Perhaps he would invite her to lunch and ask her. It would be a conversation starter; he could not imagine what else they might have to talk about. She had been working for the shop when Crosetti started there, and over the course of several years they had yet to share more than a few formal sentences at a time. She came to work on a bicycle, which suggested that she lived more or less in the neighborhood. The neighborhood being Murray Hill, this meant she had money, because one could not afford to live locally on what Glaser paid. In Crosetti’s experience, young, attractive, and wealthy Manhattan women did not yearn for semihefty Italian guys who lived with their mothers in Queens. Rolly might be an exception, though; one never could tell…
Crosetti was working on a particularly tricky bit of hypertext markup language at the same time as he was thinking these amusing thoughts. He was thinking about Rolly’s eyes, the element of the electric in her glance that made him wish for more eye contact than he ordinarily got. His mind was so thoroughly occupied with those eyes and the computer work that it took a good while before he noticed that the frying smell had waxed unusually strong, was more than a mere odor, was actual smoke. He rose, coughing a little now, and made his way to the back of the basement so that he faced the party wall that divided the bookshop basement from that of the restaurant. The smoke was thicker here, he could actually see the sooty tendrils creeping from cracks in the old brick. And the wall was warm under his hand when he touched it.
Quickly he clattered up the wooden stairs to the shop proper-deserted, and the sign with its paper back-at clock hung in the door, for it was lunchtime, and Glaser had obviously taken his protégée for a bite. He went out to the street, where he discovered a small crowd milling around the entrance to the Aegean, from the door of which issued plumes of greasy gray smoke. Crosetti asked one of the crowd what was going on. Some kind of fire, the man said, in the kitchen. Now he heard sirens. A police car rolled up and the officers started to clear people away. Crosetti darted back into the shop and down the stairs again. The smoke had become dense, choking, bearing a nauseating tang of ancient grease. Crosetti pulled his backup CD from the computer and then ran upstairs, directly to the locked case where the most valuable items were kept. Glaser had the key, of course, and after a brief hesitation Crosetti kicked in the glass. The first thing he grabbed was the McKenney and Hall History of the Indian Tribes of North America, in three folio volumes, the prize of the establishment. Out of the case, onto a table. On top of that the three-volume Pride and Prejudice first edition, and then the Leaves of Grass, another prime first, giving him a short stack worth a quarter of a million retail. He picked these up, made for the door, halted, and uttered a despairing curse as he recalled that the new Churchill Voyages was still downstairs. He hung there in an agony of indecision-rescue these in hand or go down for the Voyages?
No, he had to go down again. He put the books back on the table, but as he reached the head of the basement stairs, a heavy hand grabbed the back of his jacket and demanded to know where the fuck he thought he was going. It was a big fireman in a smoke mask, who was apparently also not a book person, although he did let Crosetti come out with the three precious titles from the case. The young clerk was standing on the sidewalk outside the security line the cops had established, gasping, filthy, clutching these to his breast when Glaser and Rolly arrived. Glaser took in what his clerk was holding and asked, “What about the Dickens?”
He meant the 1902 edition with extra watercolor illustrations by Kyd and Green. Sixty volumes. Crosetti said he was sorry. Glaser tried to push past a pair of cops, who stopped him, grabbed him, yelled angry words, which Glaser returned.
Looking up at Crosetti, Rolly asked, “Did you manage to get the Churchill out of the basement?”
“No. I was going to, but they wouldn’t let me.” He explained about the big fireman.
She sniffed the air. “Everything in there is going to smell like bad french fries. But you saved the Indian Tribes at least.”
“And Jane and Walt.”
“Yes, them too. Sidney doesn’t think you know anything about books.”
“Just what they cost,” he said.
“Yes. Tell me, if that firefighter hadn’t shown up, would you have dashed into the flames to save the Voyages?”
“There weren’t any flames,” he said modestly, “or hardly any.” She gave him the first smile that ever she gave him, the toothed grin of a young wolf.
The next day they took stock and discovered that, aside from some smoke damage, and the smell, the showroom and its contents were unharmed. It turned out that in the kitchen of the restaurant next door was a hole in the floor, and into this hole over the years the cooks had poured odd lots of grease when the main grease barrel was full or when they were too pressed or lazy to carry the stuff to where it belonged. This had pooled down in the basement, between the walls, and somehow ignited. The firefighters had smashed through the party wall in their efforts to halt the burning, and as a result much of what had occupied the bookstore’s basement was wrecked by heat, collapsed brickwork, or water. The packing case containing the six volumes of Awnsham and John Churchill’s Collection of Voyages and Travels (1732 edition) had unfortunately taken the brunt of the wall’s collapse. These volumes now lay upon a worktable amid the ruins, around which table stood Mr. Glaser, Crosetti, and Rolly, like cops examining a murder victim, or rather the two young people were like cops-Mr. Glaser was like the victim’s mom. Tenderly he ran his fingers over the crushed, soaked, and blackened full-calf cover of volume one.
“I don’t know,” he said in a little creaky voice, “I don’t know if it’s even worth the effort. What a colossal loss!”
“Wasn’t it insured?” asked Crosetti. They both stared at him in distaste.
“Of course it was insured,” Glaser replied tartly. “That’s hardly the point. This is probably the finest set of the Churchill 1732 in the world. Or was. It was in the library of one of the minor Godolphins, probably untouched and unread from the time it was delivered until the library was broken up at the death of the last heir in 1965. Then it belonged to a Spanish industrialist for nearly forty years and then I purchased it at auction last month. It was perfect, not a trace of wear or foxing or…oh, well. Impossible to recover. They’ll have to be broken for the maps and illustrations.”
“Oh, no!” exclaimed Rolly. “Surely they can be restored.”
Glaser peered at her over his thick half-glasses. “No, it simply doesn’t make economic sense, when you calculate what restoration would cost and what we might realize from a rebound and doctored set.” He paused, cleared his throat: “No, we’ll have to break them, I’m afraid.” This in the tone of an oncologist saying “stage four melanoma.”
Glaser issued an immense sigh and waved his hands weakly, as if chasing gnats.
“Caro, I’ll leave it in your hands; do it quickly before the mold starts.” He shuffled away to his private office.
“He wants you to break the volumes?” Crosetti asked.
“It’s not a complex task. But we have to dry the set out,” she replied, a distracted look on her face. “Look, the fact is I’m going to need some help.” She seemed to notice him again, and an appealing expression came to her face, a look he rather liked. He mimed searching for someone behind him and said, “Oh, not me! Man, I failed finger painting. I never once colored completely inside the lines.”