by John Dunning
Bookman's promise
( Cliff Janeway - 3 )
John Dunning
The Bookman's Promise
A CLIFF JANEWAY NOVEL
John Dunning
Also by John Dunning fiction
Two O’Clock, Eastern Wartime
The Bookman’s Wake
Booked to Die
Deadline
Denver
Looking for Ginger North The Holland Suggestions
NONFICTION
On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio Tune in Yesterday
SCRIBNER
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2004 by John Dunning
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Scribner and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.
For information regarding special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-800-456-6798
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Text set in Sabon Manufactured in the United States of America
13579 10 8642
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dunning, John, 1942-The bookman’s promise: a Cliff Janeway novel/John Dunning.
p. cm.
1. Janeway, Cliff (Fictitious character)—Fiction.
2. Burton, Richard Francis, Sir, 1821-1890—First editions—Fiction.
3. Booksellers and bookselling—Fiction. 4. Antiquarian booksellers—Fiction.
5. Ex-police officers—Fiction. 6. Denver (Colo.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3554.U494B655 2004
813‘.54—dc21
2003054273
ISBN 0-7432-4992-5
To Pat McGuire,
for long friendship, timely brainstorming, and other mysterious reasons
The man said, “Welcome to Book Beat, Mr. Janeway” and this was how it began.
We were sitting in a Boston studio before the entire invisible listening audience of National Public Radio. I was here against my better judgment, and my first words into the microphone, “Just don’t call me an expert on anything,” staked out the conditions under which I had become such an unlikely guest. Saying it now into the microphone had a calming effect, but the man’s polite laugh again left me exposed on both flanks. Not only was I an expert, his laugh implied, I was a modest one. His opening remarks deepened my discomfort.
“Tonight we are departing from our usual talk about current books. As many of you know, our guest was to have been Allen Gleason, author of the surprising literary bestseller, Roses for Adessa. Unfortunately, Mr. Gleason suffered a heart attack last week in New York, and I know all of you join me in wishing him a speedy recovery.
“In his absence we are lucky to have Mr. Cliff Janeway, who came to Boston just this week to buy a very special book. And I should add that this is a show, despite its spontaneous scheduling, that I have long wanted to do. As fascinating as the world of new books can often be, the world of older books, of valuable first editions and treasures recently out of print, has a growing charm for many of our listeners. Mr. Janeway, I wonder if you would answer a basic question before we dive deeper into this world. What makes a valuable book valuable?”
This was how it began: with a simple, innocent question and a few quick answers. We talked for a while about things I love best, and the man was so good that we soon seemed like two old bookscout hunkered down together after a friendly hunt. I talked of supply and demand, of classics and genres and modern first editions: why certain first editions by Edgar Rice Burroughs are worth more than most Mark Twains, and how crazy the hunt can get. I told him about the world I now lived in, and it was easy to avoid the world I’d come from. This was a book show, not a police lineup, and I was an antiquarian bookseller, not a cop.
“I understand you live in Denver, Colorado.”
“When I’m hiding out from the law, that’s where I hide.”
Again the polite laugh. “You say you’re no expert, but you were featured this week in a very bookish article in The Boston Globe.”
“That guy had nothing better to do. He’s a book freak and the paper was having what they call a slow news day.”
“The two of you met at a book auction, I believe. Tell us about that.”
“I had come here to buy a book. We got to talking and the next thing I knew, I was being interviewed.”
“What book did you come to buy?”
“Pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca by Richard Burton.”
“The explorer, not the actor.”
We shared a knowing laugh, then he said, “What is it about this book that made you fly all the way from Denver to buy it? And to pay—how much was it?—if you don’t mind my asking …”
Auction prices were public knowledge, so there was no use being coy. I said, “Twenty-nine thousand five hundred,” and gave up whatever modesty I might have had. Only an expert pays that much money for a book. Or a fool.
I might have told him that there were probably dozens of dealers in the United States whose knowledge of Burton ran deeper than mine. I could have said yes, I had studied Burton intensely for two months, but two months in the book trade or in any scholarly pursuit is no time at all. I should have explained that I had bought the book with Indian money, but then I’d need to explain that concept and the rest of the hour would have been shot talking about me.
Instead I talked about Burton, master linguist, soldier, towering figure of nineteenth-century letters and adventure. I watched the clock as I talked and I gave him the shortest-possible version of Burton’s incredible life. I couldn’t begin to touch even the high spots in the time we had left.
“You’ve brought this book with you tonight.”
We let the audience imagine it as I noisily unwrapped the three volumes in front of the microphone. My host got up from his side of the table and came around to look while I gave the audience a brief description of the books, with emphasis on the original blue cloth binding lettered in brilliant gilt and their unbelievably pristine condition.
