FSF, February 2008 Read online

  "He's the man with the red tie, two-thirds back on the right,” Lissette whispered. “It's all right,” she said, noting my embarrassment, “I would have asked you, if I hadn't known."

  But I knew she wouldn't have. The whole game was to appear knowledgeable, to be one of the players.

  The facilitator stepped to the podium. Deftly, he set lot forty-one in its context. Peter Kettleman, he said, had been one of the old rancher barons with 5,000 acres of range land and a spread of 3,000 cattle. One thing had set him apart from the other ranchers, however. His father had sent him to Harvard. Kettleman had had literary pretensions and, though he had never managed to publish a novel, he had entertained the likes of Owen Wister, Zane Grey, and Harold Bell Wright. His journals were full of gossipy tidbits about them and sketches of authentic ranch life.

  The auctioneer started the bid at $25,000. Reshad, in a total breach of auction etiquette, called out $75,000, and the bid was over. The old gentleman sitting next to me chuckled like this was some great joke, while I sat wondering how I could get Reshad as a client. The prince left with his entourage and the auctioneer introduced the next lot.

  This was a full set of B. M. Bower's westerns. B. M. Bower, the program explained, was one of the first writers of the genre and one of the few to have lived in the West. She was also distinguished by being one of the handful of successful female writers to depict “the lure of the West.” This particular set had been owned by the author herself, and although none of the editions were firsts, they constituted a finely bound matched set of leather volumes, gilt-edged and in pristine condition.

  All this was in the program. The auctioneer simply introduced the lot as “Item one, a set of westerns written by B. M. Bower. Owned by the author. Sixty-two volumes. Leather bound.” The auctioneer's lack of interest led me to conclude that the books were from a larger contractual deal, maybe the one involving the Kettleman diaries. It was a sale to get through, so we could move on to rarer items. Nothing more.

  The auctioneer started the bid at $350. The old gentleman to my left nodded his head and I saw the auctioneer hesitate a moment. Then he acknowledged his bid. “Three hundred fifty dollars to Mr. Mortimer Fechner. Do I have four hundred?” He did not, so the auction moved on.

  It was two hours more before they got to the Revolutionibus. During that time Lissette bid on a Gnostic incunabula from Hadrian's era and a letter penned by Albertus. She lost both items to higher bidders.

  The old man sitting beside me did not bid again, though he watched the proceedings with some interest. Once he got up and left for what I presumed was a pipe break, for he came back smelling even stronger of tobacco and I could see the bowl of his pipe sticking up out of his chest pocket. The scent of the tobacco took me momentarily back to my uncle's farm. I had gone there every summer until I was eighteen to help with the plowing and the baling. The work was backbreaking, but my aunt had set out huge meals of fried chicken, roast beef, corn, mashed potatoes, and gooseberry pies that were so savory I've used them as a standard of cooking ever since. In the evenings, my uncle would read aloud from whatever book took his fancy, and that is where my love of reading began. Sometimes we'd sit on the back porch and while the flies buzzed around the porch light and the fields settled into the slight sounds of night, my aunt and I would listen to Shakespeare and Keats, Tolstoy and Christopher Morley.

  Finally, the bidding started on the Copernicus. At first the offers came in quickly: $600,000, $650,000, $680,000.... When the bidding topped $700,000, there were only three players left, me, Lissette, and a curator from the Daedalus Museum of Astrophysics. I could feel the tension emanating from Lissette beside me and I wondered what her limit was. Mine was $900,000. I nodded my assent to $750,000 and she raised her hand to indicate $775,000. I bid $800,000 and she bid $805,000. The curator offered $815,000 and I felt her slump beside me. Now it was just me and the Daedalus man. I was going to win this one, I knew it. I bid $820,000 and the curator bid $830,000. I started to raise my hand for $835,000 when the old man grabbed my arm. “Let it go,” he said. “You don't want this one.” I looked at him in astonishment and in that moment lost the bid.

  The gavel came down. “Sold to the gentleman from Daedalus."

  "How dare you!” I hissed at the old man. “How dare you interfere!"

