A Fine Line (2 page)

“Jesus,” muttered Walt. “You’re all wet.” He pushed Henry off his lap, and the dog came waddling over to me. I held my hand down to him, and he licked it a couple of times. Then he sat beside me and gazed into my eyes.

“I like dogs,” I said. “Dogs make eye contact.”

“They think if they look at you lovingly, you’ll give them something to eat,” said Walt. He snapped his fingers. “C’mere, you.”

Henry stood up, sauntered over to where Walt was sprawled on his chaise, and lay on the bricks beside him.

A moment later Ethan came in through the door in the wall and shut it behind him. “Hi, Brady,” he said. He came over and held out his hand.

I shook it. Ethan was a small kid, skinny and quick like Walt used to be and with the same lopsided smile. Even with his shaved head and the gold stud in his left nostril, he looked about twelve. He was studying screenwriting at Emerson.

“The damn dog got mud all over me,” said Walt.

“We went down to the duck pond,” said Ethan. “I told him to wipe his feet.”

“Get a towel or something. I don’t want him tracking mud all over the house.”

Ethan gave Walt a quick salute. “Aye, aye, sir.” He looked at me and rolled his eyes, then went into the house.

Henry had rolled onto his side beside Walt’s chaise. Walt’s arm dangled down so he could scratch the dog’s belly. “You see that fucking earring in his nose?” he said. “What’s with that?”

“One of my sons got an earring when he was in college,”
I said. “Wore it for about a year, then let the hole heal up.”

Walt rolled his eyes. “You should see the kids he hangs out with. Purple hair, pierced tongues, girls dressed like boys, boys dressed like girls. You can’t tell one from the other. They all think they’re artists.”

At that moment, Ethan came back with a towel. “We
are
artists,” he said. “We’re just not very good at it yet.” He knelt down on the bricks, wiped Henry’s feet, then stood up and looked at Walt. “What do you want for dinner?”

“I don’t care,” said Walt.

“Pasta okay? I can make some pesto sauce.”

“Don’t overcook it,” said Walt. “Last time you overcooked the damn linguine.”

Ethan looked at Walt for a moment, then turned to me. “Brady? Join us?”

I shook my head. “No, thanks.”

“Stay,” said Walt.

“Nope. Thanks. Gotta go.”

He waved the back of his hand at Ethan. “Go cook,” he said. “I got something I want to talk to Brady about. And bring the damn dog with you. He scares the birds.”

“What do you expect,” said Ethan. “He’s a bird dog.” Then he whistled to Henry, and the two of them went inside.

“I don’t know how he puts up with you,” I said.

“Me, neither,” said Walt. “What kind of kid moves in with his crippled-up father, cooks and cleans the house and runs errands and takes all his bullshit?”

“A boy who loves his father, I’d say.”

“It’s not natural.”

I shrugged. “Count your blessings.” I glanced at my watch, then stood up. “I’ve got to get going.”

“Wait a minute,” said Walt. “I need you to do me a favor.”

I sat down again. “What?”

He pointed at a manila envelope that had been lying on the patio table. “I want you to deliver that for me.”

“What is it?”

“Take a look.”

I picked up the envelope and opened it. Inside was another envelope made of stiff transparent plastic.

“Be careful,” said Walt. “Don’t touch the paper. Keep ’em in the plastic. Your fingers will wreck them.”

Showing through the plastic was an unlined sheet of paper with a small pen-and-ink sketch of a bird’s head surrounded by handwriting. It was a letter. The ink had faded to a sepia color. The date was June 12, 1807. The salutation read: “My dear Mr. Wilson.”

I looked at Walt and arched my eyebrows.

“Meriwether Lewis to Alexander Wilson,” he said. “There are seven letters in that envelope. I picked them up at a little out-of-the-way antique shop in the Poconos about ten years ago. The old lady who ran the shop didn’t have the foggiest idea of their significance. She wanted to charge me a hundred dollars for them. I gave her five hundred and made her promise to contact me if she came up with any others. I suspect they’re worth a hundred times that.”

I whistled. “Meriwether Lewis. Wow.”

Walt smiled.

“Who’s Alexander Wilson?”

“He was the most eminent ornithologist of his time. An excellent watercolorist, a very precise writer, and probably the greatest authority on birds who had ever lived up to then. He was hoping to do a book about the birds of the American West based on the observations of the Lewis and Clark expedition.”

