THE ONLY THING IN the mail that day of any interest was the eviction notice. There was also a letter from The Wall Street Journal, which promised that I could get fairly rich if only I would subscribe for just six months, while down in Atlanta Julian Bond had written, wanting to know whether I wouldn’t like to send another $25 to help keep the Republic fairly honest.
I tossed The Wall Street Journal’s promise into the wastebasket, made a mental note to cut Julian Bond off with $10, and handed the eviction notice to Myron Greene, the lawyer, who had brought my mail up with him that morning.
Myron Greene read the letter slowly and suspiciously, the way lawyers read everything, even the close-cover-before-striking admonition on match folders. He read it once at arm’s length, then put on a pair of grey-tinted aviator glasses, and read it again. After that he shrugged and handed it back to me.
“It’s an eviction notice,” he said.
“I know what it is,” I said. “What I don’t know is what I can do about it.”
Myron Greene glanced around the room and although he must have tried, he couldn’t keep the small expression of disapproval from sliding across his face. He shook his head and said, “There’s really only one thing you can do about it.”
“What?”
“Move.”
I looked around trying to see it through the eyes of some benevolent Christian whom the Goodwill people had sent over and who was viewing it all for the first time. What I was being evicted from was a “deluxe” efficiency on the ninth floor of the Adelphi apartment hotel on East Forty-sixth Street. It was about 425 square feet of steam-heated space that contained virtually everything I owned in the world other than the $9,215.26 in a checking account over which the Chase Manhattan Bank was standing constant vigil.
I decided that even a benevolent Goodwill representative, who had shaped his career out of cheerfully collecting other people’s discards, might have gulped and sighed before agreeing to accept mine. There was a book-lined wall, but most of the books were worn paperbacks except for a leather-bound set of Dickens, although nobody reads Dickens much anymore. The bed was what I think they used to call a studio couch and it was beginning to sag a bit. There was also a leather wing-backed easy chair that I liked a lot and a small Sony color TV set whose predominantly yellowish cast made everyone, especially Sevareid, appear faintly choleric.
Then in front of the Pullman kitchen was the 121-year-old butcher block that I pounded the round steak on. Not far from it against the wall was the high-fidelity set that played just fine even though after I had put it all together there had been a couple of loose wires left over.
On the floor was a rug and on the walls were some prints that I still didn’t mind looking at and in the center of the room, surrounded by six mismatched, straight-backed chairs, was where I took my meals and sometimes laid my money down. It was a hexagonal poker table whose green baize cover was marred by a dark stain that had been caused when a Homicide South detective had got all excited after filling an inside straight and knocked over his Bloody Mary at 5:15 one Sunday morning.
Myron Greene and I were sitting at the poker table, he in his dark blue pin-striped vested suit and I in my terry-cloth bathrobe.
“You have to be in court today, don’t you?” I said.
“How do you know?”
“You’re either going to court or to a funeral. Otherwise you’d be wearing something more dashing. Maybe something in crushed velvet with a few posies appliquéd on the back.” Myron Greene liked to think of himself as a dandy, but he wasn’t too sure about his taste, and he liked me to encourage him.
He glanced down at his suit and brushed away some imaginary lint. “It’s five years old and it still fits perfectly.”
“You haven’t lost any weight in five years.”
“You can be awfully snotty in the morning.”
“I’m always snotty when I get up in the morning without any coffee and somebody hands me an eviction notice. You want some coffee?”
“Is it instant?”
“It’s always instant.”
Myron Greene shook his head. “Then I don’t want any.”
“How about some tea?” I said.
Myron Greene had to think about that because it was a decision, and he never made decisions without weighing the consequences carefully and even judiciously. His inbred caution, along with his brilliant grasp of the law, kept his corporate clients out of trouble and had made him wealthy, if not really rich, although he probably would be that in a few more years.
“All right,” he said. “Tea. No sugar. Lemon, if you’ve got it.”
“I’ve got it.”
I went over to the kitchen, filled the kettle, and put it on to heat. Then I turned, lost another battle with my willpower, and lit a cigarette. This time Myron Greene didn’t try to hide his disapproval.
“You shouldn’t smoke before you’ve had breakfast,” he said.
“I shouldn’t smoke at all.”
