Love, Death & Rare Books

by Robert Hellenga

  “I think we’ve reached bottom,” she said.

  I turned onto Schoolcraft Road, but we didn’t stop at the justice of the peace sign by the side of the road.

  “You know something,” she said. “I love who I am when I’m with you.”

  “Who is that?” I asked.

  “I guess we’re going to find out,” she said.

  “And you’ll get yourself checked out, right?”

  “Gabe, I’m fine. There’s nothing to be checked out.”

  “But you’re going to see Dr. Matthews again, right? You’re going to do it for me. And for Saskia.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “We’ll make a little vacation out of it, stay at the Quadrangle Club, eat steaks at Charlie Trotter’s or a bouillabaisse at Spiaggia.”

  At the depot, young mothers were drinking coffee on their way to shop for clothing for their children at Ducklings; a beautiful painting of a child was on display on an easel in front of the art gallery with which we shared a wall.

  Chas. Johnson & Son, Ltd. Antiquarian Booksellers was taking shape. Our old partners desk was in place on the old telegraph bay, which would serve as our office. Adam and Carla were arranging books on new shelves in our main gallery, which would be locked. If a customer wanted to look at something, whoever was minding the shop would simply unlock the door and let him or her in. If you’re going to sell books online, you can’t afford to have browsers taking books off the shelves and moving them around and putting them back in the wrong place, because when an order comes in over the Internet, you have to be able to put your hands on the book right away. If you can’t find the book, you’ll get a black mark for “fulfillment failure.” Too many fulfillment failures and you’ll get kicked off the site. Olivia had her own agenda. She wanted to put her mark on the shop. She wanted to be sure that a reader entering the shop could find a copy of Anna Karenina—not the first English translation for $5,000, just a good modern paperback—or Isaac Asimov’s Guide to Science, or Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions, or Darwin’s Descent of Man; or Keats’s or Auden’s Collected Poems or Eavan Boland’s or Gwendolyn Brooks’s; Peter Rabbit and Pinocchio; Julia Childs’ Mastering the Art of French Cooking and a selection of Italian cookbooks; a selection of good mysteries: Rex Stout, Michael Connolly, Donna Leon, Walter Mosley, and Sherlock Homes, of course. Tony Hillerman, P. D. James, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller… “You could have a whole shop devoted to mysteries,” she said. I didn’t remind her that Murder One, on London’s Charing Cross Road—a shop devoted to mysteries—had recently closed.

  “It’s not a good idea,” I said, “because it means we’ll have to have someone in the front of the shop at all times, someone who could be cataloging books or photographing their jackets, or putting them up online, or blogging about them, or tweaking the website.”

  “Look at them,” Olivia said, brushing aside my objection and pointing at Adam and Carla. “You and I look pretty good. You’re handsome and I’m good looking. Still pretty firm, pretty vigorous, pretty sexy. But next to them…”

  “It’s okay, don’t you think?” I said. “One generation flourishes, another passes away.”

  “Are you trying to tell me something?” she said.

  “Probably,” I said, “but I’m not sure what it is.”

  Two Sundays later we drove into Hyde Park. There was still plenty of snow cover. I stayed at the Quadrangle Club, but Olivia had to go into the hospital that night.

  On Monday and Tuesday, they ran a battery of tests, and on Tuesday afternoon, Dr. Matthews sat us down in her office. Dr. Matthews was wearing gray slacks and a white blouse. Olivia was in a blue silk dress the color of a summer sky. I was wearing jeans and a turtle neck. She told us that Olivia had been diagnosed with indolent NHL, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

  “A lazy cancer,” I said.

  “There’s nothing to be done right now,” she said. “Watchful waiting is the key, and regular checkups.”

  Leaving the hospital, I was at a loss, but Olivia seemed relatively cheerful. We stopped for a sandwich at the Medici, and then headed out on Stony Island. She waved for catfish and screamed for ribs as we passed Moo & Oink. The sky was dark and heavy, like the future. There were no stars, no moon. The flare stacks along the Skyway were burning off excess gas, like the fires of Mordor.