The man said, “They look almost new.”
“Yeah,” I said lovingly.
“I understand there’s something special about them, other than their unusual freshness.”
I opened volume one and he sighed. “Aaahh, it’s signed by the author. Would you read that for us, please?”
“‘To Charles Warren,’” I read: “‘A grand companion and the best kind of friend. Our worlds are far apart and we may never see each other again, but the time we shared will be treasured forever. Richard R Burton.’ It’s dated January 15,1861.”
“Any idea who this Warren fellow was?”
“Not a clue. He’s not mentioned in any of the Burton biographies.”
“You would agree, though, that that’s an unusually intimate inscription.”
I did agree, but I was no expert. The man said, “So we have a mystery here as well as a valuable book,” and it all began then. Its roots went back to another time, when Richard Francis Burton met his greatest admirer and then set off on a secret journey, deep into the troubled American South. Because of that trip a friend of mine died. An old woman found peace, a good man lost everything, and I rediscovered myself on my continuing journey across the timeless, infinite world
of books.
BOOK 1 - DENVER
CHAPTER 1
If I wanted to be arbitrary, I could say it began anywhere. That radio show moved it out of the dim past to here and now, but Burton’s story had been there forever, waiting for me to find it.
I found it in 1987, late in my thirty-seventh year. I had come home from Seattle with a big wad of money from the Grayson affair. My 10 percent finder’s fee had come to almost fifty thousand dollars, a career payday for almost any bookman and certainly, so far, for me. All I knew at that point was that I was going to buy a book with it. Not half a million books riddled with vast pockets of moldy corruption. Not a million bad books or a thousand good books, not even a hundred fine books. Just one book. One great, hellacious, killer book: just to see how it felt, owning such a thing.
So I thought, but there was more to it than that. I wanted to change directions in my book life. I was sick of critics and hucksters screaming about the genius of every new one-book wonder. I was ready for less hype and more tradition, and almost as soon as I fell into this seek-and-ye-shall-find mode, I found Richard Burton.
I had gone to a dinner party in East Denver, at the Park Hill home of Judge Leighton Huxley. Lee and I had known each other for years, cautiously at first, later on a warmer level of mutual interest, finally as friends. I had first appeared in his courtroom in 1978, when I was a very young cop testifying in a cut-and-dried murder case and he was a relatively young newcomer to the Denver bench. That gulf of professional distance between us was natural then: Lee was far outside my rather small circle of police cronies, and I could not have imagined myself rubbing elbows with his much larger crowd of legal eagles.
Age was a factor, though not a major one. I was in my late twenties; Lee was in his mid-forties, already gray around the temples and beginning to look like the distinguished man of the world that I would never be. He was by all accounts an excellent judge. He was extremely fair yet sure in his decisions, and he had never been overturned.
I saw him only twice in the first few years after my appearance in his court: once we had nodded in the courthouse cafeteria, briefly indicating that we remembered each other, and a year later I had been invited to a Christmas party in the mountain home of a mutual friend. That night we said our first few words outside the halls of justice. “I hear you’re a book collector,” he had said in that deep, rich baritone. I admitted my guilt and he said, “So am I: we should compare notes sometime.” But nothing had come of it then for the same obvious reasons—I was still a cop, there was always a chance I would find myself on his witness stand again, and he liked to avoid potential conflicts of interest before they came up. I didn’t think much about it: I figured he had just been passing time with me, being polite. That was always the thing about Lee Huxley: he had a reputation for good manners, in court and out.
A year later he was appointed to the U.S. District Court and it was then, removed from the likelihood of professional conflict, that our friendship had its cautious, tentative beginning. Out of the blue I got a call from Miranda, his wife, inviting me, as she put it, to “a small, informal dinner party for some book lovers.” There were actually a dozen people there that first night, and I was paired with Miranda’s younger sister Hope, who was visiting from somewhere back East. The house was just off East Seventeenth Avenue, a redbrick turn-of-the-century three-story with chandeliers and glistening hardwood everywhere you looked. It was already ablaze with lights and alive with laughter when I arrived, and Miranda was a blonde knockout at the front door in her blue evening dress. She looked no older than thirty but was elegant and interesting in her own right, not just a pretty face at Lee’s side. The judge’s friends were also considerate and refined, and I fought back my natural instincts for reverse snobbery and liked them all. They were rich book collectors and I was still on a cop’s salary, but there wasn’t a hint of condescension to any of them. If they saw a $5,000 book they wanted, they just bought that sucker and paid the price, and my kind of nickel-and-dime bookscouting was fascinating to them, something they couldn’t have imagined until I told them about it.
