Two-Thirds of a Ghost

by Helen McCloy

  THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

  A Novel

  by Amos Cottle

  This must be the unpublished book Gus and Tony had mentioned. There were no corrections in ink or pencil. Apparently it had not been styled for the printer or even proofread. It was virgin as it had come from the typist. Or did Amos do his own typing?

  Other folders in the third drawer were filled with carbons of books already published, carbons of TV scripts each bearing its own date. The first was scheduled for next January. The sequence ran for thirty-nine weeks, skipping July and August, the season of summer replacements.

  But where was the rough draft of the book Amos had just started? And his notebooks and his unpublished short stories?

  Basil skimmed through the letters first. In a few moments he realized they were all business letters from Gus or Tony or the advertising agency that ran the TV show. If Amos had received personal letters, he must have destroyed them as soon as he answered them. A man without a memory could hardly be expected to be sentimental. Such emotions were largely a product of memory, increasing as the years accumulated and the pattern of lacrimae rerum became more obvious. Amos must have been almost as detached as a child or an animal from the world of adult feeling.

  Basil was returning the letter folders to the bottom drawer when he made his first real discovery.

  The drawer stuck a little as he tried to pull it out farther. Something had caught in the grooved ledge where it was supposed to slide back and forth. His fingers found the obstruction he could not see until he dislodged it. A small coin purse in limp, cracked reptile skin, faded to a dull mottled tan. He unlatched it and saw something wrapped in yellowed tissue paper. Carefully he unrolled the paper. There was a broad, plain gold wedding ring with an inscription on the inner side A.S. to G.M., 6-10-48. There was a strand of fine, straight, brown hair, tied with a white cotton thread. It was the bright shade of pale brown that catches the light with an almost iridescent tone of bronze, a shade no dye can duplicate, and it was very fine in texture, probably the hair of a young girl or a child. There was one other thing in the little purse—a worn, gold thimble. Its border was embossed with tiny forget-me-nots enameled in pink and blue. The gold part of the border was engraved in fancy script with a single letter “G.” Gertrude? Grace? Gloria? Greta? Gretchen? Griselda? Georgiana? Gilda? Garnet? Or even the name that was so resonant with memories for him, Gisela?

  Basil stood for a long time looking at the three objects. A woman’s ring, a woman’s thimble and most probably a woman’s hair. When did a woman give up her wedding ring? Only when she was dead or divorced. But would a divorced woman’s wedding ring be treasured with a lock of her hair?

  Could these things have belonged to a former owner of the house? It seemed unlikely. Anyone who kept things like this would hardly forget them when the house was sold. They must have belonged to Amos. Did he himself know what they signified? Sentiment without memory was psychologically absurd, but it was not necessarily sentiment that might have induced Amos to preserve these trinkets. They might have been kept as the only clues he had to his lost identity. Things the police had discovered in his clothing when they found him wandering and incoherent by the roadside with a wounded head. Things they returned to him when they gave up all hope of tracing him. Things Amos and Dr. Clinton had never mentioned to Tony or Gus, perhaps because they dramatized Amos’s lost identity so vividly. After seeing these, Tony might have been more hesitant to publish a book by a man who was so obviously a walking mystery—a man with a past buried like a time bomb that might explode at any moment.

  A tap on the glass door dispersed Basil’s reflections. He dropped the purse and the trinkets into his pocket.

  Emmett Avery stood on the other side of the glass, silhouetted against the fading daylight. Basil crossed the room to let him in.

  “So this is the enemy’s stronghold!’’ Emmett’s cold, gray eyes surveyed the living room with frank curiosity and lingered on the carbon of Amos’s unpublished book. “A posthumous Cottle?”

  Basil nodded. “There’s a book in rough draft and a notebook and some short stories, too, but I haven’t come across those yet.”

