Each book I handled topped its predecessor in beauty or perversion, the common denominator being exceptional condition and, despite their subject matter, surprising literary merit. It was enough to make me forget about the Shunga until Gareth pointed to a large Japanese scroll.
I untied the silk bow and carefully unrolled the rice linen paper as the auctioneer started the bidding for a dozen bar stools. The watercolor revealed a beautifully robed geisha engaged in intercourse with a handsome young warrior. His bow and quiver of arrows leaned against a table as they made love. Although he was obviously about to explode, she maintained a chilling aloofness.
Unrolling the horizontal scroll further, I saw couples engaged in a variety of artfully arranged debaucheries, the men looking comical with their lustful grimaces while the women maintained a look of slightly bored obedience. This subjugation of the female lover, I gathered, was the essence of the Shoku-hon prints in reinforcing the precept of the master-servant principle.
Intended to excite patrons of bordellos in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century Japan, the prints portrayed better than words how courtesans and geishas were trained to satisfy men without regard to their own pleasure. They were also used as how-to books for blushing brides of the middle classes.
I knew from reading Edmond de Goncourt’s Outamaro, le peintre des maisons vertes (along with English lit, art history was one of the few classes I never cut as an undergrad) that after Utamaro died, in the early 1830s the erotic ukiyo-e prints lapsed, with the exceptions of Kunisada and Hokusai, into a coarser style portraying little more than crude posturing. But to my untrained eye, the work before me seemed more like fine art than the decadent efforts of the later period. It also represented an important find.
With Chezik hovering nearby, I hid my enthusiasm by shrugging my shoulders and turning away from the table. I needn’t have bothered. This bottom-feeder of the book trade may not have had a thousand disposable dollars to his name, but Chezik wasn’t an idiot. He answered my posturing with a knowing smile.
Still, I figured that only Gareth Hughes stood in the way of my winning those treasures and while he was worth far more than the likes of Chezik, he didn’t have the resources to outbid me on most of them.
Being a practical man, the Welshman whispered to me a proposal that made a great deal of sense.
“They’re worth tens of thousands, but we can get them for a pittance. Why don’t we come to some arrangement so as not to outprice each other?”
“You mean collude? Why, Mr. Hughes, I’m shocked.”
“You’re as much a pirate as I,” he said with what passed for a grin, “and if Christie’s and Sotheby’s can do a bit of topping, I figure we can, too. I want the Colette.”
“The Colette?”
He nodded. “You missed it entirely. Promise you won’t gouge me on that one?”
“Sure. I’m mainly interested in the Japanese scrolls. But show me the one you’re so keen on.”
We walked back to the table, trailed by Chezik, but ignored by the others whose interests were focused on a set of aluminum napkin holders the auctioneer held over his head.
Gareth pulled back the sheet and reached for a book that he had concealed beneath a 1964 issue of Fortune magazine. Titled L’Ingénue libertine, by Colette, the cover portrayed a man kneeling before a beautiful girl who held a whip over his bare buttocks. I wasn’t particularly impressed until he opened to the title page containing the following inscription in green ink:
“To Sylvia Beach, my most beautiful American friend. I give this book to you in the hope you will share it with Hemingway (un homme très joli!) who I believe will appreciate its delicacies. Je t’aime, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette de Jouvenel.”
Impressive enough, but the real kicker followed. In blue ink and a different handwriting were the words:
“And back to you, Sylvia. It was a damned fine week despite the guilt. Blame it on the book. I’ve been in worse places than this and I bet you have as well. All will be o.k. My best to Adrienne who is good at forgiving.
Ernie.”
Wow. From Colette to Beach to Hemingway.
The history of significant possessors of a book could be the most important feature of a collectible work, particularly if it had anything new to say about a major literary figure. For literature scholars, the provenance of this book was the equivalent of baseball’s double-play combination of Tinker to Evers to Chance.
