by Bruce Wagner
“We’re interested in everything!” shouted Lucy from the long hall, where autographs of historical figures were hung. With that, she threw the boys the evil eye, to egg them on.
“Well!” said Mr. Tabori, figuratively licking his chops. “I strongly suggest A Christmas Carol.” He plucked it from the shelf and turned it over with caressing hands. “Chapman and Hall, first edition, first issue: i.e., ‘Stave I’—foolscap octavo, green-coated endpapers, blue half-title, red and blue title. Four inserted hand-colored steel-engraved plates by and after Leech and four black-and-white text wood-engravings by W. J. Linton after Leech. Original cinnamon vertically ribbed cloth, all edges gilt, with the tiniest interval between blind-stamped border and gilt wreath equal to fourteen millimeters—with a perfect D in ‘Dickens.’ The slightest perceptible fading to the spine, with an early provincial bookseller’s label on the front pasted down. Spectacular! At fifty thousand dollars, it’s quite simply the best and brightest we’ve seen.” He cleared his throat, realizing he’d gone too far; these were children after all. “But I’m sure that’s in excess of your budget.”
Lucy returned, emboldened. The toddlers clearly needed her help—if she was going to stick this episode somewhere in Blue Maze, a dallying narrative would never do.
“Mr. Tabori,” she said forthrightly. “Have you ever had anything stolen? From the shop?”
Tull and Edward refused to look at her, sharpening their attention on the host, who was amiably taken aback.
“Oh, once or twice. An autograph from the wall … George Bernard Shaw. A Kerouac. Some American ‘firsts’ were stolen—Hammett and Chandler. But we got them back.”
“This,” said Edward, following her lead, “would have been about thirteen years ago.”
“ ‘This’?” said Mr. Tabori, cocking his head.
Tull reached in his pocket for the letter, which he handed to Mr. Tabori.
“Yes,” said the bookseller, nodding his head as he examined. “I remember.”
“Was it by any chance written to you?” asked Tull.
“No—that would have had to have been my brother Henry-David. He died two years ago. Colorectal cancer.”
“We’re so sorry,” said Lucy, and she really was.
“But I do remember—it was the sort of thing—one of those situations where—well, you see, he was a customer and we did know him rather well—we preferred not to call the police. We called the gentleman’s office—by then of course we were quite certain—there could have been no question—that he ‘took’ the item. The gentleman didn’t respond; Henry-David might have sent a follow-up note. That would have been H.D.’s way. My brother was the least threatening of men, so the … communiqué referred to here couldn’t have been too—but the gentleman was outraged! We were doing him a favor, not calling the police. Finally, we had no recourse. And then—” A light shone in his eye; he cocked his head again. “The gentleman who wrote this letter. He was connected to … your grandfather, no?”
“That’s right,” said the cousin.
Mr. Tabori nodded and stared into space, his gaze falling somewhere over Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets. “There was a scandal, no? A marriage—he was … a flimflam.”
Tull spoke up. “Was it a book that was taken?”
“Yes. Nothing of excessive value.”
“Did you recover it?”
“I’m afraid that one got away.”
“A purloined antiquity!” huffed Lucy, authorial glands fairly salivating. “And you called the police?”
“We were about to … when a private investigator came out—who was it? Had a funny name. Employed by Louis Trotter. He asked a few questions, then made good on the amount that was in dispute.”
“If you could just tell us more about—”
Of a sudden, Emerson Tabori gave a great sigh, as if having reached a regretful conclusion. He sat down upon one of Tara’s chairs and bid the children do the same. Edward looked amazing against the high-backed red velvet throne; Pullman clambered from camp and resettled, a spotty bedouin dead to the world.
The dealer’s tone became intimate, avuncular, almost morose. “I see that perhaps you came for more than just the selection of a gift. I’m not a gossip and am afraid I’ve spoken too much. Your grandfather is a valued client and, I like to think, a friend. Whatever happened those many years ago was a private affair. I wish I could help, but simply don’t have the information—nor would I feel comfortable imparting it if I had.”
