“I’m afraid my father passed away two weeks ago.” I didn’t need to use any of my pathetic acting skills for it to be clear what I said was true, and that it upset me.
The quick look of shock that swept across his face was more proof that this guy was out of the loop on my dad’s status and troubled by the news. “I hadn’t heard, been overseas on business. I’m terribly sorry for your loss. He and I had arrangements, you see, to meet and—I don’t know what to say.”
“It’s wet out there. You want to come in?”
“Well, just for a moment.”
We stood in the hallway, him dripping, me shivering.
“I think we met once before, in the church some months ago,” he said. “May I ask how your father passed away? It must have been a sudden illness. He seemed healthy when I saw him last.”
“We weren’t introduced,” I said, to clarify. “But yeah, we saw each other once. My dad died of a concussion. He fell down the stairs at church. They say it was an accident.”
Took me long enough, but only then did I notice he had his leather briefcase with him.
“You don’t seem too sure it was. An accident, I mean.”
With that, he suddenly sounded concerned. My first impression that he was clean as a freshwashed window might have been wrong, I thought. “Me, I’m just a kid, so what do I know.” Bread on the water, again.
“You seem like a pretty smart kid to me. None of my business, but I assume you’ve spoken with the police about your suspicions.”
“Oh, sure. The detective who’s looking into it stopped by this morning to go over a few things with me.”
“Did he. Well, let’s hope he gets to the bottom of it. I admired your father very much and we shared some of the same interests. In fact, I’d brought him something he and I had discussed before I went abroad,” he said, lifting the brief case slightly. “But I suppose it doesn’t matter now.”
That statement obviously left me in a quandary because I both knew and didn’t know what was in the briefcase. Had my father’s books so taken hold of me, so seduced me like they had him, and probably this gentleman whose name I still hadn’t asked for, fool that I was, that I was dying to know what he had brought? I couldn’t recall ever being in such a helpless bind. If I had even the slightest hint of a moustache, not the convincing sculpture of whiskers that crowned this man’s upper lip, I might have had a fighting chance to say, Hey, I know about the books. What’ve you got there? Something in vellum? A duodecimo or, like, a royal quarto? More Boethius, more Lucretius? But I sensed I hadn’t a fighting chance.
I did go ahead and venture, “If it’s a present or something, I could pass it along to my mom for you,” hoping to coax some information out of him.
The wheels in his mind were turning. If he were a cartoon character, the illustrators would make it so you could see inside his head, pistons cranking, smoke billowing in the air like the gray ghost of a cauliflower.
He floored me when he finally said, after, I swear to every angel fluttering around on butterfly wings in heaven and every devil who ever poked a pitchfork in a sinner’s behind, what had to have been a full minute, “It’s not a present. Your dad wanted it for a—friend of his who was going to buy it. It’s a little complicated.”
The brief hesitation that ballooned before the word “friend” meant it wasn’t a friend. I was young, yes, but I wasn’t born yesterday. Curious before, now I was riveted.
He continued, the wheels in his mind still turning, “I’d give it to you but the problem is, you wouldn’t really know what to do with it.”
“How complicated could it be?” I asked. I mean, I loved my dad but doubted what he had been up to here wasn’t beyond my own modest abilities.
“Your name is Liam, isn’t it?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Well, mine’s John Harrison. I’m wondering if you’d mind if I took this coat off for a minute?”
“Oh, sure,” I said, feeling that things might be drifting my way.
We sat, as if some movie director told us to and we were obedient actors, just where Reynolds and I had earlier. Harrison settled his briefcase between his polished black wingtip shoes.
“Did your father ever share with you his passion for books?”
Unbelievable, I thought. Was this guy really going to tell me what was what?
“For the Bible, sure. After that, not so much.”
“He liked other books, too. You like books, Liam?”
“They have become of real interest to me recently,” I said, mangling my English in an effort to sound sophisticated.
“I happen to think that would make your father extremely proud.”
“What sort of work do you do, Mr. Harrison?” I asked, hoping to turn the spotlight away from me. I tried to make my question sound chatty, not pushy, but even before he answered, a raft of other questions flooded my mind. How did you know my father? Why all the secrecy around these books? Who was that other guy with the white Porsche? If my dad was pushed down those stairs, why was he pushed? What the hell was going on here?
“You can call me John if you like, Liam. What I am is a librarian,” he said. “Like you, I’ve loved books ever since I was a kid, and when I grew up I figured the best way to be near what I loved was to work in a building filled with books.”
“Makes sense,” I said, ignoring his patronizing tone, waiting for more.
“It can be a little boring at times, but the job has its benefits.”
“That’s probably true of all jobs, no?” I could tell he was weighing something most important to him, so didn’t stress over it myself but did have to wonder when he would get to the blasted point.
“Listen, Liam,” said Harrison, or, that is, John, after another of his pauses, this one briefer than the others. “How good are you at keeping secrets?”
I thought of the more than sixty Bibles buried in my bedroom closet, thought of my beloved Amanda, thought of the often daydreamy life I led behind my locked bedroom door, and answered, “The best.”
