بخش 02 - فصل 09

9

Saubers – aka Hawkins – came into the shop for the first time two weeks ago, hiding behind a ridiculous adolescent moustache that hadn’t had a chance to grow out much. He was wearing black hornrims like the ones Drew (then Andy) affected back in the days when Jimmy Carter was president. Teenagers did not as a rule come into the shop, and that was fine with Drew; he might still be attracted to the occasional young male – William the Waiter being a case in point – but teens tended to be careless with valuable books, handling them roughly, reshelving them upside down, even dropping them. Also, they had a regrettable tendency to shoplift.

This one looked as if he would turn and sprint for the door if Drew so much as said boo. He was wearing a City College jacket, although the day was too warm for it. Drew, who’d read his share of Sherlock Holmes, put it together with the moustache and studious hornrims and deduced that here was a lad attempting to look older, as if he were trying to get into one of the dance clubs downtown instead of a bookshop specializing in rare volumes.

You want me to take you for at least twenty-one, Drew thought, but if you’re a day past seventeen, I’ll eat my hat. You’re not here to browse, either, are you? I believe you are a young man on a mission.

Under his arm, the boy carried a large book and a manila envelope. Drew’s first thought was that the kid wanted an appraisal on some moldy old thing he’d found in the attic, but as Mr Moustache drew hesitantly closer, Drew saw a purple sticker he recognized at once on the spine of the book.

Drew’s first impulse was to say Hello, son, but he quashed it. Let the kid have his college-boy disguise. What harm?

‘Good afternoon, sir. May I help you?’

For a moment young Mr Moustache said nothing. The dark brown of his new facial hair was in stark contrast to the pallor of his cheeks. Drew realized he was deciding whether to stay or mutter Guess not and get the hell out. One word would probably be enough to turn him around, but Drew suffered the not unusual antiquarian disease of curiosity. So he favored the boy with his most pleasant wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly smile, folded his hands, and kept silent.

‘Well …’ the boy said at length. ‘Maybe.’

Drew raised his eyebrows.

‘You buy rarities as well as sell them, right? That’s what your website says.’

‘I do. If I feel I can sell them at a profit, that is. It’s the nature of the business.’

The boy gathered his courage – Drew could almost see him doing it – and stepped all the way up to the desk, where the circular glow of an old-fashioned Anglepoise lamp spotlighted a semi-organized clutter of paperwork. Drew held out his hand. ‘Andrew Halliday.’

The boy shook it briefly and then withdrew, as if fearful of being grabbed. ‘I’m James Hawkins.’

‘Pleased to meet you.’

‘Uh-huh. I think … I have something you might be interested in. Something a collector might pay a lot for. If it was the right collector.’

‘Not the book you’re carrying, is it?’ Drew could see the title now: Dispatches from Olympus. The subtitle wasn’t on the spine, but Drew had owned a copy for many years and knew it well: Letters from 20 Great American Writers in Their Own Hand.

‘Gosh, no. Not this one.’ James Hawkins gave a small, nervous laugh. ‘This is just for comparison.’

‘Very well, say on.’

For a moment ‘James Hawkins’ seemed unsure how to do that. Then he tucked his manila envelope more firmly under his arm and began to hurry through the glossy pages of Dispatches from Olympus, passing a note from Faulkner scolding an Oxford, Mississippi, feed company about a misplaced order, a gushy letter from Eudora Welty to Ernest Hemingway, a scrawl about who knew what from Sherwood Anderson, and a grocery list Robert Penn Warren had decorated with a doodle of two dancing penguins, one of them smoking a cigarette.

At last he found what he wanted, set the book on the desk, and turned it to face Drew. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Look at this.’

Drew’s heart jumped as he read the heading: John Rothstein to Flannery O’Connor. The carefully photographed note had been written on lined paper tattered down the lefthand side where it had been torn from a dimestore notebook. Rothstein’s small, neat handwriting, very unlike the scrawl of so many writers, was unmistakable.

February 19, 1953

My dear Flannery O’Connor,

I am in receipt of your wonderful novel, Wise Blood which you have so kindly inscribed to me. I can say wonderful because I purchased a copy as soon as it came out, and read it immediately. I am delighted to have a signed copy, as I am sure you are delighted to have the royalty accruing from one more sold volume! I enjoyed the entire motley cast of characters, especially Hazel Motes and Enoch Emery, a zookeeper I’m sure my own Jimmy Gold would have enjoyed and befriended. You have been called a ‘connoisseur of grotesqueries,’ Miss O’Connor, yet what the critics miss – probably because they have none themselves – is your lunatic sense of humor, which takes no prisoners. I know you are physically unwell, but I hope you will persevere in your work in spite of that. It is important work! Thanking you again,

John Rothstein

PS: I still laugh about the Famous Chicken!!!

