Huckleberry Fiend (3 page)

“It would probably be about four hundred pages, wouldn’t you think?”

“Maybe five hundred.” (I knew better, of course.)

“So maybe half a million dollars?”

“Well, it might depend. A partial manuscript is worth a great deal less than a complete one. Unless the Buffalo Library wanted to sell— and that seems
very
unlikely— there’d be no chance of completing it. So in the end, maybe it wouldn’t fetch more than $250,000.”

“That sounds fairly low, considering.”

She nodded. “Absolutely. After all, we’re talking about
Huckleberry Finn
.”

“ ‘All modern American literature’,” I quoted, “ ‘comes from one book by Mark Twain called
Huckleberry Finn
… There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since’.”

She nodded again to show she knew the quote. “Hemingway wasn’t the only one who thought so. I could show you people who’d probably kill to own a thing like that.”

“Veritable Huckleberry fiends.”

“Oh. You know about us.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Once more she flushed in that appealing way she had. “Nothing. I was just surprised you used that phrase. The point is, you just can’t imagine the amount of reverence and hero-worship and
cultism
that’s grown up around this man. I could introduce you to people who’d give ten years of their lives if they could just spend an evening with him.”

“But what would they give for the long-missing Huck Finn holograph?”

“Who knows? But I think $250,000 is cautious. Certainly that much. Maybe as much as a million.”

“How would you get such a thing authenticated?”

“If you were smart, you’d come to us— that’s what the best dealers do. But a lot of people just don’t bother.”

“What! Why wouldn’t they?”

She put up her palms in simultaneous frustration and puzzlement. “I guess they just don’t want to know. A dealer once said to me, ‘Put it this way, Miss McCormick— if you found a nugget that weighed a ton, would you want to know it was fool’s gold?’ ”

“He must have read
Roughing It
.”

“That’s mostly about silver.” She spoke automatically, her heart not really in it. I could see she was feeling downcast about the authentication problem.

She pushed over two copies of letters from Mark Twain— the same words, but different dates. One was written on letterhead from the Bohemian Club in San Francisco. “Look at the date,” said Linda.

“Eighteen eighty-three.”

“He left San Francisco in 1866, returned briefly in ’68, and never went back after that.”

“Maybe he had some leftover stationery.”

She shook her head. “Look at the blue lines.”

She had drawn diagonal lines from the left-hand margin to the right-hand one, a few inches down the page. “Compare the two documents,” she said, “and note that the lines cross the same letter of the same word in each one. The one dated 1875 is genuine. It’s possible Clemens copied it later on Bohemian Club stationery, but not with every letter lined up exactly as it was before. That’s far too precise to be real. This one’s a forgery. But it’s one of the few times a collector’s bothered to check. Unfortunately, he did it as an afterthought.”

“So he’s out of luck.”

“Not necessarily. If he wanted to, he could probably unload it for what he paid or more.”

“It’s that bad, is it?”

She shrugged. “People are stupid.”

“What kind of paper did Mark Twain write on?”

“Half-sheets, usually. Why don’t I send you a sample of the real thing along with the facsimile? I know—‘1002’.”

“What’s that?”

She smiled a scholarly and secretive smile. “Probably the worst story Clemens ever wrote. But he finished it about the time he finished Huck, so the paper and handwriting ought to be similar.”

I left Linda with reluctance, but that’s the way things are done at the Bancroft Library, the noncirculating collection of which the Mark Twain Papers are a part. You may examine documents or books only in the reading room, and before you go in, you must check your belongings in a locker, bringing in only a pencil or typewriter. Absolutely no pens. I liked that about the place— it made me feel as if the collection were being well taken care of. I also liked the idea that anyone over eighteen could use the library, not only Cal students and graduates. Anyone off the street could walk in and examine a rare, important manuscript. But of course hardly anyone wanted to.

I did, though. It surprised me how much I looked forward to holding papers that this time I knew, without a doubt, Mark Twain had written with his own hand.

When the facsimile and the story finally came down, I was so excited I couldn’t decide which to look at first. I settled, finally, on the story, and almost fell on the floor when I saw it. The cream-colored paper was the same thickness, size, and color as that of the manuscript I had at home. The clear, expansive handwriting was unmistakable.

