“And what do you want me to do with it?” ignoring his remark.
Our drinks arrived. I took an ample swallow.
Odd and confounding, Slader lazily stirred the ice in his glass of seltzer with his forefinger, and as he did I caught him staring at my right hand. My instinct was to remove it from the table and place it in my lap where he couldn’t see the consequences of his malicious act but, feeling peevish, I left it in plain view. Let him see, I thought, what he had done. Too much time had passed in the wake of my two straightforward questions, but I added nothing further.
He broke the strange, momentary spell, asking a question of his own. “You remember our mutual friend, Atticus Moore?”
“What about him.”
“You used to be one of his best suppliers of high spots”—as crème de la crème first editions were known in the trade, books that helped mold literary history—“even when you weren’t foisting forgeries on him.” Before I could counter with accusations of my own, Slader raised his hands, warding me off. “I know, I know. I sold him stock myself, some of it golden, some not so much. But long before you consigned him your father’s collection and shipped off to Ireland, you had always provided him with great material. I even bought something now and again when I could afford to—”
“Where is all this going?”
Slader half grinned, half leered, and as he did I noticed one of his front lower teeth was chipped. Prison legacy, I hypothesized. I also noticed one of the men seated at the bar kept glancing over at us, clumsily trying to eavesdrop. Heavyset guy with ginger hair, roundish face, khaki short-sleeved shirt, and cargo pants, more observant of me and Slader than any of the other barflies. Without so much as a thought, I winked at the man and, startled, he looked away.
“The obvious reason,” Slader continued, “that he was able to continue buying all those expensive books and manuscripts, not just from you but from others, was that he had buyers with serious means.”
“I know he was the main source for several large institutional accounts,” returning my full focus to our conversation.
“True, but did he ever discuss his private collectors with you? And, in particular, one named Fletcher?”
“No, I always figured that was none of my business,” I said. “What’s this Fletcher’s first name?”
“It was—past tense, mind you—one of those Yankee blue-blood monikers where the given name might as well have been a surname. Garland.”
“Garland Fletcher,” I said. “Never heard of him, or Fletcher Garland, for that matter.”
“Fletcher’s widow, Abigail, like Fletcher himself, has roots in Massachusetts going back ten generations or more. Well-heeled types. Super private. And, like her late husband, she’s devoted a lifetime to collecting—a bit haphazardly, according to Atticus—New England antiquities, furniture, paintings, all sorts of other period pieces, many of them passed down through the family.”
“Including books.”
“Including books.”
“Including Tamerlane.”
He touched his nose, bared that chipped tooth again, before proceeding to tell me, in plausible, even credible, detail, how Poe’s first published effort came into the possession of a Fletcher relative back in early-to-mid-nineteenth-century Boston and had remained in the family for nearly two hundred years. Because the thing had never changed hands, never been donated to a library or sold at auction, never so much as been appraised by an insurance company, and since the Fletchers hadn’t seen fit to let the world know of its existence, it never found its way onto any census of surviving copies. As black tulips went, this was the most midnight black of them all.
“So what you’re saying is that the widow Fletcher has decided to announce its existence to the world, and Atticus is the one anointed to put it on the market on her behalf. Or, more likely, you’ve stolen it from the Fletchers. Or else Atticus has, and you’re supposed to fence it somehow through me.”
Slader leaned forward in his seat. “Am I wrong in remembering you as a much cooler cucumber back when you were younger? This rush to conjecture isn’t becoming in one seasoned in the, how should I put it, murkier side of the trade,” he said, his tone as flat as the face of a lake undisturbed by so much as a breeze. “That said, Will, there are elements in each of your notions that aren’t entirely incorrect.”
Double negatives, always the sign of a prevaricator. And I didn’t like him calling me by my name. I did, however, need to hear the man out. As disheartening as it was to acknowledge the fact, Slader was dangerous to me in ways no one but he and I knew.
“Abigail Fletcher has no intention of putting Tamerlane on the market. Nor will it be missing from her collection for long.”
Now I was fully confused, but wasn’t going to give him the pleasure of hearing me admit it. I drank the last finger of Jameson and waited.
“Think of it as being borrowed during the course of an appraisal of her collection.”
“Appraisal,” I repeated, as the ploy became clearer.
“Yes, by a trusted expert in the field. At the moment, its morocco solander box is right where it belongs on Mrs. Fletcher’s bookshelf. Just the pearl hidden inside the shell has been temporarily appropriated while the lady herself is vacationing with friends in the south of France. Somewhere near Avignon, I think,” he said, taking a thoughtful sip from his glass.
“You’re mad,” I told him. “That’s plain theft. I won’t be involved.”
Slader slumped back in his chair, exasperated. “You remember that business a few years back when a contractor who was installing a sound system, or maybe security, in a private library figured nobody looked inside all those handsome slipcases, so who would ever miss the treasures they housed?”
“A small wave of perfect Faulkners and other delectables hitting the market all at once—of course I remember.”
“That, my friend, was plain theft,” he said, his mouth sinking into a frown. “A decent idea badly executed. We’re not amateurs who think it’s all right to steal part of a library and leave behind a bunch of empty boxes. We’re far more judicious than that. More disciplined, more circumspect. All we’re doing is taking one thin volume and basically putting the same thing back.”
“I see. Like that 1493 Columbus letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella that was switched out from the National Library of Catalonia, then sold for a million by a couple of Italian rare book dealers,” I said. “That scheme worked fine until the authorities figured it out, negotiated the return of the original. They repatriated it earlier this summer, you may remember, in a fancy ceremony at the Spanish ambassador’s residence.”