I looked at the sketch. It appeared to be some kind of shore bird. It had a very long, curved beak. “What’s this bird?”

“Long-billed curlew,” he said. “The long-bills were unknown to science before Lewis discovered them near the Missouri River. He covered two sheets of paper, both sides, describing their appearance, their behavior, their habitat, and so forth. The other letters are also about birds. It’s great stuff. I want you to take these letters to Ben Frye. I’ve never had them appraised. You know Ben, right?”

I nodded. “Ben’s an old friend.”

Walt Duffy had been collecting bird-related artifacts—old documents, manuscripts, books, paintings, decoys and carvings—all of his adult life. His will stipulated that his entire collection would be donated to various museums and archives. His lawyer—me—had been urging him to get the whole business reappraised and adequately insured.

“I told Ben you’d be bringing them over,” said Walt. “It’s on your way home.”

“You just assumed I’d do this for you, huh?”

“You’re my lawyer,” said Walt.

I shrugged and looked at my watch. It was a little before seven. “Is he still at the shop?”

“I’ll give him a call, tell him to expect you. He’s very hot to see those letters.”

I slid the plastic envelope back into the manila one, put it into my briefcase, and stood up. “I better get going, then.”

“Ethan!” Walt yelled.

A moment later Ethan opened the door and poked his head out. “You screamed?”

“Brady’s leaving. Show him out.”

Ethan rolled his eyes, then jerked his chin at me. “Follow me. We don’t want you to get lost.”

I shook hands with Walt and left him slouched on his chaise pecking at his cell phone.

At the front door I turned to Ethan. “What’re you doing now that school’s over?”

“Oh, I’ve got a part-time job at a record store in Central Square. It gets me out of the house.”

“Well, that’s good. Getting out of the house, I mean.”

“Sometimes it’s necessary.” He smiled. “Sorry you’re not staying for dinner. I wouldn’t mind the company. Might steer the conversation to something other than my shortcomings.”

“Another time,” I said. “I promise.”

I
t was about a ten-minute walk from Walt Duffy’s townhouse on Mt. Vernon Street, down Joy Street, and across the Common to Ben Frye’s bookshop on Temple Place on the other side of Tremont. As I walked, I was acutely aware of the value of the letters I was carrying in my briefcase. I felt faintly furtive, as if I were some kind of spy disguised as a lawyer and carrying top-secret documents. It would be a lousy time to get mugged.

We were approaching June 21, the summer solstice, the longest day of the year, and even at seven in the evening, the Common swarmed with after-work secretaries in short skirts, college girls sprawled on blankets wearing halter tops and shorts, men in business suits walking their dogs, college boys with their T-shirts hanging from their hip pockets playing Frisbee, and homeless men parked on benches feeding the squirrels.

Well, there were some homeless women, too. For some reason, I’d never seen the women feeding the squirrels.

Temple Place, where Benjamin Frye’s bookshop was
located, was one of those narrow, dark, one-way alley-like Boston streets that connected Tremont to Washington. You had to know it was there to find it.

I crossed Tremont, turned down Temple Place, and stopped at the unpretentious sign beside the door: “Benjamin Frye Books—Second Floor.”

I climbed the narrow stairway to the second floor landing. The hand-lettered sign on Ben’s door read: “Benjamin Frye. Rare Books and Manuscripts. Appraisals. Hours by appointment,” followed by a phone number.

I knocked on the door. It was ajar, and when I got no reply, I pushed it open and stepped into a small, square, windowless room lined with bookshelves. A long table dominated the middle of the room. It was covered with stacks of books. Against the walls were cartons that, I assumed, contained more books.

All of the books in Ben’s shop, I knew, were old, rare, and valuable. There were no three-for-a-dollar used-paperback specials here.

“Ben?” I said. “You here?”

When there was no reply, I called louder. “Hey. Ben.”

“Who’s that?” came a voice from another room.

“It’s me. Brady Coyne.”

“Who?”

“Brady Coyne. I’ve got something from Walter Duffy.”

“Oh, right,” came his voice. “I’m out back.”

The door to Ben’s office on the other side of the book room was open. I sidestepped the table and went in.

This was a smaller version of the front room—two walls of bookshelves, one wall of file cabinets, a single dirty window that opened onto a fire escape in the back alley, and a big oak desk with a telephone and a computer and piles of
papers. Ben was sitting behind the desk peering at a computer monitor. He was sipping from a coffee mug. I doubted it was coffee.