With that he stood, a kindly smile radiating from his face. The children, who looked more like children now than when they’d come in, were downcast. Tull and Lucy helped Edward stand; and were soon joined by Mr. Tabori and staff as in the raising of the Iwo Jima flag. The crestfallen trio began trudging to the door when Tull turned back to face their admonisher.
“Mr. Tabori … that ‘flimflam’—he was my father.” The boy stood tall, and his lip quaked with passion. “For all my life I thought he was dead, but it wasn’t true. Trinnie—that’s my mother—Katrina Berenice Trotter Weiner—both she and my grandfather told me this, that he was alive, at least to their knowledge. They told me it recently, Mr. Tabori. You can imagine the effect that had; imagine what effect it would have had on you. And, well, to be honest, sir, I am trying very hard to find him—as any son would—and I will, one way or the other, with or without anyone’s help. Yes, our buying a gift was a subterfuge and for that I am sorry. Truly, we apologize! This sort of thing is new to us—to me. But you have my word that we came here today in the strictest confidence and would never think of doing anything to breach your relationship or trust … with our grandfather, or ourselves. But even if Grandpa were to know we paid a visit—”
“And he never will,” interposed the cousin.
“—he would not object. He told me a story, something he said that a general once wrote. The general cautioned his troops never to attack men who were on their way home from battle; he said men on their way home were unvanquishable. Well, I wish to bring my father home, sir; I’m on my way home, too. And nothing will stop me from getting there—from finding him! So, if you please, sir, I’d like to ask once more: is there anything else you can tell us?”
Lucy and Edward were in tears.
Mr. Tabori, not unmoved, sat down again with a sigh and smiled sagaciously. “You are here for a gift then—no?”
The children, puzzled at first, got his drift and vociferously agreed. Pullman yawned, shuddering his jowls.
“Then how can I help?”
“The book that was taken,” said Tull. “What was it?”
“A work by William Morris—News from Nowhere. A utopian novel. Not my favorite of the man’s, if I may.”
“Do you mean the British designer William Morris?” asked Edward.
As always, Lucy was shocked by her brother’s casual erudition.
“Oh, he was much more than that!” offered Mr. Tabori. “A voluminous intellect. Poet, weaver, socialist—and publisher. He founded the Kelmscott Press.”
“Do you still have a copy?” asked Tull. “I mean, another copy? News from—”
“Afraid not. The Huntington has one, if you’d like to see it. Or the Clark.” He leapt up, hurrying to a cabinet. “These are all Kelmscott. This row’s vellum—calfskin. These, prenatal; those, live birth. Down here are the linens: blue-backed holland boards. That’s how the Kelmscott Chaucer was first done: blue holland.”
Blue maze, blue board, blue holland … what a blue mystery we weave! thought the pigtailed girl.
“So you don’t have News from No—”
“We do have a Chaucer.” The latter was already laid out on a table. “I hope your hands are clean,” warned Mr. Tabori. “It’s about ninety thousand. The cover’s by Birdsall.”
He showed them the prenatal pilgrims, setting out for Canterbury.
“Sir,” said Tull diffidently. “Did you ever meet Marcus Weiner?” He couldn’t bring himself to say “my fat
her” again just yet.
“Oh, many times! Interesting character—wonderful sense of humor. Wordplay and all. Powerful voice. Great head of hair. Far-ranging mind. Now, mind you, it wasn’t uncommon for someone like him to have an ‘interest’; Hollywood’s always had a romance with collecting. Johnny Depp buys with us—he likes Hunter Thompson ‘firsts.’ Though we don’t usually carry that sort of thing. Ron Bass and Tim Burton, Whoopi and ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’—they all come through. But Mr. Weiner … well, at first I thought he was being a bit precious.”
What’s this? Was the man saying his father was a celebrity? Impossible—
“You said,” Tull stammered, “that it wasn’t uncommon for ‘someone like him’—”
“A Hollywood person. At first I thought it precious that he was only interested in Morris … though after a while, I must say he proved himself extremely knowledgeable.”
“And why would that be ‘precious’—”
“Well, you know. Because he was an agent.”
“Agent?”
“He worked there. Didn’t you know?”
