“Any banks nearby?”
“Plenty downtown,” said Poe. “But when we return to 1981, good luck spending currency issued by the Savings Institute of Butchers’ and Drovers.”
Stark’s expression changed to that of a man grappling with the concept of attempting to pay a four-star hotel bill with a sack of gold coins.
Poe said, “Listen to the literary agent instruct the writers.”
“The publishing business is changing,” the agent was saying. He tugged his watch chain, checked the time, and shoved his thumbs in his vest pockets. “No more little books. No more medium-size books.”
Emerson and Thoreau and Hawthorne and Melville started snickering. They exchanged superior looks. Then all talked at once.
“Absurd!”
“A good book’s a good book.”
“Who cares if it’s big or little?”
“Long, short, you’re done when the story’s done.”
Stark nodded. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville seemed to have a point.
A gleaming lacquered coach drawn by a matched team of four black horses came down the street. The agent raised his arm in a languid wave, and the coach stopped. A liveried footman jumped down and held the door for him. “Change,” he called as he climbed inside. “Change or disappear.”
“We’ve heard enough,” said Poe. He led Stark back through the stone alley and up the ladder and out of the rock.
Stark squinted at the Hudson a while, digesting events. Tugboats and barges and heating-oil tankers headed to Albany were all signs of here and now. “Your buddies were right,” he said. “A good book’s a good book.”
“No,” said Poe. “Our agent was right. Look at Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne. Dead as doornails. Melville went sailing. Took him forty years to get Moby-Dick noticed. Nobody would touch Billy Budd with a barge pole until the poor man was a generation in his grave.”
Stark nodded. Put that way, Edgar Allan Poe had a point. “What about you?” he asked.
Poe hesitated a long moment before he answered. “I was terrified of disappearing.”
“So, you changed.”
“I wrote a big book—still a mystery at heart, but with thriller elements, and sort of multigenerational, almost a saga. My agent called it a saga and took me to lunch. Then he informed me he could not sell my big book under my little-books name.”
“What’s a little-books name?” Stark asked.
“I’d written some gothics. But gothics, like all genres, come and go, nice and steady for a while, not much money—four grand and a promise of lead book of the month sometime down the road—then your month finally comes along just in time for bodice rippers or sci-fi fantasies to knock gothics for a loop. Anyhow, my agent told me to use the pen name D’arcy de Chambord. The publisher who bought the mystery saga asked me to shift into big family sagas. D’arcy de Chambord cleaned up. Sold one to the movies, which paid for a house with a swimming pool in Connecticut.”
“Just there on weekends?” Stark, who liked empty houses, asked.
“A fellow comes by to feed the wolf hounds.”
“Well … if you’re making so much money writing sagas, what are you doing these E. P. Allan short stories for?”
“I’m a writer. I like short stories.… My agent hates them. My book publishers hate them. So, I write them secretly as E. P. Allan.”
“Which means, you don’t have to pay your agent’s commission?” Stark, whose mind ran along such lines, remarked.
Poe took offense. “First of all, the commission on forty-nine dollars a story isn’t a hell of a lot of money. Second of all, as soon as I started making big bucks with the sagas, my agent raised his commission to fifteen percent.”
Stark nodded admiringly.
Poe said, “The short stories feature the same character. A detective named Block. I figure, when I publish about eighty of them, E. P. Allan will start to get a following. Maybe even an offer for a full-length paperback original. But at the moment, they’re just nice little classy stories that are fun to write.”
“And thanks to your family sagas, you can afford to write for fun,” said Stark.
“I wish that were so. Unfortunately, family sagas have gone out of style again. My agent couldn’t give away the last one. If I don’t come up with some new kind of big book, I’ll go broke.”
“You can always sell the Connecticut house.”
“Mortgaged to the hilt. I really need another big book deal.”
“I know the feeling,” said Stark. “I really need another big heist. You know that alley we took to Greenwich Village? Where else does it go?”
“Funny you should ask,” said Poe.
This time when they went down the rickety ladder, Stark reached up and pulled the door over the hole. “So we don’t get interrupted.”