“It’s not the one I saw,” Scofield said. “I don’t know what this is. It may be some early state or a variant, maybe some experiment that Grayson meant to destroy and never did.”
Kenney sipped his drink. “It’s a little disturbing because we know that Grayson didn’t do lettered books.”
“So the hunt goes on,” I said with a sly grin.
Scofield’s eyes lit up. This was what kept him alive as he headed into his seventh decade. The hunt, the quest, that same hot greed that sent Cortez packing through steamy jungles to plunder the Aztecs.
I fingered the plastic bag.
“That’s just some ephemera we found between the pages,” Kenney said.
I opened the bag and looked at the notes. One was from Laura Warner, an enigma unless you knew how to read it. Pyotr , she had written, don’t you dare scold me for teasing you when you yourself tease so. It does please me that you can laugh at yourself now. Was this a test to see if I’d notice? How could you doubt one who hangs on your every word? I’m returning your little trick, lovely though it is, and I await the real book with joyful anticipation .
None of us rehashed the words, though the last line hung heavy in the room. I opened the second note, a single line scratched out on notebook paper. Hang on to this for me, it’ll probably be worth some money. Nola .
“What do you make of it?” I said.
“Obviously it’s passed through several hands,” Kenney said. “People do leave things in books.”
I turned the pages looking for the poem “Annabel Lee.” I found it quickly, with the misspelled word again misspelled.
Kenney had noticed it too. “Strange, isn’t it?”
I held the page between my ringers and felt the paper. I thought of something Huggins had said: there’s no such thing as a perfect book. If you look with a keen eye, you can always find something. I pressed the page flat against the others and saw that the top edge trim was slightly uneven. There’s always something.
“Just a few more things and we can get started,” I said. “I know you boys are dying to get into this stuff, but you have to help me a little first.”
“What do you want?” Scofield said.
“I want to know everything that happened when you saw that other Raven and held it in your hands. I want to know when it happened, how, where, who was involved, and what happened after that. And I want to know about Pruitt and where he came from.”
“I don’t understand what any of this has to do with you.”
“I’ve got a hunt of my own going, Mr. Scofield. I’m hunting a killer and I’ve got a hunch you boys are sitting on the answers I’ve been looking for.”
48
Twelve years ago, Pruitt had been a hired gun for Scofield Industries. He was a roving troubleshoot-er whose job took him regularly into fifteen states, the District of Columbia, Europe, South America, and the Far East. Within the company he was known as the Hoo-Man, an inside joke that had two cutting edges. HOO was short for his unofficial title, head of operations, but in private memos that floated between department heads it was often spelled WHO . Pruitt knew who to see, who to avoid, who would bend, who would bribe. In third-world countries, Scofield said without apology, bribery was a way of life. If you wanted to do business in Mexico, it was grease that got you through the doors. You could play the same game in the Philippines, as long as you played by the Filipino rule book.
The remarkable thing about Pruitt was his ability to function in foreign countries without a smattering of language. There were always translators, and Pruitt knew who to ask and how to ask it. He was fluent in a universal tongue, the whole of which derived from half a dozen root words.
Love and hate. Sex. Life and death. Fear. Money and politics.
The stuff that gets you where you want to go, in far-flung places that only seem different from the town you grew up in. A military junta has a familiar look to a guy who’s gone before a mom-and-pop city council in Ohio, asking for a liquor license.
Grease rules the day, from Alabama to Argentina.
This was a big job and Pruitt was good at it. He was always at the top of his game when the specs called for double-dealing and mischief. He was a shadow man whose best work could never be preplanned or monitored. He was judged strictly on the big result, success, while the boss insulated himself in a glass tower high over Melrose Avenue, never to know the particulars of how a deal had been set up.
“I wasn’t supposed to know these things,” Scofield said. “But I didn’t get where I am by not knowing what’s going on. I have a remarkable set of ears and I learned sixty years ago how to split my concentration.”
Pruitt had witnessed Scofield’s Grayson fetish from the beginning. He watched it sprout like Jack’s beanstalk, exploding in a passion that was almost sexual. Pruitt knew, without ever understanding that attraction himself, that this spelled money.
With cool eyes he saw Scofield’s collection outstrip itself ten times during the first year. By the end of year two it resembled a small library, with the end nowhere in sight. Scofield was no green kid, to burn bright and burn out when his whim of the day withered and left him dry. Scofield knew what he wanted for the rest of his life. He was a serious player in the Grayson game. Pruitt may have been the first of the Scofield associates to understand the old man’s real goaclass="underline" to be not just a player but the only player.
By the middle of the third year, Scofield had acquired many of the choice one-of-a-kind items that push their owners into paranoia. He had moved the collection from the office to his mansion in the Hollywood hills, where it was given an entire room in a wing on the second floor. Scofield was nervous. He summoned his security people, discussed plans for a new system, impregnable, state-of-the-art. Pruitt, who was expert in such things, was brought in to consult and was there to help supervise the installation.
Thus sealed in artificial safety, Scofield breathed easier. But no system is better than the men who create it.
Pruitt waited and watched, biding his time.
“That year I began buying books from Morrice and Murdock in Seattle,” Scofield said. “My dealings were all with Murdock, who was then considered the country’s leading dealer in Grayson books.”
It was the year of the Morrice and Murdock breakup, when Murdock stumbled out on his own in an alcoholic stupor. “He still had a lot of books,” Scofield said, “things he had hoarded over the years. But he was cagey, difficult. He knew Grayson was on an upward spiral, but the books were his ace in the hole. He also knew that I was the market: if I happened to die or lose interest, it would stabilize and Grayson would settle into his natural level, still upward bound but at a much slower rate. Murdock wanted to make all he could on every book, but even then he was afraid of selling. No matter what I paid him, he seemed to go through it at an unbelievable clip.
“He was the kind of man who would promise the moon and give you just enough real moonbeams that you couldn’t help believing him. He talked of fabulous things, hidden in places only he knew about, and all that time he dribbled out his books one or two at a time. I bought everything he showed me and paid what he asked. I knew the day was coming when he’d get down to brass tacks and I’d see what he really had. I’ve had experience with alcoholics. Eventually they lose everything.”
In the fourth year the big break came. Murdock called, claiming to have a client who owned the only copy of Darryl Grayson’s last book.
But the deal had to be handled with tenterhooks. The woman was extremely nervous. She would only meet with Scofield under mysterious conditions, in a place of her choosing, with her identity fully protected.