Jake Arnott: The House of Rumour

‘Don’t worry, Larry. Just quoting W.B. Yeats at you.’

‘Magic City’ was the cover story with a ruined Statue of Liberty rising out of a post-apocalyptic wilderness, a lithe huntress in furs standing in the foreground and a long-haired caveman crouching before her.

‘At least Astounding runs interesting stuff,’ I said, holding it up.

‘Yeah,’ Mary-Lou agreed. ‘That’s who we should be writing for.’

It was clear to both of us that Astounding Science Fiction was by far the best and most ground-breaking of any of the pulp magazines of the time. Its new editor, John W. Campbell, had completely transformed the field, nurturing a group of exciting new writers: Isaac Asimov, A.E. van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon and especially Robert Heinlein, who lived in LA and was said to run some kind of literary circle. This was the world that we wanted to be part of.

Mary-Lou had grown tired of the LASFS Thursday meetings and would sometimes disparagingly refer to that crowd as the ‘limeade brigade’. I still attended. I had sold ‘Lightship 7 from Andromeda’ to Fantastic Tales and it looked as if I was becoming something of a regular writer for them, so I now was shown quite a lot of respect at Clifton’s Cafeteria. Mary-Lou never said as much but I got the feeling she thought it was playing safe, mixing with them, that we should really be taking more risks with our writing rather than churning out the usual stuff. And maybe thinking of her made me bold because when Robert Heinlein walked in one night I wasted little time in making a beeline for him.

Heinlein had a presence that was more than a little intimidating. Gaunt and saturnine, with swept-back hair and a pencil moustache, he looked very much like a gloomy Douglas Fairbanks Jnr. And he had seemed to come from nowhere. Having published his first story only a couple of years before, he was by then one of the brightest stars in the genre. There were all sorts of rumours about him: that he was a radical, that he had made his fortune silver prospecting, that he was into free love. I praised his latest story, ‘– And He Built a Crooked House –’ that had been in the issue of Astounding I’d picked up at the news-stand with Mary-Lou. It was about an architect who designs a four-dimensional house, a hypercube in the form of a tesseract that collapses in on itself after an earthquake into what appears to be a single cube. Those trapped inside can still pass through the original eight rooms, all of which appear to occupy the same space, with the stairs now forming a closed loop so that on reaching what they think is the top storey, the people find themselves back on the ground floor. At one point they look down a hallway to observe their own backs. I seem to remember that I said it was like a prose version of an M.C. Escher woodcut and that Heinlein smiled and nodded. What I am certain of is that, as his attention began to drift and he started to turn away, I boldly thrust out my hand and announced:

‘I’m Larry Zagorski, sir. I wrote Lords of the Black Sun .’

Heinlein laughed and clasped my palm in a firm grip. He frowned at me.

‘Yeah?’ He shook my hand the way a dog shakes a rabbit. ‘I saw the story. In Fabulous , wasn’t it? Made the fascists seem a bit glamorous, didn’t you?’

‘That was the illustrator’s fault,’ I protested.

He laughed again.

‘Only kidding with you. I liked it. But we got to be careful sometimes, haven’t we? You know, being of the devil’s party without knowing it.’

He tapped his nose. I nodded sagely but I had no idea what he meant.

‘Look, kid,’ he went on. ‘We have a little soirée every now and then at my place. Call it the Mañana Literary Society. Why don’t you come along?’

‘Can I bring someone?’

‘Your girl?’

‘Yes,’ I blurted, then thought better of it. ‘I mean, no, I mean, well… she’s another writer. A good one.’

Heinlein laughed once more and wrote out his address for me. He lived with his wife Leslyn in Laurel Canyon, on Lookout Mountain Avenue, a side road that twists up into the Hollywood Hills. And when I took Mary-Lou with me to our first meeting with the Mañana Literary Society, I felt that a whole new bright world was opening up for the both of us. It was the closest thing to a salon that science fiction had at that time and we were a part of it. Most of all I hoped it would mean that Mary-Lou would take me seriously and that I would be able to find the courage finally to say how I really felt about her. Oh yes, I felt really pleased with myself at the start of that evening. I thought I was so clever. But I was a fool, a complete fool.

Fleming watched Popov walk through the lobby of the Hotel Palacio with a sense of possession, that odd feeling of intimacy he derived from having seen a man’s file. It was a curiously inert experience, presenting an advantage while revealing a weakness of his own. Each person is a dossier, he mused. A bundle of half-known facts, misleading reports, document extracts, fragments. Dossier, from the old French for back, a loose binding, bracing the chaos of information into some sort of recognisable posture. Like the book with its spine holding up an unlikely story. Fleming had concluded long ago that real lives exist only in secret. But it had become his job to form impressions, to summarise. He had acquired a talent for the brief appraisal.

So he noted the awkward line on the buttoned front of Popov’s dinner jacket and took a moment to consider what might explain the square bulge below the breast pocket. The outline of an automatic pistol, perhaps? Fleming smiled, aware that he had become known for the brash style of his memoranda. But no, he decided, it wasn’t a gun that gave the extra weight to this man’s left-hand side. No, he thought, his smile becoming a grin. It was a big, fat slab of money, the eighty thousand dollars that rightly belonged to British Intelligence.

The ornamental gardens that surrounded the Palacio were veined with narrow gravel pathways that forked here and there, making a discreet pursuit almost impossible. Fleming was acting not so much on initiative as on compulsion, since shadowing Popov had nothing to do with his mission in Portugal. That had already been completed earlier that day with the meeting at the Café Chiado in Lisbon. Operation Mistletoe: an audacious operation to catch a top Nazi. This hastily improvised tail-job was a mere sideshow, but he found the prospect of it just as exciting as the astonishing information he had received that afternoon. For some it was the game, but for Fleming it was always the story. And here was a good one, he felt sure of it. Inspiration, yes, that’s what drove him to follow this man. Something he might use one day.

The archives of Room 39 had furnished the sparse details of the individual he now studied at close hand: Dusko Popov, Yugoslav émigré, code-named ‘Tricycle’, posing as a spy for the Nazi Abwehr while working for the British. A lethal double act. The man was a light-footed adventurer; the one who watched him was forever weighed down by ideas. Popov was all that Fleming aspired to and sometimes pretended to be: handsome, charming, something of a playboy, whose designation Tricycle was said to refer to his fondness for the ménage à trois . Fleming stalked him in jealous fascination.

He knew that the eighty thousand dollars were funds from the Abwehr to pay for an entirely fake spy network that Popov was running in London. He was due to hand it over to an MI6 agent the following day and had obviously decided it was better kept on his person than in the hotel safe. Unless Popov had had a better idea, such as a taxi into Lisbon and then a flight somewhere the next day. The Pan American flying boat was departing for Rio de Janeiro from Cabo Ruiva dock tomorrow morning. Popov would have enough money to disappear and live his cherished high life without any of the risks. Was that the story? A capricious choice that could change a whole lifetime. The dry tracks in the grounds of the Palacio fanned out, each path a possibility.