The dispatch clerk was a small, deeply harassed individual with the look of someone who had unwisely conditioned his hair and then slept on it wet.
“No refunds!” he said as soon as we entered.
“I’m not after a refund.”
“You wouldn’t get one if you were. What can I do for you?”
“We’re looking for a missing taxi. Took a fare from Vanity early yesterday morning.”
The dispatch clerk was unfazed. “I’m afraid to say that company policy is quite strict on this matter, madam. You’ll need a Jurisfiction warrant—”
“How’s this?” I asked, slapping Thursday’s shield on the counter.
The dispatch clerk stared at the badge for a moment, then picked up a clipboard from under the counter and started to flick through the pages. There were a lot of them.
“You’re fortunate we still have them,” he said. “We file with Captain Phantastic in an hour.”
He searched though them, chatting as he did so.
“We lose a couple of taxis every day to erasure, wastage, accidental reabsorption or simply to being used in books. For obvious reasons we’re keen to hide the actual number of accidents for fear of frightening people from our cabs.”
“Most thoughtful of you.”
“You’re in luck,” he said, staring at his notes. “The only taxi missing that morning was Car 1517. Its last-known fare was a pickup from Sargasso Plaza, opposite the entrance to Fan Fiction.”
“On Vanity Island?”
“Right. The driver departed Sargasso Plaza bound for the Ungenred Zone at 0823, and that was the last we heard.”
“You didn’t think about reporting it?”
“We usually wait a week. Besides, search parties are expensive.”
“Do we have a passenger name?”
“Tuesday Laste.”
Sprockett and I looked at each other. We seemed finally to be getting somewhere.
“And the name of the driver?”
“Gatsby.”
“The Great Gatsby drives taxis in his spare time?”
“No, his younger and less handsome and intelligent brother—the Mediocre Gatsby. He lives in Parody Valley over in Vanity. Here’s his address.”
We thanked him and left the office.
“ Tuesday Laste?” repeated Sprockett as we hailed a cab.
“Almost certainly Thursday.”
Sprockett’s eyebrow pointer switched from “Puzzled” to “Bingo,” paused for a moment and then switched to “Worried.”
“Problems?” I asked as we climbed into the cab.
“In the shape of a Buick,” replied Sprockett, indicating a Roadmaster that had just pulled up outside the TransGenre Taxi office. It was the Men in Plaid, and they were following the same trail we were. I leaned forward.
“Vanity Island,” I said to the driver, “and step on it.”
Vanity wasn’t a place that conventionally published people liked to visit, as it was a bizarre mixture of the best and worst prose, where iambic pentameters of exceptional beauty rubbed shoulders with dialogue so spectacularly poor it could make one’s ears bleed. We skimmed low across the narrow straits that separated Vanity from the mainland and circled the craggy island, past sprawling shantytowns of abandoned novellas, half-described castles and ragged descriptions of variable quality before coming to land in a small square just outside Parody Valley.
“You can wait for us,” I said to the cabbie, who gave me a sarcastic, “Yeah, right,” and left almost immediately, which made me regret I’d paid up front and tipped him.
We took a left turn into Cold Comfort Boulevard and made our way past unpublished pastiches and parodies of famous novels that were only on Vanity at all due to their being just within the law. If they had used the same character names from the parodied novel, they were removed to the copyright-tolerance haven of Fan Fiction. This was situated on a smaller island close by and joined to Vanity by a stone arched bridge a half mile long, and guarded by a game show host.
“How long before the Men in Plaid follow us here?” asked Sprockett.
“Five or ten minutes,” I replied, and we quickened our pace.
Given that parodies—even unpublished ones—have a shelf life governed by the currency of the novel that is being parodied, the small subgenre was dominated by that year’s favorites. We walked on, and once past the still-popular Tolkien pastiches we were in the unread Parody hinterland, based on books either out of print themselves or so far off the zeitgeist radar that they had little or no meaning. We took a left turn by When Nine Bells Toll; Hello, My Lovely and I, Robert before finding the book we were looking for: an outrageously unfunny Fitzgerald parody entitled The Diamond as Big as the South Mimms Travelodge.
Mediocre’s apartment was above a set of garages. There was a brand-new taxi parked in an empty bay beneath, and we carefully climbed the rickety stairs. I knocked on the screen door, and after a few moments a woman of slovenly demeanor stood on the threshold gnawing a chicken drumstick. She wore heavy eyeliner that had run, and she looked as though she’d just had a fight with a hairbrush—and lost.
“Yes?” she asked in a lazy manner. “Can I help?”
I flashed Thursday’s badge. “Thursday Next,” I announced, “and this is my butler, Sprockett. Your name is . . . ?”
“Gatsby.”
This was unexpected.
“The Mediocre Gatsby?”
“No, the Loser Gatsby, the youngest of the three Gatsbys. I haven’t seen Great for a while. How did it turn out with crazy Daisy? She looked like trouble to me.”
“Not . . . terrific, as I recall.”
“Did they let Mia Farrow play her in the movie?”
“I’m not sure. Is Mediocre here?”
“I’ve not seen the miserable fart for three days,” she sniffed, picking her nose. “How did you know he was missing? I didn’t call you.”
“May we come in?”
“I guess,” said Loser Gatsby with a shrug, and we walked into the apartment. Sprawled in the front room were a half dozen men and women who looked as though life had not been kind to them. One of the women had been crying recently, and two of the men still were.
“This is our Siblings of More Famous BookWorld Personalities self-help group,” explained Loser. “That’s Sharon Eyre, the younger and wholly disreputable sister of Jane; Roger Yossarian, the draft dodger and coward; Brian Heep, who despite admonishments from his family continues to wash daily; Rupert Bond, still a virgin and can’t keep a secret; Tracy Capulet, who has slept her way round Verona twice; and Nancy Potter, who is . . . well, let’s just say she’s a term that is subject to several international trademark agreements.”
“She’s a Muggle?”
“Pretty much.”
They all nodded a greeting.
“We meet twice daily to try to iron out the feelings of low self-worth we experience, given our more famous family members. It’s quite hard, I assure you, being a nobody when an elder sister or brother is iconic for all time. Tracy Capulet was telling us what it was like living in Verona.”
“It’s ‘Juliet this, Juliet that’ all day long,” said Tracy petulantly. “Juliet’s on the balcony, Juliet’s shagging a Montague, Juliet’s pretending to be dead—blah, blah, blah. I tell you, I’m totally sick of it.”
Sprockett moved to the window and peered out. The Men in Plaid would be here soon.
“This is a matter of some urgency,” I said. “Does Mediocre have a room?”
Loser pointed to a door, and before she could explain that it was locked, Sprockett had wrenched it off its hinges.