The Testament of James (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens) (8 page)

“Very sensible,” said Matthew, who seemed to recall that when the New York families had once intercepted a couple of Capone’s boys arriving on the train from Chicago, they had “sent them home” as mismatched body parts in a couple of trunks.

“Sure. And even though times have changed, this still goes double when somebody shows up here from the Old Country.”

“Dominic Penitente.”

“Party of three, staying in a nice suite at the Renaissance.”

“Not the Providence.”

“No accounting for taste. And they never checked in with anyone on the Hill, like we don’t exist. Which is fine depending on their business, of course.”

College Hill was the oldest part of Providence, but Joey referred to Federal Hill, further northwest, the city’s primarily Italian enclave.

“Except your friend Penitente did call at one place first thing,” Joey added, “and word is when he sent in his card, he got seen lickity-split, let us know if there’s anything we can do.”

“And that was?”

“What they’re now calling Cathedral Square, down off Broad Street.”

“The diocese.”

“Yeah. And these guys aren’t here from Palermo, or Salerno, or even Reggio de Calabria. What do you suppose?”

“From Rome.”

“So I’m telling you stuff you already know.”

“Not at all, Joey. This is a big help. It just figures, if this guy is connected to the church. But maybe . . .”

“He’s got no authorization from anybody I talked to. In fact, the boys are now kind of interested in Mr. Penitente. Assuming these were indeed the parties which caused the little dust-up in your front yard last Thursday, one cannot help but note it’s pretty hard to fly in to Logan with a gun, and it don’t seem like they bought them here. Can you give us any more to go on, Matthew?”

“They were following an Egyptian, name of Rashid al-Adar. He was in a rental car, I figure, picked it up either at Logan or at T.F. Green last Thursday, Warwick more likely. They were after something Rashid was bringing here. I haven’t been able to reach him since, so either he’s hurt or he’s laying low or maybe they’ve got him.”

“Friend of yours?”

“Business associate.”

“Gotcha. Are the cops looking for him, or this car?”

“Not that I know of. Once they decided Bob died of a heart attack, they moved on to more important matters.”

“Like making sure there’s no lawsuit from the mayor’s girlfriend’s husband.”

“That sort of thing.”

“Now maybe you can’t tell me, and that would be fine, but this thing Mr. Rashid was bringing you, that these gentlemen seem to want . . .”

“A book.”

“Like, a ledger, with names, amounts of money paid?”

“No. An old book, Joey, a valuable old book.”

“Seriously?”

“I haven’t seen it, sometimes these things turn out to be fakes, but this particular thousand-year-old book is about Jesus, it would be either in Greek or in Hebrew, and if it’s what the seller claims, it would buy somebody a really nice house.”

“One book?”

“In Barrington.”

Joey was suitably impressed. “OK, I got it.”

“A nice young man,” Chantal decided after Joey had taken his leave. “You helped him out, once?”

“He got into a little trouble when he was younger. He needed a lawyer who could convince the judge it was just a case of youthful hi-jinks, which it was.”

“Stole a car?”

“A truck. The week before Thanksgiving, actually. Driver went into a diner, left the diesel running, so Joey drove off with a semi trailer load of frozen turkeys.”

“Where do you put a trailer load of frozen turkeys?”

“This question occurred to Joey, as well, but not quite soon enough to keep him from getting into a bind. So he had to break into Pegnataro’s Market during the night to hide the turkeys in the walk-in freezer.”

“He must have worked all night. He’d cleared this with the owner?”

“Of course not. Old man Pegnataro shows up for work the next morning, and he’s informed his walk-in freezer is so full of frozen turkeys no one can even get in there. So he picks up the phone.”

“Not to call the police?”

“This is Providence, honey.”

“So he calls the boys.”

“He calls the boys, to ask if they know what’s going on, or if he
should
call the police.”

“They gave the turkeys back?”

“Not much choice, at that point.”

“They couldn’t get the driver to drop the charges?”

“He would have been happy to, he tried, but he’d called it in to his company, which had called it in to the police. So a lawyer was needed who knew the judge.”

“Joey is not the sharpest knife in the drawer?”

“He shows great loyalty. He looks after his mother. And at least he tried to show some initiative. It was just youthful hijinks, long before he found his proper role in life.”

