The Bookman's Promise (6 page)

Two customers came in, high-rollers from Texas who passed through Denver once a year, and for a while I was busy showing them some high-end modern books. They bought a slug of stuff that I was thrilled to see hit the road, passing over two immaculate Mark Twains to throw about the same amount of money at Larry McMurtry, Hunter S. Thompson, and a few others whose names will be toast when old Clemens is still a household word. Ralston watched them peel off eight crispy bills from a roll of hundreds and saunter up the street with their small bag of books.

“Man, I’m in the wrong business.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not always like that.”

“Doesn’t need to be.”

Almost an hour had passed since I had last spoken to Mrs. Gallant. She looked exhausted, her eyes wide open, staring at nothing. I thought, God, I’d like to crawl inside your head, but if I’d had one wish, I’d liked to have been there when her grandfather died. I had some drippy, cavalier notion that I’d have rescued her life: that, one way or another, I’d have stopped her father from selling her books.

“Mrs. Gallant.” I pulled up my stool. “I know you’re tired, but can we talk about your father for just a minute?”

Suddenly she cupped her hands over her face and wept. I touched her shoulder and we sat like that, and after a while, when she was ready, she told me what had happened. Of course the old bastard had sold her books: to him they were nothing. “He never read a book in his life,” she said. “He couldn’t have cared less. He got thirty dollars for all of them and drank that up in a week.”

“Was there a paper, any kind of legal document?”

“None that I ever saw.”

Of course not—who makes up a paper for a thirty-dollar deal? But if money had changed hands it was legal, and who after eighty years could prove that it was not?

“He was told they weren’t worth anything—they were just junk books. Doesn’t that make it a fraud? And what
right
did he have to sell them? They weren’t his to sell.”

This was yet another legal mess. What had the law said in 1906, when a woman still couldn’t vote, about a man’s right to his wife’s property? Specifically, what had the law in
Maryland
said in those days of such enlightenment?

I felt the beginnings of a headache. There were still questions to ask, all leading nowhere, I knew, but I had to ask them. I made some notes and when I looked up, Mrs. Gallant had begun to teeter in the chair. I put my hand on her arm and then Ralston was there, holding her steady. “That’s all for now, Janeway,” he said, and there was no nonsense in his voice: we were finished.

We talked for a moment about what to do. “She’ll come home with me,” Ralston said. “It ain’t the Brown Palace, but she can rest easy till Denise gets home.”

We helped her out to the car. Ralston gave me a paper with his telephone number and told me to call him later. I leaned down and spoke to her through the open window. “One last question, ma’am. Do you have any idea who bought those books?”

“Yes, of course. He was looking for fast money, so he sold them to a bookstore.”

There it was, the only ray of light in what had so far been a damned hopeless story. If a book dealer had bought that entire library for thirty dollars, even allowing for the much cheaper values of the time, it had certainly been one hell of a fraud. But what did that matter now? Like Richard Burton and Charlie Warren, like her mother and father, the garbageman and his horse, Gallant, the Boise relatives, and all the others, that bookseller would have died a long time ago.

Then she said something that hit me like a slap. “When I think of those awful book people—those Treadwells—how can they live with themselves?”

It was the hint of present tense that turned my head around.

“Mrs. Gallant…are you telling me that place is still in business?”

“Of course it is, it’s been there forever. Haven’t you ever heard of Treadwell’s? It’s a den of thieves, passed down in the same rotten family for a hundred years.”

If I had spent more time on the road I might have known about Treadwell’s. A bookman who travels always picks up local scuttlebutt, and one who travels constantly eventually knows everything about everybody. The notorious get reputations, and booksellers do love to talk candidly with a colleague they can trust.

In an hour I had made six calls to dealers I knew around the country, and I had several pages of notes on Treadwell’s Books. I had its address, its phone number, and a good description of its general layout. Its Yellow Pages ad boasted of two million books on three large floors in an old redbrick building on Eastern Avenue just off South Broadway, in an area of downtown Baltimore not far from Johns Hopkins Hospital. Over the years I had been in so many bookstores like that, I could almost see it. Dark stairwells, creaky floors, narrow aisles, deep and dusty shelves. Books double- and triple-shelved, books stacked on end, piled on top of the overflowing bookcases, with another overflow on the floor at the end of each section. Books on every conceivable subject and a few on topics nobody could have imagined. It was possible in such a store that some of the titles in the back rows of each section had not been touched in decades.

The store’s history was colorful and long. It stretched back across much of the century and had spawned generations of bookpeople, beginning with old Dedrick Treadwell, the king of knaves in that turn-of-the-century book world. The Treadwells had always had a dubious reputation in the book world. “They’d pay as much as anybody if they were bidding against other dealers and the books were good,” said a bookman in the D.C. area who knew them well. “But if it’s just them and some poor know-nothing who’s just inherited a houseful of books…Well, I’m not one to call another man a crook…let’s just say I’ve heard stories, and let it go at that.”

