The Bookman's Promise

by John Dunning

  “I couldn’t believe it. I felt my heart turn over. I said, ‘Oh yes!’ and he got this evil grin on his face and said I should follow him. Back we went into the cave, all the way into a far back room. It was just like the rest of the place—oh, Janeway, you have no idea.”

  “Actually, I do.”

  “Well, there the stuff was—boxes and boxes of glass plates. I guess he’d long ago sold off the books but the plates were all there, piled in wooden boxes, one on top of another. He found the one I wanted right away. The original label was still on it—Barney had marked each one with a piece of adhesive or some kind of old tape and it was identified in his own hand. The writing said,Charlie and Dick on East Bay. He had taken down only their first names and that’s the title he had given it. The date on it was still legible, May something, 1860. Old Wilcox held it up to the lightbulb and said, ‘That look like what you want?’ And I came a hell of a lot closer than I wanted to come, we stood side by side with our arms almost touching, and I looked up at the image and there they were, in negative, Charlie and Dick, and even on the negative I could make out those shadows on Burton’s cheeks, and behind them was the Exchange Building. I’d know that anywhere, in positive, negative, or CinemaScope. And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s it,’ and I tried to keep my heartbeat from knocking us both down, but when I looked in his face he had a grin that was almost cadaverous. I could see his skull right through the skin, and he grinned and said, ‘Bet you’d like a picture of that, wouldn’t you, honey?’ I said, ‘I’d be happy to pay you for one,’ and he said, ‘Only a thousand dollars to you, sweetie.’ ”

  She looked a little sick now, recalling it. “I know that doesn’t sound like much, but it was out of the question. There’s just no way we could have done that.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe you can.”

  36

  We talked some more and retired just before eleven o’clock. By then we all had a good sense of each other and they made a serious pledge to visit us in Colorado. “Maybe we’ll even get lucky and be assigned there,” Luke said. “I always wanted to work in the mountains, at Mesa Verde or Rocky Mountain National Park.” I told them my house would always be their house, and I promised Libby I would keep her informed as the Burton story developed. We called it a night and walked the few feet to the museum, where the three of us would bed down on the floor. Outside, the night was oppressively murky: inky, bleak, black-hole dark, with a stout wind that came at us in gusts off the sea. The sky was cloudy: only a small streak of stars could be seen through a seam across the top of the world, but that did nothing to relieve the blackness of the harbor. Charleston was nowhere to be seen, lost in some distant fog.

  I stood at the door and heard Erin say my name.

  “Hey, you coming?”

  “Yeah, I’ll be along. You two go ahead.”

  They went inside and I got out my flashlight and climbed along the edge of the battery toward the gorge wall. I thought I’d heard the sound of a boat again, and I wanted to give things a last look before turning in. I had no real reason to be uneasy or suspicious: Dante would have to be crazy to mount an assault on Fort Sumter with rangers on duty, and guys like Dante don’t stay alive by being fools. But that’s what old Judge Petigru said about the secessionists of olden days, that South Carolina was too small for a republic and too large for a lunatic asylum, and look what happened anyway. My uneasiness persisted and grew as I moved around the battery above the black ruins.

  Whatever I had heard, it was gone now: nothing but the wind assaulted my ears, that and the sea washing against this ghostly black shoal. I still wasn’t satisfied. I wanted to stand at the edge of the fort and behold the nothingness, and that meant I had to go down through the old parade ground and pick my way back up to the right flank where the high ground was. From there I had a sweeping view: more pitch-blackness than I could ever remember in my life. I circled the old wall, keeping my light pointed down in front of me, and at last I came to the point where I turned off the light and just stood there. Nothing…

  Nothing.

  Except for the wind, this must be what death is like.

  I walked along the gorge and down the left flank. From there I could see into the tiny room where Libby and Luke were talking, washing dishes, putting things away. It floated in space and a few minutes later she drew a curtain across the front window. Almost at once their light went out.

