THE SEVENTY-SECOND PAGE

The folk at the publishing house seemed unaware that the return addresses were genuine, the homes of staff members with the names changed to those of characters in the novels of Henry James. It was safe because they wouldn’t have known a Basil Ransom from a Felix Young, unless they had done time with the movies of Merchant and Ivory.

(It should be known that I do have spies at the publishing house; they don’t know it, but they often provide information valuable to me.)

Sending out fourth-rate carcasses interested me less after I discovered that all manuscripts were being opened by people in the mailroom. A vast backlog of unopened manuscripts had apparently accumulated in the hallways when the lily-livered assistants neglected to open parcels, even those represented by some rather insistent and impatient agents. I thought one of my finer touches in the R.O.T.W.C was the employment of an old, purloined William Morris Agency label for another particularly favored assistant’s package (a foetal deer.) Manuscripts without agents could just sit there and rot, which is precisely what they did until the corporate decision was made to employ the mailroom people for the new job.