“Which is?”

“Joey is now a banker.”

“You mean, like a loan shark.”

“For Aldrich Bank, downtown. Mostly mortgages, though, so I won’t quibble with your description.”

“Oh.”

* * *

“For a book that supposedly doesn’t exist, this thing sure turns up often enough.” Marian was finally taking a break from her online searches, handing Matthew the nice sheaf of stuff she’d printed out for him to peruse in his off time, if there was such a thing.

“The last report I can find was a guy from the British Museum traveling in the Sinai back in the 1930s. He stopped over at some monastery deep in the desert. The monks gave him the run of the place, he sat on a stone bench in a little library that had old books in a jumble. I mean old — vellum and parchment, leather bindings, hand-copied stuff. He says some of them were multiple old books that had been re-bound together, so he’s paging through some old book on alchemy and suddenly there it is,
The Testament of James the Just
. Of course the monks wouldn’t let him take anything away.”

“Let me guess,” Chantal chimed in. “He had other commitments. . . .”

“He had other commitments, of course, planned to go back the next year to copy the thing if he couldn’t actually buy it, but then the war started, followed by more years of political unrest; he doesn’t get back for 14 years. And when he does . . .”

“The old abbot had died, and no one had any idea what book he was talking about.”

“How did you guess?”

Matthew shook his head. “They might as well start these accounts with ‘Once upon a time . . .’”

“He swears he saw it, says he couldn’t very well have forgotten the first page, which he quotes as a variant of what we’ve heard before.”

“This is starting to sound like a tape loop or something, like
Groundhog Day
.”

“Exactly.” Marian was getting unusually animated. “All the accounts of the sightings of the Testament share these extremely coincidental details. There’s never time or opportunity to translate or even copy more than a line or two. The monks are wary, the traveler doesn’t want to give offense. He assumes he can return in a fairly short time with a proper letter of introduction to get down to work properly. But something always comes up. He falls ill, war breaks out, the Turks or the Germans are always up to something, travel in the region is impossible. When he finally gets back, 10 or 12 years later, the old abbot is dead, the book has vanished, no one even knows what book he’s talking about. I can see where after a few centuries people start to get a little cynical. ‘I found the rarest book in the world but my dog ate it.’ It’s like claiming they’ve seen a copy of
The Pillars of the Universe
, by Paul Muad’Dib, or the original manuscript of ‘The Giant Rat of Sumatra.’”

“Or a complete set of the Chums of Chance,” Matthew agreed, “including the hard-to-find
Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit
. But they do all agree on how the book begins?”

“Oh, yes, everyone knows the beginning. Call me Ishmael. I was born in a house my father built. Or, in this case, ‘This is
The Testament of James the Just
, brother of Yeshua Ben-Joseph, known to the Romans as Jesus, who was crucified by Pilate the prefect in the something-or-other year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, and who survived.’”

* * *

While they’d been talking a pale young man dressed all in black had sauntered in, glanced through the dollar books by the front door, then oh-so-casually placed a 10-by-12 manila envelope on the front counter and left. Marian walked over, opened it, gave it a quick look and handed it to Matthew.

“A letter from the missing Rashid al-Adar, or at least supposedly,” Matthew explained as he scanned it. “Instructions to sell
The Testament of James
to the first person who offers more than $100,000, but only for cash.” He handed the document to Chantal, who read it and then handed it back to Marian.

“Legitimate?” Chantal asked.

“Letters from people who have disappeared are inherently suspicious,” Matthew replied. “It’s also not a way Rashid and I have ever done business. Keep it in a drawer up here, if Rashid’s brother Hakim calls, which I expect he will, ask him to drop by and give us his opinion of the signature.”

Chantal found Matthew in the far corner of the store, reorganizing “Math and Physics.” Some books that were showing their age on the shelves he would mark down, others got stacked in a box for the dollar rack or to be repaired or donated. The biggest problem, though, was that left to their own devices the customers would not only re-shelve books spine-in or with their dust jackets akimbo, they would actually pull down the erotica from the top shelf and leave
The Misadventures of Janice
face-out with the children’s books. They’d tried posting “Your mother is no longer available to clean up after you” signs; it did no good.

