The Bookman's Promise

by John Dunning

  “I shouldn’t joke about it,” she said. “That’s a lot of money to joke about.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  I hadn’t been aware she’d been joking—how could I tell?—but now in her self-deprecating laugh I caught a glimpse of the girl she’d been: a heartbreaker, I’d bet, in the springtime of the Roaring Twenties with her life just beginning and the world opening up. In that moment the money seemed crazily irrelevant. It was still only Indian money: If I had to give up the book, I’d miss it like a severed kidney, but how much would I really miss the stupid money? I shifted my weight on the stool and said, “I don’t know what I’d do,” and she took in her breath and held it for a moment.

  “I just don’t know, that’s all I’m saying. If we could verify everything—if there were no doubts—then I guess that would be one of my options, wouldn’t it?”

  She shook her head. “You’re out of your mind.”

  “We’re not breaking any new ground there, Mrs. Gallant.”

  She squinted and peered, said, “I wish I could see you better,” but her apprehension was gone. Her fear was gone, and what was left between us was a strange and growing harmony. Was that trust I saw in her face?

  “I had no idea what I’d find when I came here. I certainly didn’t expect to meet a man of honor. I thought such creatures were extinct today.”

  “Don’t get too carried away, ma’am. I haven’t done anything yet.”

  But there was no getting around it: in those few minutes, something fundamental had changed between us. She gave a small shiver and clutched at the collar of her dress. I asked if she was cold—I had an afghan back in my office—but she shook her head.

  “Mr. Ralston?”

  “Yes, ma’am?” He came up to join us.

  “Would you please get my bag from the car?”

  I had my own chilling moment as Ralston brought in the bag and she directed him to take out what was obviously a book wrapped in cloth. What else would it be but a Burton? I fingered its violet cloth cover, opened it to the title page, and my last doubt about her vanished. A cherry copy, an exquisite First Footsteps in East Africa, London, 1856. I touched the inscription:To Charles Warren, my best American friend Charlie, in the hope that our paths may one day cross again, Richard F. Burton. It had been inscribed in 1860.

  “That’s an exceedingly rare volume today,” she said. “I’ve had it hidden away, protected it for years. I understand it’s unheard of to find one with the forbidden appendix intact.”

  The notorious so-called infibulation appendix. I turned to page 591 and found it tipped in, four pages in Latin. I remembered from Brodie’s biography that it had contained material then considered so salacious that the printers had refused to bind it into the book.

  “The sexual practices of the Somalis,” she said. “All spelled out for the public horrification and secret titillation of proper old hypocritical England. Penis rings, female circumcision—things they couldn’t talk about then and we can’t get enough of today.”

  “Burton never did have any inhibitions when it came to describing what he saw.”

  “For all the good it did him. I understand only a few copies survived.”

  “How did you manage to save this one?”

  “I was lucky. Charlie had taken this volume out of his library to look up something. It was upstairs where it wasn’t supposed to be the night he died. Later my mother found it and hid it. She kept it secret until she died, and it was found among her things. A few worthless relics, some worn-out old clothes, and this—the sum of her existence, but to me it was a symbol of what we’d been, who we were.”

  I flipped my notepad to a new page. “So tell me who you were.”

  “We were never rich, I’ll tell you that. We were always comfortable, solidly in the middle class while Charlie was alive, but people were more apt to be either rich or poor then, and the middle class was a much smaller part of the population. You could live very well in the middle class in those days.”

  She slipped back into her dream face. “Everything we were in the good times began and ended with my grandfather. He was such a loving authority figure to me when I was a child. His friends called him Charlie, but of course to me he was always Grandfather; it would have been a sacrilege to think of him any other way. But on my eightieth birthday I suddenly realized I was older than him—when he died, you know, and got stuck at seventy-nine forever. That’s when he became more like a dear old friend and I started thinking of him as Charlie.”

  “What about your father?”

