Night Music (20 page)

His work took him into the small hours, and it was only as he was repacking the books that he spotted, lying in a corner of one of the boxes, the shape of a small volume wrapped in cloth. He couldn't recall handling it during the negotiations with Sandton's son, and he certainly hadn't paid any money for it. The boxes had been empty when he brought them to Highbury to transport the books, and he had packed everything himself in order to prevent any accidental damage. He couldn't imagine how this interloper had contrived to gain passage, unless Sandton had added it when he wasn't looking, although Maggs could understand neither why nor how Sandton might have done such a thing, for he had kept his distance from Maggs throughout the entire process, appearing to regard it as a dull necessity destined to yield only a small profit, and doing little to hide his distaste for the book scout.

Now Maggs unwrapped the book. It had a brown leather binding—relatively undamaged, although clearly of considerable antiquity—and an unusual locking device consisting of a pair of concentric silver rings, each marked with tiny symbols, and each capable of being turned independently. Maggs took a magnifying glass from his desk drawer and examined the lock and its inscriptions. He then went to his shelves, removed one volume of an encyclopedia, found the reference that he sought, and returned to his desk with the book. Yes, the symbols were Arabic-Indic numerals, and Eastern—in all likelihood Persian or Urdu: he could tell by the differences in the designs of the four, five, and six numerals. What he was looking at was an early combination lock of a kind that he had never encountered before. He spent a few minutes experimenting with the dials, to no avail, before putting the book aside. He would look at it again in the morning. It was curious, though. He wondered if he should return it to the younger Sandton and decided to sleep on the matter. The testy negotiations over the purchase of the books still rankled. Had he been a man of faith, Maggs might have chosen to view the little volume as a gift from God, a way of making up for some of his lost profit. He brought the book to his bedroom and placed it on his bedside table. It was the last thing he saw before he turned off the light and closed his eyes.

That night, Maggs dreamed he was working on the lock. His fingers moved in his sleep—testing, turning.

When the click came, it was so slight that it did not disturb his rest.

•  •  •

Maggs slept late the next morning. He woke feeling fractious and unsettled, and barely glanced at the leather book by his bedside, for there was money to be made. He went to the window, checked the sky, and saw no sign of rain clouds. He dressed hurriedly, stuffed a slice of buttered bread into his mouth for sustenance, then placed two boxes of Sandton's choicest books on his little trolley and headed out.

Most of Maggs's business was conducted with the bookshops that lined Charing Cross Road. His dealings with them followed an established pattern. He would divide up his hoard, determining which books were best suited to each individual dealer, and then, once a week, he would pay them all a visit: this one on Monday, these two on Tuesday, that fellow on Wednesday. He preferred not to try to sell books toward the end of the week, when the booksellers' coffers might already have been emptied by other scouts, and a good price would be harder to obtain as a consequence. Then again, Maggs was not above offering to buy a drink come close of business on Friday in order to draw in a buyer, especially if he felt that he had a nice prize with which to bait his hook.

But most of the dealers were not particularly sociable, regarding Maggs and his kind as an unfortunate necessity in the trade, and one that was best left publicly unacknowledged. Some—the ones who regarded themselves as “gentlemen booksellers”—refused even to have him on their premises for longer than it took him to drop off a parcel of books for examination, and then parted only reluctantly with money when they found something they liked, as though doing Maggs a favor by consenting to accept the volumes, let alone pay for the pleasure. Maggs preferred dealing with those who, like himself, were not afraid to get dusty and dirty and sniffed after treasures with all the grubby energy of pigs seeking truffles in a French forest.

Atkinson was just such a dealer. He owned one of the smaller bookshops on Charing Cross Road, although nobody could ever have accused him of not using the premises to its fullest advantage. He had fitted out the shop himself, and any space capable of containing books had been adapted for shelving. He appeared to own only one shirt, or multiple versions of the same: a red-and-white-striped affair that, in fabric and hue, reminded Maggs of a deck chair. In fact, since Atkinson closed his shop for one week each August in order to take the sun at Brighton, it wouldn't have surprised Maggs to learn that, somewhere in the town, one or more such chairs had been reduced to wooden slats in order to serve the bookseller's sartorial needs.

