As Cadence rushed to catch the subway, Barren entered the West End Bar. He went up to the bar and waited for the ogre-man to come over. He watched him in the mirror, a man built like a warhorse. Certainly a potential nuisance if not taken care of now. The man approached as Barren sat, head down.
“What’ll it be, pal?”
Barren looked up. “Be?”
“What would you like?”
Barren just stared at him with his glistening dark eyes.
The big man stared back. He stood no-nonsense still, his huge nine-fingered pair of hands splayed across the expanse of copper bar-top.
Barren slowly said, “Medu.”
The man smiled wanly, doing his best convivial barkeep imitation. “If you mean ‘mead’, you’re in the wrong century. However, if you like weird old earthy stuff, I’ve got something for you.” He turned and retrieved a dark, dust-covered bottle from the back shelf. He put it gravely on the copper bar, label out, as if for inspection, then picked it up and poured a shot glass full. It was a deep brown. It smelled like overturned earth.” Fernet Branca. Italian. I don’t know what’s in it, but I think it’s a liqueur made of loam. You know, dark garden soil. Try it. On me.”
Barren looked at him and slowly took the glass and smelled it and drank the liquid. It swirled and stirred a flow of memories, the smell and taste evoking the very earth on which Barren had so often lain in ambush. He put the glass down and looked dead center into the barkeep’s single eye.
“Your days behind this bar are over, Cyclops.” He watched the big man stiffen, observed the knife scar across his face. “I’ve got some advice for you — leave this place. Now. Don’t be here when I come back.”
The man started to reach for a whiskey bottle, neck first, but something flashed in front of him. Barren’s knife hand sprung out like a viper’s head, cutting the two top buttons neatly from the bartender’s shirt and then whisking his throat. It was a teasing scratch, but not a cut. The buttons rose in the air in slow motion, the man’s lone eye rotating up and then down to follow them.
When the buttons clattered on the bar-top, he looked for the man with the knife. The bar stool was empty, the door already easing shut and cutting off a slice of afternoon light.
The one-eyed ogre-man flipped up the bar partition, walked away from his job that very day, and disappeared from this tale.
Six blocks away, Cadence was late and hurrying. She watched her feet as she quick-stepped up a massive set of stone stairs. She stopped and looked up. Her first impression of Columbia’s Low Library from the outside: Monticello on steroids. It towered up and forward, glooming over all that approached by the twelve immense casements of steps. The doors were massive wooden guardians, fit for a great keep that could withstand a hundred Grendels. She inquired at the door and was quickly redirected by a student. “The working library is the Butler Library. There.” He pointed to another stern edifice across the quad. She scurried over, entered, and stopped cold.
The Reading Room of the Butler Library stretched on and on, its roof soaring up into hazy dimness. She gawked her way to the entrance desk, where an officious-looking student served as minion. His overseer watched from an elevated plinth, half-walled in mahogany and gleaming brass. This man, obviously the head librarian, was thin and bent, long-nosed, with too-long gray hair thinned out on his pate. The whole effect was of a well-dressed, oddball hound dog. He looked impassively down at her over his bifocals, his bony hands resting on the ivory knob of an oversized, dark cane.
Students were coming and going in a stream, navigating through a turnstile activated by electronic ID cards. She approached the desk.
“Can I come in?”
“You a student?” Officious was right, she thought, but well dressed. His nerd-heroic style was straight out of Central Casting.
“No, just a visitor.” She sensed tentacles of red tape creeping toward her as he sighed and pulled out a blank form.
Half an hour later she was in. She walked around the Reading Room, looking back once at the head librarian. He stared down at her and then over his nose to inspect the form she had filled out.
The homeless man from the West End Bar was nowhere to be found.
Then a hand, barely extended from a rumple of coats, beckoned her from the far end of the room. Yes, she saw, that was the man hanging back behind one of the book stacks. Before she even got there he had turned and was disappearing down a long line of overburdened steel shelves. He had a distinctive limp as if dogged by sharp pain. She followed him to an alcove and a heavy oak table, its surface scarred like the back of a long-lived sea turtle.
“Here,” he said, “we can talk.”
She sat, feeling a strange security in the ancient grain and bumpy knotholes in the wood.
“Now you can ask some of your questions, Miss Cadence Goosebumps.”
Good, this was going to save her some time. “Look, until I find some clues about my grandfather, I’m here to get some proofs, to find out the, well, provenance of these documents. So, who exactly are you?”
He replied, rolling his eyes and muttering to himself, “Why have I allowed my indulgence to be so tested?” Then he took the weary breath of the patient saint.
“Very well,” he said. “For reasons I can’t disclose, I can tell you only so much. That being said, in nineteen sixty-eight I was a newly hired teaching assistant here at Columbia. My field, which I was faking, was Marxist literary criticism. Those being the times, I was in high demand. Like any good Marxist, I had come to despise all storybooks and their writers as distractions and opium dealers, respectively. I was offered positions at Princeton and Yale. But, feeling an … uh … urgent need to be outside the U.S. for a bit, and being adept at manipulating the systems of academia, I managed to get a one-semester teaching fellowship at Oxford. Once I got there,” he feigned the world-weary traveler, “I realized the stint was really a glorified go-fer position serving tenured professors. I looked around and grabbed a spot with the most fun guy around …”
“Who?”
“JRRT himself!”
He looked around, as if realizing he was being too explicit and too loud. He hushed his tone and hunched over, “Anyway, I spent six months in his company. That understates it considerably. I learned in a short time an immense amount about some very … obscure things. Then … it was over. I came back here.”
“So you went back to teaching … Marxist theory?”
“It’s … a little more complicated. I brought back some shadows with me. Hell, I was scared. More of that later. In any case, teaching, as in sitting behind a desk, was suddenly irrelevant. The revolution, you see, like the old mole Marx described, was popping up here! So I jumped in feet first, went to the barricades, embraced the vanguard of the movement, and helped shut this place down. Boycotts, marches, riots, the whole schmeer. You don’t remember, child, but that was a glorious time. Along with the tear gas, you could smell change in the air. Within the year, what with the precipitous drop in alumni contributions, that evading arrest thing, and my own refusal to support the system by teaching even one of my classes, I was, to use their term, removed from employment. Bastards. Anyway, that seemed to affect me more than it should, being a revolutionary and all. A kind of malaise took over from there. I ended up living on the street. A vanguard itself in a way, wouldn’t you agree?”
“I guess, but—”
“So, I learned the way of the downtrodden, mastered its perks and shortcuts, figured out how to survive the cold, the dehydration, the looks of disgust. I became used to the lifestyle. It wasn’t the first or last time I morphed my life. They even let me come in here now, as long as I don’t fall asleep. Now even that meager privilege is being questioned, I know it, by the new head librarian.”
He rolled his eyes to give direction. “You saw him, up on that station. I hide in the stacks now.”
“So how did you get to know my grandfather? And where does Tolkien fit in?”
“Charity, my dear, cuts through all distinctions. Your grandfather — an incurable good Samaritan, you should be proud to know — offered me a meal, even held open the door to the West End Bar for me to pass before him. This despite his own meager purse. Do you remember him or know what he looks like?”
“Not really. I was really little, and he didn’t leave behind any real pictures.”