  By the time we got to the Indiana line, she had laid out an agenda. She was going to sign up for the confirmation classes at St. Anne’s. She was going to stop tweaking Varieties and get the manuscript in the mail to Johns Hopkins. She was going to become a vegetarian. She was going to give up alcohol. She was going to meditate. She was going to renew her virginity and go on a retreat before the wedding in July. Reverend Sarah had given her some literature about a convent near Grand Rapids. She was going to talk to Cleatus about stabilizing the bluff. Then in December, we’d visit Saskia in Amman and spend Christmas in the Holy Land. Nadia would know how to get to Jerusalem. Carla and Adam could mind the shop.

  “What if they want to go home for Christmas?” I asked.

  “They are home,” she said. “But I’ll speak to them.”

  By the end of the week, Saskia had talked to oncologists—not just to Olivia’s doctor at Bernard Mitchell but also to doctors at cancer treatment centers at Northwestern and at the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor—and she’d Googled a dozen NHL sites on the Internet. What we needed to do, immediately, was assemble a team of specialists: a hematologist, a medical oncologist, a radiation oncologist; we needed more tests—biopsies, blood tests, CAT scans, PET scans, MRI scans; and then we needed to consider treatment options: chemotherapy, immunotherapy, radiation therapy, or a stem cell transplant. Possibly surgery, though not if the cancer was outside the limbic system.

  She couldn’t understand why her mother refused to cooperate, why her mother didn’t want her bone marrow aspirated or her lumbar punctured. Why she didn’t want to try chemotherapy, immunotherapy, radiation therapy, or a stem cell transplant.

  XIX. CONFIRMATION

  (March 2011)

  “You have to trust a man named Cleatus,” Olivia said as we heard Cleatus’s truck pull into the drive. “You know he’s on the vestry.”

  “Of course I trust Cleatus,” I said.

  “He knelt next to us on Ash Wednesday,” Olivia said.

  “I know that,” I said. “Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return. But it makes me a little self-conscious. Doing business with someone after you’ve knelt next to him.”

  “You knelt next to me,” she said. “Don’t worry about it. Sarah says he can do anything. She was standing at the sink, looking very domestic and very sophisticated at the same time, an apron protecting her new Anne Klein dress.

  I got up to open the door. Cleatus came in and sat across from us at the kitchen table. Olivia closed a cupboard door and poured coffee. Cleatus, big and burly, fiddled with his glasses.

  “Augie says…” I said.

  “I know what Augie says,” he said. “He show you those old photos of the men putting in the seawall? They came on a boat from Chicago with a pile driver. Now you’ve got a good seawall. Half-inch steel. Can’t get that anymore. That makes a big difference, but the problem you got right now is not toe erosion, it’s groundwater erosion. Groundwater discharge from the bluff face. From above, not from the lake. What we call ‘perched water’—groundwater that’s accumulated above the water table in the unsaturated zone. That water’s running underneath your house. That’s where your problem is.

  “What we’ve got to do is get rid of invasive plants, especially buckthorn, and restore the native vegetation—wild rye, Joe Pye weed, blue flat, dogwood. June grass and lake sedge on the slope where they’ll get full sun. We can stabilize the stream bank with native plants and boulders so it will carry the water around the house and into th
e creek that runs through the state park. You want to get rid of that perched water. A vertical well, probably two, to pump the water out and into the stream. And a passive well drilled into the bluff face.”

  “What’s wrong with buckthorn? I kind of like it.”

  “Buckthorn.” Cleatus shook his head. “Know your enemy. Buckthorn is like kudzu. It takes over everything. It shades out the native plants that control insects and stabilize the soil. Nurseries aren’t allowed to sell it anymore, but there are still a lot of buckthorn hedges around. You can’t cut it out because it’ll just come back angry. What we’ll do is lop the plants off about six inches off the ground and cover them with black plastic bags. The roots will stay in the ground but they won’t germinate. That helps control erosion. Then we broadcast seeds of native plants, up here in the yard and right over the edge of the bluff, and cover them with erosion control blankets so the seeds can germinate. They put their roots down under the blanket and grow up through the matting. You want to slow down the flow of the surface water.”

