The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Stories

by Mike Ashley

  Tonight, though, it’s quiet in the Working Day.

  Sitting in a booth at the back of the room is a tall, black man – he’s tall even when he’s sitting down . . . even slumped over a little, like he is right now – who’s nursing his fourth Manhattan and repeatedly turning over a pack of Camels on the table in front of him, working slowly but with admirable determination on emptying the pack into the ashtray. So far he’s managed to cram seven butts in there and, as the strangers descend the stairs, he’s considering starting on number eight. But it won’t help the figure on the bottom of his bank statement, the one he received only this morning and which he’s been worrying about all day . . . particularly the accompanying letter asking him to come in for a meeting.

  Two booths away from him, a woman wearing a little too much pan-stick is checking her face in a tiny mirror she’s taken from her purse. She’s sitting with her back to the proceedings and is using the mirror to check the new arrivals. It’s a process she’s worked in bars all around Manhattan – and, before that, in similar establishments in Philly, Miami and Des Moines. Over time she’ll do other bars in other cities, finally winding up several years hence spending the final few minutes of her life at a table in a sleazy dive out in Queens where the PA spurts Hip-Hop when she really wants to hear The Carpenters or Bread, and where the barkeep calls her “Lady”, spitting it out at her like bad meat. She doesn’t know that she’s checking the mirror to try figure out the road that lies behind her, the one she’s travelled to get where she is today . . . with all the bad decisions and failed relationships hovering over the blacktop like heat haze. But there’s no answers in a mirror, just like there’s no answers anyplace. Only more questions. She doesn’t spend too much time in one place, this “lady”, for that very reason. The more time you spend the more questions you get asked. It’s for this reason that she is about to leave the Working Day and, in so doing, provide a springboard for the adventure ahead – for, after all, as all children know, life is just one big series of adventures.

  At the table over by the counter – the noisy table – there are other questions being asked and answers given. But these questions are not as difficult, nor the answers as potentially distressing. Minutes earlier, as the strangers are crossing 23rd, big Edgar Nornhoevan is addressing the slender Jim Leafman – Laurel to Edgar’s Hardy . . . Norton to Edgar’s Ralph Kramden. Listen:

  “Okay, this one,” Edgar drawls, wiping beer froth from his top lip, “who said this one? He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

  Jim Leafman, unsung star of Manhattan’s Refuse Department, shakes his head. He’s been doing a lot of head-shaking this past half-hour. He doesn’t like this game – doesn’t know diddly about writers and their creations, or about statesmen (and women, of course) or politicians or Captains of Industry. Jim prefers it when they just tell a few jokes but, with McCoy late – McCoy Brewer, now gainfully employed by the Collars and Cuffs shirt and necktie emporium down on 21st Street – he’s left to handle Edgar by himself, and he isn’t making too good a job of it.

  “No idea,” Jim says with a shrug as the woman with the make-up weaves her slow and reluctant way past them, then up the stairs and out into the night . . . which, if she had poetry and not bile in her soul, she might say is calling to her on this particular evening. But she just does what she does, this casualty of life, and doesn’t ask questions.

  Outside, the two strangers dodge a Yellow and, glancing at the dog-eared parchment held by the taller of the two, they look up through the gloom . . . their eyes scanning the landscape of concrete towers, rain-slicked streets and store-windows.

  “There’s nothing here,” says one of them, the smaller one.

  “There must be,” comes the reply, though it has more of hope in it than of conviction.

  Then, a door opens at the base of one of the buildings and a solitary figure emerges, pulling its coat collar up against the breeze. For a second, the figure seems to see the two men and they think that she – for it is clearly a woman, they now see – is about to come over. But no, the figure turns and heads off in the direction of downtown.

  They watch her go and then return their gaze to the now darkened area from which she emerged. And they see a dimly-lit sign.

  “The Land at the End of the Working Day,” the taller of the two men reads, squinting into the gloom, saying it almost reverentially. “It’s here,” he says softly, and they smile at each other and continue across the street.

  2 Ernest Hemingway was a bullfighter?!

  Meanwhile, back in the Working Day, “Well guess, for crissakes,” is what Edgar snaps at Jim.