Sylvia Beach had been the founder and owner of Shakespeare and Company in Paris when it was the literary headquarters for Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce. Beach had published Joyce’s Ulysses when no one else would touch it.
The inscription meant that Colette, author of Gigi and one of the more outlandish personalities of that extravagant era, had given her book to Sylvia in the hope that she would sexually excite Ernest Hemingway. If the ink writings were genuine it would significantly alter the historical perception of Sylvia Beach, a lesbian who had lived happily and, supposedly, faithfully with her lover Adrienne Monnier.
I wondered if Hadley Hemingway ever chanced upon that inscription, and whether her husband used the affair associated with it to write The Garden of Eden.
“Any others like that in there?” I asked Gareth.
“Perhaps. I haven’t had time for a proper inspection. You can have all the Japanese stuff. I don’t have contacts in the art world.”
After twenty minutes, Gareth and I had divvied up most of the books and scrolls we would share and were inspecting a few more when the auctioneer directed the crowd’s attention to the table we had by then assumed was ours.
“Now we got some purty books here!” Colonel Bender bellowed as he lumbered over to us, microphone in hand. “Some ain’t as nice as the others and some don’t have no pictures at all, but most of ’em is old and all of ’em is saucy.”
The first thing he held up was the Colette.
“Ten dollars,” I bid casually, aiding Gareth with an artificially low start.
“Ten dollars, ten dollars, ten dollar’, ten dol’ … do I hear fifteen?”
“Forty!” Chezik shouted as he stepped away from the pile of Harlequin romances he had pretended to examine.
Gareth and I looked at each other with annoyance, but secure in the belief that the book scout didn’t pose an undue threat to our finances, we looked back to the auctioneer and proceeded to raise the bid in cautious increments.
Surprisingly, Chezik got the bidding up to five hundred dollars before conceding to Gareth’s ante of another hundred. That seemed to do it, but the auctioneer had to earn his commission.
“Come on, folks,” the colonel pleaded. “I know it ain’t got pictures and it’s in a funny language, but these came from a fancy home.”
I held my tongue, but it wasn’t easy honoring my promise to Hughes knowing that the fat bastard was getting an incredible piece of literary history for a tiny fraction of its worth in exchange for my getting some Japanese prints.
“Okay then,” Colonel Bender exclaimed. “Going once, going twice, for six hundred—”
“Ten thousand dollars for the lot,” said a voice behind us; a voice that most certainly did not belong to Richard Chezik.
Chapter Three
If you’ve ever had a new bicycle stolen on Christmas Day, you might understand how Gareth Hughes and I felt at that moment.
“Did yew jes’ say ten thousand dollars?” the auctioneer said after recovering his voice.
A tall, wide-shouldered man dressed in a brown silk shirt and black linen trousers stepped from behind a post, tapping his fingers against the side of his pants impatiently. His long, narrow head, bookended by cauliflower ears, was completely bald. Take away the dark sunglasses he wore in the hazy light of the auction hall, he looked like the eraser end of a #2 pencil.
“Yes, I have a check to present in that amount. You will bring the sale of these books to an end.”
The newcomer spoke with a Dutch Afrika
ner accent, one I’d heard often in my rugby career. As I pondered what a white South African was doing in Kansas City bidding on erotic books at Colonel Herl Bender’s flea market auction, Hughes piped up, refusing to accept defeat.
“Point of order!” he shouted. “These books weren’t offered as a lot. I’m prepared to offer five thousand dollars for one of the items. Just one book.”
The auctioneer, clearly out of his league, looked beseechingly at the stranger who slowly shook his head.
“This one,” Hughes insisted, holding up the Colette. “Just this one.”
“No,” the South African repeated. “All or nothing.”
Colonel Bender held out his palm seeking patience, then sat down to confer with a pinch-faced woman who looked ready to throw her calculator at him. After listening to her urgent advice, he rose red-faced to announce a decision.