“Then why don’t you quit? It’s not all that hard. I did it.”
“You quit five cigarettes a day, tops, and when you did you put on twenty pounds. I think I’ll stay svelte and cough a lot.”
Myron Greene sighed. He seemed to sigh often and deeply when he was around me. He sighed over my profligate ways, my slothful nature, and the company I kept. He sighed because I wasn’t more like him and then sighed again over the realization that if I were more like him, I wouldn’t be his client, and he would have lost his only contact with somebody who inhabited what he thought of as a netherworld peopled by latter-day Robin Hoods and their merry men who raced through life, knew a lot of blondes, and scoffed at their parking tickets because they knew how to get them fixed. If it weren’t for the wife and kids and the money, especially the money, Myron Greene would have liked to have been a slick criminal lawyer who wore flashy clothes and got his name in the paper all the time.
Instead, he settled for clients who had made him a millionaire before he was forty, which enabled him to live in Darien, maintain a summer home in Kennebunkport, drive a $20,000 Mercedes 450 SCL, and keep me on as a client. But I don’t think I was really ever a client of Myron Greene’s. I think I was his hobby.
I set the teapot and a cup and saucer in front of him, went back and got my coffee and the lemon, and sat back down at the poker table. He poured his tea, squeezed the lemon into it, tasted it, and smiled.
“It’s good,” he said.
“It’s Twinings Irish breakfast tea. It’s got a nip to it.”
“Why do you always go to the trouble of making a real pot of tea, but when it comes to coffee you drink that awful instant stuff?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose it’s because of that time when I lived in England.”
“When you were with the paper.”
“Yeah. When I was with the paper.”
“That must have been ten years ago now.”
“More like twelve or thirteen.”
I had once written a thrice-weekly column for one of those New York papers that had gone out of business in the mid-sixties. I had written mostly about the quaint ways of New York’s mountebanks and hustlers and con artists and of cops who were honest and brave and of those who were only partly so. Just before the paper folded there had been some talk of syndication, but nothing ever came of it, and largely through chance I found myself doing what I now do for a living, which is mostly waiting for Myron Greene to come calling.
He finished his cup of tea, used his breast pocket handkerchief to pat his lips, since I hadn’t thought to provide napkins, put it back carefully just the way it was, and pursed his lips, now that they were dry, in a thoughtful way, which meant that he felt that he had something important and even grave to say.
“I received three calls this morning,” he said. “Quite early this morning. Before seven.”
“That’s pretty early,” I said.
“I tentatively agreed for you to handle it although, of course, I said that I would have to check with you first.”
“How much?” I said.
“A quarter of a million.”
“My end’s the usual ten percent?”
Myron Greene nodded.
“Who’s going to pay it?”
“The insurance company has agreed to pay it, if you can get it back.”
“Then it must be worth a lot more than a quarter of a million, whatever it is, which you’re going to tell me about in due course, although at this rate due course is probably going to be late this afternoon.”
Myron Greene sighed again. It must have been either his third or fourth sigh, but I was no longer counting. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to present it in my own way. My own way is a logical, step-by-step presentation, which, I realize, is a bit foreign to you.”
“Don’t try to be sarcastic, Myron. When you try to be sarcastic you get all red in the face. You want some more tea?”
Myron Greene started to touch his face to see whether it was red, but realized what he was doing and stroked his moustache instead. The moustache was new. At least I hadn’t seen it before and I knew he was waiting for me to say something about it and I was trying very hard not to. We played little games like that with each other.
“I would like some more tea,” he said. “The first call I got was from the insurance company.”
“Have we done any business with them before?” I said as I poured.
He shook his head and gave his moustache another brush with a thumbnail. Actually, I thought the moustache made him look rather dashing, if somebody who stands five-nine and weighs close to a hundred and ninety-five pounds can look dashing.
“It’s a Los Angeles firm,” he said. “It’s comparatively small, but growing, and they’ve established quite a sound reputation for themselves despite the fact that they occasionally do some rather odd business.”
“How odd?”
“They insure such things as movie actresses’ legs and smiles and tits and things like that. But the firm’s sound. Very sound. I suppose they do it for the publicity.”
“What have they insured that we’re interested in?”
“A book.”
“A book? Just one?”
