The Bookman's Promise (7 page)

It was now twilight time, the beginning of my long nightly journey through the dark. For the moment the Treadwell business had played itself out. I didn’t want to leave it there, but there it sat, spreading its discontent. I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to call a friend, catch a movie, do a crossword puzzle. I sure as hell didn’t want to sit in a bar full of strangers as an alternative to Erin d’Angelo’s luminous presence. When all else fails I usually work on books, but that night I didn’t want to do that, either.

In fact, I didn’t know what I wanted. I seemed to have reached a major turning point in my life as a bookman. I look back at that time as my true watershed, more significant than even the half-blind leap that had brought me straight into the trade from homicide. Today I believe I was shaped by that entire half year. Even then I sensed that I was moving from my common retail base into something new, yet for most of my waking hours I had doubts that I would ever get anywhere. This must be what a writer goes through when he’s groping his way into a book. I think it was Doctorow who said that about the writing process—it’s like driving a car across country at night and all you can ever see is what’s immediately in your headlights, but you can make the whole journey that way. Maybe the book trade was like that. I had always been a slow learner, but already there had been wondrous moments when suddenly I
understood
, after months of plodding, some tiny piece of the enormous world I had come to.
A-ha! A hit of knowledge
! A leap of faith so striking that it sometimes took my breath away.

This was never greater than in those two weeks of 1987. I had bought the Burton, which I now know was the catalyst. Millie, my gal Friday, was off on vacation and I had been forced into the annoying business of minding the store. Richard Burton had fired me up and old Mrs. Gallant had stirred me up, but on a conscious level all I had was the annoying hunch that I might work till dawn; that, and how I’d explain to Dean why I’d lied to him, when I called him tomorrow.

My working domain was normally the back room, but in my solitude I wanted to be where I could at least see the lights of the street. I brought up my stuff and sat at the counter, but I couldn’t get my mind into it. I stared at my reference books and for a long time I just sat there and waited for my mood to change.

The book world was very different then. In 1987 it was real work to research even simple book problems. We were still in the earliest days of the Internet: the vast, sweeping changes that have come over us had barely begun, and none of us knew how crazy it would get. Points and values on unfamiliar books still had to be searched out the old way, in bibliographies and specialists’ catalogs, and with some, you finally had to go on a gut feeling. Knowledge was rewarded by the system: you put out your books, took your chances, and if another bookseller knew more than you did, he scored on your mistake. Today any unwashed nitwit can look into a computer and pull out a price. Whether the price is proper, whether it’s even the same edition—these questions, once of major importance, have begun to pale as bookscouts and flea markets and even junk shops rush onto the Internet to play bookseller. They love to say things like “The Internet has equalized the playing field,” but all they do is cannibalize the other fellow’s off-the-wall prices for books of dubious lineage and worth. They want to play without paying any dues, now or ever. They have no reference books to back up their assertions and they’d never pay more than pocket change for anything. They wheel and deal but they care about nothing but price. The computer may have leveled the playing field in one sense—it’s a great device for revealing what people around the world are asking and paying for certain books—but in this year of grace it will not tell you, reliably, how to identify a true American first of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
.

In those early Internet years I posted an epigram over my desk:
A book is a mirror. If an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out
. That was written two centuries ago by a German wit named Lichtenberg, but I think the same applies today to a computer screen.

I had just ordered my supper from Pizza Hut when I heard the tap on my window. I turned and there she was, the Gibson girl incarnate. Those incredible eyes. That lovely smiling face, so loaded with mischief. I leaped up and toppled my stool. My crazy heart went with it, a mad tumble that had happened with only one other woman. The great adventure of love, more thrilling and perilous than a man with a gun: I had given up the notion of ever knowing it again.

I fumbled with my keys and dropped them. Lurched over to pick them up, missed them in the dark, and almost fell on my ass. Had to go back for them, groping around on the floor. So far my performance was falling far short of the cool image I always project to the opposite sex. She stood outside, striking a pose of vast impatience. Looked at her watch. Tapped her foot while I got the key into the hole and opened the door.

“Sorry, I’m closed,” I said, regaining my cool.

“That’s okay, I’m just the gas girl, here to read your meter.”

I almost laughed at that but recovered in time to make a phony cough of it. “You’ll have to make it fast, I’m expecting someone.”

“No one special, I take it, from the look of you.”

“Just read the meter, miss, and let’s hold the fashion critique. This has been a hard day.”

“Obviously. A white sport coat indeed.”

“I wore it till the pink carnation began gasping for air and turning green around the gills. There came a point when I had to figure that the girl of my dreams just wasn’t going to show.”

“You have no faith. I had you pegged from the start. All pop, no fizz.”

“My faith was like the Prudential rock until an hour ago.”

“That’s not nearly good enough when I expected so much more of you. I take it from your wardrobe that we’re going someplace fancy. Burger King or Taco Bell? Do I get to choose?”

“Actually, I just…urn…kinda…ordered a pizza.”

She laughed out loud at that.

“I’ll bet I can cancel it,” I said. “I just this minute ordered it.”

