Edward began to chortle at the sublimeness of it all.
The same helpful employee who had nearly shooed away dear Pullman now made a little show of producing News from Nowhere as a magician might a bouquet — freshly extracted from a Collected Works, which sat forgotten in the back bindery. Mr. Tabori took the volume and, with a single penetrating glance, encouraged her to leave. She did straightaway.
“I meant of course that we didn’t have the volume available of itself. This is Longmans, Green; it must be sold in toto. It is seventy-five hundred.”
“May I?” asked Edward.
Mr. Tabori handed him the volume; the cousin riffled its pages before settling on a passage from the end:
“Inexpressibly shocked, I hurried past him and hastened along the road that led to the river and the lower end of the village; but suddenly I saw as it were a black cloud rolling along to meet me, like a nightmare of my childish days; and for a while I was conscious of nothing else than being in the dark, and whether I was walking, or sitting, or lying down, I could not tell. I lay in my bed in my house at dingy Hammersmith thinking about it all—”
As he listened, Tull seemed to hear the voice of his father, saw him somewhere in the world agonized by myriad demons, and felt rudely violated — as he had that afternoon with his cousins in the bedroom of La Colonne. He seized the book, plunking it back into the hands of a startled Mr. Tabori while Lucy diplomatically intervened.
“Emerson, I’m a writer myself — of the mystery genre. But I was wondering: do you have the Harry Potters? The original ones, from England?—”
“That’s it!” shouted Mr. Tabori, slapping his thigh. “Dowling! — ”
“Who?”
“The ‘funny name’—you made me think of it because of J. K. Rowling.”
“Made you think of …”
“The detective—the one who reimbursed us! The detective your grandfather hired. His name was Samson Dowling!”
CHAPTER 20. Inventories
Let us take a breath.
There was the introduction, pages ago, of a small detail which, in the unlikely event it has entered anyone’s mind since, may have led the reader to imagine the chronicler of this tale to be underhanded. (It would not be the first time he was wrongly accused.) A train of thought, heavily freighted, was set upon a track, then without fanfare derailed.
Inspired by the unfurling of Will’m’s “Strawberry Thief,” the baker Gilles spontaneously shared the story of his visit to a Gallic feast with his then-fiancée — something having to do with illicit songbirds and subterranean gourmands. The divertissement had been summoned from the depths to quell the pastrymaker’s nervousness around his unusual part-time employee, and he ran through it with a flourish before being heckled by the irritated giant. Just as well — Gilles had shot his anecdotal wad and would have been at a loss to continue.
Mr. Mott could not have known the strange, epic feelings he aroused in his burly listener. Right about the time he’d brought his tale around to the posh neighborhood of Marlene Dietrich and the opium eater at the door of the ancient wine cellar, Will’m found himself mentally elsewhere: twenty kilometers outside Paris to be exact, stealthily traversing a golf course during a drizzle. He saw his feet (and those of a woman, her face indistinct, gamely trailing after) step over a low barbed-wire fence, through bower and arborescent meadow. They walked awhile, then froze: in the distance stood a breathtaking apparition — a broken column made of stone. But this derelict fantasia had windows and could be lived in. While the baker droned on about crispy birds and such, Will’m remembed trodding toward the tower under billowing, storm-dirtied skies, the faceless woman tugging at his sleeve with worry. He was close enough to see the darkness within and had nearly entered when a man in short sleeves with a Gauloise stuck to his lower lip, caricature of a Frenchman, appeared on a tractor. He warned them against trespassing; so they never got to go inside.
At that very moment of recollection, an incensed Will’m resurfaced in time to cut Gilles off about his damn millet-gorged birds, barking (the perspicacious reader may recall), “That is the Frankish way, isn’t it? Murder a thrush behind veils of civility! Truth be told, the French are a dishonorable and troublously shoddy race.”
And so the baker’s history crashed to a halt.†
Such embroidery is mere preamble to the aforementioned vexation: to wit, the baker’s remorse over what he implied was the jilting of the “long-lost” bride-to-be (not Lani, by a long shot) who attended the fabled fête des gourmands. A shadow fell over him at chapter’s end — did the author clumsily mean it to be Trinnie’s? — as he wistfully reflected upon his double life. Amends, he said, were due! The reader of these pages knows better now, of that we are certain; still, if way back when, the very same but for a moment believed — if it is feasible the reader could have actually, however fleetingly, believed that the baker Gilles Mott (whose name alone too coarsely hints at things “Toulousian”), at such an early stage, was plausibly central to our tale — and, even more implausibly, if one could believe that he is still — well, then it is understandable how that reader may now turn his nose up at this red herring and feel the whole gambit to be unworthy of an author who appeared to pride himself on being sensibly meticulous; or that it was at least improvident of the latter to dredge it up here, for it may only serve to illuminate his overreaching expository failures. If such is the case — if the reader is of that opinion — then there is nothing to be done. Suffice to say Gilles Mott does have reason to suffer, and reason to believe he has caused great suffering of another. He will make amends. But this is not the time or place.†
Let teller and listener thus reconciled, regroup — and dust themselves off to remount. That’s what this chapter’s about. The trail is winding, the pace leisurely; let the loping, mulish narrative carry one along.
During the Pullmanic gala’s froth of fireworks, across the hill on Stradella, in surrey-fringed conversation, Edward Trotter, that wisest of boys, touched upon the extracurricular activities of his parents, pictorially pornographic and otherwise. He alluded to private prisons and Dead Baby Societies, but his blithe monologue went unheard; Tull’s concerns over the mysterious monogrammed letter took precedence. We have already looked into that missive with some thoroughness so can spend this time enumerating recent powerful developments in the destiny of Joyce Trotter née Gilligan.
She sat at the dermatologist’s flipping through Condé Nasts, then leaned to pull two “throwaways” from the pile. The glossy 310 had a garish photo of Katrina Trotter and Ralph Mirdling at a black-tie gala, standing beside studio titan Sherry Lansing, billionaire Gary Winnick and screenwriter Ron Bass. (All looked amiable except for the wincing Mr. M.) Joyce then opened the Courier to find a photo of her husband and Marcie Millard in white hardhats standing with shovels at the fence surrounding his former grade school. That would have had to have been staged, she thought; not even Dodd’s money made things happen that fast.