  “I don’t know,” Jim protests. “How can I guess if I don’t know?”

  Edgar sighs, takes a deep sup of his beer and blusters, “Okay, then who did he say it about?”

  “Edgar, I have no idea.”

  “I’ll give you a clue,” says Edgar, and he gets to his feet and mimes a matador waving his cape groundwards at an approaching bull.

  Jim looks around, smiling apologetically, feeling a little like Walter Matthau’s Oscar sitting alongside Jack Lemmon’s Felix, the latter noisily busy unblocking his sinuses.

  “Oh, Jesus!” Edgar says, thudding back into his seat. “It was William Faulkner talking about Ernest Hemingway.”

  “Ernest Hemingway was a bullfighter?”

  Edgar glares at his friend and pulls another card out of the box.

  “Okay, how about this –”

  “Why don’t I get a go yet?”

  “Because you haven’t answered one correctly yet.”

  Jim studies his bottle of Michelob, turns it around in his hands a couple times. “That doesn’t seem fair to me.”

  “Okay,” Edgar says, his face lighting up as he removes another card from the small box in front of him on the table. “Who said this –” He glances up at the sound of shoes on the stairs leading down into the bar, sees two sets of feet descending, and continues. “– and about whom? His ears made him look like a taxicab with both doors open.”

  “That would be Howard Hughes about Clark Gable,” one of the men – the tall one – says in a loud voice with just a trace of an accent to it: English? French? German? Edgar can’t pinpoint it. And then he turns to face a frowning Jack Fedogan and says: “I didn’t even know this place existed.”

  “We feel much the same about you,” Jack grunts, placing a freshly polished glass upside down on the shelf along the mirrored back wall.

  “Wonderful place,” the man says.

  Jack Fedogan nods. “What’ll it be?”

  “Tell me,” the man says, lowering his voice to a slightly conspiratorial level. “Do you have a back room?”

  “A back room?” Jack repeats, placing a second glass on the shelf. “You mean a restroom?”

  The stranger shakes his head and looks around for some kind of acknowledgment that he’s using a standard language. “Ah, such a quaint euphemism – you may be assured that if I had wanted to urinate or defecate then I would have asked for a room in which to do just that and not one which I desired to use simply for a rest. I would have asked for a toilet or a lavatory, perhaps even a loo or a bog, or a john or a head –” He stops and considers for a few seconds before adding, “or even a Crapper, named after the gentleman who devised the modern toilet pedestal. But no, barkeeper, I mean simply a back room – or, perhaps, a room in the back?”

  “You bein’ funny?” Jack says.

  “Are you laughing?”

  Jack shakes his head and, flipping the towel over his left shoulder, leans both hands on the counter rail in front of him.

  “Then I think it’s safe to say I am not being funny.”

  Jack nods a few seconds, sizing up the stranger, taking in his clothes, the unfashionable winged collar and foppish folded necktie.

  “You some kind of inspector?”

  The man shakes his head.

  “So –” Jack stands straight aga
in. “– who exactly might you be?”

  “Ah,” the man begins, waving an arm theatrically, “I might be Monsieur Aronnax, professor in the Museum of Paris, or Ned Land, the Canadian whaler, about to board the Abraham Lincoln on an expedition to find the fabled narwhal that later turns out to be the Nautilus . . . which, of course –” He turns to the smaller man beside him. “– would make my diminutive friend here Conseil, the professor’s devoted Flemish servant boy.”

  The small man nods, his eyes closing for the briefest of seconds.

  “Or,” the tall man continues, turning back to Jack, “perhaps I might be Dr Samuel Fergusson or Dick Kennedy – ‘a Scotsman in the full significance of the word . . . open, resolute and dogged’ – fresh from five whole weeks travelling the skies in a balloon.”

  Jack nods at the little man. “And him?”

  “Ah, a good point, barkeeper,” the tall man says, with a nod and a wink, and he turns to his companion once again and adds, “which would make him Joe, Dr Fergusson’s manservant.”

  The small man nods again, this time adding a small bow to the repertoire.

  “But you’re neither of those?” Jack Fedogan says.

  “Indeed not,” the man says. “Mayhap I’m –”

  “Mayhap?”