  I turned back toward the channel, feeling rather than seeing it. Morris Island, I thought: Fort Wagner. In that void it was hard to imagine what had happened over there: one of the great epics of warfare, overshadowed by Vicksburg only because that involved greater numbers and grander strategy and bigger names, and because it was coming to its climax at the same time. I stared at the nothing and closed my eyes, which made no difference at all, and when I opened them I seemed to see the flash of a very old rocket against the eastern sky. Just for a moment I imagined that battle and all those black warriors charging up the beach to certain death.

  I thought of death…

  Thought of Denise…

  And strangest of all in that time and place, I thought of Dean Treadwell and his unshakable faith in everybody’s bastard, Hal Archer.

  Dean and Hal…

  I thought the unthinkable and I shivered in the wind.

  I picked my way back across the ruins to the battery. Erin stood at the museum door, waiting.

  “What are you doing? I was just about to come looking for you.”

  “Without a light? You’re smarter than that.”

  “Never mind the light. What’s going on out there?”

  “Nothing. Go to bed.”

  She bristled at my abruptness. “Is this how it’s going to be, being your special friend?”

  “I don’t know. We’ve got forty days and forty nights to resolve stuff like that.”

  “Thirty-eight as of this morning. This doesn’t bode well for us to make it to thirty-seven.”

  I felt her come close in the half-light. I saw her in shadow.

  “I want to get this thing resolved,” she said. “It’s not in my nature to live like this, worrying about a madman every waking moment.”

  “I intend to resolve it.”

  “How?”

  “How I should’ve done in the first place. A little grit, a little steel, a little help from an old friend.”

  “Okay,” she said calmly. “Whatever that means, I want to be in on it all the way.”

  “I don’t need an attorney for this kind of work.”

  That was a stupid thing to say, I knew it almost before the words were out, and she reacted as if she’d been slapped. She slammed me back against the wall and whirled away down the ramp. “Well, fuck you, Mr. Janeway.”

  “Hey, Erin, wait a minute.”

  She stopped and looked back.

  “That didn’t come out right.”

  “It sure didn’t, you barbarian son of a bitch.”

  “I’m sorry.” I reached out to her.

  She gestured wildly with her hands. “Jesus Christ, you are such an idiot sometimes.”

  “I am, I am.” I made a helpless shrugging dipshit motion. “I know I am.”

  “Goddamn male chauvinist turkey-farmer dickhead. What am I going to do with you?”

  “Whatever you want. As long as you don’t—”

  “If I don’t what?”

  “Leave.”

  She seemed to melt and flow back up the ramp. She wrapped her arms around me and I buried my fingers in her thick hair.

  “Are we okay now?” I dared ask.

  “I don’t like being brushed off. Chisel that on your brain if you can find a tool hard enough. Write Erin hates being patronized, Erin won’t sit still for the little girl treatment. ”

  “I’m sorry. I’m beginning to sound like a broken record but I really, really am sorry.”

  “Okay, where were we?” she said cheerfully.

  “I was about to say something practical. How this is a man’s job
and a woman never does anything but screw up a mission.”

  “And I said something uncalled for. ‘Fuck you, Janeway,’ or something like that.”

  “You’ve really got a nasty streak that I never saw before. Your vocabulary is amazing.”

  “Actually, I never swear in real life. Bad language is just bad manners, it’s a symptom of a bankrupt mind. Lee taught me that when I was a kid and I still believe it. But you, you pigheaded medieval-godfather cocksman, you bring out the absolute worst in me.”

  “Am I not getting through here? I thought I groveled, whined, and said I was sorry. ‘Medieval-godfather cocksman!’ ‘Turkey-farmer dickhead!’ I thought Koko was tough, but I never got past ‘poopy old picklepuss’ with her.”

  “Koko is a lady. I, unfortunately, am not. So who is this hit man we’re going to hire?”

