Don Winslow - A Cool Breeze on the Underground

After all, Simon explained as they climbed the narrow staircase to his flat, “I spend most of my time in Africa, so it seemed a bit impractical to keep the whole thing.”

The flat was small. A sitting room faced the street and ran the whole width of the apartment. A small kitchen ran off this room, and the bed and bath ran off the kitchen.

Two floor-to-ceiling windows highlighted the sitting room, and a daybed flanked one of the windows. Simon set Neal’s bag down beside this bed. “Here you are, at least until I leave next week. I hope you’ll be comfortable.”

“It’s great,” Neal said, then he noticed the walls. His jaw dropped.

Simon noticed.

“My other vice,” he said. “I like books.”

No kidding. The entire room was lined with bookshelves, all of which were jammed with first editions. A card table in the center of the room struggled against the weight of heavy book catalogues. Stacks of books sat in every corner and unoccupied nook. Neal stepped to the nearest wall and stared at the book spines on the shelves. A lot of them were nineteenth-century explorers’ memoirs- Burton, Speke, Stanley-all first editions. Then Neal saw the volumes of Fielding and Smollett.

“Simon, this is fantastic.”

Simon visibly brightened. “You read?”

Neal nodded as he stared at the volumes.

“What do you read?” Simon asked.

“This,” Neal answered, pointing at the shelves. “I read this. In paperback.”

“You can touch them.”

“No, that’s all right.”

“They won’t crumble in your hands.”

Neal was actually afraid that they would-books that precious, that old. He thought he could spend his whole life quite happily in this room.

“Do you collect?” Simon asked.

“I’m a starving student.”

“I thought you were a private eye.”

Neal smiled. “That, too.”

And I don’t make much money at that, either, he thought.

“What do you study?”

“Eighteenth-century lit.”

“Odd combination, detective and academic.”

A number of wry and ironic responses occurred to Neal, but he settled for, “Well, they both involve research.”

“Indeed.”

A crowbar couldn’t have pried Neal’s eyes from the bookshelf.

“Who’s your favorite?” Simon asked.

“I’m doing my thesis on Smollett.”

“Aah.”

That’s what everybody says, Neal thought. What they mean is, Aah, how boring.

Simon stepped to the bookcase and took out four volumes. He handed one of them to Neal and stood expectantly as Neal perused it.

It was a rare first edition, first volume, of Smollett’s The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle.

Neal had never expected even to see one of these, and now he was holding one.

“Simon, this is a first edition.”

Simon grinned. “The 1751 unexpurgated version. But it’s better than that.” He gestured with his chin for Neal to examine the book.

“Handwritten marginal notes…” Neal looked at the notes more closely. He couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing, but it sure looked like old Smollett’s scrawl. He looked up from the book to Simon and raised his eyebrows.

Simon nodded enthusiastically. “From Smollett himself. Great stuff. Nasty remarks about the real people he was satirizing, little asides, that sort of thing.”

Neal’s hand started to shake. “Simon, is this…”

“The Pickle.”

“There have only been rumors that this existed.”

Simon giggled. “I know.”

“This must be worth-”

“I paid ten for it.”

“Thousand?”

“Yes.”

“Pounds?”

“Yes.”

Neal swallowed hard. The notes in these four volumes could make his thesis. Hell, it could make his career… He handed the book back to Simon.

“Mind you, I could sell it for twenty or more. I should do, really. I’m not all that keen on Smollett, no offense.”

“None taken.”

Only a handful of people were keen on Smollett, Professor Leslie Boskin at Columbia University being one of them.

Simon took the volumes and laid them on Neal’s bed. “I know one collector, Arthur bloody Kendrick… Sir Arthur bloody Kendrick, who suspects that I have these. He’d pay a king’s ransom, mind you.”

“Why not let him?”

“The swine doesn’t love books, he loves possessing them. He sees books as commodities, investments. He doesn’t deserve books.” Simon’s face flushed with indignation. “Actually, you are one of the few people who know that I have these. One of the few people who know these volumes even exist.”

“I’m honored.”

“You love books. I can see that. I do hope you’ll have an opportunity to browse through these volumes while you’re here.”

I do hope I will, too, Neal thought.

“Actually,” said Neal, realizing that he’d actually just said actually, “I have to be going. I’m going to check into my hotel tonight.”

Simon’s face showed his disappointment. “Oh. I was hoping we’d have a chance to talk about books. I’m heading to my cottage in the country first thing tomorrow. Just for two or three days before I head to Africa, Are you sure you wouldn’t rather come up with me? Surely you can’t be in that great a rush.”

“I’m afraid I am.”

“Pity. The cottage is in the Yorkshire moors. An old shepherd’s cot, actually. Peaceful. A place you can hear your heartbeat. Ill leave directions should you change your mind.”

“Thanks.”

“At least stay to dinner. We can talk about books.”

Dinner was a beefsteak tougher than a jockey’s butt, vegetables with the taste boiled out of them, potatoes, tinned fruit, a red wine you could walk on, and conversation devoted entirely to books, Neal thought that, all in all, it was delightful. The only thing that might have made it better would have been the presence of Professor Leslie Boskin,

“Scholars have been talking about the Pickle for years, but I don’t think it even exists,” Professor Boskin said, waving his cigarette around. He smoked a lot when he was excited, and he was always excited when he was talking about Smollett.

Neal Carey sat there rapt. He was a senior at the time, an English major, and Boskin was an academic star. Neal had chosen Columbia University for two reasons: instructions from Friends, and Professor Leslie Boskin, the country’s foremost scholar of the eighteenth-century English novel. A famous authority at age thirty-seven, he had come out of a nowhere Pennsylvania steel town to win a scholarship to Harvard, which he parlayed into a Rhodes. His first book, The Novel and the New Reading Public, redefined the field. He was a true eighteenth-century gentleman: He paid his bills, shouted his share of the rounds, and believed first and foremost in the sanctity of friendship. One of those friends was Ethan Kitteredge, who on the deck of Haridan had told Boskin the truly picaresque life story of his promising young student Neal Carey. Not long after that, Boskin invited Neal to partake of a Chinese dinner. Every aspiring undergraduate in the English program knew what that meant: an invitation to become a graduate student under Boskin’s wing. Two years of harassment, browbeating, nit-picking, and slow torture.

Neal was thrilled. It was all he had ever wanted. He dug into his Peking duck and listened. Boskin was on a roll. His black eyes glowed.

“You see, Smollett struggled for years just to get noticed. He had an inferiority complex like a mule at a donkey convention. He was Scottish, he was relatively uneducated… in those days surgeons were pretty low on the social scale. So when his first novel, Roderick Random, came out, he thought he’d finally be accepted by the London literati.” Boskin paused to lay some strips of duck and some plum sauce onto the pancake and to take a sip of Tsingtao. “But he wasn’t. Johnson, Garrick, all the boys still snubbed him. So then he writes Pickle and he lets them have it. Really vicious satire. Not to mention the Lady Vane memoirs he throws in for the hell of it. Imagine it, here is the supposed diary of a highborn lady all about fucking around; and people are wondering, where did Smollett get this shit? And Pickle is a smash! The public loves it! And he’s picked up by London society. Johnson, Garrick, all the boys.”