  “My father…” She struggled for a word but couldn’t find it. The moment stretched and became strained. “What do you want to know? I tried to love my father…but he wouldn’t let me. He wasn’t a bad man…just a weak one.”

  “Did he drink?”

  I saw her recoil in surprise.

  “I’m not a mind reader, ma’am, it just figures.”

  She fidgeted. She could feel me hemming her in, taking her into places she had avoided for a long time. At last she answered the question. “His drinking put my mother in the poorhouse after my grandfather died. That’s where she died, alone in a consumption ward. They all died within a few years of each other—Charlie…Mama…him.”

  I decided to leave her father’s drinking for the moment, but I knew we’d get back to it. “So you were alone in the world at what age?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “This was in Baltimore?”

  “Yes, but when Mama got sick I was sent to live with her brother in Boise, Idaho.”

  “How did that work out?”

  “It was horrible. He was a common laborer; he made very little money and his wife took in wash to help make ends meet. They already had five children, the last thing they needed was another one. I was resented by all of them; they never said it in so many words, but I knew. They put up with me because I was family, that’s what good people did then. I hated being an obligation, so I ran away after two years and I never saw any of them again. I’m sure they all said good riddance when I was gone.”

  Her eyes drifted to the street, as if moving images from that old life had begun to play on my storefront window. “They’d all be dead now, wouldn’t they?”

  “That’s hard to say. You’re still here.”

  A pregnant pause: I flipped a page. “What happened then?”

  “A lot of things you don’t need to know about. Just say I soon learned how to take care of myself and we’ll leave it at that. I went back to Baltimore and married Gallant in 1916. I’ve had an amazing ability to go from bad to worse all my life, and this was just another case of it. That doesn’t matter now, it’s all a very long time ago. Let’s just say Gallant didn’t live up to the promise of his name.”

  She made a nervous gesture. “Let’s talk about something else. Those were hard times and I’d rather not think about it. Anyway, Gallant’s got nothing to do with this. I doubt if I ever said the word books the whole time we were married. But I never stopped thinking about them. They were on my mind all through those hard years.”

  “Sounds like you had a few of those. Hard years, I mean.”

  She made a little laughing sound. “Oh honey, I could tell you stories that would curl your toenails. The twenties weren’t half-bad; we had some good days then and some money too. But Tucker lost his shirt along with everybody else in 1929. Then he…died…and I lived in a cardboard box at a garbage dump all through the winter of 1931. The dump was the only place where the cops would leave me alone. I went to sleep every night with the smell of rotten meat in my nose and the sounds of rats in my ears. All I had was that little silver key to Tucker’s deposit box, where I kept my book. But what does that matter now? I lived through it and I’m still here, fifty-eight years after Tucker Gallant was laid out with two fellas throwing dirt in his face.”

  She swallowed hard and looked off into the dark places of the store. “The tough part is when I think how different my life might’ve been if t
hose books hadn’t been lost. Knowing all the time they were meant to be mine.”

  “What would you have done with them then, sold them?”

  “That would’ve been hard. They were such a part of my life.” She shrugged. “When you get hungry enough you’ll sell anything. They sure weren’t worth then what they’d sell for today, but I bet I’d have gotten myself a fair piece of change even in the thirties. Maybe put myself through college. I always wanted to go to college. Always wanted to study…”

  “Study what?”

  “You’ll laugh.”

  “No, I won’t. Of course I won’t laugh.”

  “It just seems silly now, but I always wanted to study something grand. Like philosophy.”

  She rolled her eyes at her own folly. “My gosh, philosophy. Of all the silly things.”

  I didn’t laugh: she did.

  “Now I ask you, Mr. Janeway, have you ever heard of anything as silly as that?”

