strained and tired.
‘I’m sorry to call so late.’
‘It’s all right, Mr Hardy. I cannot sleep.’
‘You can now, I’ve got the scroll.’
He made a yipping sound and I would have liked to have seen his face. There might even have been a smile on it. I drove out to Vaucluse through the drizzle and ran the Falcon up the drive and in beside the Jag. Kangri was there waiting for me, wearing his suit. Mrs Tsang was there too, in a dressing gown. I managed to give her an encouraging nod when Kangri was examining the scroll.
‘Wonderful, Mr Hardy. Undamaged. Wonderful. Thank you. A bonus, most certainly.’
I said a bonus would be nice and dragged out the box I’d opened. I handed him one of the books.
‘My God,’ he said, ‘Appalling. Who…?’
I shook my head. ‘Sources, Dr Kangri. Don’t ask.’ I gave him the plates and other stuff.
‘The boil is lanced, then?’ he said.
‘Yeah.’ I got out the other boxes and stacked them by a wall.
‘I will get you a cheque.’ He rushed off towards the house.
Mrs Tsang wrapped her elaborately embroidered dressing gown tightly around her and looked up at me.
‘Henry?’
I nodded. ‘He’s okay, untouched. But he’s in big trouble with his partners. I think he’ll be going away for a while.’
Kangri came back and handed me a cheque. He was almost bubbling and he forgot himself enough to put his arm around Mrs Tsang as he spoke to her.
‘We will burn this rubbish, eh, Mrs Tsang?’
‘Yes,’ she said.
I said goodnight and backed out leaving them standing close together, caught in my headlights. A gilt dragon coiled around Mrs Tsang’s slim body.
Dr Kangri’s bonus was pretty quickly spent and when his book came out it was in a limited edition and cost a thousand bucks a copy. But I’ve still got the uncaptioned copy of Tibetan Love Positions — it’s one of my more stimulating souvenirs.
‹‹Contents››
The Mae West Scam
Mr Joseph Thackeray was a literary agent. That made both of us agents, me being a private enquiry ditto. The first thing Mr Thackeray did after informing me of his profession and seating his narrow frame in one of the sagging chairs in my office, was ask me how much I charged.
‘One hundred and twenty-five dollars a day plus expenses.’ I said. ‘How about you?’
He looked annoyed. ‘Ten per cent of my client’s earnings.’
‘Handy if you’ve got David Williamson-have you?’
He looked still more annoyed. ‘No, but I’ve got Carla Cummings, at least for now. Are you always this flippant, Mr Hardy?’
‘Yeah, always, don’t tell me you take agenting seriously?’
His prim little mouth pursed up, and he brushed wispy hair back from his high forehead. The narrow shoulders and the silly bow tie made him look like a lightweight but he had an incongruously deep and forceful voice. I’ve got better shoulders and don’t wear bow ties; my voice isn’t much but then, I do most of my agenting on the street rather than on the phone.
‘I certainly do,’ the strong voice from the weak face said. ‘I consider myself a facilitator of literature.’
‘At ten per cent.’
He drew in a deep breath, which made his Adam’s apply move in his scrawny neck but made his voice more resonant. ‘I’ll persist because I’m told you’re good at this sort of thing. Talented, someone said; although I can’t think how the word applies.’
‘Let’s hope you will see when we’re through. You’ve got a problem with Carla Cummings?’
‘I can see you listen when you’re being spoken to, that’s good. Yes, a problem.’
It was the first approving word he’d spoken; we were getting along famously already. I leaned back in my sagging chair and let him tell it.
Carla Cummings was a country girl, born in Dubbo, who’d worked as a nurse and written thirty novels before her thirty-first was published. She was only thirty herself at the time, so she’d averaged better than three unpublished novels per year for ten years. The Crying Gulls made it all worthwhile. The book was a three- generation family saga set on the north coast of New South Wales. According to Cummings’s own account in the many interviews she gave after the paperback rights were sold for two million dollars, she’d constructed the book to make it ideal for abridgement, extraction and serialisation. It was abridged, extracted and serialised everywhere, and the hard cover edition sold out and was reprinted three times. It was a million dollar movie property, and heartily loathed by every reviewer who touched it.
‘She hasn’t written a word since she finished Gulls,’ Thackeray said.
‘Can’t see what I can do about writer’s block.’
‘That’s only part of the problem. She’s drinking, she’s neurotic, gambling, falling out with everyone.’
‘With you?’
‘Especially with me.’
‘You’re worried about your ten per cent.’
He sighed. ‘I have to assume that this aggression, this… boorishness is your stock in trade. Yes, I’m concerned about my income and my reputation both-I assume you’re concerned about yours?’
‘Yeah. Fair enough, Mr Thackeray, didn’t mean to ride you. What’s troubling her? Not money? Not the bad reviews?’
He laughed a laugh that would have sounded good over the phone, rich and amused. ‘I doubt if she read them. She was such a carefree creature-scatterbrained you’d have said. She was the easiest of clients.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Oh, she’d talk to anyone, wouldn’t haggle about every little detail-not like some of them.’
The few writers I knew were drunks and fragile egotists; it was refreshing to hear about a carefree one.
‘Is she a good writer?’ I asked.
Thackeray plucked at his bow tie and looked past me through the dusty window out over rooftops to a dull, leaden sky. He shook his head.
‘Terrible,’ he said.
We did agenting things like writing and accepting cheques, and I undertook to follow Miss Cummings around for a while and check on her friends and see if I could find out what was on her mind and stopping her from writing another blockbuster.
Thackeray had given me Cummings’s schedule for the next couple of days and I planned to pick her up that night after a book launching in a city bookshop. The first thing I did after depositing the agent’s cheque was go to my favourite bookshop in Glebe Point Road for a copy of The Crying Gulls. I usually buy my second-hand Penguins and remaindered sports books there, so the proprietor gave me an odd look when I handed over six bucks for something that felt like a house brick.
‘You’ll hate it,’ he said. ‘It’s slop.’
‘I’ll use it to work on my pecs then.’ I needed both hands to carry the book and I waved aside the five cents changed he offered. ‘Give it to a poet,’ I said.
The book’s cover featured a sunburnt country scene with three figures standing on something reminiscent of Ayers Rock. The figure in the middle was a woman who looked like Olivia Newton-John dressed to boogy; the man
