My Darling Detective

by Howard Norman

  “I’ve fallen behind in my obligations. I’ll do better.”

  “Well, Jacob, I’m about to trust you, not just to do better, but to do your best. Because the family who purchased Tombeau des Rois has fallen on hard times. The photograph is up for auction in three weeks in London.”

  “I would imagine you have the research waiting in the library.”

  “I do indeed.”

  “What’s the highest I can bid?”

  “Twelve thousand, not a penny more. But if need be, Jacob, not a penny less. And that is twelve thousand English pounds, by the way.”

  “Of course.”

  From Mrs. Hamelin’s library I telephoned Martha at the police station. “I’ve just been told I’m going to London in two weeks.”

  “What about our weekend in Montreal?”

  “It’s an important auction. I’m sorry.”

  “Disappointing. There was going to be that restaurant. There was going to be that hotel.”

  “Worse yet, I’ve got to start my research tonight—now, in fact. Esther read me the riot act a few minutes ago. Not happy with me. Not happy at all. My being so distracted lately. Stuff like that.”

  “Tell Esther—uh, Mrs. Hamelin. Tell her you’ve been very attentive to me. Use the term ‘under the bedclothes.’”

  “I’m afraid that wouldn’t help my situation much, but I’m glad you feel the way you feel.”

  “I don’t mind practicing for marriage for another year. But after that, if we don’t set a date, I’m going to propose to both Hodgdon and Tides, possibly within the same hour.”

  “They’re both already married.”

  “True, but I know many secrets about them—their so-called work habits. I could easily blackmail them into it. Once I spoke to their wives, they’d serve me tea and start packing their suitcases. They’d be appreciative. It would all get done very quickly.”

  “What time is Detective Levy Detects on tonight?”

  “Ten o’clock, as usual. You’d better be here by then, Jake. We have to listen together. Want me to save you some dinner?”

  “Mrs. Brevittmore will give me something, I’m sure. I’m in Esther’s library now, and believe me, there’s a stack of books and academic papers and all sorts of other things I’ve got to start in on.”

  “Just so you know, tonight’s episode? Detective Levy and Leah Diamond get caught up in the murder of the little bald guy who sells newspapers and cigars and candy in the hotel lobby. I mean, who’d want to do that? He always had a kind word. But who knows? Maybe he was crooked.”

  “I’ll give all this some thought when I’m walking over tonight. I’ve got to hit these books now, Martha.”

  “Me, I’ve got to move one report over to the other side of my desk. Then I’ve got to replace it with another report.”

  “See you around nine-thirty, okay?”

  “If you’re later than ten, you know I won’t talk to you until the episode’s over.”

  “If I know anything, I know that.”

  Auguste Salzmann: The Jerusalem Photographs, the translation of a book written in the mid-nineteenth century, was very informative, especially about Salzmann’s life. He’d begun his artistic career as a painter, studying under his brother, Henri-Gustave. Then he got interested in photography. In 1854 he went to the Holy Land on a mission sponsored by the French Ministry of Public Interest, but his journey was cut short by illness—it may have been acute dysentery. Still, he managed to make 150 calotypes of historical monuments in Egypt and Jerusalem. He worked in technically refined “salt prints,” as they were called. Mrs. Hamelin had also provided me with a book called The Art of the French Calotype and fifty or so articles about Salzmann from various journals, including four whose translation from the French she’d commissioned.

  I read more than a hundred pages, took notes, then packed my shaving kit and a change of clothes and walked to Martha’s apartment. I arrived at the very start of Detective Levy Detects. Martha had set the radio on the kitchen table and gestured, with a finger upright across her mouth, for me to stay quiet, so I sat at the kitchen table too, and she slid a cup of hot tea over to me. Of late she’d been trying to get me to drink tea at night instead of coffee.