  Two customers came in, high-rollers from Texas who passed through Denver once a year, and for a while I was busy showing them some high-end modern books. They bought a slug of stuff that I was thrilled to see hit the road, passing over two immaculate Mark Twains to throw about the same amount of money at Larry McMurtry, Hunter S. Thompson, and a few others whose names will be toast when old Clemens is still a household word. Ralston watched them peel off eight crispy bills from a roll of hundreds and saunter up the street with their small bag of books.

  “Man, I’m in the wrong business.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s not always like that.”

  “Doesn’t need to be.”

  Almost an hour had passed since I had last spoken to Mrs. Gallant. She looked exhausted, her eyes wide open, staring at nothing. I thought, God, I’d like to crawl inside your head, but if I’d had one wish, I’d liked to have been there when her grandfather died. I had some drippy, cavalier notion that I’d have rescued her life: that, one way or another, I’d have stopped her father from selling her books.

  “Mrs. Gallant.” I pulled up my stool. “I know you’re tired, but can we talk about your father for just a minute?”

  Suddenly she cupped her hands over her face and wept. I touched her shoulder and we sat like that, and after a while, when she was ready, she told me what had happened. Of course the old bastard had sold her books: to him they were nothing. “He never read a book in his life,” she said. “He couldn’t have cared less. He got thirty dollars for all of them and drank that up in a week.”

  “Was there a paper, any kind of legal document?”

  “None that I ever saw.”

  Of course not—who makes up a paper for a thirty-dollar deal? But if money had changed hands it was legal, and who after eighty years could prove that it was not?

  “He was told they weren’t worth anything—they were just junk books. Doesn’t that make it a fraud? And what right did he have to sell them? They weren’t his to sell.”

  This was yet another legal mess. What had the law said in 1906, when a woman still couldn’t vote, about a man’s right to his wife’s property? Specifically, what had the law in Maryland said in those days of such enlightenment?

  I felt the beginnings of a headache. There were still questions to ask, all leading nowhere, I knew, but I had to ask them. I made some notes and when I looked up, Mrs. Gallant had begun to teeter in the chair. I put my hand on her arm and then Ralston was there, holding her steady. “That’s all for now, Janeway,” he said, and there was no nonsense in his voice: we were finished.

  We talked for a moment about what to do. “She’ll come home with me,” Ralston said. “It ain’t the Brown Palace, but she can rest easy till Denise gets home.”

  We helped her out to the car. Ralston gave me a paper with his telephone number and told me to call him later. I leaned down and spoke to her through the open window. “One last question, ma’am. Do you have any idea who bought those books?”

  “Yes, of course. He was looking for fast money, so he sold them to a bookstore.”

  There it was, the only ray of light in what had so far been a damned hopeless story. If a book dealer had bought that entire library for thirty dollars, even allowing for the much cheaper values of the time, it had certainly been one hell of a fraud. But what did that matter now? Like Richard Burton and Charlie Warren, like her mother and father, the garbageman and his horse, Gallant, the Boise relatives, and all the others, that bookseller would have died a long time ago.

  Then she said something that hit me like a slap. “When I think of those awful book people—those Treadwells—how can they live with themselves?”

  It was the hint of present tense that turned my head around.

  “Mrs. Gallant…are you telling me that place is still in business?”

  “Of course it is, it’s been there forever. Haven’t you ever heard of Treadwell’s? It’s a den of thieves, passed down in the same rotten family for a hundred years.”

  5

  If I had spent more time on the road I might have known about Treadwell’s. A bookman who travels always picks up local scuttle-butt, and one who travels constantly eventually knows everything about everybody. The notorious get reputations, and booksellers do love to talk candidly with a colleague they can trust.

  In an hour I had made six calls to dealers I knew around the country, and I had several pages of notes on Treadwell’s Books. I had its address, its phone number, and a good description of its general layout. Its Yellow Pages ad boasted of two million books on three large floors in an old redbrick building on Eastern Avenue just off South Broadway, in an area of downtown Baltimore not far from Johns Hopkins Hospital. Over the years I had been in so many bookstores like that, I could almost see it. Dark stairwells, creaky floors, narrow aisles, deep and dusty shelves. Books double-and triple-shelved, books stacked on end, piled on top of the overflowing bookcases, with another overflow on the floor at the end of each section. Books on every conceivable subject and a few on topics nobody could have imagined. It was possible in such a store that some of the titles in the back rows of each section had not been touched in decades.