  “Yes, mayhap then I am Phileas Fogg, a phlegmatic – even Sphinx-like – Byron with moustache and whiskers –”

  “Which would make the little guy Jean Passepartout, yes?” says Jack.

  And for a few seconds, silence floods into the Working Day.

  Edgar Nornhoevan and Jim Leafman watch, enraptured.

  The tall (even while he’s sitting down) black man in the end booth lets out a smile – his first for the day – as he reaches for the pack of Camels.

  3 In the presence of a literary man

  “My, oh my,” the tall man exclaims, “I do believe, my dear Meredith, that we are in the presence of a literary man.”

  Jack Fedogan shakes his head. “Uh uh, I just remember all my classic literature – particularly Jules Verne and Thomas Hardy – from school.” And then he says, “You could also be Michael Ardan –‘an enthusiastic Parisian, as witty as he was bold’ – which, moo-hepp mee-hype, could conceivably make Doberman here Ardan’s worthy friend J. T. Maston, fretting over his telescope as Ardan, President Barbicane of Baltimore-based Gun Club, and the industrious Captain Nicholl undertake their journey around the moon.”

  For a few seconds the silence in the bar – the West Coast Jazz CD being between tracks – is absolute until the tall man slaps the counter and lets out a throaty roar of a laugh. “Capital!” he exclaims loudly, “absolutely capital.”

  “So, whyn’t we start right from the top,” Jack says.

  The tall man’s smile is warmer now as he holds out a hand. “In reality,” he says, “I am Horatio Fortesque, a literary scholar of some repute – particularly within those circles whose members appreciate the great works of Monsieur Jules Verne – while my companion here is Meredith Lidenbrook Greenblat.”

  “Lidenbrook?” Jack says, his voice quizzical against the surety of Lou Levy’s piano on “Serenade In Blue” as he shakes the two men’s hands.

  “Jack, I didn’t know you knew so much about books,” is what Edgar Nornhoevan says as he sidles up to the bar, empty glass held in his bear-like hand.

  The bartender shrugs, polishes a piece of counter and pushes a couple of shot glasses first one way and then the other. “Verne was always a favourite of mine,” he says, making a so-what with his mouth before he adds, “along with Dick Prather’s Shell Scott books, John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee and Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct yarns. I guess some things you don’t forget.”

  Edgar is shaking his head, looking at Jack head-on but keeping a weathered eye trained on the two strangers right alongside him.

  “You need that filling?” Jack asks.

  “Oh,” Edgar says, looking down in surprise at the glass – now where did that come from! – and then, nodding, “sure, one more.”

  “And Jim?”

  Jim Leafman gets up from the table and shuffles up to Edgar, planting his own glass on the counter. “Guess I’ll squeeze another one in,” he says, turning to the tall stranger and giving him a sly wink. The stranger chuckles.

  “So, you strangers in town?” Edgar asks, immediately feeling like a putz: after all, he silently reasons to himself, this is no two-muddy-cross-streets shanty town circa 1850, it’s twenty-first century New-goddam-York.

  But the tall man doesn’t seem perturbed by the question, and he shakes his head. “I’ve lived in Manhattan most of my life,” he says, his voice softening out a little and losing some of the clipped precision he’d sported earlier against Jack. “Come from south american stock,” says Horatio Fortesque, “Bolivia to be exact, and my name was originally Bill,” he says. “Martinez – William Martinez,” he says. “Horatio Fortesque seemed altogether a wholly more appropriate name for someone so immersed in the literary world,” he says, aiming the words to nobody in particular and up into the air above the counter.

  “Edgar Nornhoevan, Horatio,” says Edgar, holding out his hand. “And this here’s my good friend Jim Leafman,” he says as the stranger shakes first Edgar’s hand and then Jim’s. “We drink here pretty much all the time.”

  “I’m delighted to make your acquaintance,” Fortesque gushes . . . with just a little too much butter on the bread as far as Edgar is concerned.

  “So, how about your friend?” Edgar says, nodding to the Peter Lorre lookalike standing just in Horatio Fortesque’s shadow.

