Night & Demons (48 page)

Carter’s realization of that fact had come shortly after meeting McElroy at a friend’s rooming house. There was a bull session going on, several of the fellows from the house and a few other outsiders. Carter had stayed for an hour or so, drinking coffee and arguing Viet Nam—more pro than con, but not very pleased about matters.

When he got up off the arm of the chair where he’d been sitting, he mentioned that he had a real bitch of an assignment in Latin Survey that he’d better get cracking on. One of the outsiders (start bombing the hell out of Hanoi and they’ll listen to reason) looked up.

“Have you read any medieval Latin?” he asked.

Carter had, he admitted, but not a lot. Some of Bishop Gregory’s history, a mite of Iordanes.

The other fellow got up also. He looked a little older than Carter’s twenty-one, smallish with dark, short hair.

“You might be interested in some of the things I’ve got, then. Manuscripts.”

“I’d like to see them,” Carter agreed. “Do you have them in town?”

“Come on over now,” the other offered, “they’re back at the house with the rest of my collection.”

So, the two of them had shrugged into their coats and left behind an argument that was centering on MacArthur’s recall. Carter learned that his new acquaintance was Bob McElroy, that he was a grad stuðdent in history, and that his father-in-law had bought them a rooming house only five blocks from campus when he’d married Jeanette. It was approved housing, meaning the eight girls who lived upstairs had to sign in at night, but the entrance hall looked less like a dorðmitory lobby than a professor’s study. A wealthy professor.

The furniture was a big desk, a floor lamp, and three cushioned chairs. The bookcases were built into the walls, which they covered save where the doors and the staircase prohibited. McElroy unlocked the center drawðer of the desk and pulled it open. Carefully, he laid the top sheet on the desk and unfolded the tissue paper covering it.

“Fourteenth century,” he announced proudly. Some monk had done a striking job on the initial letter; as a result, it was impossible to say what it was for the writhing vines that surrounded it.
“Que videlicet albanus paganus adhuc sum perfidorum mandata adversum Christianos saevirent.”

Carter read with difficulty, unused to the shapes of the letters and the lack of punctuation. “It’s the devil to make out the words, isn’t it?”

McElroy laughed and said there was worse than that. He took out another of the sheets—there were nearly a dozen of them in the drawer—and unwrapped it beside the other. It wasn’t pretty, the parchment itself being an irregular width and dirty yellow as well. The writing was a faded brown and only the vertical strokes were easily visible. Carter could make neither head nor tail of it.

“My god,” he said, “how do you read this?”

McElroy smiled. “I can’t read any of it. I only had one year of Latin, in high school.”

Carter looked at him sharply. “I thought . . .” he began, running his eyes along the shelves . . . . “Yes, here it is. I saw it when we came in.”

The book Carter had found and pulled out was one of a fine, leather-bound set. He opened it to the title page:

Epistulae Erasmi

“If you can read this, you can read a good deal.”

McElroy took the book, running his hand down the age-mottled page. “Erasmus, isn’t it?” he said. “I picked up quite a bit of stuff in Paris two years ago. There’s more here, too,” waving at the shelves in general. “I really ought to study it some more. How long do you think it would take me to get to where I could read things?”

Carter was stunned at the hundreds of dollars—lord, more—that had been wasted in filling the shelves. McElroy wasn’t just a snob who wanted atmosphere; he was a collector, a real bibliomaniac. He hadn’t read most of his books, couldn’t read many of them—but he loved them for themselves. So far as Carter was concerned, McElroy was an ass; not because of the money he spent on books—Carter would have done the same if able—but because he didn’t read what he bought.

They saw each other fairly frequently after that. On occasion Carter would take a girl to McElroy’s for the evening and the four of them would play bridge as McElroy’s charges came in. More often Carter just stopped in during the afternoon and the two men would talk books, leafing through some of McElroy’s newer acquisitions. Carter could translate the Latin tags found in 17th century materials McElroy was using for his thesis, sometimes giving help on the lessons with which he was trying to review his Latin outside of class. In return Carter listened with wonder at stories of browsing in London and Paris and borrowed magnificent volumes to read.

He noticed the
de Mercibus
et Gentibus Ordinaris Solis
purely by chance. It was bound in leather with a metal spine and corner pieces, not particularly striking where it stood between a bound volume of Restoration religious propaganda and a black-letter edition of Ovid’s
Amores.

McElroy chanced to be out that afternoon, discussing his thesis with a professor. Jeanette—small, blond, and prone to curl up in armchairs, looking very nice indeed—was writing something at the desk. Carter, frowning as he looked at the title page, said, “Say Jeanette . . .”

“Mm?” She looked up, tossing her head a little to clear a lock of hair from her eyes.

“Got any notion where Bob picked this up?” Carter continued, handing the book to her, open.

Jeanette glanced at the title page, then the spine, and handed the book back to Carter. “I don’t recall it particðularly. Bob can tell you. Why? What does it say?”

“Regarding the commerce and peoples of the order of the sun,” Carter translated. “Or maybe ‘products and peoples.’ I’d have to check a dictionary. But what bugs me is the last part. It really sounds like they’re talking about the solar system, doesn’t it?”