“My wife says they were offered as erretatica … eroica … or somethin’. Ah, hell, them’s all the same, them dirty books.”
Mrs. Bender could stand it no more and rose, all five feet of her, to announce in a shrill voice that the books were not described individually in the newspaper, but rather as “erotic books” in general. Therefore, they could be sold as a lot.
The auctioneer shrugged his shoulders apologetically in response to Gareth’s impotent snarl.
“Going once, going twice …”
“Eleven thousand five hundred,” I said quietly.
I was gambling with Anne’s college education. It cost that much for just one semester at C.U. But my bookman’s intuition had taken over. I didn’t want those beautiful Japanese scrolls and that piece of literary history to go to a bad home without a challenge.
“Twelff five,” sputtered the man in the brown shirt.
“Fourteen,” I countered with a nonchalant shrug, but my sphincter felt so tight I couldn’t have passed a raisin.
A long silence followed in which I ignored my competitor. Nonetheless, I felt his eyes boring into the back of my head.
“Fourteen thousand dollars,” squeaked the colonel. “Do I hear fourteen five?”
He didn’t. “Awright then, goin’ once …”
I turned for the second time to look at the man who continued to stare at me. He had taken off his dark shades, most likely to better size up his competition, and I noticed his eyelids had narrowed to slits. Beads of sweat gathered on his forehead.
I guessed that he wasn’t buying the books for himself and we were now beyond his employer’s authorized limit. What kind of person, I wondered, could put that kind of apprehension in such a hard man?
“Twenty thousand,” the man hissed as the colonel raised his gavel.
Now it was my turn to sweat. I glanced at Hughes, who quickly avoided my look. He would be good for ten thousand just to get the Colette, but he didn’t have the money for more at the prices being bid.
I was alone, betting my entire livelihood on a pile of paper and leather, discovering how focused one becomes when success or failure rests on nothing more than gut instinct and a momentary perusal of the goods. I could sell two hundred and fifty shares of inherited stock for $6,000, use a $10,000 line of credit at Midwest Bank, and unload a first-edition of The Reivers by Faulkner that I’d been saving for myself. But did I really want to risk that kind of money for books I hadn’t researched thoroughly?
“Twenty-five thousand,” I said.
The room erupted in applause.
Gareth Hughes barked a surprised laugh and the colonel performed a brief jig as if struggling to control his bladder. Even his wife emitted a constipated smile as she tallied up the commission on her calculator.
The Afrikaner leveled his porcine eyes at me as if I was the only person in the universe. His look confirmed that he would make up the difference out of his own pocket.
“Thirty-five thousand,” he said.
“Forty,” I countered blithely and totally beyond reason, except for my renewed belief that, up to a point, my opponent could not afford to let me win. The trick was to guess where that amount stopped.
Everyone in the room stared at me, including Gareth Hughes, who stepped forward and gave me a cool, one-sided smile accompanied by a shake of the head that made it clear I was not to count on him. Whether it was the stifling heat of the room or the insane position I had placed myself in from misplaced pride and an old-fashioned devotion to rare books, I felt dizzy and nauseous.
“Forty-five.”
“Damn,” I muttered under my breath.
Those near enough to hear my curse smiled sympathetically, assuming I was disappointed because I could bid no higher. But my small outburst was only for the effect it would have on the Afrikaner.
Sick as I was with worry, I knew with all my quavering heart that we had not yet reached the end sum. We were close, however, and I shed my poker face just long enough for him to see I was near the end of my challenges.
I waited for Herl Bender to threaten dropping the hammer before quietly upping the count by $2,500. To have raised the ante by another increment of $5,000 ran the risk of scaring away the competition, the last thing I wanted.
My opponent studied me long enough for mankind to evolve into something else. The colonel went through his by now well-practiced prolonging of the raised gavel, letting it quiver in the left hand he held high above his head, his patience bubble-gum stretched as he aimed his eyes at the man, urging the final bid to top mine.
