The Book of Lamps and Banners

by Elizabeth Hand

“The police?”

  “Oh yes, the police! No, I haven’t gotten in touch with them yet, I suspect they may call me as well. Or just drop by.”

  I glanced uneasily back at the door, but Nathan prattled on without noticing. “I’m not a person of interest, so I imagine I’m pretty far down the totem pole as far as that sort of thing goes. Pretty far down,” he repeated with emphasis, and gestured me into a room.

  There’s a very thin tightwire that separates collectors and hoarders, and Nathan seemed to be barely maintaining his balance there. Boxes covered the floor, stacked so high they obscured the walls. Any bit of free space was piled with books like a frozen game of Jenga. Here, the pervasive odors were old paper and Earl Grey tea.

  “Welcome to the Fortress of Bookitude.” Nathan indicated a metal folding chair alongside a leather recliner with a blanket draped across it, the only proper furniture I could see. “Pardon the sordid state of affairs, you’re the first to actually visit in a while. I don’t spend much time here, to be honest.”

  I sat, after making my way past a wasteland of takeaway boxes filled with dried-up tea bags and an Anglepoise lamp perched on a carton marked DOCTOR WHO. Nathan settled into the recliner, tossing a pillow into the canyon of boxes behind him.

  “So,” he said.

  “So how long have you—”

  “Aren’t you going to record this?” Nathan stared at me quizzically. “Or take notes?”

  “Oh yeah, right.” I fumbled inside my bag for a pen. “You, uh, got a piece of paper or something?”

  Nathan’s brow furrowed. He pushed himself from the recliner and puttered around the room, returned to hand me two sheets of lined notepaper. “You don’t use a recorder? Or your mobile?”

  “I’m old-school.” I smoothed the paper on my knee. “Okay. You’ve known Harold a long time?”

  He nodded, touching the rosary around his neck. “Yonks. I used to see him at George’s stall in Farringdon every Saturday. There were a hundred bookstalls there once, extending all the way to High Holborn, all passed down through families. It’s all gone now—they ended up building an awful Thatcherite office block there. There’s still a bit of the original brick wall, if you know where to look.”

  He shook his head sadly. “It would be around 1971 when Harold and I first met. Farringdon wasn’t closed to anyone, but ninety percent of the people there were runners or dealers or scouts. Not many women, sorry. There was no bullying, but it was a genuine scrum—you needed to be fast and strong, which in those days I was.

  “George had four long tables, covered with books. When you arrived they were all covered with tarpaulins. Each table was priced differently and, for years, the best table had every book on it priced for a pound. But you never knew which table would be the best table. George switched them every week, and you never knew what was under the tarp. He uncovered them one at a time, and he wouldn’t unveil the next one till the first was empty.

  “It was like watching a cardplayer for tells. He’d walk back and forth between the tables, stop in front of one, and everyone would cluster around it. Then suddenly he’d make a break to another table and whip off the tarpaulin like a stage magician. Everyone would run for it and start grabbing books as fast as possible before they disappeared.”

  “Sounds like a madhouse.”

  Nathan smiled. “It was.”

  I remembered I was supposed to be taking notes and scribbled on the sheet of paper. Madhouse.

  “Within half an hour, he’d have sold two thousand books,” Nathan continued. “In forty-five minutes, everything would be gone.”

  “And that’s where Harold learned his job?”

  “Oh yes. Harold had a marvelous eye, one of the best. He sold enough to private collectors to lease his own place in Islington, and eventually did well enough to set himself up in Hampstead.”

  His eyes blurred with tears. “I still can’t believe it’s true. Can you?” He gave me a pleading look, as though I might reveal some elaborate hoax.

  “No.” I recalled Harold’s expression as he gazed at his treasure for the first time. “I can’t.”

  Nathan took out a red bandanna and blew his nose, shaking his head.

  “Do you know who might have killed him?” I asked. “Some kind of professional rivalry?”

  “The book business isn’t like that. Or it wasn’t until now.”

  “What about something personal? Love affair gone bad, something like that?”

  “There were rumors…” He stopped himself and stuffed the bandanna back into his pocket. “Not my business.”

  “What about a guy named Gryffin Haselton. Do you know him?”

  “Gryffin? He’s one of my American customers, lives in California. Why do you ask?”

