have passed it on if he had—and of course the Bailey biography didn’t refer to the matter at all.
And what, precisely, were the circumstances of his death? God knows, Doyle thought, the man made many enemies during his lifetime, but which one was it that caught up with him on, probably, the twelfth of April in 1846? His body was found in the marshes in May, decomposed but verifiably his, also verifiably killed by a sword thrust through the belly.
Hell, thought Doyle, dejectedly staring at the book in his lap, more is known about the life of Shakespeare. And Ashbless was a contemporary of such appallingly thoroughly chronicled people as Lord Byron! Granted, the man was a minor poet, whose scanty and difficult work would, if not for some derogatory remarks made about it by Hazlitt and Wordsworth, be absolutely forgotten instead of just reprinted rarely in notably complete anthologies— still, the man’s life ought to have left more marks.
Across the aisle, through the windows on that side of the plane, he saw the twinkling lights of London rise as the huge plane banked, and he decided the stewardess wouldn’t bring him another drink so near disembarking time. He glanced around, then surreptitiously drew his flask out of his inside jacket pocket, unscrewed the top and poured an inch of Laphroaig into the plastic cup his last drink had arrived in. He put the flask away and relaxed, wishing he could also clip and light one of the Upmann cigars waiting in the opposite pocket.
He took a sip of the warm scotch and smiled—Laphroaig was still damn good, if not quite the wonder it had been when it was being bottled at 91.4 proof. In fact, he thought, these new Upmann cigars from the Dominican Republic aren’t nearly what they were when they were being rolled in the Canary Islands.
And none of the young ladies I’ve gone with since Rebecca have been interesting at all.
He flipped open the old book and stared at the frontispiece engraving, a portrait done from the Thorwaldsen bust: the sunken-eyed, startlingly bearded poet stared back at him from the picture, his massive height and breadth of shoulder clearly implied by the sculptor’s skill. And how was it in your day, William? Doyle thought. Were the cigars and scotch and women any better?
For a moment Doyle imagined that Ashbless’ faint sardonic grin was directed at him… Then, in a moment of vertigo so strong that he nearly dropped his cup and grabbed the arms of the seat, it seemed that Ashbless really was looking at him, through a picture and across a hundred and fifty years, in scornful amusement.
Doyle shook his head sharply and closed the book again. That’s how you know you’re tired, he told himself: when a guy a century dead seems about to wink at you out of a picture. Never happened with Coleridge.
He tucked the book into his briefcase next to the book he’d brought along to serve as his credentials—it was The Nigh-Related Guest, a biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge by Brendan Doyle. He had wanted to follow it with a lengthy study of the Lake Poets, but the reviews of the Guest, and its sales, had caused his editor at the Devriess University Press to suggest he pursue, as the editor had put it, “a more uncharted sort of territory. I’ve admired,” the editor had gone on, “your two articles in the PMLA that attempted, with some success, to make sense of the murky verse of William Ashbless. Perhaps a biography of that odd poet would strike the critics—and the college librarians!—as a more ground-breaking piece of work.”
Well, thought Doyle as he closed his briefcase, unless I resort to outright fiction, it looks like it will be a damned short piece of work.
The plane was descending, and when he yawned his ears popped. Forget Ashbless for now. Whatever Darrow is paying you twenty thousand for, it has to do with Coleridge.
He had another sip of the scotch, and hoped fervently that the job didn’t also have to do with planchettes or Ouija boards or any such stuff. He’d once seen a book of poems supposed to have been dictated by the ghost of Shelley, through a medium, and he half-suspected that this DIRE job might be a similar enterprise. He wondered, too, whether twenty thousand dollars might be enough to make him abandon his professional integrity and participate. He drained the cup, as the plane seemed to be about to touch down.