  I told her in general terms who, what I wanted him to do, and why he’d do it—not for money but to clear a debt that was decades old. “He’s just gonna be my insurance policy,” I said. “If there is such a thing for this kind of stuff.”

  Suddenly she realized I was serious. “Does this guy have a name?”

  I almost said I’d take care of it but I thought much better of that and I gave her his name.

  “Oh God,” she said. “Oh my dear. You do have some bad friends.”

  “Yeah. He was like my brother long ago. People were sure I’d end up just like him.”

  “No way could you have been like that.”

  “You might sing a different tune if you had known me when I was fifteen. It was amazing, really, that I lived all that down. Became a cop.”

  “And you literally saved his life?”

  “As literal as it gets.”

  “Tell me again what we’re going to have him do.”

  “He’s gonna help us teach a certain bad-ass some manners, like Lee taught you but with different powers of persuasion. And I hope with better results.”

  “Generally speaking, I like the sound of that,” she said without much enthusiasm.

  “You’ll like this even better. I’ve been thinking about it for a while now and I’ve finally come to a couple of ugly conclusions. We’ve gone too far to slip into some live-and-let-live detente, like two bully nations in a cold war, even if that option suddenly became possible. Maybe I’d be okay with a standoff if he hadn’t torched Koko’s house, but that’s not an option anymore. Now there’s got to be an evening-up of the score. I can’t just walk away from here and make like none of this ever happened. I’ve thought about it; can’t do it.”

  “What would satisfy you, she asked in fear and trembling.”

  “If Dante were to build Koko a new house, that might square it. I don’t know, I’d have to think about it.”

  When she spoke again it seemed like a long time had passed. “You must be mad.”

  “I’m damned mad.”

  “I meant mad as in crazy.”

  “That too.”

  “He’ll never do that.”

  “He might.” I put an arm over her shoulder. “A guy like Dante only understands one thing. But he really understands that.”

  “He didn’t understand it the first time.”

  “He understood it, he just didn’t quite believe it. My fault; something about my performance must’ve been lacking. Maybe because, no matter how big a bad-ass I tried to be, at the bottom line it was still just a performance. Those guys have a way of knowing.”

  “It’s got to be real.”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “So now it’s real. You would kill him.”

  “In a Hungarian heartbeat. But don’t tell Koko yet; I don’t want her to get her hopes up in case it doesn’t work out that way.”

  Suddenly she seemed to change the subject. “Do you remember the night we met?”

  “Are you kidding? That was one of my all-time high spots.”

  “Do you remember what I said?”

  “How could I forget? Among other things, you called me a wimp.”

  “I never said that. I only wondered innocently how you’d have done in Burton’s shoes.”

  “I tried to tell you. All I got for my trouble was ridicule and the rolling-eyes routine.”

  “Tell me now.”

  “I’d have leaped up from my stretcher and shaken off the fever, found the big lake, made a map that even the Royal Geographic Society couldn’t challenge, left Speke dead in the hot sun, raced home and claimed the glory I should have had all along. So what’s your point?”

  “There is no point. Except maybe I love you.” She rose on her toes and kissed me fiercely. “I guess that’s my point.”

  “It’s a good one. Maybe now it won’t hurt so much…you know, when we all die together.”

  37

  Inside, we planned our next move. Erin and Koko had put their bags near the bottom of the museum ramp. Koko had hung her clothes over the rail and crawled into her bag, and she watched us sleepily from the floor, occasionally piping in with an opinion while the two of us stood there and talked. We all hated to quit Charleston with Burton’s journal still in limbo. Erin wanted another try at Archer on her way out of town, but that struck me as risky with little to be gained. “Something might well be gained,” she said, “if Archer told us what happened to the journal.” At this point I had to doubt if Archer had ever planned to produce Burton’s journal, no matter how much money Lee was able to throw at him—he had come up empty, with new conditions or half-baked reasons to stall, every time. Erin couldn’t believe that. “Lee has done nothing but defend Archer and praise him to the rooftops. What would Archer gain by taunting his oldest friend? What would be the point if he’s not going to sell us the book anyway? Now he’s alienated Lee, they can’t even speak to each other, and what good does that do him?”

