Final Edit by Robert A Carter

ago
     by now—and any others in recent years had all followed the same pattern. It was Margo who initiated them. Margo who had always
     been in complete control of the event. And it was I who had been the more than willing acolyte in the venereal ceremony. I
     had only thought I was seducing her; it was she who led me—every step of the way. Did I wish to continue to be he who must
     obey—or ought I to change partners and dance with somebody else? Maybe it was time to move on.
    But I knew without any reservation—or any misgiving, either—that I would go to bed tonight alone. And chaste.
    “Still,” I said, “there’s still food and drink. May I have some more of that bracing pasta?”
    “Of course,” said Margo, smiling her Da Vinci smile, “if you’ll pour some more of that extraordinary wine.”
    We finally did get around to discussing the ABA, which, in the way conventions have, was fast fading out of mind. She wanted
     to know if any of the parties had been fun, so I told her about the one I’d attended at the Library of Congress. The party
     was given in the huge and majestic foyer of the library. Marble underfoot and all around me, Italian mosaics on the floor,
     ornamental cornucopias, ribbons and vines galore. We were served plump oysters on the half shell, champagne, and sweet fresh
     strawberries on ice.
    “I felt more at home in this building than in any other in the capital,” I told Margo. There was the world’s largest library,
     the home of all knowledge, and the home as well of the Copyright Office, a publisher’s best friend.
    The contentment I exuded must have been visible to any of the partygoers in my vicinity, because one of them came up and said,
     “Nick, you look like you just swallowed an agent whole.”
    It was Bernie Rath, the executive director of the American Booksellers Association, and the master of all its revels. Short,
     stocky, bearded Bernie is a transplanted Canadian, and a warm supporter of the written and printed word, as well as a sworn
     enemy of censorship. I have always liked him.
    “What news on the Rialto, Bernie?” I said. “How’s the convention going?”
    “Setting new records for attendance,” he said.
    “What are people talking about?” Usually there is one book or author that sets everyone at the ABA to talking. I have always
     hoped it would be one of my books; it usuallyturns out to be the new Norman Mailer novel or the sequel to
Gone with the Wind.
    “As a matter of fact,” Bernie said, “they’re talking mostly about the new multimedia.”
    The new electronic developments—they’re quite something. They are the specter haunting everyone in book publishing. In a world
     where a device held in one’s hand can communicate with a computer thousands of miles away, where databases containing hundreds
     of volumes of text, sound transcriptions, and color photographs can be accessed night and day within seconds, how is intellectual
     property to be protected? How are publishers to know what to charge for what they
think
they own, and who is to police the computer pirates? No wonder we are all trembling at the thought of these wondrous innovations
     in microchip storage, and reluctant to jump on the Japanese bandwagon; they threaten to put us all out of business.
    Sober thoughts, but appropriate in the home of the Copyright Office. And just like that my mood altered, from euphoria in
     the presence of so much grandeur, to gloom at the prospect of becoming irrelevant, superfluous, a dinosaur of print in an
     electronic universe.
    I am not sure how much of what I felt I was able to convey to Bernie Rath, who nodded sagely and drifted off—or to Margo,
     in her lamplit living room; it didn’t seem to matter too much.
    The murder of Parker Foxcroft, however, was something else. That kept us going until my bedtime.
    “What was it like finding him, Nick? How did you feel?”
    I had no doubt that the memory of that moment would never leave me. How