Bookman's wake

yourself tease so. It does please me that you can laugh at yourself now. Was this a test to see if I’d notice? How could you doubt one who hangs on your every word? I’m returning your little trick, lovely though it is, and I await the real book with joyful anticipation .

None of us rehashed the words, though the last line hung heavy in the room. I opened the second note, a single line scratched out on notebook paper. Hang on to this for me, it’ll probably be worth some money. Nola .

“What do you make of it?” I said.

“Obviously it’s passed through several hands,” Kenney said. “People do leave things in books.”

I turned the pages looking for the poem “Annabel Lee.” I found it quickly, with the misspelled word again misspelled.

Kenney had noticed it too. “Strange, isn’t it?”

I held the page between my ringers and felt the paper. I thought of something Huggins had said: there’s no such thing as a perfect book. If you look with a keen eye, you can always find something. I pressed the page flat against the others and saw that the top edge trim was slightly uneven. There’s always something.

“Just a few more things and we can get started,” I said. “I know you boys are dying to get into this stuff, but you have to help me a little first.”

“What do you want?” Scofield said.

“I want to know everything that happened when you saw that other Raven and held it in your hands. I want to know when it happened, how, where, who was involved, and what happened after that. And I want to know about Pruitt and where he came from.”

“I don’t understand what any of this has to do with you.”

“I’ve got a hunt of my own going, Mr. Scofield. I’m hunting a killer and I’ve got a hunch you boys are sitting on the answers I’ve been looking for.”

48

Twelve years ago, Pruitt had been a hired gun for Scofield Industries. He was a roving troubleshoot-er whose job took him regularly into fifteen states, the District of Columbia, Europe, South America, and the Far East. Within the company he was known as the Hoo-Man, an inside joke that had two cutting edges. HOO was short for his unofficial title, head of operations, but in private memos that floated between department heads it was often spelled WHO . Pruitt knew who to see, who to avoid, who would bend, who would bribe. In third-world countries, Scofield said without apology, bribery was a way of life. If you wanted to do business in Mexico, it was grease that got you through the doors. You could play the same game in the Philippines, as long as you played by the Filipino rule book.

The remarkable thing about Pruitt was his ability to function in foreign countries without a smattering of language. There were always translators, and Pruitt knew who to ask and how to ask it. He was fluent in a universal tongue, the whole of which derived from half a dozen root words.

Love and hate. Sex. Life and death. Fear. Money and politics.

The stuff that gets you where you want to go, in far-flung places that only seem different from the town you grew up in. A military junta has a familiar look to a guy who’s gone before a mom-and-pop city council in Ohio, asking for a liquor license.

Grease rules the day, from Alabama to Argentina.

This was a big job and Pruitt was good at it. He was always at the top of his game when the specs called for double-dealing and mischief. He was a shadow man whose best work could never be preplanned or monitored. He was judged strictly on the big result, success, while the boss insulated himself in a glass tower high over Melrose Avenue, never to know the particulars of how a deal had been set up.

“I wasn’t supposed to know these things,” Scofield said. “But I didn’t get where I am by not knowing what’s going on. I have a remarkable set of ears and I learned sixty years ago how to split my concentration.”

Pruitt had witnessed Scofield’s Grayson fetish from the beginning. He watched it sprout like Jack’s beanstalk, exploding in a passion that was almost sexual. Pruitt knew, without ever understanding that attraction himself, that this spelled money.

With cool eyes he saw Scofield’s collection outstrip itself ten times during the first year. By the end of year two it resembled a small library, with the end nowhere in sight. Scofield was no green kid, to burn bright and burn out when his whim of the day withered and left him dry. Scofield knew what he wanted for the rest of his life. He was a serious player in the Grayson game. Pruitt may have been the first of the Scofield associates to understand the old man’s real goal: to be not just a player but the only player.

By the middle of the third year, Scofield had acquired many of the choice one-of-a-kind items that push their owners into paranoia. He had moved the collection from the office to his mansion in the Hollywood hills, where it was given an entire room in a wing on the second floor. Scofield was nervous. He summoned his security people, discussed plans for a new system, impregnable, state-of-the-art. Pruitt, who was expert in such things, was brought in to consult and was there to help supervise the installation.

Thus sealed in artificial safety, Scofield breathed easier. But no system is better than the men who create it.

Pruitt waited and watched, biding his time.