  “In tonight’s episode,” the announcer said, “Detective Frederik Levy and the love of his life and partner in sleuthing, Leah Diamond, have been called in to investigate the murder of Fanwell Birch, who worked the newspaper stand in the lobby of the Hotel Devonshire. Always one with a firm handshake and a hale and hearty good morning, and a good old Canadian work ethic, at work by six in the a.m. and never left the lobby before eight in the p.m., Fanwell Birch, age fifty-eight, five feet five inches tall, not a hair on his head, who owned two suits, two ties, two white shirts, and two pairs of shoes and socks, was found with a bullet in the heart, slumped over a stack of newspapers, in the hotel lobby where he spent half a lifetime. Apparently, nobody heard the shot. Well, then again, Fanwell Birch probably heard it.”

  Right after this, Martha took my hand and led me into her bedroom, and we lay down on top of the bedclothes. “There, that’s better,” she said. She loved listening to the radio a room away like this. But whether the radio was on the bedside or the kitchen table, it was almost as if Detective Levy Detects intensified Martha’s comprehension of the powers of seduction.

  “You know, darling, even when I’m here alone, I usually listen to Detective Levy Detects in bed. And it’s not that I actually want to be Leah Diamond—well, all right, maybe for a night.”

  Frankly, I don’t remember much of the plot, but I do remember some of the lines that made Martha laugh and say, pretty much like she always said, “Boy, those people really know how to talk, don’t they?”

  See my derringer, here, pointing at you? A derringer is the miniature poodle of guns—with rabies.

  So what you know my name, so what? Just because you know my name don’t mean you know my game.

  I sized you up in two minutes, sonny. I’m a student of people. They don’t give out diplomas for that. There’s no diploma for how I size people up.

  You’re actually asking, is this gun loaded? Sure it’s loaded, else it wouldn’t have any bullets in it.

  Woke with your clothes on, eh? That don’t mean at some point in the evening you didn’t have them off, now, does it? If you can’t remember, why should I tell you?

  Smooching, necking, kissing, none of them suffice. See, I want to do something with our lips there ain’t no dictionary word for it. Something in the dark, way beyond the dictionary.

  In my experience, at heightened moments of bidding at auction, it little matters what I know about the photographer or the photograph in question. How to say this? You aren’t bidding against other bidders’ knowledge, but against their incentive. Sitting in my assigned seat, I am all nerves. I unbutton the collar of my white shirt, loosen the knot of my tie. (Mrs. Hamelin expects me to be properly dressed, an auction being a “formal occasion of attentiveness and possibility,” as she put it.) And being all nerves, my alertness isn’t drawn from books, articles, treatises, or my one course in art history. No, I’m merely an emissary on assignment, in a fugue state of intuition, who can lift his right hand in a sharp little wave, or shoot it up like a schoolboy anxious to answer the teacher’s question, or casually hoist an open palm as if gesturing to a waiter to bring the check. Or raise the bidding paddle, if one is provided. It all depends on the moment.

  Bidding at auction is complicated for me. On the one hand, I want to please Mrs. Hamelin and come home with the goods. On the other hand, I am acutely aware of the systems of class, privilege, and imperiousness that, at any time, might intervene in, and violate the purported etiquette and order of, the auction room. This, in fact, occurred in London during the bidding for Tombeau des Rois.

  I traveled to London on September 9, 1977. The auction was held in a spacious private home on George Street, a block west of Durrants Hotel, where I’d taken a room. In London I always staye
d at Durrants, no matter the location of the auction. By always, I mean this was my third visit to London. Arriving jet-lagged at six o’clock in the morning, I was pleased that Mrs. Hamelin had thought to secure my room for the previous night, so I could check right in and get some much-needed sleep. Waking at about three, I found a fish and chips shop nearby, then returned to my room to brush up on my reading about Tombeau des Rois and telephone Martha.

  “How are you?” she said. “The auction is in three hours. I sent my suit down immediately to be pressed,” I said. “Esther Hamelin trained you well, Jake. Kidding aside, good luck. I hope it goes well and you get the photograph for her. What’s it called again? My mind is fuzzy.” “Tombeau des Rois de Juda,” I said. “Oooh, a man who can speak French so fluently really makes me want to—” “I wish you were here too, my darling detective. Sometime maybe you can travel with me to an auction.” “I’ll save my pennies. Let me know how it goes, please. Bye-bye.”