“Worked where?”
“Why, at William Morris! The agency—he was a hotshot. You mean that you didn’t … but how could you not have—” Mr. Tabori was briefly distressed, thinking again that he’d told too much; but remembering the boy’s eloquent speech, moved on. He pointed to the embossed, intertwining initials of the letterhead the children had mistaken for Marcus Weiner’s. “You see? The William Morris logo.”
Edward began to chortle at the sublimeness of it all.
The same helpful employee who had nearly shooed away dear Pullman now made a little show of producing News from Nowhere as a magician might a bouquet—freshly extracted from a Collected Works, which sat forgotten in the back bindery. Mr. Tabori took the volume and, with a single penetrating glance, encouraged her to leave. She did straightaway.
“I meant of course that we didn’t have the volume available of itself. This is Longmans, Green; it must be sold in toto. It is seventy-five hundred.”
“May I?” asked Edward.
Mr. Tabori handed him the volume; the cousin riffled its pages before settling on a passage from the end:
“Inexpressibly shocked, I hurried past him and hastened along the road that led to the river and the lower end of the village; but suddenly I saw as it were a black cloud rolling along to meet me, like a nightmare of my childish days; and for a while I was conscious of nothing else than being in the dark, and whether I was walking, or sitting, or lying down, I could not tell. I lay in my bed in my house at dingy Hammersmith thinking about it all—”
As he listened, Tull seemed to hear the voice of his father, saw him somewhere in the world agonized by myriad demons, and felt rudely violated—as he had that afternoon with his cousins in the bedroom of La Colonne. He seized the book, plunking it back into the hands of a startled Mr. Tabori while Lucy diplomatically intervened.
“Emerson, I’m a writer myself—of the mystery genre. But I was wondering: do you have the Harry Potters? The original ones, from England?—”
“That’s it!” shouted Mr. Tabori, slapping his thigh. “Dowling!—”
“Who?”
“The ‘funny name’—you made me think of it because of J. K. Rowling.”
“Made you think of …”
“The detective—the one who reimbursed us! The detective your grandfather hired. His name was Samson Dowling!”
CHAPTER 20
Inventories
Let us take a breath.
There was the introduction, pages ago, of a small detail which, in the unlikely event it has entered anyone’s mind since, may have led the reader to imagine the chronicler of this tale to be underhanded. (It would not be the first time he was wrongly accused.) A train of thought, heavily freighted, was set upon a track, then without fanfare derailed.
Inspired by the unfurling of Will’m’s “Strawberry Thief,” the baker Gilles spontaneously shared the story of his visit to a Gallic feast with his then-fiancée—something having to do with illicit songbirds and subterranean gourmands. The divertissement had been summoned from the depths to quell the pastrymaker’s nervousness around his unusual part-time employee, and he ran through it with a flourish before being heckled by the irritated giant. Just as well—Gilles had shot his anecdotal wad and would have been at a loss to continue.
Mr. Mott could not have known the strange, epic feelings he aroused in his burly listener. Right about the time he’d brought his tale around to the posh neighborhood of Marlene Dietrich and the opium eater at the door of the ancient wine cellar, Will’m found himself mentally elsewhere: twenty kilometers outside Paris to be exact, stealthily traversing a golf course during a drizzle. He saw his feet (and those of a woman, her face indistinct, gamely trailing after) step over a low barbed-wire fence, through bower and arborescent meadow. They walked awhile, then froze: in the distance stood a breathtaking apparition—a broken column made of stone. But this derelict fantasia had windows and could be lived in. While the baker droned on about crispy birds and such, Will’m remembed trodding toward the tower under billowing, storm-dirtied skies, the faceless woman tugging at his sleeve with worry. He was close enough to see the darkness within and had nearly entered when a man in short sleeves with a Gauloise stuck to his lower lip, caricature of a Frenchman, appeared on a tractor. He warned them against trespassing; so they never got to go inside.
At that very moment of recollection, an incensed Will’m resurfaced in time to cut Gilles off about his damn millet-gorged birds, barking (the perspicacious reader may recall), “That is the Frankish way, isn’t it? Murder a thrush behind veils of civility! Truth be told, the French are a dishonorable and troublously shoddy race.”