  “No reason,” I went on quickly. “Just, someone told me he’s a friend of Harold’s.”

  “He is. Lovely chap. He used to stay with me when he visited London. Not much room for him now,” he admitted with a glance around the room.

  I fought to recall another name from Gryffin’s contact list. “What about Malloy Townson. Know him?”

  Nathan rolled his eyes. “Everyone knows Malloy, though some wish they didn’t. He has some strange ideas, Malloy.”

  “Could he—”

  “Not unless he’d lost his mind completely. Which is possible, I suppose. But Malloy has enough trouble keeping track of all his conspiracy theories, without something like this. He and Harold were good friends. Opposites attract—Harold’s open-minded as they come. Whereas Malloy…”

  He held out his hand and mimed a shaky boat. “He runs with a different crowd. Folks who have ‘the right to offend.’ I have a different word for them.”

  “Is there anyone who holds a grudge against Harold?”

  “I’d be very surprised.” He mused, frowning. “But you know, now that I think of it, I did hear something. Where was it? Wait!”

  He snapped his gnarled fingers triumphantly. “I know! A launch at Maggs for Iain Sinclair a few months ago. I was there chatting with someone, can’t remember who. But whoever it was mentioned he’d heard that Harold was negotiating for something extraordinarily rare.”

  “Really?” I kept my voice even. “Do you have any idea what it was? Or who you were talking to?”

  Nathan sighed. “Not a thing. My memory’s going, that’s the sad truth. But that’s interesting, isn’t it? If Harold had come across something unusual. I wonder if anyone else has mentioned it?” He thumped the arms of his chair. “I don’t think they have! You have a scoop there, my friend.”

  I gave him a conspiratorial look. “Can you please not mention this to anyone right away? Just so I have time to file the story?”

  Nathan thought for a moment. “Yes, all right. Though I can’t lie to the police if I see them. This might break the case.”

  There was a ping, and Nathan dug in the recliner for his mobile.

  “Speak of the devil,” he said, reading a text. “Here’s Malloy now. They’re headed to the Bolt—we meet there once a month with Harold. Thirty years we’ve been doing it.” He tapped in a reply, sighing again. “Now it’s just me and Malloy and William and Birdhouse.”

  “Gwilym Birdhouse?” I did a double take. “The singer?”

  “The very one. He dabbles a bit as a collector. English esoterica, Elizabethan, mostly. Fancies himself a modern antiquarian. Are you a fan?”

  “He was after my time. I didn’t even know he was still performing.”

  “I’m not sure he is. But he made enough to keep himself happy. He raises sheep in the Hebrides or Faeroe Islands, one of those places. Orkney. Sheep for wool, not eating—he’s a vegan.”

  “So is Birdhouse his real name?”

  “Haven’t the slightest. He’s Malloy’s friend more than mine. Harold could get along with anybody. And Birdhouse was a customer, so…”

  Nathan made a show of pinching his nose. “You learn to make excuses for differences of opinion. I think he’s a crackpot. You c
an make up your own mind about his music. Handel, that’s my style.”

  Nathan’s mobile pinged again. This time his eyebrows shot up when he looked at the screen. He raised a finger to me, spoke to whoever was on the other end, and wended his way into the hall.

  As soon as he was out of sight, I grabbed my bag. The conversation had been a washout. I’d wave goodbye as I left.

  I made a cursory inspection of the boxes as I left the room. Most seemed destined for Oxfam. But near the door, a stack of books caught my eye, the top one a volume of Mick Rock’s work. I paused to scan the other titles. Lillian Roxon’s Rock Encyclopedia. Madonna’s Sex. All in pretty bad shape, spines cracked, dust jackets missing. If I looked inside, I’d probably find seeds and stems left from back in the day.

  Then a familiar title caught my attention. I stooped and carefully removed an oversize volume from the pile.

  The cover was a black-and-white night shot of five people standing in an alley slick with rain. Battered metal trash cans, a junked car. The light from a streetlamp bleached their faces a featureless white. Jean-clad pipe-cleaner legs, cowboy boots, and filthy Keds. One figure faced the camera, his hand extended warningly, mouth a smeary wound.

