The Bookman's Promise

Two O’Clock, Eastern Wartime

The Bookman’s Wake

Booked to Die

Deadline

Denver

Looking for Ginger North The Holland Suggestions

NONFICTION

On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio Tune in Yesterday

SCRIBNER

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New York, NY 10020

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2004 by John Dunning

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Scribner and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

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Text set in Sabon Manufactured in the United States of America

13579 10 8642

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dunning, John, 1942-The bookman’s promise: a Cliff Janeway novel/John Dunning.

p. cm.

1. Janeway, Cliff (Fictitious character)—Fiction.

2. Burton, Richard Francis, Sir, 1821-1890—First editions—Fiction.

3. Booksellers and bookselling—Fiction. 4. Antiquarian booksellers—Fiction.

5. Ex-police officers—Fiction. 6. Denver (Colo.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3554.U494B655 2004

813‘.54—dc21

2003054273

ISBN 0-7432-4992-5

To Pat McGuire,

for long friendship, timely brainstorming, and other mysterious reasons

The man said, “Welcome to
Book Beat,
Mr. Janeway” and this was how it began
.

We were sitting in a Boston studio before the entire invisible listening audience of National Public Radio. I was here against my better judgment, and my first words into the microphone, “Just don’t call me an expert on anything,” staked out the conditions under which I had become such an unlikely guest. Saying it now into the microphone had a calming effect, but the man’s polite laugh again left me exposed on both flanks. Not only was I an expert, his laugh implied, I was a modest one. His opening remarks deepened my discomfort.

“
Tonight we are departing from our usual talk about current books. As many of you know, our guest was to have been Allen Gleason, author of the surprising literary bestseller
, Roses for Adessa.
Unfortunately, Mr. Gleason suffered a heart attack last week in New York, and I know all of you join me in wishing him a speedy recovery
.

“In his absence we are lucky to have Mr. Cliff Janeway, who came to Boston just this week to buy a very special book. And I should add that this is a show, despite its spontaneous scheduling, that I have long wanted to do. As fascinating as the world of new books can often be, the world of older books, of valuable first editions and treasures recently out of print, has a growing charm for many of our listeners. Mr. Janeway, I wonder if you would answer a basic question before we dive deeper into this world. What makes a valuable book valuable?”

This was how it began: with a simple, innocent question and a few quick answers. We talked for a while about things I love best, and the man was so good that we soon seemed like two old bookscout hunkered down together after a friendly hunt. I talked of supply and demand, of classics and genres and modern first editions: why certain first editions by Edgar Rice Burroughs are worth more than most Mark Twains, and how crazy the hunt can get. I told him about the world I now lived in, and it was easy to avoid the world I’d come from. This was a book show, not a police lineup, and I was an antiquarian bookseller, not a cop.

“I understand you live in Denver, Colorado.”

“When I’m hiding out from the law, that’s where I hide.”

Again the polite laugh. “You say you’re no expert, but you were featured this week in a very bookish article in
The Boston Globe.”

“
That guy had nothing better to do. He’s a book freak and the paper was having what they call a slow news day
.”

“The two of you met at a book auction, I believe. Tell us about that.”

“I had come here to buy a book. We got to talking and the next thing I knew, I was being interviewed.”

“What book did you come to buy?”

“Pilgrimage to Medina and Mecca
by Richard Burton
.”

“The explorer, not the actor.”

We shared a knowing laugh, then he said, “What is it about this book that made you fly all the way from Denver to buy it? And to pay
—
how much was it
?—
if you don’t mind my asking
…”

Auction prices were public knowledge, so there was no use being coy. I said, “Twenty-nine thousand five hundred,” and gave up whatever modesty I might have had. Only an expert pays that much money for a book. Or a fool.

I might have told him that there were probably dozens of dealers in the United States whose knowledge of Burton ran deeper than mine. I could have said yes, I had studied Burton intensely for two months, but two months in the book trade or in any scholarly pursuit is no time at all. I should have explained that I had bought the book with Indian money, but then I’d need to explain that concept and the rest of the hour would have been shot talking about me.

Instead I talked about Burton, master linguist, soldier, towering figure of nineteenth-century letters and adventure. I watched the clock as I talked and I gave him the shortest-possible version of Burton’s incredible life. I couldn’t begin to touch even the high spots in the time we had left.

“You’ve brought this book with you tonight.”

We let the audience imagine it as I noisily unwrapped the three volumes in front of the microphone. My host got up from his side of the table and came around to look while I gave the audience a brief description of the books, with emphasis on the original blue cloth binding lettered in brilliant gilt and their unbelievably pristine condition.

The man said, “They look almost new.”

“Yeah,” I said lovingly.

“I understand there’s something special about them, other than their unusual freshness.”

I opened volume one and he sighed. “Aaahh, it’s signed by the author. Would you read that for us, please?”