Just to be sure, I pulled out the one-page Xerox I’d brought. Booker’s manuscript couldn’t— just couldn’t— be other than the real thing. There was simply no way. I knew instantly why collectors didn’t bother to have documents authenticated. You just
knew
.

I turned to the facsimile, placing my Xerox over the first page— exactly the same size! I started to read: “Well, away in the night, & stormy, & all so mysterious-like…” That didn’t sound right. It should have picked up after Colonel Sherburn shot old Boggs. This seemed to have to do with finding a wrecked steamboat. But then, out of some dusty corner of memory, I remembered the name of the steamboat— Walter Scott. It was the insert. Clemens had numbered it “81 A-l,” the “A,” I supposed, meaning exactly what it does now—“add” or “addition.” The add ran sixty of those tiny pages, and the next numbered page was 160. The first sentence began like this: “They swarmed up the street towards Sherburn’s house…”

Before I went home, I tried to read the story, but, frankly, I was too excited. Its whole name was “1002: An Oriental Tale,” and it purported to be Scheherazade’s version of a lost manuscript. A good idea, but I honestly can’t say whether I agree with Linda that it’s the worst thing the great man wrote. I wondered if, up in the Mark Twain Project, new editors had to take a few months to inure themselves to handling such things. It had been different in my own living room when I didn’t really know what I had. Here, I just couldn’t calm down.

I managed to read enough pages— and also to look at enough of the facsimile— to give me an idea. On these, as on the pages I had at home, the author had changed very little. On the typescript of the Oriental Tale, which Linda had also sent, he had changed a lot more.

After turning in the materials, I gave Linda a call. “Paul!” Her voice was pleased, no doubt about it. “I enjoyed our talk.”

“Me too. You were nice to give me so much time.”

“Nonsense. I felt badly it couldn’t have been longer. Maybe we could continue later.”

I realized with surprise that this had suddenly become a full-blown flirtation. And why not? I wasn’t a bad-looking guy, for a bearded and bespectacled bear. And I suppose I
had
been looking at her in rather an interested manner. “I’d like that,” I said. “Maybe we could have coffee. Meanwhile, though, I’ve got another question. Did Twain make a lot of revisions on the printer’s typescript?”

“Absolutely. That’s why the typescripts are so important to scholars.”

“So the hypothetical Huck Finn holograph ought to be slightly different from the book as we know it.”

“Oh, yes.”

All I had to do was compare— but my copy of the book had burned with my house. “Say, Linda,” I said. “I need a new copy of Huck. Which edition should I get?”

“Ours, of course.”

“The new one, you mean. But aren’t there several other UC Press editions?”

“There
is
no other edition.” She spoke severely.

“What about the 100th Anniversary Edition?” This was quite a famous one, launched with much fanfare.

She made a noise that sounded oddly like a snort. “Little-known fact: They left the last line off.”

Heading for the bookstore, it occurred to me I was learning lots of little-known facts. I couldn’t even imagine how a university press had managed to leave the last line off of any book. Yet there it was. The Mark Twain Library edition (the one Linda called “ours”) had it, the other one didn’t: “The End, Yours Truly Huck Finn.” Sold.

Comparing book with manuscript, I was rewarded on the very first page, where Huck tells part of the plot of
Tom Sawyer
and then says: “Now the way the book winds up, is this: Tom and me found the money the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich.”

In manuscript, the sentence read like this: “The way the book ends up is this: Tom and me found the gold the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich.” The author had added the “now,” changed “ends” to “winds,” and “gold” to “money.”

I read on. And found many more discrepancies. And was convinced: If this wasn’t the real thing, I was the King’s Camelopard.

I started to understand the appeal of collecting. What a thrill to have these papers in my house, knowing that the great man’s thoughts had come out of his head and down his arm and out of his pen and spilled onto them!

I was consumed suddenly by the same compulsion Booker had felt— to get this thing back to where it belonged. Unfortunately there was only one person I knew about who was likely to know where that was— Beverly Alexander. But perhaps not so unfortunately— just because I had property stolen from her bedroom didn’t mean I couldn’t talk to her. Perhaps I could say I was from the Bancroft Library and I’d heard she had the manuscript; if she were legitimate, that ought to prod her into sobbing out her tale of woe. If she weren’t, I’d be able to tell from her reaction.

