The Bookman's Promise (5 page)

Suddenly I believed her.

I had spent years interrogating people, and in most cases I could smell a lie as soon as it was said. The good cops are the ones who know the truth when they hear it.

The little things were what got me. The particulars, like the blue plaster…

The
pale blue
plaster. The crack in the ceiling, just
over the kitchen door
. The garbageman with his
speckled
mustache and his horse named
Robert
, for Christ’s sake. Who the hell thinks of Robert as a name for a horse? Unless it’s real.

Suddenly she was getting all the benefit of my doubt.

Suddenly I had to give her that much simple justice. Suddenly the choices were no longer mine to make. Suddenly I had to hear what she really knew: I had to separate what she
thought
she knew from what she wanted to believe, and keep what I wanted to believe out of it. Suddenly I had to figure out what the truth was, because, that suddenly, I might have to ask the auction-house people to figure it out for all of us.

I could just imagine what they’d say. There are seldom any guarantees in a book auction, and at first there’d be icy disdain, the kind of ivory-tower, holier-than-thou bullshit that book people dish out better than anyone. Maybe if I made enough noise they’d have to look at it. The Boston Book Galleries was an upscale auction house with a fine reputation, and the book had been sold with a provenance that looked spotless. But in recent years even the most prestigious auction houses had been duped. Some of them had sold their souls and participated in the duping, so nothing was sacred if the book had to be checked. The inquiry would go all the way back to the day when Richard Francis Burton had signed it to some man named Charles Warren.

The old woman looked at me hard, trying to see me through her haze, and again it was as if she knew things that had not been said. She knew how close she had come to losing me. She had broken through a chink in my defenses and she knew that too, even if she didn’t quite know how. She had come with little hope on a journey that must have seemed endless, and in just these few minutes we had reached a turning point. She took a deep breath and we were back to that moment of truth she had sidestepped a moment ago. She tried to smile but didn’t make it, and in the end there was nothing to do but to say what she had come here for.

“My grandfather died in 1906. His library was pillaged immediately after his death, all of it whisked away in a single evening. It’s never been seen since.”

I coughed, politely, I hoped. But the chemistry between us was sizzling now, and I knew exactly what she wanted. She wasn’t just after my book, she wanted it all. Her grandfather’s library had been missing for more than eighty years and Ms. Josephine Gallant, at the end of her life, wanted me to find it for her.

The only sound in the next half minute was the ticking of the clock. She sat waiting while my mind ran through the worst possible implications of what she had said.

I knew enough about the law in these matters to know how murky it could get. Common law says title can’t be acquired even from a good-faith seller if there’s theft hidden somewhere in the property’s history. The term
caveat emptor
may be part of a dead language but there are excellent reasons why it is still universally known. Richard Burton in his earliest childhood would have had a perfect understanding of it.

Things are seldom that simple in modern American law. State statutes may vary wildly on the same set of circumstances, and the passage of enough time can erode original rights in defiance of legal intent. People die, decades slip away, and what was once clearly their property can acquire a valid-looking new history of ownership.

Eighty years was a good long time, but this old lady had not died. She sat before me, a human relic, waiting tensely for some indication of what I would do. All she had going for her was a faint hope and the tiny matter of my conscience. If I chose to go happily among the world’s most notorious assholes, what could she do about it? I had bought the book fair and square: hell, I could stonewall her forever. Even if she’d had money and the law was ultimately on her side, its process was not. Given her age and the way lawyers jack each other off, she’d never live long enough to see her book again.

I had a hunch she knew these things as well as I did. Even Ralston knew: I could see him in my peripheral vision, out at the end of my art section, keenly interested in us now and no longer making any effort to hide it. Was there such stuff as three-way chemistry? Maybe so, but that didn’t account for everything. We all knew what I could have done. Only I knew what I had to do.

“What are you thinking, Mr. Janeway?”

“Just groping around the edges of a moral dilemma, Ms. Gallant.”

I could almost see her mind churning, hunting for any small thing that would make my dilemma less groping and my choice more moral. But she didn’t know how to get there, and all she could do was ask a blind question. “What can I tell you?”

I picked up my notepad, which had dropped to the floor beside my chair. “His name was Warren, yours is Gallant. You can start with that.”

“Warren was my mother’s name. Gallant was the name of the fool I married, more than seventy years ago. I kept it because I always loved the regal sound of it.”

This too sounded real, but she was still reading doubt into my questions. “Does it seem far-fetched that I might’ve found someone to marry me once, Mr. Janeway?”

“Not at all.”