Ben Frye was a gangly, stooped, heronlike man with a long beak and big sad eyes. He had a half-bald head and a long gray-blond ponytail and a scraggly beard. He wore a hoop in his left ear, an Indian bead necklace around his neck, and a red bandanna around his head. He’d occupied the admissions office at B.U., he’d marched with Dr. King, he’d gotten arrested in Chicago, he’d danced in the rain at Woodstock, and he’d been stoned at a hundred rock concerts all over the nation.

Later he’d earned his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology at Duke. Typical old hippie.

I cleared my throat, and he turned, pushed his glasses on top of his head and grinned at me. “Well?” he said. “Where are they? You got those Lewis letters with you, right?”

I nodded.

He pointed at my briefcase and snapped his fingers. “Lemme see ’em, man.”

A straight-backed wooden chair was pushed against the wall. I dragged it to Ben’s desk and sat down with my briefcase on my lap.

“So how have you been?” I said.

“Come on, dammit,” he said. “Gimme the letters. I’ve been peeing my pants since Duffy told me about them. Meriwether Lewis to Alexander Wilson? You realize what you got there?”

“Walt seemed to think they were worth something.”

“Listen,” he said. “If these letters are . . .” He shrugged. “I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ve got to look at them. Hand ’em over.”

I opened my briefcase, took out the manila envelope, and held it against my chest. “Could they be forgeries or something?”

He nodded. “It’s possible, sure. There’s a lot of interest in documents from the Voyage of Discovery nowadays. Ever since that Ambrose book and the PBS series. Ambrose pointed out that there seems to be a lot of missing stuff. Big chunks of time, no journals, for one thing. Some of it’s probably lost forever, but once in a while something turns up. And, yeah, there have been some forgeries.” He reached across the desk. “So I gotta see that stuff.”

I handed him the envelope.

He took it, adjusted his glasses onto the bridge of his nose, opened the manila envelope, and slipped the plastic envelope out. He bent close to it. “Oh, my,” he muttered. “Holy shit.” He groped around on his desk, found a magnifying glass, and peered through it. “Long-billed curlew,” he mumbled.

“Is it genuine?” I said. “The letter?”

He looked up at me and blinked. “I wish it was that easy,” he said. “I’ll have to test the paper and the ink, study the handwriting, the spelling and syntax, all that. Meriwether Lewis was a poor speller but a knowledgeable naturalist.”

“Suppose they’re genuine?”

“Then I do my research and come up with a value for them.”

“How do you do that?”

Ben shrugged. “Check the auctions. Talk to the curators. It’s not a science. I gather as much information as I can, then try to estimate what Duffy could sell them for. It’s supply and demand, like anything else. This is a good time for Lewis and Clark stuff, but I might advise Walter to keep them off the market for a couple years. We’re coming up on the
two-hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the expedition. They departed in the summer of 1804, you know.”

I smiled. “Yes, I knew that.”

“Well, we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves.” He smiled. “I really get off on this stuff. This is better than free love in Harvard Square. Remember the night LBJ announced he wasn’t going to run?”

I smiled. “I was in seventh grade in sixty-eight, Ben.” I stood up. “I assume you’ll be in touch with Walt?”

He nodded.

I reached across his desk. “I’m outta here, then.”

He gripped my hand quickly, then said, “You can find your way out?”

I nodded and turned for the door. When I looked back, Ben Frye was hunched over the plastic envelope of letters, peering through his magnifying glass.

On the way home I stopped at Skeeter’s for a burger, and I ended up watching the ball game on the TV behind the bar, so I didn’t get to my rented sixth-floor condo unit on Lewis Wharf until after eleven. I dropped my briefcase inside the doorway and headed straight for the bedroom.

The red light on my answering machine was blinking. Two blinks, pause, two blinks. I hit the “play” button, then began to strip off my office pinstripes.

The recorded voice said, “First message, today, eight-forty-seven
P.M.
” Then came the voice of Billy, my older son: “Hey, Pop. Whatcha doin’? Just wanted to say Happy Father’s Day. Knowing me, I’ll forget to send a card. Fishing’s been great. When you comin’ out?”

Billy had dropped out of UMass in the middle of his
sophomore year to pursue his dream of becoming a trout-fishing guide and ski instructor in Idaho. Now, at twenty-two, he seemed to have realized his dream. I kept wondering what he’d do next. Most people go through their whole lives without ever fulfilling their dreams.