I liked it. Since she would have no idea who I really was, I wouldn’t be putting myself in any danger. She wouldn’t know where to find me, but if I needed to, I could investigate
her
to my heart’s content. To make it work, though, I’d probably need a disguise. Nothing too elaborate— maybe I’d wet my hair and slick it down, take off my glasses, stick a pillow under my jacket. Ah— and put something in my cheeks to fill them out. That would alter the shape of my head, face, and body, so that, from a distance, anyway, I probably wouldn’t be recognized right away.

I felt it absolutely necessary to call on her— she might sob out a tale of woe on the phone, but I was never going to get any idea of what she was like if I didn’t meet her. And I confess to an overwhelming curiosity about what sort of flight attendant would keep a priceless manuscript in her closet. So I wet down my hair and stuck a pillow in my jacket, though, in the end, I couldn’t bring myself to wear cheek fillers.

Like Sardis and me, Isami and Beverly shared a duplex— only they shared it with the upstairs tenants as well. It was a square stucco building in the Noe Valley, painted a depressing aqua that had caught and held the dirt of ten or a dozen years. I whipped off my glasses as I mounted the stairs, transforming myself into Langhorne Langdon of the Bancroft Library’s Mark Twain Project. (If Bev were a Twain scholar, the name would give me away as a fraud, but that was part of my master plan— she’d grow increasingly upset and give
herself
away as she caught on that I’d combined Clemens’s middle name with his wife’s maiden name.)

A female voice answered my knock: “Who is it?”

“I’m looking for Beverly Alexander.”

The door opened instantly. Behind it stood a very pretty, very scared-looking young Japanese woman. And behind her stood the last person in the world I’d expected to see, or wanted to see, or for that matter, could in any way tolerate seeing. “Paul Mcdonald. Do come in,” said Inspector Howard Blick of the San Francisco Police Department. “Got a pillow in your jacket?”

Damn Blick! The most irritating thing about him was that I never understood his insults. Was he accusing me of being fat or letting me know I wasn’t exactly a master of disguise? The former, I thought, and had half a mind to fling open my jacket, letting the pillow fall zanily at his feet. But the thing was that Blick was a homicide inspector; his presence indicated this was no time for hilarity. I said: “Howard. What a surprise.”

“Get your butt in here.” The next most irritating thing about Blick was that he was unnecessarily bossy, but the worst thing about him— going far beyond mere irritation— was that he had the brains of a ball peen hammer. I’d known him since my days on the police beat, when I could incur his orangutan-like wrath merely by using words he didn’t know in my stories. Arcane stuff like “the” and “as.”

Not wanting to even a little bit, but knowing better than to try to flee, I got my butt into the hallway. “You a friend of Beverly’s?”

“A friend of a friend.”

“You still goin’ out with the gorgeous Kincannon thing?” Kincannon thing? I wanted to hit him, which was the idea, I guess. Due to an unfortunate matter occurring some months earlier, he knew Sardis and he knew a lot better than to call her a “thing.” Especially to me. But I just shrugged noncommittally, proud of myself for not taking the bait. “I mean,” said Blick, “here you are at Bev’s and everything.” He turned quickly to the woman. “Do you know him, Miss Nakamura?” He spoke so sharply she winced. A headshake was all she could manage. He turned back to me. “Beverly’s dead, dildo. Somebody offed her last night.”

“Don’t call me dildo, shithead.”

“I said she’s dead, asshole.”

“No need to swear about it, fuckface.” I was walking a very fine line here. Probably if I called him one more name Blick was going to start reading me my rights, but I figured I could get that last one in. “Impolite to the lady.”

“Mcdonald, what the fuck are you doing here?”

I said: “Miss Nakamura, you’ll have to forgive him. He’s under stress.” She jumped as if I’d sneaked up behind her.

“You know her? Mcdonald, how do you know these ladies?”

How indeed? It was the very question I was struggling with. Ah, but I remembered something. “We haven’t met, but you mentioned her name yourself, Inspector.” I turned to Isami. “Miss Nakamura? Paul Mcdonald. I’m very sorry to hear about your— about Beverly.” I was playing for time, trying to think up some plausible story, and it was finally starting to come to me.