Little Doors (31 page)

Quickly, Mamoulian layered a few Readers Digests over the trove. Carrying the box as if it contained his hypothetical firstborn, Mamoulian worked his way out of the maze and back to the attic stairs. He banged his head on a rafter at one point, but made no vicious exclamation. He barely felt the blow, such hunter’s elation filled his veins.

Down in the kitchen, the aproned and bespectacled widow Hollis stood at the stove, tending a pan of boiling water. She smiled tentatively at Mamoulian and his burden, causing him to feel like some comic strip character soliciting cookies from the old lady neighbor.

“I’m just making us some instant coffee, Mr. Mamoulian. I see you found something.…”

“Just a box of old magazines. Generally, these things are a dime a dozen. But I culled a few issues with articles on various celebrities—DiMaggio, Marilyn, James Dean. I can always sell those for a dollar or two. How about twenty-five dollars for the whole box?”

The widow’s smile wavered, then bravely reset itself. “Whatever you think is fair, Mr. Mamoulian.”

Mamoulian rested the box on the kitchen table, hurriedly wrote a check, then picked up the concealed rare firsts and turned toward the door.

“Won’t you be staying for coffee?”

“No thanks. Nervous stomach. Gotta run.”

In his swiftly accelerating old Buick, Mamoulian allowed himself a small smile that quickly broadened into a large grin and then transformed to full-blown laughter. He powered down his window and reached across the seat to the treasure box. He picked up one of the crappy
Digests
and hurled it out the window, watching it arc like a crippled bird. One after another the worthless magazines flew out to die like literary roadkill on the highway’s shoulder, reading matter for the wind alone.

That sight should really give the widow something to puzzle about next time she drove into town.

* * *

The phone at Mamoulian Rare Books rang, and Mamoulian snatched it up.

“Alex, it’s me. Can I come over?”

Mamoulian sighed at the unexpected sound of his brother’s voice, the nasal whine tempered only slightly by a shred of unwonted humility. “Lev, I run a shop that’s open to the public. How could I keep you out?”

Lev Mamoulian remained quiet a moment, then said, “I’ve had more gracious invitations—”

“Where to? The drunk tank?”

“—but I’ll come over anyway.”

“There are ten bars between your house and here. Do you think you’ll show up sometime today?”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

“I’m not holding my breath.”

“Goodbye, Alex.”

Mamoulian hung up the phone and returned to his study of several of his competitors’ impressive catalogues. Every one boasted a cyber-address. More and more, his peers seemed to be moving their bookselling enterprises to the Web. Mamoulian knew nothing about the Internet, but suspected that it would soon supersede the old way of doing things, if it hadn’t already. Where such a phenomenon would leave him and other old-fashioned booksellers was not in doubt. Even more in the gutter than he already was, subsisting on scraps, if not out of business altogether.

Slapping down the catalogues onto his desktop, Mamoulian made a silent resolve to do something about getting online. He was too middle-aged and otherwise talentless to change careers now. Evolve or die, that would have to be his motto. Businesswise, he had been stagnating for too long. Surely his wiles and cunning would translate intact to the computer world. There had to be a reasonable profit margin somewhere in cyberspace for the guy with a sharp eye for bargains and more hustle than his peers.

The bearish Mamoulian stood up and, in the absence of any customers, began tidying his already neat store. Two small rooms on the fourth floor of an old office building in a fading downtown, a space about as big as your average ice cream stand. Mamoulian could recall when his neighbors in the building had consisted of an assortment of professionals—dentists, lawyers, architects, jewelers. Now most of the offices served as storage space, holding old files belonging to an insurance company that remained as the sole major tenant. One office was bloated with bags of Styrofoam peanuts—property of the Wrap-and-Pak franchise on the first floor—like some kind of dormitory prank. If his rent hadn’t been frozen decades ago (Mamoulian had earned the undying gratitude of his now elderly landlord by tracking down a copy of
St. Nicholas
magazine the man had fondly recalled from his childhood, then offering it as a gift), Mamoulian would have moved long ago.

