Bruce Wagner - I'll Let You Go

“And he never will ,” interposed the cousin.

“—he would not object. He told me a story, something he said that a general once wrote. The general cautioned his troops never to attack men who were on their way home from battle; he said men on their way home were unvanquishable. Well, I wish to bring my father home, sir; I’m on my way home, too. And nothing will stop me from getting there — from finding him! So, if you please, sir, I’d like to ask once more: is there anything else you can tell us?”

Lucy and Edward were in tears.

Mr. Tabori, not unmoved, sat down again with a sigh and smiled sagaciously. “You are here for a gift then — no?”

The children, puzzled at first, got his drift and vociferously agreed. Pullman yawned, shuddering his jowls.

“Then how can I help?”

“The book that was taken,” said Tull. “What was it?”

“A work by William Morris— News from Nowhere . A utopian novel. Not my favorite of the man’s, if I may.”

“Do you mean the British designer William Morris?” asked Edward.

As always, Lucy was shocked by her brother’s casual erudition.

“Oh, he was much more than that!” offered Mr. Tabori. “A voluminous intellect. Poet, weaver, socialist— and publisher. He founded the Kelmscott Press.”

“Do you still have a copy?” asked Tull. “I mean, another copy? News from —”

“Afraid not. The Huntington has one, if you’d like to see it. Or the Clark.” He leapt up, hurrying to a cabinet. “These are all Kelmscott. This row’s vellum — calfskin. These, prenatal; those, live birth. Down here are the linens: blue-backed holland boards. That’s how the Kelmscott Chaucer was first done: blue holland.”

Blue maze, blue board, blue holland … what a blue mystery we weave! thought the pigtailed girl.

“So you don’t have News from No —”

“We do have a Chaucer.” The latter was already laid out on a table. “I hope your hands are clean,” warned Mr. Tabori. “It’s about ninety thousand. The cover’s by Birdsall.”

He showed them the prenatal pilgrims, setting out for Canterbury.

“Sir,” said Tull diffidently. “Did you ever meet Marcus Weiner?” He couldn’t bring himself to say “my father” again just yet.

“Oh, many times! Interesting character — wonderful sense of humor. Wordplay and all. Powerful voice. Great head of hair. Far-ranging mind. Now, mind you, it wasn’t uncommon for someone like him to have an ‘interest’; Hollywood’s always had a romance with collecting. Johnny Depp buys with us — he likes Hunter Thompson ‘firsts.’ Though we don’t usually carry that sort of thing. Ron Bass and Tim Burton, Whoopi and ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’—they all come through. But Mr. Weiner … well, at first I thought he was being a bit precious .”

What’s this? Was the man saying his father was a celebrity? Impossible—

“You said,” Tull stammered, “that it wasn’t uncommon for ‘someone like him’—”

“A Hollywood person. At first I thought it precious that he was only interested in Morris … though after a while, I must say he proved himself extremely knowledgeable.”

“And why would that be ‘precious’—”

“Well, you know. Because he was an agent.”

“Agent?”

“He worked there. Didn’t you know?”

“Worked where ?”

“Why, at William Morris! The agency — he was a hotshot. You mean that you didn’t … but how could you not have—” Mr. Tabori was briefly distressed, thinking again that he’d told too much; but remembering the boy’s eloquent speech, moved on. He pointed to the embossed, intertwining initials of the letterhead the children had mistaken for Marcus Weiner’s. “You see? The William Morris logo.”

Edward began to chortle at the sublimeness of it all.

The same helpful employee who had nearly shooed away dear Pullman now made a little show of producing News from Nowhere as a magician might a bouquet — freshly extracted from a Collected Works , which sat forgotten in the back bindery. Mr. Tabori took the volume and, with a single penetrating glance, encouraged her to leave. She did straightaway.

“I meant of course that we didn’t have the volume available of itself . This is Longmans, Green; it must be sold in toto. It is seventy-five hundred.”

“May I?” asked Edward.

Mr. Tabori handed him the volume; the cousin riffled its pages before settling on a passage from the end:

“Inexpressibly shocked, I hurried past him and hastened along the road that led to the river and the lower end of the village; but suddenly I saw as it were a black cloud rolling along to meet me, like a nightmare of my childish days; and for a while I was conscious of nothing else than being in the dark, and whether I was walking, or sitting, or lying down, I could not tell. I lay in my bed in my house at dingy Hammersmith thinking about it all—”

As he listened, Tull seemed to hear the voice of his father, saw him somewhere in the world agonized by myriad demons, and felt rudely violated — as he had that afternoon with his cousins in the bedroom of La Colonne. He seized the book, plunking it back into the hands of a startled Mr. Tabori while Lucy diplomatically intervened.

“Emerson, I’m a writer myself — of the mystery genre. But I was wondering: do you have the Harry Potters? The original ones, from England?—”

“That’s it!” shouted Mr. Tabori, slapping his thigh. “ Dowling! — ”

“Who?”

“The ‘funny name’—you made me think of it because of J. K. Rowling.”

“Made you think of …”

“The detective— the one who reimbursed us! The detective your grandfather hired. His name was Samson Dowling!”

Let us take a breath.

There was the introduction, pages ago, of a small detail which, in the unlikely event it has entered anyone’s mind since, may have led the reader to imagine the chronicler of this tale to be underhanded. (It would not be the first time he was wrongly accused.) A train of thought, heavily freighted, was set upon a track, then without fanfare derailed.

Inspired by the unfurling of Will’m’s “Strawberry Thief,” the baker Gilles spontaneously shared the story of his visit to a Gallic feast with his then-fiancée — something having to do with illicit songbirds and subterranean gourmands. The divertissement had been summoned from the depths to quell the pastrymaker’s nervousness around his unusual part-time employee, and he ran through it with a flourish before being heckled by the irritated giant. Just as well — Gilles had shot his anecdotal wad and would have been at a loss to continue.

Mr. Mott could not have known the strange, epic feelings he aroused in his burly listener. Right about the time he’d brought his tale around to the posh neighborhood of Marlene Dietrich and the opium eater at the door of the ancient wine cellar, Will’m found himself mentally elsewhere: twenty kilometers outside Paris to be exact, stealthily traversing a golf course during a drizzle. He saw his feet (and those of a woman, her face indistinct, gamely trailing after) step over a low barbed-wire fence, through bower and arborescent meadow. They walked awhile, then froze: in the distance stood a breathtaking apparition — a broken column made of stone. But this derelict fantasia had windows and could be lived in. While the baker droned on about crispy birds and such, Will’m remembed trodding toward the tower under billowing, storm-dirtied skies, the faceless woman tugging at his sleeve with worry. He was close enough to see the darkness within and had nearly entered when a man in short sleeves with a Gauloise stuck to his lower lip, caricature of a Frenchman, appeared on a tractor. He warned them against trespassing; so they never got to go inside.