Chapter 3

Chapter 3

            It was easier for Jack to work hard and fast when he was doing it ironically. He loved this Queen Mary project. It was he who, months earlier, had persuaded Paul to let him and his brothers take over this peculiar tangent to the book business. Now, in the final week leading up to setting sail, he could hardly sleeps night for the excitement. He loved that here, at the swanky auction house, among experts in various esoteric fields, he was turning water into wine. And he loved that he could do in right under their very eyes. Here he was, dressed like a book dealer, acting like a book dealer, for all anyone knew, trying to be a book dealer. While all the while, he was just measuring shelves and buying books by the foot. He went through the motions – consulting his printout of auction lots, pulling books from the shelves and flipping to the title pages, ostensibly looking for autographs and indications of edition. It was the same things everyone else was doing, except Jack was making sure that those indicators of value and scarcity were absent from the books on his most-wanted list.

This was the third time Riverby had been tapped to update the library on the Queen Mary. The ocean liner made much of its library in its advertising literature, but when his uncle had been on board a decade ago, he came home unimpressed. He had contacted the company and offered his services – to keep the library fresh and current, in exchange for a state room on board from time to time – and a relationship had begun.

It was vacation reading. The literary equivalent of an all you can eat buffet, which the ship also provided. Books for people to lay open on their chests while they napped pool-side or to set on their bedside tables like hard covered teddy bears for grownups with dispensable income. Or yes, perhaps ever to read and then inadvertently to steal when they disembarked. Two thousand dollars for a week crossing the Atlantic, they must figure, what’s one little paperback book? You’re supposed to take the soaps and the towels, right? So why not a book? That’s why they put the gaudy QM2 stickers on them so prominently.

But this past winter, for some reason, the boys had had the hardest time finding the right sort of books. Their usual sources, library sales, auctions, flea markets, had all been inexplicably barren. With the deadline just days away, they had only 45 boxes of books. They needed at least twice that many. In the 27 auction lots in this sale that were glossy hardcovers or appropriate paperbacks, Jack saw the answer to their worries.

As he looked over the books, he also saw that no one else in the room was paying any attention to this part of the collection. The couple with the spiral notebooks were still talking in not-quite-hushed tones about their discoveries. There was a large pear shaped man with bowl-cut hair looking furiously through the art books. He clutched his canvas tote bag under his arm as he worked, as though it were full of secrets that he was afraid would spill out if he set it down. He was wearing a ribbed black sweater and dark blue pants that were wrinkled in all the places that bent and disconcerting threadbare in all the places that rubbed or stretched during the bending. Jack knew him as The Fat Man, from Paul’s stories of auctions past. He was an art book specialist and a very conservative bidder. He only bid on things that he knew he could sell quickly. He put one book back on the shelf and pulled out the next. He flipped through the pages without looking at them, then took out the next book and repeated the operation.

“Did you see a little monograph on Klimpt in here?” The Fat Man asked another browser standing near him. “I know it was here before. I saw it before. I think someone may have taken it.”

The other man, a thin, bald professorial type shook his head.

“That’s the thing about this arrangement,” continued The Fat Man, to no one in particular, as he pulled out the next book and rifled through it, “you leave all the books out like this and some things are going to walk away. It was a five hundred dollar monograph.”

As he looked through more volumes, his agitation seemed to grow. He muttered, “I knew I should have told Benson to put it in the case. You know, I try to play by the rules here, but this is just what happens. I’ve seen it before, too. Things either get lost or damaged.”

The professorial type, who was sipping white wine from a glass and not really handling any of the books, glanced his direction again and the Fat Man used the opportunity to direct his rant at him.

“One time it was an original drawing by Dali. During the preview it was tucked inside a book and then after the sale, it was gone. Another time a set mysteriously got split up so that volume one was on one shelf and volume two was on another shelf and volume three on a third. The only was you could reunite them was to buy it all, so right away that’s more than most of us can afford.”

“What are you looking for?” asked the bald man.

“Oh nothing,” said The Fat Man, “it doesn’t matter now, does it?” He laughed a nervous, high pitched laugh.

“Should I get someone?” asked the bald man.

The Fat Man didn’t answer. He only continued to work his way down the shelf of oversized books, shaking each one as he went. The bald man used the moment of silence to slip out of the book room, back into the main gallery.

Jack counted volumes and made notes on his printout. 40 volumes on this shelf… pay $20-$30 for them.  65 volumes here… try to get them for less than $35. When it was books like this, there wasn’t much skill or expertise involved. That was why Cable was drawn to the better, rarer books. Cable was always more comfortable, if not outright happier, when subtlety and complexity played a role. His penchant for obscure details and deep research gave him an edge in those situations. When it came to appearances and snap judgments, though, Jack was unparalleled.

“Franklin, what are you looking for?” The black man with the Wembley polo shirt came in from the front room. “That man said something is missing.”

“Oh, I don’t know, Bud,” said The Fat Man, “it seems like it’s always something, doesn’t it?”

“That’s what you say,” said Bud, cheerfully, “Maybe I’ve seen it. What are you after?”