  “De mortuis…” Emmett sighed. “We’ll all have to be sickeningly polite about them, I suppose. There are certain advantages to an author in being dead…. Tony and Leppy were very much interested when I ran into them at the station and told them I was coming here to meet you. They wanted to know why and, of course, I couldn’t tell them because you hadn’t told me. Why am I here, Dr. Willing? As a suspect? Or the devil’s advocate?”

  “Neither. As an expert witness. Tony Kane says that your father was a publisher’s accountant who knew more about contracts than anyone in the business and that you worked for several years in his office before you became a critic. I want you to read these letters and then tell me just how they strike you. Won’t you sit down?”

  Emmett settled himself in another easy chair and glanced at the first page of the scrapbook Basil handed him. Uninvited he began to read aloud as if this were a jest so rich it must be shared. He had a good reading voice that relished every shade of meaning in the words he uttered.

  Daniel Sutton and Company,

  256A Fourth Avenue, New York 16, New York.

  January 14, 1952

  Amos Cottle, Esq.

  The Willows

  Stratfield,

  New York

  Dear Mr. Cottle,

  All of us here at Daniel Sutton are quite impressed with the publishable qualities of THE BATTLEFIELD. As it stands, the script is a little too long, and I agree with my first reader, Susan Grey, who insists that the title is not a good selling title. There are a number of other minor revisions I should like to suggest, as follows:

  Chapter Ten should be eliminated altogether. Chapter Eighty now told from the point of view of the Japanese sergeant, should be rewritten from the point of view of the American soldier who dies in Chapter Two. It will, I am sure, be a simple matter to postpone his death to Chapter Fourteen and write his part, as a living participant, into the intervening chapters. I should also like to see another character introduced halfway through the book—someone from the deep South. All your American soldiers are from the North, East and West. I am sure we would get better sales south of the Mason-Dixon line if we had one Southern character. It would be a relatively easy task to introduce another character and bring the number of soldiers involved up to a round dozen. And one other thing: I think it would be more unusual if the American combatants in this story were marines instead of infantrymen. There have been a number of war books about the infantry lately, but none about the marines. Have you any objection to making this change? The final decision must, of course, rest with the author, but here at Daniel Sutton we all feel that the time is ripe for a book about marines.

  If you could do all this acceptably in about six days, the book would be in time for the one spot still vacant on our fall list. If not we would have to postpone publication for another year, and I fear the story would have lost some of its timeliness by then.

  Yours Very Sincerely,

  Anthony Kane

  Editor

  Carbon copy to Augustus Vesey Inc.

  January 20, 1952

  Dear Mr. Cottle,

  We’re still holding that spot on the list for you, but we can only do so for another day or so. When will the revision be ready?

  Sincerely Anthony Kane

  REVISION MAGNIFICENT JOB AM DISCUSSING CONTRACT WITH VESEY REGARDS TONY KANE

  February 2, 1952

  Amos Cottle, Esq.

  The Willows

  Stratfield, New York

  Dear Amos,

  Enclosed are three copies of the contract I negotiated with Tony Kane of Daniel Sutton yesterday for your book now entitled NEVER CALL RETREAT. Will you please sign all three and return two, keeping one for your own files.

  I am not entirely happy about Clause 6B which gives Daniel Sutton fifty percent of all yo
ur subsidiary rights. I argued with Tony Kane about this at considerable length, but he was adamant. He said that a first novel is always a gamble, that they are planning a large advertising appropriation for this book, that the costs of production have risen so high since the war that they are operating at a loss anyway and probably won’t be able to stay in business much longer unless they get a larger share of subsidiary money. He also pointed out that if publishers don’t make a good profit on books like yours that do sell, they can’t afford to print really artistic books that don’t sell and the high standards of American literature would suffer in consequence. In short, Tony feels that the popular best sellers should carry the financial burden for the more recondite type of prestige book on ft publisher’s list. When I pointed out that this was a bit rough on the best-selling author, Tony made a nice gesture and yielded a point. He said that if we would agree to the fifty percent subsidiary rights clause as it stands, he-would write in another clause saying that you could have all your rights in Italy and Finland! I thought this was quite a handsome concession on Tony’s part. I trust you will agree and forward the signed contracts to me immediately.