Myron Greene nodded. “That’s right. Just one. Now the second call I received this morning, again quite early, I might add, was from Washington.”
“Ah,” I said.
“What does ‘ah’ mean?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose it means that the plot thickens. That’s what a call from Washington can mean, especially if it’s from the CIA or the State Department or somebody jazzy like that.”
“It was from the Library of Congress.”
“Well, that’s where they keep books. In fact, they keep some pretty valuable ones there.”
“Valuable and rare. The call was from the Chief of the Rare Book Division.”
“He’s missing a rare book, I take it.”
Myron Greene shook his head. “No, that was the principal reason he called. He wanted to make it quite clear that the book in question had only been on deposit with the Library and that the owner had insisted on withdrawing it, using his own security measures and not those of the Library or of the federal government for that matter.”
“So somebody stole it after it left the Library?”
“Apparently so. However, the man I talked to, a Mr. Laws, while insisting that neither the Library nor the government had any responsibility for the book’s theft, also wanted me to know that they would cooperate in any way that they could in securing its retrieval.”
“You mean getting it back.”
“That’s what I said.”
I shook my head. “You said securing its retrieval. Five minutes on the phone with Washington and you start talking the way they do down there.”
“It must be contagious,” he said. “Now then. The third call. It must have been long distance, too, but I’m not absolutely sure. It had that funny kind of hum that long distance has. It was from a woman or a man who was trying to sound like a woman who was trying to disguise her voice.”
“Tricky,” I said. “And also a new wrinkle. Nobody’s ever used that one on me before. What did he or she want?”
“We’ll make it she. She said that you had been recommended by the insurance company, but she didn’t know anything about you. She wanted to know somebody she could talk to about you who was in her line of work.”
“What’s her line of work?”
“She said she was a thief.”
“What did you say?”
“I said that most of the people whom you knew who were in her line of work were in jail—although through no fault of yours. Then I thought of somebody.”
“Who?”
“Bingo Bobby.”
“Good Lord,” I said. “Bingo Bobby Bishop. I haven’t thought of him in years. I also thought he was doing ten to twenty down in Oklahoma. McAlester, wasn’t it?”
“It was,” Myron Greene said, “but he got out. He called me about a month ago and wanted to know if I could recommend some young, really smart lawyer who was just starting out in practice and didn’t charge too much.”
“For himself?”
“He said for a friend. I took his number and then called him back and gave him the name of a kid I know who’d just got out of law school. He thanked me and told me to tell you hello. So I gave his number to the woman.”
“The one who called you this morning. Well, if she wanted to talk to a thief, he’s a good one.”
Myron Greene sipped his tea. “He must have given you a good reference because she called me back.”
“The thief?”
“Yes.”
“What’d she say?”
“She said she thought she’d be able to work with you. I told her that I would have to talk with you first, but that I felt sure that you’d be interested. You are interested, aren’t you?”
“I’m interested.”
“Then you have to be in Washington this evening to meet with the insurance company’s representative who’s flying in from Los Angeles. He and the Chief of the Rare Book Division will brief you on the book.”
“You mean they might even mention its name.”
“I didn’t forget to mention it, if that’s what you mean. They wouldn’t tell me. All they would say is that it’s old and rare and extremely valuable.”
“How old?”
“A little more than five hundred years old, they said. Oh, yes. The thief wanted to know one more thing. She wanted to know what to call you. I said she could call you Mr. St. Ives or Philip or even Phil, if you grew really chummy. She said she didn’t mean your name, she meant what you did for a living. I told her that she could think of you as a professional intermediary.”
“You shouldn’t try to pretty it up,” I said. “Professional intermediary is what you put down on my tax returns. You should have told her what I really am, since she says she’s a thief, which almost makes her part of the family.”
“You mean go-between?”
“That’s right, Myron. Go-between.”
THE ADELPHI APARTMENT HOTEL that they were going to tear down and evict me from, although not in that order, had been built back in the early twenties about the time that the claw-footed bathtub was beginning to disappear from the American scene.
