The Testament of James (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens)

by Vin Suprynowicz

  “You watch hardly any TV.”

  “I must have heard a policeman yell that, once. It seemed appropriate.”

  “Were we just rescued by a couple of Islamic terrorists?”

  “No no. Who actually got rescued is another question, though I’m sure Hakim meant well. But Rashid’s family aren’t terrorists. They’re capitalists.”

  “Oh. I guess that’s all right, then.” Chantal had come down off the adrenalin rush enough to start finding the whole thing a bit ridiculous.

  “It’s fine. Makes sense the family would send someone if Rashid has been out of touch since last Thursday.”

  “I think I’d better not leave you alone tonight.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. You can have the big bed; I’ll sleep in the front bedroom.”

  “Matthew, don’t be an idiot.”

  “Hm?”

  “No one is sleeping in the front bedroom.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “OK.”

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  WEDNESDAY MORNING

  Chantal was becatted by the lovely Serafina, so Matthew gave the larger brunette a kiss and carried his mug of hot tea down the stairs to the shop. Marian had already opened up and there were a few early customers in; the general rule was that if there were two staff members washed up and straight enough to work, no would-be customer was left pressing his or her nose to a locked front door.

  “Skeezix has done well today,” Marian smiled in greeting. She was wearing a fetching hand-crocheted wool cap to go with her gray sweater and skirt — gray on gray. Bob had joked more than once that Marian’s mother must have once been frightened by a brightly colored clown. She’d stacked the contents of the diminutive scout’s morning pasteboard boxes on the front counter and was tallying up his pay.

  “Cleaning out a house?”

  “The lady calls me first because I’m willing to haul away so much. She thought a buck a book was fine.”

  “Look what he found,” Marian held up a couple of 12mos from the box — 12mos being books the size of a Hardy Boys mystery, slightly smaller than your standard octavo, “duodecimos” if you wanted to get technical, so named because they were originally printed by folding a full sheet of printer’s paper into 12 leaves, instead of eight.

  “Edgar Rice Burroughs in jackets? Good work, Skeezer. How early?”

  “Fighting Man of Mars is Metropolitan, a first,” Marian answered, proudly.

  Marian would probably pay the Skeezer close to a hundred bucks for that one alone, confident it would bring four or five times that, online. Assuming it wasn’t dampstained. If you wanted people to stay eager in their work, you saw they were properly compensated when they got something right. As long as you could still make your four-bagger, of course. A triple had once been enough, but no more. Regulatory costs and other government extractions were up across the board, at the very time people were doing more of their shopping online. Modern retail overhead was murder; somebody had to make sure the lights stayed lit, even on days when you didn’t bring in enough to buy lunch. Which meant on occasion Skeezix would pay three bucks for a book that would only sell for six, and he’d have to keep it or eat the buck-and-a-half. The store was not a charitable enterprise.

  But knowledge was the real wealth, and once the Skeezer had learned the authors, the topics, the grading standards that made it worthwhile to gamble a few bucks, he’d have knowledge that would last him all his life, from the auction rooms to a barn sale in Chepachet.

  Most of the books that had ever been manufactured weren’t worth the cost of hauling away, especially with the corners chewed by mice or silverfish; it was easy to end up with an apartment full of boxes of crumbling junk with the covers falling off. No sense spending a week’s grocery money to have a book rebound if you knew that when you got done it would barely buy you lunch.

  So how did anyone learn which ones were worth grabbing? Over in the corner of the store this morning a scannerboy was sliding books out from the shelf and running his little electronic gizmo over the bar codes on the dust jacket rear panels, scan scan scan, waiting for his mindless toy to beep and tell him he’d hit one of the thousand best-selling books on Amazon this week, or whatever it was supposed to do. They thought this allowed them to avoid the drudgery of actually reading, studying the bibliographies, learning anything. In the thrift shops where Niven & Pournelle’s Mote in God’s Eye was shelved under “Religion” and illiterates marked everything at a fixed price they undoubtedly did find the occasional Maclehose first of Dragon Tattoo for a couple bucks, but there were no bar codes before 1980, and a scanner couldn’t tell you whether a book had been signed on the title page to the author’s good pal Ernest Hemingway. A real book scout — and Skeezix was quickly becoming one — could spot value across the room, sometimes just from the way books had been treated and shelved.

  “Excuse me.”

  “Yes?” Marian being tied up with Skeezix, Matthew had remained on the floor to help out.

  “Why is one of these Hardy Boys priced at eight dollars, and the other at twenty-four?”

  The stout matron seemed legitimately curious. “Because one of them has a dust jacket,” Matthew explained.

  “Three times as much, just because it has a paper wrapper?” The fragile jacket had actually been encased in a removable clear polyester protector, though Matthew saw no point in mentioning the obvious.

  “Yes, ma’am. Young people could be pretty rough with those juveniles. After 70 years, it’s the collectible jackets people look for.”

  “Isn’t that a bit ridiculous?”

  “Ma’am, we don’t make up the prices. We check online, especially knowledgeable dealers, then we price at about 60 percent of market, so collectors know they can do better here. And that’s before you consider how many online sellers can’t properly identify what they’re selling, in the first place, letting their computers list every paperback reprint of Frankenstein as ‘published 1818.’ But it’s the collectors who decide how much they’re willing to pay. With the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drews and Ted Scotts, it’s the pre-1950 jacket art that’s in demand. If we priced much lower, the re-sellers would be in here with shopping carts; they’d strip us bare.”

  The woman actually snorted.

  “The juveniles are actually pretty reasonable, ma’am. A nice first printing of The Great Gatsby is going for a few thousand now without the dust jacket. With the original jacket, much more.”

  “You’re telling me the paper jacket is worth as much as the whole book?”

  “Actually, ma’am, an original Gatsby jacket in decent shape is now selling for as much as your house.”

  “I’ll just take the eight dollar book, please.”

  “Sure thing.”

  He rang the woman up and watched her let herself out, nose held high. Matthew placed the jacketed Clue in the Embers on the go-back shelf. It had a Rudy Nappi jacket from the mid-fifties, not one of the great Grettas from the early ’30s which were finally starting to seriously climb in price, but still a classic. It showed the boys trapped by a lava flow, dressed in short leather jackets and hunting caps and bizarre red-and-white striped clown socks, looking for all the world like the backwater offspring of Johnny Carson’s Floyd R. Turbo.

  “She actually went for the worthless copy without the jacket?” Skeezix asked.

  “I assume it showed up in some box, we shouldn’t be buying ’em without the jackets.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Unless they’re red or maroon.”

  “Otherwise they’re not collectible.”

  “I told her that.”

  New trouble now arrived in the form of two guys in shiny black shoes and dark gray business suits. The tall one with the big shoulders and the little gold lapel pin kept looking all around; Matthew figured him for the bodyguard. In fact, except for the absence of the little earphone, he could have been Secret Service. But it was the shorter, stocky
guy, the scented guy with the wavy, neatly coiffed salt-and-pepper hair and the powder-blue silk pocket handkerchief, who did the talking.

  “You are the proprietor?” he asked. The accent could have been from anywhere along the arc from Turkey to Morocco.

  “I am.”

  “So you’re Matthew Hunter.”

  “And you are?”

  “I’m interested in a book.”

  “We have quite a few.”

  “I’ll be frank.”

  “I’ll be Joe.”

  “What?”

  “The book you’re looking for has a name?”

  “Pardon me, I am Muhammad Mubarak, Deputy Minister of Culture and Antiquities for the Islamic Republic of Egypt.” The guy produced a fancy embossed card with a tiny Egyptian flag in full color like it was some kind of sleight-of-hand trick, must have stood in front of a mirror practicing that move for hours. “And this is my escort, Mister Charles Petrocelli, of your own U.S. State Department.”

  Mister Charles Petrocelli gave a half smile and a nod but kept his hands behind his back.

  “We know our national, Mr. Rashid al-Adar, was supposed to deliver a manuscript copy of the book he describes as The Testament of James here one evening last week,” smiled the dapper Egyptian functionary. “Although we have not been able to trace his whereabouts since then, it appears he did arrive here. That would indicate your associate must have ended with the book, in which case the book is almost certainly still here.”

  “I was away last week.”

  “Yes. We heard about your unfortunate associate’s death. You have my deepest condolences. Natural causes, we were told.”

  “That would depend.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Heart attacks are a natural cause of death unless they’re brought about by the criminal actions of another party, so it could depend on the circumstances. A police officer told me that.”

  “Mr. Hunter, I hope I can be frank.”

  “Only if I can be the impulsive younger brother with the lighter hair.”

  “What?”

  “Joe.”

  “What?”

  “Many people are interested in this mysterious book. Unfortunately, I don’t have it, Mr. . . . Mubarak?”

  “Interesting. Interesting.” The Egyptian peered around, as though he expected to find thousand-year-old manuscripts flopped on top of the science fiction paperbacks in their Ziplocs or wedged in with the Show Biz biographies.

  “If this book turns up, Mr. Hunter, I must put you on notice that it’s a valuable part of the cultural heritage of the Islamic Republic of Egypt. No permission was ever granted for its removal from our shores, no duties have been paid, and it will have to be repatriated. You understand ‘repatriated’?”

  “I’ve got nothing against your particular government, Mr. Mubarak, as long as you don’t decide to reconquer Spain.” Neither of his visitors smiled. “But I have to tell you this notion that the politicians in Cairo or wherever can claim title to anything that happens to turn up anywhere within the boundaries of your feudal fiefdom is pernicious. You understand ‘pernicious’? I don’t deal in stolen goods, I try to keep up on the news of any big museum or library thefts, and if anyone has snatched a rare medieval Egyptian codex recently it’s escaped my attention. The missing Mr. al-Adar told my associate the book has been in his family for decades, for generations, and I’ve seen no evidence to the contrary. You’re not allowed to just seize stuff in this country.”

  “Of course any ‘seizing’ would be done by your own State Department under the appropriate international treaties, Mr. Hunter. I think you’ll agree it’s the Anglo-Saxon powers that seem to have ended up with a curious monopoly on all those statues from the Parthenon. I hope we can agree that cultural treasures belong in their proper context, in the locales where they were created, available for scholarly study, displayed for the pride and edification of the populace.”

  “It would have been nice if the Caliph Omar had felt the same way back when the Moslems took Alexandria and the caliph told Amir Ibn Alas to burn the library, since if what was in the library agreed with the Koran it was redundant, and if the books didn’t agree with the Koran they were heretical.”

  “That may or may not have happened, Mr. Hunter . . . fifteen hundred years ago. I fear the Christians burned many books, as well. And much more recently.”

  “I’ll give you the benefit of assuming you just haven’t spent a lot of time in the museum game, Mr. Mubarak. Most of them have got five times more stuff in their basements than they can ever display; their biggest problem is how to get rid of the surplus without taking political heat. They lose shit all the time. And that’s without taking into account the frequency with which Christian churches have been looted and burned in your fine Islamic republic, lately.”

  “We won’t be misplacing The Testament of James, Mr. Hunter.”

  “Actually, there are worse places it could end up than safely outside Christendom. I just stick to this old-fashioned idea that people who want things should actually pay for them. That makes it a little harder to lock them up in a vault, promising someone will get around to translating and publishing in 50 years or so, like the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

  “I couldn’t agree more about locking things away, Mr. Hunter. Although I believe in the case of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the culprits were those other guys. As to whether there might be a modest reward for someone who has to go to some expense to help us recover this book, I’m sure you would find my government accommodating.”

  Yeah. Matthew really looked forward to filling out those forms. And now the big stick to follow the carrot?