The Fat Man’s hair hung down into his eyes. He got it out of the way not by brushing it aside with his fingers, but by shaking his head – twitching his head – to rearrange his bangs. If the new arrangement were no better than the previous, he’d just do it again, until he could see.

“It was a little monograph on Klimpt,” he said, “32 pages. Printed in Poland in the fifties. About this big.”

“Klimpt,” repeated Bud. “He’s the one that did the mosaics, isn’t he?”

The Fat Man laughed his nervous laugh. “Among other things, yes.”

“Yeah, I know him” said Bud, “Somebody else was asking me about that. It was on the shelf you’re looking at, wasn’t it?”

“It was,” said The Fat Man, “but it isn’t now. Obviously. That’s why I’m looking for it.”

Bud took a small notepad out of his back pocket. “Lot number one oh two.”

“Did you see it yourself, before?” asked The Fat Man.

“No, I just wrote down the bid for this other guy,” said Bud, “I didn’t see it.”

“Well if you’ve got a bid for someone on this lot, I’d call them up if I were you and tell them the Klimpt piece is missing,” said The Fat Man.

“Yeah?” asked Bud.

“Or you’re going to have a disappointed customer,” he laughed.

“You tell me if you find it, OK?” He made a note in his pad. “I’ll ask Benson if he’s seen it.”

Jack worked his way to the end of the row of low shelves running down the center of the room. He’d filled in prospective prices for about half of the lots he wanted. In looking around the room at the other people, he was surprised to realize that he seemed to be working harder than most of them. The majority appeared to be more interested in chatting with each other than in looking at the books.

“Oh, with the ebooks selling so cheap now, I’m just glad I don’t have to make a living off this anymore,” said one paunchy middle aged man.

“I’ve been having good luck with digitizing,” said another. “At 99 cents a copy, I can sell the same file a dozen or more times if it gets a seller ranking over 200,000 on Amazon.”

“But isn’t that still just $12 dollars?” asked the first man.

“Before their commission, it is. They’re taking thirty percent now!”

“And for twelve times the work. Not for me,” said the first man.

Jack moved to the other side of the low bookcases, and in so doing moved into range to overhear another conversation. This one was between a gray haired man who was seated at a table with an old leather bound book open to a detailed engraving and a darker skinned man with a striking beard. It was black beneath his chin and silver everywhere else. His moustache, which stood out from his face and curled up at the ends like a true handlebar, was jet black. His hair, swept back from his face and worn a little longer than was fashionable, was silver. He stood with his arms crossed over his barrel chest and with his feet far apart. Jack would not have been surprised to see him wearing shiny blue boots that turned up at the toes and ended in tassles. Instead he was wearing a gray oxford shirt and black pants. He wore a dark green silk scarf around his neck, with a twist and a loose knot at the neck, and a matching pocket handkerchief. The silk had veins of gold in it which, unfurled, might have been Arabic writing, or which might as easily have been paisley. The man matched, in all detail, the description of Paul’s longtime nemesis at the auction house, the fearsome Iron Sheik. Jack positioned himself as close to the two men as he could get, without attracting attention.

“It’s not what it used to be,” said the seated man. “It seems just a matter of money now. When was the last truly great discovery? Take this, for example.” He pointed to the engraving in the book in front of him. “It’s beautiful. 1525. All the plates present except the Satanic one, of course. But it’s become just a commodity. You can buy ten of them online any hour of the day. I remember the first time I saw one of these. I’d been searching for ten years in bookstores all over the continent. This little man came shuffling out of the back with his copy and I knew what it was before he even put it down. That one had the Satanic plate but not the Resurrection.”

“Is the Resurrection rare?” asked the The Iron Sheik.

“What, this?” the seated man pointed to the illustration. “They’re all rare, whatever that means nowadays.”

The Iron Sheik stepped closer and looked down at the engraving. He pulled his reading glasses down from where they had been perched on his head and looked closer. Then he opened his auction catalogue and made a note beside the photo of that book.

“What do they sell for?” asked The Iron Sheik.

“Five, six, sometimes seven,” said the seated man, leaning back. He held up his hands in dismay, “and to whom? People who never read them. They’re just ticking books off their checklists. And no doubt this one will go in that range as well. And yet here we are two hours before the sale and where are those people? I can remember when having a book like this come to town, come to a museum in town would have people standing in line just to see it.”

“Really?” said The Iron Sheik.

The seated man nodded and let out a long sigh, “I don’t know why I even bother. It might as well be socket wrenches, for all they care. Some internet bidder in Texas or Nevada is going to get it, anyway.”

The Iron Sheik opened his catalogue again and Jack could see him circle the listing for this book. Then he closed the catalogue and moved slowly over to where The Fat Man was. The Fat Man, meanwhile and for all his bulk, continued to work like a squirrel trying to unearth nuts he’d buried long ago. The Iron Sheik leaned in and took note of the lot number that The Fat Man was fretting over. Then he jotted that down in his catalogue as well.

Jack turned his attention back to the books in front of him, but before he could make any more headway, Cable appeared next to him and took his arm. Jack could tell by the look on his face that something was wrong.

Cable still had his earpiece in.

“We’ve got a bit of a problem,” he said.