“Why not let him?”
“The swine doesn’t love books, he loves possessing them. He sees books as commodities, investments. He doesn’t deserve books.” Simon’s face flushed with indignation. “Actually, you are one of the few people who know that I have these. One of the few people who know these volumes even exist.”
“I’m honored.”
“You love books. I can see that. I do hope you’ll have an opportunity to browse through these volumes while you’re here.”
I do hope I will, too, Neal thought.
“Actually,” said Neal, realizing that he’d actually just said actually, “I have to be going. I’m going to check into my hotel tonight.”
Simon’s face showed his disappointment. “Oh. I was hoping we’d have a chance to talk about books. I’m heading to my cottage in the country first thing tomorrow. Just for two or three days before I head to Africa, Are you sure you wouldn’t rather come up with me? Surely you can’t be in that great a rush.”
“I’m afraid I am.”
“Pity. The cottage is in the Yorkshire moors. An old shepherd’s cot, actually. Peaceful. A place you can hear your heartbeat. Ill leave directions should you change your mind.”
“Thanks.”
“At least stay to dinner. We can talk about books.”
Dinner was a beefsteak tougher than a jockey’s butt, vegetables with the taste boiled out of them, potatoes, tinned fruit, a red wine you could walk on, and conversation devoted entirely to books, Neal thought that, all in all, it was delightful. The only thing that might have made it better would have been the presence of Professor Leslie Boskin,
15
“Scholars have been talking about the Pickle for years, but I don’t think it even exists,” Professor Boskin said, waving his cigarette around. He smoked a lot when he was excited, and he was always excited when he was talking about Smollett.
Neal Carey sat there rapt. He was a senior at the time, an English major, and Boskin was an academic star. Neal had chosen Columbia University for two reasons: instructions from Friends, and Professor Leslie Boskin, the country’s foremost scholar of the eighteenth-century English novel. A famous authority at age thirty-seven, he had come out of a nowhere Pennsylvania steel town to win a scholarship to Harvard, which he parlayed into a Rhodes. His first book, The Novel and the New Reading Public, redefined the field. He was a true eighteenth-century gentleman: He paid his bills, shouted his share of the rounds, and believed first and foremost in the sanctity of friendship. One of those friends was Ethan Kitteredge, who on the deck of Haridan had told Boskin the truly picaresque life story of his promising young student Neal Carey. Not long after that, Boskin invited Neal to partake of a Chinese dinner. Every aspiring undergraduate in the English program knew what that meant: an invitation to become a graduate student under Boskin’s wing. Two years of harassment, browbeating, nit-picking, and slow torture.
Neal was thrilled. It was all he had ever wanted. He dug into his Peking duck and listened. Boskin was on a roll. His black eyes glowed.
“You see, Smollett struggled for years just to get noticed. He had an inferiority complex like a mule at a donkey convention. He was Scottish, he was relatively uneducated… in those days surgeons were pretty low on the social scale. So when his first novel, Roderick Random, came out, he thought he’d finally be accepted by the London literati.” Boskin paused to lay some strips of duck and some plum sauce onto the pancake and to take a sip of Tsingtao. “But he wasn’t. Johnson, Garrick, all the boys still snubbed him. So then he writes Pickle and he lets them have it. Really vicious satire. Not to mention the Lady Vane memoirs he throws in for the hell of it. Imagine it, here is the supposed diary of a highborn lady all about fucking around; and people are wondering, where did Smollett get this shit? And Pickle is a smash! The public loves it! And he’s picked up by London society. Johnson, Garrick, all the boys.”
Neal watched Boskin shove a huge hunk of the pancake into his mouth, chew it quickly, and wash it down with a slug of beer. It was true, Neal thought, Boskin really would rather talk about Smollett than eat.
Boskin set the beer down and continued. “But now he’s feeling badly about all the vicious shit he wrote in Pickle, so when he’s asked to do a second edition, he takes most of it out. But he has one copy somewhere-one copy in which he puts all the notes: who’s who, what the joke is, and the truth about Lady Vane. Was she his mistress? Is all the juicy stuff true?”
Boskin jabbed his chopsticks into his Dragon and Phoenix and came up with a piece of shrimp. “So Smollett gets old. As do we all, so drink up. He goes to Europe for his health. Gets a tumor the size of a baseball on his hand. His daughter and only child dies. Life sucks the big one. Miserable, bankrupt… he finally croaks in Italy. But we know for a fact that he had a copy of every one of his books with him when he went for the deep drop. So what would the widow do? No money… no prospects… no piece of The Rock…”
“Sell them.”
“Right! All she had to trade on was her late beloved’s fame. So she sold his whole collection, one by one. And every other book has surfaced except his Pickle. The Pickle. Four volumes of literary treasures. That’s how the rumor started. They say it’s never surfaced because it has all these marginal notes with all the goods on Samuel Johnson, Garrick, Akenside, and, of course, the sporting Lady Vane.
“Any collector, any eighteenth-century scholar, would give his left testicle to have a look at those volumes. Except they don’t exist. The rest of that duck is yours, by the way.”
Except they did exist-in Simon Keyes’s apartment. Neal had held them in his hands, books that could provide his future, his fortune, and his freedom. And he’d put them back on the shelf.
16
The piccadilly hotel was as simple as its name. Not plain or unattractive, but simple in the sense that it knew what it was: a good solid place from which to do business, tour the city, go the theater, and take in the sights of London. It offered large rooms, big beds, decent food, and room service. You could ring up for anything you wanted at the Piccadilly Hotel. The Piccadilly Hotel knew that people went to hotels to do things they didn’t do at home.
The lobby was large, built in the days when people met socially in hotel lobbies. It featured a lounge with old wing-back chairs big enough to seat Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, and a decently dark, mahogany bar that was somehow always cool in hot weather and warm in cold weather. It was the kind of bar where the men always kept their ties knotted but felt relaxed, anyway; the kind of a lounge where the barkeep would never disturb you to ask whether you wanted another but was always there with your drink at the slightest glance.
The lobby ended at the registration desk. The Piccadilly Hotel had too much sense to make a new guest search for the bloody thing, and it was always staffed by at least half a dozen red-jacketed clerks who knew their business: See that the room was paid for, and get the guest to it. If you made a reservation at the Piccadilly Hotel, you always got a room. They didn’t believe in overbooking; in fact, they always kept a couple of rooms saved for emergencies. You could stay for a night or a year at the Piccadilly Hotel. The rules were the same. You paid your bill, and kept your jacket on.
Neal shucked his off the moment he stepped into his room, a nice large one on the sixth floor, with a small window air conditioner that struggled bravely against the heat. He kicked his shoes off on the ubiquitous red carpet and surveyed the room with a consumer’s eye. The blue wallpaper was the color of the sea after a storm, and was decorated with prints of heavily muscled, bare-chested, bare-knuckled boxers toeing the line. A manly room.