibernation and didn't come out again until the battleground was cleared of rubble and bodies), but I assumed that Louis had to mean something to France to be made final overseer of his possessions.

"Help you?"

The secretary had on – I swear to God – a gold lamй T-shirt with gold sequin letters spelling out "Virginia Woolf" across her nice chest. There was a copy of The Super Secs facedown on her desk.

"I have an appointment with Mr. Louis."

"Are you Mr. Abbey?"

"Yes." I looked away because all of a sudden she had that "Aren't you… ?" glint in her eye, and I wasn't in the mood for her questions.

"One minute and I'll see…" She picked up the receiver and dialed an extension.

On one wall of the waiting room was a display ease of the books the house had recently published. I started looking at the fiction, but what caught my eye was a gigantic coffee-table book, The World of Puppets. It cost twenty-five dollars but seemed so thick through the glass window that it had to have every photograph ever taken of a wooden head or string. I decided to buy it for Saxony for all the work she'd been doing. I knew that the gesture would mean something more to her than I probably wanted it to, but the hell with that. She deserved it.

"Mr. Abbey?"

I turned, and there was Louis. He was short and squat, probably around sixty, sixty-one years old, well groomed. He had on this very dapper tan suit with wide lapels, and a sea-blue herringbone shirt with a maroon ascot tucked down into the neck instead of a tie. Silver metal-frame glasses that made him look like a French movie director. Semi-bald, he gave me a semi-dead-fish handshake.

He led me into his office, and just before he closed the door, I heard his secretary snap her gum. The place was wall-to-wall books, and sneaking a glance at some of the titles, I realized how important he must be if he edited even half of these people.

He smiled apologetically and stuck his hands into his pants pockets. "Do you mind if I join you on the couch? Please, please sit down. I hurt my back playing racketball last week, and it hasn't been the same since."

Ted Lapidus suit, sequin secretary, racketball… Whether or not I approved of his style, he was my strongest link to Marshall France at the moment.

"You said that you wanted to talk about Marshall, Mr. Abbey." He was smiling a little wearily, I thought. He'd been over this territory before? "You know, it's interesting – ever since the colleges started teaching courses in children's literature, and people like George MacDonald and the Grimm Brothers have been established and made quote literary unquote, the interest in France's work has gone way up again. Not that the books haven't always sold. But now a number of schools have his things on their reading lists."