“Norman Mailer.”
“Couldn’t remember the alphabet,” said the voice beneath the shawl.
“Gertrude Stein,” I said.
“Suffered from undescended testicles,” said the voice.
“My God,” I gasped.
I stepped back. I stared at the covered cage. I blinked at Shelley Capon.
“Do you really know what you have here, Capon?”
“A gold mine, dear Raimundo!” he crowed.
“A mint!” I corrected.
“Endless opportunities for blackmail!”
“Causes for murder!” I added.
“Think!” Shelley snorted into his drink. “Think what Mailer’s publishers alone would pay to shut this bird up!”
I spoke to the cage:
“F. Scott Fitzgerald.”
Silence.
“Try ‘Scottie,’ ” said Shelley.
“Ah,” said the voice inside the cage. “Good left jab but couldn’t follow through. Nice contender, but—”
“Faulkner,” I said.
“Batting average fair, strictly a singles hitter.”
“Steinbeck!”
“Finished last at end of season.”
“Ezra Pound!”
“Traded off to the minor leagues in 1932. ”
“I think … I need … one of those drinks.” Someone put a drink in my hand. I gulped it and nodded. I shut my eyes and felt the world give one turn, then opened my eyes to look at Shelley Capon, the classic son of a bitch of all time.
“There is something even more fantastic,” he said. “You’ve heard only the first half.”
“’You’re lying,” I said. “What could there be?”
He dimpled at me—in all the world, only Shelley Capon can dimple at you in a completely evil way. “It was like this,” he said. “You remember that Papa had trouble actually getting his stuff down on paper in those last years while he lived here? Well, he’d planned another novel after Islands in the Stream, but somehow it just never seemed to get written.
“Oh, he had it in his mind, all right—the story was there and lots of people heard him mention it—but he just couldn’t seem to write it. So he would go to the Cuba Libre and drink many drinks and have long conversations with the parrot. Raimundo, what Papa was telling El Córdoba all through those long drinking nights was the story of his last book. And, in the course of time, the bird has memorized it.”
“His very last book!” I said. “The final Hemingway novel of all time! Never written but recorded in the brain of a parrot! Holy Jesus!”
Shelley was nodding at me with the smile of a depraved cherub.
“How much you want for this bird?”
“Dear, dear Raimundo.” Shelley Capon stirred his drink with his pinkie. “What makes you think the creature is for sale?”
“You sold your mother once, then stole her back and sold her again under another name. Come off it, Shelley. You’re onto something big.” I brooded over the shawled cage. “How many telegrams have you sent out in the last four or five hours?”
“Really! You horrify me!”
“How many long-distance phone calls, reverse charges, have you made since breakfast?”
Shelley Capon mourned a great sigh and pulled a crumpled telegram duplicate from his velveteen pocket. I took it and read:
FRIENDS OF PAPA MEETING HAVANA TO REMINISCE OVER BIRD AND BOTTLE. WIRE BID OR BRING CHECKBOOKS AND OPEN MINDS. FIRST COME FIRST SERVED. ALL WHITE MEAT BUT CAVIAR PRICES. INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATION, BOOK, MAGAZINE, TV, FILM RIGHTS AVAILABLE. LOVE. SHELLEY YOU-KNOW-WHO.
My God again, I thought, and let the telegram fall to the floor as Shelley handed me a list of names the telegram had been sent to:
Time. Life. Newsweek. Scribner’s. Simon & Schuster. The New York Times. The Christian Science Monitor. The Times of London. Le Monde. Paris-Match. One of the Rockefellers. Some of the Kennedys. CBS. NBC. MGM. Warner Bros. 20th Century-Fox. And on and on and on. The list was as long as my deepening melancholy.
Shelley Capon tossed an armful of answering telegrams onto the table near the cage. I leafed through them quickly.
Everyone, but everyone, was in the air, right now. Jets were streaming in from all over the world. In another two hours, four, six at the most, Cuba would be swarming with agents, publishers, fools, and plain damn fools, plus counterespionage kidnapers and blonde starlets who hoped to be in front-page photographs with the bird on their shoulders.
I figured I had maybe a good half-hour left in which to do something, I didn’t know what.
Shelley nudged my arm. “Who sent you, dear boy? You are the very first, you know. Make a fine bid and you’re in free, maybe. I must consider other offers, of course. But it might get thick and nasty here. I begin to panic at what I’ve done. I may wish to sell cheap and flee. Because, well, think, there’s the problem of getting this bird out of the country, yes? And, simultaneously, Castro might declare the parrot a national monument or work of art, or, oh, hell, Raimundo, who did send you?”
“Someone, but now no one,” I said, brooding. “I came on behalf of someone else. I’ll go away on my own. From now on, anyway, it’s just me and the bird. I’ve read Papa all my life. Now I know I came just because I had to.”
“My God, an altruist!”
“Sony to offend you, Shelley.”
The phone rang. Shelley got it. He chatted happily for a moment, told someone to wait downstairs, hung up, and cocked an eyebrow at me: “NBC is in the lobby. They want an hour’s taped interview with El Córdoba there. They’re talking six figures.”
My shoulders slumped. The phone rang. This time I picked it up, to my own surprise. Shelley cried out. But I said, “Hello. Yes?”
“Señor,” said a man’s voice. “There is a Señor’ Hobwell here from Time, he says, magazine.” I could see the parrot’s face on next week’s cover, with six follow-up pages of text.
“Tell him to wait.” I hung up.
“Newsweek?” guessed Shelley.
“The other one,” I said.
“The snow was fine up in the shadow of the hills,” said the voice inside the cage under the shawl.
“Shut up,” I said quietly, wearily. “Oh, shut up, damn you.”
Shadows appeared in the doorway behind us. Shelley Capon’s friends were beginning to assemble and wander into the room. They gathered and I began to tremble and sweat.
For some reason, I began to rise to my feet. My body was going to do something, I didn’t know what. I watched my hands. Suddenly, the right hand reached out. It knocked the cage over, snapped the wire-frame door wide, and darted in to seize the parrot.
“No!”
There was a great gasping roar, as if a single thunderous wave had come in on a shore. Everyone in the room seemed knocked in the stomach by my action. Everyone exhaled, took a step, began to yell, but by then I had the parrot out. I had it by the throat.
“No! No!” Shelley jumped at me. I kicked him in the shins. He sat down, screaming.
“Don’t