“Oh,
The city seemed really… well, bright. Remade yet sound, not at all like the brash New World I’d expected. And such friendly people. Preconceptions are always wrong.
We got a taxi.
“Hey!” I’d spotted something. “There’s a pattern. Avenues north to south? Streets east to west?”
Rose laughed at my exitement. “Sure. The rule here.”
“And numbered!” I was more thrilled than Columbus. “In
“Except for Broadway,” the taxi driver cut in. “And lower n’ 14th Street’s real bad. Old-fashioned, y’know?”
He and Rose engaged in an incomprehensible dialogue about whether all even-numbered streets should all have eastbound traffic. I looked out. The place was heaving, for all that it was Sunday. Rose had told him to go round the southern tip of Manhattan to show me SoHo and Greenwich Village. I thought it all wonderful. And I was safe here, which was more than could be said for the place I’d left.
More parks and open spaces and different architectures than the parson preached about. I was exhilarated when we stopped in West 56th Street to disembark. I had an ugly moment of terror about the tip. Rose explained.
“A tenth, fifteen per cent if you’re pleased.”
We were standing in a quiet street outside an antiquarian bookshop of the name Hawkins. Hardly any traffic, and Rose looking distinctly flushed as she fumbled for a key. Why was she nervous? I’d not made any serious mistakes, not said the wrong thing.
“I work here, Lovejoy. I’d like you to see it.”
If she said so. I followed her up the steps into a pleasant but confined shop. She seemed a little breathless, talking too much.
“My sister’s business, really. She’s the one with the knowledge. I’m just a hanger-on.”
“Mmmh, mmmh,” I went, saying the books were really quite good, the usual lies. There’s a feel you get from reading old pages that you don’t from new. I thought Blake a swine until I read his own printing.
“That glass case holds Moira’s special sale stock.”
I paused. Nothing special, save a tatty copy of
“Of course, Moira dreams of the one really big find,” Rose said, switching lights on so I could be impressed all the more.
“Don’t we all, love,” I said with feeling. “Same back home. Er, in California.”
There was a desk at an angle between the cabinet and the door, with unanswered letters spread about.
“We have associates in England, France, Germany. Coffee?”
She had a silvery pot all ready, fresh milk in a carton, cups. Modern gunge.
“Please.” I didn’t like Rose’s let’s-pretend conversation. But that alone wasn’t what was worrying me.
One of the addresses I could see on the letters was not far from where I live. Lived.
“Moira’s on the trail of something now.” Rose already had the pot making a noise. I watched her.
“Special?”
“Something drastic, fantastic”
Oh, dear. I almost switched off. Antiques are an open invitation for every extraterrestrial to orbit in from Planet Greed. We’re all avaricious, wanting Tutankhamen’s gold bracelet for a song, dreaming of finding a Turner watercolour behind the wainscoting so we can ballock the boss and eagle off to Monte Carlo. And legends don’t help, teaching us about King Arthur’s lost crown, Shakespeare’s autobiography, the fabled gold ship lost in the North Sea. Newspapers make us worse, always full of little lads digging up early Christian silver chalices, old aunties discovering that their plain gilt earrings are the ones Cleopatra lost in the Nile, all that. You think I’m against romance? Work a week in antiques. You’ll get weary with reports of miraculous finds that turn out to be utter dross. It’s always somebody else’s exultant face under the banner headline, never mine.
Still, friends justify the means. And Rose was a sort of pal. So I smiled and went, “Mmmh.”
“Moira was the same when she found that Book of Hours. Cream?”
“No, ta.” What’s wrong with milk? “Where, love?”
“Sixteenth-century, French.” She pointed.
“Eh? Oh, aye.”
Pull the other one, I thought. It stood there among the parchment bindings. Phony now, phony always. I think it knew it, too. But next to it was a tattered relic volume that beamed out enough radiance to warm any dealer’s vitals. It was labelled Burnet, probably that Thesaurus which the crabby old doctor had published in Venice about 1700. (Tip: Nothing—repeat, zilch—has soared in price quite so much as the devotional Books of Hours did a few years ago. But be careful. Fakes are flooding onto the market, the better-class ones priced about the same as your average Rolls.)
“I play a game, Lovejoy…”
I on the other hand was wondering about the elegant woman sitting in the back room. She’d been there when we arrived. Rose knew it. She’d manoeuvred me round the wrong side of the desk so I wouldn’t see her. Sister Moira? Only a glimpse, but I was sure she was the aloof lassie who sat and read in Fredo’s. I’d caught her in the reflection of the glass door.