  “As long as you understand that concealing stolen property could cause problems with the authorities right here in your own country.”

  Matthew and the Egyptian both smiled with their mouths, snakes not ready to put things to the test, just yet. The big State Department guy, on the other hand, was watching Chantal, who’d put in an appearance and was now pitching in to put polyester dust jacket protectors on most of the acquisitions Skeezix had hauled in that morning. Everyone in the trade called them “Mylar,” but that was just a Dupont trademark for their particular brand of polyethylene film; most of the manufacturers had switched to generic polyesters years ago.

  Chantal was pretty, of course, but it was likely she’d drawn the big guy’s attention for another reason. Chantal did not avert her eyes. If someone stared at her, she tended to stare back, death rays, till they backed off. It made her stand out.

  “Times have changed, Mr. Hunter, even in Washington,” said the scented Egyptian. “Eventually, the codex will return to Egypt.”

  “Assuming it exists, that is.”

  “Assuming it exists.”

  As Chantal worked she asked Marian how she was doing with her day’s Internet research. Marian waited for the fancy Egyptian and his big chauffeur to leave before reporting on her progress.

  “Seems that back in 1912, a British scholar visiting a desert monastery in the Sinai claims to have seen a copy of our missing Testament. He didn’t have time to copy it, he was just passing through. Naturally he assumed he’d be able to return the next season, but things came up. When he finally got back in 1921 no one could find the book. Naturally, the conspiracy theorists claim he talked too much, the Church heard about the book, bought or stole it, that it’s either destroyed now or buried in the deepest vaults of the Vatican.”

  “We’re still assuming the original burned with the library in Alexandria?” Matthew asked.

  “It’s unlikely any copies existed above ground after the Fourth Century, although these tantalizing reports do keep surfacing,” Marian replied. “The early Christians weren’t much easier on heretics than the Romans. So essentially we’re looking for a book that’s not just lost — assuming it ever existed — but actively suppressed.”

  In the next room an eager pre-teen girl could be seen pulling books off the shelves in quick succession, carryi
ng them over to show them to her dad, who was kneeling on the floor in front of 19th century adventure fiction — the case labeled “A Hit Before Your Mother Was Born.”

  “No, not that one. No, not that one, honey.”

  “Perhaps if you tell me what you’re looking for,” Matthew strolled over and suggested, pleasantly.

  “Gold books.”

  “Mining, or jewelry?”

  “What?”

  “Books on gold mining, or books with pictures of gold jewelry?”

  “No, gold books. We’ve got a lot of red books, see, so we’re putting them on a shelf—”

  “And you want to do the shelf in red and gold.”

  “Yes. The more beat up the better. And of course they have to be cheap. That’s why we want used books.”

  “You could also do red, black, and gold, unless you feel that’s excessively Teutonic.”

  “What? No, but I’ve been thinking we could do red and green, if that’s easier.”

  “A fine choice, and you’d have a head start on your Christmas decor. Unfortunately, ‘beat to hell’ is not a condition we generally stock.”

  “Are all your books two dollars?”

  “They’re marked individually.”

  “Yeah, but I mean what’s the price? Some places they’re all two dollars, paperbacks fifty cents.”

  “Not here. They’re all marked individually.”

  “Like, how much for this green book?”

  “The first printing of H. Rider Haggard’s She? I’m sure you’ll remember it as the one where Ursula Andress walks through the blue flame and comes out looking like Helen Gahagan Douglas. It’ll be marked in pencil on the first plain blank page.”

  The man fumbled to find it. “Seven-fifty? Well, it is pretty.” The book had beveled edges and the gilt Egyptian goose scarab to upper left of the front board.

  Matthew removed the volume from the character’s hands, a bit firmly. “This book is marked seven hundred fifty dollars, about 75 percent of its current market value. The gift inscription is dated the first day of issue.”

  “That’s got to be more than the thing sold for when it was new!”