  I had a bowl of soup, some bread, and a salad in the hotel dining room. Then I went back up to my room and got dressed in my suit, tie, and polished shoes. I walked to the private home where the auction was to be held. I produced my credentials and was shown into what looked to me like a ballroom. Folding chairs were set out in rows. The easel and podium were up front. It was all done in good taste. By the time the first item was put on exhibit, every seat was filled. No one was standing in the back or along the sides of the room. Invitation only.

  The auctioneer stepped to the podium, adjusted the microphone, and said, in a British accent, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.” His name, as listed on the elegantly printed program, was Everett Gray. When he first appeared from the back room, I almost burst into laughter: he so fully met the description, on Detective Levy Detects, of the murdered newspaper seller, Fanwell Birch. If I wanted to end my employment with Mrs. Hamelin, I could’ve done so, right then and there, by standing up and shouting, “You’re not Everett Gray. No, sir, you are in fact one Fanwell Birch, who sold newspapers and cigars in the lobby of the Devonshire Hotel in downtown Toronto, Canada. Because you see, sir, I am not Jacob Rigolet, as my name tag professes me to be. No, I am Detective Frederik Levy.” Plus which, telling Martha what I’d done would’ve made her laugh. That is often, of an evening, my one ambition, to make her laugh.

  Instead, I sat out the bidding for a photograph titled Cadillac Showroom, by Robert Frank, from the auction house’s twentieth-century collection, in uninterested silence.

  It was over an hour before the bidding for the twentieth-century collection was completed. Between heated rounds of bidding, the man seated next to me, Hans Frisch, an Austrian representing a private client, would lean over and provide a witty and insightful comment. I liked this fellow and arranged to have a drink with him at Durrants Hotel after the auction. When, perhaps against my better judgment, I’d told him that I was there to bid only on Tombeau des Rois, his whole countenance soured. He resituated himself, groaning, as if it were an arduous journey, rather than a matter of inches, to the far edge of his chair. Staring at the podium, he said, “I’ll have to pass on that drink, I’m afraid, Mr. Rigolet. With professional apologies, naturally.” It was then I realized he was there to bid on the same photograph.

  As it turned out, he bid on all three nineteenth-century photographs on offer ahead of Tombeau des Rois and was successful twice. When the Salzmann was brought to the easel, its bona fides given, and the bidding begun at five thousand pounds, Hans Frisch turned to me and said, “My constitution does not allow me a subjunctive mood, always so prevalent in these auctions.” (Later, I had to look up “subjunctive” in the dictionary in Durrants’ library.) The bidding had upped only to six thousand five hundred when Frisch raised the paddle with his seat number on it and called out, “Twenty-two thousand pounds!” He turned to me and sniffed, then turned back to the podium, where Mr. Gray cleared his throat and said, in a tensely restrained voice, “The gentleman bids twenty-two thousand pounds. Do I hear twenty-two thousand five hundred?” But the bidding for Tombeau des Rois was over. The gavel came down. Hisses were heard in protest. Hans Frisch rose from his chair and walked down the aisle and out the back door. My work being over and done with, I followed him out, not close behind.

  I immediately made all sorts of harsh judgments concerning Frisch, but I hadn’t yet had time to sort them out. Because of Frisch’s ambush, I had lost out on Tombeau des Rois de Juda, though I may not have won it anyway. That part was unpredictable: someone other than Frisch may have been willing to bid higher than my allotted twelve thousand. Still, Frisch had made certain to end the bidding in such an arrogant and abrupt manner, not subscribing to the received or expected notions of fairness, not allowing for the auction to build in tension, not allowing for the traditional repertoire of feints, hesitations, grandstanding, subtleties, and resignations, though Frisch’s outlandish bid certainly did deliver a dramatic performance, and of course he won the Salzmann. It was Frisch’s sheer crudeness that would not be forgiven. All of that. All of that. And now I dreaded telephoning Mrs. Hamelin, which she always insisted I do right after an auction ended. I’d go directly to my room and pick up the phone and ask to be connected to her number in Halifax. I would have to report that Tombeau des Rois was the second photograph in a row I’d failed to win for her. Next, I would telephone Martha.

