Huckleberry Fiend (18 page)

Cynthia smiled, a little tightly I thought. “Excuse me, will you?” I got the impression this stuff wasn’t exactly new to her.

“You know what’s upstairs?”

We shook our heads.

“Another museum. This house, it’s a museum in itself, but I got another one— a sweet little gem of a museum. Kind of a museum within a museum, you get me?”

Oh, no. Dear God, not another museum. I’d had enough wax tableaux for a decade.

“You want to know what I do? I’ll show you what I do. I’m gonna show you something fewer than a hundred people have ever seen— I’m gonna show you Herb Wolf’s Museum of the Greatest. You ready for this?”

It looked like a ballroom, and also a little like a rummage sale. Odd things were hung on the walls. Others were displayed on specially built pedestals. There were photographs, but no paintings. You couldn’t say there wasn’t art, though. Some of the objects were undoubtedly art— priceless art. And some were old clothes. Like a pair of shoes on a white pedestal.

Our host began the tour with these: “Know whose shoes those were? Ty Cobb’s.”

“Gosh,” said Sardis, obviously trying to figure out what the point was.

“I couldn’t get Black Betsy— or at least I haven’t got her yet. Know what that is, Miss Williams? That’s Babe Ruth’s bat, which is currently— temporarily, I like to think— in the Baseball Hall of Fame. But I, Herb Wolf, have Ty Cobb’s shoes. Ty Cobb, you see, was the greatest average hitter of all time.”

“But—”

“I’m getting to why the shoes. He was an ornery guy, you know what I mean? He used to sharpen his spikes, so they’d hurt when he slid into base and hit somebody. See that?” He turned over one of the shoes.

“Up there— look. That’s Frank Lloyd Wright’s cape.” Next to the cape was a picture of the architect wearing it.

“Here’s one of the best pieces I have— just look at it. Recognize it?” It was a stunning piece of Aztec jewelry. “Montezuma’s. Not any old Indian’s— Montezuma’s.”

I said: “May I examine it?”

“Sure.” He handed it over as casually as if it were a cufflink. I had the same feeling, holding it, that I’d had with the manuscript. Tom Sawyer was right— it was something electric. Or was I nuts? But I couldn’t help it, I felt it. “Recognize it?” asked Wolf.

“It certainly looks like something I’ve seen before.”

“Maybe you get the idea why I keep Pinkie. There’s a couple of governments want that thing— and they aren’t the only ones. Some of this other stuff’s the same— not as famous, maybe, passed from collector to collector, some of it absolutely unknown to the general public— but priceless. Beyond price. You gotta be real discreet buying this kind of stuff. Some of it you have to negotiate, maybe years, with people’s estates and heirs, and different museums and things. And sometimes servants, museum guards, people like that— do you get my drift? Everybody has a price.”

Crusher stared up at a crummy-looking old jacket. “What’s that? It looks like a flight jacket.”

“Yeah. It’s Amelia Earhart’s. See her picture? It’s the first one she ever had— made out of patent leather, of all things. It looked too new so she slept in it for three nights to bang it up. She paid twenty dollars for it. I’m not gonna mention what it cost me. See this here? It’s de Lesseps’s transit— the one he used on the Suez Canal. Do you believe that? You better, baby. It’s genuine. And that thing. Look at it.”

I picked it up and fondled it. “Very nice. It looks like a bit of scrimshaw.”

“It’s scrimshaw, all right. From Moby Dick.”

“But Moby Dick didn’t—”

“Didn’t exist. Sure. Right. But Melville based him on a real whale— the one this came from. He used to hold that scrimshaw while he wrote— used to fondle it just like you’re doing now, and think of
him
out there.”

“Gee.”

“I’ve got stuff you just won’t believe— look— George Washington’s wooden teeth, Sarah Bernhardt’s wooden leg, Lassie’s collar— look at that a minute. Kind of an anomaly, huh? You notice I don’t have one thing from movies in here. It doesn’t belong in a museum of the greatest; it’s not culture. But I got a weakness for dogs, and Lassie was the greatest. I named my own dog after her, didn’t I? The dog my only daughter plays with. Not Rin Tin Tin. Lassie. There’s more books about her. Look— Buffalo Bill’s rifle, Galileo’s telescope, Martin Luther King’s Bible. But you don’t see any paintings, do you? Know why? The Mona Lisa’s not for sale. Not yet, anyhow. And you don’t see a manuscript. Now, I’ve got something in the next room’s going to knock your eyes out, but it’s not a manuscript. I want the greatest, that’s why. Only the greatest. I want Huck Finn. The greatest American novel.”

