Bookscout (2 page)

He lived in a room above a store on Broadway. There was an icebox and a bare table, a sofa that was gradually losing its stuffing, two chairs, a small bed, a closet. The bathroom was down the hall. The window looked down into the street. In the summer he liked to keep it open; he liked the sounds of life, the noises of traffic. But the weather was turning now. Soon the snow would fall, and the window was shut for the season. Joel slept in the bed; Lacy on the couch. He had met Lacy last year during the big Christmas freeze and they’d been together ever since. Lacy had been on the skids for a long time. He’d been penniless and hungry and worst of all cold, and Joel had brought him here for a touch of Christmas spirit.

That was ten months ago. In a way, Lacy was like a faithful, friendly hound: he was company of a sort without being a bother. Lacy didn’t know much, but he did know when Joel wanted to talk and when to leave him alone. He was a small man; he reminded Joel of Ratso in that movie Midnight Cowboy, only Lacy didn’t have Ratso’s cunning or willingness. Initially Joel thought to take Lacy in for a day or two; then, after Lacy had been with him a month, Joel thought to teach him bookscouting. If they could double-team a sale—one work one side while the other worked the other—it stood to reason they’d miss fewer choice items. But Lacy never learned it. Lacy would pick up the cheapest, gaudiest thing on the table. If it had a colorful cover he might stand looking at it for five minutes. “Ain’t this purty, Joel?” he would say, and all the while he’d miss something truly valuable that had been stacked against it.

Joel tried to explain about book club editions and their general worthlessness in the used book trade. But Lacy didn’t understand. He never learned it and now Joel thought he never would. Now Lacy went out of his way to avoid the cheap-looking stuff. That’s how Joel missed a rare copy of
Tarzan and the Leopard Men,
a $200 book if ever there was one. There was just too much to this business for a mind like Lacy’s to absorb. Lacy might eventually have learned the difference between book clubbers and regular publishers’ editions, but when you threw in the element of pulp fiction, which also by its nature looked cheap but brought in almost unbelievable prices, Lacy was lost. He would instinctively shy away from a Burroughs or a Sax Rohmer, remembering the day Joel had scolded him, and that day Popeye Lamonica had walked out with the Tarzan.

Popeye was a bookscout to be reckoned with: a mean, brawling man in his forties who knew the book business and how to milk it. In the course of a Saturday morning, Joel and Lacy might meet Popeye three or four times at yard sales across Capitol Hill. Sometimes Joel got to the books first, sometimes Popeye did. There was no love between them. Popeye was brash and intimidating and he could get physical. More than once Joel had seen him muscle other scouts to get at the good stuff. Nobody knew his real name: people called him Popeye because of his voice, a gnashing of gravel that sounded astonishingly like that of the cartoon character.

He figured he’d meet Popeye at least a few times today. It was Saturday, the last day of autumn. There would be a sprinkling of sales across Capitol Hill, then everything would close down for the winter. Like the other full-time scouts, Joel would continue to work the cold months, but then he was confined mainly to two stores, which were worked by everybody. The competition any more was terrible, but this year there was a desperation of sorts to his search. It had not been a great summer. Usually he saved summer’s money to get himself through the winter, but keeping Lacy as well as himself had taken its toll. He was three months behind in his room rent, and only last night he’d been informed by Mr. Jacobs who ran the building that if the entire balance wasn’t paid by next weekend they’d have to get out.

He needed a couple of big books, and badly. They were on the streets before nine, canvassing the hill for signs. It was even bleaker than he’d anticipated. Sales were few and far between and most didn’t start till ten o’clock. Joel’s method of operation was to arrive early, ring the doorbell and ask about books. If there were some, he’d ask to see them: that way, even if he couldn’t buy till ten, he’d know how things stacked up and could set his priorities. Popeye and most other serious scouts operated the same way. Even at that it was like a fascinating Chinese puzzle. Denver’s Capitol Hill was a vat of streets, thirty blocks long and fifteen deep. If a sign fell down in the night, bookscouts might not know of a particular sale unless they cruised up a side street by accident. That, of course, was part of the intrigue. Many were the days when Joel had worked the entire hill only to find a gem of a sale tucked into Richthofen Place or in some side street south of Sixth Avenue.