“Good. I kind of thought so,” he said. “Your father, being a man of cloth, probably taught you what the phrase ‘to take a leap of faith’ means?”
“Sure, I know what that means.”
“All right, I’m going to take a leap of faith in you, okay?”
“I’m chill with that,” I said, wishing immediately I had expressed myself less like some wannabe hip-hopster and more like a responsible grownup.
“Good,” he continued. “Have you ever heard the word ‘deacquisition’?”
“No, sir, I haven’t.”
“What about ‘deaccession?’”
I didn’t know that one, either, so he explained what they meant and went from there to tell me a lot of other interesting things. The more I spoke with John Harrison, the cooler, or rather more estimable, he seemed. I could see why my father enjoyed his friendship, or working with him, or whatever they did together. We conversed for an hour, him treating me more like an adult than anybody had in a long time, actually ever, telling me a little about a world I might never have imagined existed before I inherited my trove. Once I got the gist of what he was saying, and hearing the clock strike four, I told him my mother and brother would be coming home pretty soon, and he left after shaking my palm-damp hand, taking that book with him for safekeeping just for a few days, never knowing that it probably would have been just as safe if not safer in my tenderloin clutches. Unless what he let me in on was a pack of lies, which it wasn’t, I just felt it in my bones, the reverend had quite an interesting double life going on here for the past several years. On the one hand, it fried my circuits to think of him, my bike-riding, sermon- preaching dad, as an under-the-radar outlaw. On the other, I found myself weirdly proud that he’d led a whole clandestine life nobody might have guessed. That he was so squeaky clean made it possible for him to take a walk on the wild side. Yes, my mind was blown but, at the same time, I was deeply inspired. Looking back, I see that day
as the one when I became, for better or worse, a man.
True to my word, veritable poster boy of godless integrity that I was, I didn’t let on to my family about my second visitor that Friday, although I did tell my mother that the detective had dropped over.
“He have anything concrete to tell us?” she asked, filling the kitchen cabinets with cans of soup and vegetables after finding a place for a carton of milk in our fridge, which was already overstuffed with casseroles and pot pies that neighbors and congregants had dropped off after the funeral. To her credit, mater had kept up the same dinner regimen that kept pater so hearty during their years of marital solidarity. If meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and canned peas were good enough for a man who ministered to hundreds of unwashed souls over the years, and secretly collected and fenced rare books—I hadn’t known, until Harrison told me, that the word “fence” had another meaning beyond chainlink and pickets—then loaf, spuds, and mushy peas were good enough for me.
“Not really,” I said, neutral as a glass of water. “He told me that the rest of them he works with say it was an accident. Guess they don’t have any clues.” I was about to add that maybe we should consider suing the church since there was a little lip on the third step down on which he might have caught the tip of his shoe. But then I realized we would pretty much only be suing ourselves. Besides, who knows whether the insurance was all paid up. Just seemed like a dead end in every sense.
“Well, then, I wish he’d stop coming around and stirring up bad memories.”
“I hear you, Mom. But his intentions are good,” remembering that line about how the road to perdition is paved with good intentions. She was right. Especially now that I knew what I knew. It was going to be best if Reynolds did back off. If I stuck to that old bit about An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, it could wind up being my eye and my tooth that might go missing. I didn’t know whether or not my poor father tripped and plunged down the stairs all on his lonesome. Point was, either way he was gone and there was no getting him back. And, like it or not, the less the police looked into his death, the less the chance they would uncover his curious secrets. He was beloved by his tightfisted flock, I thought. Let him stay beloved.
“I think Liam did it,” my little brother, who will never get a blue ribbon for sanity, offered up to no one in particular. Three years my junior, he might as well have been a decade younger the way he acted sometimes.
“Hush your mouth,” said my mother, a nice little flash of anger stoking her words.
“Yeah, zip it, Kemosabe,” I concurred.
“Stop calling me that,” he countered.
“Calling you what, Kemosabe?”
“Both of you. Stop it right now.”
The soundtrack for dinner that night was all forks and knives against plates, glasses of juice being gulped and set back down on the table, highlighted by an occasional sniffle from my stuffy nose. Looked like I was finally coming down with the cold I had been faking all week, comeuppance from a wrathful deity no doubt. I went to bed early, no Xbox, no tube, no De rerum natura, and slept in a pool of sweat until late morning the next day.
“You okay in there?” my worried mom asked, knocking lightly on my door.
“Be down in a minute,” I said, then lay there for another half an hour thinking about how much I missed Amanda, since the church was closed until a replacement minister was found, but also about Harrison, who’d given me his cell number. I don’t think he could believe it any more than I did, that he basically offered to let me consider picking up where the reverend had let off. Obviously my dad had been a fence for the ages, since it didn’t look like Harrison was taking his business elsewhere. Although, I had to wonder, maybe there weren’t any available elsewheres. Or, at least, elsewheres that could be so covert and trusted.
“You’re young to be doing this sort of thing,” Harrison had said toward the end of our meeting, or whatever it was, almost as if he was thinking out loud. “But there’s a matter of some urgency involved here with finishing up the prearranged transactions—”
I felt proud that I was suddenly asked to be part of a transaction. Transactions were never kid stuff. The word was just too big and stately to have anything to do with playing marbles or touch football or comparable baloney.