It was certainly an odd coincidence to be hearing so much of DIRE lately. A month ago they’d offered a job to Steerforth Benner, the most brilliant English Literature graduate student Doyle had ever had. Doyle remembered being mildly surprised to hear from Benner that DIRE was still in existence. Doyle knew of the company, of course —from small beginnings in the 1930s, it had become, under the shrewd guidance of its colorful founder, a pillar of American scientific industry rivalling IBM and Honeywell. They’d been very big in things like the space program and undersea exploration, and during the 60s, Doyle recalled, they were always sponsoring Shakespeare plays on television without commercial interruptions. But the company had withdrawn from the public eye during the 70s, and Doyle had read somewhere—in the National Enquirer, he believed it was—that J. Cochran Darrow had learned he had cancer, and after exhausting all the scientific possibilities of a cure, had tried to turn the resources of DIRE toward the occult, in the hope of finding a cure in the dubious annals of magic. Newsweek had only noted that DIRE was laying off most of its personnel and closing down their production centers, and Doyle remembered a Forbes article, titled something like “DIRE Straits,” about the sudden worthlessness of their stock.
And then Benner was approached by them and offered a high-paying, though unspecified, position. Over a pitcher of beer one night Benner had told Doyle about all the tests he was taking in order to qualify: tests for alertness under fatigue and distraction, physical endurance and agility, quick comprehension of complicated logic problems… and even a few tests which struck Doyle as distasteful, the purpose of which seemed to be to measure Benner’s capacity for ruthlessness. Benner had passed them all, and though he did tell Doyle afterward that he’d been accepted for the position, he completely, though amiably as ever, evaded all questions about the job itself.
Well, Doyle thought as, sounding distant through the insulation, the wheels yelped against the runway, maybe I’m about to learn what Benner wouldn’t tell me.
The guard unlocked the gate and took Doyle’s suitcase from the driver, who nodded politely and walked back toward the purring BMW. Doyle took a deep breath and stepped through, and the guard locked the gate behind him.
“Good to have you with us, sir,” the man recited, his voice raised to be heard over the roaring of diesel engines. “If you’ll follow me, please.”
The lot was more expansive than it had looked from the street, and the guard led him on a looping course to stay out of the way of intimidating obstacles. Big yellow earth-moving tractors lurched and shifted from place to place, popping head-sized stones to dust under their mill wheel tires and sending up an unholy clattering roar as they pushed quantities of rubble into big heaps and then pushed these away somewhere out in the darkness; the rubble, Doyle noted, was fresh, the broken edges of stone still white and sharp-smelling. And there were busy people hurrying about on foot, too, laying out thick power cables and peering through surveying instruments and calling numbers to each other over walkie-talkies. The ring of bright spotlights cast a half-dozen shadows from every object.
The guard was six feet tall and taking long strides, and the shorter Doyle, having to jog occasionally to keep up, was soon puffing and wheezing. What’s the goddamn hurry, he wondered angrily; though at the same time he promised himself that he’d start doing sit-ups and push-ups in the mornings again. A battered old aluminum trailer stood at the periphery of the glare, moored to the activity by cables and telephone lines, and this proved to be their destination. The guard hopped up the three steps to the door and knocked, and when someone inside shouted, “Come in!” he stepped down and waved Doyle ahead. “Mr. Darrow will speak to you inside.”
Doyle walked up the steps, opened the door and went in. The inside of the trailer was littered with books and charts, some looking old enough to belong in a museum and others obviously brand new; all were clearly in use, the charts covered with penciled notes and colored pins, and the books, even the oldest and most fragile, propped carelessly open and marked up with felt-pen ink. An old man stood up from behind one of the taller book stacks, and Doyle was impressed in spite of himself to recognize, from a hundred pictures in magazines and newspapers over the years, J. Cochran Darrow. Doyle had been prepared to humor a wealthy but sick and almost certainly senile old man, but all such thoughts evaporated before the man’s piercing and frostily humorous gaze.
Though the hair was whiter and scantier than recent photographs had shown, the cheeks a little hollower, Doyle had no difficulty in believing that this was the man who had pioneered more fields of scientific research than Doyle could probably even spell, and, out of a small-town sheet-metal factory, built a financial empire that made J. Pierpont Morgan look merely successful.
“You’re Doyle, I hope,” he said, and the famous deep voice had not deteriorated at all.
“Yes, sir.”
“Good.” Darrow stretched and yawned. “‘Scuse.me, long hours. Sit down, any space you can find. Brandy?”