  The others were turned sideways, staring at something on the wet pavement, just out of the camera’s line of sight. If you knew where to look, you’d see a bare foot protruding from a black puddle at the edge of the frame.

  I saw it, because I knew where to look. I knew where to look because my name was on the cover.

  Chapter 21

  Dead Girls was the book that had made my reputation. Photos of the nascent downtown punk scene: outside and inside Max’s and CBGB, reeking alleys, the back seat of Chevy Impalas where kids huffed Carbona. Pictures so grainy and underexposed you didn’t know if you were looking at a living person or a mannequin or a corpse. Musicians and artists whose drug habits lasted longer than their careers; a beautiful girl whose boyfriend tied her off and split when her eyes rolled back in her head and her skin turned blue. A line of hunched-over figures waiting to score amid charred box springs and burning tires. Black-and-white photos I’d taken of myself, dressed up like Salome, or Judith beheading Holofernes.

  The book got rapturous reviews. A year later, I was broke and broken, working in the Strand’s stockroom to keep myself in speed and Jack Daniel’s.

  The sound of footsteps echoed from Nathan’s hall. I jammed the book into my bag and scrambled to my feet.

  “Well!” Nathan walked back into the room, flourishing his mobile like he’d just won the lottery. “Now, who do you think that was? Metropolitan Police—they’re coming to talk to me. Saves me a trip to the station house. Though I always wanted to be in one of those interrogation rooms. See if it’s like the movies.”

  “I’ll get out of your way.” I pushed past him into the hallway. “Thanks again for your help.”

  “My pleasure,” he said as he opened the door. “Send me a link to your piece when it goes up. Did you want a photo?”

  From the corner of my eye, I saw two policewomen heading up the sidewalk. “Not now. Gotta run if I’m going to make my deadline.”

  I shoved on my sunglasses and left with studied nonchalance, turning in the opposite direction from the cops. One of them stared at me as Nathan ushered her inside. When I reached the corner, I broke into a run, stopping at the first bus shelter I saw. I joined the queue to board a red double-decker, and slumped into an empty upstairs seat.

  Quinn was going to kill me. The cop who’d seen me leaving Ballingstead’s place would ask who I was: if she googled me, she’d find there was no Shelley Wilson at the Tribune or anywhere else. If CCTV had captured Gryffin and me in the Vale of Health, the same cop might recognize a six-foot woman with cropped black hair, wearing a motorcycle jacket and cowboy boots.

  Plus I’d jogged Nathan’s memory so that he recalled hearing something about Harold Vertigan and an exceedingly rare book—information he’d certainly pass on to the police. I reached into my bag for the whiskey and took a long swallow, finishing the bottle, and gazed out the bus window as we passed Trafalgar Square.

  Quinn and I should bail, now, before I was recognized or Gryffin went to the cops. I tried calling Quinn on the burner. No answer.

  I ran through my options. Ordinarily I’d opt for killing time in a bar, but Quinn would be royally pissed off that I’d screwed up my meeting with Ballingstead. Showing up drunk wouldn’t be a good idea.

  Still, Ballingstead had mentioned a place called the Bolt, which I assumed was a pub. I took out Gryffin’s mobile and tried to figure out the best way to get there. Nathan would no doubt entertain the cops for as long as he could, reliving glory days of the London used-book trade. If I was lucky, I could get in and out of the Bolt before he arrived to meet his friends.

  And, I had to admit, I was curious to see what Gwilym Birdhouse looked like now. I hadn’t thought about him in decades. Not that I’d ever thought of him much, or thought much of him. He’d made his reputation as a teenager in the late 1980s, long after my heyday, an English singer/songwriter who had a foot in two camps: the moody psych-goth of bands like the Jesus and Mary Chain, or Love and Rockets, and the kind of low-key, slightly jazzy folk-rock that harkened back to Traffic’s “John Barleycorn Must Die.”

  Birdhouse got lumped in with other eccentric English musicians—Robyn Hitchcock, Roy Harper, Julian Cope. Like Cope, he was more like a genuine, and genuinely odd, throwback whose songs, despite their psychedelic trappings and postpunk energy, reflected a deep yearning for an earlier time. An era that had never really existed, outside of village festivals where Morris dancers performed for American tourists hungry for a vision of Ye Olde England that never was.