  Well, Archer was a prick: at least we could all agree on that. “Maybe he’s secretly hated Lee all these years for being born with a silver spoon in his mouth,” I said. There were plenty of precedents both in history and literature for such unholy relationships. One party is undercut and sabotaged for years without ever dreaming that his so-called friend is behind it all. If that were true, the only mystery, aside from the enigmas of a black heart, was why Archer would let his secret out now instead of any other time. Koko said, “Maybe Lee found out what Archer really thinks and Archer no longer had any reason to hide it.” Erin shook her head. “No, I’m sure Lee would’ve told me that.” Since we were into wild ideas, it was also possible that Archer had never had the book at all, or maybe Dante had taken it from him if he had. But if Dante now had it, he’d probably have been on the first flight back to Baltimore. He’d want to dispose of the goods first, get what money there was to get, and settle old scores later. So I thought, with no facts to go on, but at that point I wasn’t sure enough to bet on anything.

  Erin hated to give up on Archer. “I’ll do it your way but I don’t want to forget why I was sent here. I would still feel better if I could see him once more, even if he doesn’t do anything but have me thrown out again.” What worried me about this was that the hospital was such an obvious place for someone to set up a watch and catch us coming or going. I had plans for Dante, but I wanted them to unfold on my timetable, not his: I needed to live long enough to put them in motion and see how they went. In the end we were all just talking. Always in the back of my mind was the possibility that Dante knew exactly where we were, and whatever was going to happen would be on his schedule after all.

  Our only hard decision was that we were done with Charleston: there was nothing more for us to find here. If things went well and we could get away in the morning without being seen, I had at least some reason for optimism. We’d retrieve my rental car and head north to Florence; from there to Charlotte, and on to Denver. Koko didn’t see why she needed to go to Denver. “We’ve got to stick together for now,” I said, and Denver was my home base. “You can stay with me,” Erin said, “as long as you need to.” “Good,” I said. If we made it
that far, I had to feel good about our prospects. Then I could go on offense. We left it at that and I went back up to the entryway where I had stashed my sleeping bag.

  The sight of it gave me no craving for sleep. I was in one of those dark moods, bone-tired but still wide awake, and for a long time I sat outside on the edge of the battery with my legs dangling, watching the sky and listening to the air. I thought of Libby and I understood how she could come to love this place. Ultimately it would get on my nerves—I am too much a product of my time and this is undoubtedly one of my failings, among many. I can go like Erin on long sabbaticals in the mountains, but at some point cabin fever sets in and I need to hunker down in civilization’s dirty places, go book hunting around the fringes of Denver, talk to someone, mix it up with crazies, go to a party of book lovers at Miranda’s, or just sit in a bar with an old pal. My life went from the nearest pockets of the sublime to the most distant reaches of the ridiculous, and I didn’t know if that was my ideal or if I could even guess what an ideal was. But in any other time, in limited doses, I would love it here.

  A rumble of thunder sounded far away in the east, but soon it got quiet again, with only the wind and the sea in my ears. I closed my eyes and at some point I found myself thinking of Vince Marranzino. Vinnie: that told me how long ago our mutual history had been. He didn’t seem like a Vinnie to me. That sounded too much like a gangster’s nickname, and no matter how much I had learned about him via newspapers and our own departmental intelligence, I still thought of him as a kid named Vince, not a Vinnie-hood. I heard his voice out there with the ghosts of Battery Wagner:How do ya really like this book racket of yours, Cliffie? Just a wisp of him there in the harbor, then he was gone. A whisper to the wisp: that’s all it would take and a man would die in Baltimore.