A Rare & Deadly Issue by Marlena Thompson

Chapter One: All’s Fair

“Five thousand dollars for this letter? But it’s not even handwritten. It’s typed!”

Jenny Maguire’s tone was incredulous. Ten months in the antiquarian book business hadn’t dulled her wonder at the fantastic prices bits of paper could command.

She’d addressed her question to a slender young man with fashionable stubble and an air of infinite superiority. He was holding the costly missive the way a mother might her newborn child. In a voice heavy with the exaggerated patience reserved for the very young or hopelessly dense, he said, in an affected British accent, “My dear, this isn’t just any TLs.”

“TL. . . ?” Jenny began, immediately sorry she’d let on she didn’t understand what the initials meant.

“TLs. That’s a typed letter, signed.” Noting Jenny’s nametag identifying her as an exhibitor at the fair, he said, “Tsk, tsk. If you’re a bookseller, dear, I advise you to brush up on the jargon. Anyway, about this Chandler TLs. It’s an amazing piece. He actually explains why he started writing pulps in the first place. Most letters go on about . . .” he paused, searching for the ultimate slur, “. . . domesticana.”

Jenny would bet this dealer didn’t own a house in the suburbs with a minivan parked in the driveway. Despite his arrogance, Jenny acknowledged the truth of his words. If she wanted to be an effective bookseller, she’d better learn the lingo quickly. Still, she wasn’t totally unenlightened, and she felt the need to prove that fact to this young dealer. Looking at the letter, she said in a voice she hoped conveyed professional assuredness, “I can see what this is. I just wondered why a TLs by Raymond Chandler should go for so much. I saw an Agatha Christie letter in which she writes about her work, and it was selling for about half that. Hers is an ALs, too. An autograph letter, signed.”

Eyeing a potential buyer approaching his booth, the dealer turned away from Jenny, but said nothing, for which Jenny was grateful. She’d been aching to call him a rude little snob and had he uttered another word, she might have done so, which truly would have been unprofessional.

She looked down at her watch: 2:16. Her lunch hour was officially over at 2 p.m. She glanced in the direction of the booth Alex had rented for the duration of the book fair. She didn’t want to return to it just yet; Alex had been touchier than usual these last days. She had no desire to be chewed up and spit out like the tobacco he’d taken to lately.

Not that she didn’t understand Alex’s heightened sensitivity. A full month hadn’t passed since his brother, Wally, had died a horrid death. In his own hot tub, no less. She’d never met Wally Harbolick, but Alex used to speak about him all the time. “My big brother, always looking out for me,” he’d said on more than one occasion, as if the two were still adolescents and not grown men. It was clear Alex had idolized his brother. Jenny wondered why he hadn’t withdrawn from the fair altogether, since it came up so soon after Wally’s. . . .

She hated the word “murder.” In her mind, it was distinct from all other words, oversized and rubricated, like principal words in medieval manuscripts. Like Alex, Jenny had also lost family to sudden violence. Both her parents had been killed in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem when she was still a child. She supposed Alex must take comfort in knowing his brother’s murderer had been caught. It was closure of a sort, more than she’d ever had.

Reflecting on the fervor with which Alex was trying to make sales today, Jenny guessed he was among those who best cope with grief by burying themselves in work.

Deciding she’d pondered death long enough for one afternoon, she hurried back to the booth.

Jenny had been to book fairs before, but none glittered as brightly as this one in the Armory in New York. With the notorious provinciality of the native New Yorker, she thought of her city as the capital of the country, Washington being just the place where the president and politicians did business.

Among the exhibitors were some of the most eminent antiquarian booksellers in the world. Almost two hundred of them crowded the large hall, each renting a space large enough to hold one to three small bookcases and a glass display case.

There were three lengthwise rows of booths—two rows backed against the walls and one dividing the room in half. Though each booth contained identical glass display cases and small, wooden bookcases, Jenny was impressed by how most dealers managed to make their booths distinctive. Wall space behind the booths was covered with such varied embellishments as hand-colored prints, ancient maps, and signed photos of assorted literati and glitterati. One dealer had even laid an exquisite Oriental rug in the entry to her booth, perhaps, Jenny thought, to intimate that this fair was not so very different from the Eastern markets of old where wives were bartered for camels.

