The Bookman's Promise (32 page)

This was a stunning announcement, which she had saved for the last, but she gave it to us with a dismissive wave of her hand. “Poor Barney Stuyvessant had a miserable jerk for a brother-in-law and then had his life cut short to boot. He might have been an important early photographer, but he went into the Confederate Army in 1861 and was killed at Bull Run in July that year. His sister apparently had possession of his records, papers, letters, and books as well as his original glass plates. She had believed in him all her life, but she died in childbirth in 1862, and Kelleher got rid of all that stuff.

“I don’t know what happened to it in the years after the war. Sometime in the 1960s it surfaced in a North Charleston junkshop. Rulon heard about it and went to see it. The man only wanted five hundred for everything: my God, those glass plates alone were a steal at that price, but Rulon was one of those maddening people who never paid the asking price for anything. He certainly could afford it, but he just had to dicker and the fellow got offended. What happened next depends on what you want to believe. Rulon either walked or was thrown out and had second thoughts almost at once. But he had a huge ego, he hated to admit he’d been wrong, and by the time he got back there two weeks later, the junkman had sold it to someone else. And was just delighted to tell him about it.”

“Who bought it?”

“A fellow named Orrin Wilcox, who was traveling through town. He was a…” She looked at Luke. “What was it he called himself? A booksmith, a booksomething, I can’t remember.”

“A bookscout,” I said.

“That’s it. A junkman by another name: someone who deals primarily in books but knows about letters and photographs as well. An eccentric man.”

“Many of them are.”

“By then I was determined to follow it to the end. I tracked him to Charlotte, where he has the most incredibly cluttered bookstore I have ever seen. It wasn’t even a bookstore in the normal sense of the word: it was like a cave of books that went back and back through I don’t know how many rooms, all so crowded with stuff that you could barely move. You got the feeling if you pulled one book out the whole building would tumble down. No place for a claustrophobic. But I went up there and saw this stuff. I had some notion that I was on the verge of a major discovery. Maybe I was, but we’ll never know that now, will we?”

“What happened?”

“I scraped together some money and I left Luke here to mind the store, then I caught a bus for North Carolina. I found Mr. Wilcox with no trouble at all. He was a gnarled little man, very old, very crotchety, so cantankerous I didn’t know what might set him off. But he let me in and for a while we got on reasonably well. I thought I was playing it so cool, but when we got down to brass tacks I got a bit spooked. I asked if he still had the Barney Stuyvessant archive and he said, ‘Whaddaya think I did with it, dearie, threw it out with the blinkin’ trash?‘ I told him I was looking for a picture I had heard might be in there, just a street scene with two men in it, and right away he said, ’Charlie ‘n’ Dick.‘

“I couldn’t believe it. I felt my heart turn over. I said, ‘Oh yes!’ and he got this evil grin on his face and said I should follow him. Back we went into the cave, all the way into a far back room. It was just like the rest of the place—oh, Janeway, you have no idea.”

“Actually, I do.”

“Well, there the stuff was—boxes and boxes of glass plates. I guess he’d long ago sold off the books but the plates were all there, piled in wooden boxes, one on top of another. He found the one I wanted right away. The original label was still on it—Barney had marked each one with a piece of adhesive or some kind of old tape and it was identified in his own hand. The writing said,
Charlie and Dick on East Bay
. He had taken down only their first names and that’s the title he had given it. The date on it was still legible, May something, 1860. Old Wilcox held it up to the lightbulb and said, ‘That look like what you want?’ And I came a hell of a lot closer than I wanted to come, we stood side by side with our arms almost touching, and I looked up at the image and there they were, in negative, Charlie and Dick, and even on the negative I could make out those shadows on Burton’s cheeks, and behind them was the Exchange Building. I’d know that anywhere, in positive, negative, or CinemaScope. And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s it,’ and I tried to keep my heartbeat from knocking us both down, but when I looked in his face he had a grin that was almost cadaverous. I could see his skull right through the skin, and he grinned and said, ‘Bet you’d like a picture of that, wouldn’t you, honey?’ I said, ‘I’d be happy to pay you for one,’ and he said, ‘Only a thousand dollars to you, sweetie.’”

She looked a little sick now, recalling it. “I know that doesn’t sound like much, but it was out of the question. There’s just no way we could have done that.”

She shrugged. “Maybe you can.”