In his early days, old man Treadwell had operated out of various hole-in-a-wall shops. In the early thirties he had leased the building on Eastern Avenue with an option to buy. He had clearly set his sights on bigger game, and soon he and his son were sucking up books by the tens of thousands, all over the East Coast. They were voracious buyers, insatiable raptors of the book trade. “God knows how many books that we now consider classic and sell for four figures were blown out of there for nickels and dimes then,” one dealer said. They were of the turn-‘em-fast school: buy cheap, sell cheap, get the cash, move on, and buy some more.

I love stores like that: I can spend hours and thousands of dollars in those dusty, half-lit book dungeons. But they are becoming severely endangered as rents go ever higher and downtown space is consumed by high-traffic, high-profit enterprises. Soon they will be like the people of Margaret Mitchell’s Old South, no more than a dream half-remembered.

The first Treadwell must have imagined the trends decades ago. He bought the building and his son had sons and flourished there. They rode out the Depression, the war years were good, and the postwar even better. The second generation died and a third came along. A few of them stayed in the trade; most left to find, they hoped, a brighter future elsewhere. Today the managing partners were brothers of the fourth generation, Dean and Carl Treadwell. I got good descriptions of both from a dealer in Chicago. “Dean is a big, burly fellow with a beard,” my friend said. “Carl is a smaller guy, quieter, but you get the feeling there’s a lot going on with Carl—some anger, maybe even an occasional original thought. Carl gives you the feeling of still water running deep, and Dean would rather come off as a hail-fellow-well-met, salt-of-the-earth type. Dean likes to pretend they’re just rubes, but make no mistake, there are two cunning minds under all that bullshit he puts on. And they do know their books.”

Maybe so, but in the current generation, Treadwell’s had suddenly fallen on hard times. “Carl’s the culprit,” said the guy in Washington. “You didn’t hear it here, but he’s gotten himself into bad company—gamblers, thugs, the Baltimore mob. Gangsters may even own a piece of that store now. I heard Carl lost his pants in a poker game last year.”

“You should get out more,” said my friend in Chicago. “Everybody knows about the Treadwells.”

For another hour I meditated over what I had learned. There have always been a few crooks in the trade. As one old bookman put it, there’s a bad apple in every town. Sometimes he’s an obvious con man dripping with charm. He may be the cold thief who walks casually out of a bookstore with a ten-volume Conan Doyle tucked into every inch of his pants, coat, and shirt, the signed volume crammed desperately into some dank body cavity, and immediately finds another bookseller eager to hold his nose and buy it, fifty cents on the dollar, no questions asked. He is also that rival bookseller who must know a hot book when he sees one. He wears more faces than Lon Chaney in the best of his times. He’s the sweet-faced kid who jacket-clips worthless book club editions and sells them as firsts to the Simon Pure collector. Occasionally he’s a renegade, thriving on intimidation and operating from the trunk of a car. He may be any kind of personality, but that glitch in his character keeps him working the shady side of the street forever. His spots never change.

As I grew into my business I learned how gray it all is. There is such an eye-of-the-beholder mentality in the book trade that it plays perfectly into the hands of the enemy. What
must
be paid as a rock-bottom minimum to keep it just above the level of fraud? Should it matter if a two-hundred-dollar book is in tiny demand compared with a book that sells easily for the same two hundred? How much may be deducted for condition, and by whose standard must condition be measured? We don’t like to admit it but the flimflam man has a trait that’s all too common to the rest of us. The degree of his crookedness is a wild variant, and our own generosity can vary as much from one of us to the next.

It’s no wonder that the trade is such a warm, fertile place for pond scum; what’s amazing is how little of it you actually find there. Most dealers pay 30 to 40 percent, straight across the board, which is certainly decent, considering the overhead. Many do scale back what they pay because they may have those books for years. Some of them may never sell. And there’s one thing that will always separate us from a cheese-pushing hose artist: we never lie on either end, buying or selling, and he
always
lies—on either end, both ends, and in the middle.

How different my own life might have been. Only some quirk in my character had kept me from becoming what I now despised. I could be rich now on crooked money. I had seldom seen Vince Marranzino since the old days but that possibility had been rife between us. On another night he had stepped out of a big touring car with a wicked-looking sidekick. I’d opened the door, hiding the apprehension I felt, and Vince embraced me like some godfather out of Mario Puzo. I’d slapped his back. He was still hard and tough, and the scar on his face had deepened where long ago a young hood had gashed him with a broken beer bottle. Thinking of him now, his scars reminded me of Richard Burton.

The muscle had waited on the sidewalk while Vince and I talked. Now he was called Vinnie, but I could still call him Vince. He remembered old debts and I could call him anything I wanted.
Only you can call me that old name, Cliffie
.

He knew his presence made me uneasy. But he’d had to come: he’d seen the newspaper stories about my fall from grace, and he wanted to help me square things.

He’d looked around him and said,
You like this book racket
?

Yeah, I do.

You wanna buy some real books?

I dunno, Vince. What would I have to do for ‘em?