“—that were already in process before your father passed. Claude ought to be in touch in a matter of days, and there’s quite a lot of money at stake for all three of us.”
Again, I loved feeling I was a part of a sophisticated gang or ring where each of us depended on the other and the lucre was flowing like spring melt.
“So if I could trust you to help complete the deal, I’m sure your father would’ve been grateful. And it’ll be some decent walking-around money for you. Just that you can’t let anyone notice, or ever tell anybody, ever, is all.”
“You can trust me,” I said, and meant it.
Whether or not the reverend would have been grateful, it didn’t seem to me to be very hard work, and its shadier side attracted the anarchist in me. Harrison would give me a book to transfer to another man, this Claude guy, who would give me an agreed-upon amount of money, which I’d pass along to Harrison after taking for myself what he called “the courier’s percentage,” and everybody was happy as proverbial clams. Since Harrison couldn’t safely get directly in touch with Claude and finish things up on his own—they didn’t want to meet or talk or know each other at all—it was up to me to bridge them.
“Why not?” I had asked, in all innocence.
“It’s better for you that you don’t know why not, Liam,” Harrison explained, or rather didn’t explain. “‘Why’ is a word best stayed away from.”
Never liked that word, anyway, so it was easy enough for me not to ask.
“How do I reach this Claude person?”
“You don’t,” said Harrison. “He reaches you.”
“Well, how will he know if I have something for him?”
“He won’t, not exactly. You either will or you won’t have what he wants,” Harrison said. “Thing is, it all runs along more smoothly than you can imagine. Your father always told me that Claude is a pleasant fellow, and I think you’ll agree that your father was a good judge of character.”
Fair enough, I thought, not sure whether my dad was a good judge of character or not. Steering clear of the word “why,” I tried to push the river a little more. “Does Claude own a white Porsche, like one out of a sixties movie?”
“You know, Liam, I admire your curiosity. I admire your pluck. It’s impressive in someone your age. The answer to the question is not necessarily. And the answer to your next question, if I’m guessing it right, is that it’s best you don’t know at this point. You okay with that?”
“All good,” I said, more and more liking the craziness of what I was hearing here.
The warm smile that dawned on Harrison’s face made me feel ten stories tall. How I wanted to know what book it was he had in his briefcase. What century, who the writer was, what the binding looked like, all that interesting stuff. No doubt it was worth some righteous dough, but strange as it sounds, that came in kind of second for me. We—my family and my dad’s old church—needed money, for sure. But the book itself, the physical object, and my response to it, had a quality that couldn’t be put into words, even if I had a thousand years to try. The closest I could come, then or now, was love. I’m not the sentimental kind, not much anyway. But love was what I felt, both pure and simple, and impure and not so simple. No, it wasn’t the same love I had for Amanda—I felt no deeper love for anyone or anything—but still, it was a rich, growing love for these old leather-bound antiquarian Xboxes, vellum-covered TVs with programming by Boethius and his excellent crew of fellow scribes caught immortal on the page. How I wanted to tell Harrison right then and there I was all in. Instead, I kept my cool. He would find out soon enough. Smart son of a gun probably already knew he had a partner in me.
Besides, the words my mother told me not long aft
er my father’s death came back verbatim, sharp as the razor I’d just started using on the feathery whiskers on my chin, firm as the smooth cement floor on which my dad cracked his skull. “Now you’re going to have to be the head of the family,” she had told me, “and take your father’s place in whatever ways you can.” I had no idea what that might require of me when she said it. But times had changed, quick as a slip on a step, and life was upside down and inside out. I couldn’t afford to sit around wishing things were like before. I knew what I had to do in order to measure up. Knew what kind of man I had to be.
With that decision, my course was essentially set for many years of my young life. To cut away the fat and the gristle and carve straight to the meat of the matter, I went for it. Harrison met me briefly, furtively, near an elementary school playground, to pass along the book he’d brought for my father—this time in a nondescript brown paper bag—after phoning to find out if I was up to the task after giving it a little thought.
“Yes, sir,” I told him. “Proud to have the opportunity.”
I fulfilled my obligations well enough that I continued as go-between, wearing my father’s sometime mantle with pride, caution aplenty, and in the growing knowledge that any college degree I might have pursued was trumped by the symbiotic education I was getting by handling, researching, and reading these books. Fatuous or gushy as it might sound, they inspired me to learn more than I ever might have learned in academia.
What astounds me, looking back at those callow days, those yearning-to-learn days of methodical madness, those good boy-bad boy days, me watchfully passing back and forth the rarest of rare books and the coldest of cold cash, is that the Harrisons and Claudes of this world would take a chance on an underage, unproven cadet. See, the way I figure it, if my saintly father had been selected as the perfect recruit to be a part of this operation of liberation, as they saw it, or, more like it, pretended to in order to maintain their dignity, their integrity, and all that, then I, his eldest, but an innocent youth, was an even better go-between and minor partner in the scheme.
The Nature of My Inheritance Page 4