'Where are you taking him to now?'
'He's being flown to a private clinic for diagnostic treatment,' said MacMordie and the car moved off. In the back seat Piper whimpered through his bandages.
'What's that, darling?' Sonia asked. But Piper's mumble was incomprehensible.
'What was all that about a diagnostic treatment?' Sonia asked MacMordie. 'He doesn't need '
'Just to throw the press and media off the trail. Mr Hutchmeyer wants you to stay with him at his residence in Maine. We're going to the airport. Mr Hutchmeyer's private plane is waiting.'
'I'll have something to say to Mr Goddam Hutchmeyer when I see him,' said Sonia. 'It's a wonder you didn't get us all killed.'
MacMordie turned in his seat. 'Listen,' he said, 'you try promoting a foreign writer. He's got to have a gimmick like he's won the Nobel Prize or been tortured in the Lubianka or something. Charisma. Now what's this Piper got? Nothing. So we build him up. We have ourselves a little riot, a bit of blood and all and overnight he's charismatic. And with those bandages he's going to be in every home tonight on TV. Sell a million copies on that face alone.'
They drove to the airport and Sonia and Piper climbed aboard Imprint One. Only when they had taken off did Sonia remove the bandages from Piper's face.
'We'll have to leave the rest on till your hair starts to grow again,' she said. Piper nodded his bandaged head.
From Maine Hutchmeyer phoned his congratulations to MacMordie. 'That scene outside the hospital was the greatest,' he said, 'that's going to blow a million viewers' minds. Why we've made a martyr out of him. Like a sacrificial lamb on the altar of great literature. I tell you, MacMordie, for this you get a bonus.'
'It was nothing,' said MacMordie modestly.
'How did he take it?' asked Hutchmeyer.
'Well he seemed a little confused is all,' said MacMordie. 'He'll get over it.'
'All authors have confused minds,' said Hutchmeyer, 'it's natural with them.'
Chapter 10
And Piper spent the flight in a confused state of mind. He still wasn't sure what had hit him or why and his mixed reception as O'Piper, Piparfat, Peipmann, Piperovsky et al. added to the problems already confronting him as the suppositious author of Pause. And in any case as a putative genius Piper had assumed so many different identities that past personae compounded those of the present. So did shock, MacMordie's bloodbath, suffocation, resuscitation, and the fact that he was wearing a turban of bandages over an unscathed scalp. He stared out of the window and wondered what Conrad or Lawrence or George Eliot would have done in his position. Apart from the certainty that they wouldn't have been in it, he could think of nothing. And Sonia was no great help. Her mind seemed set on making the financial most from his ordeal.
'Either way we've got him over a barrel,' she said as the plane began to descend over Bangor. 'You're too sick to go through with this tour.'
'I absolutely agree,' said Piper.
Sonia crushed his hopes. 'He won't wear that one,' she said. 'With Hutchmeyer it's the contract counts. You could be on an intravenous drip and you'd still have to make appearances. So we sting him for compensation. Like another twenty-five thousand dollars.'
'I think I would rather go home,' said Piper.
'The way I'm going to play it you'll go home with fifty grand.'
Piper raised objections. 'But won't Mr Hutchmeyer be very cross?'
'Cross? He'll blow his top.'
Piper considered the prospect of Mr Hutchmeyer blowing his top and disliked it. It added yet another awful ingredient to a situation that was already sufficiently alarming. By the time the