  “How much is this going to cost?” I asked. The money from the November auction at Swann’s had finally arrived, so I wasn’t worried. But I wanted to know.

  “Not as much as having your house slide into the lake.”

  “When can you start?” Olivia asked.

  “Couple of weeks.”

  “Can you build us some new stairs?” I asked.

  “I can do that too.”

  I admired men like Cleatus, an older type, like Grandpa Chaz, men who knew how to do things, how to adjust your carburetor, or get bats out of your attic or rats out of your basement, how to seat a toilet or install a new soil pipe or tuck-point your foundation. You’d see their trucks parked in front of the big houses in Hyde Park—contractors.

  Two weeks later, I came home from the shop, where Adam and Carla and I had been putting together our first online catalog. The yard was full of police cars. Well, three police cars. Local. State. Sheriff’s. Olivia, who’d been at St. Anne’s with Reverend Sarah, was standing next to a bright red drilling machine talking to a state trooper, holding Booker on a leash. Booker was straining to get at the hole. Two shallow wells had been dug to pump out pockets of “perched” water. A dowsing rod had been used to locate an underground stream. Olivia, I learned later, had been trying the dowsing rod when the digger had uncovered two bodies.

  Olivia and the state trooper and a couple of policemen were looking down in the hole. A police photographer was trying to keep them away from the hole so he could take pictures.

  I left the Jeep in the drive and joined them.

  A couple of bodies. Or rather, a skeleton and something that looked like a body lay side by side in the hole, about a foot apart. Bits of cloth clung to both. I knew right away who they were. Or what they were. The New York hit men who’d come to kill Eddie. Augie never told me Eddie had killed them. What he’d said was, “Eddie sent them away.” I was never sure I could believe Augie, but now… I didn’t say anything, but I was thinking, there might be more! Two more. And there probably were, though they didn’t turn up that afternoon, and I didn’t mention the possibility.

  “Looks like they were killed with a shotgun,” one of the policemen said, though I wasn’t sure how he could tell. “Slugs. Something busted up their ribs pretty bad.”

  Will they find the slugs? I wondered. Do slugs bear the same kind of distinctive marks as bullets? Does it matter? Were the slugs from the same gun? Or two different guns? I pictured Augie and Eddie at the bedroom windows at the east end of the house, or running out of the side doors with shotguns, or waiting in the trees. What about the dog? Augie said they’d turned the dog loose.

  The bodies were twenty or thirty feet from the house, but they could have been dragged after they’d been killed.

  Where would I wait if I knew someone was coming to kill me? How would I know? Would someone tip me off? Or would I just know? What if I didn’t know someone was coming to kill me? Would I be prepared? How would I know what to do?

  I made a couple of omelets for supper. As we ate, Olivia kept saying how terrible it was, but I could see she was very excited. Some real evil had gotten loose in our backyard. Was this a rent in the cosmic fabric? she wondered. Was it a sign of a “rebellion” against God’s plan?

  I took a more down-to-earth, Aristotelian point of view. I wanted to divert this stream of thought, the way Cleatus was diverting the underground stream that was causing toe erosion. “Life’s already a muddle,” I suggested. “You don’t need to complicate things.”

  Olivia covered her omelet with hot sauce. She wanted sensation rather than thought.

  “Life’s muddle,” I said again. “I don’t see evidence of anyone rebelling against the cosmic order here.”

  “But tearing up something. Doesn’t it make you think of a rent?”

  By the time the sun had finally disappeared, the two bodies had been covered, and the police presence was gone, except for one unlucky policeman who was still there to protect the crime scene. I was glad when he came to the door and interrupted us. He wanted to explain how he thought it happened, though it was hard to be sure now—no weapon, no motivation, no timeline, no witnesses.

