The stranger absorbs Hershey’s withering stare like a man in his prime with nothing to fear, notwithstanding the damage that Time the Vandal has done to his face. The clawed lines, the whisky nose, the sagging pouches, the droopy eyelids. A silk handkerchief pokes up from his jacket pocket and he wears an elegant fedora, but Sodding Hell. How can the incurably elderly stand it? “And you are?”

“I’m your near future, my boy.” He swivels his once-handsome face. “Take a good, long look. What do you think?”

What I think is that tonight is the Night of the Fruitcakes. “What I think is that I’m no fan of cryptic crosswords.”

“No? I enjoy them. I am Levon Frankland.”

I take the proffered champagne flute and make an underimpressed face. “No bells are going ‘dong,’ I must confess.”

“I’m an old mucker of your father’s from another time. We were both contemporaries at the Finisterre Club in Soho.”

I maintain my underimpressed face. “I heard it finally closed down.”

“The end of the end of an era. My era. We met,” Levon Frankland tilts his glass my way, “at a party at your house in Pembridge Place in, ooh, sixty-eight, sixty-nine, around the time of the Gethsemanejazzamaroo. Amongst the various pies into which I had thrust my sticky fingers was artist management, and your father hoped that an avant-folk combo I represented would work on music for The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The plan came to nought, but I remember you, dressed up as a cowboy. You had not long mastered the art of bowel control and social intercourse was still years away, but I’ve followed your career with an avuncular interest, and read your memoir about your dad with relish. Do you know, every few months, I get it into my head to call him and arrange lunch? I clean forget he’s gone! I do so miss the old contrarian. He was sinfullyproud of you.”

“Yeah? He did a sodding good job of hiding it.”

“Anthony Hershey was an upper middle class Englishman born before the war. Fathers didn’t do emotions. The sixties loosened things up, and Tony’s films were a part of that loosening, but some of us were better than others at … deprogramming. Crispin, bury that hatchet. Hatchets don’t work on ghosts. They cannot hear you. You only end up hatcheting yourself. Believe me. I know of what I speak.”

A hand clasps my shoulder and I spin around to find Hyena Hal smiling like a giant mink. “Crispin! How was the signing?”

“I’ll live. But let me introd—” When I turn back to Levon Frankland, he’s been swept away by the party. “Yeah, the signing was fine. Despite half a million women wanting to touch the hem of some crank who writes about angels.”

“I can spot twenty publishers from here who’ll regret not snapping up Holly Sykes until their dying days. Anyway, Sir Roger and Lady Suze Brittan await the Wild Child of British Letters.”

Suddenly I’m wilting. “Must I, Hal?”

Hyena Hal’s smile dims. “The shortlist.”

Lord Roger Brittan: onetime car dealer; budget hotelier in the 1970s; founder of Brittan Computers in 1983, briefly the U.K.’s leading maker of shitty word processors; acquirer of a mobile phone license after bankrolling New Labour’s 1997 landslide, and setter-upper of the BritFone telecom network that still bears his name, after a fashion. Since 2004 he’s been known to millions via Out on Your Arse!, the business reality show where a clutch of wazzocks humiliate themselves for the “prize” of a Ј100K job in Lord Brittan’s business empire. Last year Sir Roger shocked the arts world by purchasing the U.K.’s foremost literary prize, renaming it after himself and trebling the pot to Ј150,000. Bloggers suggest that his acquisition was prompted by his latest wife, Suze Brittan, whose CV includes a stint as a soap star, face of TV’s book show The Unput-downables, and now chairperson of the Brittan Prize’s panel of uncorruptible judges. But we arrive at the canopied corner only to find Lord Roger and Lady Suze speaking with Nick Greek: “I hear what you’re saying about Slaughterhouse-Five, Lord Brittan.” Nick Greek possesses American self-assurance, Byronic good looks, and I already detest him. “But if I were forced at gunpoint to pick thetwentieth-century war novel, I’d opt for Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. It’s—”

“I knewyou’d say that!” Suze Brittan performs a little victory jig. “I adoreit. The only war novel to really‘get’ trench warfare from the German point of view.”

