“Mr. Beale?” Alice asked. “Are you expecting someone?”
“Is it obvious?” he said.
“You’ve been looking out that window for twenty minutes.”
“And I couldn’t even tell you what’s out there. I think I’ve been somewhere else entirely.”
“Anyplace nice?”
“I’ve been wandering the Mediterranean.”
“That would be nice!”
“Well…” He looked wistfully out the window. “It’s been twenty years of war and dangers, and I’d really rather be home. And I don’t know what to expect when I get there.”
“I see.” Alice nodded, very sympathetically. “Twenty years is a long time. They might think you’re never coming back.”
“I know my beloved will always be true.” Suddenly he was alert, focused on the window. “There! There it is!”
The delivery truck came to a stop and the quick young man bounded up the steps. Charles had the front door open.
“Afternoon, Mr. Beale! Sign here.”
“Thank you, Roger. I’ve been waiting for this one. Alice, could you ask Morgan to come downstairs?”
“What do you think?” Morgan asked.
“I’m not sure. It’s very nice,” Charles said. Both of them were just inches above the front cover. “Very, very nice. We’ll open it.”
He put his gloved finger against the page edges and lifted, opening it in the middle. “The typeset is at least 1800s. And the.. . oh my!”
“What?”
“Look close. At the paper.”
“Is it parchment?”
“Vellum, even. This was a very expensive book.”
“What about now?”
“I don’t know yet.” He turned back to the beginning. “Not much of a title page, is it?”
“No date, no publisher, no city,” Morgan said. “Just the title and author.”
“It could maybe be a half title if there were a regular title page after it.” He shook his head. “But the book is still very nice.”
“But you don’t recognize it all?”
“No. It’s not any printing I know of. Get that Barlow, will you? Thank you.”
Morgan laid a heavy, modern book on the desk, modern at least compared to the other books in the room. Charles opened it with as much respect.
“Alexander Pope.” He found the page. “Two dozen editions before 1850.” He turned the pages of the Odyssey back to the first printed page. “I’ll say 1830s.”
“What about the signature?”
“Right.” He turned back another page to the inside of the front cover. “That is supposed to be an A?”
“And that’s the P,” Morgan said.
“It isn’t even two words. It’s just one word. Even dead, I think Pope would have signed more clearly than that.” He turned back to the first printed page. “Look. At the very inside edge. See?”
“It looks like…”
“Yes.” Charles closed the book and looked at it from the top. “Yes. You can see here. There was another page, and it’s been removed. You can see just the sliver that was left.”
“That would have been the real title page?”
Charles had the book open. “It’s been cut out.”
“So it was the half title.”
Charles was staring very hard. “I’m not sure. There’s something about it.”
Morgan waited. Charles looked up at the shelves. All four walls of shelves looked back. The shades varied, but they were all brooding hues of brown. The shelves were divided every three feet by vertical braces, and every section was numbered. Some sections were filled; many had spaces. Ceramic blocks held the books upright where the shelf wasn’t filled.
“Get… um… there, over there, those three. Above the Grotes. The red ones. All three.”
Morgan carried them to the desk. Charles opened the first.
“A Jane Austen set from 1820-something, isn’t it? Yes, 1828. Now, see, the set title page. It has all the standard title page information, but it’s the same for each volume except for the one line of the volume title. Then, the next page is the volume title page. Just like in our Odyssey.”
“So this Odyssey is part of a set,” Morgan said. “Is that good?”
“Well… yes and no. If we knew anything about the set, and then if we could actually locate any other volumes, that would be very good. But we don’t, so we probably couldn’t, so it wouldn’t. And the missing main title page is very damaging.”
“Was it broken out?”
“Yes, to be framed. I’m sure it was. It’s probably on someone’s wall right now, or more likely in a box in someone else’s attic.”
“What will we do with this?”
“We could put it in the catalog and on the website, but just as it is-it’s probably not worth more than eight hundred, and that’s just because of its age and the quality of its materials. I wonder who was bidding it up to seventeen hundred.”
“It was another dealer.”
“Just taking a chance, like I was. And maybe I was the loser. Well
… let me look at it for a while before I decide what to do.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Maybe I’ll read it. I don’t know if the Pope translation is even in print anymore. And this is a very nice volume.” He turned away from the book. “What are you up to these days, Morgan?”
“Actually, sir, I’ve been looking through the inventory. I have a list to order.”
“Anything special?”
“It’s mostly replacements. I’ll find them wherever I can. Briary Roberts has a lot of them.”