  “Mr. Palmisano…” he said. “His uncle was Eddie from Chicago.”

  “Right,” I said, “a virtuoso with a machine gun.”

  We didn’t invite the policeman to wait in the kitchen because by this time we were eager to get our own bodies into bed. Through the open window, we could hear the police radio squawking and talking. It added to the excitement. Olivia was very sexed up that night. More so than usual. I think she wanted to show me that she could still surprise me. In fact, she surprised me all the time, but this time I think she surprised herself too.

  Two days later the landscape crew was able to get back to work. The buckthorn stumps had been wrapped in plastic bags that made you think of rows of graves in a military cemetery, but black rather than white; the perched water was being pumped into the stream. The old streambed had been diverted so that it joined a larger stream in the state park, and the new streambed had been reinforced with rocks. The ground had been covered over with native plants. Erosion control blankets had been draped over the steep slope of the bluff.

  Augie called. “You send the police out here to arrest me?”

  “Did they arrest you?”

  “No, but they wanted to.”

  “What’d you tell them?”`

  “What could I tell them? The big cop had a face like a budino.”

  “A ‘rice pudding,’” I said.

  “That’s what I just said.”

  “You could tell them what happened.”

  I could feel Augie shrugging his shoulders. “Maybe it was the Finnish guy.”

  Augie wanted to come out to take a steam. Olivia nodded her approval.

  “I’ll come and pick you up.”

  “Nah,” he says. “I’ll get the van to bring me. I’m in a wheelchair today, since I saw you. My hip.”

  I started the sauna. By the time Augie arrived, it was up to 120. When it came time to disrobe, Olivia helped Augie. She was a natural helper.

  “You’re a beautiful woman,” he said, not glancing at her sideways, but looking her straight up and down.

  “So,” Olivia said, spreading out her towel on one of the benches. “Tell us everything. Did you kill those men?”

  “Me? I wouldn’t put it like that.”

  “How would you put it?”

  “They came to kill Eddie. Eddie sent them away.”

  “So it wasn’t the Finnish guy?”

  He shrugged. We watched the fire take different shapes. Elemental. Fire Earth Air Water. We listened too, to the noise the water made when it hit the hot rocks, as if the rocks were spitting at us.

  “How did th
ey get under the ground?”

  “That I don’t know. Eddie talked to them and they went back to New York. That’s what I thought.”

  “Then Eddie shot them?”

  Augie threw up his hands to indicate that he knew nothing. But Olivia kept after him. “Maybe you killed them, to protect your uncle?”

  “You’re worse than the police,” he said, and then he said: “I asked the driver to take me past that new store of yours. The old depot. I remember sometimes the girls would come down on the train and Eddie’d send me to meet them at the depot.”

  “We’re going to have a section on local history. Maybe you should write a book. About Eddie and about your good life with Eddie.”

  Augie laughed.

  “I did some digging at the library,” I said. “And there’s lots of stuff online, you know, more than I told you before. The police know about Eddie.”

  “Eddie was always good to me. Took me to Al Capone’s going-away party. I was only seven years old.”

  “I thought you were three or four, and that he told you about it later.”

  “I got a snapshot somewhere. Eddie was my mother’s brother.”

  “Sister Sarah, from the church. Nice-looking woman. Drops in every now and then. She’s like you. Wants to know all about the old days.”

  “It’s Reverend Sarah,” Olivia said.

  “Like those guys who got drowned in their own wine vats. Eddie didn’t have nothing to do with that. That was a different Eddie. That was Eddie the Clutching Hand. That’s what they called him. The Clutching Hand. ’Cause of the way he’d grab on to your shirt when he was talking to you and not let go. Eddie Campanello, that was his name. He was friends with the guy who used to run boats from the old harbor, it was a natural harbor then. They’d run a fast boat up the river to Capone’s farm, where they made the booze. Take the booze out to the big boat. Six barrels at a time was all they could handle. Take it out to the big boat, then Chicago. Told everyone it was from Canada.