by John Dunning
Another surprise: her voice was steady and strong. She put on her glasses and squinted through the heavy lenses, confirming my original guess. She could make out colors, shades of light and dark, shapes moving past on the street; she could assess enough of my appearance to see a fierce-looking, dark-haired bruiser straddling a stool before her; she could find her way along a sidewalk if she didn’t stumble and fall. But by almost any legal definition, she was blind.
“My name is Josephine Gallant. You have a book that belongs to me.”
I thought at once of that mysterious City of the Saints that had dropped in my lap from St. Louis. This was actually going to be good news: I could pay her a thousand dollars for that copy; hell, I could give her two thousand and sell it at cost. Maybe that would make a small difference in her life and I could go back to my own life knowing I had given her my best. Then she said, “My grandfather was Charles Warren,” and at once I remembered that phone call from the crazy woman, surrounded by spooks in Baltimore. This is how quickly good news can turn into oh shit in the book business.
Before I could gather my thoughts she said, “What I meant was, it once belonged to me. Even after all these years I still think of them as my books.”
“Them?”
“There were more where that set came from.”
Again I felt her chemistry. She felt mine too, and suddenly she trembled. “You’re a formidable man,” she said; then, in a much smaller voice, “Aren’t you, Mr. Janeway?”
For once I was flabbergasted into near-speechlessness. She repeated it, more certain now—“You are a formidable man”—as if she half expected me to haul back without warning and knock her off the chair. Softly I said, “Ma’am, I am no threat to ladies.” After an awkward pause I went on in a silly vein, trying my best to lighten her up. “I haven’t robbed a bank all week. I don’t do drugs. Don’t kick dogs…well, maybe little ones, but I never eat small children. That’s one good thing I can say for myself.”
She stared. I said, “Honest.” She lifted a shaky hand to her eyes and I gave up with a soggy punch line. “Those are all rumors that got started by an angry bookscout.”
I had a flashing moment of insanity when I almost told her the actual truth. By nature I am a cavalier with women, but I was afraid if I said that I’d have her for life.
Then she spoke. “When I called you on the telephone that day you were busy. I should have considered that. I only realized later that I must have sounded like a fool.”
“I think it was just that business about not letting them hear you.”
I felt a hot flush of shame but my cutting remark didn’t seem to offend her.
“I live in an old folks’ home in Baltimore. I’m on Medicaid and I’m not supposed to have unreported money of my own. That’s why I didn’t want them to hear what I was saying. It took everything I had hidden away to get here.”
This was not going well. Her answer for them had been annoyingly believable, so I threw her another one. “I was also a little puzzled when you said Burton had started our civil war.”
“You thought I was crazy.”
I shrugged. “No offense, ma’am. I was getting a lot of crazy calls then.”
“Well, of course he didn’t start that war. If I said that I didn’t mean it literally.” She was agitated now, whether at me or herself I couldn’t tell, but the trembling in her hands had spread to her face. For a moment I thought she was going to faint.
“Are you okay, ma’am? I’ve got a cot in the back if you’d like to lie down.”
She took a deep, shivery breath. “No, I’m fine.”
She didn’t look fine: she looked like a specter of death. She said, “I know I’m not going to make any headway trying to convince you about what Burton did or didn’t do,” then almost in the same breath she said, “How much do you know about his time in America?”
“I know he went to Utah in 1860 to meet Brigham Young. He was interested in polygamy and he wanted to see for himself how a polygamous society functioned.”
“That’s only what the textbooks tell you.”
It was what Burton himself had said in his books, but I nodded. “He had to get away from England for a while. He had been double-crossed by Speke, who took all the glory of discovering the African lakes for himself. I don’t know, maybe there was some truth to the story that he just wanted to come here and fight some Indians.”
“You know of course that he was a master spy.”
“I know when he was in India he often spied for the Crown.”
“And when he came to America, he disappeared for three months. What do you think he was doing here then?”
“Nobody knows. It’s always been assumed that he was on a drinking spree in the American South with an old friend from his days in India. But there’s no documentation for that time: the only evidence is Burton’s comment that they intended to do this. All Burton said was that he had traveled through every state before suddenly arriving at St. Joseph for his long stagecoach trip to Utah.”
“That’s not entirely true anymore. I heard that some pages from a journal have been found in England, supporting the view that Burton and his old friend Steinhauser were together after all. According to this account, they spent more time in Canada than in the Southern United States.”
“Well, there you are.”
“What if I told you there was another journal of that missing period, one that tells a far different story?”
“I’d have to be skeptical. A dozen biographers never uncovered it.”
“Maybe they didn’t know where to look.”
This again was possible. A man travels many roads—even a diligent biographer like Fawn Brodie never finds everything—but I still didn’t believe it. “I thought Mrs. Burton destroyed his journals.”
She simmered behind her old-lady face. “Well, this would be one she never got her bloody little hands on.”
“If such a book exists, I’d love to see it.”
“It exists, all right. Don’t worry about that.”
She fought her way through another attack of shakes. “It exists,” she said again.
