A Slepyng Hound to Wake

by Vincent McCaffrey

  Eddy leaned in over the table. “He had all the good ones. I only paid about nine hundred dollars and I got twenty-five early Arkham House editions that day.” It sounded like a boast, but then it might just be a fond memory. All booksellers kept such moments in mind to tide them over the bad decisions.

  Henry asked, “What happened to the rest?”

  Eddy shrugged his shoulders. Bones pressed against the cloth of his shirt.

  “Sold ’em all. Sold ’em at my old store. You remember that place, don’t you? It was the science fiction fans who used to pay my rent there. Nobody gives a damn about Cervantes anymore. Had a set of the Boswell journals when I opened up. I was there twelve years. Managed to read through the whole damn thing during slow times. Knew it was time to close the place for good when I finished the last volume.”

  Henry nodded and Eddy let him inspect the book in silence. This copy of Beyond the Wall of Sleep had been read more than once. The binding opened freely. But there was no significant wear. The paper was cream white and without a dirty fingerprint—unusual enough for the war years when the paper used was of a lower grade. The black cloth had the sheen of its original state, the bottom edge was unscuffed by shelf wear. The book itself was still in fine condition, but the dust jacket was better described as near fine—no visible soiling, slight yellowing, with a small nick at the top of the backstrip and a closed tear of less than a quarter inch. When Henry finally spoke, he was only saying out loud the thought in his head.

  “Funny thing is, that the Peabody family fortune was made on the opium trade in China.”

  Eddy shrugged. “Is that right. Is that so? What goes around comes around, don’t it? Hale Peabody liked the horses and the horse they say. Well … so. What will you give me?”

  Henry had not heard the term “horse” for heroin since he was a kid. He looked at Eddy’s eyes. They were clear.

  He said, “Three hundred.”

  Eddy did not wince. “It’s worth two thousand.”

  Henry nodded. “I could go four.”

  Eddy wagged his head. “Four-fifty.”

  They both knew it would be less than five at the start. The dance was only a sort of handshake, to make it official. In fact, Henry would be selling the book again wholesale for less than half its potential value to the right dealer.

  Eddy now followed as Henry carried the book wrapped in a brown grocery bag back to Harvard Square, purposely skipping a closer branch of his bank, just to be in a more public place when he withdrew the money.

  The Square was busy. The plaza at Holyoke Center was thick with an evening mix of students and street people. The drum of a musician on overturned buckets punctuated the din of talk and traffic.

  A policeman, one foot up on the curb and head half turned, seemed to be keeping an eye on the underage crowd gathered in the brick-lined “pit” behind the subway entrance.

  “June 24th, 2003,” flashed in green from a glass strip in the stainless steel face of the bank machine. Another insisted on the time. It was 9:37.

  The machine sucked in Henry’s bank card with the purr of an animal, but then refused his request. He punched in half the amount. The tongue of bills Henry pulled from the slot were new and stuck together in the warm air. He used his credit card to extract the rest in the same fashion. Eddy counted it twice, hunching his shoulders as he did, and using his scrawny frame to block the view of anyone interested. Henry saw the cop turn toward them and then away again.

  Eddy said, “Deal.”

  Henry nodded. “Good. Have fun at the auction.”

  They parted at the enclosure for the bank machine, going in opposite directions. Eddy’s last words were, “Catch ya later.”

  Henry walked back slowly, trying to enjoy the night. Recent days of rain had left things clean. A small wedge of moon held a cloud apart long enough to overcome the city lights. On narrow sidewalks he stepped aside for couples. The fleeting thought crossed his mind that he had forgotten something or was headed in the wrong direction. He was going home alone, with a book in his hand. It did not seem enough.

  He arranged the book on his kitchen table, as he had done with the paperbacks earlier, but photographed it several times from different angles. He removed the jacket and photographed the book standing up with the title page visible. Then he uploaded the images to his computer and sent out his second email of the day, this time including the basic bibliographic information cribbed from an old catalog. His collection of catalogs on the specialties he was less familiar with filled two shelves beside the couch. This left him hungry again and he put his mind on a cool beer.