This gathering was singular because of the merchandise, which, to a bibliophile, was spectacular.

The true antiquarian would seek—and find—incunabula, books produced before 1501. Collectors of contemporary fiction would be thrilled with the incredible selection of modern first editions, some so current they were barely off the best-seller list.

Those who liked porn with a little panache would delight in books with risqué fore-edged paintings depicting nude beauties frolicking in pastoral settings.

And the book lover for whom content is second to form would revel in the finely crafted books produced by certain nineteenth-century English private presses.

Jenny belonged to this last category. Though a voracious reader, she came from a generation that sustained itself on a diet of paperbacks. From Penguin classics to romance novels, whatever the content, they all “felt” the same. The idea of a future with only cyberbooks with no “feel” at all was too horrific for Jenny to contemplate.

When the grandmother with whom Jenny had grown up protested that her granddaughter “threw away good money” on hardbound books, Jenny would explain that reading great literature in paper wrappers was like drinking fine wine from a Styrofoam cup.

She was therefore in tactile heaven the first time she felt the luxuriant handmade paper and vellum-bound covers of the jewel of the nineteenth-century private presses, the Kelmscott Chaucer.

It had happened while she was studying for her doctorate degree in English literature. At almost thirty-six, she’d been older than most full-time doctoral candidates. She had been an English teacher in a Brooklyn middle school for twelve years before deciding to get a Ph.D. She’d loved teaching during the early years of her career. Though she never tired of her students, she began to resent what she felt to be an encroaching parental tyranny when it came to the curriculum. When a group of parents vociferously objected to her teaching Bram Stoker’s

Dracula (“Vampires are the devil’s disciples and should not be brought into the classroom!”), Jenny decided she’d had enough. She began working on her doctorate and hoped that somewhere during her studies she would discover a new professional direction.

While visiting a friend in Washington, D.C., she had attended a local book fair and experienced what she later came to think of as an epiphany. She could still remember the red hair, red beard, and shocking blue eyes of the dealer who’d encouraged her to touch the Chaucer, the finest book ever produced by the Kelmscott Press.

“Go on, now. Touch it. It’s the only way you can appreciate it fully,” he had said in a lyrical accent that Jenny couldn’t place definitively. Its mix of Celtic cadences could have been Irish, Scottish, or a pleasant something else.

She had obliged him, stroking the covers gingerly, like a virgin exploring her lover’s body for the first time.

As she caressed the book, the dealer told her about the Kelmscott Press. “It was set up by William Morris, the nineteenth-century English poet and master craftsman. He was unhappy with the shoddy craftsmanship of his day and wanted to make books that were true works of art. And so we have this. Go on, touch it again.”

Jenny hadn’t needed to be encouraged. She loved the feel of the silky vellum. As she made slow, circular movements against the book cover with her fingertips, a hand lightly touched her own. “It’s a lovely, gentle touch you’ve got, but firm. You can tell quite a bit about a person by his—or her—touch.”

Jenny had looked up into the bright blue eyes staring unwaveringly into her own black ones. It was a look from which Jenny felt powerless to disengage. Not that she wanted to. The eyes that held hers conveyed keen intelligence, confidence, and something else Jenny couldn’t quite name. Whatever the ineffable quality was, it had mesmerized her. That, and something disturbingly familiar about his face.

“Did you know that?” asked the dealer. Jenny knew that only a moment had passed since he’d made an earlier comment, but she felt that since then, an age had passed. She didn’t remember what he’d been talking about and hadn’t a clue what he was asking.

As if guessing her dilemma, he smiled. “I said that the touch of a person, be it rough or gentle, indifferent or purposeful, reveals quite a bit about that person’s character.”

“Well, yes, I suppose it would. I never gave it much thought,” responded Jenny, regaining her composure.

He smiled broadly, revealing a set of slightly crooked teeth and twin spider webs around his eyes. Why did those countless crinkles make him seem more like an old friend than someone she’d just met?

