Bookman's promise

Suddenly she was getting all the benefit of my doubt.

Suddenly I had to give her that much simple justice. Suddenly the choices were no longer mine to make. Suddenly I had to hear what she really knew: I had to separate what she thought she knew from what she wanted to believe, and keep what I wanted to believe out of it. Suddenly I had to figure out what the truth was, because, that suddenly, I might have to ask the auction-house people to figure it out for all of us.

I could just imagine what they’d say. There are seldom any guarantees in a book auction, and at first there’d be icy disdain, the kind of ivory-tower, holier-than-thou bullshit that book people dish out better than anyone. Maybe if I made enough noise they’d have to look at it. The Boston Book Galleries was an upscale auction house with a fine reputation, and the book had been sold with a provenance that looked spotless. But in recent years even the most prestigious auction houses had been duped. Some of them had sold their souls and participated in the duping, so nothing was sacred if the book had to be checked. The inquiry would go all the way back to the day when Richard Francis Burton had signed it to some man named Charles Warren.

The old woman looked at me hard, trying to see me through her haze, and again it was as if she knew things that had not been said. She knew how close she had come to losing me. She had broken through a chink in my defenses and she knew that too, even if she didn’t quite know how. She had come with little hope on a journey that must have seemed endless, and in just these few minutes we had reached a turning point. She took a deep breath and we were back to that moment of truth she had sidestepped a moment ago. She tried to smile but didn’t make it, and in the end there was nothing to do but to say what she had come here for.

“My grandfather died in 1906. His library was pillaged immediately after his death, all of it whisked away in a single evening. It’s never been seen since.”

I coughed, politely, I hoped. But the chemistry between us was sizzling now, and I knew exactly what she wanted. She wasn’t just after my book, she wanted it all. Her grandfather’s library had been missing for more than eighty years and Ms. Josephine Gallant, at the end of her life, wanted me to find it for her.

CHAPTER 4

The only sound in the next half minute was the ticking of the clock. She sat waiting while my mind ran through the worst possible implications of what she had said.

I knew enough about the law in these matters to know how murky it could get. Common law says title can’t be acquired even from a good-faith seller if there’s theft hidden somewhere in the property’s history. The term caveat emptor may be part of a dead language but there are excellent reasons why it is still universally known. Richard Burton in his earliest childhood would have had a perfect understanding of it.

Things are seldom that simple in modern American law. State statutes may vary wildly on the same set of circumstances, and the passage of enough time can erode original rights in defiance of legal intent. People die, decades slip away, and what was once clearly their property can acquire a valid-looking new history of ownership.

Eighty years was a good long time, but this old lady had not died. She sat before me, a human relic, waiting tensely for some indication of what I would do. All she had going for her was a faint hope and the tiny matter of my conscience. If I chose to go happily among the world’s most notorious assholes, what could she do about it? I had bought the book fair and square: hell, I could stonewall her forever. Even if she’d had money and the law was ultimately on her side, its process was not. Given her age and the way lawyers jack each other off, she’d never live long enough to see her book again.

I had a hunch she knew these things as well as I did. Even Ralston knew: I could see him in my peripheral vision, out at the end of my art section, keenly interested in us now and no longer making any effort to hide it. Was there such stuff as three-way chemistry? Maybe so, but that didn’t account for everything. We all knew what I could have done. Only I knew what I had to do.

“What are you thinking, Mr. Janeway?”

“Just groping around the edges of a moral dilemma, Ms. Gallant.”

I could almost see her mind churning, hunting for any small thing that would make my dilemma less groping and my choice more moral. But she didn’t know how to get there, and all she could do was ask a blind question. “What can I tell you?”

I picked up my notepad, which had dropped to the floor beside my chair. “His name was Warren, yours is Gallant. You can start with that.”

“Warren was my mother’s name. Gallant was the name of the fool I married, more than seventy years ago. I kept it because I always loved the regal sound of it.”

This too sounded real, but she was still reading doubt into my questions. “Does it seem far-fetched that I might’ve found someone to marry me once, Mr. Janeway?”

“Not at all.”

“I wasn’t always a withered old prune. There was a time when even a young buck like yourself might’ve found me comely. But that was so long ago it might have been on another world.” She touched her cheek as if searching for a tear. “The first time I heard it I thought the name Gallant had the loveliest sound. Tucker Gallant. My God, he’s been dead almost sixty years. I wonder if I didn’t marry him just for his name.”

“You don’t strike me as the type who would do that, Mrs. Gallant.”

“Who knows what type I was? I was barely a grown woman when I met him.”

Her hands had begun to tremble and she looked away, squinting at the light from the street. Hope was fickle and it faded now as reality settled in. “I knew I was coming here on a fool’s errand. You’re being very kind, Mr. Janeway, but I’m not under any illusions about anything. Even if I could prove everything I say, where would I be?”