  With all good wishes from Meg and myself,

  Yours as ever,

  Gus

  P.S. You will note that the last clause is an agency clause appointing me your representative in all matters arising out of this contract at a commission of twenty-five percent. This is a little higher than the commission some agents get but it will cover the typing charges you are not able to meet at the present time. Also, the cost of long-distance phone calls to the West Coast, cables to Europe and the commissions I shall have to pay other agents in Hollywood, London and Paris. I could send you an itemized bill for these incidentals, but I believe that a straight twenty-five percent commission will prove more advantageous in the long run and facilitate bookkeeping for both of us.

  G.V.

  Emmett put down the scrapbook with a wolfish grin. “Oh, boy!” he said with malicious delight. “And I always thought Sutton, Kane was a reputable publisher!”

  “But you don’t now?”

  Emmett’s face sobered.

  “If there were no libel laws, I’d say they were the biggest bunch of crooks that ever lived. Tony Kane is a smart operator. But Gus Vesey is even smarter. That twenty-five percent that ‘facilitates bookkeeping.’ What a phrase! ‘More advantageous in the long run’—to whom? Must have been a powerful lot of long-distance phone calls to Hollywood to justify that for a period of four years. May I see the contracts?”

  Basil handed them over. Emmett chuckled indulgently from time to time as if he were reading a rather naughty humorous magazine. “Didn’t Cottle ever hear of the Authors’ Guild contract?…No termination clause—option on the next two books on the same terms. This is the sort of thing that was done fifty years ago before there were any movie or TV rights: one of those self-perpetuating, slave contracts, just like marriage…. Royalty, ten percent of the retail price of the trade edition with no increase on copies sold…Fifty percent of first serial, reprints, condensations, second serial, movies and TV to Tony, also foreign sales and translations, excepting only Italy and Finland…What a gold mine! Whoever killed Amos Cottle, it was not Tony Vane or Gus Vesey!”

  “Then you would say this was an unusual contract? Not representative of established trade practice today?”

  “Representative? For Pete’s sake! Of course there was a time when the author of a first book would accept any terms to get in print and some publishers took advantage of that. But not today. And, even in the old days, ten percent commission was always established trade practice for agents. There must be some reason for Gifs Vesey taking more than twice that, but what the dickens can it be? Certainly not the reason he gives in this letter. In a year or so, that twenty-five percent would amount to a lot more than the incidentals he lists. Something peculiar was going on here. Take another point: after Amos was a commercial success, Gus should have tried to negotiate a better contract for Amos with Tony. But apparently he didn’t. He just let the old, slave contract roll along on its options-on-the-same-terms clause, like perpetual motion…. The only reason I can see is that Tony himself suggested this extra fifteen percent to Gus as a cut-back, if Gus would persuade Amos to sign Tony’s fifty percent cut of motion picture and TV rights. That’s monstrous! It puts Gus in the same category as agents who pocket their clients’ money and it makes Tony a crook, too.”

  “Suppose Amos had come to realize that he was being gypped and had tried to rebel? Would that be a motive for murdering him?”

  Emmett considered this carefully. “No, I think not. You see. I don’t believe anyone could prove that Gus or Tony had done anything illegal. There’s no law that fixes a literary agent’s commission at ten percent. Amos couldn’t prosecute Gus. How could Amos prove in court that Tony was bribing Gus to betray a client’s interests? If word of what they had done got around in the trade, Gus and Tony might have lost a lot of business in the long run. That’s about the worst that could happen. I don’t believe either of them would risk their necks committing murder to prevent that. They both have enough to live on now. They don’t have to be in business. Of course, if Amos woke up to the facts of life he’d try to get another agent and another publisher. Even then he might need a smart lawyer to break a contract without a termination clause, unless Tony decided to be decent about technicalities, provided Amos kept mum about the sort of deal he’d had from both of them. Losing Amos’s future books would cost Gus and Tony money, but they couldn’t save that future money by killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.”

  “Was he really a goose? Personal prejudice aside, how is Amos Cottle really regarded as a writer?’’

  “Why don’t you ask Leppy?”

  “I want another opinion. From the devil’s advocate.”

  Avery lit a cigarette. “I’ll try to be honest with you. I’ll even admit that I was a bit heavy-handed in my review in the Trib yesterday. But I still do not think Amos Cottle was a great writer or even a good one.”

  “What made him so successful?”

  Emmett shrugged. “If you could answer that question about any author, you could make a fortune in publishing. Few publishers make really great fortunes, simply because no one knows just what makes a book sell. For one thing it’s a quality that probably varies enormously with time and place. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was a complete flop when it was issued around Christmas. Reissued a few months later, it was an instant success and made Stevenson’s reputation.

  “In other business enterprises, there is some yardstick for quality. When you produce steel ingots or toothpaste you know that they are marketable if they meet certain standards of quality and if there’s a demand for steel or toothpaste. You’re sure to make a profit if your costs aren’t too high. A publisher has no such assurance. From the very beginning, his acceptance of a script for publication depends largely on the personal tastes and caprices of the publisher and his readers. Even intelligibility is no longer a criterion. It is stylish to be unintelligible. You can almost insure artistic success that way, though commercial success is still much more subtle and unpredictable. Highbrows have literary fashions to go by, lowbrows don’t.”

  Avery exhaled a long plume of smoke and Basil said, “I’d like very much to hear an analysis of Cottle’s success from someone as hostile to him as you were.”

  The wolfish grin came back to Avery’s face. “The popular writer is always a pale carbon copy of the artistically fashionable writer of the previous generation. It’s sort of like. Third Avenue copying a Paris model two years later at a price of fourteen ninety-five. But in books there’s a cultural lag of almost thirty years.

  “Amos came along at a time when the popular writer was taking over the technique of the artistic writers of the Twenties. Style confused and subjective, but not absolutely enigmatic. Mood sensual and emotional, but the more common sensualities and emotions, nothing recondite. The popular writer never needs to
worry about intellectual content anyway, so its absence from the new look suits him to a T. Freudian symbolism he Wisely leaves to the literary aristocracy whenever he can, but he’s just as much at home with violence, poverty, vulgarity and sex as the highest brow, and his dialogue is just as colloquial if a little less ungrammatical. For the popular writer, the real innovation is the gradual abandoning of plot which must have cost him and his readers quite a psychological wrench, for plot has always been the backbone of popular writing until now. But they made the adjustment, as the psychologists would say. Even TV and slick magazines are abandoning plot for mood, as the high priests of literature did in 1925. Today a plot is indecent anywhere outside a mystery, the last refuge of the conservative writer.

  “Amos was typical of the popular writer of his generation, with nothing great or enduring about him. He was the lowbrow’s Faulkner or rather, perhaps, the Mickey Spillane of the middlebrow. The curious question is this: why did Amos’s books have such a great success when a dozen or more of exactly the same type are dropped out each year with a dull thud and forgotten in six months?”

  “Advertising?” suggested Basil.

  “Not exactly. Advertising doesn’t sell books, but it does sell Hollywood and then movies sell books. The tail wags the dog. Retreat was sold to Hollywood before publication on the strength of the proposed advertising campaign. From then on the commercial success of that one book was insured, and the thing was bound to snowball, provided that Amos produced enough books of the same type regularly. That was the real secret of Amos Cottle’s great success. Productivity. He kept right on, doggedly doing the same thing on the same scale at the same level once a year for four years. That was the thing Amos had that other writers at his level didn’t have—an enormous, almost superhuman fertility in the writing of bad books. The sheer weight and number of his books was overwhelming in volume. He was bound to end with a TV program and the Bookbinders’ Award. With that fatal facility and Tony and Gus to guide him, he just couldn’t lose.