“I wasn’t always a withered old prune. There was a time when even a young buck like yourself might’ve found me comely. But that was so long ago it might have been on another world.” She touched her cheek as if searching for a tear. “The first time I heard it I thought the name Gallant had the loveliest sound. Tucker Gallant. My God, he’s been dead almost sixty years. I wonder if I didn’t marry him just for his name.”

“You don’t strike me as the type who would do that, Mrs. Gallant.”

“Who knows what type I was? I was barely a grown woman when I met him.”

Her hands had begun to tremble and she looked away, squinting at the light from the street. Hope was fickle and it faded now as reality settled in. “I knew I was coming here on a fool’s errand. You’re being very kind, Mr. Janeway, but I’m not under any illusions about anything. Even if I could prove everything I say, where would I be?”

“In an ideal world, I would return the book and get my money back. Then the auction house would give it to you as the rightful owner.”

“Your tone tells me that’s not likely to happen.”

“It’s not theirs to give. Their position would be that all sales are final. In that ideal world, maybe you could discover who consigned it. But then you’d have to fight it out with him.”

“How do they think I’m supposed to do that?”

I shrugged. “Not their problem.”

“So much for the ideal world. Now what?”

I didn’t say anything. Hell, I was no lawyer: it wasn’t my place to tell her what to do. If I made a good-faith effort to find out about the book, nobody could ask more than that.

“This is some situation,” she said.

Yes, it was, but I wasn’t going to advise her.

“If you keep the book, I lose. If you give it back, I still lose.”

So far she had an excellent grasp of it.

“I guess my only recourse is to persuade you to give
me
the book.”

There was a touch of self-ridicule in her voice, like,
That’ll be the day, when cows milk themselves dry and the ghost of Richard Burton comes back to take it away from you at the point of a sword
.

“No one but a fool would do that,” she said.

She had that right. In our dog-eat-dog world, she was nothing to me. She was trouble and pain, the embodiment of bad news. But my heart went out to her.

“I shouldn’t joke about it,” she said. “That’s a lot of money to joke about.”

“Tell me about it.”

I hadn’t been aware she’d been joking—how could I tell?—but now in her self-deprecating laugh I caught a glimpse of the girl she’d been: a heartbreaker, I’d bet, in the springtime of the Roaring Twenties with her life just beginning and the world opening up. In that moment the money seemed crazily irrelevant. It was still only Indian money: If I had to give up the book, I’d miss it like a severed kidney, but how much would I really miss the stupid money? I shifted my weight on the stool and said, “I don’t know what I’d do,” and she took in her breath and held it for a moment.

“I just don’t know, that’s all I’m saying. If we could verify everything—if there were no doubts—then I guess that would be one of my options, wouldn’t it?”

She shook her head. “You’re out of your mind.”

“We’re not breaking any new ground there, Mrs. Gallant.”

She squinted and peered, said, “I wish I could see you better,” but her apprehension was gone. Her fear was gone, and what was left between us was a strange and growing harmony. Was that trust I saw in her face?

“I had no idea what I’d find when I came here. I certainly didn’t expect to meet a man of honor. I thought such creatures were extinct today.”

“Don’t get too carried away, ma’am. I haven’t done anything yet.”

But there was no getting around it: in those few minutes, something fundamental had changed between us. She gave a small shiver and clutched at the collar of her dress. I asked if she was cold—I had an afghan back in my office—but she shook her head.

“Mr. Ralston?”

“Yes, ma’am?” He came up to join us.

“Would you please get my bag from the car?”

I had my own chilling moment as Ralston brought in the bag and she directed him to take out what was obviously a book wrapped in cloth. What else would it be but a Burton? I fingered its violet cloth cover, opened it to the title page, and my last doubt about her vanished. A cherry copy, an exquisite
First Footsteps in East Africa
, London, 1856. I touched the inscription:
To Charles Warren, my best American friend Charlie, in the hope that our paths may one day cross again, Richard F. Burton
. It had been inscribed in 1860.

“That’s an exceedingly rare volume today,” she said. “I’ve had it hidden away, protected it for years. I understand it’s unheard of to find one with the forbidden appendix intact.”

The notorious so-called infibulation appendix. I turned to page 591 and found it tipped in, four pages in Latin. I remembered from Brodie’s biography that it had contained material then considered so salacious that the printers had refused to bind it into the book.

“The sexual practices of the Somalis,” she said. “All spelled out for the public horrification and secret titillation of proper old hypocritical England. Penis rings, female circumcision—things they couldn’t talk about then and we can’t get enough of today.”

“Burton never did have any inhibitions when it came to describing what he saw.”

“For all the good it did him. I understand only a few copies survived.”

“How did you manage to save this one?”