Just let me throw a little work your way. I’ve got a job now, you could do it in a week. Make you fifty, seventy-five grand. Buy all the goddamn books you want for that.

Well
, I’d said, smiling.
That would be a start, anyway
.

But I’d said no thanks without hearing what the job was.

Vince had looked disgusted.
Hey you, you big bazooka, when are you gonna let me square accounts with you
?

We’re square now, Vince. You don’t owe me anything.

But I had once saved his life and he shook his head sadly. To a man like Vince, that account could never be squared with words alone.

He’d gripped my arm.
Strong as ever, ain’tcha, Cliff? Bet I can throw your ass
.

I’d laughed.
I’ll bet you can
.

When I looked up again the afternoon had faded. It was five-fifteen and no word from Erin. I faced the fact that she wasn’t coming.

It was two hours later in Baltimore, probably too late to call Treadwell’s—assuming I had some valid excuse, or could think of one, or could say anything that sounded at all real. I was caught up in an old cop’s impulse: I wanted to hear the man’s voice, so I picked up the phone and punched in the number.

It rang, five times…six. Nobody there, just as I thought, and just as well. Then I heard a click on the other end, and a woman’s voice. “Hi, Treadwell’s.”

“Is Treadwell there?”

“Which one?”

“Whoever’s handy.”

She said, “Justa minute, hon,” and I was put on hold. Well, I was into it now: nothing to do but hang up or play it out. There was no elevator music, nothing but that dead-flat line to help me while away the hours. How many times had I done this as a cop, made a cold call with no plan of action and only a hunch to go on? Sometimes it worked out fine, and if there was a compelling reason to pussyfoot around with these guys, I couldn’t see it.

Long minutes later I heard the phone click again, and suddenly there was a faint hum on the line. Almost at once the man spoke: “This’s Dean.”

“Hey, Dean,” I said in my best good-old-boy voice. “I was referred to you as a possible source for some books I want to find.”

“Well, whoever sent you got one thing right—I got books. You buying ‘em by the pound or the ton? Or are you interested in something particular?”

I laughed politely. “The last book I bought by the ton was an Oxford textbook on erectile dysfunction.”

He bellowed into the phone, a raspy laugh followed by a hacking smoker’s cough. “Buddy, if you’ve got that problem, ain’t no book gonna cure it. Might as well slice off the old ginger root and donate it to medical research.”

“Jesus, Dean, don’t jump to that conclusion. That book was for a friend of mine.”

He laughed again. “Yeah, right. So listen, what the hell can I do for you?”

“I heard through the grapevine you might have some books by Richard Burton. I’m talking about real stuff, you know what I mean?”

I thought the pause was long enough to be significant. He coughed again and said, “What grapevine did you hear that through?”

“Oh, you know…here and there. The main question is whether it’s true.”

This time the pause was long enough to be halftime at the Rose Bowl. After a while I said, “Dean? You still with me?”

“Yeah, I’m here. Just trying to think what I might have. We got a lot of books here, pal. I gave up long ago trying to keep track of it all.”

“I don’t think you’d have any trouble keeping track of this stuff. You got a rare book room, I imagine you’d know what’s in it, right? I mean, this isn’t like the two million books you put out on the open shelves.”

“Easy for you to say. You got two million books?”

“Hell no, thank God.”

I waited. I heard the sound of a cigarette being lit. I heard him blow smoke. “Where you calling from?”

“I’m on the road. Trying to decide if it’s worth my time and energy to come all the way out to the coast.”

“And you’re a serious buyer, right?”

“Serious enough to make your day.” I decided to lie a little for the cause. “Maybe your month, if you’ve got what I want.”

“We might still have something, I’m not sure.”

Still
? A damned significant word, I thought. He said, “I’ll have to check and call you back. What’s your name?”

Screw it, I thought: let’s see where this goes. “Cliff Janeway.”

“The guy in Denver?”

“I can’t believe how that story got around.”

“Yeah. You’ll have to tell me who the hell your press agent is.”

“His last name’s luck. First name’s dumb.”

“I could use some of that.”

“Maybe you’re having it right now, Dean,” I said with a nice touch of arrogance.

“Yeah, we’ll see. I’m sure you know if I did have something like that, it wouldn’t be at any dealer’s prices. I wouldn’t want you to come all the way here thinking there’d be a lot of margin in a book like that.”

“I’m used to that. I didn’t pay a dealer’s price in Boston, either.”

“Okay, so where are we? You want to call me back?”

“Yeah, sure. You say when.”

“How about tomorrow, about this same time.”

“You got it. Good talking to you, Dean.”

I hung up and sat there quietly, thinking about it.

About ten minutes later the phone rang. When I answered it, nobody was there.

Actually, somebody
was
there. For a moment I could hear him breathing, then he covered the phone to cough. And there was that faint hum on the line.

Dean.

My new old buddy, Dean Treadwell. The last of the good old boys, checking up on me.

Now he knew I’d been lying. I wasn’t on the road at all, was I?

I heard the click as he hung up the phone. The hum went away and the line went dead.