She fought her way through another attack of shakes. “It exists,” she said again.
“That’s pretty definite, ma’am…almost as if you’d seen it yourself.”
She nodded dreamily and I felt the hair bristle on the back of my neck. “A very long time ago,” she said. “A long, long lifetime ago. I don’t expect you to believe me. I just thought you might want to know that your book came out of a collection that was stolen from my family. But I guess that wouldn’t matter either.”
“Of course it would. But you’ve got to have proof.”
Outside, an ambulance went screaming past. In those few seconds I decided to take an objective and academic interest in what she was saying. Her great age demanded at least that much respect, so I ordered myself to go gently and save the assholery for someone who needed it.
I picked up a notepad and felt almost like a cop again. “How big a collection was this?”
“Large,” she said, and I could almost feel her heartbeat racing at my sudden interest. She had my attention: this was why she’d come, this was what she wanted.
“It was quite large,” she said. “You’d probably consider it the makings of a library. A good-sized bookcase full of books. A cabinet full of letters and papers.”
“A library like that isn’t easy to steal,” I said. “A man doesn’t just walk away with that in his hip pocket.”
“This was not a thief in the night. It was done through lies and
Immediately I asked the vital legal question. “Did money change hands?”
She said, “I don’t know, I’m not sure,” but her answer was too quick and her eyes cut away from mine. I knew she was lying and she knew I knew. But what she said next only made it worse. “What difference does that make, if it was a crooked deal?”
That’s the trouble with a lie, it usually leads straight to another lie. A question rooted in a lie is a lie itself. I figured she knew quite well what a difference it could make, and a lie is a lie is a lie, as Gertrude Stein, that paragon of the lucid profundity, would have gushed. Ms. Josephine Gallant dodged it by retreating into her own dim past, and there, so surprisingly that it surprised us both, she saved herself.
“That collection was put together by my grandfather more than a hundred years ago. My earliest memories are of my grandfather and his books. I remember the colors of them…the textures. I remember that room, in a house that exists only in my memory. The pale blue walls. The plaster beginning to crack in the far corner, over the kitchen door. The shiny oak floor. Me, sitting on my grandfather’s lap while he read, and outside, the sounds of horses in the street. The garbageman, with his speckled walrus mustache…nice old Mr. Dillard, who drove a wagon with a horse named Robert. Our windows were always open in the summer and there was noise—all the noises of the street—but it never disturbed my grandfather when he was reading. He could lose himself in a book. If I asked him, he would read aloud until I fell asleep. And if I awoke—if I nudged him—he would start reading again.”
She took a long breath. “If you’ve read Burton’s books, you know they can be difficult. But there are places where they bring a landscape to life, even for a child. My grandfather admired Burton tremendously. The cabinet was full of letters from Burton, written over twenty-five years. All of our books were inscribed to him by Burton, and he had many more that Burton had not written but had sent him over the years, on exotic topics that Burton had found interesting. There was always a little note inside, with some mention of the time they had spent together, and many of the books were extensively annotated with marginal notes in Burton’s hand.”
She smiled. “He often asked me, my grandfather, if I liked his books, and I always said oh yes, I loved them, and he said, they will be yours when you grow up.”
She cocked her head as if to say,
“These are my fondest memories. Listening to my grandfather read, in Burton’s own words, of his adventures in India, Africa, Arabia, and the American West.”
Her smile was faint: fleeting and wistful, lovely in the way a desert landscape must be from the edge of space. In that moment her small untruth seemed trivial and the general unease I had been feeling sharpened and became specific.
She wasn’t talking like a crazy woman now.
Not at all.
Suddenly I believed her.
I had spent years interrogating people, and in most cases I could smell a lie as soon as it was said. The good cops are the ones who know the truth when they hear it.
The little things were what got me. The particulars, like the blue plaster…
The
