From a distance she looked very young, an illusion that dissolved as I came closer. She was one of those women who look better with some age. She’d be a knockout at forty, about six years from now. We said our hellos and I apologized for intruding. She waved that off and led me inside. “My books are all over the house,” she said. “It’ll take you a long time to see them all. Maybe we should confine ourselves to the big room today.”
The house smelled musty, the way a place gets when it’s been closed for six months. Her living room was long, with a fireplace and a high ceiling. She had an enormous print of a whale, the picture Rockwell Kent had done for the 1930 edition of Moby Dick. There were other whales about—knick-knacks on the shelves, pictures on the walls, paintings, photographs. Over the fireplace she had a blown-up photograph of a lone man standing on the bow of a speedboat. A larger boat was in the background, bearing down. I knew what it was: someone from Greenpeace, putting himself between an unseen whale and a boatload of modern whalers.
There weren’t many books in the living room, and these she said were junk, “just things I’m reading.” The main event was two rooms removed. The whole east wall was made of glass. There were heavy drapes, open now, which she used, probably in the morning, to protect her books against the sun. All the other walls were lined with books.
“Before you get started, there was a call for you about ten minutes ago. It may’ve been your girl at the store. It sounded pretty confused. Here, I got part of it on the tape machine.”
She flipped a small cassette player. The first thing I heard was Peter’s voice. He was in the middle of a sentence, as if he’d been talking over the recording. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but his voice sounded almost panicky. He turned away from the phone and there was a jumble of voices. A woman’s voice said, “Let me talk to him, Peter… Peter, would you give me that phone… give it to me, Peter, right now.” There was a click and a bump and Miss Pride came on. “Mr. Janeway, are you there? Hello?” Then I heard her say, lower, as if she’d turned away. “There’s nobody on the line, Peter, are you sure you dialed it right?” Then Peter screamed—literally screamed—“It’s a fucking tape recorder!” and I heard him shout something but I couldn’t make out the words. They were both talking for about ten seconds; then Miss Pride came back on and said in a low voice, “Look, I’m sorry, someone’s come in…I’ll call you back.”
The line went dead.
“You certainly know some strange people, Mr. Janeway,” Miss McKinley said.
“I can’t imagine what was going on there.”
“I think you’d better call her back.”
She went out of the room while I called. The phone rang and rang. The clock on the wall said five twenty-five: the store had been closed for twenty-five minutes.
I sat for a moment and stared at the machine. Miss McKinlev poked her head in.
“Everything all right?”
“I don’t know. Could I hear the tape again?”
But there was nothing on the tape that hadn’t been there the first time.
I called Seals & Neff. Ruby answered on the first ring.
“Hey, Rube, this’s Janeway. Listen, would you walk up the street and see if everything is okay at my place?”
“Sure. What’s wrong?”
“Peter was just in there. I’m afraid he may’ve been giving Miss Pride some grief.”
“Sure… gimme your number where you’re at…I’ll call you right back.”
I hung up and sat down to wait.
“How about some coffee?” Miss McKinley said. “I’ve got some whiskey if you’d like a drink.”
“As a matter of fact, it is almost decent time for a bourbon.”
“How do you like it?”
“Just like it comes.”
She came back with the drink just as Ruby called. She motioned to the phone, that I should answer it, and I did. Ruby said, “Place looks shipshape to me, Dr. J. All locked up tight and the night-light on.”
“Did you try the doors?”
“All both of’em. Walked around, rattled the windows, sang three stanzas of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ through the keyhole. Nobody’s there, Dr. J. Whatever the bug up Pete’s ass was, she must’ve handled it and got him out of there.”
“Okay,” I said in a doubtful voice. “Thanks, Ruby.”
I looked at Miss McKinley. “What a crazy thing.”
“There’s probably a simple explanation.”
“Yeah…but you’d think she’d call back.”
“Maybe it slipped her mind. She did say someone had come in. Anyway, there’s nothing you can do about it now. Might as well do what you came for.”
28
Everything julian lambert had said about her books was true, except that even then you weren’t prepared for them. You just don’t see that many sensational books in one place. It was all literature, published since the mid-1800s, and it was all letter-perfect. You need a bookman’s eye to appreciate what a perfect copy of a fifty-year-old book looks like. It does not look like a new book—it looks so wonderfully like an old book that’s never been touched. Never been touched by human hands—that’s the feeling her books gave you. There were things in that room that I knew hadn’t been seen in that condition in half a century. She had a shelf of Jack Londons in crisp dust jackets from before 1910. She had a little poetry piece that had ushered Ernest Hemingway into the book world. She had Mark Twain’s copy of Kim, signed by Kipling when he and Clemens had met, in 1907. There were so many signed books, variants, unique pieces, books with unusual associations, books from authors’ personal libraries, letters, and manuscripts that mere first editions seemed unexciting and trite. She had factory-fresh copies of Look Homeward, Angel, and Steinbeck’s first, awful, but extremely scarce novel, Cup of Gold. After a while this becomes meaningless: it degenerates into a simple list of the great, the rare, the wonderful. When I came upon Hawthorne’s copy of Moby Dick, inscribed by Melville in great friendship and lavishly annotated in Hawthorne’s hand, I heard a long deep sigh fill the room. I realized a moment later that it had been my own voice.
The phone rang, and I thought of Miss Pride. I heard the recorder kick on and Rita McKinley’s voice repeating the message I had heard so often. At the beep, a man said, “Rita, this is Paul… Call me back when you can.” It rang again, almost immediately. The recorder played and beeped and a voice said, “This is George Butler the Third calling from New York. I have decided to buy the four books we discussed yesterday. Would you please ship and bill as soon as possible?” Of course I knew who Butler the Third was. I saw his self-aggrandizing ads in the AB all the time. “Mr. George Butler III announces his acquisition of…” That kind of thing. George Butler was one of the so-called big boys of the book world. You read his ads and you knew he never put on his pants like a mortal man, he just drifted up and floated down into both legs at once. I wondered what four books George Butler had decided he couldn’t live without, and what the tariff would be. Ten thousand? Twenty? Just routine business for Ms. McKinley, who was certainly operating on a high level from her ivory tower in the mountains.