“That’s pretty definite, ma’am…almost as if you’d seen it yourself.”
She nodded dreamily and I felt the hair bristle on the back of my neck. “A very long time ago,” she said. “A long, long lifetime ago. I don’t expect you to believe me. I just thought you might want to know that your book came out of a collection that was stolen from my family. But I guess that wouldn’t matter either.”
“Of course it would. But you’ve got to have proof.”
Outside, an ambulance went screaming past. In those few seconds I decided to take an objective and academic interest in what she was saying. Her great age demanded at least that much respect, so I ordered myself to go gently and save the assholery for someone who needed it.
I picked up a notepad and felt almost like a cop again. “How big a collection was this?”
“Large,” she said, and I could almost feel her heartbeat racing at my sudden interest. She had my attention: this was why she’d come, this was what she wanted.
“It was quite large,” she said. “You’d probably consider it the makings of a library. A good-sized bookcase full of books. A cabinet full of letters and papers.”
“A library like that isn’t easy to steal,” I said. “A man doesn’t just walk away with that in his hip pocket.”
“This was not a thief in the night. It was done through lies and deceit.”
Immediately I asked the vital legal question. “Did money change hands?”
She said, “I don’t know, I’m not sure,” but her answer was too quick and her eyes cut away from mine. I knew she was lying and she knew I knew. But what she said next only made it worse. “What difference does that make, if it was a crooked deal?”
That’s the trouble with a lie, it usually leads straight to another lie. A question rooted in a lie is a lie itself. I figured she knew quite well what a difference it co
uld make, and a lie is a lie is a lie, as Gertrude Stein, that paragon of the lucid profundity, would have gushed. Ms. Josephine Gallant dodged it by retreating into her own dim past, and there, so surprisingly that it surprised us both, she saved herself.
“That collection was put together by my grandfather more than a hundred years ago. My earliest memories are of my grandfather and his books. I remember the colors of them…the textures. I remember that room, in a house that exists only in my memory. The pale blue walls. The plaster beginning to crack in the far corner, over the kitchen door. The shiny oak floor. Me, sitting on my grandfather’s lap while he read, and outside, the sounds of horses in the street. The garbageman, with his speckled walrus mustache…nice old Mr. Dillard, who drove a wagon with a horse named Robert. Our windows were always open in the summer and there was noise—all the noises of the street—but it never disturbed my grandfather when he was reading. He could lose himself in a book. If I asked him, he would read aloud until I fell asleep. And if I awoke—if I nudged him—he would start reading again.”
She took a long breath. “If you’ve read Burton’s books, you know they can be difficult. But there are places where they bring a landscape to life, even for a child. My grandfather admired Burton tremendously. The cabinet was full of letters from Burton, written over twenty-five years. All of our books were inscribed to him by Burton, and he had many more that Burton had not written but had sent him over the years, on exotic topics that Burton had found interesting. There was always a little note inside, with some mention of the time they had spent together, and many of the books were extensively annotated with marginal notes in Burton’s hand.”
She smiled. “He often asked me, my grandfather, if I liked his books, and I always said oh yes, I loved them, and he said, they will be yours when you grow up.”
She cocked her head as if to say,That’s all I have. I’m sorry it’s not enough.
“These are my fondest memories. Listening to my grandfather read, in Burton’s own words, of his adventures in India, Africa, Arabia, and the American West.”
Her smile was faint: fleeting and wistful, lovely in the way a desert landscape must be from the edge of space. In that moment her small untruth seemed trivial and the general unease I had been feeling sharpened and became specific.
She wasn’t talking like a crazy woman now.
Not at all.
Suddenly I believed her.
I had spent years interrogating people, and in most cases I could smell a lie as soon as it was said. The good cops are the ones who know the truth when they hear it.
The little things were what got me. The particulars, like the blue plaster…
The pale blue plaster. The crack in the ceiling, just over the kitchen door. The garbageman with his speckled mustache and his horse named Robert, for Christ’s sake. Who the hell thinks of Robert as a name for a horse? Unless it’s real.
Suddenly she was getting all the benefit of my doubt.
Suddenly I had to give her that much simple justice. Suddenly the choices were no longer mine to make. Suddenly I had to hear what she really knew: I had to separate what she thought she knew from what she wanted to believe, and keep what I wanted to believe out of it. Suddenly I had to figure out what the truth was, because, that suddenly, I might have to ask the auction-house people to figure it out for all of us.
I could just imagine what they’d say. There are seldom any guarantees in a book auction, and at first there’d be icy disdain, the kind of ivory-tower, holier-than-thou bullshit that book people dish out better than anyone. Maybe if I made enough noise they’d have to look at it. The Boston Book Galleries was an upscale auction house with a fine reputation, and the book had been sold with a provenance that looked spotless. But in recent years even the most prestigious auction houses had been duped. Some of them had sold their souls and participated in the duping, so nothing was sacred if the book had to be checked. The inquiry would go all the way back to the day when Richard Francis Burton had signed it to some man named Charles Warren.
