I'll Let You Go (28 page)

“And he
never will
,” interposed the cousin.

“—he would not object. He told me a story, something he said that a general once wrote. The general cautioned his troops never to attack
men who were on their way home from battle; he said men on their way home were unvanquishable. Well, I wish to bring my
father
home, sir;
I'm
on my way home, too. And nothing will stop me from getting there—from finding him! So, if you please, sir, I'd like to ask once more: is there anything else you can tell us?”

Lucy and Edward were in tears.

Mr. Tabori, not unmoved, sat down again with a sigh and smiled sagaciously. “You
are
here for a gift then—no?”

The children, puzzled at first, got his drift and vociferously agreed. Pullman yawned, shuddering his jowls.

“Then how can I help?”

“The book that was taken,” said Tull. “What was it?”

“A work by William Morris—
News from Nowhere
. A utopian novel. Not my favorite of the man's, if I may.”

“Do you mean the British designer William Morris?” asked Edward.

As always, Lucy was shocked by her brother's casual erudition.

“Oh, he was much more than that!” offered Mr. Tabori. “A
voluminous
intellect. Poet, weaver, socialist—
and
publisher. He founded the Kelmscott Press.”

“Do you still have a copy?” asked Tull. “I mean,
another
copy?
News from
—”

“Afraid not. The Huntington has one, if you'd like to see it. Or the Clark.” He leapt up, hurrying to a cabinet. “These are
all
Kelmscott. This row's vellum—calfskin. These, prenatal; those, live birth. Down here are the linens: blue-backed holland boards. That's how the
Kelmscott Chaucer
was first done: blue holland.”

Blue maze, blue board, blue holland … what a blue mystery we weave!
thought the pigtailed girl.

“So you don't have
News from No
—”

“We
do
have a Chaucer.” The latter was already laid out on a table. “I hope your hands are clean,” warned Mr. Tabori. “It's about ninety thousand. The cover's by Birdsall.”

He showed them the prenatal pilgrims, setting out for Canterbury.

“Sir,” said Tull diffidently. “Did you ever meet Marcus Weiner?” He couldn't bring himself to say “my father” again just yet.

“Oh, many times!
Interesting
character—wonderful sense of humor. Wordplay and all. Powerful voice. Great head of hair. Far-ranging mind.
Now, mind you, it wasn't uncommon for someone like him to have an ‘interest'; Hollywood's always had a romance with collecting. Johnny Depp buys with us—he likes Hunter Thompson ‘firsts.' Though we don't usually carry that sort of thing. Ron Bass and Tim Burton, Whoopi and ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer'—they
all
come through. But Mr. Weiner … well, at first I thought he was being a bit
precious
.”

What's this? Was the man saying his father was a celebrity? Impossible—

“You said,” Tull stammered, “that it wasn't uncommon for ‘someone like him'—”

“A Hollywood person. At first I thought it precious that he was only interested in Morris … though after a while, I must say he proved himself
extremely
knowledgeable.”

“And why would that be ‘precious'—”

“Well,
you
know. Because he was an agent.”

“Agent?”

“He
worked
there. Didn't you know?”

“Worked
where
?”

“Why, at William Morris! The agency—he was a hotshot. You mean that you didn't … but how could you
not
have—” Mr. Tabori was briefly distressed, thinking again that he'd told too much; but remembering the boy's eloquent speech, moved on. He pointed to the embossed, intertwining initials of the letterhead the children had mistaken for Marcus Weiner's. “You see? The William Morris logo.”

Edward began to chortle at the sublimeness of it all.

The same helpful employee who had nearly shooed away dear Pullman now made a little show of producing
News from Nowhere
as a magician might a bouquet—freshly extracted from a
Collected Works
, which sat forgotten in the back bindery. Mr. Tabori took the volume and, with a single penetrating glance, encouraged her to leave. She did straightaway.

“I meant of course that we didn't have the volume available of
itself
. This is Longmans, Green; it must be sold in toto. It is seventy-five hundred.”

“May I?” asked Edward.

Mr. Tabori handed him the volume; the cousin riffled its pages before settling on a passage from the end:

As he listened, Tull seemed to hear the voice of his father, saw him somewhere in the world agonized by myriad demons, and felt rudely violated—as he had that afternoon with his cousins in the bedroom of La Colonne. He seized the book, plunking it back into the hands of a startled Mr. Tabori while Lucy diplomatically intervened.

“Emerson, I'm a writer myself—of the mystery genre. But I was wondering: do you have the Harry Potters? The original ones, from England?—”

“That's it!” shouted Mr. Tabori, slapping his thigh. “
Dowling!—”

“Who?”

“The ‘funny name'—you made me think of it because of J. K. Rowling.”

“Made you think of …”

“The
detective—
the one who reimbursed us! The detective your
grandfather
hired. His name was Samson Dowling!”

L
et us take a breath.

There was the introduction, pages ago, of a small detail which, in the unlikely event it has entered anyone's mind since, may have led the reader to imagine the chronicler of this tale to be underhanded. (It would not be the first time he was wrongly accused.) A train of thought, heavily freighted, was set upon a track, then without fanfare derailed.

Inspired by the unfurling of Will'm's “Strawberry Thief,” the baker Gilles spontaneously shared the story of his visit to a Gallic feast with his then-fiancée—something having to do with illicit songbirds and subterranean gourmands. The divertissement had been summoned from the depths to quell the pastrymaker's nervousness around his unusual part-time employee, and he ran through it with a flourish before being heckled by the irritated giant. Just as well—Gilles had shot his anecdotal wad and would have been at a loss to continue.

Mr. Mott could not have known the strange, epic feelings he aroused in his burly listener. Right about the time he'd brought his tale around to the posh neighborhood of Marlene Dietrich and the opium eater at the door of the ancient wine cellar, Will'm found himself mentally elsewhere: twenty kilometers outside Paris to be exact, stealthily traversing a golf course during a drizzle. He saw his feet (and those of a woman, her face indistinct, gamely trailing after) step over a low barbed-wire fence, through bower and arborescent meadow. They walked awhile, then froze: in the distance stood a breathtaking apparition—a broken column made of stone. But this derelict fantasia had windows and could
be lived in. While the baker droned on about crispy birds and such, Will'm remembed trodding toward the tower under billowing, storm-dirtied skies, the faceless woman tugging at his sleeve with worry. He was close enough to see the darkness within and had nearly entered when a man in short sleeves with a Gauloise stuck to his lower lip, caricature of a Frenchman, appeared on a tractor. He warned them against trespassing; so they never got to go inside.

At that very moment of recollection, an incensed Will'm resurfaced in time to cut Gilles off about his damn millet-gorged birds, barking (the perspicacious reader may recall), “That
is
the Frankish way, isn't it? Murder a thrush behind veils of civility! Truth be told, the French
are
a dishonorable and troublously shoddy race.”

And so the baker's history crashed to a halt.
^†

Such embroidery is mere preamble to the aforementioned vexation: to wit, the baker's remorse over what he implied was the jilting of the “long-lost” bride-to-be (not Lani, by a long shot) who attended the fabled
fête des gourmands
. A shadow fell over him at chapter's end—did the author clumsily mean it to be Trinnie's?—as he wistfully reflected upon his double life. Amends, he said, were due! The reader of these pages knows better now, of that we are certain; still, if way back when, the very same but for a moment believed—if it is
feasible
the reader could have actually, however fleetingly, believed that the baker Gilles Mott (whose name alone too coarsely hints at things “Toulousian”), at such an early stage, was plausibly central to our tale—and, even more implausibly, if one could believe that he is still—well, then it is understandable how that reader may now turn his nose up at this red herring and feel the whole gambit to be unworthy of an author who appeared to pride himself on being sensibly meticulous; or that it was at least improvident of the latter to dredge it up here, for it may only serve to illuminate his overreaching expository failures. If such
is
the case—if the reader is of that opinion—then there is nothing to be done. Suffice to say Gilles Mott
does
have reason to suffer, and reason to believe he has caused great
suffering of another. He
will
make amends. But this is not the time or place.
^†

Let teller and listener thus reconciled, regroup—and dust themselves off to remount. That's what this chapter's about. The trail is winding, the pace leisurely; let the loping, mulish narrative carry one along.

