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"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, al 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 C6rdoba 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, FTLM 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