The Collectors

“Well, that might work,” Caleb grudgingly conceded. “But what if they ask you some question you don’t know the answer to?”

“There’s no one easier to impersonate than a scholar, Caleb,” Stone assured him. Caleb looked very offended at this remark, but Stone disregarded his friend’s annoyance and added, “I’ll be at the library at eleven o’clock.” He wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to Caleb. “This is who I’ll be.”

Caleb glanced down at the paper and then looked up in surprise.

With that, the meeting of the Camel Club was adjourned, although Stone took Milton aside and started talking to him quietly.

A few hours later at the library Caleb was handing a book to Norman Janklow, an elderly man and reading room regular.

“Here it is, Norman.” He handed him a copy of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. Janklow was a Hemingway fanatic. The novel he was holding was a first edition, inscribed by Hemingway.

“I would die to own this book, Caleb,” Janklow said.

“I know, Norman, me too.” A signed Hemingway first edition would fetch at least $35,000, Caleb knew, certainly beyond his financial means and probably Janklow’s too. “But at least you can hold it.”

“I’m getting started on my biography of Ernest.”

“That’s great.” Actually, Janklow had been “getting started” on his Hemingway biography for the last two years. Still, the notion seemed to make him happy, and Caleb was more than willing to play along.

Janklow carefully fingered the volume. “They’ve repaired the cover,” he said irritably.

“That’s right. Many of our first-edition American masterpieces were housed in less-than-ideal conditions before the Rare Books Division really got up to speed. We’ve been going through the backlog for years now. That copy was long overdue for restoration, an administrative error, I guess. That happens when you have nearly a million volumes under one roof.”

“I wish they’d keep them in their original condition.”

“Well, our chief goal is preservation. That’s why we have this book for you to enjoy, because it’s been preserved.”

“I met Hemingway once.”

“I remember you telling me.” Over a hundred times.

“He was a piece of work. We got drunk together at a cafe in Cuba.”

“Right. I remember the story very well. I’ll let you get to your research.”

Janklow slipped on his reading glasses, took out his pieces of paper and a pencil and lost himself in the adventurous world of Ernest Hemingway’s prodigious imagination and spare prose.

Promptly at eleven o’clock Oliver Stone arrived at the Rare Books reading room dressed in a rumpled three- piece tweed suit and holding a cane. His white hair was neatly combed, and he sported a very trim beard along with large black glasses that made his eyes buglike. That coupled with his walking with a stoop made him appear twenty years older than he was. Caleb rose from his desk at the back of the room, hardly recognizing his friend.

As one of the attendants at the front desk approached Stone, Caleb hurried forward. “I’ll take care of him, Dorothy. I . . . I know the gentleman.”

Stone made an elaborate show of producing a white business card. “As promised, Herr Shaw, I am here to see the books.” His accent was thick and Germanic, and very well done.

As Dorothy, the woman behind the front desk, looked at him curiously, Caleb said, “This is Dr. Aust. We met years ago at a book conference in . . . Frankfurt, was it?”

“No, Mainz,” Stone corrected. “I remember very clearly, because it was the season of Spargel, the white asparagus, and I always go to the Mainz conference and eat the white asparagus.” He beamed at Dorothy, who smiled and went back to what she was doing.

Another man came into the reading room and stopped. “Caleb, I wanted to talk to you for a minute.”

Caleb turned a shade paler. “Oh, hello, Kevin. Kevin, this is, uh, Dr. Aust from Germany. Dr. Aust, Kevin Philips. He’s the acting director of the Rare Books Division. After Jonathan’s—”

“Ah, yes, the very untimely death of Herr DeHaven,” Stone said. “Very sad. Very sad.”

“You knew Jonathan?” Philips said.

“Only by reputation. I think it clear that his paper on James Logan’s metrical translation of Cato’s Moral Distichs was the final word on the subject, don’t you?”

Philips looked chagrined. “I must confess I haven’t read it.”

“An analysis of Logan’s first translation from the classics to be produced in North America, it is well worth exploring,” Stone advised kindly.

Philips said, “I’ll be sure to add it to my list. Ironically, sometimes librarians don’t have a lot of time to read.”

“Then I will not burden you with copies of my books,” Stone said with a smile. “They’re in German anyway,” he added with a chuckle.

“I invited Dr. Aust to take a tour of the vaults while he’s in town,” Caleb explained. “Sort of a spur-of-the- moment thing.”

“Absolutely,” Philips said. “We’d be honored.” He lowered his voice. “Caleb, you heard the report about Jonathan?”