Circulating among the shelves of fiction and nonfiction, the boxes of plastic-enveloped ephemera, Mamoulian dusted the familiar titles, many of which had sat on his shelves for so long that they had become more fixture than stock, foster children meant to be housed temporarily, yet now immovable graybeards ensconced in their rockers. He polished the glass front of the locked cabinet that held his unsold rare firsts, pausing as always to admire the spine of the gem of his stock. But today he felt a need to actually fondle his baby, and so he unlocked the cabinet and removed the priceless glassine-jacketed book.

The entire print run of Doubleday’s edition of Ballard’s
The Atrocity Exhibition
had supposedly been pulped before distribution, under orders from the morally offended publisher. Yet in his reverent hands, Mamoulian held a copy from that legendary printing. He had obtained it for a dollar from an anonymous street vendor on the Bowery during a New York City buying trip in 1979, but its authenticity was not in doubt. No one but a madman would have forged to utter perfection such a dubious title. No doubt some sticky-fingered pressman or warehouse employee had carelessly swiped it without anticipating its subsequent value. Mamoulian knew that he could sell the apocryphal book in an eyeblink, but he had never even done so much as hint at its existence to anyone else. Owning it somehow validated his whole crummy shop.

Like a furtive Ali Baba, Mamoulian restored the treasure to its cave, and returned to his makework. He shuffled a stack of new orders—distressingly small—into ranking by date of receipt. He pencilled the price of one dollar into a couple of loser titles recently acquired in an auction-lot, modern self-help crap. Then Mamoulian opened the door to the corridor where he kept a shelf of cheap stuff designed to entice inside any hapless soul lost enough to end up here.

Down the corridor, the antique elevator bonged and ratcheted open. Lev Mamoulian stepped off and turned to spot his brother Alex. Older than Alex, Lev resembled his brother enough to cause both of them the pain of being forced to confront one’s living semblance, a truth-telling fetch sent to embarrass and chastise.

Mamoulian waited impatiently by the door to his store while his brother shambled closer. (A pane of frosted glass bore the store’s chipped gold-painted name). Surprisingly, despite Lev’s damaged gait, the older man seemed sober and halfway respectable looking, his rumpled clothes unpatched by vomit or blood.

Lev held out his hand to shake Mamoulian’s, who responded warily.

“Can I come inside?”

“You’re here, aren’t you?”

Behind the closed door, Lev scanned the interior of the store for potentially eavesdropping customers, then dropped wearily into the only chair, the one behind Mamoulian’s desk. He knuckled his temples and grimaced.

“God, my head hurts.”

“Sorry, I don’t have any booze in the store.”

Lev dropped his fists into his lap but kept them clenched. “I don’t want any stinking booze. I’m checking into a clinic today. That is, if you’ll help.”

Mamoulian balanced on the desk’s edge, near the cigar box that held his change-making cash. “I don’t believe you. What brought this immense change of life on?”

“Roberta. She’s going to leave me this time, for real, and take Avram with her, unless I dry out. I can’t live without my wife and son. I’ve got to do it, no matter how hard it is.”

“But you don’t have the cash.”

“No, I don’t have the cash.”

“And you want a loan from me. Another one.”

Lev banged the desk. “Don’t make it sound so sleazy! I’m not pouring it down a rathole. This time’s different, damn it!” Lev’s bravado ebbed as swiftly as it had flared, and he slumped in his seat. Mamoulian considered his broken brother for some time, then spoke.

“How much?”

Lev lifted his head. “Two thousand for two weeks. After I get discharged, I keep right on with AA. Wilkins has promised me a job once I dry out. He said I was the best model-maker he ever saw, until my hands started to shake. Can you help me, Alex?”

“Get out of my chair.”

Lev rose in defeat and began to shuffle toward the door.

“Where are you going? I just need to dig out my checkbook.”

After Lev had folded the check into his pocket, he asked Mamoulian, “Is there anything I can do for you, Alex?”

“Get sober.”

“I’m doing that for myself. Nothing else?”

“You don’t know any cheap computer guys who could set me up on the Web, do you?”

Lev brightened. “Avram’s a whiz with that stuff. He’d do it for free just for the fun of it. He’s bored as hell sitting at home this summer.”

Mamoulian pondered the offer. “I’ll pay him something. I don’t want him feeling like he’s working off his old man’s debt.”

“There’s no danger of that.” Lev patted the pocketed check. “You’ll see this money back soon. You just made the best investment of your life.”

“I’d like to believe that, Lev. I really would. Listen, you’d better get going now. I’ve got to try to earn the rent on this dump.”

At the door, Lev said, “How are you and Mona doing these days?”

“Mona and I are no longer an item. She claimed she could never envision signing her charge slips ‘Mona Mamoulian.’”

“That’s one useful excuse for breaking up, I suppose. Well, thanks again, Alex. Good luck with your book hunting.”

“Luck is only half of it, my friend. Only half of it.”

* * *

The quiet, underpopulated river valley spread lazily across three states. Once a hotbed of industry and commerce, its mills humming, its cities bustling, its casually polluted waterway boldly shouldering freight and travelers, the region now slumbered, generally ignored by cultural and business trendsetters, existing in a semi-detached fashion from the rest of the country. Pastures and farms had reverted to new forests. Cities had hollowed out, suffered for decades, then been either partially revived or left to rot, to greater or lesser degrees, by civic and private capital. Like collapsing stars, the area’s smaller towns had either compacted to denser matter or fallen entirely down black holes. The region’s roads were second-rate, the last in the tristate area to be plowed after winter storms, but its river was cleaner than it had been a century ago. The pace of life was easy, and the valley’s residents exhibited a certain despondent charm, having learned how to survive in such diminished circumstances. Overall, the forgotten land seemed not such a bad place to live. And from Mamoulian’s viewpoint, the place represented his secret seam of gold: a small, twisty lode hard to work, but just rich enough to sustain him.

The junk shops and Salvation Army stores of the valley would often be salted with collectible books going for just cents on their real dollar value. The contents of the sleepy and musty used-book stores were hardly any more expensive, and frequently just as rare. Generally located in the most decrepit neighborhoods, run mostly by crotchety elderly men and women (half of them seemingly Libertarians, to judge by the piles of anti-government bumper stickers stacked on their counters), these stores usually rewarded Mamoulian’s searches, despite the annoying heaps of Harlequin romances and survivalist series novels he had to fight past. Then there were the antique-heaped barns and hastily arranged estate sales to consider, both of which often offered troves of books acquired by Victorian and Edwardian robber barons whose lineages had now gone extinct. (Once, Mamoulian had discovered dozens of Wodehouse first editions in the office of a machine shop undergoing a bankruptcy sale.)

Taken all in all, the valley served as Mamoulian’s private preserve, continually restocked by fate and changing circumstances with exotic species.

Yet for some reason, on this buying trip he kept coming up empty-handed. It had been six months since he had visited the region, plenty of time for its contents to churn in the mysterious fashion arranged by birth, death and economics. But they simply hadn’t. For some freak reason, from one store to another he encountered only trash. His biggest find so far, a week into the trip, a week of crummy motels and junk food, had been a complete run of
The Spirit
reissues done by Harvey Comics, purchased at a yard sale for a dime each from a pimply adolescent, and worth over twenty-five dollars apiece. Not too shabby, but Mamoulian hated dealing comics. They seemed declasse and louche, offensive to his sensibilities, not the kind of trade he wanted to conduct under the banner of Mamoulian Rare Books.

If he hadn’t had someone minding the store, he would have cut this futile expedition short. But with Avram tending the premises, Mamoulian felt he could hold out a little while longer, in expectation of a big hit just around the next corner.