“A
pizzal
And I’ll bet it’s a pizza for
one
.”

“I can have them make another one,” I said in the wimpiest voice I could put on.

She sighed deeply. “I guess you might as well. Oh, chivalry, where art thou? I’ll tell you this much, sir, Sir Richard Burton rests unchallenged in his tomb tonight.”

She browsed my shelves while I made the call.

“No anchovies,” she yelled from New Arrivals.

I appeared suddenly at her side. “How’d your case go?”

“We lost but we knew we would. Anything else would have put us all in the hospital from shock. Now we’ve got something we can appeal, take it out of cowboy heaven.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

“Maybe sometime. Right now I’m so happy to be out of there I don’t even want to think about it. I drove straight through from Rock Springs. As of this time last night, I’m on vacation…three glorious weeks to write, contemplate, and recover.”

After a moment, she said, “I thought of calling around three o’clock, in case you actually were standing here in some goofy white sport coat. Then I thought no, this would be more fun. Arrive when all hope is lost. See if you’re still here. Razz you a bit. How’s it working so far?”

“I’m getting pretty damned annoyed, if you want to know the truth.”

“Miranda should have told you, I’m a card-carrying member of Lunatics Anonymous. We Loonies see the world as one big insane asylum. Our goal is to laugh at everything. If I don’t find some kind of laughter in all this chaos, I’ve got to cry, and I hate that. So I make fun of the handicapped. Tell racially insensitive jokes. Put down those who are already oppressed.”

A moment later she said, “I’m kidding.”

“I knew that.”

“I figured you did. Right from the start you seemed to be as crazy as I am.”

“I must have compared wonderfully to the stuffed shirt you were driving that night.”

When she said nothing to that, I said, “Did I step on professional toes there?”

“Would it matter?”

“Of course. Mr. Archer may be a jerk on a world scale, but I no longer feel any uncontrollable compulsion to say so.”

“Don’t bite your tongue on my account. Just be aware that an escort who speaks ill of her client soon has no clients to speak of. So I may not participate in the verbal dismemberment.”

“Whatever you say, my lips are sealed.”

“In that case, yes, Archer’s right up there among the most pompous asses that the ill winds of New York have ever blown my way.”

“As much as it grieves me to say it, he’s actually a very good writer. He was one of the modern authors I liked best…”

“Until you met him.”

“That does take away some of his sex appeal. What’re you doing driving authors around?”

“Didn’t Miranda tell you? She told me you asked.”

“Miranda is proving to be an untrustworthy confidante.”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter. I got into the author tours early, for spending money in college. Now I don’t need the spending money so it must be the intellectual stimulation.”

“So if you’re driving the author of
The Hungry Man’s Diet Book
, or the guy who wrote
Six Ways to Profit from the Coming Nuclear War
, what kind of stimulation do you get from that?”

“I don’t drive those authors.”

“Must be nice to pick and choose.”

“The woman who owns the agency became one of my best friends. When I see who’s coming through, I can put in a request if it’s someone I like.”

“But this time you got stuck with Archer.”

“No, I asked for him.”

“Couldn’t be his personality. Must be because he’s an old friend of the judge.”

“I don’t remember saying that. You sure jump to a lot of conclusions.”

“I’m trying to get you properly placed in the cosmos and you’re giving me no help at all. Are you saying you knew Archer was a pompous ass and still you asked for him?”

“Life is strange, isn’t it?”

She found a layer of dust, flicked it away, and said, “You need a woman’s touch in here.”

Before I could answer that, she said, “If it wasn’t Archer I wanted to meet that night, who could it be? God knows it couldn’t be you.”

I did a beating heart gesture that made her smile.

She said, “I had already met Mr. Archer on a couple of occasions. I lived with Lee and Miranda for several years when I was growing up, so I already had a pretty good line on Archer. Didn’t Miranda tell you that?”

I made a gesture:
I don’t remember
.

“Oh, you’re impossible,” she said.

“Depends on what you’ve got in mind.” I cleared my throat. “So what happens if you think you’ll like an author, then he gets here and you can’t stand him?”

“I try to show some class. Sometimes it’s tough but I try to remember who I’m working for, just as you considered Lee and Miranda that night when you were so tempted to call Archer whatever you were tempted to call him. I never put the agency in an embarrassing position.”

“So you get your choice of jobs, and still you drive Archer.”

“Be nice to me and maybe someday I’ll tell you why.”

“Then let’s move on, as you lawyers like to say. You look at my books while I walk up the street and get us a really cheap bottle of wine to go with this grand feast we’re about to have.”

I bought a fine bottle of wine, but the liquor store, which always stocked corkscrews, failed me tonight and I had to settle for a cheap bottle with a screw top. I kept the good stuff to prove my intentions but I knew I was in for some joshing. So far I was batting a thousand.

We ate in the front room with only a distant light, a pair of shadows to anyone passing on the street. The screwball mood had deserted us for the moment, and what we now had was a spell of cautious probing. Was she really writing a novel? Yes, and she was serious about it, she had fifty thousand words as of yesterday. She was a light sleeper and there had been lots of time to work on it in the middle of the bleak Rock Springs nights. The law filled her days and she escorted for a woman named Lisa Beaumont, who usually had others she could call in a rush.