Atkinson didn't allow smoking on his premises, as he claimed that it damaged the books. He refused to drink tea anywhere but in the little office behind the counter, for fear that an accidental spillage might ruin a volume, and even then he sipped directly from a Dewar flask, and always replaced the lid between mouthfuls. There was, it was said, a Mrs. Atkinson, although nobody had seen her in years, possibly not even Mr. Atkinson, whose place of business was the first on the street to open each morning, and the last to close each night. Even then, Atkinson could still be glimpsed inside, examining books by lamplight, or just sitting in his little office, reading and sipping tea.

Atkinson's particular areas of interest included the kind of Asian volumes contained in Sandton's collection. His knowledge of the subject was greater than Maggs's, and his list of potential buyers for such items commensurately larger. Maggs wanted to turn the books around as quickly as possible, for he had his eye on an estate sale in Bath next month, and he trusted Atkinson more than any other dealer in London. Even allowing for Atkinson's percentage on the sale, Maggs would still be comfortably in the black on the Sandton collection, and the money would be in his hands more quickly than if he tried to sell its contents himself.

But Atkinson was busy when he reached the shop—he was on the verge of offloading half a shelf of nautical volumes for at least twice what they were worth, and ten times what he had paid for them—and Maggs knew better than to distract him from such a windfall, especially when he was about to ask for Atkinson's assistance. Furthermore, if Atkinson did well with the nautical volumes then he might be inclined to settle for a smaller cut on the Sandton collection. So Maggs simply dropped off the boxes and told Atkinson that he'd call on him again the next day to discuss their contents. With that done, and his burden lightened, he wheeled his trolley down to the Corner House on the Strand, where he treated himself to a hearty late breakfast in anticipation of the influx of funds that would soon be coming his way.

•  •  •

Maggs spent the rest of the day scouting for books and discovered a nice underpriced first edition of
The Water Babies
at Marks & Co., which he then sold to a young bookseller at Sotheran's for a considerable profit. (Both Marks and Cohen, proprietors of the former establishment, had trained at the latter and would have been galled to learn of the oversight.) With his pockets heavier than when he'd started that morning, and the promise of more money to come, it was a cheerful Maggs who returned to his rooms as darkness fell.

He had forgotten about the little volume until he spotted it lying on his bedside table. He instantly saw that the two interlocking silver rings had separated, and the volume was now unlocked. He had a vague memory of dreaming about the book, but that was all. It had certainly been secure when he went to bed, and he was sure that nobody had been in his rooms since he left that morning. He could only suppose that either his efforts of the night before had inadvertently led him to stumble across the correct combination, and the lock had been so stiff with age that it had taken a while for the mechanism to respond, or the lock was long past its usefulness, and the simple act of fiddling with it had caused it to yield.

Maggs examined the damage of the years, and the exposed parts of the boards and binding. He thought the headband might have been worked at the same time that the book was sewn and cord used instead of catgut. At a guess, he was prepared to date it to the fifteenth century, or earlier, which made it quite the gem. As before, he could still find no trace of decoration on the cover, or any indication of its contents.

He dug up a pair of cotton gloves before opening the book. If it was valuable, he did not want to risk having the dirt and oils from his skin transferring to the paper and staining it. The pages were of a linen fiber mix—he could tell just by looking at them—with rough edges. The first four were entirely blank. The rest—perhaps fifty in all—were covered in script, although rendered in an alphabet and language that Maggs did not recognize. The ink was reddish purple and had not faded in the slightest over the years, so that the pages might have been filled that very morning. The volume was also palimpsestic, so that a turn on the diagonal might reveal a different communication to one familiar with its language of origin.