The old woman looked at me hard, trying to see me through her haze, and again it was as if she knew things that had not been said. She knew how close she had come to losing me. She had broken through a chink in my defenses and she knew that too, even if she didn’t quite know how. She had come with little hope on a journey that must have seemed endless, and in just these few minutes we had reached a turning point. She took a deep breath and we were back to that moment of truth she had sidestepped a moment ago. She tried to smile but didn’t make it, and in the end there was nothing to do but to say what she had come here for.
“My grandfather died in 1906. His library was pillaged immediately after his death, all of it whisked away in a single evening. It’s never been seen since.”
I coughed, politely, I hoped. But the chemistry between us was sizzling now, and I knew exactly what she wanted. She wasn’t just after my book, she wanted it all. Her grandfather’s library had been missing for more than eighty years and Ms. Josephine Gallant, at the end of her life, wanted me to find it for her.
4
The only sound in the next half minute was the ticking of the clock. She sat waiting while my mind ran through the worst possible implications of what she had said.
I knew enough about the law in these matters to know how murky it could get. Common law says title can’t be acquired even from a good-faith seller if there’s theft hidden somewhere in the property’s history. The termcaveat emptor may be part of a dead language but there are excellent reasons why it is still universally known. Richard Burton in his earliest childhood would have had a perfect understanding of it.
Things are seldom that simple in modern American law. State statutes may vary wildly on the same set of circumstances, and the passage of enough time can erode original rights in defiance of legal intent. People die, decades slip away, and what was once clearly their property can acquire a valid-looking new history of ownership.
Eighty years was a good long time, but this old lady had not died. She sat before me, a human relic, waiting tensely for some indication of what I would do. All she had going for her was a faint hope and the tiny matter of my conscience. If I chose to go happily among the world’s most notorious assholes, what could she do about it? I had bought the book fair and square: hell, I could stonewall her forever. Even if she’d had money and the law was ultimately on her side, its process was not. Given her age and the way lawyers jack each other off, she’d never live long enough to see her book again.
I had a hunch she knew these things as well as I did. Even Ralston knew: I could see him in my peripheral vision, out at the end of my art section, keenly interested in us now and no longer making any effort to hide it. Was there such stuff as three-way chemistry? Maybe so, but that didn’t account for everything. We all knew what I could have done. Only I knew what I had to do.
“What are you thinking, Mr. Janeway?”
“Just groping around the edges of a moral dilemma, Ms. Gallant.”
I could almost see her mind churning, hunting for any small thing that would make my dilemma less groping and my choice more moral. But she didn’t know how to get there, and all she could do was ask a blind question. “What can I tell you?”
I picked up my notepad, which had dropped to the floor beside my chair. “His name was Warren, yours is Gallant. You can start with that.”
“Warren was my mother’s name. Gallant was the name of the fool I married, more than seventy years ago. I kept it because I always loved the regal sound of it.”
This too sounded real, but she was still reading doubt into my questions. “Does it seem far-fetched that I might’ve found someone to marry me once, Mr. Janeway?”
“Not at all.”
“I wasn’t always a withered old prune. There was a time when even a young buck like yourself might’ve found me comely. But that was so long ago it might have been on another world.” She touched her cheek as if searching for a tear. “The first
time I heard it I thought the name Gallant had the loveliest sound. Tucker Gallant. My God, he’s been dead almost sixty years. I wonder if I didn’t marry him just for his name.”
“You don’t strike me as the type who would do that, Mrs. Gallant.”
“Who knows what type I was? I was barely a grown woman when I met him.”
Her hands had begun to tremble and she looked away, squinting at the light from the street. Hope was fickle and it faded now as reality settled in. “I knew I was coming here on a fool’s errand. You’re being very kind, Mr. Janeway, but I’m not under any illusions about anything. Even if I could prove everything I say, where would I be?”
“In an ideal world, I would return the book and get my money back. Then the auction house would give it to you as the rightful owner.”
“Your tone tells me that’s not likely to happen.”
“It’s not theirs to give. Their position would be that all sales are final. In that ideal world, maybe you could discover who consigned it. But then you’d have to fight it out with him.”
“How do they think I’m supposed to do that?”
I shrugged. “Not their problem.”
“So much for the ideal world. Now what?”
I didn’t say anything. Hell, I was no lawyer: it wasn’t my place to tell her what to do. If I made a good-faith effort to find out about the book, nobody could ask more than that.
“This is some situation,” she said.
Yes, it was, but I wasn’t going to advise her.
“If you keep the book, I lose. If you give it back, I still lose.”
So far she had an excellent grasp of it.
“I guess my only recourse is to persuade you to give me the book.”
There was a touch of self-ridicule in her voice, like,That’ll be the day, when cows milk themselves dry and the ghost of Richard Burton comes back to take it away from you at the point of a sword.
“No one but a fool would do that,” she said.
She had that right. In our dog-eat-dog world, she was nothing to me. She was trouble and pain, the embodiment of bad news. But my heart went out to her.