The Adventures of Gideon Cairn

I expected that any friend of Bernie would be another Bernie, if two such existed in the same hemisphere. I didn't expect Michael. He was small and bespectacled and younger than I. The age-factor troubled me. Would my co-writers get younger and younger? Was I over the hill at 26? Would I become one of those bossy hags that bully new employees and sip gin out of office paper cups in the afternoon? I was the senior writer now, and that scared me. I took those fears out on Michael, but he didn't seem to mind. He was, he is, a very nice person. He is also very bright -- in a bizarre, macabre, outré, grand-guignol way—a child of Mary Shelley out of Fu Manchu. He has read every pulp magazine, seen every horror movie, heard every mystery program on radio, stored his mind with enough historical evils to justify an exorcism. Brain surgery on Michael would reveal a steamy fen full of smiling and malignant toads. All these horrors co-existed with the hopeful innocence of Oliver Twist before Fagin. Within a week I was feeling protective. I wasn't sure what Michael felt toward me, but I knew that I could keep things platonic. Michael wasn't a threat. I was between men and I wanted to stay there. We had long lunches and dinners at Horn & Hardart's, where I sucked his mind like a brain-dead succuba drinking fresh inspiration. He thought that we should introduce a serial format, two or three shows with one story—what appeared to be a supernatural murder that Cairn could solve in rational terms. All that summer we lived in Michael's world, somewhere east of Transylvania, bordered by the dark bazaars of Istanbul and Gideon Cairn's library on Beekman Place. Milton said that we were better off in Michael's world. He was worried about what was going on in the real Europe. The Germans were threatening Czechoslovakia. He thought there would be war in Europe by the end of the summer.