Harry Kaplan's Adventures Underground (39 page)

Myself, I wasn't sure where in creation Marco Polo had traveled, but just looking at the book was enough to give you ideas. I could picture him at some juncture in his wanderings, about to cross a broad river where archers were poised for his protection on the forked tongues of dragons. I saw the trunks spilling silks and goblets and devil's inventions, the camels champing intelligently in their golden reins. I saw the whole caravan shimmering miragelike as it boarded a paddle-wheeled ark several parasangs long. Buff-skinned ladies were chained to their litters, their jeweled navels shining through lounge pajamas like beacons through fog. Sadly they played on their dulcimers and slide trombones.

“This here a rare edition,” the old gent was saying, having totally ignored my caveat. His voice had a soothing bass resonance and his breath, as he leaned toward me over the counter, exuded a pleasant fragrance of gingery rosé. “It were salvage by my pappy from the wreck a the steamboat
Sultana
, long with sixty-leven white folk an a sho't ton a hemp. This uz famous, the city have ereck a stone which you can read it bout my pappy Mistah Hezeki Sledge. Well suh, the time have come when the book turn around an hexchange the compliment. What it done am it have save his natchl life. See that, tha's a bullet hole.”

I was beginning to feel certain mutinous stirrings, unbusinesslike palpitations in the area of my chest. It was a kind of excitement that threatened to undermine the reputation for hard-headed professionalism I hoped shortly to enjoy. I nodded like now I'd heard everything.

“Un-hunh, and I'm the Rabbi Shmelke of Pshishke.”

This tripped the old guy up, if only momentarily. During that lull I came to understand how, in business, your left hand might take liberties that the right need not know about.

As the old-timer began tentatively to resume his pitch, I slowly unfolded my arms. I sent the fingers of my left hand spidering down the counter toward a booklet of unstubbed pawn tickets. This, along with the rubber stamp and ink pad, I began to gather toward me. At the same time, with my right hand I punched a cash register key, the drawer springing open with a silvery
brrrng
. Looking idly in the till, the way you'd peer into a sack to see what was for lunch, I interrupted the old guy to offer him two bits.

His venerable head recoiled as if from the impact of such an insulting offer. “You be pull my leg or what!” he exclaimed. “I have you ta know this are a priceless hairloom, got gre-e-e-at sentimental valyah!”

As his frown intensified, his lower lip extended until it drooped over his chin like a sock in a wringer. “I is mos disappointed,” he repined. “Course, in time like these whachacall-em hard time which it ain't never been no soff time down on Beale…” He inhaled as if to steady himself for the sacrifice he was called on to make, then presented his impressive set of ivories again.

“Time like these, I b'lieve I can see my way ta let y'all have this precious volume fo the picayune price a, shall we say, fi dollah.”

My jaw dropped over the unnegotiable distance between five dollars and twenty-five cents. Any self-respecting merchandiser would have given the old bluffer the bum's rush out the door. But I told myself that this type of sparring would stand me in good stead for subsequent transactions—I needed the practice. Without further hesitation I came back with a compromise.

“A buck,” I said, “take it or leave it.”

Now he would know for future reference, and put the word out on the street, that Harry Kaplan was nobody's fool. He had the gift of driving a hard bargain; he had the horse sense. I dipped into the till where the jeweler's glass lay among loose change, and pushed back my specs to stick the lens in my eye. Now I wanted the visor, the rubber thumb, all the paraphernalia my papa had used to complete the illusion that he was what he pretended to be. The props made the man—this might have been true in my father's case, though in my own I was more convinced by the minute that I was born for this job.

Making a show of examining the old man's property more closely, however, I made the mistake of actually examining it more closely. Through the lens I couldn't help but observe certain features I'd overlooked at first glance.

“Two dollah fitty cent,” countered the old-timer, having chosen this moment to revise his expectations. But I was too absorbed in my scrutiny of his book to be distracted.

What I saw, when I'd unclasped and parted the covers, were crumbling mud-brown pages, water-stained and undulant as the lip of a clamshell. I saw how the print was aged to unreadability, the washed-out maps and drawings bled to apparition. I saw a pear-shaped hole several hundred pages deep, which I thought was less likely the work of a bullet than a worm.

I almost groaned aloud at how generous the bid of an entire buck now seemed. There was of course nothing for it but to retract my extravagant offer, the question being how to do it with a measure of diplomacy. Not that this crafty old codger, who was currently conceding unprompted to a buck seventy-five, deserved any special treatment. But I wouldn't want him to accuse me of violating the particulars of haggling, especially on this inaugural occasion. It wouldn't do that I should be taken for an amateur.

In an effort to override the change of heart my face must have betrayed, the old man had made his move. Already he was extending a shell-pink palm to receive his loan. A little flustered but still determined to back out of the transaction, I searched my mind for a way to get rid of him. Then I had an idea. Affably reaching over the counter, I took hold of his parchment-dry hand and gave it a hearty shake.

“Fine, fine,” I assured him in response to an inquiry that neither of us had heard him make. “Always nice to see you, fairly makes my day. Next time bring the wife. And by the way, have you had a chance to read this? Well, so long. Ver farblondjet. Abyssinia.”

My intention was that, confounded by my erratic behavior, the customer would grab up his property and beat a hasty retreat. For a few seconds the old man did seem to be genuinely taken aback, but instead of fleeing the shop, he continued to stand his ground. He studied my face, evidently undecided as to whether I was pulling a fast one or just plain nuts. In the end, whatever his conclusion, he was suddenly all teeth again, returning my handshake so vigorously that the jeweler's loupe fell from my eye.

Then it was my turn to grow anxious, wanting to retrieve my fingers from the grubby warmth of his tenacious grip. No fooling, I wanted my hand back. But the old man hung on so tightly that you'd have thought he had hold of a leprechaun. He kept pumping my arm like he expected me to start spitting shekels.

“Young man,” he announced, as together we seemed to be shaking on the deal, “it done look like you'n me is in bidness.”

Later that afternoon I took in a battered bugle. It wasn't much, but the hepcat character who brought it in really handed me a laugh. He told me that he'd shaken it down, along with a peck of persimmons, from a tree where an angel was napping in Handy Park. This I recorded dutifully, entering the accounts on cardboard shirtfronts in place of the ledgers I planned to buy.

After the bugle I took in a lump of rusty metal that could have been a Cracker Jack prize, though the luckless veteran who pawned it guaranteed it was none other than the “Congregational Legion of Honor, awarded for bravery above and beyond the call of the wild.” I was skeptical until he offered to throw in, as a bonus, Baby Face Nelson's trigger finger in a jar of alcohol. Then I paid a little more than face value for a pair of pennies, pinched (according to my customer) from the eyes of a famous dead hoofer. He boasted that he'd used them thereafter for the taps on his own dancing shoes.

I took in a tambourine made from a lynching victim's hide, a locket containing a curl of Shirley Temple's hair, some gold-capped molars that Casey Jones had lost in a brawl. I took in a hand-carved walking stick with its crook whittled into the shape of a serpent's head. The draggle-footed party didn't say so, but I thought it might have passed for the rod that Moses used to perform his magic tricks. Maybe this was stretching it, but that's what it put me in mind of—the magic rod the bashful prophet sometimes borrowed from his brother Aaron, the talkative one.

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