“
‘To Charles Warren,’”
I read: “
‘A grand companion and the best kind of friend. Our worlds are far apart and we may never see each other again, but the time we shared will be treasured forever. Richard R Burton.’ It’s dated January 15,1861
.”

“Any idea who this Warren fellow was?”

“Not a clue. He’s not mentioned in any of the Burton biographies.”

“You would agree, though, that that’s an unusually intimate inscription.”

I did agree, but I was no expert. The man said, “So we have a mystery here as well as a valuable book,” and it all began then. Its roots went back to another time, when Richard Francis Burton met his greatest admirer and then set off on a secret journey, deep into the troubled American South. Because of that trip a friend of mine died. An old woman found peace, a good man lost everything, and I rediscovered myself on my continuing journey across the timeless, infinite world of books.

If I wanted to be arbitrary, I could say it began anywhere. That radio show moved it out of the dim past to here and now, but Burton’s story had been there forever, waiting for me to find it.

I found it in 1987, late in my thirty-seventh year. I had come home from Seattle with a big wad of money from the Grayson affair. My 10 percent finder’s fee had come to almost fifty thousand dollars, a career payday for almost any bookman and certainly, so far, for me. All I knew at that point was that I was going to buy a book with it. Not half a million books riddled with vast pockets of moldy corruption. Not a million bad books or a thousand good books, not even a hundred fine books. Just one book. One great, hellacious,
killer
book: just to see how it felt, owning such a thing.

So I thought, but there was more to it than that. I wanted to change directions in my book life. I was sick of critics and hucksters screaming about the genius of every new one-book wonder. I was ready for less hype and more tradition, and almost as soon as I fell into this seek-and-ye-shall-find mode, I found Richard Burton.

I had gone to a dinner party in East Denver, at the Park Hill home of Judge Leighton Huxley. Lee and I had known each other for years, cautiously at first, later on a warmer level of mutual interest, finally as friends. I had first appeared in his courtroom in 1978, when I was a very young cop testifying in a cut-and-dried murder case and he was a relatively young newcomer to the Denver bench. That gulf of professional distance between us was natural then: Lee was far outside my rather small circle of police cronies, and I could not have imagined myself rubbing elbows with his much larger crowd of legal eagles.

Age was a factor, though not a major one. I was in my late twenties; Lee was in his mid-forties, already gray around the temples and beginning to look like the distinguished man of the world that I would never be. He was by all accounts an excellent judge. He was extremely fair yet sure in his decisions, and he had never been overturned.

I saw him only twice in the first few years after my appearance in his court: once we had nodded in the courthouse cafeteria, briefly indicating that we remembered each other, and a year later I had been invited to a Christmas party in the mountain home of a mutual friend. That night we said our first few words outside the halls of justice. “I hear you’re a book collector,” he had said in that deep, rich baritone. I admitted my guilt and he said, “So am I: we should compare notes sometime.” But nothing had come of it then for the same obvious reasons—I was still a cop, there was always a chance I would find myself on his witness stand again, and he liked to avoid potential conflicts of interest before they came up. I didn’t think much about it: I figured he had just been passing time with me, being polite. That was always the thing about Lee Huxley: he had a reputation for good manners, in court and out.

A year later he was appointed to the U.S. District Court and it was then, removed from the likelihood of professional conflict, that our friendship had its cautious, tentative beginning. Out of the blue I got a call from Miranda, his wife, inviting me, as she put it, to “a small, informal dinner party for some book lovers.” There were actually a dozen people there that first night, and I was paired with Miranda’s younger sister Hope, who was visiting from somewhere back East. The house was just off East Seventeenth Avenue, a redbrick turn-of-the-century three-story with chandeliers and glistening hardwood everywhere you looked. It was already ablaze with lights and alive with laughter when I arrived, and Miranda was a blonde knockout at the front door in her blue evening dress. She looked no older than thirty but was elegant and interesting in her own right, not just a pretty face at Lee’s side. The judge’s friends were also considerate and refined, and I fought back my natural instincts for reverse snobbery and liked them all. They were rich book collectors and I was still on a cop’s salary, but there wasn’t a hint of condescension to any of them. If they saw a $5,000 book they wanted, they just bought that sucker and paid the price, and my kind of nickel-and-dime bookscouting was fascinating to them, something they couldn’t have imagined until I told them about it.

Miranda was a superb hostess. The next day, as I was composing a thank-you note, I got a call from her thanking me for coming. “You really livened things up over here, Cliff,” she said. “I hope we’re going to see lots more of each other.”

And we had. I hadn’t done much rubbernecking that first night, but the judge’s library later turned out to be everything it was cracked up to be. It was a large room shelved on all four walls and full of wonderful books, all the modern American greats in superb dust jackets. At one point Lee said, “I’ve got some older things downstairs,” but years had passed before I saw what they were.