We talked some more and retired just before eleven o’clock. By then we all had a good sense of each other and they made a serious pledge to visit us in Colorado. “Maybe we’ll even get lucky and be assigned there,” Luke said. “I always wanted to work in the mountains, at Mesa Verde or Rocky Mountain National Park.” I told them my house would always be their house, and I promised Libby I would keep her informed as the Burton story developed. We called it a night and walked the few feet to the museum, where the three of us would bed down on the floor. Outside, the night was oppressively murky: inky, bleak, black-hole dark, with a stout wind that came at us in gusts off the sea. The sky was cloudy: only a small streak of stars could be seen through a seam across the top of the world, but that did nothing to relieve the blackness of the harbor. Charleston was nowhere to be seen, lost in some distant fog.

I stood at the door and heard Erin say my name.

“Hey, you coming?”

“Yeah, I’ll be along. You two go ahead.”

They went inside and I got out my flashlight and climbed along the edge of the battery toward the gorge wall. I thought I’d heard the sound of a boat again, and I wanted to give things a last look before turning in. I had no real reason to be uneasy or suspicious: Dante would have to be crazy to mount an assault on Fort Sumter with rangers on duty, and guys like Dante don’t stay alive by being fools. But that’s what old Judge Petigru said about the secessionists of olden days, that South Carolina was too small for a republic and too large for a lunatic asylum, and look what happened anyway. My uneasiness persisted and grew as I moved around the battery above the black ruins.

Whatever I had heard, it was gone now: nothing but the wind assaulted my ears, that and the sea washing against this ghostly black shoal. I still wasn’t satisfied. I wanted to stand at the edge of the fort and behold the nothingness, and that meant I had to go down through the old parade ground and pick my way back up to the right flank where the high ground was. From there I had a sweeping view: more pitch-blackness than I could ever remember in my life. I circled the old wall, keeping my light pointed down in front of me, and at last I came to the point where I turned off the light and just stood there. Nothing…

Nothing.

Except for the wind, this must be what death is like.

I walked along the gorge and down the left flank. From there I could see into the tiny room where Libby and Luke were talking, washing dishes, putting things away. It floated in space and a few minutes later she drew a curtain across the front window. Almost at once their light went out.

I turned back toward the channel, feeling rather than seeing it. Morris Island, I thought: Fort Wagner. In that void it was hard to imagine what had happened over there: one of the great epics of warfare, overshadowed by Vicksburg only because that involved greater numbers and grander strategy and bigger names, and because it was coming to its climax at the same time. I stared at the nothing and closed my eyes, which made no difference at all, and when I opened them I seemed to see the flash of a very old rocket against the eastern sky. Just for a moment I imagined that battle and all those black warriors charging up the beach to certain death. I thought of death…Thought of Denise…

And strangest of all in that time and place, I thought of Dean Treadwell and his unshakable faith in everybody’s bastard, Hal Archer.

Dean and Hal…

I thought the unthinkable and I shivered in the wind.

I picked my way back across the ruins to the battery. Erin stood at the museum door, waiting.

“What are you doing? I was just about to come looking for you.”

“Without a light? You’re smarter than that.”

“Never mind the light. What’s going on out there?”

“Nothing. Go to bed.”

She bristled at my abruptness. “Is this how it’s going to be, being your special friend?”

“I don’t know. We’ve got forty days and forty nights to resolve stuff like that.”

“Thirty-eight as of this morning. This doesn’t bode well for us to make it to thirty-seven.”

I felt her come close in the half-light. I saw her in shadow.

“I want to get this thing resolved,” she said. “It’s not in my nature to live like this, worrying about a madman every waking moment.”

“I intend to resolve it.”

“How?”

“How I should’ve done in the first place. A little grit, a little steel, a little help from an old friend.”

“Okay,” she said calmly. “Whatever that means, I want to be in on it all the way.”

“I don’t need an attorney for this kind of work.”

That was a stupid thing to say, I knew it almost before the words were out, and she reacted as if she’d been slapped. She slammed me back against the wall and whirled away down the ramp. “Well, fuck you, Mr. Janeway.”

“Hey, Erin, wait a minute.”

She stopped and looked back.

“That didn’t come out right.”

“It sure didn’t, you barbarian son of a bitch.”

“I’m sorry.” I reached out to her.

She gestured wildly with her hands. “Jesus Christ, you are such an idiot sometimes.”

“I am, I am.” I made a helpless shrugging dipshit motion. “I know I am.”

“Goddamn male chauvinist turkey-farmer dickhead. What am I going to do with you?”

“Whatever you want. As long as you don’t—”

“If I don’t what?”