Miranda was a superb hostess. The next day, as I was composing a thank-you note, I got a call from her thanking me for coming. “You really livened things up over here, Cliff,” she said. “I hope we’re going to see lots more of each other.”
And we had. I hadn’t done much rubbernecking that first night, but the judge’s library later turned out to be everything it was cracked up to be. It was a large room shelved on all four walls and full of wonderful books, all the modern American greats in superb dust jackets. At one point Lee said, “I’ve got some older things downstairs,” but years had passed before I saw what they were.
From the beginning there were differences to their most recent dinner party. For one thing I was no longer a cop, and the manner of my departure from the Denver Police Department might have chilled my relationship with any judge. I had roughed up a brutal thug, and the press dredged up my distant past, a childhood riddled with violent street fighting and close ties to people like Vince Marranzino, who later became one of Denver’s most feared mobsters. Never mind that Vince and I had only been within speaking distance once in almost twenty years; never mind that I had lived all that down and become, if I do say so, a crackerjack homicide cop—once you’ve been tarred by that brush it’s always there waiting to tar you again. By then there were rumors that Lee was on a short list of possibles for a U.S. Supreme Court nomination, and though it was hard to picture Lee and Ronald Reagan as political bedfellows, I had no real idea what Lee’s politics were. All I knew was this: if there was even a chance for him in the big teepee, the last thing I wanted was to mess that up. I had been front-page news, none of it good, for most of a week, but if Lee worried about his own image and the company he kept, I never saw any sign of it. He called and asked for my version of what had happened, I told him the truth, and he accepted that. “Not the best judgment you’ve ever shown, Cliff, but this too shall pass,” he said. “I’m sure you’re busy right now keeping the wolves at bay. As soon as this settles down, we’ll get together.”
But then I was gone to Seattle, and suddenly several months had passed since I’d seen them. I came home with a big stash, my Indian money; I book-hunted across the midwest with Seattle friends, and when I returned to Denver one of my first calls was from Miranda.
“Mr. Janeway.” Her icy tone sounded put-on but not completely. “Are you avoiding us for some reason? Have we done something to offend you?”
I was instantly shamed. “Not at all,” I said, answering her second question and avoiding the first. “God, you can’t believe that.”
“Then kindly get your ass over here, sir,” she said. “Friday night, seven o’clock, no tie, please, no excuses. Come prepared to liven up what promises to be a rather drab affair.”
“You wouldn’t know how to do a drab affair.”
“We’ll see about that. This one may be a challenge, even for a woman of my legendary social talents. One of Lee’s boyhood chums is coming to town. Don’t tell anybody I said this, but he’s not exactly my cup of tea. So, will you come help me make the best of it?”
“Yes, ma’am, I’d be honored.”
“It’s been so long since we’ve seen you I’ve forgotten your face. Are you married yet?”
I laughed.
“Going steady with anyone?‘
“Not at the moment.”
I knew why she was asking. Miranda loved informality, but at a sit-down dinner she was a stickler for a proper head count. “I’ve got the perfect lady for you on Friday,” she said.
I paused, then said, “Thank you for the invitation.”
“No, Cliff, thank you. I know why you’ve been so scarce, and I just want you to know we appreciate the consideration but it’s not necessary and never was. We’ve stopped by your bookstore any number of times but we’ve never been able to catch you.”
I knew that, of course: I had seen their checks in the
cash drawer. “I’m always out hunting books,” I said.
“Apparently so. But Lee and I would be pretty shallow people, wouldn’t we, if we wrote off our friends at the first sign of trouble.”
“That was some pretty bad trouble.”
“Yes, it was, but it got you out of being a cop and into the book business. So it wasn’t all bad, was it?”
This was a smaller group than they’d had in the past, with only eight of us, including the Huxleys, at the table. Lee’s boyhood pal turned out to be Hal Archer, the writer and historian who had won a Pulitzer prize six years before, coming from far left field to snatch it away from several favored and far more academically endowed candidates. At the time I was glad he had won: I always pull for the underdog and I had truly admired his book. It was a dense account of two ordinary families in Charleston, South Carolina, during the four years of our civil war. Using recently found documents, letters, and journals, Archer had managed to bring them to life despite having to deal with a mountain of detail. He told, in layman’s words and with the practiced eye of an artist, how they had survived and interacted among themselves and with others in the shattered city. It was an epic story of courage and hardship in the face of a stiff Union blockade, an unrelenting bombardment, and three years of siege, and he told it beautifully.
Archer had published only historical fiction before turning out this riveting true account, but even then I considered him a major talent. I had read him years earlier and had earmarked him at once as a writer who would never waste my time. He had a towering ability to make each word matter and he never resorted to showy prose. He made me live in his story; his work was everything I had always loved about books. With all that going for us, why did I dislike him so intensely the moment I met him?
