"A woman in her underwear - and nothing on top. Shall I read the caption?" Ilsa giggled just slightly, because she was beginning to understand the British fondness for bad puns, and she was looking forward to demonstrating that knowledge.
"No, Ilsa. I don't need to know about the page-three girl. Go to page four."
"Two headlines on page four," said Ilsa. "The first is: 'Taxi Drivers a Terror to Tourists?'"
It was an article about a spate of robberies and nonlethal assaults against patrons of Black Cabs. Ilsa read the headline with the proper inflexion, making it sound as alarming as the headline writer clearly intended it to be.
"Hmm." Ilsa's employer seemed disappointed and began to butter a scone.
"And the second is a lawyer on Baker Street who denies that he's Sherlock Holmes," continued Ilsa. "There's a photo. I think one might call him good-looking, in a stuffy sort of way."
Her employer abruptly stopped buttering. There was silence for a moment. Then -
"Let me see it."
It was just three short paragraphs, not even breaking news; just a follow-up piece, about one Reggie Health - a thirty-five-year-old London barrister - and the unusual circumstances of a trip he had taken to Los Angeles a short time earlier.
Ilsa watched as her employer stared at the passage for a very long time, eyes searching intently, as though there were something more on the page than just the words.
"Is something wrong?" said Ilsa.
"It's like trying to find a gray cat in the fog," said Ilsa's employer finally, getting up from the table, with the Daily News in hand, and without finishing breakfast. "But I think I am beginning to remember."
Ilsa did not ask what was being remembered. She took the tray away, saw that the medications were again untouched, and wished it were not so.
A bold, mesmerizing novel about the woman known as "Typhoid Mary," the first known healthy carrier of typhoid fever in the burgeoning metropolis of early twentieth century New York.
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
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Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
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Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
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British Parliament asks Amazon to clarify why it pays $9 million in income tax on $23 billion of UK sales.(May 20 2013) Amazon will be called back to give further evidence to members of the British Parliament "to clarify how its activities in the U.K. justify its low corporate...
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