Drew scanned the letter longer than necessary, to calm himself, then looked up at the boy calling himself James Hawkins. ‘Do you understand the reference to the Famous Chicken? I’ll explain, if you like. It’s a good example of what Rothstein called her lunatic sense of humor.’

‘I looked it up. When Miss O’Connor was six or seven, she had – or claimed she had – a chicken that walked backwards. Some newsreel people came and filmed it, and the chicken was in the movies. She said it was the high point of her life, and everything afterwards was an anticlimax.’

‘Exactly right. Now that we’ve covered the Famous Chicken, what can I do for you?’

The boy took a deep breath and opened the clasp on his manila envelope. From inside he took a photocopy and laid it beside Rothstein’s letter in Dispatches from Olympus. Drew Halliday’s face remained placidly interested as he looked from one to the other, but beneath the desk, his fingers interlaced so tightly that his closely clipped nails dug into the backs of his hands. He knew what he was looking at immediately. The squiggles on the tails of the ys, the bs that always stood by themselves, the hs that stood high and the gs that dipped low. The question now was how much ‘James Hawkins’ knew. Maybe not a lot, but almost certainly more than a little. Otherwise he would not be hiding behind a new moustache and specs looking suspiciously like the clear-glass kind that could be purchased in a drugstore or costume shop.

At the top of the page, circled, was the number 44. Below it was a fragment of poetry.

Suicide is circular, or so I think;

you may have your own opinion.

In the meantime, meditate on this.

A plaza just after sunrise,

You could say in Mexico.

Or Guatemala, if you like.

Anyplace where the rooms still come

with wooden ceiling fans.

In any case it’s blanco up to the blue sky

except for the ragged mops of palms and

rosa where the boy outside the café

is washing cobbles, half asleep.

On the corner, waiting for the first

It ended there. Drew looked up at the boy.

‘It goes on about the first bus of the day,’ James Hawkins said. ‘The kind that runs on wires. A trolebus, he calls it. It’s Spanish for trolley. The wife of the man narrating the poem, or maybe it’s his girlfriend, is sitting dead in the corner of the room. She shot herself. He’s just found her.’

‘It doesn’t strike me as deathless poesy,’ Drew said. In his current gobsmacked state, it was all he could think of to say. Regardless of its quality, the poem was the first new work by John Rothstein to appear in over half a century. No one had seen it but the author, this boy, and Drew himself. Unless Morris Bellamy had happened to glimpse it, which seemed unlikely given the great number of notebooks he claimed to have stolen.

The great number.

My God, the great number of notebooks.

‘No, it’s sure not Wilfred Owen or T. S. Eliot, but I don’t think that’s the point. Do you?’

Drew was suddenly aware that ‘James Hawkins’ was watching him closely. And seeing what? Probably too much. Drew was used to playing them close to the vest – you had to in a business where lowballing the seller was as important as highballing potential buyers – but this was like the Titanic suddenly floating to the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, dinged-up and rusty, but there.

Okay, then, admit it.

‘No, probably not.’ The photocopy and the letter to O’Connor were still side by side, and Drew couldn’t help moving his pudgy finger back and forth between points of comparison. ‘If it’s a forgery, it’s a damned good one.’

‘It’s not.’ No lack of confidence there.

‘Where did you get it?’

The boy then launched into a bullshit story Drew barely listened to, something about how his Uncle Phil in Cleveland had died and willed his book collection to young James, and there had been six Moleskine notebooks packed in with the paperbacks and Book of the Month Club volumes, and it turned out, hidey-ho, that these six notebooks, filled with all sorts of interesting stuff – mostly poetry, along with some essays and a few fragmentary short stories – were the work of John Rothstein.

‘How did you know it was Rothstein?’

‘I recognized his style, even in the poems,’ Hawkins said. It was a question he had prepared for, obviously. ‘I’m majoring in American Lit at CC, and I’ve read most of his stuff. But there’s more. For instance, this one is about Mexico, and Rothstein spent six months wandering around there after he got out of the service.’