She had always loved books—new, old, it really didn’t matter. Even as a teenager she’d had dreams of doing what I did. “I knew a fellow long ago who showed me the charm of older books. He wanted to be a rare-book seller, just like you.” But what about me? What was it really like in the book trade? It could certainly be boring, but you never knew what might walk in the door the next minute and turn the day into something extraordinary. She cocked her head in bright interest—
Like what, for instance
?—and the next thing I knew I was telling her about Mrs. Gallant, the whole bloody story beginning with my trip to Boston. “Wow,” she said at the end of it. “So what are you going to do for her?”

“Whatever I can, which won’t be much. Eighty years is a long time.”

“A long time,” she echoed. “But wouldn’t it be great if you could find those books?”

“Oh yeah. It’d be great to win the Nobel Peace Prize while I’m at it.”

“Don’t make light of it. You could actually do this, if the books are still together. Then you could retire in utter glory. What else would you need to do in your career after that?”

“Oh, just the little stuff, like make a living.” “That’s the trouble with the world today: there’s too much emphasis on money.”

“Spoken like one who has money to burn.”

“Don’t harass me, Janeway, I’m composing your mission statement.”

We slipped back into cautious probing. Yes, she said with pointed annoyance, she did have a little money saved up. They paid her well at Waterford, Brownwell, Taylor and Waterford, where her office faced the mountains on the twenty-third floor and she was said to be on the fast track to make partner. They liked her, they were doing everything they could to keep her happy, but her heart wasn’t in it anymore. “I wonder how I’d like what you do.”

Who could say? Some of the smartest people never do get it— they have no idea about the intrigue that can hide in the lineage of a book, or the drama that can erupt between two people when a truly rare one comes between them. I quoted Rosenbach—
The thrill of knocking a man down in the ring is nothing compared with the thrill of knocking him down over a book
—and she smiled. But there are many quieter thrills in the book world. The bottomless nature of it. The certainty of surprise, even for a specialist. The sudden enlightenment, the pockets of history that can open without warning and turn a bookman toward new fields of passionate interest. Wasn’t that what had just happened with me and Richard Burton? “I think I’d love it,” she said. “You want a partner?” “Sure. I figure a fifty percent interest should be worth at least, oh, thirty or forty bucks. But you won’t have an office on the twenty-third floor.”

She asked for the grand tour as if we were serious, and I walked her through the store. I pointed out its attributes and shortcomings, and it took us twenty minutes to see every nook and cranny. We ended up back in the dark corner of the front room, where my best books were.

She looked up at me. “I guess before we seal this partnership we need to know more about each other. I’ll start. How much has Miranda already told you?”

“Nothing.”

“Lying’s not a good way to begin, Janeway. And you don’t do it very well.”

“Actually, I’m a pretty good liar when I need to be.”

“You’re good at stalling too.”

“You must be a killer on cross.”

“I sure am, so stay on the point: what Miranda told you and why.”

“She told me nothing. Nothing, as in no real thing,
nada
, caput.”

“Why do I get the feeling she told you about my dad?”

“I don’t know, maybe you’re a suspicious creature whose instincts are to trust nobody. All she said was that Lee and your father were partners and you lived with them after he died.”

She leaned into the light. “My father was an embezzler.” Then she was back in the shadows, her voice coming out of the void. “My dad was a crook.”

“Those are mighty unforgiving words, Erin.”

“There can be no forgiveness for what he did. He stole from his client.”

She took a deep breath and said, “When I was little my dad was my hero. He was funny and smart: he could do no wrong. I never wanted to be anything but a lawyer, just like him.”

I told her I was sorry. Sometimes people fall short of what we want them to be.

“I was thirteen when it came out. The worst possible age. In school I heard talk every day. The humiliation was brutal. I wanted to run away and change my name but Lee talked me out of that.”

“Lee’s a smart man.”

“Lee is a great man. He knew what I needed was not to deny my name but to restore it. I don’t know what I’d have done if not for him. Did you know they put me through law school?”

I shook my head. “Miranda did say they couldn’t be prouder of what you’ve done.”

“Well, now I’ve done it. I made all the honor rolls, got a great job, paid them back. My father’s not just dead, he’s really buried, and I don’t need to do it anymore.”

Abruptly she changed the subject. “Your turn. Bet you’re glad you’re not still a cop.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being a cop. There are some fine people who are cops.”

“I know that.”

After an awkward pause, she said, “Look, I know what happened to you back then. I read all the stories and if any of it mattered to me, I wouldn’t be here now. I like you. You make me laugh. And just for the record, I like the police too. Most of the time.”

“Then we’re cool.”

She flashed me that lovely smile. “We’re cool, man.”

I wondered how cool we were, but at that moment the phone rang.

It was Ralston, taking a chance I’d still be here. “Can you come up to my house? Mrs. Gallant wants to see you.”

“Sure. How about first thing in the morning?”

I had a dark hunch what he would say, just before he said it.

“You’d better come now. I think she’s dying.”