“You don’t like
Moby Dick
?”

“It’s not available. I would kind of like something by Faulkner, though. Or Pamela Temby.”

“Pamela Temby?”

“Why not Pamela Temby? The best-selling author of all time? Yeah, Pamela Temby. This is no snob museum. This is a museum of greatness.”

“Gosh,” said Sardis again.

“When I get
Huckleberry Finn
, it’s going in a special room. It’s only got three things in it. You ready?”

We went through a heavily secured door into a kind of vault. As advertised, it contained three things, each on its own pedestal. Very beautifully displayed were a small knife, a miniature statue, and a golf ball. The statue looked like a tiny replica of Michelangelo’s
David
.

“That’s right— that’s
David
. You got it. The original
David
. That, Miss Williams and Mr. Wilcox and Mr. Mcdonald— that is the model Michelangelo used for
David
.” He paused and said
“David”
again; kind of whispered it, as if he couldn’t say it enough.

“And the knife?”

“Shakespeare’s. Shakespeare’s quill knife. Shakespeare’s! Do you realize he literally couldn’t have written without that thing? I’m on the trail of a manuscript, too, but it has to be the right one. I’ll get it— these things take time. But for now I have the knife.”

“You’d put Huck in here?”

“Absolutely. I think it’s that important.”

I pointed to the golf ball. “Sam Snead’s?”

His expression, his posture, everything about him, positively personified smug. “Alan Shepard’s.”

“You can’t mean—”

“I do. The one he hit on the moon.”

“But— that’s impossible.”

“It isn’t. I won’t tell you how I got it, or what I had to go through to get it, or how much I had to pay to get it. But I will tell you it isn’t impossible. I’ve got it. Mr. Herb Wolf. Touch it if you like.”

I did, and, as with the scrimshaw, experienced no thrill of electricity. Perhaps you had to want to believe.

“Did you happen to notice,” asked Sardis on the way home, “that he didn’t name it Samantha Wolf’s Museum of the Greatest?”

“You could hardly miss it, could you? How much of that stuff do you think is genuine?”

“Hardly any. Why?”

“I think most of it is. The Aztec thing I’m pretty sure about— I think I saw it in a museum a few years ago. And I figure he’s a pretty canny guy with pretty good sources. Probably most of it comes with a pretty good provenance. But some of it’s such obvious hokum. I can’t believe the guy’s so vulnerable.”

“Say, Crusher,” said Sardis, “what’s Dan like?”

“Classy guy. Paul, can I ask you something?”

“Fire away.”

“Next time it occurs to you to give me advice on how to improve my love life, would you mind keeping it to yourself?”

* * *

I’d forgotten to feed Spot before I left and he was cranky. “Any calls, old buddy?”

“Yes, and it was damned annoying— I was contemplating the mind-body problem, but it was uphill work, what with my stomach growling and the damned phone ringing off the hook.”

“Okay, okay. Here’s some Kitty Queen.”

“Too little too late. I think Booker’s the one who’s been calling, wondering how you’re spending his money.”

“What makes you think that?”

“You’ve noticed you’re not getting anywhere, haven’t you? Why wouldn’t it have occurred to him?”

He was really in a mood. Actually, I was eliminating suspects like crazy. Pamela Temby obviously didn’t have the manuscript and neither did Herb Wolf— unless, of course, they’d cleverly deceived me.

He’d even lied about the phone ringing off the hook. As a matter of fact, I’d think a growling stomach would improve one’s understanding of the mind-body problem and the phone had obviously been no bother at all— only one teeny-tiny little message.

“This is Clarence Jones,” said the caller, “from Fulton, Miss’ippi. I’m wonderin’ if you’re the gentleman placed the ads in the
Tupelo Journal
.”

“Mr. Jones? This is Paul Mcdonald. I placed the ads you saw. Which one are you calling about?”

“Both of ’em, maybe. But I never caught onto that before.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Mr. Mcdonald, one of them ads said you might have somethin’ that belongs to me that was written by Mr. Mark Twain. Now I’m wonderin’— is it some papers that start out sayin’ they was written by Mr. Mark Twain?”

“Well, not exactly, but—”

“It ain’t them papers?”

“No, it is. I mean, I think so. They don’t start exactly that way, that’s all. But close enough.”

“I thought I remembered ’em startin’ that way.”

Need I mention how fast my heart was beating? “Now, hang on, Mr. Jones, I might have your papers. That is, I think I might know where they are, if you’ll just bear with me here. What can you tell me about them?”