‘Along with a dozen other American writers of note, including Ernest Hemingway and the mysterious B. Traven.’

‘Yeah, but look at this.’ The boy drew a second photocopy from his envelope. Drew told himself not to reach for it greedily … and reached for it greedily. He was behaving as though he’d been in this business for three years instead of over thirty, but who could blame him? This was big. This was huge. The difficulty was that ‘James Hawkins’ seemed to know it was.

Ah, but he doesn’t know what I know, which includes where they came from. Unless Morrie is using him as a cat’s paw, and how likely is that with Morrie rotting in Waynesville State Prison?

The writing on the second photocopy was clearly from the same hand, but not as neat. There had been no scratch-outs and marginal notes on the fragment of poetry, but there were plenty here.

‘I think he might have written it while he was drunk,’ the boy said. ‘He drank a lot, you know, then quit. Cold turkey. Read it. You’ll see what it’s about.’

The circled number at the top of this page was 77. The writing below it started in mid-sentence.

never anticipated. While good reviews are always sweet desserts in the short term, one finds they lead to indigestion – insomnia, nightmares, even problems taking that ever-more-important afternoon shit – in the long term. And the stupiddity is even more remarkable in the good notices than in the bad ones. To see Jimmy Gold as some sort of benchmark, a HERO, even, is like calling someone like Billy the Kid (or Charles Starkweather, his closest 20th century avatar) an American icon. Jimmy is as Jimmy is, even as I am or you are; he is modeled not on Huck Finn but Etienne Lantier, the greatest character in 19th century fiction! If I have withdrawn from the public eye, it is because that eye is infected and there is no reason to put more materiel before it. As Jimmy himself would say, ‘Shit don’t

It ended there, but Drew knew what came next, and he was sure Hawkins did, too. It was Jimmy’s famous motto, still sometimes seen on tee-shirts all these years later.

‘He misspelled stupidity.’ It was all Drew could think of to say.

‘Uh-huh, and material. Real mistakes, not cleaned up by some copyeditor.’ The boy’s eyes glowed. It was a glow Drew had seen often, but never in one so young. ‘It’s alive, that’s what I think. Alive and breathing. You see what he says about Etienne Lantier? That’s the main character of Germinal, by Emile Zola. And it’s new! Do you get it? It’s a new insight into a character everybody knows, and from the author himself! I bet some collectors would pay big bucks for the original of this, and all the rest of the stuff I have.’

‘You say there are six notebooks in your possession?’

‘Uh-huh.’

Six. Not a hundred or more. If six was all the kid had, then he certainly wasn’t acting on Bellamy’s behalf, unless Morris had for some reason split his haul up. Drew couldn’t see his old pal doing that.

‘They’re the medium-sized ones, eighty pages in each. That’s four hundred and eighty pages. A lot of white space – with poems there always is – but they’re not all poems. There are those short stories, too. One is about Jimmy Gold as a kid.’

But here was a question: did he, Drew, really believe there were only six? Was it possible the boy was holding back the good stuff? And if so, was he holding back because he wanted to sell the rest later, or because he didn’t want to sell it at all? To Drew, the glow in his eyes suggested the latter, although the boy might not yet know it consciously.

‘Sir? Mr Halliday?’

‘Sorry. Just getting used to the idea that this really might be new Rothstein material.’

‘It is,’ the boy said. There was no doubt in his voice. ‘So how much?’

‘How much would I pay?’ Drew thought son would be okay now, because they were about to get down to the dickering. ‘Son, I’m not exactly made of money. Nor am I completely convinced these aren’t forgeries. A hoax. I’d have to see the real items.’

Drew could see Hawkins biting his lip behind the nascent moustache. ‘I wasn’t talking about how much you’d pay, I was talking about private collectors. You must know some who are willing to spend big money for special items.’

‘I know a couple, yes.’ He knew a dozen. ‘But I wouldn’t even write to them on the basis of two photocopied pages. As for getting authentication from a handwriting expert … that might be dicey. Rothstein was murdered, you know, which makes these stolen property.’

‘Not if he gave them to someone before he was killed,’ the boy countered swiftly, and Drew had to remind himself again that the kid had prepared for this encounter. But I have experience on my side, he thought. Experience and craft.

‘Son, there’s no way to prove that’s what happened.’

‘There’s no way to prove it wasn’t, either.’

So: impasse.

Suddenly the boy grabbed the two photocopies and jammed them back into the manila envelope.

