“Girl hunter, actually.”
Simon laughed. “Oh yes. Well done.”
He led them through the maze of parking lots as if they were late for lunch with the Queen. He stopped on locating a small silver sports car, a convertible with the top down.
“This,” he announced with a flourish, “is a Gordon-Keble.”
“It’s nice,” Neal said, self-consciously inane. The extent of his knowledge about cars was that they had a steering wheel and four tires-unless left overnight in his neighborhood.
“There were only thirteen ever made,” Simon continued with shy pride. “I own three of them.”
“That’s great.”
“One of my vices,” Simon confided in a tone more appropriate to a confession of sexual relations with twelve-year-old Chinese girls dressed up as nuns.
“What are the others?”
“Other cars?”
“Other vices.”
“You’ll see,” Simon answered seriously. “Shall we take the Keble to town?”
Simon tossed Neal’s single bag into a small space behind the seats as Neal settled into the car. Neal sank back in the bucket seat and felt at least two inches off the ground.
Simon turned the key in the ignition and the little car came to life with demonic energy. Neal had the scary impression that the car had been waiting for this moment; it throbbed with predatory vibrations that reached from the soles of Neal’s feet to the top of his hair. It hummed like a wolf at the edge of a flock of sheep, like the worst boy on the block let out of his room.
“Quite a feeling, isn’t it?” Simon asked proudly.
“Yes.” Terror.
Simon drove as if he knew something about physics that Einstein hadn’t thought of and God never intended. If nature abhorred a vacuum, Simon positively loathed one, and rushed to fill in the tiniest gap in the heavy flow of speeding traffic. He passed on the right, left, center, and all variations in between, and the Keble responded as if involved in some kind of blood compact with its human master.
Neal sat as low in his seat as possible and kept his eyes closed as much as pride would allow.
“Why only thirteen?” he shouted over the rushing wind in an attempt to stave off vomiting by conversing.
“After Gordon was killed, Keble just lost the heart for it!”
“How was Gordon killed?” Neal asked, hating himself, knowing the answer would make him even more miserable.
“Swerved to avoid a grouse and jumped a stone wall! Landed in a church graveyard! Convenient, that!”
Simon crossed three lanes of traffic, oblivious to a chorus of blaring horns and curses, to take advantage of a two-foot gap created by an exiting car. He accelerated up a wicked outside curve, dove down the ensuing hill, braking just in time to avoid sodomizing a dairy truck, slid into the passing lane, and floored the accelerator. The gearbox sounded like a Chinese opera.
“I’ve had three bad smashups myself!” Simon shouted by way of reassurance. “One in Madagascar! Laid up for months! Broke several major bones!”
As the slightly thinning traffic allowed the driver to exercise his full gifts and the car’s fiendish potential, Neal prayed that Simon’s skull wasn’t among those major bones. Pale and sickened, Neal was plastered to the seat by what he knew could be only G forces, and he no longer hoped for survival, only a quick and merciful immolation. As anxiety perspiration joined the flow of heat-induced sweat, and the silver demon sped farther and faster toward a fiery death, Neal silently composed a postcard to Joe Graham: “Dear Dad, having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.”
14
Simon’s flat was a second-floor walk-up on Regent’s Park Road, a quiet street not far from the London Zoo: a good neighborhood for a safe house. Simon owned the entire house but rented the ground floor to a respectably married gay couple.
After all, Simon explained as they climbed the narrow staircase to his flat, “I spend most of my time in Africa, so it seemed a bit impractical to keep the whole thing.”
The flat was small. A sitting room faced the street and ran the whole width of the apartment. A small kitchen ran off this room, and the bed and bath ran off the kitchen.
Two floor-to-ceiling windows highlighted the sitting room, and a daybed flanked one of the windows. Simon set Neal’s bag down beside this bed. “Here you are, at least until I leave next week. I hope you’ll be comfortable.”
“It’s great,” Neal said, then he noticed the walls. His jaw dropped.
Simon noticed.
“My other vice,” he said. “I like books.”
No kidding. The entire room was lined with bookshelves, all of which were jammed with first editions. A card table in the center of the room struggled against the weight of heavy book catalogues. Stacks of books sat in every corner and unoccupied nook. Neal stepped to the nearest wall and stared at the book spines on the shelves. A lot of them were nineteenth-century explorers’ memoirs- Burton, Speke, Stanley-all first editions. Then Neal saw the volumes of Fielding and Smollett.
“Simon, this is fantastic.”
Simon visibly brightened. “You read?”
Neal nodded as he stared at the volumes.
“What do you read?” Simon asked.
“This,” Neal answered, pointing at the shelves. “I read this. In paperback.”
“You can touch them.”
“No, that’s all right.”
“They won’t crumble in your hands.”
Neal was actually afraid that they would-books that precious, that old. He thought he could spend his whole life quite happily in this room.
“Do you collect?” Simon asked.
“I’m a starving student.”
“I thought you were a private eye.”
Neal smiled. “That, too.”
And I don’t make much money at that, either, he thought.
“What do you study?”
“Eighteenth-century lit.”
“Odd combination, detective and academic.”
A number of wry and ironic responses occurred to Neal, but he settled for, “Well, they both involve research.”
“Indeed.”
A crowbar couldn’t have pried Neal’s eyes from the bookshelf.
“Who’s your favorite?” Simon asked.
“I’m doing my thesis on Smollett.”
“Aah.”
That’s what everybody says, Neal thought. What they mean is, Aah, how boring.
Simon stepped to the bookcase and took out four volumes. He handed one of them to Neal and stood expectantly as Neal perused it.
It was a rare first edition, first volume, of Smollett’s The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle.
Neal had never expected even to see one of these, and now he was holding one.
“Simon, this is a first edition.”
Simon grinned. “The 1751 unexpurgated version. But it’s better than that.” He gestured with his chin for Neal to examine the book.
“Handwritten marginal notes…” Neal looked at the notes more closely. He couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing, but it sure looked like old Smollett’s scrawl. He looked up from the book to Simon and raised his eyebrows.
Simon nodded enthusiastically. “From Smollett himself. Great stuff. Nasty remarks about the real people he was satirizing, little asides, that sort of thing.”
Neal’s hand started to shake. “Simon, is this…”
“The Pickle.”
“There have only been rumors that this existed.”
Simon giggled. “I know.”
“This must be worth-”
“I paid ten for it.”
“Thousand?”
“Yes.”
“Pounds?”
“Yes.”
Neal swallowed hard. The notes in these four volumes could make his thesis. Hell, it could make his career… He handed the book back to Simon.
“Mind you, I could sell it for twenty or more. I should do, really. I’m not all that keen on Smollett, no offense.”
“None taken.”
Only a handful of people were keen on Smollett, Professor Leslie Boskin at Columbia University being one of them.
Simon took the volumes and laid them on Neal’s bed. “I know one collector, Arthur bloody Kendrick… Sir Arthur bloody Kendrick, who suspects that I have these. He’d pay a king’s ransom, mind you.”