Jake whistled. “Zowie. And then of course she kept the house that had been Ricks’s.”
“It had gone on for thirty years,” I said. “Kind of genius. All their London friends knew them as each other.”
Jake nodded. “I like it,” he said again. “But how fast can you get it down? Because I have some news for you.” I waited. “It’s not good. Wareham’s book is on her publisher’s spring list. Next year.”
“What?” How could she be done? I’d been writing as I was researching, but I was only halfway through. How could she be finished? Well, I knew how. She’d been writing all day while the Weasel was reading the letters, then calling her to tell her what she’d found. It would be trash, pure trash, and full of clichés. And also, what was the secret she had mentioned on the phone? Was there something else I didn’t know about? What had she discovered that was so amazing?
“It’s going to be the lead nonfiction book,” Jake said.
“I can’t believe it.”
“Believe it,” Jake said. “Yours has to come out in the next six months or we’re lost.”
The next day I was back at the Beinecke. The Wolverine wasn’t there, but the Weasel was, wearing a cream silk blouse and a gold bracelet, sitting at their table. In the middle of the afternoon the Wolverine appeared. She very ostentatiously did not see me, and she walked over to the Weasel and whispered something. The Weasel stood and the two of them started for the door.
I spent the afternoon going over the latest files I could get, letters from the seventies. I saw plenty of evidence of what I was looking for. When Jens asked about her next book, or even her next story, she resisted more and more. Don’t ask, she said finally.
It killed me that I didn’t have another six months to work all this together properly.
When I got up for a break, out in the hall I saw the Wolverine again. She was headed toward the staff room, though this time alone. In her clothes and style she tried to imitate the Weasel, but because she was squat and dark she couldn’t. She was one of those women who throws a big scarf around her neck to appear rakish, but since she has no neck she looks as though she’s drowning in textile. Today she was wearing one of those scarves, and it came up to her ears and nearly down to her waist.
She was walking away from me, down the hall, and on an impulse I followed her. I moved silently, keeping my heels from hitting the floor. I wanted to see what was behind that door. She pulled it open fast and slipped inside, but I could see through a narrow slit: several long tables, chairs standing messily about. High metal shelves against the wall held a hodgepodge of file boxes. Then the door shut and I was left out in the hall, standing on my tiptoes, wondering what she was looking at.
I had the feeling that those X-files held the fact that she was gay — which would have been a big deal decades ago, when she gave her papers to Yale, but a small deal now. So what had the Wolverine learned that was so amazing? Was it Ricks’s confession, during the eighties, that she couldn’t write anymore? Was it the secret of the switched identities? Or was it the secret that Pauline Mays had written the idiotic book which had been on the best-seller list for forty-eight weeks now, and which might — who knew? — mean a claim of fraud, if the publisher had presented the work of a clumsy amateur under the golden name of Alison Ricks?
The thought of Wolverine learning this made me angry. And worse, it seemed unfair that she had chewed in her horrible rodent-like way through the barrier Ricks had chosen to erect. She’d done it just by buttering up some rich donor, whereas I had done real research and found it out on my own.
There was no way I could finish my book in time to compete with the Wolverine. She had finished it in a year and a half, so it would be a quickie, superficial and trashy. Even worse, she was a terrible writer.
I’d looked up some of her stuff. I could imagine the sentences: Alison (she’d call her Alison, as though they were friends) and her lesbian girlfriend, the elegant socialite Pauline May, led a scandalous life of partying and debaucheries.
Did she even know what debaucheries meant? It made me angry just thinking of her using it.
Their big London town house was a party pad, full of wild times and bohemian revels. Drugs, sex, and liquor were rife.
Did she even know what rife meant? Could she write a single sentence without a cliché? She would write, She must have thought... a sentence that should never appear in a biography. She would call Ricks an acclaimed author and her work luminous and provocative and compelling, and say that her writing was haunting and her style was deft.
I doubted that she had even read Ricks’s work, or had any idea why it was great. Whereas I had not only read every book, I also owned them all, and I had bought them years ago, as they came out.
The more I thought about the Wolverine’s terrible writing the angrier I became, standing in the hall as I thought about her cliché-ridden style, and her big fucking advance, and her trashy, splashy, successful book that was going to be the lead nonfiction book on the spring list. Across from me Chelsea was standing at her desk. She looked up, her eyebrows raised interrogatively. I was motionless, doing nothing.
“Do you need something?” Chelsea called over. “Or are you just thinking?”
“Thinking,” I said. “Trying to decide what angle to follow next.”
Just then the door to the staff room opened and the Wolverine came out. She peered up and down the hall, then walked quickly toward us. She didn’t look at either Chelsea or me, but stared straight toward the exit. She was wearing thick stacked heels and a skirt, with one of her big drowning shawls over her neck and shoulders. There was something odd about her posture: her shoulders were even more hunched than usual. They were drawn up high under her shawl, making her even more neckless.
As she walked past me, steaming along on her short thick legs, her rodent-like profile jutting out ahead of her, I thought again of her terrible writing and something came into my mind, out of nowhere. I stepped forward and stuck out my foot.
The Wolverine tripped, staggered, lurched, and fell headlong. She landed on her knees, putting her left hand out to break her fall. With her right hand she was clutching at her chest. Out from beneath the shawl fell a file folder. When it hit the stone floor it spilled its contents: a sheaf of handwritten letters.
There was a silence. No one moved.
Chelsea said, “Miss Wareham.”
Then we heard the sound of the alarm, loud and metallic against the alabaster walls.
It was the first time I’d heard a loud noise in the library, and the first time I’d seen speed and confusion there, people running, hard shoes on stone floors, raised voices, the static of walkie-talkies, the complicated metallic synchrony of doors locking.
I liked the library when it was silent and light-filled, suffused with that alabaster glow. I liked it when it was like a church, where people moved slowly and reverentially, and spoke in hushed, respectful voices. I liked the library when it echoed the secrecy of the closed, forbidding buildings studding the narrow streets, with their sealed windows and locked doors. I liked the idea of closed archives, inaccessible information, facts that were not available to the public. I liked mysteries that were only to be shared with those dedicated initiates who had earned the right to be inducted into the world of secret knowledge. I liked the Beinecke when it held those secrets within its silent realm.