Bookman's promise cj-3

by John Dunning

  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 h
ear 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.

  It was now twilight time, the beginning of my long nightly journey through the dark. For the moment the Treadwell business had played itself out. I didn’t want to leave it there, but there it sat, spreading its discontent. I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t want to call a friend, catch a movie, do a crossword puzzle. I sure as hell didn’t want to sit in a bar full of strangers as an alternative to Erin d’Angelo’s luminous presence. When all else fails I usually work on books, but that night I didn’t want to do that, either.

  In fact, I didn’t know what I wanted. I seemed to have reached a major turning point in my life as a bookman. I look back at that time as my true watershed, more significant than even the half-blind leap that had brought me straight into the trade from homicide. Today I believe I was shaped by that entire half year. Even then I sensed that I was moving from my common retail base into something new, yet for most of my waking hours I had doubts that I would ever get anywhere. This must be what a writer goes through when he’s groping his way into a book. I think it was Doctorow who said that about the writing process—it’s like driving a car across country at night and all you can ever see is what’s immediately in your headlights, but you can make the whole journey that way. Maybe the book trade was like that. I had always been a slow learner, but already there had been wondrous moments when suddenly I understood, after months of plodding, some tiny piece of the enormous world I had come to. A-ha! A hit of knowledge! A leap of faith so striking that it sometimes took my breath away.

  This was never greater than in those two weeks of 1987. I had bought the Burton, which I now know was the catalyst. Millie, my gal Friday, was off on vacation and I had been forced into the annoying business of minding the store. Richard Burton had fired me up and old Mrs. Gallant had stirred me up, but on a conscious level all I had was the annoying hunch that I might work till dawn; that, and how I’d explain to Dean why I’d lied to him, when I called him tomorrow.

  My working domain was normally the back room, but in my solitude I wanted to be where I could at least see the lights of the street. I brought up my stuff and sat at the counter, but I couldn’t get my mind into it. I stared at my reference books and for a long time I just sat there and waited for my mood to change.

  The book world was very different then. In 1987 it was real work to research even simple book problems. We were still in the earliest days of the Internet: the vast, sweeping changes that have come over us had barely begun, and none of us knew how crazy it would get. Points and values on unfamiliar books still had to be searched out the old way, in bibliographies and specialists’ catalogs, and with some, you finally had to go on a gut feeling. Knowledge was rewarded by the system: you put out your books, took your chances, and if another bookseller knew more than you did, he scored on your mistake. Today any unwashed nitwit can look into a computer and pull out a price. Whether the price is proper, whether it’s even the same edition—these questions, once of major importance, have begun to pale as bookscouts and flea markets and even junk shops rush onto the Internet to play bookseller. They love to say things like “The Internet has equalized the playing field,” but all they do is cannibalize the other fellow’s off-the-wall prices for books of dubious lineage and worth. They want to play without paying any dues, now or ever. They have no reference books to back up their assertions and they’d never pay more than pocket change for anything. They wheel and deal but they care about nothing but price. The computer may have leveled the playing field in one sense—it’s a great device for revealing what people around the world are asking and paying for certain books—but in this year of grace it will not tell you, reliably, how to identify a true American first of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

  In those early Internet years I posted an epigram over my desk: A book is a mirror. If an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out. That was written two centuries ago by a German wit named Lichtenberg, but I think the same applies today to a computer screen.

  I had just ordered my supper from Pizza Hut when I heard the tap on my window. I turned and there she was, the Gibson girl incarnate. Those incredible eyes. That lovely smiling face, so loaded with mischief. I leaped up and toppled my stool. My crazy heart went with it, a mad tumble that had happened with only one other woman. The great adventure of love, more thrilling and perilous than a man with a gun: I had given up the notion of ever knowing it again.

  CHAPTER 6

  I fumbled with my keys and dropped them. Lurched over to pick them up, missed them in the dark, and almost fell on my ass. Had to go back for them, groping around on the floor. So far my performance was falling far short of the cool image I always project to the opposite sex. She stood outside, striking a pose of vast impatience. Looked at her watch. Tapped her foot while I got the key into the hole and opened the door.