  Birdhouse had never gone out of fashion, because he’d never been in fashion. His lyrics involved puns and clever wordplay; he was a keyboard player, not a guitarist, and one of the few musicians who played a harp. I saw him perform only once, in the mid-nineties, when he opened for Alejandro Escovedo at the Bottom Line. Birdhouse played his sole hit, a lachrymose ballad called “No One Knows You Like the Rain.” He didn’t endear himself to the audience by showing support for the Gulf War.

  Still, Birdhouse continued to record albums like Tree Songs and Houdini of Harrogate, playing English summer festivals like Green Man and narrating podcasts about endangered species in the Hebrides. The last time he’d been on my radar was when he came out in favor of Brexit. Not the sort of company I wanted to keep. But beggars can’t be choosers.

  Chapter 22

  I found the Bolt in a cobblestoned mews slick with moss and smelling faintly of garbage. A plaque identified the pub as the site of a former stable. In 1747, lightning struck the building; the horses managed to escape from their stalls and raced in flames through the nearby streets.

  The Bolt’s exterior appeared recently remodeled. Inside, women with Tesco bags at their feet chatted over lunch plates that had yet to be cleared away. Three men sat at a table by the window, too young by several decades to be Harold’s friends. Behind the bar, a cheerful girl with an Eastern European accent and a shamrock tattooed above her wrist hovered over the register. I ordered a large whiskey and made a slow pass through the pub.

  It was larger than it first seemed. A chalkboard listed the week’s events—karaoke, darts tournament, 1980s Quiz Night. Near the restrooms, an arched doorway opened onto a second room. I stepped inside.

  Two white men in late middle age sat at a long wooden table covered with empty pint glasses. One man, grossly overweight, wore a pink-and-green flannel shirt. Wisps of white hair streamed from his scalp like smoke. The other man had brush-cut iron-gray hair and blue eyes. The ruddy skin around his eyes was crinkled, as though he’d spent decades staring into the sun, and he had a tattoo on his neck of a red cross. He looked more like a long-haul truck driver than a bookdealer.

  I wondered if these were Nathan’s colleagues. The only other customers were an elderly man and woman with a dog lying placid
ly at their feet. I strolled past the two middle-aged men, feigning interest in the faded equine prints and old photos of mounted policemen on the walls.

  “…have forgotten about it in a week. It’s all just unbelievable. The police rang, I couldn’t tell them a thing.” The fat man jabbed a finger at his companion. “Not a thing. Sheila told them they could drop by, but they didn’t.”

  I settled at a neighboring table, sipping my whiskey as I pretended to read my mobile.

  “This will be ISIS, William,” said the man with the brush-cut hair. “Up in Birmingham, they have a cell.”

  “Don’t be daft. It’s not the damned ISIS, Malloy!” the fat man exclaimed. “What the hell would terrorists want with Harold?” He reached for his pint glass. “You need to stop reading the Internet. This was a robbery. Someone wanted a book.”

  “You’re wrong about that,” his companion said. “It’ll be the camel fuckers, mark my words.”

  The fat man—William—leaned across the table. “Shut your mouth, Malloy, you’ll get us tossed.”

  Their conversation resumed at a lower volume. I caught snatches of it—Harold’s name; the uselessness of the police; Malloy’s theories about terrorism. Nothing useful.

  After a few minutes of drinking and eavesdropping, I reached for my bag. I withdrew the copy of Dead Girls, then the TLS, and removed the page from The Book of Lamps and Banners from the magazine. It felt oddly supple beneath my fingers, more like suede than papyrus. I wanted to examine the manuscript text without being observed, so I opened Dead Girls, slipped the leaf inside, and lowered my face to the page.

  It exuded a very faint scent. Not the dusty smell of old books or paper, but a strange, smoky odor, like charred wood and grilled meat, and also of carrion. I remembered what Harold had said about the volume’s anthropodermic binding and quickly closed the book. A wave of nausea hit me, as when I first stared at Ludus Mentis.

  After a few moments, the nausea passed. I glanced at Malloy and the fat man, who gazed into their pint glasses in stony silence. Harold must have been the peacemaker between the two. I sighed and again opened Dead Girls, taking care to avoid the papyrus sheet as I flipped to the introduction by Chris Makos: