Between Silk and Cyanide (22 page)

Author to himself en route to 84, February '43

The tortuous road which led from childhood to Baker Street had begun at 84 Charing Cross Road.

Every Saturday morning from the age of 8 onwards I was taken to Father's shop (which was doing too well to open on Saturdays) so that he could start teaching me the profit margins of rare books, and a few elementary tricks of the trade. As compensation, every Saturday afternoon Mother took me up the road to the Astoria cinema which occasionally showed films we both understood.

One Saturday morning when I was 8 and a half my higher education began. Father proudly showed me a signed 1st edition of
The Gold Bug
by Edgar Allan Poe which he had just acquired. It had cost £6 10 shillings and was to be priced at £850 as the Americans were certain to want it. Although I wasn't supposed to waste time reading the merchandise, the moment he left to attend to the overnight I riffled through
The Gold Bug
hoping that at that price it might contain a few interesting pictures. Instead I found myself reading about a message in code which had to be broken because it contained the secrets of a buried treasure. Poe used dozens of words which I didn't understand including cryptograph but I knew what a crypt was. I'd learned at school that Crippen had once crept into one, crapped and crept out again.

An hour later I needed no cinema. All I wanted was a code of my own to break. I remembered Father telling me that every book worth over £5 had its cost written in code at the back so that his staff could tell at a glance how much discount to allow awkward customers but he hadn't explained how the code worked. 'Time enough for that,' he said. For me that time had now come.

At the back of The Gold Bug C/MN was written in pencil. Since it had cost £6.10/-—father never lied about anything except his consumption of whisky—then surely C must be 6 and MN 10. But Poe would want to know how Marks & Co. dealt with the rest of the figures.

I examined the backs of 20 other books, and found that the only letters written in pencil were ACEHKMNORS.

Whatever the code was, it couldn't be as difficult as Poe's or Father and his partner Mark Cohen couldn't have used it. Could it have come from a word? The letters C E H N 0 spelt COHEN. That left AK MRS-MARKS. 84's code was

But could I have solved it if I hadn't known that C was 6 and MN 10? It was time to find out.

My grandfather had a rare bookshop (E. and M. Joseph) at Leicester Square and my cousins an even rarer one (Myers and Co.) in Bond Street, and as I was usually welcome at both premises the next time I visited them I took the opportunity of inspecting their codes. They were far harder to work out than father's but I was eventually able to tell him that their profit margins were even greater than his.

From that moment onwards, I had two ambitions: to know as much about codes as Edgar Allan Poe, and one day to become a writer, probably of horror-stories, possibly of films.

The shop stood on four floors at the corner of Cambridge Circus, and one of its regular patrons stood on four paws outside the Palace Theatre opposite. He was a benign bulldog who was the constant companion of a lady named Doris. Doris was a short-term companion for those who could afford her prices. She was an avid collector of Rudyard Kipling as well as passing clients. Whenever she left her beat to enter Marks & Co. she insisted on being served by the most physically prepossessing member of Father's staff, who was also its best salesman, Frank Doel.
[11]

On the rare occasions when Doris hadn't enough cash on her to aquire the Kipling she coveted she would ask Frank to reserve it for her and return sometimes a few minutes later, sometimes a few hours (it depended on the weather) to complete her transaction.

Although 84 was respected by book-collectors around the world and numbered amongst its other distinguished clients a member of the royal family (who liked his pornography bound in vellum), Charles Chaplin, Bernard Shaw, Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, Michael Foot, MP (who later saved 84 from demolition by having a preservation order placed on it), the British Museum, scores of universities and (most important of all to Marks & Co.) the booktrade itself—the firm indulged in one activity of which its loyal customers knew nothing.

Marks & Co. were kings of the book ring. They were one of the five leading firms of antiquarian booksellers who never bid against each other in the auction rooms. One member of the ring would be allowed to buy a book for a nominal sum, say £100. As soon as auction was over the five conspirators would hurry to their nearest safe-house—usually a Lyons tea shop—and conduct a private action. If one of them bought the book in question for £500, the profit would be divided in cash amongst the other four. This was called a 'knock-out', and Frank Doel once blew an entire operation.

A famous heart specialist named Evan Bedford instructed him to bid up to £300 for an edition of Harvey's
De Motu Cordis,
the earliest book on the circulation of the blood, which was coming up for auction at Hodgson's. Too busy with his own Harley Street room to attend the auction himself, he telephoned Frank at home late at night demanding to know why the book had been sold to a dealer for £200 when he'd authorized Frank to bid three.

Confided that it had been sold in the knock-out for £650. The physician immediately undertook to have the whole question of the book ring raised in the House of Commons, which caused cardiac arrest amongst its five participants.

The then editor of
The Times Literary Supplement
, himself a collector of rare books, was anxious to avoid a scandal and invited the five leading firms of antiquarian booksellers to sign an undertaking that they would take whatever steps they thought necessary to put an immediate stop to the book ring—if such a thing existed. The Big Five arrived at the editor's office a quarter of an hour earlier than expected and, whilst waiting to sign the undertaking, held a knockout in the ante-room. It was far better security for them than a Lyons tea shop and the tea was free.

I asked the normally discreet Frank why he'd told a client about the book ring.

'Well, you see,' he said, 'when the phone rang the wife and me were having a jolly good fuck in front of the fire.' He hesitated. 'And I don't think too well on my back.'

He seemed to be thinking well enough on his backside as he sat at his desk at the far end of the room totting up the day's takings. He was closely watched by Father's partner, Mark Cohen, who had reluctantly agreed when the firm first made its bid to enter the elite world of antiquarian booksellers that it should be called Marks & Co. rather than Marks & Cohen. The two men made one perfect bookseller, Mr Cohen providing the knowledge. Father the acumen. They'd worked together for twenty years without a written agreement because they understood what a partnership meant. Mr Cohen, who had two daughters but no son, regarded the war as a welcome postponement of his partnership with me and asked somewhat nervously if I had been given the day off by the Ministry of Labour. I was relieved that my domestic cover-story hadn't yet been blown.

Monitored all the way by Mr Cohen, I wandered along the densely packed shelves picking up a handful of peacetime whenever I stopped and reluctantly putting it back, going from
Jorrocks's Jaunts and Jollities
to
Gibbon's Decline and Fall,
from Johnson's
Rasselas
to Goldsmith's
Deserted Village,
and Baker Street didn't exist until I came to Macaulay's
Lays of Ancient Rome.

I'd stood alone with Brave Horatius, the bloody Captain of the Gate, for twelve consecutive hours because a Belgian agent with an urgent message had spelt his name 'Horateous'. And that same agent with an even more urgent message had spelt the Etruscans who old scarce forbear to cheer with a 'k', and it had taken the girls id me 16,000 attempts spread over three cheerless days to discover.

I decided to cede the ground floor to SOE and visit the rarities uptairs, which included Father.

As I passed the one part of the shop which was artificial—a door covered in the spines of books to conceal the fact that it led to the unmanned basement—Mr Cohen and Frank were engaged in some complex research. The till was two and sixpence short.

Only established clients—or newcomers who survived Frank's scrutiny, 84's equivalent of a pass—were allowed to climb the staircase which led to Father's office and the two floors above. The CD of Marks & Co. was seated at his desk with his back to Doris. He was absorbed in collating 84's latest acquisition—a first edition of
Vedute di Roma,
which included the rare volume of Carceri, the Italian prisons. According to Father, good booksellers never turned the pages books, they strummed them, and he was strumming Vedute now to the glorious tune of its asking price.

I enquired about the state of 84's health, which was more important than his own, and he pointed to a pile of orders from dealers and private clients around the country and from America. He then produced a letter on War Office notepaper from Field Marshall Lord Alanbrooke and whispered, as if it were a state secret, that he was the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. The letter started 'Dear Ben' and was written as from one field marshal to another. I knew Alanbrooke had a passion for books on ornithology and that most of his library had come from 84. Now he wanted Father to acquire a Gould's
Birds of Asia
in mint condition and was enquiring about the price.

Commenting that Alanbrooke was a real 'Mensch' with no side to him at all, Father retrieved the letter from me, picked up his pen (he could write more quickly than most people could type), and began composing his reply.

I tested the powers of thought transference:

Dear Alanbrooke,

My boy tells me that at C's behest your Chiefs of Staff committee is continuing to withhold an official directive from SOE and that if it doesn't deliver one soon in mint condition this splendid organization may be obliged to shut shop.

I am at a loss to understand why C has such animus towards SOE. Would I be wrong in conjecturing that there's an Intelligence ring in existence with a knock-out in Broadway?

Please accept Gould's Birds of Asia with the lad's compliments.

Yours, etc.

Why was Father looking at me as if wondering whose son I was?

The second floor was the magic floor, the healing floor, my refuge from St Paul's School and my hope in years to come. It was called the Occult and Masonic department.
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It consisted of a large outer office, a small inner one, and George Plummer, whose specialized knowledge established the prices of occult and masonic books around the world.

Like most outstanding booksellers Plummer had little formal education and seldom read for pleasure. He had a particular flair for masonic books and was honorary adviser to the Grand Lodge library, yet he wasn't a Freemason himself because Catholics were forbidden to join secret societies other than their own. This didn't prevent him from taking Father into the inner office and rehearsing him in masonic ritual until he was word-perfect.

Of all the bizarre clients who'd visited Plummer's domain there were three who interested him most. One, an erudite mystic called Aleister Crowley, charged his devotees exorbitant prices to watch him perform a popular ceremony not in front of a fire but on top of an altar; the second was Edward Everett Horton, an American comedian who appeared in several Astaire-Rogers films, collected books on tintinnabulation, and confessed to Plummer that three Dominican bell-ringers were constantly at work in his head; and the last was his employer's son who, as a small boy of eight, had perched on a stool his desk and broken his first code.

I didn't want to be reminded of that episode but found myself glancing at the space which he'd cleared for me. It was occupied by a copy of Bourke's
Scatological Rites of Mankind
reserved for Mr Harry Edwardes, the president of the
Society for Psychical Research,
and I wondered why he was interested in excremental practices. I left love for Plummer saying how sorry I was to have missed him and managed not to sign it DYC/M.

The third floor glowed like the face of a young FANY who's broken her first indecipherable. It was full of books in exquisite bindings and they hardly seemed to have aged a wrinkle since they'd paraded like mannequins in their former salon, the palace of Versailles. Ten minutes in their company was a day in the sunshine. The fourth floor was Marks & Co.'s war room. Everything in it was locked away in bookcases whose doors it was impossible to see through. Behind the dark glass were thousands of coloured plates, title-pages and frontispieces—spare parts which could be transplanted into any book which needed them, none of them more spare than I.

What the hell am I doing hiding from Giskes in a bookshop?

I said goodnight to Father, who inspected me thoughtfully to see what I'd borrowed. He warned me to make sure I closed the front door behind me as Cohen and Frank had already gone home. Presumably the two and sixpence had been accounted for. I hadn't visited the basement but there wasn't much point; I was in one already. Turning to the front door, I realized that for the first time in my life I had the shop to myself. I found myself sitting in the chair which Freud had once occupied hoping that we might make contact through anal osmosis. I'd welcome his concept of a Plan Giskes.

I looked at the table where he'd examined all that 84 could produce on the subject of Moses. There was a solitary book on it, with the special conceit of those who roam bookshops in search of know not what, I felt it was waiting for me.

It was a reproduction of the 1455 Gutenberg Bible, the first book printed in movable type. I was drawn to all incunabula and would proclaim early printed books my personal duchy if ever I ascended to the throne of 84.

I leafed through the Bible, surely the most comprehensive Situation Report ever written.