Murdock…hey, Otto, you’ve got customers out here.” She opened a door and a dim beam of light fell out of a back room. “Mr. Murdock?” she said softly.
I saw her in silhouette, moving toward me. “That’s funny,” she said. “Looks like he went away and left the store wide open.”
I groped along the wall and found a switch. It was dim even with the lights on. I took my first long look at how the mighty could fall. Murdock had tumbled all the way down, hitting rock bottom in a rat’s nest of cheap, worn, and tattered books. His bookshelves had long since filled to overflowing, and the floor was his catchall. Books were piled everywhere. The piles grew until they collapsed, leaving the books scattered where they fell, with new piles to grow from the rubble like a forest after a fire. I walked along the back wall, looking for anything of value. It was tough work—the fiction section was almost uniformly book-club editions of authors who aren’t collected anyway: Sidney Sheldon, Robert Wilder, Arthur Hailey. A sign thumbtacked to the wall said books for a buck. Cheap at half the price, I thought.
“You see anything?” Eleanor asked from the far corner.
“Four computer books, two copies of
She sighed. “Put ‘em all together and what’ve you got?”
“Desk-top breeding by vampires.”
She gave a sharp laugh, tinged with sadness. “This place gets worse every time I come here. I’m afraid I’m wasting your time; it looks like Otto hasn’t had a good book in at least a year.“
You never knew, though. This was the great thing about books, that in any pile of dreck a rose might hide, and we were drawn on through the junk in the search for the one good piece. I had worked my way around the edge of the front room and had reached the door to the back when I heard Eleanor say, “Good grief, look at this.” She had dropped to her hands and knees, out of sight from where I stood. I asked what she had and she said, “You’ll have to come look, you’ll never believe it.” I found her near the door, holding a near-perfect copy of
“It’s a whole bag of stuff,” she said. “All Ayn Rand, all in this condition.”
There were two
Six, seven grand retail, I thought. Sitting by the door in an open bag, in an unattended store.
“It doesn’t make much sense, does it?” Eleanor said.
I shook my head.
“If the door blew open, they’d get screwed by the rain in a minute,” she said. “Jesus, Otto must’ve really lost it.”
“Look, you know this guy—do you think he’s so far gone that he wouldn’t know what he could get for these?”
“I doubt that. Otto might not know about the new guys—the Graftons, Paretskys, Burkes—but he’d sure as hell know about Ayn Rand.”
We stood there for a minute and touched them.
“What’re you gonna do?” Eleanor said.
“Damned if I know. I’m dying to buy these from him.”
“What would you offer him?”
I pondered it. “Three grand. Thirty-five hundred if I had to.”
“You could get them for less than that. There are some guys in this town who’d pay him that kind of money, but Otto’s burned his bridges here. I’ll bet you could get ‘em for two.”
“I’d give him three in a heartbeat.”
“Take ‘em, then. Leave him a note, make him an offer like that, and you’ll be doing him the biggest favor of the year. Tell him you’ll send the books back if he doesn’t like it. I guarantee you you’re doing him a favor, because nine out often people would come in here and see those books and take ’em and run like hell. You know that’s true. Take ‘em and leave him a note.”
“That’s probably against the law,” I said, but I knew it probably wasn’t. In most states, theft requires evil intent.
I put the books back in the bag, folded the top over carefully, and tucked it under my arm. “What’s in the back room?”
“Just more of the same,” she said.
We went on back. The room was cluttered with books and trash. In a corner was an ancient rolltop desk half-buried in junk books and old magazines.
