There Is No Importance

WAIT FOR TOMORROW (408 pp.)--Robert Wilder--Putnam ($3.50).

It is not often that a book can be judged by its cover, but in the case of Wait for Tomorrow the publishers have made it almost easy. In the right foreground, out of a Dali-type desert, rises a stack of 85 gold coins. A kingly crown lies in the sand nearby, and a derelict liquor bottle dribbles into oblivion. In the distance a ridge of bloody mounds bars the way to a paradisiacal grove of cloud-pink skyscrapers.

With that information, any good guesser who had read a couple of Robert Wilder's previous bestsellers (Flamingo Road, Written on the Wind, Bright Feather) might almost twig to the whole story:

A European king and his mistress (not Carol and Magda, the author hastens to say) are passing their exile in Mexico City, eating high on the lotus as they await admission to the U.S. With them are the king's chamberlain, a villain as cold as a Danube carp, and a sadistic international financier, who keeps thin, boned whips in his bureau drawer.

Into this pleasant company comes Slade Compton, a hard and frequently foiled newspaperman from the States, who has been hired to wash that Fascist smell off the king, so he can pass under the noses of the U.S. public. But even for Slade the smell is too strong. He betrays the king in the interests of dear old democracy, but not before he has downed gallons of the royal bourbon, and has had to fend off ardent passes from the royal mistress.

At the end. fearing to be murdered by one of the king's henchmen, Slade has small thanks for his services to democracy. "Nada, Senor," says a philosophical waiter. "There is no importance." The waiter sums up the book well enough; even when turned upside down, given a dash of Psychopathia Sexualis and a medium-sad ending, these refugees from Graustark are still from Graustark.

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