Because a long series of owners had refused to spend what they should have on maintenance, the Adelphi had skipped middle age and instead had gone directly into advanced senility. The heating system wheezed and drooled. The elevators were spiteful, the way a mean old lady can be spiteful, and kept letting you off on the wrong floor. The walls were cracked and stained and a musty grey, although they once must have been an oyster white. The carpets were worn and patched, and you kept tripping over them. The bar and restaurant off the lobby was patronized largely by utter strangers who tried it only once by dreadful accident. And then there was Eddie, the sinister bell captain.
Eddie was one of those persons who make a lot of tourists loathe New York. His was the elbow that dug into them in the subway. His back was what they saw getting into the taxi that they knew was theirs. And his was the voice that promised them twenty-year-old blondes, but delivered forty-five-year-old hookers instead.
After ten years of diligent effort Eddie had almost given up trying to hustle me. But not quite. I think he thought of me as a worthy opponent who put him on his mettle. If you wanted a service performed, such as having your dog walked or somebody’s arm broken, Eddie would do it or get it done. If you needed a broad, booze, dope, or a desert lot, Eddie would sell it to you. For a price he would lie to your boss, stall the collection agency, or even get you a cab, which is what I had in mind when I got off the elevator carrying my suitcase.
“I want a four-bit cab,” I told him as he took my bag.
“Whaddaya mean four bits? That’s all you ever tip.”
“And that’s the kind of cab you always hail. You know, the kind with the broken shocks, the ripped upholstery, and the driver who speaks nothing but Kurdish.”
“We like to kid a little this morning, don’t we? Where to?”
“La Guardia. Eastern shuttle.”
“Washington, huh? You always get in trouble when you go to Washington.”
“Not always. I didn’t get in trouble that time I took my son down to see the cherry blossoms.”
“How is he? I ain’t seen him in a while.”
“He’s okay.”
“What is he now, ten?”
“Yeah. Ten.”
“You know what I hear? I hear his new daddy took a real bath in the market. That’s what I hear.”
“I’ve sort of been worrying about that,” I said. “He must be down to his last thirty or forty million.”
We were outside on Forty-sixth by now and Eddie was using his fingers to whistle up a cab, but I could see that his heart wasn’t in it yet.
“Your ex really done all right for herself, didn’t she, I mean by leaving you and marrying what’s-his-face with all that dough?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He probably doesn’t pick up his pajamas either.”
Eddie gave another whistle through his fingers and then turned to me with his usual sly and crafty look. “I sent the eviction letter up with your lawyer this morning.”
“I forgot to thank you for it, didn’t I? How long have you known, six months?”
“Nah. Just a couple of months. Maybe three.”
“You can certainly keep a secret, Eddie.”
“I tipped off a couple of people. Y’know, the ones who’ve took care of me good.”
“Well, I’ve tried not to fail you. I’ve tried terribly hard.”
“Yeah, shit. Well, these people I tipped off, I sort of helped them find a new place, y’know?”
“You’re not only generous, you’re sweet.”
“Yeah, well, I thought maybe you’d want me to sort of help you out. I know a place that’d just suit you down to a T. Over on West Fifty-sixth. Hell of a nice place. One bedroom, big living room, air-conditioned.”
“How much?”
“Not bad. Not bad at all. Six twenty-five a month.”
“I don’t mean how much for the rent. I mean how much for the key?”
Eddie shrugged, spotted a cab, and gave another blast through his fingers. The cab started nudging its way through the traffic toward the curb. “Well, you know how these things work,” he said. “You gotta grease a few palms.”
“How much key money, Eddie?”
“Seeing how it’s you, only three grand.”
“Forget it.”
“Think it over,” he said as he put my bag in the front seat and turned with his hand out. I put two quarters into it.
“I don’t have to think it over,” I said. “But just out of curiosity, who owns the building, your brother-in-law?”
“Nah,” Eddie said and smiled. “I do.”
To the best of my knowledge nobody has ever written a song entitled “April in Washington,” and it’s not hard to understand why. It was April 15, a little after one in the afternoon, when I arrived at National Airport and took a cab to the Hay Adams hotel. It was a warm, even balmy, day, and scores of government workers were still picnicking out of their brown bag lunches in Lafayette Square.
When I came out of the hotel two hours later the temperature had dropped twenty-five degrees, it was threatening to spit snow, and the talkative cab driver I got told me that they were thinking of closing the government offices early.