And so the baker’s history crashed to a halt.†
Such embroidery is mere preamble to the aforementioned vexation: to wit, the baker’s remorse over what he implied was the jilting of the “long-lost” bride-to-be (not Lani, by a long shot) who attended the fabled fête des gourmands. A shadow fell over him at chapter’s end—did the author clumsily mean it to be Trinnie’s?—as he wistfully reflected upon his double life. Amends, he said, were due! The reader of these pages knows better now, of that we are certain; still, if way back when, the very same but for a moment believed—if it is feasible the reader could have actually, however fleetingly, believed that the baker Gilles Mott (whose name alone too coarsely hints at things “Toulousian”), at such an early stage, was plausibly central to our tale—and, even more implausibly, if one could believe that he is still—well, then it is understandable how that reader may now turn his nose up at this red herring and feel the whole gambit to be unworthy of an author who appeared to pride himself on being sensibly meticulous; or that it was at least improvident of the latter to dredge it up here, for it may only serve to illuminate his overreaching expository failures. If such is the case—if the reader is of that opinion—then there is nothing to be done. Suffice to say Gilles Mott does have reason to suffer, and reason to believe he has caused great suffering of another. He will make amends. But this is not the time or place.†
Let teller and listener thus reconciled, regroup—and dust themselves off to remount. That’s what this chapter’s about. The trail is winding, the pace leisurely; let the loping, mulish narrative carry one along.
During the Pullmanic gala’s froth of fireworks, across the hill on Stradella, in surrey-fringed conversation, Edward Trotter, that wisest of boys, touched upon the extracurricular activities of his parents, pictorially pornographic and otherwise. He alluded to private prisons and Dead Baby Societies, but his blithe monologue went unheard; Tull’s concerns over the mysterious monogrammed letter took precedence. We have already looked into that missive with some thoroughness so can spend this time enumerating recent powerful developments in the destiny of Joyce Trotter née Gilligan.
She sat at the dermatologist’s flipping through Condé Nasts, then leaned to pull two “throwaw
ays” from the pile. The glossy 310 had a garish photo of Katrina Trotter and Ralph Mirdling at a black-tie gala, standing beside studio titan Sherry Lansing, billionaire Gary Winnick and screenwriter Ron Bass. (All looked amiable except for the wincing Mr. M.) Joyce then opened the Courier to find a photo of her husband and Marcie Millard in white hardhats standing with shovels at the fence surrounding his former grade school. That would have had to have been staged, she thought; not even Dodd’s money made things happen that fast.
Her eye drifted to an ad:
EXCEPTIONAL CRYPT FOR SALE
Pierce Brothers Mortuary in Westwood Village
Resting Place for a Single Casket and a Single Urn
Located in “Sanctuary of Peace”
Crypt is at eye level, in the same enclave as
Marilyn Monroe, Truman Capote, Natalie Wood and other legendary personalities
Price $105,000
There are no longer any other crypts available in this Sanctuary.
Don’t burden your heirs with a hasty choice of your final resting place.
It gave her the biggest idea she ever had in her life.
As she drove through the cemetery gate, infused with collagen and Percodan, Joyce saw a familiar coxcombly figure at the far end of the oval drive—her father-in-law, chatting with a groundskeeper. She parked close enough to see the old man press something into the other’s hand before Epitacio shut him into the Silver Seraph and spirited him away.
She of course knew of Mr. Trotter’s exhaustive search for the ideal mausoleum, but had never visited the winning Westwood site. She’d never seen any of the famed funerary models either (except for the doghouses), not having had a great interest and never, oddly, having been invited into that most legendary and exclusive of clubs: the Withdrawing Room. Amazing, she thought, to run into him at this time of day—the man truly was obsessed! Joyce watched the Rolls roll away and the homely caretaker return to raking. Then she ambled to the park office, where a receptionist quickly introduced her to Dot Campbell, the effervescent manager (she used Gilligan instead of Trotter); Ms. Campbell, in a smudged gingham, seemed ill-fitted for the part.