She had no time to consider that question as the dealer took her hand in his. “You can also tell quite a lot about people by their hands,” he said. “My granny could do that.”

“Read palms, you mean?”

“That, too. But she could read people just by looking at the size and shape of their fingers.” He turned her hand over and ran the tip of his fingers along the length of hers. “Such long, slim fingers. My granny would know straightaway you’re an artist, and tell you so.”

He had smiled again, but then turned and acknowledged someone else. He excused himself and in an instant was gone.

Although Jenny hadn’t even learned his name, the dealer had made an ineradicable impression on her. It was a meeting she’d come to believe was destined. She had been toying with a few ideas about a new professional direction, but after her brief encounter with the intriguing Celt she was suddenly sure what she wanted to do. She quit her doctoral studies in English literature and, over the next few years, obtained another master’s degree, this one in library science. She took classes in leather tooling and restoration. Like William Morris a century earlier, she hoped to produce books that were, in form at least, objets d’art.

It seemed Jenny would justify the stranger’s remark that his “granny” would deem her an artist.

Jenny’s own grandmother was not oblivious to her granddaughter’s artistic talents. Although skeptical of the practicality of her granddaughter’s career choice, she was not entirely opposed to it. “The art of making beautiful books is in our tradition,” said Rosa Toledano, referring to her own Sephardic Jewish heritage. “Some of the most magnificent illuminated manuscripts were created by Sephardic Jews: the Lisbon Bible, the Sarajevo Haggadah.”

Jenny couldn’t resist teasing her chauvinistic grandmother. “My father’s Irish heritage might also have something to do with it. The Book of Kells is hardly a comic book!” The paragon of surviving Irish manuscripts from the early medieval period is more like it, she thought.

Rosa had sighed. “Well, I hope you can find work in such a field. After all, this is not the twelfth century, or even the 1960s. Everything now is so . . . disposable. Have you considered creating something a little more useful? Jewelry, maybe? You could do that anywhere, even here in New York.”

“Nope,” Jenny had said. “My mind’s made up. I don’t only want to be an antiquarian book restorer, I want to be the best there is. That’s why I’m going to Los Angeles at the end of the year.”

Rosa’s silence led Jenny to suspect her protests had less to do with pragmatism than her reluctance to part with her only and much-loved granddaughter. Not that leaving New York was going to be easy for Jenny. She hesitated to leave Rosa who, despite her relative good health and remarkable energy, was still over eighty. Rosa was also alone, unlike Grandmother Maguire, whose many sons and daughters made sure their mother was well looked-after. After her parents had died, Jenny had been taken in under the protective wings of her father’s siblings, especially his three brothers whom she often thought of as her rough-and-tumble guardian angels. Leaving their sheltering circle of love would be as hard for Jenny as leaving Rosa. Her concerns were somewhat allayed after she’d arranged for a neighbor to do Rosa’s shopping and look in on the older woman on a daily basis. It was all the “care” the independent Rosa would allow, anyway.

Jenny had decided Los Angeles was the best place to learn her craft; the many new and flamboyantly wealthy collectors there eager to exchange cash for culture had made that city a mecca for dealers who sold leather-bound books by the yard. So she had bid her family a tearful farewell and headed west.

She had hoped to become apprenticed to one of eclectic L.A.’s small private presses that specialized in printing beautiful books in limited editions. But jobs at those select publishing houses were even scarcer than the books the houses printed. Soon after arriving on the West Coast, Jenny had landed a job as a cataloguer at The Deckled Edge, an antiquarian bookshop in West Hollywood. Owned and run by Alex Harbolick, The Edge’s impressive inventory included many leather-bound books from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Emilio DiAngelo, a master binder from Ravenna, Italy, had a shop next to The Deckled Edge and was happy to share his knowledge with someone as eager to learn as Jenny.

Jenny was delighted with the arrangement and considered herself lucky—most of the time. Seeing Alex outside the shop’s booth at the New York book fair with his arms folded across his chest, she felt her luck might have run out.

“Reggie! I hope you haven’t rushed back on my account. You only work for me, you know.”