“They’re just thinking about it though,” he said. “By the time they make up their mind it’ll be five o’clock and there’ll be six inches of snow on the ground.”
“Is that what the weather forecast says?”
“Nah. That’s what I say. We didn’t used to have weather like this in this town. Only in the past two or three years. Before that we used to have pretty good weather. You know what I think caused it?”
“What?”
“Watergate.”
“That’s a thought.”
“Way I figure it, Watergate got people all steamed up, I mean it really affected the temperature of their bodies, and all this steam had to go someplace, so it went up and made clouds and so that’s why we got a lot more rain and snow now than we used to.”
We were going east on Pennsylvania Avenue, and a new building that I hadn’t seen before appeared on the left. It seemed to cover an entire block. “What’s that?” I asked.
“That there?” the driver said. “That there’s the new FBI building. Guess who they named it after?”
“Bobby Kennedy.”
“Nah. J. Edgar Hoover. You know what he really was, don’tcha?”
“No. What?”
“He was the biggest fag in town, that’s what he was. Jack Kennedy found out about it, and that’s why Hoover had him shot down there in Dallas.”
“I’ll be damned,” I said.
The driver nodded gloomily. “You drive a cab in this town and keep your ears open, you learn a lot of things.”
We reached the First Street Southeast entrance to the Library of Congress without any more bulletins from the driver. “I wonder what they really do in there?” he said, eyeing the old building with what seemed to be faint suspicion.
“I think they lend books,” I said.
“You know what I hear they got in there?” he said. “I hear they got the world’s biggest collection of dirty books, but they won’t let nobody but Congressmen or government big shots check ’em out.”
“What a pity,” I said, handed him the fare, and started to get out of the cab.
“You wanna know something else?”
I turned back to look at him. He was staring up at the Library with a moody expression. “I bet I ain’t read a book in twenty-five years.”
“It hardly shows at all,” I said, got out of the cab, and went in search of a Mr. Hawkins Gamble Laws III, who was going to tell me all about a book that had been borrowed without permission and wouldn’t be returned until somebody came up with a quarter of a million dollars.
I asked a couple of tweedy gentlemen with short beards and thoughtful expressions where I could find the Rare Book Division. One of them turned out to be from Paris, judging from his accent, while the other volunteered the information that he was from Italy, Bologna to be exact, and had been working at something interesting, which I didn’t quite catch, in the Hebraic Section of the Orientalia Division for the last twenty-one years. We had a nice little chat about that, and then I went off on my own, armed with their directions, and got lost only twice, probably on purpose, because the Library of Congress is an interesting place to wander around in. I especially liked the main reading room with its high ceiling, hushed atmosphere, and dedicated scholars, who were looking into things that I had the feeling I would like to know about.
The Rare Book Division was on the second floor of the east wing of the building. I wandered into its reading room first through a pair of fine bronze doors that were worth a look. There were three panels on each door emblazoned with printers’ names and devices, and I recognized the device of Fust and Schoeffer, a couple of printers who supposedly used to work with Johann Gutenberg, the man who started it all. I also recognized the printer’s mark of William Morris, the man who founded the Kelmscott Press, not the talent agency, and who, probably more than anybody else, got the country interested in fine printing again back in the 1890s.
The reading room of the Rare Book Division turned out to be a peaceful place with twenty-foot ceilings and an air of determined concentration. There were a couple of rows of nicely lit tables with comfortable-looking chairs occupied by perhaps a dozen persons who wore rapt expressions and didn’t move their lips while they read.
The office that the government provided for the Chief of its Rare Book Division wasn’t overwhelming. There was a nice desk and some upholstered chairs and a few pictures, but there wasn’t anything for show, and it could have been the office of the brigadier general out at the Pentagon who buys all of the Army’s machine guns. Government offices tend to look pretty much alike.
But if you didn’t remember the office, you remembered the man who occupied it. For one thing, Hawkins Gamble Laws III was probably one of the politest men I ever met in my life. After I was ushered in by his secretary, he shook my hand as if it were indeed the great pleasure he claimed it to be, saw to it that I got the room’s most comfortable chair, dispatched his secretary for coffee, and then inquired solicitously about how he could best be of service. I got the feeling that if I had told him that I was down on my luck and needed a hundred until next Tuesday, he would have dug down into his own pocket and offered it without hesitation, except for the comment that if Tuesday didn’t prove convenient, Friday would do just as well.