Today was that kind of day. They cruised the length of the hill and beyond, and came back up Eighth Avenue. There was precious little: by eleven o’clock they had hit a dozen places and bought half a dozen books. By eleven-thirty he was about to quit. That’s when Lacy saw the sign. Hanging by one nail, it looked old and useless, but something told him to look. Sure enough, it was a moving sale, dated today only, in a quiet street two blocks away.

The house was half way down the block. Capitol Hill is always clogged with cars, and they had to park around the block and walk. But Joel didn’t mind: he had a feeling about this place, the same kind of feeling Columbus must have had when he stepped off in the New World. This was virgin territory; he could almost smell it. Then, around the opposite corner a familiar figure came walking toward them.

“Popeye, Joel,” Lacy said.

“Yeah, I see ’im.”

Popeye saw them too. His pace quickened until he was coming at a trot. Joel had never been able to push or run after books: a man lost his last shred of dignity when he did that. They reached the wrought iron gate at almost the same instant. Popeye muscled in first and went clumping up the steps. Into the hall the three of them went. A man sat at a table over a cash box near the door. “Where’s the books?” Popeye said. The man motioned to a set of stairs that led to a basement. Down they went, Popeye in the lead, and there in the basement was a wall of books, a world of books, more books than Joel or Popeye had seen in a month’s hard scouting. And not a book clubber among them; a scout gets to know, almost instantly, the difference between book clubbers and the real stuff.

Popeye began to grab. He grabbed titles at random, tried to suck it all in, the useless with the useful, the buggers with the gems. “You stand back,” Joel said to Lacy “You’ll just get in the way here.” He got as far away from Popeye as he could, starting on the opposite end. He saw at once that it was a random library, built along no particular pattern except that it was mostly fiction. Nothing wrong with that: the best prices were being paid for old, out-of-print literature. And this was old, not antique surely, but old as far as modern first editions went. Whoever had compiled this had fallen in love with literature, say, around 1948, and had bought books all through the early fifties. And that was fine too: there were plenty of damn valuable titles from those years. In more ways than one, it was Joel’s own era. Even as he thought this he saw it: the one book he had to have, the one he’d gladly leave Popeye Lamonica lying in his own blood to obtain.
Something for Nothing,
by Walter Behr. A $500 book, yes, so rare that he had never seen it in all his twenty years of scouting. But more, oh so much more than that. It lay half way down a shelf, in the middleground between them. He reached for it. Popeye saw him, saw the book in the same instant, and lunged at it. Both fists tightened around the spine. With a cry of rage, Joel wrenched it away, and books sprayed off the shelves and spun across the floor.

“You son of a bitch,” Joel said. “You get away from me.”

“Gimme that book,” Popeye said.

Joel moved toward the stairs. Popeye moved to cut him off. Joel picked up a poker from the fireplace.

“I’ll kill ya, Popeye, so help me Jesus I’ll split your damn head open.”

He was breathing hard and trembling. He couldn’t imagine himself frightening a man like Popeye, being at least twenty-five years off his prime, but there must have been something in his eyes. Popeye moved back. Joel slipped past him and dropped the poker on the stairs as he went up. At the door he stopped to catch his breath. The man at the cash box eyed him suspiciously.

“You okay, fella?”

“Yeah, sure. How much’re your books, pardner?”

“Fifty cents apiece.”

He fished out two quarters, tucked the book under his arm and went out into the street. He didn’t know where Lacy was, didn’t care just now. Nothing mattered but to get the book home safe.

He heard Lacy’s voice, too late. He turned and Popeye was coming down on him, looming like some medieval giant. Popeye suckerpunched him, caught him a straight right to the ribs as he was turning. He doubled up, his breath gone, and fell to the sidewalk. The book spun away in the grass. Popeye stepped over him and went after it, but Joel reached up and grabbed his leg. “Get the book Lacy, get it and run!” he shouted.

Popeye kicked at him and tore his leg free. But by then Lacy had scooped up the book and was running hell-for-leather down the street.

Popeye chased him for half a block, then gave up. He stood on the street shouting senselessly after Lacy’s dwindling form. “Lacy, you bastard! I’ll get you for this, Lacy! You feeble-brained moron, I’ll kick your brains in!”