Jenny’s immediate response was annoyance, though she tried to temper it by reminding herself this man had recently lost a brother. Not only had Alex used a tone heavy with sarcasm, he’d also called her by the nickname he knew she hated.

“Come on, now,” she said. “Give me a break. I’m only a few minutes late and last week I put in at least eight hours of my own time on the First Editions catalogue. And please don’t call me ‘Reggie.’ You know I don’t like it.”

He smiled ruefully. “Sorry. Forgot. Guess I’m just beat.” His shoulders slumped and he rested his head momentarily on his hand. Whatever remnants of resentment Jenny still felt dissolved completely. Alex was mourning his brother and she was moved that he allowed her to see his grief. His eyes were filled with such raw pain, she was about to reach out and touch his arm. Then he straightened his shoulders and the moment passed.

“It’s just that I could have used your help,” he said. “I’ve been here by myself for the last hour. Might have made a few more sales if I’d had someone to catch the little fish while I reeled in the big one.” Alex smiled slyly. “But, what a catch.”

“Oh?” commented Jenny, taking the bait as she knew he expected.

“Yup. Just sold Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, the second issue of the first edition, for eighty-five hundred dollars, to a dealer from Kyoto named Narrate. Had I been a little more persuasive, I could probably have gotten even more. But I went easy on him because I know he was crushed a few years ago when the Asian market came tumbling down.”

“But we don’t have A Christmas Carol, do we?”

“We didn’t—then we did—now we don’t. Ahh, the beauty of a fast buck!”

“I remember seeing A Christmas Carol yesterday at the booth down at the other end of the room, Brown’s Booksellers. It was only five thousand dollars. Was that in worse condition?”

“Don’t be dumb. It was the same book. Lucky for me, Narrate didn’t see old Brown holed up in his crummy half-booth in the corner. When I spotted Narrate, I remembered that he’d asked for A Christmas Carol at the Boston Fair a couple months ago. So I rushed over to Brown, told him I wanted to examine the book ’cause I was considering buying it, then ran to Narrate and offered it to him at eighty-five hundred. He was glad to have it, and I made a tidy profit for five minutes’ work and some fast thinking. Don’t you agree?”

“I can’t disagree. But it’s not the most ethical way to sell books, is it?”

Alex’s eyes darkened.

“Hey, Snow White, wake up and smell the monkey cage. It’s filled with about as much crap as you’re shoveling now. And no one would agree with me more than Narrate. Business is business. If I wanted to do ethics, I’d have gone into religion. Just think. I could have been some TV preacher who gets caught on camera with his pants down or another paragon of ‘ethics,’ like, say, a politician, maybe? But no, I chose to be a book dealer.”

His voice softened suddenly and a smile played on his lips. “I guess I’m acting like a sorry s.o.b. It’s just that you’re a little naïve. But that’s why I love you.”

Jenny considered the man who stood before her. She’d seen his mood swings before. This one had nothing to do with grief or any other transient situation. It was just Alex. She’d often marveled at his ability to go from irascible to irresistible faster than he revved his brand-new Jaguar (which he said suited him better than the Mercedes it had replaced) from zero to eighty. It was more than the brilliance of his cosmetically altered smile. It was his knowing just what buttons to push to make anyone he talked to, man or woman, feel special. Jenny knew his charm was calculated and superficial, but knowing that did not confer immunity. Alex was a master manipulator.

He could be snappish. When he drank, which wasn’t infrequently, he sometimes got mean. But his tears of contrition always seemed genuine, and when he asked for a hug of forgiveness, he got it, even from those who knew better. Like faith healers, cult leaders, and other masters of the psychic con, Alex had an undeniable knack for turning erstwhile victims into lifelong devotees.

It was a talent he exploited with consummate skill, even more so than Jenny knew. Those who did know the details of his exploits were at a loss to explain exactly how he got away with it most of the time.

Once, after having had a few drinks too many, he smashed his car through the front of a video store. His passenger received whiplash and facial lacerations while Alex walked away without a scratch. And, he had convinced his sober friend to claim responsibility for the crash to keep him out of jail, for he’d had other DWI offenses. Once he was “in the clear,” Alex severed all contact with his generous passenger, who nonetheless remained loyal and never revealed the truth to authorities.