  The old man just lifted his eyebrows at me.

  I was so angry my next words came out in a sputter. I shoved my way past him to get to the aisle. It was bad form to leave the hall after losing a bid, but I didn't care.

  I went outside and set off walking, not really paying attention to where I was going, just walking off my anger. Rain was drizzling down and the streets were mostly empty except for a few soggy souls hurrying to light and warmth and some kind of comfort. Cars whirred by, sending up a muddy spray of slush. I stopped at a corner and waited for the light. The signal's reflection wavered a lollipop red in a puddle. Before the light changed, I turned back to the hall, my desire to be in a dry place overcoming my anger.

  I went in a side door instead of walking around front and found myself in a hallway of offices. I shook the rain off my coat and started off in the general direction of the auction room, leaving a trail of small puddles behind me. As I rounded the corner, I saw the auctioneer talking earnestly to a bald man in a black suit, and concluded the auction was in intermission.

  "I told you,” the auctioneer was saying irritably. “I checked those Bowers over thoroughly. There was nothing there."

  "Well, you missed something. Otherwise Fechner would never have....” The bald man caught sight of me. “May I help you, sir?” he asked in the insistent, slightly frosted voice museum guards use when you try to get too close to an exhibit.

  "Sorry, wrong door, I guess. I'm trying to get back to the auction room."

  "Let me escort you there.” The bald guy walked me briskly back to the auction and I chose a seat toward the rear of the hall. I sat through the rest of the proceedings in a kind of daze. Fechner was gone. Lissette was still there but she mercifully ignored me. I was pretty sure my career was over. I was pretty sure I would never be in that hall again.

  The next morning I slept in. I heard my alarm go off and the sound of the shower from the apartment next door, but I just burrowed in deeper. Finally, when all the doors had slammed and all the people had left and the complex was settling down to the slow tick of time that happens in empty rooms, I rolled out of bed and padded to the phone.

  My client answered on the second ring. “So,” she said, “you finally decided to report."

  "Ms. Arbuckle, I can explain."

  "There's no explanation that could possibly be satisfactory. You lost the bid at $70,000 below limit. You won't be representing me again.” She hung up.

  It was the beginning of the unraveling. Though Ms. Arbuckle had instructed me to keep our relationship confidential, she apparently didn't mind revealing my incompetence to her cronies.

  The clientele I had built up so carefully all dropped me. My mentor, Larkin, wouldn't return my calls, and the acquaintances I had made in the trade acted embarrassed when they saw me.

  I started circling want-ads and living on cereal and Top Ramen. On good days I sent out resumes. On the bad days I reviewed my life like a cancer patient with an uncertain prognosis. I'd had setbacks before, but none had made me question the upward trajectory of my life. Now I thought maybe I wouldn't amount to anything. Now I thought I'd be lucky to get a job in a shoe store.

  My luck changed on the morning I decided to check out the shelter as a future place of residence. I was reading the Times and eating a bowl of Frosted Flakes when I came across the headline, “Forger takes Daedalus for $830,000.” That grabbed my attention. Apparently the curator of the museum, being a fussy sort of man, had decided to have the ink tested in the De revolutionibus, and the laboratory performing the analysis had found anatase in the ink. Anatase was a mineral that hadn't been used in the composition of ink until the twentieth century. The curator w
as demanding a refund from Kholson's and Kholson's was saying that of course, the book was insured and they just couldn't imagine how the Kepler expert had missed this anomaly.

  I had barely finished reading the article when the phone rang. It was Larkin. “My dear boy, so sorry I haven't been able to return your calls but I just now got back into town. But what a triumph on the Kepler debacle! How in the world did you know?"

  "Let's just say I stay informed.” I wasn't about to tell my former mentor I had only been saved from buying the piece by Fechner's intervention.

  "Quite right,” Larkin said smoothly. “Every agent should have some secrets. Well, my boy, you won't lack for clients now, and you'll be able to set your own price on the commission. And it won't hurt me either to let people know I've had you under my wing for quite some time now."

