Janeway’s Rule of the Discriminating Bookscout was born. Buy what you like, what you read. Trust your judgment. Have faith. The good guys, like Melville, might die and be forgotten with the rest, but they always come back.
I was practicing what Maugham has called the contemplative life. At night I read some of the books I’d found. I read things I had never imagined or heard of, and I listened to good music, mostly jazz, and studied incessantly the catalogs of other dealers. I learned quickly and never forgot a book I had handled. This is how the game is played: you’ve got to be part businessman, part lucky, part clairvoyant. The guy with the best crystal ball makes the most money. The guy in the right place at the right time. The guy with the most energy, the best moves, the right karma.
I had been here before: I knew things that hadn’t yet happened. I was home at last, in the work I’d been born for.
I had been in business three months when I was pulled back suddenly into that old world. It started a few days before Halloween. 1 had two visitors in the store: Jackie Newton and Rita McKinley.
23
I had come to the store late that day after a tough round of fruitless bookscouting. The days were getting shorter: we were off daylight saving time and darkness had fallen by five o’clock, the time we normally close for the night. Usually I tried to get in by four—Colfax is a rough street and I didn’t like leaving Miss Pride to close up alone—but that day I had scouted Boulder and had run later than expected. It was almost five when I pulled up in front of the place and parked. I saw Miss Pride, alone in the front room, adding up the day’s receipts. When I came in she rolled her eyes toward the back rooms, and when I came closer she held up the calculator to show me what she’d done that day. The total was $1,425, my best day ever. I gave a little whistle. “Couple of high rollers,” she said. “They’re still here, in back.”
She showed me the receipts. They had bought John Stephens’ Incidents of Travel in the Yucatan, a very nice 1843 first edition in the original boards, and the expensive Louise Saun-ders-Maxfield Parrish Knave of Hearts, which I had bought from a catalog only last month. The tariff for the two items came to almost $1,200.
“Just an average day if it wasn’t for them,” I said.
“They are definitely strange ducks, Mr. Janeway,” she said, keeping her voice down. “But when they spend this kind of money, who’s going to quarrel?”
“Strange how?” I asked.
“Well, they came in here about three-thirty. The one did all the talking. He asked for you right off. When I told him you weren’t in, he asked when you’d be back. I said probably before five. He asked to see the best books in the house. I showed him the Stephens and the Parrish. He said, I’ll take these, just like that. Paid with hundred-dollar bills.” She cocked the cash drawer open slightly, so I could see the wad of money. “Then he wouldn’t take any change. He gave me twelve hundred-dollar bills and said keep the change. I told him it was against policy, we didn’t accept tips, but he went on as if he hadn’t heard me. I thought he was going to leave but he didn’t. He walked all around the store. Like I said, he’s in the back room now.”
I shrugged. “No accounting for people, Miss Pride. I’ll take his money.”
“I thought you would.”
I sat where she had been sitting and started looking through the other sales. “You can take off now if you want.”
“Oh, I’ll hang around a bit. Mr. Harkness is coming by in a few minutes to take me to dinner.”
I sat up straight. “Jerry Harkness?”
“Something wrong with that?”
I went back to my bookkeeping. Far be it from me to tell her who she could see. But yes, dammit, now that she mentioned it, there was something a little wrong. She was a sweet young girl and Jerry Harkness was a relatively old man. Honey draws flies, remember? And yeah, I was a little ruffled and I didn’t like it much. Hell, I was too old for her, and Harkness had me by a good eight years. I had gone around the horn to keep my relationship with Pinky Pride on a purely professional level, and she was going out with Jerry Harkness.
“Mr. Janeway? Is something wrong?”
“It’s your business, Miss Pride. He just seems to be a bit old, that’s all I was thinking.”
“Funny I never thought of him that way. But you’re right, he’s got to be almost as old as you are.”
I stared at the ceiling.
“I’m kidding, Mr. Janeway, where’s your sense of humor? Of course he’s too old for me, I’m not going to marry the man… unless…”
“What?” I snapped. “Unless what?”
“I might consider it if he’d be willing to do one of those convenience things that would let me stay in the country per-manently. I might consider anyone who’d do that for me. But Mr. Harkness isn’t going to do that. He wants to buy me a supper and I said yes: nothing more to it than that. If you’ve got something for me to do, though…”
I shook my head. “Just don’t get in any dark corners.”
“I never do, sir, unless they’re of my own making. I hope he’ll tell me some of the finer points of his specialty.”
“I’m sure he will,” I said dryly.
“I want to know it all.”
“Someday you will,” I said, and meant it.
She was learning fast. It’ll be a national tragedy if we have to send her back to Scotland, I thought. The enormity of the book business—the fact that most of the books that even a very old dealer sees in a year are books that he’s never seen before—simply did not faze her. She was fearless and confident at the edge of the bottomless pit. A genius, confining himself to the narrowest possible specialty, could not begin to know it all. This was the task Pinky Pride had set for herself.
She had learned so much in three months that I had her added to my book fund as a co-signer. She bought from book-scouts and signed away my money as freely as I did. She made mistakes but so did I: she also made at least one sensational buy a week. I knew that someday, in the not-too-distant future, she’d be gone, if not back to Scotland then away to a place of her own. For now, for this short and special time we shared, my job was to keep her happy.
“By the way, I’m giving you a raise,” I said.