The Great Pursuit

'He said he was a bleeder,' she told the chief surgeon who could see that already, 'he said he had to have a transfusion. I didn't want to do it and he said he didn't want one and she told him not to and he got at the blood bank and then he passed out and then they put him on resuscitation and '

'Put her on sedation,' shouted the surgeon as the nurse was dragged out still screaming. On the operating table Piper was bald. In a desperate attempt to find the site of the wound his hair had been clipped.

'So where the fuck's the haemorrhage?' said the surgeon, shining a light down Piper's left ear in the hope of finding some source for this terrible loss of blood. By the time Piper revived they were none the wiser. The scratch on his hand had been cleansed and covered with a Band-Aid and through a needle in his right wrist he was getting the transfusion he had dreaded. Finally they cut off the supply and Piper got off the table.

'You've had a lucky escape,' said the surgeon. 'I don't know what you're suffering from but you want to take it easy for a while. Maybe the Mayo could come up with an answer. We sure as hell can't.'

Piper wobbled out into the corridor bald as a coot. Sonia burst into tears.

'Oh my God what have they done to you, my darling?' she wailed. MacMordie studied Piper's bald head thoughtfully.

'That doesn't look so good,' he said finally and went into the theatre. 'We've got ourselves a problem,' he told the surgeon.

'No need to tell me. Diagnostically I wouldn't know.'

'Yeah,' said MacMordie, 'it's like that. Now what he needs is bandages round his head. I mean he's famous and there's all those TV guys out there and he's going to come out looking like Kojak and he's an author. That isn't going to improve his image.'

'His image is your problem,' said the surgeon, 'mine just happens to be his illness.'

'You cut his hair all off,' said MacMordie. 'Now how about a whole heap of bandages? Like right across his face and all. This guy needs his anonymity till his hair grows back.'

'No way,' said the surgeon, true to his medical principles.

'A thousand dollars,' said MacMordie and went to fetch Piper. He came reluctantly and clutching Sonia's arm pathetically. By the time he emerged and went outside with Sonia on one side and a nurse on the other only two frightened eyes and his nostrils were visible.

'Mr Piper has nothing to say,' said MacMordie quite unnecessarily. Several million viewers could see that. Piper's bandaged face had no mouth. For them he could have been the invisible man. The cameras zoomed in for close-ups and MacMordie spoke.

'Mr Piper has authorized me to say that he had no idea his great novel Pause O Men for the Virgin would arouse the degree of public controversy that has marked the start of his lecture tour of this country...'

'His what?' demanded a reporter.

'Mr Piper is Britain's greatest novelist. His novel Pause O Men for the Virgin published by Hutchmeyer Press and available at seven dollars ninety '

'You mean his novel caused all this?' said an interviewer.

MacMordie nodded. 'Pause O Men for the Virgin is the most controversial novel of this century. Read it and see what has caused this terrible sacrifice on Mr Piper's part...'

Beside him Piper swayed groggily and had to be helped down the steps to the waiting car.

'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 plane landed he was in a state of acute anxiety and it took all Sonia's coaxing to get him down the steps and into the waiting car. Presently they were speeding through pine forests towards the man whom Frensic in an unguarded moment had spoken of as the Al Capone of the publishing world.

'Now you leave all the talking to me,' said Sonia, 'and just remember that you're a shy introverted author. Modesty is the line to take.'

The car turned down a drive towards a house that had proclaimed itself by the gate as 'The Hutchmeyer Residence'.

'No one can call that modest,' said Piper staring out at the house. It stood in fifty acres of park and garden, birch and pine, an ornate shingle-style monument to the romantic eclecticism of the late nineteenth century as embodied in wood by Peabody and Stearns, Architects. Sprouting towers, dormer windows, turrets with dovecotes, piazzas with oval windows cut in their latticework, convoluted chimneys and angled balconies, the Residence was awe-inspiring. They drove under a porte-cochere into a courtyard already crammed with cars and got out. A moment later the enormous front door opened and a large red-faced man bounded down the steps.