‘Wait a minute,’ Drew said, alarmed. ‘Whoa. Hold on.’

‘No, I think it was a mistake coming here. There’s a place in Kansas City, Jarrett’s Fine Firsts and Rare Editions. They’re one of the biggest in the country. I’ll try there.’

‘If you can hold off a week, I’ll make some calls,’ Drew said. ‘But you have to leave the photocopies.’

The boy hovered, unsure. At last he said, ‘How much could you get, do you think?’

‘For almost five hundred pages of unpublished – hell, unseen – Rothstein material? The buyer would probably want at least a computer handwriting analysis, there are a couple of good programs that do that, but assuming that proved out, perhaps …’ He calculated the lowest possible figure he could throw out without sounding absurd. ‘Perhaps fifty thousand dollars.’

James Hawkins either accepted this, or seemed to. ‘And what would your commission be?’

Drew laughed politely. ‘Son … James … no dealer would take a commission on a deal like this one. Not when the creator – known as the proprietor, in legalese – was murdered and the material might have been stolen. We’d split right down the middle.’

‘No.’ The boy said it at once. He might not yet be able to grow the biker moustache he saw in his dreams, but he had balls as well as smarts. ‘Seventy-thirty. My favor.’

Drew could give in on this, get maybe a quarter of a million for the six notebooks and give the boy seventy percent of fifty K, but wouldn’t ‘James Hawkins’ expect him to dicker, at least a little? Wouldn’t he be suspicious if he didn’t?

‘Sixty-forty. My last offer, and of course contingent on finding a buyer. That would be thirty thousand dollars for something you found crammed into a cardboard box along with old copies of Jaws and The Bridges of Madison County. Not a bad return, I’d say.’

The boy shifted from foot to foot, saying nothing but clearly conflicted.

Drew reverted to the wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly smile. ‘Leave the photocopies with me. Come back in a week and I’ll tell you how we stand. And here’s some advice – stay away from Jarrett’s place. The man will pick your pockets.’

‘I’d want cash.’

Drew thought, Don’t we all.

‘You’re getting way ahead of yourself, son.’

The boy came to a decision and put the manila envelope down on the cluttered desk. ‘Okay. I’ll come back.’

Drew thought, I’m sure you will. And I believe my bargaining position will be much stronger when you do.

He held out his hand. The boy shook it again, as briefly as he could while still being polite. As if he were afraid of leaving fingerprints. Which in a way he had already done.

Drew sat where he was until ‘Hawkins’ went out, then dropped into his office chair (it gave out a resigned groan) and woke up his sleeping Macintosh. There were two security cameras mounted above the front door, one pointing each way along Lacemaker Lane. He watched the kid turn the corner onto Crossway Avenue and disappear from sight.

The purple sticker on the spine of Dispatches from Olympus, that was the key. It marked the volume as a library book, and Drew knew every branch in the city. Purple meant a reference volume from the Garner Street Library, and reference volumes weren’t supposed to circulate. If the kid had tried to smuggle it out under his City College jacket, the security gate would have buzzed when he went through, because that purple sticker was also an antitheft device. Which led to another Holmesian deduction, once you added in the kid’s obvious book-smarts.

Drew went to the Garner Street Library’s website, where all sorts of choices were displayed: SUMMER HOURS, KIDS & TEENS, UPCOMING EVENTS, CLASSIC FILM SERIES, and, last but far from least: MEET OUR STAFF.

Drew Halliday clicked on this and needed to click no farther, at least to begin with. Above the thumbnail bios was a photo of the staff, roughly two dozen in all, gathered on the library lawn. The statue of Horace Garner, open book in hand, loomed behind them. They were all smiles, including his boy, sans moustache and bogus spectacles. Second row, third from the left. According to the bio, young Mr Peter Saubers was a student at Northfield High, currently working part-time. He hoped to major in English, with a minor in Library Science.

Drew continued his researches, aided by the fairly unusual surname. He was sweating lightly, and why not? Six notebooks already seemed like a pittance, a tease. All of them – some containing a fourth Jimmy Gold novel, if his psycho friend had been right all those years ago – might be worth as much as fifty million dollars, if they were broken up and sold to different collectors. The fourth Jimmy Gold alone might fetch twenty. And with Morrie Bellamy safely tucked away in prison, all that stood in his way was one teenage boy who couldn’t even grow a proper moustache.