The following weekend while I was reading the New York Times and True was feeding Caleb lunch in the kitchen, there was an unexpected knock on the front door. I opened it to find Chuck on the doorstep.
“I spotted your Volvo in the driveway so I figured this was your place. You wouldn’t happen to have a couple of hours? I had a new instrument package put on the Whaler and wanted to check it out, so I’m looking for somebody who can drive while I play with the calibration.”
I had been looking forward to the Sunday paper and my family, but the notion of planting myself atop the flybridge and commanding the resonant power of the twin Yamahas was seductive.
True and I had plans to go to the farmers market, but she seemed pleased for me and Chuck assured her that we’d be back before noon. He said he had already put the boat in the water and it was tied up at a public dock.
I would have liked to take Caleb. I knew it would be a thrill for a six-year-old to ride on the big boat. But calibrating nautical instruments was serious, grown-up work and Caleb would be a distraction so I didn’t ask Chuck if Caleb could go along.
The ride over to the marina in Chuck’s big, fully optioned, leather-scented Chevy Suburban didn’t take long—just enough time to move along the rudiments of acquaintanceship. I could hear in his voice the familiar cadence and tone of Eastern society—maybe Long Island.
“So where do you work, Mitchell?”
“I’m a creative exec at Sather and Knowlton. They’re an ad agency.”
“What are you working on?”
“Trek bicycles is our major account these days. What about you?”
“Humble stockbroker.”
“Where?”
“Just a little independent brokerage in Century City. We do mostly money management on a few big accounts and some trading for the house.”
“That sounds good.”
“Yeah. I used to toil in the fields at Merrill Lynch in New York and this is a lot more satisfying.”
“And the market’s good.” I added with a conspiratorial smile.
“Boston Whaler good.”
The boat was tied to the public dock with rope so new and supple that it felt like cashmere. Powerboats have about the same appeal to a sailor as motorcycles have to a sports car owner—they’re a quick thrill, but nothing you’d want to indulge in long term. Anyone who chooses to spend more than an hour or so pounding his kidneys on the afternoon chop has to be a masochist. Chuck’s offer for a brief go-round seemed perfect.
We set out into the channel that leads into Santa Monica Bay. The boat had a speedometer (in marine parlance a “knot meter”) that uses a tiny paddlewheel under the boat to measure the speed of water rushing by. It also had GPS that could read out speed. Both systems are subject to minor inaccuracies. The paddlewheel needs to be calibrated to be trusted, and one can do it either by comparing it to the GPS readout (not accurate after the first decimal point), or by running a course of a fixed length using a stopwatch to measure time in both directions and then computing the speed in knots by dividing seconds into nautical miles. The timed mile is the failsafe mariner’s method, and since proper boating is a celebration of obsessive compulsion, we were going to run the half-mile fixed course marked by poles on the rocks of the channel breakwater and convert time and distance into speed.
My job was easy. He ran the stopwatch and called the marks while I steered a straight line and watched to keep the knot meter at a steady 5.00 knots. We did six passes. He adjusted the instrument on the first four and the last two were confirmatory.
He acted diffident about his background, but after breaking the ice and telling him of my Eastern roots, I learned that he was raised in Greenwich, and had gone to Deerfield Academy and to Dartmouth.
“Deerfield was good for me,” he confided. “I still have friends from Deerfield. I don’t have a lot of fondness left for Dartmouth.”
Chuck didn’t say whether he was a descendent of tire maker Harvey Firestone and I wasn’t about to ask. I think I remember that the Firestones gave to Princeton and not Dartmouth.
In Chuck’s presence I felt a pang of the same discomfort I remember as a nominal black person at Hotchkiss School—an insider and outsider at the same time. Privileged by having attended one of the East’s most prestigious prep schools but always feeling the uneasy guest.
Afterward Chuck invited me for a quick drink at the bar of the California Yacht Club in the Marina where he had a membership. Among a spattering of well-to-do nautical barflies in a milieu of captain’s chairs with polished brass name plaques, trophy cases and yacht club burgees he managed an air of elite diffidence to the surroundings.
“What kind of clients do you have?” I asked him.
“They’re pretty dull, really. We don’t take management accounts under a half mil and we only do it if we totally control all the transactions, so it keeps the loudmouths and bozos pretty much at bay. It’s mostly older clients with too much money who are looking for a good return without getting their hands dirty.”
“Well, I bet they’re happy now.”
“Even in a good market, we always outperform so the answer is yes. And we have our own company portfolio which is doing quite well. Everybody in the market is a winner these days which naturally makes me nervous. You invested?” he asked.
Of course I was invested. The bartender was invested. The parking lot attendant was invested. In 1999, everyone was invested. And we were all pleased as punch with ourselves. It was like being a Chicago Bulls fan in the Michael Jordan days.
“A little bit,” I said with false modesty. “Pick and shovel tech companies. Medium caps mostly.”
“That’s good.” He nodded paternally. “You making out?”
“I’m doing fine.” I tried to mask how terribly proud I was of myself. I was doing fan-fucking-tastic.