Tabbyhunter was sprawled on top of the bookcase. Occasionally he would reach down with one paw and bat at Matthew’s hair. Matthew would reach up and catch the paw, hold it for a few seconds, then let it go just before the gray tiger could bite his hand.

“Matthew? Marian says Jackson is here.”

Jackson was a good customer, ’50s TV and classic rock ’n roll, posters, signed albums, autographed books, anything that had to do with San Francisco in the ’60s. But he was generally phone and Internet; it was unusual for him to be in.

“Jackson!” They did one of those four-handed handshake things that involved grabbing the forearm, like teen-age lifeguards. Chantal rolled her eyes. “Wish you’d let us know you were coming, we could have put on dinner,” Matthew continued. “As a matter of fact, how long can you stay?”

“No, no, I won’t put you out, I was just passing through. Some damned federal prosecutor got a hair across his ass that my associates were violating the Wire Act, guy’s been in some kind of a Nembutal trance for 20 years. We had to file restraining orders and seek a declaratory judgment, you wouldn’t believe the time and money it takes just to run a legal business any more. Well, maybe you would.”

“I would. Talk to people who sell ivory chess sets.”

“Ivory? Oh, right! Endangered species!” The explosive laugh. Jackson was a big man and his whole body shook when he laughed.

“Matthew, don’t mean to put you on the spot, maybe I could look around a little, only have a couple hours in town, but do you have anything for me?”

“I think I do.” Matthew led Jackson back beyond the curtained room of pricier books, past the “Please check with staff” sign, to the old windowless pantry adjoining the kitchen that now held the safes. Matthew worked one of the dials, swung open the massive steel door, and reached in, setting aside first editions of
Anna Karenina, Riddle of the Sands
, and
Tarzan of the Apes
, all protected in heavy Ziploc bags.

“Here you go,” he handed Jackson a newer book in a flashy modern dust jacket.

“Ah,
Have Mercy!
” Jackson nodded as he held the book reverently. “I grew up with the Wolfman. Of course, it’s not that rare a book unless it’s . . .”

“Signed, yes.”

The famed disc jockey, who introduced classic Rhythm and Blues to a generation of young Southern Californians from his pirate station South of the Border and was rewarded with a pivotal role in George Lucas’ breakthrough film
American Graffiti
, had just finished the first leg of his book tour when he died of a heart attack at the age of 57, arriving home after recording his show, July of 1995.

“Not many out there.” Jackson opened the book to the half-title, where the Wolfman, born Robert Smith of Brooklyn, N.Y. had signed in his hard-to-mistake black felt-tip scrawl, complete with his iconic pop-eyed wolfman cartoon.

“‘To my pals,’” Jackson read aloud, “‘Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia, thanks for—’” and now the big man actually emitted an involuntary sob. “‘Thanks for putting me in your song.’”

“You know the song?”

“‘Ramble On Rose.’ But no one knew this existed, Matthew. I mean, no one even. . . . Jerry died that same year.”

“A month later.”

“You can sell me this?” Jackson had tears in his eyes.

“Held it to give you the first chance.”

“And you’re pretty sure it’s, I mean . . .”

“Look at the bleed-through on the reverse. See where it’s uneven from the upward pen strokes? That at least tells us it was free-hand. Now, a good forger can forge anything, but they usually stick to Fitzgerald and Hemingway and your Harry Potters. And in that case you’d expect someone to be asking a high price. But this showed up at an estate sale, going for the same money as the Clive Cusslers.”

“Yes. Of course, yes. I want this. Can you, can you pack it and ship it to me?”

“Marian will handle it.”

“Insured. Take a scan or something, so we can prove what it is if anything happens, that it exists.”

“Of course.” Matthew placed the other books back in the safe — including the first of Haggard’s
She
that had been sitting on top — spun the dial, and turned to guide Jackson back out to the front of the store. “Anything else you’re looking for?”

“Where did it come from? Do you know?”

“I can’t find any record it was listed in the Garcia estate, you know what a mess that was. Things like that could go to the children, a roadie, they hang onto it for awhile and then there’s another death or a foreclosure and the estate gets cleared by an executor or a distant relative who just wants the house empty so they can sell it, they don’t even look inside.”