“I wonder, Lady Suze,” Nick Greek treads delicately, “if you’re thinking of All Quiet on the Western—”

“ WhatGerman ‘point of view’?” huffs Lord Roger Brittan. “Apart from ‘Totally bloody wrong twice in thirty bloody years’?”

Suze crooks her little finger through her black pearls. “That’s why The Naked and the Deadis so important, Rog—ordinary people on the wrong side suffer too. Right, Nick?”

“To put the shoe on the other foot is the novel’s chief strength, Lady Suze,” says the tactful American.

“Bloody shoddy product branding,” says Lord Roger. “ The Naked and the Dead? Sounds like a necrophilia manual.”

Hyena Hal steps in: “Lord Roger, Lady Suze, Nick. Introductions are hardly necessary, but before Crispin leaves—”

“Crispin Hershey!” Lady Suze holds up both hands as if I’m the sun god Ra. “Your event was totes amazeballs! As they say.”

I manage to lift the corners of my mouth. “Thank you.”

“I’m honored,” brownnoses Nick Greek. “In Brooklyn there’s, like, a whole bunch of us, we literally worship Desiccated Embryos.”

“Literally”? “Worship”? I have to shake Nick Greek’s hand, wondering if his compliment is a camouflaged insult—“Everything you’ve done since Embryosis a crock of crap”—or a prelude to a blurb request—“Dear Crispin, totally awesome to hang out with you at Hay last year, would you dash off a few words of advance praise for my new effort?” “Don’t let me interrupt,” I tell the trio, “your erudite insights about Norman Mailer.” I bowl a second googly at the young Turk: “Though for my money, the granddaddy of firsthand war accounts has to be Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage.”

“I didn’t read that,” Nick Greek admits, “because—”

“So many books, so little time, I know,” I drain the fat glass of red that elves placed in my hand, “but Crane remains unsurpassed.”

“—because Stephen Crane was born in 1871,” counters Nick Greek, “ afterthe Civil War ended. So can’t really be firsthand. But if Crispin Hershey esteems it,” he whips out an eReader, “I’ll download it right now.”

My gammon lunch repeats on me. “Nick’s novel,” Suze Brittan tells me, “is set in the Afghanistani war. Richard Cheeseman ravedabout it, and he’s interviewing Nick on my program next week.”

“Oh? I’ll be glued to the set. I heard about it, actually. What’s it called? Highway 66?”

“Route 605.”Nick Greek’s fingertips dance on the screen. “Named after the highway in Helmand Province.”

“Were your sources any more firsthand than Stephen Crane’s?” Obviously not: The closest this pallid boy ever came to armed combat was group feedback on his creative writing MA. “Unless, of course, you were a literate marine in an ex-life?”

“No, but that’s a fair description of my brother. Route 605wouldn’t exist without Kyle.”

A small crowd, I notice, is now watching us, like tennis spectators. “I hope you don’t feel overly indebted to your brother, or that he doesn’t feel you’ve exploited his hard-won experiences.”

“Kyle died two years ago.” Nick Greek stays calm. “On Route 605, defusing a mine. My novel’s his memorial, of sorts.”

Oh, great. Whydidn’t Publicity Girl warn me that Nick Greek’s a sodding saint? Lady Suze is looking like a Corgi just shat me out, while Lord Roger gives Nick Greek a fatherly squeeze on the biceps: “Nick, son, I don’t know yer, and Afghanistan’s a total bloody cock-up. But your brother’d be proud of yer—and I know what I’m on about, ’cause I lost my brother when I was ten. Drowned at sea. Suze was saying—weren’t you Suze?—that Route 605is my sort of book. So yer know what? I’ll read it over the weekend”—he clicks his fingers at an aide, who taps a smartphone—“and when Roger Brittan gives his word, he bloody well keeps it.” Bodies come between me and the haloed ones—it’s as if I’m being towed away on casters. The last familiar face is that of Editor Oliver, cheered by the future angle of Route 605’s sales graph. I need a drink.