“The first thing you might tell me,” I said, “is what was stolen from whom.” I used whom because I thought that if I had said who it would have made him uncomfortable, although he would have been far too polite to have shown it I noticed that he himself spoke a kind of mandarin English, touched up with plenty of commas and semicolons, which you don’t run across too often in the United States unless you subscribe to The Economist.
“I really must apologize for not telling your attorney, Mr. Greene, the name of the book in question,” Laws said. “However, when I explained my reasons he grasped the situation immediately, although it was an ungodly hour when circumstances forced me to telephone him.”
“Myron’s fairly quick in the morning,” I said.
“He seemed a most perceptive chap. Sugar?”
“Please.”
Instead of shoving the sugar bowl across the desk to me he rose, walked around, and held the bowl while I spooned what I needed into my cup. The sugar bowl looked to be silver, as did the cream pitcher and the tray they rested on. The cups were of a thin, translucent china, and I got the idea that when it came to personal possessions, Laws liked to have nice things around, although I noticed that his catalog of nice things didn’t include a silver-frame portrait of the wife and kids. I decided that he must have felt his home life was a personal matter and not something that needed advertising.
Laws was somewhere in his late fifties, a tall man, really tall, but slightly stooped, as if he were afraid that his height might make him miss something that he should be attentive and polite about. He wore a nicely cut grey flannel suit, the shade of old pewter, which went with his hair, and he was one of the few men I ever saw who didn’t seem in the least self-conscious about the Phi Beta Kappa key that he wore on the gold chain across his vest.
He had a big, squarish head, almost too big, but not quite, and he kept cocking it to one side to show that he was both interested and attentive. His eyes were the twinkling kind, as brown and as friendly as a cocker pup’s, and they didn’t seem to need glasses, which I thought unusual. He smiled often and easily, as though he found the world a rather interesting, pleasant place to live in because it was populated with wonderful people like me, and after a few minutes in his beaming presence I had to forgive him for the fact that he parted his hair in the middle and wore a bow tie.
I sipped my coffee and complimented him on it, and he seemed genuinely pleased that I liked it. After that he gave his big chin a couple of reflective strokes, cocked his head to the other side as if to make sure that I was as comfortable as possible, hurriedly found an ashtray when I produced a cigarette, and leaned forward and lit it with a package of matches, which he insisted that I keep. I kept them, after first noting that they were from the Sans Souci, which is where all the important folks in Washington like to eat lunch.
“I take it then,” he said, “that you have accepted the assignment to serve as intermediary in the return of the purloined book. Dear me, that must be the first time that I’ve used purloined in thirty years.”
“You don’t hear it much anymore,” I said.
“We were, Mr. St. Ives, most distressed to learn that the book had been stolen, although our distress was somewhat alleviated by the fact that it was not stolen from the Library itself.”
“So I understand.”
“The book in question is quite old and quite rare and hence, quite valuable.”
“How valuable?”
“That’s difficult to say. On today’s market, taking inflation into consideration, I should think that it would be snapped up at five hundred thousand dollars. It could bring as much as three-quarters of a million.”
“It’s not a Gutenberg Bible, is it?”
“Oh, dear me, no. I do believe we would have called out the National Guard if one of them had been stolen. We have three, you know.”
“I didn’t. Out of curiosity, what would one of them bring on today’s market, if there is such a thing as a market for Gutenberg Bibles?”
Laws had to think about it. He gave his big chin another couple of reflective rubs, tugged at an ear-lobe, and took a sip of his coffee. “I would hesitate to say, but I think at least several million dollars. Back in 1930 the Library acquired Dr. Vollbehr’s collection of three thousand incunabula, which at the time included one of the three known perfect copies on vellum of the Gutenberg Bible. It took a special Act of Congress, but we paid one and a half million dollars for the entire Vollbehr collection. However, Dr. Vollbehr himself had paid nearly three hundred and fifty thousand dollars for that particular Gutenberg, which made it at the time the highest price ever paid for a printed book. That, however, was nearly fifty years ago. Today?” Laws shrugged and let the question answer itself.
“The book that was stolen was what?”
“It was Pliny’s Historia Naturalis