“I was lucky. Charlie had taken this volume out of his library to look up something. It was upstairs where it wasn’t supposed to be the night he died. Later my mother found it and hid it. She kept it secret until she died, and it was found among her things. A few worthless relics, some worn-out old clothes, and this—the sum of her existence, but to me it was a symbol of what we’d been, who we were.”

I flipped my notepad to a new page. “So tell me who you were.”

“We were never rich, I’ll tell you that. We were always comfortable, solidly in the middle class while Charlie was alive, but people were more apt to be either rich or poor then, and the middle class was a much smaller part of the population. You could live very well in the middle class in those days.”

She slipped back into her dream face. “Everything we were in the good times began and ended with my grandfather. He was such a loving authority figure to me when I was a child. His friends called him Charlie, but of course to me he was always Grandfather; it would have been a sacrilege to think of him any other way. But on my eightieth birthday I suddenly realized I was older than him— when he died, you know, and got stuck at seventy-nine forever. That’s when he became more like a dear old friend and I started thinking of him as Charlie.”

“What about your father?”

“My father…” She struggled for a word but couldn’t find it. The moment stretched and became strained. “What do you want to know? I tried to love my father…but he wouldn’t let me. He wasn’t a bad man…just a weak one.”

“Did he drink?”

I saw her recoil in surprise.

“I’m not a mind reader, ma’am, it just figures.”

She fidgeted. She could feel me hemming her in, taking her into places she had avoided for a long time. At last she answered the question. “His drinking put my mother in the poorhouse after my grandfather died. That’s where
she
died, alone in a consumption ward. They all died within a few years of each other—Charlie…Mama…him.”

I decided to leave her father’s drinking for the moment, but I knew we’d get back to it. “So you were alone in the world at what age?”

“Thirteen.”

“This was in Baltimore?”

“Yes, but when Mama got sick I was sent to live with her brother in Boise, Idaho.”

“How did that work out?”

“It was horrible. He was a common laborer; he made very little money and his wife took in wash to help make ends meet. They already had five children, the last thing they needed was another one. I was resented by all of them; they never said it in so many words, but I knew. They put up with me because I was family, that’s what good people did then. I hated being an obligation, so I ran away after two years and I never saw any of them again. I’m sure they all said good riddance when I was gone.”

Her eyes drifted to the street, as if moving images from that old life had begun to play on my storefront window. “They’d all be dead now, wouldn’t they?”

“That’s hard to say. You’re still here.”

A pregnant pause: I flipped a page. “What happened then?”

“A lot of things you don’t need to know about. Just say I soon learned how to take care of myself and we’ll leave it at that. I went back to Baltimore and married Gallant in 1916. I’ve had an amazing ability to go from bad to worse all my life, and this was just another case of it. That doesn’t matter now, it’s all a very long time ago. Let’s just say Gallant didn’t live up to the promise of his name.”

She made a nervous gesture. “Let’s talk about something else. Those were hard times and I’d rather not think about it. Anyway, Gallant’s got nothing to do with this. I doubt if I ever said the word
books
the whole time we were married. But I never stopped thinking about them. They were on my mind all through those hard years.”

“Sounds like you had a few of those. Hard years, I mean.”

She made a little laughing sound. “Oh honey, I could tell you stories that would curl your toenails. The twenties weren’t half-bad; we had some good days then and some money too. But Tucker lost his shirt along with everybody else in 1929. Then he…died…and I lived in a cardboard box at a garbage dump all through the winter of 1931. The dump was the only place where the cops would leave me alone. I went to sleep every night with the smell of rotten meat in my nose and the sounds of rats in my ears. All I had was that little silver key to Tucker’s deposit box, where I kept my book. But what does that matter now? I lived through it and I’m still here, fifty-eight years after Tucker Gallant was laid out with two fellas throwing dirt in his face.”

She swallowed hard and looked off into the dark places of the store. “The tough part is when I think how different my life might’ve been if those books hadn’t been lost. Knowing all the time they were meant to be mine.”

“What would you have done with them then, sold them?”

“That would’ve been hard. They were such a part of my life.” She shrugged. “When you get hungry enough you’ll sell anything. They sure weren’t worth then what they’d sell for today, but I bet I’d have gotten myself a fair piece of change even in the thirties. Maybe put myself through college. I always wanted to go to college. Always wanted to study…”

“Study what?”

“You’ll laugh.”

“No, I won’t. Of course I won’t laugh.”

“It just seems silly now, but I always wanted to study something grand. Like philosophy.”

She rolled her eyes at her own folly. “My gosh, philosophy. Of all the silly things.”

I didn’t laugh: she did.

“Now I ask you, Mr. Janeway, have you ever heard of anything as silly as that?”