Eighty years was a good long time, but this old lady had not died. She sat before me, a human relic, waiting tensely for some indication of what I would do. All she had going for her was a faint hope and the tiny matter of my conscience. If I chose to go happily among the world’s most notorious assholes, what could she do about it? I had bought the book fair and square: hell, I could stonewall her forever. Even if she’d had money and the law was ultimately on her side, its process was not. Given her age and the way lawyers jack each other off, she’d never live long enough to see her book again.
I had a hunch she knew these things as well as I did. Even Ralston knew: I could see him in my peripheral vision, out at the end of my art section, keenly interested in us now and no longer making any effort to hide it. Was there such stuff as three-way chemistry? Maybe so, but that didn’t account for everything. We all knew what I could have done. Only I knew what I had to do.
“What are you thinking, Mr. Janeway?”
“Just groping around the edges of a moral dilemma, Ms. Gallant.”
I could almost see her mind churning, hunting for any small thing that would make my dilemma less groping and my choice more moral. But she didn’t know how to get there, and all she could do was ask a blind question. “What can I tell you?”
I picked up my notepad, which had dropped to the floor beside my chair. “His name was Warren, yours is Gallant. You can start with that.”
“Warren was my mother’s name. Gallant was the name of the fool I married, more than seventy years ago. I kept it because I always loved the regal sound of it.”
This too sounded real, but she was still reading doubt into my questions. “Does it seem far-fetched that I might’ve found someone to marry me once, Mr. Janeway?”
“Not at all.”
“I wasn’t always a withered old prune. There was a time when even a young buck like yourself might’ve found me comely. But that was so long ago it might have been on another world.” She touched her cheek as if searching for a tear. “The first time I heard it I thought the name Gallant had the loveliest sound. Tucker Gallant. My God, he’s been dead almost sixty years. I wonder if I didn’t marry him just for his name.”
“You don’t strike me as the type who would do that, Mrs. Gallant.”
“Who knows what type I was? I was barely a grown woman when I met him.”
Her hands had begun to tremble and she looked away, squinting at the light from the street. Hope was fickle and it faded now as reality settled in. “I knew I was coming here on a fool’s errand. You’re being very kind, Mr. Janeway, but I’m not under any illusions about anything. Even if I could prove everything I say, where would I be?”
“In an ideal world, I would return the book and get my money back. Then the auction house would give it to you as the rightful owner.”
“Your tone tells me that’s not likely to happen.”
“It’s not theirs to give. Their position would be that all sales are final. In that ideal world, maybe you could discover who consigned it. But then you’d have to fight it out with him.”
“How do they think I’m supposed to do that?”
I shrugged. “Not their problem.”
“So much for the ideal world. Now what?”
I didn’t say anything. Hell, I was no lawyer: it wasn’t my place to tell her what to do. If I made a good-faith effort to find out about the book, nobody could ask more than that.
“This is some situation,” she said.
Yes, it was, but I wasn’t going to advise her.
“If you keep the book, I lose. If you give it back, I still lose.”
So far she had an excellent grasp of it.
“I guess my only recourse is to persuade you to give me the book.”
There was a touch of self-ridicule in her voice, like, That’ll be the day, when cows milk themselves dry and the ghost of Richard Burton comes back to take it away from you at the point of a sword.
“No one but a fool would do that,” she said.
She had that right. In our dog-eat-dog world, she was nothing to me. She was trouble and pain, the embodiment of bad news. But my heart went out to her.
“I shouldn’t joke about it,” she said. “That’s a lot of money to joke about.”
“Tell me about it.”
I hadn’t been aware she’d been joking—how could I tell?—but now in her self-deprecating laugh I caught a glimpse of the girl she’d been: a heartbreaker, I’d bet, in the springtime of the Roaring Twenties with her life just beginning and the world opening up. In that moment the money seemed crazily irrelevant. It was still only Indian money: If I had to give up the book, I’d miss it like a severed kidney, but how much would I really miss the stupid money? I shifted my weight on the stool and said, “I don’t know what I’d do,” and she took in her breath and held it for a moment.
“I just don’t know, that’s all I’m saying. If we could verify everything—if there were no doubts—then I guess that would be one of my options, wouldn’t it?”
She shook her head. “You’re out of your mind.”
“We’re not breaking any new ground there, Mrs. Gallant.”
She squinted and peered, said, “I wish I could see you better,” but her apprehension was gone. Her fear was gone, and what was left between us was a strange and growing harmony. Was that trust I saw in her face?
“I had no idea what I’d find when I came here. I certainly didn’t expect to meet a man of honor. I thought such creatures were extinct today.”
“Don’t get too carried away, ma’am. I haven’t done anything yet.”
But there was no getting around it: in those few minutes, something fundamental had changed between us. She gave a small shiver and clutched at the collar of her dress. I asked if she was cold—I had an afghan back in my office—but she shook her head.
“Mr. Ralston?”
“Yes, ma’am?” He came up to join us.
“Would you please get my bag from the car?”
I had my own chilling moment as Ralston brought in the bag and she directed him to take out what was obviously a book wrapped in cloth. What else would it be but a Burton? I fingered its violet cloth cover, opened it to the title page, and my last doubt about her vanished. A cherry copy, an exquisite First Footsteps in East Africa, London, 1856. I touched the inscription: To Charles Warren, my best American friend Charlie, in the hope that our paths may one day cross again, Richard F. Burton. It had been inscribed in 1860.
“That’s an exceedingly rare volume today,” she said. “I’ve had it hidden away, protected it for years. I understand it’s unheard of to find one with the forbidden appendix intact.”
The notorious so-called infibulation appendix. I turned to page 591 and found it tipped in, four pages in Latin. I remembered from Brodie’s biography that it had contained material then considered so salacious that the printers had refused to bind it into the book.
“The sexual practices of the Somalis,” she said. “All spelled out for the public horrification and secret titillation of proper old hypocritical England. Penis rings, female circumcision—things they couldn’t talk about then and we can’t get enough of today.”
“Burton never did have any inhibitions when it came to describing what he saw.”
“For all the good it did him. I understand only a few copies survived.”
“How did you manage to save this one?”
“I was lucky. Charlie had taken this volume out of his library to look up something. It was upstairs where it wasn’t supposed to be the night he died. Later my mother found it and hid it. She kept it secret until she died, and it was found among her things. A few worthless relics, some worn-out old clothes, and this—the sum of her existence, but to me it was a symbol of what we’d been, who we were.”