“Most thoughtful of you.”
“You’re in luck,” he said, staring at his notes. “The only taxi missing that morning was Car 1517. Its last-known fare was a pickup from Sargasso Plaza, opposite the entrance to Fan Fiction.”
“On Vanity Island?”
“Right. The driver departed Sargasso Plaza bound for the Ungenred Zone at 0823, and that was the last we heard.”
“You didn’t think about reporting it?”
“We usually wait a week. Besides, search parties are expensive.”
“Do we have a passenger name?”
“Tuesday Laste.”
Sprockett and I looked at each other. We seemed finally to be getting somewhere.
“And the name of the driver?”
“Gatsby.”
“The Great Gatsby drives taxis in his spare time?”
“No, his younger and less handsome and intelligent brother—the Mediocre Gatsby. He lives in Parody Valley over in Vanity. Here’s his address.”
We thanked him and left the office.
“Tuesday Laste?” repeated Sprockett as we hailed a cab.
“Almost certainly Thursday.”
Sprockett’s eyebrow pointer switched from “Puzzled” to “Bingo,” paused for a moment and then switched to “Worried.”
“Problems?” I asked as we climbed into the cab.
“In the shape of a Buick,” replied Sprockett, indicating a Roadmaster that had just pulled up outside the TransGenre Taxi office. It was the Men in Plaid, and they were following the same trail we were. I leaned forward.
“Vanity Island,” I said to the driver, “a
nd step on it.”
Vanity wasn’t a place that conventionally published people liked to visit, as it was a bizarre mixture of the best and worst prose, where iambic pentameters of exceptional beauty rubbed shoulders with dialogue so spectacularly poor it could make one’s ears bleed. We skimmed low across the narrow straits that separated Vanity from the mainland and circled the craggy island, past sprawling shantytowns of abandoned novellas, half-described castles and ragged descriptions of variable quality before coming to land in a small square just outside Parody Valley.
“You can wait for us,” I said to the cabbie, who gave me a sarcastic, “Yeah, right,” and left almost immediately, which made me regret I’d paid up front and tipped him.
We took a left turn into Cold Comfort Boulevard and made our way past unpublished pastiches and parodies of famous novels that were only on Vanity at all due to their being just within the law. If they had used the same character names from the parodied novel, they were removed to the copyright-tolerance haven of Fan Fiction. This was situated on a smaller island close by and joined to Vanity by a stone arched bridge a half mile long, and guarded by a game show host.
“How long before the Men in Plaid follow us here?” asked Sprockett.
“Five or ten minutes,” I replied, and we quickened our pace.
Given that parodies—even unpublished ones—have a shelf life governed by the currency of the novel that is being parodied, the small subgenre was dominated by that year’s favorites. We walked on, and once past the still-popular Tolkien pastiches we were in the unread Parody hinterland, based on books either out of print themselves or so far off the zeitgeist radar that they had little or no meaning. We took a left turn by When Nine Bells Toll; Hello, My Lovely and I, Robert before finding the book we were looking for: an outrageously unfunny Fitzgerald parody entitled The Diamond as Big as the South Mimms Travelodge.
Mediocre’s apartment was above a set of garages. There was a brand-new taxi parked in an empty bay beneath, and we carefully climbed the rickety stairs. I knocked on the screen door, and after a few moments a woman of slovenly demeanor stood on the threshold gnawing a chicken drumstick. She wore heavy eyeliner that had run, and she looked as though she’d just had a fight with a hairbrush—and lost.
“Yes?” she asked in a lazy manner. “Can I help?”
I flashed Thursday’s badge. “Thursday Next,” I announced, “and this is my butler, Sprockett. Your name is . . . ?”