Ross Thomas: No Questions Asked

“Would it be a good investment at that price?”

Laws thought about it for a while. Then he nodded and said, “As an extremely long-term investment, yes, but there are very few persons around who could afford to do so. Very few.”

“The Arabs?”

“A possibility.”

“They’re buying up everything else,” I said.

“I have heard rumors that they are going into rare books as an investment, but they are only rumors.”

“How old is the Goodwater daughter?”

“I think she was only a child, or possibly an infant, when Joiner Goodwater made his uranium strike. I suppose she’s thirty now, or almost. Why?”

“I was just trying to get a picture of her,” I said. “Not married?”

“No.”

“Is she odd or eccentric or kooky or somehow unbalanced?”

Laws again shook his head. “No, to the best of my knowledge, at least from what her attorney said, she is a most self-possessed and determined young woman. That was the same impression that I gained by talking to her over the telephone.”

“I was wondering why she turned down your offer to provide security measures for the book’s transfer?”

“About that she was most clear and most adamant.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, she said that the private investigator whom she was sending to pick up the book, a Mr. Jack Marsh—” Laws broke off his sentence as if he were not quite sure how he should complete it.

“What about him?” I said.

“Well, she said that Mr. Marsh was not only a close personal friend, but also highly competent in his field.”

“Did you check with the insurance company about him? They must have had some say-so.”

“Indeed I did. They said he is not just competent. They said that he is the best there is.”

Laws and I talked a little longer. I tried to get as many details as I could, and he tried to tell me everything he knew about the theft, which really wasn’t very much more than he had already said, and soon we found ourselves going over the same ground.

When I rose to leave he insisted that he give me a personally conducted tour of some of the Library’s treasures, and I got to inspect one of the Gutenberg Bibles, plus a second edition of the first book printed in England in 1477, The Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers , and the only known presentation copy of Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue , which I thought was rather neat.

I also made a careful examination of the Library’s copy of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis . It was a thick, heavy folio about eighteen inches tall with perhaps seven hundred pages. Its binding was of heavy boards, probably oak, covered with stamped leather.

I turned to Laws. “The one that was stolen was printed on vellum, you say?”

He nodded. “The only one that was. It increases not only its value enormously, but also its weight. I should say that it weighs approximately forty pounds.”

“It would be difficult to fake it, wouldn’t it?”

“Fake it?”

“Come up with a forgery,” I said.

Laws shook his head. “Virtually impossible, but please note that I said virtually. Of late, there have been some really magnificent forgeries, true works of art actually, but mostly they have been forgeries of documents rather than books. To forge a book like this would pose immense technical problems. To reconstitute the vellum and then chemically age it would demand a master craftsman. The binding presents an equally difficult problem, one that is almost insurmountable. But again, I say almost.”

“It couldn’t be done in, say, a week or ten days?”

“No. No it couldn’t. Impossible.”

I thanked him again for his courtesy, promised that I would keep him informed, shook his hand because he seemed to feel that it would be the polite thing to do, and then left to find a cab to take me back to the hotel.

There weren’t any cabs, of course. There weren’t any cabs because it was 4:35 in the afternoon and the government workers were streaming out of the Library and the Capitol and the Senate and the House office buildings, and besides that, it was snowing.

They haven’t quite yet decided what to do about snow in Washington. When it snows really hard the government shuts down, the schools close, and everybody goes home and waits for it to melt. It was snowing hard now, big fat thick wet flakes that stuck to everything they hit. It looked to me as though it would never end and that Washington might not dig its way out until Mother’s Day.

I decided to try for a taxi anyway. The only alternative was a mile-and-a-half walk back to the hotel. My reasoning was that if I were going to catch pneumonia, I needed to conserve my strength. So I stood there at the corner of First and Independence Southeast and yelled and waved my arms and whistled and attracted a number of amused looks and smug smiles from homeward-bound commuters, but no taxi.

I was just about to give up when the black Plymouth sedan let go with a growl from its siren, frightened some cars out of its way, and edged over to the curb. Its right-hand door opened, and I heard a voice say, “Get in, St. Ives. You look ridiculous.”

I brushed some of the snow off, got in quickly, and said, “You promised not to be late again.”

“Still the wise-ass,” the man behind the wheel said and threatened a couple of more cars with a growl from the siren. The cars fell back, and he squeezed the Plymouth sedan over into the slow-moving traffic.

His name was Herbert Fastnaught, and in the six or seven years since I had last seen him he had lost his youth. Some policemen do that, grow old in a week, and it seemed to have happened to Fastnaught. When I had last seen him he had been a boyish, pink-cheeked, gum-chewing detective sergeant in the Metropolitan Police Department’s robbery squad. Now he chewed on a thick unlit cigar, and the pink cheeks had sagged down into heavy jowls, and the curly blond hair that I remembered was turning grey at the sides and thin on top. He looked forty-five, although I knew that he couldn’t be much more than thirty-seven.

“I thought you’d be at the Madison,” Fastnaught said, not looking at me, but staring at the bumper of the car ahead. “So I called there, but they said you weren’t registered and I thought to myself, the Hay Adams, that’s about the next most expensive hotel in town, and sure enough, you were registered there, but you weren’t in. So I called Laws, and he said you’d just left. I took a chance that you couldn’t find a cab and there you were waving your arms around and looking silly.”

“I hear you made lieutenant,” I said. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks. You ain’t changed much.”

“I exercise, try to watch my diet, and drink a lot of Scotch,” I said. “It does wonders.”

“This book you’re go-betweening.”

“The Pliny.”

“Yeah, the Pliny book. You can buy me some expense account Scotch, and we’ll have a little talk about it.”

“All right. You still in robbery?”

“Nah, I’m not in robbery anymore.”

“What happened to that partner of yours, Demeter?”

“Demeter? Well, Demeter was all set to retire, he had three weeks to go, and then he goes into this place that he’s got no business going into, a pad over on Ninth and T, and some dude takes the left side of his head off with a shotgun, just like that, and him three weeks away from retirement.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said.

“Yeah. So was his wife.” Fastnaught took out a disposable lighter and used it to light his cigar. He blew some smoke at the windshield, still not looking at me, still looking at the car ahead. “What about you, you still in New York?”

“Still there.”