  I found myself following Frisch on the street. He was carrying a leather valise. He turned once to look back. When he reached Durrants Hotel, he stopped and waited for me. He held out his hand, but I refused to shake it. “I understand,” he said. “But life is more complicated than what first it might appear. Allow me to stand you that drink. Please.”

  In the dark bar of the hotel, with its black leather couches and chairs, its small round tables, its bartender dressed in white shirt and black vest and trousers, there were three Japanese women and, at a corner table, two men speaking in low tones. Later, the bartender said one of the men was the poet Ted Hughes. He told me, “Right around the corner is Francis Edwards, Antiquarian Books. Mr. Hughes has a number of his books there. Just a suggestion, mate.”

  Anyway, when the waiter called out for our choices, I ordered a vodka straight up, and Frisch a White Russian; he looked apologetically at me and said, “Weak stomach—the cream helps.” Frisch brought our drinks back to the table. Holding his glass in the air, he said, “To displeasing our employers.” Hesitatingly, I clinked my glass against his. It seemed a peculiar toast to make, and to ask me to make.

  “Look, Mr. Rigolet—may I call you Jacob?” I nodded. “Jacob, look. I’ve got a nervous condition. Let me explain. How you saw me behave at the auction, that is how I always behave at auctions. I work for an extremely wealthy man who lives in Zurich. Part of an old banking family. He is—how do you say it? My bread and butter. He does not give me limits on what I can bid. I proceed at my own discretion. He only expects me to bring a photograph or photographs back for his collection, you see. To not have a limit, and my nervous condition—which is that I am claustrophobic to a terrible degree, and so, in an auction room, I am often almost ready to black out. To faint dead away. So therefore I—what is the American expression? Cut in line? It almost always works, my bid being twice, three times, even more than what anyone else has bid to that point.”

  “But you didn’t do that with the first three photographs you bid on,” I said.

  “Yes, but there was little bidding on those. The end came swiftly, and you might have noticed that I stepped out into the hallway between each item. To get some air.”

  “I did notice that.”

  “Yet with Tombeau des Rois, once I knew you were there to bid on that one photograph, I knew the bidding for it might take some time.”

  “So you cut in line.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Better than to faint dead away.”

  “Still, I looked at you, my friend. I studied your face. And I said to myself: No doubt a good man. A man working for an employer of means.
In that sense, a man just like myself. And by my actions I may have made life difficult for this good man. And I felt . . . I felt artificial. I felt artificial, here—” He held his open palm against his heart. “And now we are here, together, having a drink. And I will confess to you that I have reached a low point. I am, as the French say, experiencing the black butterfly. The depression. I can find no way to put it in reverse. My wife has left me. My children no longer acknowledge my existence. I anger everyone at the auctions—I have actually been struck in the face, in a Rotterdam auction house this occurred—and yet the auctions are my only employment.”

  He finished his drink and waved his glass in the air, indicating to the bartender that he wanted another of the same. The bartender delivered it himself this time.

  “Salud!” Frisch said, and drank the second White Russian in three gulps. “Now here is what I propose. This is a way to make your visit to London a success and to reprieve me of my miserable guilt, at how shamelessly I have comported myself.

  “Nine o’clock, the bank where is my employer’s account will open. I will withdraw the twenty-two thousand pounds, as I am authorized to do. The bank knows me and knows whom I represent, you understand. I will then go to the auction house and complete the transaction with them. I will next meet you at this very same table. You did mention you’d taken a room here in Durrants Hotel? I will then hand to you Tombeau des Rois. You will then board a plane for Canada, where you will deliver the photograph to your employer. Voilà! You are a success in your employer’s eyes. I have what is called power of attorney, and I will have provided you with a formal letter declaring Tombeau des Rois is a gift. It will be entirely legal. There would in my opinion be no need to provide any more details to your employer. You can simply say that life is unpredictable and the photograph is his.”