Lenny Bartulin - Death by the Book

“Nice.”

“Beautiful. I’ve got some myself!”

Jack wrote DURST on the envelope and then scribbled it out. “The good doctor spent all day looking between rich women’s legs,” he said. “Maybe in the end it just drove him a little crazy.”

“Having too much fun. And you know what happens when you have too much fun.” MacAllister switched to a Scottish accent again. “My dear old mother used to say, Where laughter starts, tears are sure to follow .”

“What was the scandal?”

“Well, they were having so much fun they stopped thinking altogether. They threw the colours in with the whites and suddenly everything turned grey,” said MacAllister. “Where there’s sex and drugs, there’s always money. Seems the blonde knew a banker who knew a lawyer who knew the wife of a CEO who bought some shares and made some quick dividends. Too quick.”

“Patience is a virtue.”

“The whole thing was bent like a giant banana. And it all came out because a monkey called Durst got caught in a cubicle bending over a high-heeled babe with a hundred-dollar roll up her nose and his smooth hand down her pants. And then they all had none.”

“Anyone else get into trouble?”

“Businessmen are allowed to play, but not doctors. Durst was the only one who ended up with none. And he’d actually made his money from working. The rest couldn’t lose it if they dropped it out of a plane over the Pacific Ocean in a hurricane.”

“Money clings to them like a birthmark.”

“Yeah, and they’ve always got one the size of a frying pan. Mine’s in my crack and you can’t see it with the naked eye.” MacAllister sighed. “You know I met Durst once. Real arrogant bastard, all slicked-back hair, aftershave and perfect teeth.”

“What was he after?”

“Gift for his wife. Anniversary, I think. Kasprowicz must have suggested it because he had no idea.”

“Did he buy anything?”

“Yeah, a copy of The Great Gatsby . It was the only title he recognised out of my first editions. He said, oh yeah, Robert Redford wrote this. For fuck’s sake!”

“Now, now, Brendan,” said Jack. “Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”

“According to Fitzgerald.” The telephone brushed against his beard and the sound was like radio static. “Not a bad little copy though,” he said wistfully. “British first edition from Chatto & Windus. Okay, the dust jacket was average and the book was a bit rough round the edges, but nice for two and a half grand.”

“Thanks. You always know the good stuff. You should write a book.”

“Twenty-five years serving the rich and bored, my friend. This is nothing. Run-of-the-mill scandal. There’s much, much more. If I wrote it all down it’d be longer than the Encyclopaedia Britannica .”

Jack spent most of Sunday afternoon in a small, musty attic room in Balmain, all spider webs and dust and dejected cardboard boxes. The deceased estate: another feature of the second-hand dealer’s lot. Looking through dead people’s crap, driven by the slim possibility of finding something of value.

The final haul was meagre: a small box of literary pretension from the 1950s and 1960s. Man and His Symbols by Jung; John Barthes’ Giles Goat Boy and The Sotweed Factor ; the trilogy Nexus , Sexus and Plexus by Henry Miller; Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins ; The Unquiet Grave by Palinurus; and Meetings with Remarkable Men by G.I. Gurdjieff.

There was an elaborate bookplate with a striped coat of arms inside the front cover of each volume: From the Library of Harold J. Cummins . Obviously Harry had been all class. The books were in excellent condition. Jack wondered if he had ever actually read any of them.

Only one little volume really interested him. It was the last book he found, right at the bottom of a crumpled cardboard box, squashed under the weight of a small horde of old literary journals and magazines. Jack supposed it was not too much of a coincidence. Because trawling books was what he did, because at any given time, with any box full of books, the odds were there. That Jack had met the author’s brother two days ago had nothing to do with nothing.

The front cover was dark blue. The title and the author’s name were in grey typeface. Below, in the bottom third of the cover, was a reproduction of Hundertwasser’s Genesis — Pieces of Pineapple . The strong yellows and greens seemed a little colourful for Kass. Almost humorous. It was the first copy of Simply Even that Jack had come across.

Inside, it was inscribed: Dearest Harold, For all your help. With gratitude, Edward.

Jack directed the taxi straight over to Susko Books so that he could dump the box and not have to worry about lugging it there in the morning. The city was empty and spacious. A calm had settled along with the drizzle. It looked clean in the pearly afternoon light. This was how Jack liked it best. The city in winter. Red wine weather. He remembered there was a bottle of cheap Shiraz under the counter at the shop.

Apart from a few people waiting for buses, York Street was deserted. Jack got out of the taxi and took his box from the back seat. As he crossed the road he heard the flags on top of the Queen Victoria Building snapping in the wind, their cables ringing out against the poles like thin, erratic bells. He glanced at the Town Hall clock. Just after 4.00 p.m.

He opened the front door to Susko Books and stepped inside. The light was metallic, blue-grey, but soft too, regardless of the cold. Jack left the lights off. He put the box on the counter and switched on the heater by his desk. From a drawer he took out an aluminium ashtray and from under the counter the bottle of Shiraz.

He took the Edward Kass book from the box and pressed play on the stereo. Sketches of Spain drifted into the shop like a warm desert wind. It reminded Jack that he still had not read Don Quixote .

He sat down at his desk, poured wine into a glass and lit a cigarette. He opened Simply Even at random. Page 12.

Jack brushed some ash from the page. He flipped through the book again. Page 36.

So much for the bright cover.

The phone rang. Jack put the book down, went to the counter and answered.

“Susko Books.”

“Jack?”

It was Annabelle Kasprowicz.

“Speaking.”

“Oh, it’s you. I wasn’t sure if anybody else worked there.”

Jack leaned against the counter. “Well, there’s Carlos,” he said. “But he never answers the damn phone. I’m thinking about sending him back to Costa Rica.”