  Someone knocked on his door—a familiar knock. He opened it without asking. Della was there, and came in talking.

  “Is that your landlady on the front porch? She seems nice—like somebody’s aunt. The movie was good, but Bob can be a real jerk. Likes to control everything. Take charge. But I’ve told you that before. What are you doing?” She made a direct line for the book on the table. Henry had not yet spoken, or even smiled. Her string of banter continued. “Cool … Always up to something. Busy, busy, busy. Did you get this while I was watching your namesake trying not to fall in love with Veronica Lake? He didn’t succeed. Neither will you.”

  Henry opened his arms dramatically. “That’s what I really ought to do. I ought to run away. Take a trip—Like Sullivan’s Travels. See what the world looks like on the other side of the Connecticut River.”

  She did not pause. “But you’ve been to Northampton. You want to go in the other direction. You want to go to Budapest.” She paged the book. “This stuff is weird.”

  She was suddenly ignoring him, reading random paragraphs. That was another thing he did not like. She was a speed-reader. He had failed to convince her to read more slowly, to enjoy the use of words. But then, she read such crap—why dawdle?

  “You’re right. I’ve been all the way to Northampton. What I really want is a beer, and the fridge is empty.” He motioned her toward the door again.

  “Good idea … As always.” She kept reading, without making a move to leave.

  He said, “That’s not your kind of stuff,” and nudged her. “Lovecraft was a misogynist.”

  She finally turned to him. “What are you doing with it then? You love women. What’s it worth?”

  Why did she suddenly want to know that? She seldom expressed any interest in his books.

  “Enough to bother with. The dealers will make their offers, and I’ll take the best I get. Come on.”

  She turned her head a little sideways and raised her eyebrows at him. He wished she wouldn’t use color on her eyebrows. She did not know how to use makeup. She was a natural blond, and she had the silly idea that her eyebrows disappeared without additional color.

  She said, “Books are not a living. They’re a hobby. You want to make a living—you get a job and I’ll marry you and we’ll have two and a half kids and you can do this on the side and we’ll live happily ever after.”

  “With Bob?”

  “Bob is a jerk. He tried to feel me up while we were watching the movie.”

  Henry shook his head. “That wouldn’t be because you gave him the wrong signals or anything, right?”

  “Right! I just wanted to go to the movies. I knew you weren’t going to sit there with him on the other side of me, trying to feel me up or not. Now, if you both had been feeling me up, that would have been different, but you just can’t share, can you?”

  “No.”

  “See? That’s why I love you and not Bob. It’s a Solomon kind of thing.”

  “A what?”

  “Like Solomon. Like the two women and the baby. You’re the mother who wouldn’t share, and I’m the baby.”

  “So now you’re saying I’m a mother?” He exaggerated the look on his face. She always had the oddest analogies.

  But he never had the chance to analyze that idea further.

  There was another knock on the door—not familiar. Then a voice.

&n
bsp; “Cambridge Police. Henry Sullivan?”

  Henry looked at Della, who looked back at him without expression. He liked the idea that she was slow to panic.

  He opened the door on two uniformed officers standing at either side of the frame, as if he was about to shoot his way out.

  Chapter Two

  His eyes followed the perfect arc of Varitek’s home run and stopped at the sweeping edge of the lettering on the John Hancock sign as the ball fell to the bleachers. The sign did not have the same comfortable feel as the old red and white Hood Milk billboard. And Henry could not remember just then what standard had been replaced by the pale colors of the Dunkin Donuts sign. Everything was changing, and he had not been to as many games lately as he would have liked. He felt a wave of complaint rise inside of him.

  He wished he were a snob. Why didn’t it bother him that he was nearly forty years old—very nearly—and his best friend was a garbage man? He should have gone to college, if for no other reason than to have a better grade of friends to hang with. Why should he be satisfied with this? He should have season tickets. Box seats, maybe. He could have been a snob, if he had tried. Albert hated snobs. It was worth at least an hour’s ranting. Henry was about to disclose this newly discovered wish when Albert spoke first.