Maggs's first impression was that the book had been written with a sense of some urgency, for the calligraphy had none of the beauty and elegance of even the more modest European manuscript copies that had passed his way. It seemed to Maggs that what he was holding was a notebook, but it struck him as unusual that a creation such as this—a leather-bound book, constructed with enough skill to survive relatively intact for five or six centuries at least, its pages of the finest quality—should contain only a palimpsest rendered in untidy script.

He spent an hour going through his encyclopedia, consulting examples of alphabets ancient and modern, trying to find a comparable model for the scribbles. He had no success and finally set the book aside, but not before wondering once again about the extraordinary vibrancy of its ink. He carefully touched it with a gloved finger, half expecting it to stain the tip, but the material came away clean.

He decided that Atkinson might know of someone willing to buy it, earning Maggs a nice little windfall. Then again, he could always take it to the British Library and ask someone there to examine it first. Yes, that might be for the best. After all, he reasoned, he could have in his possession the notebook of some Arab genius, an Eastern da Vinci, although an Arab would surely have written in Arabic, and the book's only connection to that civilization appeared to be its lock. Could the lock have been a later addition? Possibly, but Maggs was no more expert in locks than he was in the lost languages of the East.

He went to his window and listened to the sound of a man singing in the pub at the end of the lane, a piano tinkling in accompaniment. The song was unknown to Maggs, but not to the babble of voices that joined in the chorus. He felt no urge to join them. He was, by nature, a solitary being.

It was a warm, close night, so he left the windows open to allow some air to circulate, even though not the lightest of breezes disturbed the stillness. He stripped to his underclothes and went to bed, where he read a couple of pages of
The Octopus.
He had a weakness for books about railways. It came from childhood, he knew, when he would watch the trains pass along the track that ran below his family home. He had wanted to become a train driver, imagining that there could be no finer vocation, but the closest he had ever come to his wish was a seat in a third-class carriage. Instead, he was a single man of indeterminate age who smelled of damp clothes and dry paper and would not be mourned when he died, except perhaps by the handful of dealers who could be bothered to close up their shops for the duration of the funeral.

The singing in the pub stopped, and he heard time being called. He closed
The Octopus
. Tomorrow he would meet with Atkinson, and they would discuss an appropriate price for the books. As he nodded off to sleep, he heard a sound as of the pages of a book being turned. He put it down to the wind, for he was too tired to recall the calmness of the night.

•  •  •

The following morning he again woke later than usual, and his renewed sense of being poorly rested was not entirely unjustified, for the night had remained very humid, and it seemed that he spent most of it twisting and turning in an effort to find a cool spot on his narrow bed. He shaved, nicking himself painfully in the process, and headed for Charing Cross Road, and his meeting with Atkinson. Only when he was more than halfway there did he realize that he had forgotten the little notebook, but he was in no mood to return for it. The British Library would still be standing tomorrow, and Maggs was more interested in Atkinson's valuation of the illustrated volumes, and in discovering how quickly he could sell them on.

Atkinson was on his stool by the window, carefully erasing the penciled price on a modest set of Austen. Beside him were the two boxes that Maggs had delivered the day before, still containing the books. Perhaps Atkinson hadn't got round to looking at them yet, but that would have been unusual for the bookseller, who was generally quick off the mark when it came to making a few quid. But the boxes were in the place where Atkinson habitually placed assortments in which, for whatever reason, he was not interested, there to be collected by their soon-to-be disappointed owner. But it wasn't conceivable that Atkinson was uninterested in those volumes, thought Maggs. They couldn't have been closer to hard cash if they bore the king's head on them.

“All right?” said Maggs. “Warm one out there.”

“Warm one in 'ere and all,” said Atkinson.

The sweat was dripping from his brow, and his underarms were already stained with patches of damp. Maggs was sure that his own shirt was pasted to his back beneath his coat. He should have left it at home, but his coat was as much a part of him as his eyes and ears. He could fit a lot of books into the pockets of that coat, inside and out.