I squirmed at that. I perfectly well knew it to be a biblical parable, but it was not Caesar up there in the Hennessy Building, pulling strings attached to the police department.
The minister took off his spectacles, folded them, and seemed to shake his head at himself. “Let us return to the singing.”
As we walked out after the service, Grace pursed a look at me as if to see what I thought. “My Arthur used to say there are those who make a scarecrow of the law.” I thought it best not to say Arthur had read some Shakespeare along the way. Directly ahead of us, Hoop and Griff were stumping along, sleeve cuffs flying as they dissected the sermon. Watching them, Grace said soberly: “The union is going to have its hands full, isn’t it.”
THERE WAS NO KNOWING how these things come about, but somehow that Sunday spate of Welsh sermonizing and song rinsed away the window men. The way was clear, to and from the library, the next day and the next and those after that, and while I habitually peeked over my shoulder for figures lurking half a block behind, they were notable only for their absence. It was as I indeed hoped, I could tell myself: the goons or their bosses saw me for what I was, a glorified library clerk sauntering meek and mild to church, and were wasting no further time on me.
Which was a lucky thing, because I was falling in love with the Butte Public Library. Walking up to it each fresh morning, its Gothic turret like the drawbridge tower into the castle, I warmed to the treasures within those softly gray granite walls. Sandison standing there at the top of the steps counting us off as if checking his herd came to seem patriarchal rather than high-handed. The staff softened toward me-with the exception of Miss Runyon-as I picked up stray tasks that they wanted to dodge. The nooks and crannies and grandiosities of the old building intrigued me, like an ancient mansion labyrinth leading back to Gutenberg’s printing press and the start of everything, and always, always, there were the lovely classic books tucked away here and there for stolen snatches of reading. Down any aisle, Stendhal or Blake or Wharton or Cather or Shakespeare or Homer or any of the Russians waited to share words with me, their classic sentences in richly inked typefaces as if rising from the paper. I suppose the best way to say it is that the library’s book collection, courtesy of that snowtopped figure with the Triple S initials, was the kind I would have had myself if I were rich.
In short, work of this sort fit me from head to toe. I could even put up with sharing office space with Sandison, as his chain-lightning moods kept a person alert. The old saying had his name on it: he may have been hard to get along with, but harder to get along without.
The library ran on one principle: Samuel S. Sandison was next to God. Whether above or below, opinions varied. His style of administration was as effective as it was unpredictable. For hours on end he would stay holed up in the office, apparently oblivious to anything happening elsewhere in the building. Then without warning he would barge out of his lair and prowl from floor to floor, wearing the expression of a man who took pleasure in kicking puppies. The result was an amazing library: the staff was on its toes every second, and its offerings were, of course, first-rate. I have to say, the man responsible for all this was not exactly an officemate easy on the nerves. The only mirth Sandison showed was when he spotted a bargain book in some catalogue of rarities and he would let out a “Heh!” and smile beneath his wreath of beard. Mostly, being around him was like having the Grand Inquisitor grading one’s homework.
“Goldsmith,” he characteristically would snap over his shoulder from where he was enthroned in his desk chair, and I had mere seconds to figure out whether he meant for me to trot across town to the dealer in fine metals or commence a conversation about the poet of England’s peasantry.
Guessing, I recited: “ ‘Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey / Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.’ Rather daring for his day, wouldn’t you say, Sandy?”
“Romantic twaddle about how nice it was to live in huts, I’d call those elegies of his.”
“That’s too dry a reading of him,” I protested. “He had a wicked wit. Who else would have said of Garrick that onstage he was wonderfully simple and natural, it was only when he was off that he was acting?”
That brought a snort. “Doesn’t mean old Goldilocks could tell a hoe from a hole in the ground. Robert Louis Stevenson, now, he knew his stuff about how life really is.” And with that, Oliver Goldsmith, or whomever, would be consigned to the vast second rank and remain unbought.
“Morgan?” The dubious drawl that met me this particular day told me I was in for another assignment of the Sandison sort. “You started something with those music stands. Now Miss Runyon claims she can’t function unless she has a corkboard on a tripod to pin pictures on for the kids’ story hour. Go down there and see what you can rig up.”
As I was passing his desk, he looked askance at me over one of the catalogues of rare books that were perpetually open in front of him. “ Oxford flannel?”
“Serge.” I brushed a bit of lint off the new blue suit. “Like it?”
“You look like an undertaker.”
Down the stairs I went, past Miss Runyon’s cold eye, to the spacious meeting room all the way in the basement. The basement had originally been intended as an armory, and its thick walls made it a fine auditorium, no sounds escaping to the outside. You could about hear the spirited echoes of the Shakespeareans and the philosophical ones of the Theosophists lingering amid the pale plaster foliage of the scrollwork around the top of the walls. A curtained stage presided across one end of the room, and at the other stood a spacious supply cabinet. I was rooting around in the cabinet for anything resembling corkboard and a tripod when I heard the entry door swish closed in back of me.
I glanced over my shoulder and there the two of them were, big and bigger.
“Look at him, Ty.” The one who was merely big had a pointed face with eyes that bulged like those of an eel, probably from so much time spent planted in front of store windows peering sideways. “In that prissy suit, you’d almost think he’s the real item, wouldn’t you.”
The response from the figure half a head taller than him clipclopped in at a heavy pace: “If we wasn’t smart enough to know he’s up to something, yeah.”
The lesser goon was alarming enough, but Typhoon Tolliver I knew to be made of muscle, gristle, and menace. In the boxing ring his roundhouse blows stirred a breeze in the first rows of seats-hence his nickname-and had he been quicker in either the feet or the head, he might have become an earlier Jack Dempsey. As it was, his career of pounding and being pounded made him no more than a punching bag that other heavyweights needed to get past on the way to a championship bout. His flattened features and oxlike blink were the kind of thing I had been afraid would happen to Casper, another reason behind cashing in on our fi xed fight and the intention to steer the ring career of Capper Llewellyn into early retirement after he regained the title. Trying not to stare at Tolliver and his ponderous bulk, I brushed my hands of my cabinet task and managed to utter: