“Of course it would. But you’ve got to have proof.”
Outside, an ambulance went screaming past. In those few seconds I decided to take an objective and academic interest in what she was saying. Her great age demanded at least that much respect, so I ordered myself to go gently and save the assholery for someone who needed it.
I picked up a notepad and felt almost like a cop again. “How big a collection was this?”
“Large,” she said, and I could almost feel her heartbeat racing at my sudden interest. She had my attention: this was why she’d come, this was what she wanted.
“It was quite large,” she said. “You’d probably consider it the makings of a library. A good-sized bookcase full of books. A cabinet full of letters and papers.”
“A library like that isn’t easy to steal,” I said. “A man doesn’t just walk away with that in his hip pocket.”
“This was not a thief in the night. It was done through lies and
Immediately I asked the vital legal question. “Did money change hands?”
She said, “I don’t know, I’m not sure,” but her answer was too quick and her eyes cut away from mine. I knew she was lying and she knew I knew. But what she said next only made it worse. “What difference does that make, if it was a crooked deal?”
That’s the trouble with a lie, it usually leads straight to another lie. A question rooted in a lie is a lie itself. I figured she knew quite well what a difference it could make, and a lie is a lie is a lie, as Gertrude Stein, that paragon of the lucid profundity, would have gushed. Ms. Josephine Gallant dodged it by retreating into her own dim past, and there, so surprisingly that it surprised us both, she saved herself.
“That collection was put together by my grandfather more than a hundred years ago. My earliest memories are of my grandfather and his books. I remember the colors of them…the textures. I remember that room, in a house that exists only in my memory. The pale blue walls. The plaster beginning to crack in the far corner, over the kitchen door. The shiny oak floor. Me, sitting on my grandfather’s lap while he read, and outside, the sounds of horses in the street. The garbageman, with his speckled walrus mustache…nice old Mr. Dillard, who drove a wagon with a horse named Robert. Our windows were always open in the summer and there was noise—all the noises of the street—but it never disturbed my grandfather when he was reading. He could lose himself in a book. If I asked him, he would read aloud until I fell asleep. And if I awoke—if I nudged him—he would start reading again.”
She took a long breath. “If you’ve read Burton’s books, you know they can be difficult. But there are places where they bring a landscape to life, even for a child. My grandfather admired Burton tremendously. The cabinet was full of letters from Burton, written over twenty-five years. All of our books were inscribed to him by Burton, and he had many more that Burton had not written but had sent him over the years, on exotic topics that Burton had found interesting. There was always a little note inside, with some mention of the time they had spent together, and many of the books were extensively annotated with marginal notes in Burton’s hand.”
She smiled. “He often asked me, my grandfather, if I liked his books, and I always said oh yes, I loved them, and he said, they will be yours when you grow up.”
She cocked her head as if to say, That’s all I have. I’m sorry it’s not enough.
“These are my fondest memories. Listening to my grandfather read, in Burton’s own words, of his adventures in India, Africa, Arabia, and the American West.”
Her smile was faint: fleeting and wistful, lovely in the way a desert landscape must be from the edge of space. In that moment her small untruth seemed trivial and the general unease I had been feeling sharpened and became specific.
She wasn’t talking like a crazy woman now.
Not at all.
Suddenly I believed her.
I had spent years interrogating people, and in most cases I could smell a lie as soon as it was said. The good cops are the ones who know the truth when they hear it.
The little things were what got me. The particulars, like the blue plaster…
The pale blue plaster. The crack in the ceiling, just over the kitchen door. The garbageman with his speckled mustache and his horse named Robert, for Christ’s sake. Who the hell thinks of Robert as a name for a horse? Unless it’s real.
Suddenly she was getting all the benefit of my doubt.
Suddenly I had to give her that much simple justice. Suddenly the choices were no longer mine to make. Suddenly I had to hear what she really knew: I had to separate what she thought she knew from what she wanted to believe, and keep what I wanted to believe out of it. Suddenly I had to figure out what the truth was, because, that suddenly, I might have to ask the auction-house people to figure it out for all of us.
I could just imagine what they’d say. There are seldom any guarantees in a book auction, and at first there’d be icy disdain, the kind of ivory-tower, holier-than-thou bullshit that book people dish out better than anyone. Maybe if I made enough noise they’d have to look at it. The Boston Book Galleries was an upscale auction house with a fine reputation, and the book had been sold with a provenance that looked spotless. But in recent years even the most prestigious auction houses had been duped. Some of them had sold their souls and participated in the duping, so nothing was sacred if the book had to be checked. The inquiry would go all the way back to the day when Richard Francis Burton had signed it to some man named Charles Warren.
The old woman looked at me hard, trying to see me through her haze, and again it was as if she knew things that had not been said. She knew how close she had come to losing me. She had broken through a chink in my defenses and she knew that too, even if she didn’t quite know how. She had come with little hope on a journey that must have seemed endless, and in just these few minutes we had reached a turning point. She took a deep breath and we were back to that moment of truth she had sidestepped a moment ago. She tried to smile but didn’t make it, and in the end there was nothing to do but to say what she had come here for.
“My grandfather died in 1906. His library was pillaged immediately after his death, all of it whisked away in a single evening. It’s never been seen since.”
I coughed, politely, I hoped. But the chemistry between us was sizzling now, and I knew exactly what she wanted. She wasn’t just after my book, she wanted it all. Her grandfather’s library had been missing for more than eighty years and Ms. Josephine Gallant, at the end of her life, wanted me to find it for her.
CHAPTER 4
The only sound in the next half minute was the ticking of the clock. She sat waiting while my mind ran through the worst possible implications of what she had said.
I knew enough about the law in these matters to know how murky it could get. Common law says title can’t be acquired even from a good-faith seller if there’s theft hidden somewhere in the property’s history. The term caveat emptor may be part of a dead language but there are excellent reasons why it is still universally known. Richard Burton in his earliest childhood would have had a perfect understanding of it.
Things are seldom that simple in modern American law. State statutes may vary wildly on the same set of circumstances, and the passage of enough time can erode original rights in defiance of legal intent. People die, decades slip away, and what was once clearly their property can acquire a valid-looking new history of ownership.