“You know I shouldn’t say this—”
“No, that’s okay.”
“Look. Take it for what it’s worth. It’s a rising market. And it will probably keep on going for a while. But it’s not going to last forever.”
“I know that.” I thought I did. It had always been part of my plan to take my original stake off the table and play with winnings only.
“I know everybody and his brother is making money right now just like I am. But in the end it’s really an insider’s game. And I don’t mean just logging on to stocksynergy.com and pimping for stock tips. It’s fat right now and everybody’s feeling good. But when it gets thinner, you’ll be playing against guys in the know, guys like me, and it could get tougher. It will get ugly.”
“I appreciate that.” (Note to myself, what is stocksynergy.com?)
“I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s just that I like you. It looks like you’ve got a great family. I wouldn’t want to see you get hurt.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Enough said. My partners call me Eeyore.”
I got home in time to accompany Caleb on a short bike ride around the block. True made sure his little helmet was fastened tight before we left and stayed home to cook dinner. Caleb and I rode down Wasatch Street, right on Colonial, right again on Palms and then back home. When a poodle barked at us from behind a fence Caleb was startled for a second, then giggly.
Chapter 9
I see Nick’s car parked outside of Book Trader in Redondo Beach. I want to talk to him and I pull into a parking space nearby. Book Trader is a storefront on a narrow street in an area with lots of surf and motorcycle shops. It is one of the few book stores that have survived since Borders and Barnes & Noble and, later, Amazon devoured what was left of the independent bookstores landscape. I look over the two-dollar used-book rack out front and quickly find a book on yoga I know I can sell for twelve dollars.
Online bookselling is one more predator nipping at the heels of brick-and-mortar stores, but Bunk Petersen, Book Trader’s proprietor, has never been anything but kind and cordial to me. The same couldn’t be said about his sister and par
tner, Sally.
“Hey, Ralph,” Bunk greets me. “I heard something about you getting beat up in Anaheim.”
Bunk is in his early sixties, but he approaches with his grip on a walker, the result of early onset Parkinson’s.
“You okay?”
“Yeah. Just bruised and a little wiser.”
“Nick’s in the back. He told me.”
“Yeah. I saw his car.”
Bunk has boxes of books in a shed behind the store. He takes them in from long-established sources and sometimes doesn’t even open the boxes before letting a few preferred online booksellers rummage through them.
He notices the book in my hand. “Find a treasure?”
The synergy of my relationship with Bunk is that he doesn’t like selling online. As a bibliophile he finds no pleasure in the impersonal transaction. To him it’s the difference between owning a restaurant and selling frozen dinners. Because he only carries clean and unmarked inventory and prefers to sell books that actually interest him, a lot of titles that might bring good money on Amazon were chaff for him. This was our point of intersection.
For example, I can bring him a copy of Frank Lloyd Wright: Inside and Out, a nicely illustrated but common coffee table book on a tony subject worth only about six dollars online. Because it’s such an appealing book, it will sell for twenty on Bunk’s shelf. In exchange, he’ll give me an unattractive accounting textbook that would never move in his store, but that I can sell for thirty.
“Hey, Ralphie,” he says, putting down his book and walking toward the back, expecting me to follow. I do, passing through Sally’s hard stare. She regards me and my business as a waste of her brother’s valuable time. He goes to a stack of books on the floor near the back door, picks up a large book.
“You know this?”
It’s a book of Miro lithographs. It says Volume One. There are three more volumes in the set underneath. I don’t know it but I know I should.
“Where’d it come from?” I ask, unable to formulate a smarter question.
“An estate in Pasadena,” he says. As an established and reputable dealer with a physical store, he has access to estate sales that I can’t muster. The high-end estate brokers call Bunk to preview estate libraries because they trust him to pay a fair price. The sleazy brokers may look for someone who will kick back to them for a first look, but that isn’t Bunk.
I thumb through the crisp pages.
“There are thirty-six original lithographs inside the set,” he says. “That’s where the value is.” He is pleased to be my mentor.
I turn the heavy pages and stop on a full-page lithograph. The colors are bright and beautiful. The sharp image looks very much like Miros that I have seen in museums.
“Really nice,” I say with conviction. He’s pleased that I like it. I’m honored that he chooses to share it with me.
“I’m gonna go in back,” I say.
I go out the back door and find Nick outside the metal shed foraging through a couple of moving boxes. I’m uneasy about my agenda. When I inquire about the missing books I don’t want to seem suspicious of him, even if I am. Although we are friends, we understand the larcenous nature of the business, and our trust is layered over a bed of mistrust. Underneath I believe Nick is entirely capable of stealing another bookseller’s books. In fact, I wondered later why he chose to announce when I was on his couch that he noticed that my car was open and that he hoped Helmet Head didn’t take anything. Could that have been disingenuous of him? If so, the benefits of our relationship are still greater than the price of a few books. Let it lie for the moment.