  The store’s history was colorful and long. It stretched back across much of the century and had spawned generations of bookpeople, beginning with old Dedrick Treadwell, the king of knaves in that turn-of-the-century book world. The Treadwells had always had a dubious reputation in the book world. “They’d pay as much as anybody if they were bidding against other dealers and the books were good,” said a bookman in the D.C. area who knew them well. “But if it’s just them and some poor know-nothing who’s just inherited a houseful of books…Well, I’m not one to call another man a crook…let’s just say I’ve heard stories, and let it go at that.”

  In his early days, old man Treadwell had operated out of various hole-in-a-wall shops. In the early thirties he had leased the building on Eastern Avenue with an option to buy. He had clearly set his sights on bigger game, and soon he and his son were sucking up books by the tens of thousands, all over the East Coast. They were voracious buyers, insatiable raptors of the book trade. “God knows how many books that we now consider classic and sell for four figures were blown out of there for nickels and dimes then,” one dealer said. They were of the turn-’em-fast school: buy cheap, sell cheap, get the cash, move on, and buy some more.

  I love stores like that: I can spend hours and thousands of dollars in those dusty, half-lit book dungeons. But they are becoming severely endangered as rents go ever higher and downtown space is consumed by high-traffic, high-profit enterprises. Soon they will be like the people of Margaret Mitchell’s Old South, no more than a dream half-remembered.

  The first Treadwell must have imagined the trends decades ago. He bought the building and his son had sons and flourished there. They rode out the Depression, the war years were good, and the postwar even better. The second generation died and a third came along. A few of them stayed in the trade; most left to find, they hoped, a brighter future elsewhere. Today the mana
ging partners were brothers of the fourth generation, Dean and Carl Treadwell. I got good descriptions of both from a dealer in Chicago. “Dean is a big, burly fellow with a beard,” my friend said. “Carl is a smaller guy, quieter, but you get the feeling there’s a lot going on with Carl—some anger, maybe even an occasional original thought. Carl gives you the feeling of still water running deep, and Dean would rather come off as a hail-fellow-well-met, salt-of-the-earth type. Dean likes to pretend they’re just rubes, but make no mistake, there are two cunning minds under all that bullshit he puts on. And they do know their books.”

  Maybe so, but in the current generation, Treadwell’s had suddenly fallen on hard times. “Carl’s the culprit,” said the guy in Washington. “You didn’t hear it here, but he’s gotten himself into bad company—gamblers, thugs, the Baltimore mob. Gangsters may even own a piece of that store now. I heard Carl lost his pants in a poker game last year.”

  “You should get out more,” said my friend in Chicago. “Everybody knows about the Treadwells.”

  For another hour I meditated over what I had learned. There have always been a few crooks in the trade. As one old bookman put it, there’s a bad apple in every town. Sometimes he’s an obvious con man dripping with charm. He may be the cold thief who walks casually out of a bookstore with a ten-volume Conan Doyle tucked into every inch of his pants, coat, and shirt, the signed volume crammed desperately into some dank body cavity, and immediately finds another bookseller eager to hold his nose and buy it, fifty cents on the dollar, no questions asked. He is also that rival bookseller who must know a hot book when he sees one. He wears more faces than Lon Chaney in the best of his times. He’s the sweet-faced kid who jacket-clips worthless book club editions and sells them as firsts to the Simon Pure collector. Occasionally he’s a renegade, thriving on intimidation and operating from the trunk of a car. He may be any kind of personality, but that glitch in his character keeps him working the shady side of the street forever. His spots never change.