by Noel Hynd
Frank Cooper retired from journalism in 2005. He spent time reading and fishing. He gave up on ever publishing the background story he had seen and lived first hand in New York in 1968. Sometimes Cooper thought that maybe he had invented the whole Firebird thing in his mind. It all seemed so unsettled, so unfinished. If anything, to Frank Cooper, that was the legacy of Firebird, the final cruelty. The not knowing. The sense of a thing left incomplete, a great vast story untold, like an empty chapter in a bulging history book. He wondered if someday someone who had been close to the case would come along in his or her later years and complete the chapter. Someone who had been close. But the void left inside him as he grew old, posed by so many unanswered questions, was all that remained.
Frank Cooper died in 2015 at the age of eighty-seven.
Two years before his death, he showed his wife a manuscript that he was working on about the case. He gave her time to read it but did not allow her to take any notes or to make a copy. Then she watched one quiet Sunday morning in their home overlooking the Pacific as he erased it from all of his computer discs.
“There,” he said. “That’s that! I did my best.”
Then he fed both printed copies into a fire.
He took his wife’s hand. That was what mattered to him most.
“You did your best,” she agreed. “That’s all that anyone could ask.”
Cooper was right. It had been a good run. When he passed away, none of the remaining New York papers carried his obituary. The one in San Jose did, but younger people, J-schoolers, edited out the unsubstantiated part about the spy story.
There it ended. Almost.
Chapter 97
New York City, November 2018
The woman waiting in the reception area at the book publisher’s office was in her seventies. But she looked and carried herself as if she were a decade younger. She was tanned and casually attired. She wore comfortable clean jeans, a blouse and a sports jacket. Outside the Manhattan skyscraper the midday was sunny and balmy. The woman reflected the day.
These editorial offices of the giant publishing enterprise were on the fifty-seventh floor of a new skyscraper in the West Fifties. Like so many current day publishers, it was one arm of a multi-national conglomerate. The parent headquarters were in Luxembourg City, though it bore the imprint of an old American publisher.
The door to the inner offices opened into the reception area. A young man in khaki slacks and a blue shirt, no jacket, no tie, stepped out. He greeted the visitor warmly and by name.
“Welcome. Mr. Maguire is ready to see you now,” he said.
The woman smiled. She picked up on some small talk and followed down a carpeted hallway that bore giant framed book jackets, most of them best sellers or prize winners. Much like a movie studio, the artifacts were the way a company congratulated itself on its own wonderfulness.
They arrived at a corner office. The Editor-in-Chief, a man at a vast desk stood and smiled. It was the first time he and his visitor, his first-time author, had met face to face.
“Well,” he said, smiling. “At last we meet in person. What a pleasure!”
“Thank you,” she said. There was more than a handshake and less than an embrace. “Please. Sit,” he said. “Water? Flat or sparkling? Perhaps something other than water?”
“Water would be fine,” she said, sitting.
Her eyes drifted to the skyline of the west side of Manhattan. The city had changed enormously since she and her late husband had lived and worked here. The assistant, the young man, disappeared and re-appeared with a chilled bottle of water.
The editor was almost at a loss for words.
“Well, I must say,” he said. “Meeting you finally. I have to tell you. Your book is both unique and extraordinary. Remarkable. It’s our pleasure to publish it. I’m confident it will do well.”
“I hope so,” she said. “One never knows.”
“No,” he agreed, “one doesn’t.”
“May I call you Lauren?” he asked.
“You’d be offending me if you didn’t.”
“How does it feel to be a ‘first novelist’?” Maguire asked.
Lauren laughed. “First novel and last novel,” she said. “I’m not sure I have another story. I’m not sure I enjoyed the process. Took me decades, you know. Then another year and a half of revising, working with the editor you sent to work with me. Not sure I have the patience or stamina for another.”
“The Magic Mountain took Thomas Mann seven years,” Maguire said. “Catch-22 took Joseph Heller eight.”
She countered. “The French mystery author, Georges Simenon used to write a book in two weeks. Of course, some of them feel that way when you read them. I’m sure every case is different,” she said.
“It is. It is,” Maguire said.
After a long pause and a short smile, he hunched forward.
“Listen. Here’s what I’m dying to ask,” the editor said. “But I’ve been waiting because I wanted to ask in person. Very ‘off the record.’ This is a novel, what you wrote. Okay. We market it as fiction naturally. But how much is true, how much is invented?”
She laughed. “I knew you’d ask that,” she said.
“The book is full of names, full of dates,” Maguire said. “We vetted them all. They all stand up to scrutiny.” He paused. “But be honest with me. Between us. Is this mostly fiction or mostly non-fiction?”
Lauren laughed again.
“Call it what you want. Call it non-fiction fiction. Isn’t that what Capote called In Cold Blood? Something like that? A non-fiction novel.”
“Something of a mongrel of a genre,” the publisher said. “Fact and fiction get badly blurred these days.”
“Of course. Yes. They do. But listen. It all happened,” she said. “It did. About ninety-five percent the way I wrote it. There are some rough edges, of course,” she said. “That’s how it is with real events. Oh, look, obviously, I changed some of the names, some of the place settings. There was no New York Eagle, for example. But Frank, my late husband, and I both worked on a tabloid newspaper in New York in the 1960s. During the Wallace campaign. During the so-called summer of love. We were on the obvious newspaper. That’s where I met my husband. The name of the newspaper was the most significant thing I changed. I played with a few names, a few places. There are a number of people who are still alive. I’m not out to embarrass anyone. I just wanted to finally tell my husband’s story, our story, and the intrigue that he, we, more or less stumbled across. For all intents and purposes, this is the way it happened.”