“Well, I’d be mighty surprised if you did have ’em ’cuz I threw ’em away ten years ago. But, see, the thing was, there was two ads, and the other one mentioned Mr. Lemon. That was the funny part. See, really, it was Mr. Lemon threw ’em away.”

“Edwin Lemon. Yes. I advertised about his whereabouts.”

“He ain’t been around here in the same ten years. Left town right after I brought him the papers. But I never connected it up, see. Your ads got me to thinkin’.”

“Mr. Jones, I’m getting mixed up. Maybe we could start at the beginning.”

“Well, see, I’m out of work again. I was looking through the classifieds like usual, and I don’t have too much to do, so gen’ally I get to readin’ all the ads, like the personals and everything— keep thinkin’ maybe somebody left me an inheritance or somethin’. You know, maybe I’ll see one says, ‘Clarence Jones, it will be to your advantage to call such-and-such.’ I read ’em just kind of idle-like, daydreamin’, you know. Then all of a sudden there it was— ‘I may have something that belongs to you.’ ‘Cept without my name on it. But it did have Mr. Mark Twain’s name. Mr. Mark Twain’s the pride of our family, you know. Great-granddaddy used to work for him, back in Connecticut. Wadn’t that the place the Yankee was from that he wrote about?”

My stomach was doing more “sommersets” than Peter the cat after Tom gave him the Pain-Killer. “Your great-grandfather worked for Mark Twain?”

“Yessir, he shore did. Used to tell stories about him when I was a boy. Bad-tempered gentleman, Great-granddaddy said. But he could always make you laugh. First he’d jump all over you, then he’d make jokes-like, to kind of apologize.”

“Your great-grandfather actually knew Mark Twain?”

“Worked for him nearly two and a half years— then he closed up the house and went off to Europe to live. Him and his whole fam’ly. Suffered what my great-granddaddy always called ‘financial perverses.’ That used to make Daddy and them laugh so— but Great-granddaddy always said that was what Mr. Sam said— he called him ‘Mr. Sam’— and he wasn’t gonna say it no different.”

“Mr. Jones, about the papers— did he give them to your great-grandfather?”

“No, sir, I don’t b’leeve so. Didn’t give him nothin’, so far’s I know, ’cept headaches and maybe one other thing. See, what happened was, when Great-granddaddy lost his job, he decided to come back to Miss’ippi, where he had fam’ly. My granddaddy was just a boy then. But our fam’ly didn’t do so good here. Granddaddy growed up, had one job, then another, then my daddy growed up and got a job over at the college.”

“Itawamba Junior College?”

“Yessir. He was a janitor over there, till he lost his job. That was about ten years ago, back when I was still in high school. Well, sir, it was mighty cold that winter and we didn’t even have no money for firewood. Mama says, ‘Clarence, you go chop up some of that old junk out in the back. It ain’t no good nohow. May as well burn it.’ Well, see, the reason the stuff was out in the back was the place we were livin’ wadn’t no better than a shed. We’d lost our house— wadn’t ours, really, we were renters— but we couldn’t afford to pay the rent, so the church found us this little place. Couldn’t even fit all the furniture in. And what we had wadn’t worth nothin’, anyhow. So what we couldn’t get in the house we just put in the backyard. And Mama couldn’t see no reason to keep it.

“So I was just choppin’ away on this beat-up old desk that we used to use for a chest of drawers and I come upon these papers. I looked down, couldn’t b’leeve my eyes ’cuz I knew every inch of that piece of furniture— used to keep my underwear and shirts in it— but there was this kind of secret drawer in it. I pulled the papers out real carefully and see what the first one says, about Mr. Mark Twain, you know, and I start thinkin’, maybe when they took that house apart back in Connecticut, they got rid of some old junk— maybe give it to the servants. So I go to try to fin’ Daddy and I found him all right— dead drunk on the bed.

“Now, I shoulda’ left well enough alone, but I wadn’t but seventeen. I wake him up and I say, ‘Daddy, Daddy, did Mr. Mark Twain ever give Great-granddaddy anything? Like any old furniture, maybe?’ And Daddy says, ‘What you wake me up ’bout a thing like that for?’ and smacks me ’cross the face. By now I’m too mad and my pride’s too hurt to go on with it, so I figure I’ll do somethin’ else. I knew Mr. Lemon at the college library ’cuz his mama, Miz Veerelle, used to come around, bring us things, try to help out, you know. Everybody knowed Daddy got too drunk to work and there was all us kids and everything.

“See, I figure if these papers was really Mr. Mark Twain’s, then maybe they’re worth somethin’— least maybe his fam’ly’d like to have ’em back and maybe they’d give us a little reward or somethin’ for ’em.”