But the stranger only continued to stare at me.
Outside Christmas and St. Patrick’s Day, I’m not a religious man, but my eyeballs shifted upward, seeking divine deliverance from owing a fortune I did not have for items I had inspected for less than two minutes. Add to this the miserable fact that they were offered by an auctioneer with about as much credibility handling rare books as Mike Tyson. Any wonder that during those milliseconds my bowels slipped into my Nikes?
If there was any consolation to be had, it was that the Afrikaner seemed as concerned as I at what was about to transpire, confirming that his boss was not a very understanding individual when it came to losing.
Except that he had nothing to worry about.
If I couldn’t honor the bid, which was extremely likely, he would get the books for the first price he bid before I originally countered.
Namely, $10,000.
Not only would I owe a substantial amount in damages to the auctioneer and face possible felony charges for fraud, my credibility as a book dealer would be ruined unless I could make good the $47,500.
I began to calculate the fair market value of my house (naturally, the economy was experiencing the worst recession in modern history) when I heard a quivering voice from the back of the room utter the magic words that renewed my faith in Catholicism.
“I bid fifty.”
The voice didn’t belong to the Afrikaner, but to Richard Chezik, that thieving book scout who wasn’t supposed to have a pot to piss in. On the other hand, the person at the other end of the cell phone that Richard held to his ear with his plastic prosthesis probably did. The sneaky bastard must have been reporting my bidding with the Afrikaner to his client, waiting for the right moment to jump in.
And thank Jesus, Mary, and Joseph for that.
For a few seconds you couldn’t have heard a mouse fart, then the room exploded in wild applause and laughter.
The Afrikaner appeared as startled as I, only now he had his own cell phone to his ear and the look of renewed interest. He didn’t hesitate to top Chezik’s bid by another $2,500 while I looked on in relief and wonder. Chezik reported the raise into his cell phone and raised the ante, which, in turn, was quickly countered by the person calling the shots on the Afrikaner’s phone.
Sixty grand is what Richard Chezik’s client and I cost the stranger’s boss that day.
After Colonel Bender slapped down the gavel, the crowd remained silent for a few moments before madly rushing toward the table to see what prizes had lain before their unschooled eyes. The pandemonium pr
ovided enough diversion for Gareth Hughes to sneak the Colette into his leather satchel and skulk out a side door.
I didn’t pursue him. My colleague was long past reason. It happens sometimes with bibliophiles; that “gentle madness” Nick Basbanes is always writing about.
If the stranger noticed that Gareth had fled with the Colette, he didn’t show it as he shoveled the books, far too carelessly for a true book lover, into four cardboard boxes. When they were filled, the colonel motioned for three of his helpers to pick them up, leaving the fourth on the floor.
“Are you ready to go?” Colonel Bender asked the man.
“I’m ready.”
“Well then, you’d best get that last one and show the boys to your car.”
The set of the big fella’s jaw made it clear he wasn’t doing any physical labor, even though the remaining box weighed all of twenty-five pounds.
“One of the boys will come back and get it,” the colonel said diplomatically.
“I want ’em taken out togetter. Now.”
Bender’s crimson face puffed up like a blowfish. He still held the check for $60,000 in his right hand and, for an instant, I thought hillbilly pride would prevail over common sense.
No such luck.
“I’ll get this one, Colonel,” I said, picking up the box. “Go ahead with the rest of your business.”
“Why, thank you, son. That’s mighty decent of you.”
I figure it never hurts to protect another man’s dignity, especially if there’s no threat to my own in doing it, and, as I’d have some questions for the colonel later, I thought it wise to get on his good side.
“Show us the way, Shakespeare,” I said to the Afrikaner.
He snorted contemptuously, aiming those piggy eyes at me again until satisfied he had stored my features in his memory bank. Then the other three book haulers and I followed him out of the building.
The Dirty Book Murder Page 2