  “Sorry, I’m closed,” I said, regaining my cool.

  “That’s okay, I’m just the gas girl, here to read your meter.”

  I almost laughed at that but recovered in time to make a phony cough of it. “You’ll have to make it fast, I’m expecting someone.”

  “No one special, I take it, from the look of you.”

  “Just read the meter, miss, and let’s hold the fashion critique. This has been a hard day.”

  “Obviously. A white sport coat indeed.”

  “I wore it till the pink carnation began gasping for air and turning green around the gills. There came a point when I had to figure that the girl of my dreams just wasn’t going to show.”

  “You have no faith. I had you pegged from the start. All pop, no fizz.”

  “My faith was like the Prudential rock until an hour ago.”

  “That’s not nearly good enough when I expected so much more of you. I take it from your wardrobe that we’re going someplace fancy. Burger King or Taco Bell? Do I get to choose?”

  “Actually, I just…urn…kinda…ordered a pizza.”

  She laughed out loud at that.

  “I’ll bet I can cancel it,” I said. “I just this minute ordered it.”

  “A pizzal And I’ll bet it’s a pizza for one.”

  “I can have them make another one,” I said in the wimpiest voice I could put on.

  She sighed deeply. “I guess you might as well. Oh, chivalry, where art thou? I’ll tell you this much, sir, Sir Richard Burton rests unchallenged in his tomb tonight.”

  She browsed my shelves while I made the call.

  “No anchovies,” she yelled from New Arrivals.

  I appeared suddenly at her side. “How’d your case go?”

  “We lost but we knew we would. Anything else would have put us all in the hospital from shock. Now we’ve got something we can appeal, take it out of cowboy heaven.”

  “Want to tell me about it?”

  “Maybe sometime. Right now I’m so happy to be out of there I don’t even want to think about it. I drove straight through from Rock Springs. As of this time last night, I’m on vacation…three glorious weeks to write, contemplate, and recover.”

  After a moment, she said, “I thought of calling around three o’clock, in case you actually were standing here in some goofy white sport coat. Then I thought no, this would be more fun. Arrive when all hope is lost. See if you’re still here. Razz you a bit. How’s it working so far?”

  “I’m getting pretty damned annoyed, if you want to know the truth.”

  “Miranda should have told you, I’m a card-carrying member of Lunatics Anonymous. We Loonies see the world as one big insane asylum. Our goal is to laugh at everything. If I don’t find some kind of laughter in all this chaos, I’ve got to cry, an
d I hate that. So I make fun of the handicapped. Tell racially insensitive jokes. Put down those who are already oppressed.”

  A moment later she said, “I’m kidding.”

  “I knew that.”

  “I figured you did. Right from the start you seemed to be as crazy as I am.”

  “I must have compared wonderfully to the stuffed shirt you were driving that night.”

  When she said nothing to that, I said, “Did I step on professional toes there?”

  “Would it matter?”

  “Of course. Mr. Archer may be a jerk on a world scale, but I no longer feel any uncontrollable compulsion to say so.”

  “Don’t bite your tongue on my account. Just be aware that an escort who speaks ill of her client soon has no clients to speak of. So I may not participate in the verbal dismemberment.”

  “Whatever you say, my lips are sealed.”

  “In that case, yes, Archer’s right up there among the most pompous asses that the ill winds of New York have ever blown my way.”

  “As much as it grieves me to say it, he’s actually a very good writer. He was one of the modern authors I liked best…”

  “Until you met him.”

  “That does take away some of his sex appeal. What’re you doing driving authors around?”

  “Didn’t Miranda tell you? She told me you asked.”

  “Miranda is proving to be an untrustworthy confidante.”

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter. I got into the author tours early, for spending money in college. Now I don’t need the spending money so it must be the intellectual stimulation.”

  “So if you’re driving the author of The Hungry Man’s Diet Book, or the guy who wrote Six Ways to Profit from the Coming Nuclear War, what kind of stimulation do you get from that?”

  “I don’t drive those authors.”

  “Must be nice to pick and choose.”

  “The woman who owns the agency became one of my best friends. When I see who’s coming through, I can put in a request if it’s someone I like.”