“Fascinating,” Maguire said. “Frank Cooper. Quite a fine reporter in his day.”
“Yes, he was,” she said with pride.
“I’m sorry I never got to meet him.”
“I’m sorry too,” Lauren said. Her voice caught. “He’s been gone for three years now.”
She was quiet. Her mood took a dip. “Not a day goes by that I don’t miss him,” she said. “Not a day when something happens, and I think, oh, I can’t wait to tell Frank about that, and then I catch myself and remember that he’s no longer here. Except in spirit, of course. We were married for, well, we married in 1970 and were together for nearly fifty years. This book, this story, it’s his testament, I guess. His legacy. The one thing no one can tinker with or change. That’s why I wrote it.”
Why didn’t your husband write the book?” Maguire asked. “Or publish the larger story? He pretty much dropped it.”
“He didn’t want to. Not without a solution. There’s that,” she said, “but also something else. The one thing that I learned along the way, one thing my husband taught me way back when he was writing obituaries, sometimes the person most involved in a story doesn’t have the perspective. It’s the observer, the person on the sidelines, who can see the story with the best perspective. Think of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby.”
Maguire made a thoughtful expression and nodded. “Never thought of it that way,” he said.
> “I learned a lot from Frank Cooper,” she said. “And I’m not sure I’m even finished.”
“I suppose so,” Maguire answered.
They looked at each other across the desk.
Maguire lifted the manuscript that was on his desk. It was big and thick.
“Firebird,” he said. “I like that.”
Lauren smiled.
“Oh. Let me show you something,” Maguire continued. “We have a mockup of the jacket art. We put the story out to one of the best book jacket designers in the world. A Dutchman who lives in New Zealand. Tell me if you like it.”
He reached to a folder on his desk. He took a large piece of artwork out. He glanced approvingly at it and then spun it around and showed her.
“Firebird,” he said.
“Firebird,” she nodded, examining the art work. “Yes, I like it. And Frank would have liked it, too.”
THE END
More spy fiction from Noel Hynd:
Flowers From Berlin
MORE THAN 1,000,000 COPIES IN PRINT OR DOWNLOADED!
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Trade Paperback available also, only through Amazon..
Perhaps the greatest American spy novel! Ever!
The classic American spy novel.
Love and betrayal, spies and patriots, murder and romance, Roosevelt versus Hitler on the eve of World War Two. "Winds of War" meets "The Eye of The Needle."
This espionage thriller follows FBI agent William Cochrane's efforts to stop a Nazi spy from assassinating FDR. Toss in a love affair with a British Secret Service operative and you have the makings of a page-turner. LJ's reviewer found the book "complex in characterization, crisp in dialogue, and thorough in its background" – Library Journal
"First rate!" - The Cleveland Plain-Dealer
Truman’s Spy
It is early 1950, the midpoint of the Twentieth Century. Joe McCarthy is cranking up his demagoguery and Joseph Stalin has intensified the cold war. In Washington, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI is fighting a turf war with the newly founded Central Intelligence Agency. Harry Truman is in the White House, trying to keep a lid on domestic and foreign politics, but the crises never stop. It should be a time of peace and prosperity in America, but it is anything but.
FBI agent Thomas Buchanan is assigned to investigate the father of a former fiancée, Ann Garrett, who dumped Buchanan while he was away to World War Two. And suddenly Buchanan finds himself on a worldwide search for both an active Soviet spy and the only woman he ever loved. In the process, he crosses paths with Hoover, Truman, Soviet moles and assassins, an opium kingpin from China, and a brigade of lowlife from the American film community.
Truman’s Spy is a classic cold war story of espionage and betrayal, love and regret, patriots and traitors. This is the revised and updated edition of Noel Hynd’s follow-up to Flowers From Berlin. The story is big, a sprawling intricate tale of espionage, from post-war Rome and Moscow to New York, Philadelphia and Hollywood, filled with the characters, mores and attitudes of the day. And at its heart: the most crucial military secret of the decade.
"Noel Hynd knows the ins and outs of Washington's agencies, public and private." -
Publishers Weekly
"A notch above the Ludums and Clancys of the world....." – Booklist
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Also from Noel Hynd, available now, a stunning work of historical crime fiction: Ashes From A Burning Corpse.
On a hot night in the Bahamas in 1943, someone murdered Sir Harry Oakes, one of the richest men in the world. There were four wounds to his skull. His corpse had been abused, covered ritualistically with feathers and set on fire. The murder was horrific by anyone’s standards.
A few evenings later, the phone rang in the home of Alan Hynd, America’s highest paid true crime reporter. {Source: NY Times, 1951} The Oakes case would send the writer to Nassau to cover a homicide that was littered with a cast of international characters and which, in its cover-up, became unique in the annals of true crime.
Ashes From A Burning Corpse is the novelized story of that writer’s coverage of the case and how it changed his life. The author is Noel Hynd, the veteran espionage novelist, who has created this story from his father’s writings and private recollections.
http://a.co/5BHANZV