  “You stink.”

  Henry started from the reverie which overlaid his concentration on the game. “What?”

  How could Albert distinguish Henry’s smell amidst the hot breath of Fenway Park? The kid with the cardboard tray of nachos directly behind them was chewing with his mouth open. The kid’s father had spilled half his beer onto the cement, and it was drooling among the peanut shells at Henry’s feet. Because Johnny Damon could slice a ball their way any time, Henry wanted to keep his eyes on the batter.

  And that was another thing. That was a complaint for the ages. He had never gotten a foul ball since he was a kid, not even close, and he was almost forty.

  Albert leaned Henry’s way. “Just something I noticed. I think it’s the books. It’s the mildew. It’s the rot.”

  Henry defended himself without turning. “All I smell is beer and peanuts—and garbage. You can’t smell anything because you’re so used to the garbage.”

  Albert reacted as if he were hit.

  “What garbage? I changed my clothes. I took a shower. There’s no garbage on me.”

  Henry had an answer, but he wanted to keep his eye on Johnny Damon. The Detroit pitcher was really letting his fastball ride up. But Henry had a good comeback, even if it would be a waste to use it just now. He could say, “How would you know if you had any garbage on you? You can’t smell worth a damn.”

  Or he could mention Teddy Morris. Any mention of Teddy Morris was worth ten minutes of Albert’s ire.

  But Henry didn’t feel up to it. He was not on his own game today, much less the real deal in front of his eyes. Henry decided to appease, instead.

  “I knew a girl once who worked over at the Necco candy factory. She always smelled so sweet. You just wanted to lick her.”

  Albert’s answered as if uninterested in deténte. “You mean Mandy. I remember Mandy. She didn’t smell. That’s just your dirty mind.”

  Damon swung beneath another fast-ball and was gone.

  Henry was not in the mood for any more verbal wrestling. The real problem was that Albert was still unhappy with Henry about buying tickets for seats so far beyond third base. Henry had drawn the short straw to stand in line with several hundred other fools during a freezing rain in February, and he had screwed up. He had overslept. He had never overslept for anything else in his life. Not that he could remember. Even in December he was one of the first in line at the Hubley book auction, huddling in the early morning dark at that metal gate and stomping his feet against the cold. He couldn’t even blame Della. They had just started dating at the time, but she had gone home early that night. It just happened. And this was their fourth game of the year and Albert was still complaining.

  Albert seemed to swell in his seat. This was part of the punishment. Already too large for the narrow seats offered by the cheap Red Sox management, Albert grew larger at times like this, his elbows and forearms overlapping the metal armrests, his knees hard against the seat in front of him. Children often cried if unfortunate enough to be stuck behind Albert. Grown people whispered and whined to their partners. In fact, Albert was not over six foot four—only a couple inches taller than Henry. It was the breadth of his shoulders that made the difference.

  Henry leaned forward so that their shoulders did not meet. He said, “Things get in your pores. You can’t get them out. It’s like a coal miner with the black grit beneath the skin. They can’t get rid of it. You can’t let it go. You can’t get over it. Like some people are with other people’s mistakes. So, you think I smell like books—”

  “Nasty old rotten books,” Albert added.

  “… but you smell like—”

  “Dove soap. It’s the only kind Alice ever buys.”

  “… garbage.”

  They both stared out at the field between innings. Henry knew Albert’s mind was working on something more and he waited on it. Let him make the next move.

  Albert poked a finger into the air. “Now, not like my boys! That’s a real smell. Pure locker-room. That’s what Alice calls their bedroom. The locker-room. They stuff their dirty clothes under their beds. Danny has taken to using a hair gel that draws flies. Junior is doing three sports at school this year. Alice makes him do his own laundry, so he waits until things get stiff before he washes them.”