During the Pullmanic gala's froth of fireworks, across the hill on Stradella, in surrey-fringed conversation, Edward Trotter, that wisest of boys, touched upon the extracurricular activities of his parents, pictorially pornographic and otherwise. He alluded to private prisons and Dead Baby Societies, but his blithe monologue went unheard; Tull's concerns over the mysterious monogrammed letter took precedence. We have already looked into that missive with some thoroughness so can spend this time enumerating recent powerful developments in the destiny of Joyce Trotter née Gilligan.

She sat at the dermatologist's flipping through Condé Nasts, then leaned to pull two “throwaways” from the pile. The glossy
310
had a garish photo of Katrina Trotter and Ralph Mirdling at a black-tie gala, standing beside studio titan Sherry Lansing, billionaire Gary Winnick and screenwriter Ron Bass. (All looked amiable except for the wincing Mr. M.) Joyce then opened the
Courier
to find a photo of her husband and Marcie Millard in white hardhats standing with shovels at the fence surrounding his former grade school.
That would have had to have been staged
, she thought;
not even Dodd's money made things happen that fast
.

Her eye drifted to an ad:

Pierce Brothers Mortuary in Westwood Village
Resting Place for a Single Casket and a Single Urn
Located in “Sanctuary of Peace”
Crypt is at eye level, in the same enclave as
Marilyn Monroe, Truman Capote, Natalie Wood and other legendary personalities

Price $105,000

It gave her the biggest idea she ever had in her life.

As she drove through the cemetery gate, infused with collagen and Percodan, Joyce saw a familiar coxcombly figure at the far end of the oval drive—her father-in-law, chatting with a groundskeeper. She parked close enough to see the old man press something into the other's hand before Epitacio shut him into the Silver Seraph and spirited him away.

She of course knew of Mr. Trotter's exhaustive search for the ideal mausoleum, but had never visited the winning Westwood site. She'd never seen any of the famed funerary models either (except for the doghouses), not having had a great interest and never, oddly, having been invited into that most legendary and exclusive of clubs: the Withdrawing Room. Amazing, she thought, to run into him at this time of day—the man truly was obsessed! Joyce watched the Rolls roll away and the homely caretaker return to raking. Then she ambled to the park office, where a receptionist quickly introduced her to Dot Campbell, the effervescent manager (she used Gilligan instead of Trotter); Ms. Campbell, in a smudged gingham, seemed ill-fitted for the part.

As they strolled the enclave past various “bench estates” and columbaria—new mausoleums were in varied stages of construction—she learned more about Ms. Campbell and her sister Ethel's pet peeves than she might have cared to. That was all right; in this instance, a kind-hearted eccentric would serve her well. SIT DOWN AND HAVE A CHAT WITH SADIE AND MORRIS was etched into a marble love seat beside two graves. Dot explained how Sadie and Morris were not yet dead but wanted the legend inscribed anyway. In funeral-world parlance, that was what they called pre-need.

Something drew her to the farthermost corner of the property, where a maintenance yard was being razed to make way for more
tombs. It was lonely there, and felt colder than the rest of the grounds. When she saw a whitish pigeon wheel overhead, it reminded her of the doves at Castaic and she knew her instincts were, well, dead-on. Dot was glad the woman was interested in something family plot–size and said the work-in-progress parcel could be had for a million and a half, including a newly built adjacent shrine.