Alex treated his lovers no better. After he’d lost interest in a brief fling with an employee, he’d beguiled the still-besotted cataloguer into seeking employment in another shop, “to help get over the heartache.” Another employer might have been hit with a whopping sexual harassment suit. Alex still received annual Christmas cards from his former cataloguer.

“Hey, I just remembered,” said Jenny. “I didn’t leave you to work the booth on your own. Lenny was supposed to be here to help out. I asked him to cover for me, and he said he would.”

Alex’s eyes narrowed. “Since when do you listen to anything my idiot of a nephew has to say?”

For all that Alex had adored Wally, he couldn’t abide his brother’s son. When Wally had asked Alex to hire Lenny, Alex had initially recoiled, but he couldn’t refuse his brother. Wally had practically raised him after their mother died. So Alex had taken Lenny into the business, and the contempt that uncle felt for nephew seemed to swell when the link between them died.

Lenny wasn’t much younger than Alex, but the physical contrast between the two men was striking. Alex was five-foot-six and delicately built. Lenny was big. For every pound of his uncle’s spare flesh, Lenny carried at least two. Topping six-foot-five, Lenny had impressive muscles that bulged shamelessly through the T-shirts and jeans he favored, much to his dapper uncle’s distaste.

Alex’s small stature and constant denigration of his nephew invited retorts from Lenny’s wife, Charlene, that Alex was “plum jealous” of Lenny because Alex was such an “itty-bitty thing.” She actually used such expressions in everyday conversation.

Born of humble parentage in a flyspeck of a town just outside Pascagoula, Mississippi, Charlene had long ago discovered the advantages of cultivating the image of a “belle” in L.A., the city that, if it hadn’t exactly created the Scarlet O’Hara image, packaged and marketed it in its almost universally accepted form.

In fact, Charlene wasn’t far from the truth. Alex was jealous of his nephew. The considerable age difference between Alex and Wally had made the latter almost a surrogate father to the young brother who worshipped him. Lenny’s birth had changed that relationship forever.

“You know,” Alex continued, “I didn’t even want Lenny to come to New York. But he insisted he really needed ‘hands-on’ experience at a fair. Now I’m itching for a ‘hands-on’ experience myself. I’d like to get my hands around his throat!”

Jenny wondered if the anger Alex was expressing toward Lenny was a safer emotion to express openly than the grief he felt for Wally. She sighed. She had difficulty unraveling the personalities of men less complex than Alex.

Though she didn’t tell Alex, she agreed with his opinion of Lenny. He was vulgar and coarse. But listening to Alex running down his nephew all the time was draining. She was eager to change the subject. “You might be pleased to know I’ve been spending my time learning the business. Found out that one Raymond Chandler TLs can fetch five thousand dollars. Yet Legacy Bookshop is selling a terrific collection of twenty Virginia Woolf letters for about thirty-five thousand. And they’re handwritten. I mean . . . holographic.” Since her earlier humiliation by the insolent book dealer, Jenny was eager to prove she could talk trade. “I guess literary merit doesn’t count for much when it comes to market value,” she said.

Alex smiled disdainfully. “Academic types like you are really a hoot. You come to work in the antiquarian book trade thinking every dealer is like the guy in 84, Charing Cross Road. And that every collector would just about croak after touching Shakespeare’s First Folio. That’s a crock. Would you care for a little lesson?”

Jenny knew she would get one anyway, so she didn’t bother to answer.

“Ray Bradbury is a damned good writer—and an important one too, right?”

Jenny agreed, as would most bibliophiles. After all, Bradbury had written Fahrenheit 451, the speculative fiction classic that exalted books.

“But he signed plenty of books in his day, so his signature isn’t as valuable as that of some authors who aren’t half as good.

“Now guys like Salinger and Kerouac weren’t so generous with the old John Hancock. Hell, you should see what signed Kerouacs go for these days. As it happens, these guys were good, but even if a writer’s mediocre, if he was a hot commodity and was shy about signing books, his autograph could be scribbled on doggie-doo and it would still sell for megabucks.” He paused and added thoughtfully, “Especially if he’s dead. So much for ‘literary merit.’ The operative equation in this business is if it sells, it’s good, not the other way around. And for the record, literary merit is pretty subjective. There are those of us who think Raymond Chandler is a hell of a better read than Virginia Woolf.”

Jenny said nothing. She didn’t enjoy being patronized, but was getting used to Alex’s harangues. She was also learning to choose her battles, and decided this wouldn’t be one of them.

Taking Jenny’s silence for capitulation, Alex’s mood lightened. An engaging grin replaced the vestiges of a grimace, and he said in an almost mellifluous voice, “I must be crazy, yelling at you when I should be making nice. The nights are long and chilly here in New York. And a gorgeous girl like you shouldn’t be sleeping alone. Hmmm. Maybe I shouldn’t assume that you are. Sleeping alone, that is. You might have someone stashed away for the night.” Catching a look on Jenny’s face that clearly told him it was none of his business, he released an exaggerated sigh. “Oh well, if I do lose out tonight, I only hope it’s to a guy. I’d cry if I found out a gorgeous babe like you was a dyke.”

Alex never let political correctness prevent him from being offensive. The handsome and flirtatious Alex had returned. His reentry had been so facile Jenny had trouble remembering he’d ever left.

Though Jenny knew Alex’s sexual overtures technically constituted harassment, they didn’t annoy her as they might have coming from someone else. He came on to every woman so indiscriminately, it seemed as if he was as interested in maintaining an image as in scoring. What disturbed her more were the cracks he frequently made about “dykes and fags.”

Instead of challenging his insulting comments, which she knew would bring on a nasty scene, she tried to defuse them. “As it happens, I won’t be sleeping alone. I brought along my teddy bear, and I do believe it’s of unspecified gender.”

Alex smiled wryly and turned to re-price the books he’d recently bought at the fair. As he worked, he continued to instruct his disciple, this time without his previous rancor. “Take Gerald Conway, for instance,” said Alex as he replaced the prices penciled on the upper right corners of front endpapers with ones at least twice as high.

“Gerald Conway?” she repeated. “I know him. I’m a mystery buff, you know. He’s the one who wrote the Sgt. Carruthers mysteries. Sgt. Carruthers became almost as popular a character as Inspector Morse when PBS adapted Conway’s stories for TV.”

“Right you are,” responded Alex, not bothering to look up as he spoke. He worked with the assurance of a man who knows when to trust his instincts, never lingering for more than ten seconds over any one item.

“He wrote the Carruthers mysteries and a hell of a lot more besides. He’s supposedly written more than anyone else in his field in the twentieth century. Except for maybe Georges Simenon.”

“Conway died last year, right?” asked Jenny, although she didn’t really require confirmation. “I saw a retrospective of some sort on PBS recently. In fact, I think they’re planning to rerun the whole lot of Sgt. Carruthers episodes on a special Mystery series.”

Alex looked up momentarily. “I don’t watch PBS. Not enough T-and-A. But you’re right. The combined powers of death and television have made Conway’s name a household word again.”

“I’m guessing he also was reluctant to sign and inscribe books?”

“You guess correctly. Signed and inscribed Conways are as rare as breasts without implants back home in L.A. Of course, that old coot Conway wrote so much and lived in so many different places that no one can be sure when a nice little cache of love letters might turn up under some hag’s moldy old mattress.”

“I guess. You said Salinger’s signatures and inscriptions were rare. I suppose that’s why the love letters he wrote thirty years ago to his young mistress sold for so much at auction, even though he was still alive at the time.”

“Right. That kind of ephemera goes for a goddamned mint.” Alex smiled, looking truly happy for the first time all day.

Jenny was making a mental note to check out the bookcases in her old bedroom in Brooklyn for Conway first editions when she was startled by a woman’s high-pitched scream. It was followed by a terror-filled plea.

“Lenny. Leave him alone. Please, honey. You’re gonna kill him!”

Click Here to return to Rare & Deadly

Click here to browse in our Online Book Store
            To take a tour of our Publishing House Click here:
       ©Pearl Street Publishing, LLC 1999-2006