  “I made Mister Meredith Lidenbrook Greenblat’s acquaintance through the internet,” Fortesque says, imbuing the word ‘internet’ with almost W. C. Fields-like pomposity. “In a chat room,” he adds.

  Jack Fedogan places two beers on the counter in front of Edgar and looks over at the two strangers. Picking up the slack, Edgar says, “Buy you a beer?”

  “Certainly, that’s most kind of you,” Fortesque trills. Then, to Jack, “Do you have imported beers?”

  Jack nods as he presses the eject button on the CD player behind him. As he consigns the West Coast Jazz CD into its case and removes one of the disks from Time Signatures, the four-CD Dave Brubeck retrospective, he says over his shoulder, “What did you have in mind?”

  “Something English,” Peter Lorre chirps up, the phrase hissed out rather than actually spoken, and then, correcting himself, “Something British, I mean.”

  “I spent some time in England,” Jim Leafman says, reaching for his beer.

  “I got Tetley’s on tap,” Jack says, “plus in bottles I got Old Peculier, Black Sheep, Marston Moor, Landlord, Cropton’s Two –”

  “Landlord,” says Lorre, drooling.

  “Tetleys is fine for me,” Fortesque says and then, turning to face Jim, “Whereabouts?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “In England. Whereabouts did you stay?”

  “Oh,” Jim says, taking a deep sup of his beer as he casts his mind back to the days before he worked at the Refuse Department (“Sanitation”, he tells most folks) . . . the time he now regards as BC – Before Clarice – before he parked up his ’74 Olds that, at the time, was two parts yellow and eight parts rust (the rust is now winning the battle), parked it up outside the travelling salesman’s apartment building with the . 38 sitting in his lap . . . and then seeing the guy walking along the street, the guy who was sticking it to Clarice behind Jim’s back, seeing him in his fancy shoes and his fancy pants, fancy shirt and fancy sports jacket, knowing that he smelled of expensive cologne and not sewage the way Jim smelled . . . maybe even, down behind the zipper, smelled a little of Clar –

  “It was a long time ago,” Jim says, emerging from the beer and the memories, licking his top lip at the residue of the former and blinking his eyes hard three times at the latter.

  “I said where,” Fortesque says, with just a hint of irritation in his tone.

  “York shire,” Jim says,
splitting the word into two, the second part sounding like the areas where the little folks lived in those Lord of the Rings movies. “Leeds,” he adds.

  “How long were you there?” asks Fortesque.

  In your eyes, sings Carmen McRae, Brubeck tickling the ivories, Eugene Wright on bass and the indefatigable Joe Morello handling the drums. They sound so close they could be right here in the bar and, just for a second, both Jack Fedogan – who knows the song well, and the original album it comes from (Tonight Only!) – and Fortesque turn around momentarily before settling back to what appears to be a genesis of conversation.

  “Oh, around six maybe eight months I guess.” Jim looks down at his beer and, without looking back up, he says softly, “I was twenty years old.”

  “Quite a journey for a young man to make,” Horatio Fortesque says, reaching for his pint glass of Tetleys and nodding first to Jack, then to Edgar, and finally to Jim Leafman, unsure as to whom he owes the gratitude.

  “Yeah, I guess,” says Jim.

  The Lorre-lookalike snakes out a hand and grasps the bottle of Landlord, pours it into the glass alongside it.

  “You want to sit down?” Edgar asks.

  Fortesque and Lorre nod and the quartet move over to where Edgar and Jim were sitting just a few minutes earlier.

  “But it was nothing like a journey I saw a man take night after night,” Jim says, sliding his beer around on one of Jack’s Working Day coasters. “Every night,” he says, “right up until –” And his voice trails off.

  4 What the hell’s ‘tipsey’?

  “I’d been up in Leeds maybe around a week, maybe a little less,” Jim Leafman says, glancing around just in time to see Jack move his counter polishing a little closer to their table.

  Edgar settles back on his chair and glances at the two strangers, who seem relaxed about Jim’s story. He looks across at the tall black man, smoking – always seems to have a cigarette on the go – and back at Jim.

  “Got a little job at a newsagent store – little more than a newsstand – in the city and rented a small apartment. They call them flats,” Jim explains to his audience and receives nods and blinks to let him know they all understand.