“Scholars have been talking about the Pickle for years, but I don’t think it even exists,” Professor Boskin said, waving his cigarette around. He smoked a lot when he was excited, and he was always excited when he was talking about Smollett.
Neal Carey sat there rapt. He was a senior at the time, an English major, and Boskin was an academic star. Neal had chosen Columbia University for two reasons: instructions from Friends, and Professor Leslie Boskin, the country’s foremost scholar of the eighteenth-century English novel. A famous authority at age thirty-seven, he had come out of a nowhere Pennsylvania steel town to win a scholarship to Harvard, which he parlayed into a Rhodes. His first book, The Novel and the New Reading Public, redefined the field. He was a true eighteenth-century gentleman: He paid his bills, shouted his share of the rounds, and believed first and foremost in the sanctity of friendship. One of those friends was Ethan Kitteredge, who on the deck of Haridan had told Boskin the truly picaresque life story of his promising young student Neal Carey. Not long after that, Boskin invited Neal to partake of a Chinese dinner. Every aspiring undergraduate in the English program knew what that meant: an invitation to become a graduate student under Boskin’s wing. Two years of harassment, browbeating, nit-picking, and slow torture.
Neal was thrilled. It was all he had ever wanted. He dug into his Peking duck and listened. Boskin was on a roll. His black eyes glowed.
“You see, Smollett struggled for years just to get noticed. He had an inferiority complex like a mule at a donkey convention. He was Scottish, he was relatively uneducated… in those days surgeons were pretty low on the social scale. So when his first novel, Roderick Random, came out, he thought he’d finally be accepted by the London literati.” Boskin paused to lay some strips of duck and some plum sauce onto the pancake and to take a sip of Tsingtao. “But he wasn’t. Johnson, Garrick, all the boys still snubbed him. So then he writes Pickle and he lets them have it. Really vicious satire. Not to mention the Lady Vane memoirs he throws in for the hell of it. Imagine it, here is the supposed diary of a highborn lady all about fucking around; and people are wondering, where did Smollett get this shit? And Pickle is a smash! The public loves it! And he’s picked up by London society. Johnson, Garrick, all the boys.”
Neal watched Boskin shove a huge hunk of the pancake into his mouth, chew it quickly, and wash it down with a slug of beer. It was true, Neal thought, Boskin really would rather talk about Smollett than eat.
Boskin set the beer down and continued. “But now he’s feeling badly about all the vicious shit he wrote in Pickle, so when he’s asked to do a second edition, he takes most of it out. But he has one copy somewhere-one copy in which he puts all the notes: who’s who, what the joke is, and the truth about Lady Vane. Was she his mistress? Is all the juicy stuff true?”
Boskin jabbed his chopsticks into his Dragon and Phoenix and came up with a piece of shrimp. “So Smollett gets old. As do we all, so drink up. He goes to Europe for his health. Gets a tumor the size of a baseball on his hand. His daughter and only child dies. Life sucks the big one. Miserable, bankrupt… he finally croaks in Italy. But we know for a fact that he had a copy of every one of his books with him when he went for the deep drop. So what would the widow do? No money… no prospects… no piece of The Rock…”
“Sell them.”
“Right! All she had to trade on was her late beloved’s fame. So she sold his whole collection, one by one. And every other book has surfaced except his Pickle. The Pickle. Four volumes of literary treasures. That’s how the rumor started. They say it’s never surfaced because it has all these marginal notes with all the goods on Samuel Johnson, Garrick, Akenside, and, of course, the sporting Lady Vane.
“Any collector, any eighteenth-century scholar, would give his left testicle to have a look at those volumes. Except they don’t exist. The rest of that duck is yours, by the way.”
Except they did exist-in Simon Keyes’s apartment. Neal had held them in his hands, books that could provide his future, his fortune, and his freedom. And he’d put them back on the shelf.