by D J Mcintosh
“Did Newhouse tell you about the theft when he called earlier? Of the book I won for Mr. Renwick, I mean.”
Norris, I sensed, was normally a cheerful person and likely had trouble expressing negativity; still my question caused him to purse his lips in a slight frown. “Yes, indeed he did. Two thefts in one night. And both associated with Charles. Just awful. Not a coincidence, do you think?”
“Far from it. In fact I think they may have been committed by the same man.” I thought of the woman posing as a New York cop and corrected myself. “If not one man then a group working together.” The room felt cool and I felt glad of the hot tea. I wrapped my hands around the mug to warm them. “Were valuable books taken from here as well?”
“Just a minute, and I’ll show you what they stole.” Norris opened one of the lower trays in a cabinet, pulled out a file, and handed it to me. “Not books. But they did take this. One of the valuables Charles had from the time he was a boy living in the Orient—the Near East rather; I suppose that’s the correct term to use now. He kept it on display in the front room.”
I looked at the photograph. I had no idea what to make of the strange-looking circular stone, although I immediately recognized the markings as cuneiform writing. I held the photograph up to the light to get a better look. “Do you know what it is?”
Norris shook his head. “Can’t tell you. Renwick himself didn’t know its exact purpose but it was a prized object. He went over there this past August.”
“Where exactly?”
“Iraq.”
“In the middle of a war?”
“He told me he’d gone to Basrah. Our English soldiers are in charge there, you know, and compared to Baghdad it’s relatively quiet. Frankly, I’m not convinced he told me the truth. I suspected he said that to reassure me.”
“Curious the thief would take this and leave other valuables behind.”
“You’re right,” Norris said. “A first English edition of Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book and one of Perrault’s original publications from 1855 were both in the front room—worth a great deal. I’ve removed them to the bank for safekeeping.”
“Does that round stone object have any connection to the book I won at auction for Mr. Renwick?”
Norris lifted his glasses to rub his eyes. “I believe it did. Just what I cannot say. Charles was not a talkative man at the best of times. Very close-mouthed about it.”
As I drank my tea, I wondered why Renwick had been so guarded about the object. I didn’t want to upset Norris any further but had to bring the conversation around to my attacker. “Did Newhouse tell you what happened to me?”
“I got the gist of it. You were assaulted by a stranger?”
“That’s right. A peculiar man. He carried a cane with a white horse carved on it. Black hair and mustache. Goatee. Black hat and long coat.”
Norris reacted as though I’d struck him. “My goodness! A similar person came into the shop yesterday afternoon. Said he was interested in buying one of our books. I explained we didn’t sell them directly. He argued with me. Finally I agreed to let him have a children’s fairy-tale book just to get rid of him.”
My nerves tingled on hearing this. “Did he say anything else?”
“No. But he had a strange quality about him.” Norris’s voice grew hoarse and I had to lean in to hear him. “And he didn’t even pretend to give me an honest name. At first I thought he was trying to make some kind of joke.”
“Gian Alessio Abbattutis—is that what he said?”
“Why, no. Wilhelm Grimm—one of the German fairy-tale brothers, the younger of the two. Can you believe that? Why make up a name I’d recognize as false?”
I mused out loud, “Maybe he came to check your place out because he knew he’d be back later to rob you.”
Norris took offhis glasses and rubbed his eyes once more. “He waited till after I left for the day. Until Charles was alone. I fear I’ll never see Charles again.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“The police are still looking but I know he’s gone. I’m just waiting to hear where they’ve found his remains. Charles was a man of … shall I say, determined punctuality and habit. Even though he lived in a flat a mile away, this was his home. He’d arrive every morning at precisely eight. Neat as a pin he was. Dressed in a suit every day I knew him. He’d hang up his jacket as soon as he came in and put on an apron to work in. At seven thirty in the evening, promptly, he’d take his hat, lock the door, and cross the street to the public house for a glass of sherry and his evening meal. His faithful routine, six days a week. On Sundays he’d walk in Kensington Park and take afternoon tea in the Orangery. The only exceptions were regulated holidays and his three-week excursion abroad every August. Set your clock by him, you could.”
“How old is Mr. Renwick?”
“Seventy-two. Not that he held any truck with celebrations.”
“You’ve worked together for a long time I gather.”
“From well before we set up the business. We met at Eton. We were outsiders. That’s why the two of us were naturally drawn to each other.”
“Why outsiders?”
“He was the only boy in the school with a disability. Picked up some sort of pathogen as a youth living with his parents in the Near East. The illness crippled his bones and caused a permanent limp. His spine was badly distorted so he had to walk bent over. And his skin was permanently affected. The other boys nicknamed him the dwarf. A nasty slight. Renwick was short anyway and his spinal deformity forced him to stoop. I was his only friend.
“The bullying drove him into his shell. Like a turtle he was after that, always afraid to stick his neck out into the wide world.”
Norris’s account of Renwick’s suffering struck a nerve. I’d witnessed other kids on the receiving end of the merciless treatment my schoolmates doled out to the weak ones. “Kids can be cruel. What about his family?”
“He came from blue blood; his father was a diplomat in the British foreign service—a vice-consul in Persia and later promoted to ambassador to Iraq. Charles regaled me with stories of how his father had to pretend to lose at backgammon when he played with the Hashemite King Faisal II. ‘Wars have been ignited over less,’ he’d say.
“And I was a scholarship student without a penny to my name. No silver spoon for me. We were both odd types; that’s why we sought each other out. That and our dedication to books. From Eton we went on to Cambridge together.”
“What did you study?”
“Comparative literature.”
“Did that include fairy tales?”
Norris smiled. “Yes.”
“Do you know why Renwick wanted Basile’s The Tale of Tales?”
Norris’s eyes brightened. “I can show you more easily than telling you.”
I followed him over to the printing presses. Norris ran his hand lovingly over one of the machines. “A Kluge letterpress. Impossible to duplicate this quality nowadays. We use movable iron type. This was Charles’s specialty. He had a genius for selecting a typeface that perfectly suited the personality of the book. You can’t get the same look with computers. The text they produce is too perfect, too homogeneous. And Charles brooked no mistakes. He almost drove us into bankruptcy once when he destroyed an entire printing of a custom folio ordered by a collector. There’d been a slight error. I insisted we could print a new page and rebind but he wouldn’t hear of it.
“The codex, the custom of binding books, is relatively new, you know. Books used to be sold in sections, or quires, as we term them. And customers had to pay to have their books bound themselves. At our shop we bring in an outside expert who knows how to hand bind. Otherwise, everything is done by us.”
We walked over to one of the rectangular tables. Norris explained their starting point was always with the spirit of the book. “All the other decisions flow from that,” he said. He carefully picked a finished book from a shelf and removed it from its plastic sleeve.
�
��Charles’s pride and joy was our fairy-tale editions. He loved the stories as a child, became a collector of them in university, and went on to publish them.” He put the book on the table for me to leaf through. “This is the true tale of Cinderella, based on a story by Giambattista Basile, not the cartoon version children are familiar with today. Perrault must take the blame for that.”
“How so?”
“He modified it to make it more palatable to genteel readers. ‘Cinderella’ is an old story, although not originally European. We think it came from China as an oral folk tale. Giambattista Basile was the first to name the heroine Cinderella.”
“What’s the other version?”
“Basile painted her as a schemer who hated her stepmother and wanted her governess to marry her father instead. She and her governess conspired to murder the stepmother, plotting to push the woman into a chest and break her neck with the lid. Though the plan worked, her governess turned the tables. Soon after she married the father, she favored her own daughters and forced Cinderella to become a kitchen slave.”
“Amazing the story could change so much. Th ose heroines always seem to be victimized by evil stepmothers or queens.”
“That’s true, and the men frequently come off as quite passive—taking a back seat to the main action, so to speak. They turn from a frog into a prince at the end,” he chortled, “and marry the girl who’s done all the work of carrying the narrative. Or a king will start the action by forbidding his daughter to marry her beloved and the rest of the tale is about how she cleverly outsmarts her father.”
I laughed at this, not having thought about the stories from that point of view.
“Stepmothers were a later substitute for the wicked mother. The Grimm brothers made that change in ‘Snow White,’ for example. But the women at the center of these early stories were assertive and quite imaginative in devising ways to escape their fate. Basile’s tales were often quite black, full of sexual innuendo. The young women he portrayed were not at all like today’s passive princesses. They would ultimately succeed by astutely manipulating the people around them. Quite feisty ladies, I guess you would say.”
For a moment Norris appeared to forget I was there as he murmured, “Charles loved what he called ‘the tales’ the most. One of his few happy memories was being read to by his nan before bed. He believed they were true, you know.”
I smiled, thinking of Evelyn. “True? Not just stories?”
“He thought they were based on real events that occurred long ago. Of course, he didn’t think that as a child. He developed that theory later, as he began to travel and read widely.”
Norris saw me admiring the font they’d used on the Cinderella book. “That’s an old Garamond font. One of the originals. Charles searched high and low for the type pieces. Beautiful, isn’t it? We commissioned Farrar for the illustrations. The complete printing was sold out before the first book came off the press.
“Our next project would have been an adventure. Charles always wanted to try something original. Sylvia Bellman completed the graphics and we decided to make our own paper for it. Only a month ago we spent several long days gathering willow and cow parsnip for the paper. Autumn is the perfect time because that’s when plant cellulose is at its peak. When properly treated, cow parsnip produces a beautiful translucent paper stock.
“You’ll know the story—’The Pied Piper of Hamelin,’ one of Charles’s favorites. The reader will be able to see flora of the meadow like the one the piper led the children through embedded in the pages themselves. I intend to finish it”—his voice trailed off again—”as a tribute to him. It may well be the last book our firm publishes.”
“The Pied Piper” was one of the more macabre fairy tales. The cheery piper in his colorful clothes leading children to their death seemed an odd and disturbing choice. “Did Renwick think that story too was based on a real event?”
“Indeed he did. And he may have been right about it. Scholars have devoted years attempting to trace the story back to an actual occurrence. Some think it was an analogy for a case of plague that swept through a German village; others believe it to be an early recounting of a particularly lurid case of pedophilia.
“I think that’s why he pursued The Tale of Tales so obsessively. He wanted the early versions of the stories so he could find the germ of truth in them.” Norris cleared his throat. “He’d talked himself into believing that one of those stories had origins in the Middle East and linked directly to his childhood illness. He referred to it as a plague tale and had himself convinced the author hid some guide or code in the book that pointed to the source of a deathly contagion. Pure folly, in my opinion.”
Eight
Norris shook his head, his white forelock bouncing as he did so. “Charles was always a fanciful man, but that theory of his went beyond all bounds of rationality.”
I had to agree with him. The notion of a virulent disease having anything to do with a fictional tale sounded preposterous. Still, it helped explain Renwick’s warning about the book. “Which story was he referring to?”
“Why, I’d almost think you took this nonsense seriously too. I don’t know which title, Charles wouldn’t tell me, but it was one of the four famous ones I’m sure. ‘Sleeping Beauty,’ ‘Snow White,’ ‘The Pied Piper,’ or ‘Beauty and the Beast.’”
“You said earlier Renwick thought the author included a secret reference to a real location in the book? A map or a series of directions?”
“Yes, something like that; I can’t tell you more. I simply don’t know because Charles kept it to himself. It wasn’t his custom to hide things from me, but something about that book changed him. And it frightened me. ‘Better you stay entirely out of it,’ he said.”
This tallied with the admonition I’d received in the solicitor’s letter. “Newhouse said the book had a repellent history. Do you know what he meant?”
I caught a fleeting look of disapproval on Norris’s face when I said this. “I have no idea. But from the time Charles first mentioned that blasted book, his personality changed. One day I came into the shop and he seemed higher than a kite because he’d just learned it was to be offered at auction. And then almost overnight, he sank into a deep depression. It wasn’t at all like him to display such mood swings. I was very worried and said as much but his behavior continued. He’d come into the shop with red-rimmed eyes and I knew he hadn’t slept a wink. Normally he was quite soft-spoken but he’d snap at me for the merest trifles. He began to study the most gruesome subjects—Greek chimeras and medieval exorcists. Those books are still here.” He picked a few off the shelf and handed them to me.
All of them looked to date back a century or more ago, reprinted in modern formats. Leafing through them, I shivered a little at the illustrations. They reminded me of José de Ribera’s frightening images. Most of the ideas contained within them reflected sheer superstition, but if people actually believed that stuff, I supposed they could do harm.
“One day I found him, just over there”—Norris nodded toward a corner of the shop—”curled up in a ball, shaking as if he’d had the fright of his life. Claimed a monster was hunting him. A demon, he called it. He lost weight after that, and rapidly, at least two stone.” He dropped his voice, though we were alone. “Very alarming, it was. You can imagine, I began to fear for his sanity. And then just when he seemed to be tipping into a permanent breakdown, his mood reversed. He learned you’d agreed to bid on the book for him. Suddenly, everything was rosy again.”
Norris shook his head ruefully. “It’s almost as if the tales he revered all his life began to take over his mind. Had he been a more well-rounded person, had a life outside of work, things might have been different.”
“How do you mean? He didn’t have any family? No wife or children?”
“I’m afraid not. Excessively shy, he was. Felt he’d be rejected because of how he looked. ‘No woman wants a crooked man,’ he’d say. My own dear wife, bless her heart, tried to
introduce him to several ladies. Lovely women. But to no avail.
“In third form Charles developed an infatuation with a sister of one of the other boys. A beautiful girl, although he couldn’t hope to attract her. To his amazement she invited him out to tea one day but she stood him up. One of the boys put her up to it. They ribbed him mercilessly about it.”
A moment later Norris added, “Speaking of women, one particular lady appears to have caught his eye. I mention it only because it seemed strange. Again, out of character for Charles.”
“Oh?”
Norris pulled out the Cinderella book and took a photo from between the back leaves. “Here she is.” He handed it to me.
The photo must have been taken on a cheap camera, perhaps even a Polaroid, because the color had faded to sepia tones. The woman had been caught off guard and was clearly not posing for the picture. She was young, around twenty, and had an enchanting face, although you would not call her classically beautiful. Rosy lips and alabaster skin, enhanced by expressive dark eyes. A wariness in her look and in the way she held her body suggested tension or strain.
An older man stood behind her, his hand possessively planted on her shoulder. Her father perhaps? He too seemed unaware of the camera trained upon him. He had the air of someone always in command and his thin lips were turned down in a slight frown, as if whatever situation they’d been captured in tested his patience.
It may have been due to the faded color of the poor-quality photo, but his skin, although wrinkle free, looked artificially bronzed, as if he’d applied cheap tanning lotion. It contrasted oddly with his thick helmet of snow-white hair. The background was out of focus so gave me no clues as to where the photo had been shot. I turned it over and saw on the back a note scrawled so hastily it was difficult to make out. I thought it said Talia, Aug. 18/2000.