He waited in agony for Lacy to return. He hunched over the back of a chair and gazed down into Broadway traffic, imagining the worst. At last Lacy appeared, darting furtively between people pouring out of the Woolworth store across the street. Lacy had his coat buttoned tightly around him, concealing, one could only hope, the book; his head moved quickly from side to side. He came in fits and starts, a fugitive looking more than ever like a fugitive by trying so hard not to, taking cover in a doorway for minutes on end, then hurrying on to the next one.

Of course Popeye had no way of knowing where they lived. Besides, that kind of anger would quickly wash away. Popeye would have gone back into the house, and perhaps found more good books there, and in an hour it would be all over. They would see Popeye again next week, and nothing would be said about it.

Lacy looked up and saw Joel sitting in the window. Joel motioned him over and Lacy dashed out in traffic and was almost felled by a car.

Joel had visions of a book mangled beyond repair, but it was still picture perfect. The cover was just as he’d remembered it, just as he’d first seen it all those years ago: the lovely pale background, the cracked teacup, the drop of dark fluid spilling like a tear toward the author’s name. Walter Behr. Damn. He opened it ever so slightly and heard the binding crack. Inside was a pink reviewer’s slip. A mint review copy, worth maybe another hundred over what a standard first might bring. Six hundred dollars over the counter; Ramsey would give him one-fifty sure, maybe two-fifty if Joel told him how much that money meant, maybe three if he had a buyer primed and ready. Two hundred would set him right again: pay up the rent, buy some groceries, buy him some time. But there was a bigger question gnawing at him.

Did he want to sell it?

Could he sell it?

“I done good, didn’t I, Joel?”

“Yeah, Lacy. You done just fine.”

He decided to go to Ramsey’s. Lacy was afraid to venture out into the streets, so Joel left him there. He wrapped the book in a brown bag and put it under the seat of his car. He brooded as he drove, as a man will when he reaches a fork and may take only one road. The book was so special, and if he let it go now he’d never live long enough to find another copy. The publisher, Henry Holt, had brought out maybe three thousand copies. Press runs were smaller then; costs were so much lower, and it was a lot easier for a book to earn itself clear. Say thirty-five hundred copies, but it had not come even close to selling that many. Too literary, the public said. Not literary enough, the critics said. Pretentiously literary, but without a proper foundation, the academics said. And they were all wrong. It was a helluva book, a novel about a man who comes to a new level of self-awareness in two hundred pages. But it didn’t sell. Maybe eight hundred copies sold and the rest were pulped. And after that Walter Behr had gone off in another direction. His second novel
was
a success; his third made lots of money and got all the attention in the world. But it was that rare first book that was still, after all these years, considered the author’s best.

Life was funny, wasn’t it?

And the book world was small, incredibly confined and self-contained. Ramsey knew about his fight with Popeye before he arrived. The moment he opened the door, Ramsey said, “Where’s the book?”

Joel laughed. “God, news travels fast.”

“Popeye was in a while ago. Says he’s laying for you guys. Claims you pulled the book right outa his hands.”

“You’ll believe anything if you’ll believe that.”

Ramsey smiled. “Yeah, I figured it might be the other way around.”

Joel pulled up a stool and they sat talking. The store was empty; Saturday afternoons were unpredictable, and today was one of the bad days. “People are bracing for the cold,” Ramsey said. “They’re out buying firewood, not books. So what’s happening? You gonna sell me that Behr book or not?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Ramsey; I just don’t know. I found some other stuff this morning.”

“What stuff?”

“Aw,” Joel said, “nothing much, really.”

“No,” Ramsey said. “When you find a Walter Behr, the other stuff don’t matter much, does it?”

“You want to see it?”

“Sure I want to see it. You got it on you?”

“It’s in the car.”

He got the book, took it carefully out of the bag and laid it on the counter under Ramsey’s eyes. “Ummmm-uh” Ramsey said. “Review copy, too. Damn, that’s nice, Joel. Bet it’s been sitting on that shelf untouched for thirty years from the look of it. Look here, some of the pages still haven’t been cut open yet. Tighter’n a drum and twice as pretty. Let’s get that cover in plastic before something happens to it.” He took a protective cover from under the counter and began to wrap the dust jacket as if it were a newborn babe.