  I should have hung up on him then, but I didn't. I was still playing the game of making connections, of cultivating those who could help me climb one more rung on the ladder.

  One by one my former clients all came back to me, all but Ms. Arbuckle, who probably felt she'd burnt her bridge. And I got more. Suddenly, I was the expert in town, the one who could discern false from real, who could separate acquisitions with a strong investment future from those that were second rate and doomed to fail.

  I did very well in the next year and a half. I made money. I made connections. I moved from my small apartment to a loft downtown with raftered ceilings and hardwood floors. I even acquired some investments of my own: a small statue from Pompeii of a boy hurling a discus, a first edition of Poe's Tamerlane. But somehow the heart had gone out of it, and when I was at cocktail parties conversing with the women in designer gowns and the men wearing Rolexes, I would think none of these people would help me if I was down. None of these would take a step to keep me from sleeping in a cardboard box under a bridge. And then I would wonder if I would help any of them. Some of them, I thought I would. I'd like to think I would.

  It was on one of these flat, empty evenings that I left a gathering to walk the city streets. The autumn night smelled like leaves and earth cooling. I passed an all-night deli and a mechanic's garage, the cars in the lot looking like dim, slumberous beasts of uncertain potential. And then I came to a used bookstore that looked like it was still open. It was one of those sunken places where you go down a smattering of steps to get to the shop. Light spilled out of the door and onto the porch. Through the plate glass I could see rows of bookcases and books stacked on the floor at precarious angles. It looked homey and inviting.

  A little bell on the door tinkled when I went in, but there didn't seem to be anyone about. I drifted from shelf to shelf, saying hello again to old friends, the Iliad, Horace's Odes, Great Expectations, The Heart of Darkness. I flipped open a well-worn copy of Yeats and found myself reading an old favorite. “I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree.” If only I could, I thought, for Innisfree to me was more an idea than a place and I didn't know how to get there. I tucked the book under my arm and went in search of the proprietor. As I walked toward the back of the store, I heard voices coming from a room off to my left.

  The door was only partially open and I had to give it a nudge to walk in. Inside two older men and a young woman with neon-blue hair were sitting on some tattered, stuffed chairs. The woman, whom I took to be nineteen or twenty, was dressed in overalls and an oversized men's work shirt. She had the sharp, delicate features that Edwardian painters lent to fairies and woodland elves. A loop of silver pierced one of her eyebrows and a glass stud winked from her lower lip.

  One of the older gentlemen was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt sporting, incongruously, a pocket protector. Three Eversharps and a gold-capped pen nestled in its casing. The man was thin and spare and balding. He had a dark complexion and blue eyes that were now fixed on me with an intensity I found unsettling.

  I recognized the leonine features and unruly white hair of the other man immediately. It was Mr. Fechner from the auction, the one who had saved me from bidding on the fake Revolutionibus. He was wearing a suit that looked remarkably like the one he had worn to Kholson's, except this one was maybe a bit more frayed and disheveled. It had that slept-in look one sometimes sees in the clothes of philosophers and poets. They fell silent at my entrance.

  "Sorry to interrupt. I was wondering if I might buy this book?"

  The girl with the blue hair took the book from my hand. “Whatcha got? Oh, Yeats. Great choice! Whatcha think, Mr. F? Five bucks?"

  Fechner looked at me. “Mr. Mason from the auction, isn't it?"

  I nodded.

  "Consider it a gift."

  "Mr. Fechner, I can't tell you how grateful I am for what you did at that auction. My whole career would have...."

  He waved his hand. “A trifle that cost me nothing. Why don't you sit down?” He indicated a brown, upholstered chair piled high with books. “Just put those on the floor. Ariel, this is Mr. Mason. Mr. Mason, this is Ariel and that dour gentleman over there is Roger McCaffrey."

  "Call me Sam,” I said. The reaction from Fechner's two companions couldn't have been more opposite.

  "Lovely,” Ariel said, plopping back in her chair. “Who's yer favorite author?"

  McCaffrey began irritably tamping tobacco in a pipe. “Mind if I smoke?” he asked, though it was clear he intended to go ahead whether I minded or not.

  "Please do,” I said, much to his disappointment and Fechner's evident amusement. “My uncle smoked Borkum Riff and the smell of a pipe always reminds me of the summers I spent on his farm. Conrad's my favorite,” I said, turning to Ariel. “Who is yours?"

  "Oh, right now it's Ian Dallas, but it changes. Last week I was really into H. G."

  "That's right, you liked his Palace of Green Porcelain, with its tattered books and monuments,” said Fechner, “and there's an inaccessible library in The Book of Strangers. I'm beginning to see a trend here."

  "What you should read now is The Name of the Rose,” said McCaffrey. “I wonder what it is about lost and forbidden knowledge in ancient, dusty tomes that always draws us in?"

  "I know what you mean,” I said. “I sometimes dream of finding a secret underground vault of the Alexandrian library with perfectly preserved scrolls upon scrolls of ancient manuscripts that the fires never got to and destroyed."

  McCaffrey's eyes lit up. “So, if you were wandering the corridors of this forgotten vault, what manuscript would you most want to find?"

  "That's a hard one, but I think I'd choose the book of letters that was bound of the correspondence between Alexander's general, Hephaestion, and Alexander's great teacher, Aristotle. Just imagine what they would have said about the man they both loved from the disparate perspectives of the hardened, embittered general and the philosopher turned skeptic."

  "But what of Aeschylus?” asked Fechner, leaning forward in his chair. “Wouldn't you pick, surely, one of his lost plays? The originals, you know, were housed in Alexandria after Ptolomy, one of the first frenzied bibliomaniacs, stole them from the Greeks. Think of putting your hand on the Memnon or the Cabiri and reading for the first time in seventeen hundred years a line with the cadence of, ‘From the gods who sit in grandeur/grace comes somehow violent...’”

  So began the first of many discussions I had with this small group of book lovers whom I soon learned to call friends. They were an eclectic group, held together by their fascination with ideas. McCaffrey was a retired physicist, of Scotch and Native American lineage. Ariel was a farm girl turned punker, recently transplanted to the city, and Fechner was the epitome of an autodidact. He had an insatiable curiosity. He was always learning and there was no subject he could not discourse upon, if not with expertise, then at least with knowledge.

  I got in the habit of dropping by the bookstore two or three nights a week. Fechner was always there. Often, he was joined by Ariel and McCaffrey. Gradually, I began to realize I much preferred their company to that of any of my acquaintances in the auction and collection business. If I
had thought about it then, I suppose I would have said I took comfort from these three because they loved books and ideas for the thoughts they conveyed and not for anything they could bring on the market. If I had thought about it then, I suppose I would have recognized I was beginning to dislike the man I had become.

  On one of the first evenings I found Fechner alone, I asked him about his purchase of the Bower books. I told him about how I'd stumbled upon the auctioneers discussing Fechner's purchase. Fechner walked over to a bookcase in his private “not for sale” area and pulled one of the books off the shelf. Silently, he turned the book so that the spine was toward him and the gilt-edged ends of the pages were toward me. Then, holding the pages together, he bent them sideways. I gasped. There before me in miniature detail was a painting of a cowboy riding his horse full out, chasing a steer running across a prairie. A lasso circled high above the cowboy's head and his hat had just flown backward in the wind.

  This was a fore-edged painting, one of those rare book decorations that were only revealed when the pages were bent, just as Fechner had bent these sideways. I had always dreamed of finding one, but never had. The little painting had an extraordinary vitality. You could see the lines of energy in the horse straining forward, in the steer's mad dash for freedom.

  "Who is the painter?” I asked.

  "Russell. He was a great friend of Bower's and he painted each of these as a gift."

  "And Kholson's didn't know? Why didn't they look?"

  "Arrogance. They assumed a matched set couldn't be worth anything. They were obviously not firsts and Bower isn't considered that collectable, though, to my mind, her depiction of the West was a lot more genuine than Grey's or L'Amour's, or even Wister's."

  "What will you do with these?"

  "Enjoy them, show them to friends and, when the right person comes along, give them away."