“Anything expensive? We won’t replace the Melville, of course.”
“There is a nice Dante I found for about twelve thousand. Longfellow, eighteen sixty-seven. It’s on one of the private auction sites.”
“Eighteen sixty-seven? A first-edition Longfellow? That would be nice. I’ll look at it.”
“Mr. Beale?” Alice called down from above. “You have a telephone call. Mr. John Borchard.”
“Hello, John, this is Charles Beale.”
“Charles! I’m starting to feel like an old friend, calling you so often.”
“I’m feeling the same way.”
“Good. I think I’ve worked out a space in my schedule for tomorrow morning. I want to stop in and see you.”
“Tomorrow morning would be fine.”
“Wonderful! I’ll look forward to it. Tomorrow morning then?”
“Yes, John, tomorrow morning.”
“What time do you open?”
“Ten o’clock. But I’ll be here earlier.”
“Oh, no, I’m sure you’d be busy. Would ten-thirty be convenient?”
“That would be fine.”
“Then tomorrow morning, at ten-thirty.”
“Tomorrow morning at ten-thirty.”
“Is that a customer?” Morgan asked as Charles set the telephone down.
“No, an old friend.”
“He’s coming by the store?”
“Yes. I think he might come tomorrow morning. Maybe around ten-thirty.”
Evening
“Good evening, ladies,” Charles said, coming up from the basement. Alice and Dorothy were together at the counter.
“Are you ready?” Dorothy asked.
“Yes. I could walk out the door this instant. Are we going home for dinner?”
“I was going to get some fish out of the freezer.”
Charles considered. “I don’t know. After reading Moby-Dick all morning yesterday, I don’t know if I’m in the mood for fish.”
“I’m open to suggestions,” Dorothy said.
“Have we sold anything this afternoon?” Charles asked Alice.
“Quite a few books, Mr. Beale. There was a Kipling, Captains Courageous.”
“No, no more fish.”
“A Carry On, Mr. Bowditch?”
“No.”
“Several Patrick O’Brians.”
“No!”
“A Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand -”
“No, no, no! Anything else?”
Alice smiled so sweetly. “And a Hemingway.”
“Don’t tell me,” Charles said.
“ Old Man and the Sea.”
“Is that all?”
“Well, there was an F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby. ”
“Ah,” Charles sighed. “That sounds like something we can work with.”
Between four wild lanes of mired Duke Street traffic and their table were a wide brick sidewalk, a wider plate glass window, and a mild jazz trio. Between the two of them were two knives, two forks, and one steak.
“John Borchard is coming to the store tomorrow morning,” Charles said during a pause in the music.
“I’ve heard so much about him,” Dorothy said.
“In quantity and quality. Besides that he was Derek’s boss, you’ve heard that he is harsh and cruel, that he put innocent people in prison in Kansas, that he blackmailed and ultimately destroyed Patrick White, and that he killed Derek. That’s quite a tale.”
“It does predispose me against him.”
“He is also charming, jolly, thoughtful and very important.”
“I’ll keep an open mind. What do you think about him?”
“I’m trying to stay open myself,” Charles said. “He is something between Derek’s victim and his co-conspirator.”
“Why is he coming?”
“To find out what I know, if anything, about Derek, including why I’ve put myself in the middle of his tussle with Karen Liu and Patrick White.”
“Would he know about Derek’s papers?”
“At this point, I’d put it at seventy percent that he does.”
“Does he know you have them?”
“I give it forty percent that he at least suspects.”
“What will you tell him?” Dorothy asked.
The jazz group fired up.
“I will play that by ear.”
Did any of our philosophers play chess, Charles?”
“Chess? Why, I have no idea, Derek. What an interesting question.”
“What would you guess?”
“Voltaire, if any of them. Hamilton might have.”
“I picture most of them hunched over their writing desks scrawling by candlelight. Not gregarious or social.”
“Nor cunning, either, Derek.”
“You aren’t cunning, Charles, are you? And you play chess quite well.”
“I’m gregarious.”
“What about Burke? Would he have played?”
“He might have been cunning, Derek. For the power he wielded in Parliament, he must have been. It wasn’t all fiery speeches.”
“The deals were struck at the gaming tables.”
“So he played cards, not chess.”
“I think I agree, Charles. Chess is pure intellect. Politics is much closer to gambling. Do you play any card games?”
“They’ve never appealed to me.”
“Perhaps we should try. I think you’d be good at it.”
“I’d have to learn any you’d suggest, Derek.”
“I think I’ll get a deck of cards.”