21.
All trails became dead ends. Tips that had at first seemed urgent now faded away. The waiting game began. Whoever had the manuscripts would want money, and a lot of it. They would surface eventually, but where and when, and how much would they want?
Chapter two
The Dealer
1.
When Bruce Cable was twenty-three years old, and still classified as a junior at Auburn, his father died suddenly. The two had been feuding over Bruce’s lack of academic progress, and things had gotten so bad that Mr. Cable had threatened more than once to cut young Bruce out of his will. Some ancient relative had made a fortune in gravel, and, following bad legal advice, had set up a scheme of misguided and complicated trusts that had strewn money over generations of undeserving kinfolks. The family had for years lived behind the facade of fine wealth while watching it slowly drip away. Threatening to modify wills and trusts was a favorite ploy used against the young, and it had never worked.
Mr. Cable, though, died before he made it to his lawyer’s office, so Bruce woke up one day with the promise of a quick $300,000, a beautiful windfall but not quite retirement money. He thought about investing it, and doing so conservatively might net him an annual return of between 5 and 10 percent, hardly enough to sustain the lifestyle Bruce was suddenly contemplating. Investing in a more daring way would be far riskier, and Bruce really wanted to hang on to the money. It did strange things to him. Perhaps the strangest was his decision to walk away from Auburn, after five years, and never look back.
Eventually, a girl enticed him to a Florida beach on Camino Island, a ten-mile-long barrier strip just north of Jacksonville. In a nice condo she was paying for, he spent a month sleeping, drinking beer, strolling in the surf, staring at the Atlantic for hours, and reading War and Peace. He’d been an English major and was bothered by the great books he had never read.
To protect the money, and hopefully watch it grow, he considered a number of ventures as he roamed the beach. He had wisely kept the news of his good fortune to himself — the money, after all, had been buried for decades — so he was not pestered by friends offering all manner of advice or looking for loans. The girl certainly knew nothing about the money. After a week together, he knew she would soon be history. In no particular order, he thought about investing in a chicken sandwich franchise, and some raw Florida land, and a condo in a nearby high-rise, and several dot-com start-ups in Silicon Valley, and a strip mall in Nashville, and so on. He read dozens of financial magazines, and the more he read the more he realized he had no patience for investing. It was all a hopeless maze of numbers and strategies. There was a reason he’d chosen English over economics.
Every other day he and the girl wandered into the quaint village of Santa Rosa, to have lunch in the cafés or drinks in the bars along Main Street. There was a decent bookstore with a coffee shop, and they fell into the habit of settling in with an afternoon latte and the New York Times. The barista was also the owner, an older guy named Tim, and Tim was a chatterbox. One day he let it slip that he was thinking about selling out and moving to Key West. The following day, Bruce managed to shake the girl and enjoy the latte by himself. He took a seat at the coffee bar and proceeded to prod Tim about his plans for the bookstore.
Selling books was a tough business, Tim explained. The big chains were deep discounting all bestsellers, some offering 50 percent off, and now with the Internet and Amazon folks were shopping from home. In the past five years, over 700 independent bookstores had closed. Only a few were making money. The more he talked the more somber he became. “Retail is brutal,” he said at least three times. “And no matter what you do today, you gotta start all over again tomorrow.”
Bruce admired his honesty but questioned his savviness. Was he trying to entice a buyer?
Tim said he made decent money with the store. The island had an established literary community, with some active writers, a book festival, and good libraries. Retirees still enjoyed reading and spent money on books. There were about forty thousand permanent residents, plus a million tourists each year, so there was plenty of traffic. What was his price? Bruce finally asked. Tim said he would take $150,000 cash, no owner financing, with the assumption of the lease of the building. Somewhat timidly, Bruce asked if he could see the store’s financials, just the basic balance sheet and profit and loss, nothing complicated. Tim didn’t like the idea. He didn’t know Bruce and thought the kid was just another twentysomething loafing at the beach and spending Daddy’s money. Tim said, “Okay, you show me your financials and I’ll show you mine.”
“Fair enough,” said Bruce. He left, promising to return, but got sidetracked by an idea for a road trip. Three days later he said good-bye to the girl and drove to Jacksonville to shop for a new car. He coveted a sparkling-new Porsche 911 Carrera, and the fact that he could simply write a check for one made the temptation painful. He stood his ground, though, and after a long day of horse-trading he surrendered his well-used Jeep Cherokee for a brand-new one. He might need the space to haul things. The Porsche could always wait, perhaps until he’d earned the money to buy one.
With a new set of wheels, and money in the bank, Bruce left Florida for a literary adventure that he anticipated more with each passing mile. He had no itinerary. He headed west, and planned to one day turn north at the Pacific, then back east, then south. Time meant nothing; there were no deadlines. He searched for independent bookstores, and when he found one he decamped for a day or two of browsing, drinking coffee, reading, maybe even lunch if the place had a café. He usually managed to corner the owners and gently poke around for information. He told them he was thinking about buying a bookstore and, frankly, needed their advice. The responses varied. Most seemed to enjoy their work, even those who were wary of the future. There was great uncertainty in the business, with the chains expanding and the Internet filled with unknowns. There were horror stories of established bookshops driven out of business when large discount stores popped up just down the street. Some of the independents, especially those in college towns too small for the chains, appeared to be thriving. Others, even in cities, were practically deserted. A few were new and enthusiastically bucking the trend. The advice was inconsistent and wide-ranging, from the standard “Retail is brutal” to “Go for it, you’re only twenty-three years old.” But the one constant was that those giving advice enjoyed what they were doing. They loved books, and literature, and writers, the whole publishing scene, and they were willing to put in long hours and deal with customers because they considered theirs to be a noble calling.
For two months, Bruce drifted across the country, zigzagging aimlessly in pursuit of the next independent bookstore. The owner in one town might know three others across the state, and so on. Bruce consumed gallons of strong coffee, hung out with authors on tour, bought dozens of autographed books, slept in cheap motels, occasionally with another bookworm he’d just met, spent hours with booksellers willing to share their knowledge and advice, sipped a lot of bad wine at signings where only a handful of customers showed up, took hundreds of interior and exterior photographs, took pages of notes, and kept a log. By the time his adventure was over, and he was finished and tired of driving, he had covered almost eight thousand miles in seventy-four days and visited sixty-one independent bookstores, no two even remotely similar. He thought he had a plan.