“Leave.”

She seemed to melt and flow back up the ramp. She wrapped her arms around me and I buried my fingers in her thick hair.

“Are we okay now?” I dared ask.

“I don’t like being brushed off. Chisel that on your brain if you can find a tool hard enough. Write
Erin hates being patronized, Erin won’t sit still for the little girl treatment
.”

“I’m sorry. I’m beginning to sound like a broken record but I really, really am sorry.”

“Okay, where were we?” she said cheerfully.

“I was about to say something practical. How this is a man’s job and a woman never does anything but screw up a mission.”

“And I said something uncalled for. ‘Fuck you, Janeway,’ or something like that.”

“You’ve really got a nasty streak that I never saw before. Your vocabulary is amazing.”

“Actually, I never swear in real life. Bad language is just bad manners, it’s a symptom of a bankrupt mind. Lee taught me that when I was a kid and I still believe it. But you, you pigheaded medieval-godfather cocksman, you bring out the absolute worst in me.”

“Am I not getting through here? I thought I groveled, whined, and said I was sorry. ‘Medieval-godfather cocksman!’ ‘Turkey-farmer dickhead!’ I thought Koko was tough, but I never got past ‘poopy old picklepuss’ with her.”

“Koko is a lady. I, unfortunately, am not. So who is this hit man we’re going to hire?”

I told her in general terms who, what I wanted him to do, and why he’d do it—not for money but to clear a debt that was decades old. “He’s just gonna be my insurance policy,” I said. “If there is such a thing for this kind of stuff.”

Suddenly she realized I was serious. “Does this guy have a name?”

I almost said I’d take care of it but I thought much better of that and I gave her his name.

“Oh God,” she said. “Oh my dear. You do have some bad friends.”

“Yeah. He was like my brother long ago. People were sure I’d end up just like him.”

“No way could you have been like that.”

“You might sing a different tune if you had known me when I was fifteen. It was amazing, really, that I lived all that down. Became a cop.”

“And you literally saved his life?”

“As literal as it gets.”

“Tell me again what we’re going to have him do.”

“He’s gonna help us teach a certain bad-ass some manners, like Lee taught you but with different powers of persuasion. And I hope with better results.”

“Generally speaking, I like the sound of that,” she said without much enthusiasm.

“You’ll like this even better. I’ve been thinking about it for a while now and I’ve finally come to a couple of ugly conclusions. We’ve gone too far to slip into some live-and-let-live detente, like two bully nations in a cold war, even if that option suddenly became possible. Maybe I’d be okay with a standoff if he hadn’t torched Koko’s house, but that’s not an option anymore. Now there’s got to be an evening-up of the score. I can’t just walk away from here and make like none of this ever happened. I’ve thought about it; can’t do it.”

“What would satisfy you, she asked in fear and trembling.”

“If Dante were to build Koko a new house, that might square it. I don’t know, I’d have to think about it.”

When she spoke again it seemed like a long time had passed. “You must be mad.”

“I’m damned mad.”

“I meant mad as in crazy.”

“That too.”

“He’ll never do that.”

“He might.” I put an arm over her shoulder. “A guy like Dante only understands one thing. But he really understands that.”

“He didn’t understand it the first time.”

“He understood it, he just didn’t quite believe it. My fault; something about my performance must’ve been lacking. Maybe because, no matter how big a bad-ass I tried to be, at the bottom line it was still just a performance. Those guys have a way of knowing.”

“It’s got to be real.”

“Oh yeah.”

“So now it’s real. You would kill him.”

“In a Hungarian heartbeat. But don’t tell Koko yet; I don’t want her to get her hopes up in case it doesn’t work out that way.”

Suddenly she seemed to change the subject. “Do you remember the night we met?”

“Are you kidding? That was one of my all-time high spots.”

“Do you remember what I said?”

“How could I forget? Among other things, you called me a wimp.”

“I never said that. I only wondered innocently how you’d have done in Burton’s shoes.”

“I tried to tell you. All I got for my trouble was ridicule and the rolling-eyes routine.”

“Tell me now.”

“I’d have leaped up from my stretcher and shaken off the fever, found the big lake, made a map that even the Royal Geographic Society couldn’t challenge, left Speke dead in the hot sun, raced home and claimed the glory I should have had all along. So what’s your point?”

“There is no point. Except maybe I love you.” She rose on her toes and kissed me fiercely. “I guess that’s my point.”

“It’s a good one. Maybe now it won’t hurt so much…you know, when we all die together.”