  Henry let out a short laugh. “It’s all in your mind. Like those guys you read about who lose a leg and still think they can feel their toes. The stench of ripe garbage has numbed your senses. You wish you could smell, so you imagine it. You wish you could smell as good as I do.”

  Albert ignored that line of reasoning. “Coal grit? Missing legs? It’s that book leather I’m talking about. Leather comes from dead bodies. It’s just rotting skin.”

  Henry had to admit, that was good. He liked that. He had no verbal maneuver to better it. Henry was not going to be able to win this one.

  “You’ve never even smelled a dead body. How would you know? The leather is tanned. It oxidizes.”

  Albert turned to Henry suddenly, his voice a little lower. He had been reminded of something. “Do they know yet what happened to that poor guy?”

  Henry was glad for the change of direction. “I called the detective back after they questioned me the last time. It was probably just a robbery. Eddy had my four hundred and fifty dollars on him. People have been killed for less. God only knows what Eddy had hidden in that apartment. They asked me more than once if I had noticed anything when I went in there. I guess the place was ransacked afterwards. They have no idea what might have been stolen. Eddy hung out with the wrong people. And I guess druggies get killed all the time.” He paused and then added, “The cops don’t seem to care as much as I do.”

  There was another fly ball and the inning was over.

  Albert said, “There’ve been a few of those type of things in Cambridge, lately. Someone’s killing druggies, like they’re not going to die soon enough on their own.”

  Henry studied the Boston bullpen again. A reliever was up but he could not quite see the number on the shirt. He was a righty. They needed a lefty. “That’s another reason not to read the papers,” Henry answered. “The auction announcements are the only section worth looking at.”

  Albert turned to him, “Are you ever going to get the book back?”

  Henry shrugged. “Cops still have it. I think they’ll return it to me at some point. I have an order on hold already.”

  “Stinks.”

  “Right.”

  Albert shook his head and stared out at the field. “Lot’s of things stink.”

  Henry held back an additional thought and looked toward the bleachers, as he often did, to find the seats he and his sister and the old man used to sit in.

>   Albert nudged him with his shoulder.

  “You want your beer now? It’s my turn.”

  Henry nodded.

  The fifth inning had started as Albert rose from his seat and someone behind them shouted for him to sit down. Albert glared back and moved down the row without waiting.

  Henry took the opportunity to look past him and peek again at the redhead directly behind the visitor’s dugout. She was amazing by all standards, and it was not a coincidence that he had to look over the backs of so many other heads along the line of sight. The tall fellow beside her was George Duggan, twice her age, and not her father. Some authors lived better than others. It was the way the system worked. Some authors lived better than a hundred others, Henry thought idly. Henry had sold Duggan’s very first novel about Boadicea at least a dozen times over the years, each time for more. A fine copy was now going for a thousand dollars and up, online. He could still remember the first one he had sold for Barbara at Alcott & Poe sometime around 1984, for twelve bucks, and glad to get it.

  The batter for Detroit put a ball into the bullpen, just short of the outstretched arms in the bleachers.

  Henry recalculated the trajectory of the ball as if it were coming right at him, just as it did when he used to bring his glove—Shelagh used to wear his father’s old glove to the games, because she liked the look of it, and he was always jealous of that small and beaten thing, even as proud as he had been of the new mitt he had bought for himself. The three of them used to sit in the bleachers just there above the bullpen and look in at the box seats.

  The old man called them the swell seats, but he meant the seats for the swells. His father earned decent money. He was union, but he always had extra work. They were not poor, in any case, and all the seats were a lot cheaper then. They could have afforded better. But it was part of a way of thinking. It was something Henry hoped he had left behind. “Use it up. Wear it out. Make it do, or do without,” his father used to say. Always buy what was on sale. Never pay full price. Henry hated it. It was like an infection in his blood. It was somehow the exact opposite of greed or avarice. Not frugality, but parsimony. Niggardliness. It was the compulsion not to want. The desire not to have. The need not to wish. It was one of the things which had made his sister Shelagh run off with Rick long ago.