Kenney took the news like a world-class poker player. But Scofield began to tremble.
“And, oh, yeah,” I said as an afterthought: “I also happen to have picked up Grayson’s original subscriber list along the way…if something like that could be of any interest to you.”
Scofield fumbled in his pocket and got out a vial of pills. He took two with water. Kenney looked in my eyes and said, “What do you want?”
“Right now just listen. You boys go on up to Seattle and wait for me in your room at the Four Seasons. I’ll either come to you or call you later today or tonight. Don’t talk to anybody about this till I get back to you. Are we all on the same page?”
They looked at each other.
“Yes,” Scofield said in a thin voice. “We’ll be there.”
I got up and left them, pushing my way through the crowd. Outside, the yard looked like a convention of lunatics. People ran back and forth, crawled under cars in the mud, screamed at each other. Two fistfights were in progress off to the side, and in the distance I heard a siren.
I didn’t see Bowman or Trish and didn’t have time to look. I got in the truck and drove away.
I was well up the highway when I realized that something was clinging to my windshield. It was a crisp C-note. Franklin flapped madly against the glass as I banked north into 1-5. I didn’t stop even for him. In a while he lost his hold and blew away.
46
I was waiting at a table in the Hilton coffee shop when Huggins came in. He glanced around nervously, scanning the room twice before he saw me. A flash of annoyance crossed his face, but he chased it away and put on a passive mask in its place. I didn’t move except to raise my eyes slightly as he crossed the room in my direction.
“Mr. Hodges,” he said, sitting down.
“My name isn’t Hodges, it’s Cliff Janeway. I’m a book dealer from Denver.”
If this surprised him, he didn’t show it. His eyes had found the bait that had lured him here, that charred paper chip that had been haunting his dreams since Saturday night. I had put it out on the table, on top of the sheet Trish had brought back from St. Louis.
He leaned over the table and looked at it. “May I?”
“Carefully.”
He picked up the fragment and again gave it the long, hard look through the eyepiece. His breath flared out through his nostrils as he looked. When at last he put the paper down, his eyes looked tired, as if he’d just gone halfway round the world.
“What do you think?”
He grunted. “It’s hard to say.”
“Come on, Mr. Huggins, let’s not play around. The day is going fast and I’ve got lots to do.”
“I’m not sure what you want from me.”
“Let’s start with this.” I shoved the paper from St. Louis across the table and under his nose. “That look like the same alphabet to you?”
It pained him to look: you could see it in his eyes, the sure knowledge that he had something here but he’d never be able to keep it.
“Mr. Huggins?”
“Yes…I guess I’d have to say it probably is.”
We looked at each other.
“So,” he said: “now you can go tell Scofield and that’ll be that.”
I was finding it hard to argue with him. A part of me knew where he was coming from and sympathized with his viewpoint. As a bookman I was offended at the prospect of Scofield buying up every remaining scrap of Grayson’s work. But I had Amy Harper to consider. This stuff was her future.
Suddenly Huggins was talking, one of his now-familiar monologues. But the tone was different: his voice had taken on the soft weariness of the defeated. “Twenty years ago, Grayson was an incredibly fertile field for a collector. He had just died and his books could still be had at almost every auction of fine-press items. I built my own collection piece by piece, scrap by scrap. It was so satisfying. You carve out your expertise, you shape and define it, and because of your scholarship others come into it and find the same pleasures and satisfactions you have. But you remain the leader, the first one they think of when they’ve taken it as far as they want to go with it and they’re ready to sell. Then a man like Scofield comes along and everything changes.”
He sipped his water and gave me a hard look. “I haven’t been able to buy anything now for more than seven years. Only isolated pieces here and there, things that fall into my lap. You can forget the auction houses…Scofield’s man is always there, always. And you can’t outbid him, you’d have to be Ross Perot…I don’t know, maybe it’s time I donated what I’ve got to a library and got out of the Grayson business. The trouble is, I don’t know what else there