As he digs through the boxes, Nick’s constantly darting little eyes catch me before I speak. He looks briefly surprised, and then grins at me.
“Hey Ralph. How are you feeling?”
“I’m okay.”
“That’s good. Doreen was worried about you.”
“No. I’m feeling a lot better. Thanks to you and her. I appreciate it.”
Nick nods, reaches into a box and pulls out a small paperback, Little Essays Toward Truth by Aleister Crowley.
“What do you think?” he queries me. Everyone is a mentor today. That suits me fine. I pick it up and look at it. The copyright is ten years old. It’s lightly worn. It doesn’t look valuable. I know Crowley has some cachet among book collectors and early editions might be worth a lot, but he is in print in many editions and this one doesn’t seem noteworthy.
“I don’t know.”
I pull out my phone.
“Not good enough, my friend. You won’t find it in there.”
I have a feature in my phone that allows me to quickly check the price of books by feeding it the title or ISBN number, but it’s not very useful for antiquarian or first edition books. He places the book in a small pile he has started. Clearly he considers it to be of value and he’ll negotiate with Bunk for it. I decide this is a good time to ask my question.
“Hey, so I’m missing some books.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I think from my car. I’m thinking maybe Helmet Head took them…when my car was in your driveway. Remember, I forgot to lock it.”
“What books?”
“I’m not sure. But I had a fifty-dollar textbook that was something like Literature and Language and a book about Sufis—”
“Sufis?”
“Yeah. You know. The religious sect?” He nods. I continue. “And a Heinrich Kley art book, but I don’t think it was worth much.”
“You think he took them?”
“I don’t know. I’m sure I had them.”
“You were pretty out of it, Ralphie.”
“No. I know I had them.”
“And that’s it?”
“And an old copy of The Old Man and the Sea.”
“Hardback?”
I nod. I see from his eyes he’s on to something.
“How old?” he continues.
“There are millions of old ones out there.”
“You didn’t look inside it?”
“I threw it in the box.”
“You didn’t look at the publisher’s page?”
“No.”
“What if it was a first?”
“It wasn’t a first.”
“It’s a classic novel. You always have to look at the publisher’s page. Always.”
“I mean what are the chances?”
“Did it have a dust jacket?”
I nod.
“Fishing village on the front dust jacket?”
I nod again.
“Village in brown?” Yes again. “Cover is blue?” he goes on.
“Uh-huh.”
Nick continues to press.
“Was Hemingway’s picture on the back of the dust jacket?”
“I don’t remember. I think so. Maybe.”
I look at him for guidance. I don’t know if it’s good or bad if Hemingway is on the back of the jacket. I have a sinking feeling.
“What color was the photo?”
“I don’t know. Wasn’t it black and white?”
“Was it tinted blue?”
“What do you mean, ‘tinted blue’?”
“Not black and white. Had a bluish tinge.”
“I don’t know.”
“Think.”
I try to remember. When I picture the cover in my mind’s eye, the photograph does indeed have a bluish cast.
“What if it did have a bluish tinge?”
He pauses a moment for effect, then says gravely, “If it had a bluish tinge, then it’s a 1952 book and it’s maybe gonna be a first.”
“It wasn’t a first edition,” I say. I don’t know what I prefer. Do I want to find out the book I had and lost was a first edition? “There are a million of them out there.”
“Okay.”
“I mean, what are the odds?”
“Was the picture blue?”
I think hard. I can see it in blue in my mind, but I don’t know if I’m making i
t up.
Bunk ambles over from inside. Nick brings him up to speed.
“Ralphie found maybe a first edition Old Man and the Sea in Anaheim and Helmet Head stole it out of his car.”
“We don’t know it’s a first edition,” I say.
“If it’s a first it’ll have the Scribner’s seal and a letter A on the publisher’s page,” Bunk offers.
“I never saw the publisher’s page,” I say.
“But why else would he bother to take it? Helmet Head knows books,” Nick offers, shaking his head.
“No, he doesn’t.”
“He’s a fucking iceberg, Ralphie. He’s all under the surface.”
“I won’t let him in the store,” says Bunk.
“I don’t know that he took it,” I protest.
“Fine. Forget I said it.”
“What’s a first edition go for these days?” I ask, trying to sound diffident.
“What was the condition?”
“I don’t know. Pretty good.”
“Dust jacket, too?”
“I don’t think there were tears.”
“First edition, first printing?” Bunk, now interested in the conversation, responds.
“Okay. Say first printing.”
“You don’t want to know,” Bunk offers as he rolls his eyes.
“Near fine? No autograph or inscription? At least ten thousand,” Nick says.
“Shit.”
Sally appears at the back door. Bunk fills her in on the discussion. “Helmet Head stole a first edition Hemingway out of Ralphie’s car.”
“Oh no!”
“We don’t know it was a first edition,” I say. I know, however, that a book scout’s myth is being born here and now, and that I am in no position to stop its momentum.
“We won’t let him in the store. He’s such a creep. What can you do? Can you call the police?”
“Good luck with that,” says Nick with a sneer.
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