Jeanette pushed her letter aside, frowning herself. “Let me see it again,” she said, taking the book from Carter. She flipped a few pages with practiced competence. “It’s printed, all right,” she said, “but the ink has faded enough it must be pretty old. Older than I’d expect to find mention of the solar system—in those words, I mean.”

Carter nodded in agreement. “It looked older than Copernicus to me, too. When was he for sure, 1500?”

“Umm,” the girl mumbled, closing her eyes to concenðtrate. “The book was published in 1543. Is there a date on this one?”

There wasn’t. Beneath the title were the words:

Ezra beu Judah edidit

Barcinoni

decem annis post reditum eius

“Great,” said Carter, scowling. “Ezra, son of Judah, published this at Barcino ten years after his return. Where the hell was Barcino?”

“That’s it!” cried Jeanette, hopping to her feet and reaching for a massive 18th century atlas on one of the top shelves. She could only get her fingertips on it, so Carter handed it down to her. She got the map she wantðed on the first try, Spain, and pointed gleefully to Carter, “All the names are in Latin; see there?”

She was pointing to a dot on the southeast coast, labeled, just as she had hoped, Barcino.

“Very good,” said Carter with approval. “Barcelona. Now at least we know where it was printed.”

“More than that!” the girl said, bursting with delight at her successful deduction. “Ferdinand and Isabella threw the Jews out of Spain in 1480.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Carter in amazement. “Sure, and Alexander VI let them into Rome and there was hell to pay over that. But where did you pick it up?”

Jeanette smiled. “Well, I graduated with a 3.88 in Spanish, you know. And you can’t learn a language without learning something about the country. Don’t you find that with Latin?”

Still smiling, now as much at Carter’s surprise as at her success, she stretched to put the book away. Again Carter reached over her to take the book; this time their thighs brushed lightly.

The door opened and he stepped back, embarrassed, without any particular reason to be. It was McElroy, shaking his briefcase to clear the snow from it. “God,” he said, “have you got any bright ideas about what the Council of State intended to do about the Scotch Presbyterians, Al?”

“Damn fools deserve whatever thesis topics they pick,” Carter answered with a laugh. “Bryant didn’t give you any help?”

“Nobody gave me any help,” McElroy replied, shaking his head. “What’s for dinner, Honey?”

Jeanette shrugged. “What would you like? I could take some fish out of the freezer.”

“Damn it all,” McElroy groaned, half-serious, “that’s your job. Yes, that’s why you’re home, remember? So you can take care of the house. What did you do all afternoon?”

Carter, embarrassed again, stepped into the pause before Jeanette could say anything. “Don’t knock her—you’ve got a very smart wife. She’s just figured out where and when this book was published.” He tapped the volume in his left hand.

“This one?” McElroy asked, taking the book when Carter handed it to him. “I got this . . . let me see: Paris, summer of ’63. From the estate of Dr. Francois Geyer, along with a batch of other stuff. Turned out to be mostly novels he’d picked up as a boy when I got around to sorting it. There were some old medical books— Heidelburg, 1658 one of them. I kept them and this too, I guess. Most of the lot I resold. What did you say the date on this was?”

“Your wife figured it out. Somewhere between the invention of the printing press and 1480, at Barcelona.”

“Not a chance,” McElroy answered absently. “There wasn’t any printing press at Barcelona until—oh, hell, a long time after 1480. Unless . . .”

His voice trailed off as he made careful comparisons between two pages. He turned another page, then whisðtled through his teeth. Reaching over to the desk he picked up a 6-inch rule, transparent except for the diviðsions. “Look here,” he said, pointing out a capital “H” to Carter. “See the height of it? And this one?”

There were six capital “H”s scattered over the three pages. All of them differed from the rest in height, width, or some other peculiarity of design. “This son of a bitch was block printed or I’m King Tut,” McElroy said as he pointed out the sixth “H.” “Every plate separately carved, and it was a neat job, too.”

“What’s it worth?” Carter asked, suddenly impressed by the fact that the book through which he had been leafðing nonchalantly was probably five hundred years old.

McElroy shook his head. “Can’t say; it’s out of my class. I’ll get Hebard in Library Science to take a look at it.”

He turned to Jeanette who was still standing near the atlas, looking as surprised as Carter was sure he too must. “Honey,” McElroy asked, “have we got three steaks left? Al, you feel like dinner here? I think I owe it to you.”

“Well, I was thinking of going out tonight—”

“Dilly? Just tell her to come on down. We’ll get another steak if we don’t have enough.”

“No, no, just a girl from my chem lab,” Carter, put off his train of thought by McElroy’s assumption. Dilly was one of the girls upstairs; Carter had gotten serious enough about her earlier in the year that he had asked McElroy if there was any chance that a girl might not come in one night and not get reported to the Dean of Women. McElroy knew damned well what he meant and he hadn’t made a bureaucratic fuss about it. He had told Jeanette, though, and it made Carter feel a little funny. It was actually worse because nothing came of it after all.

“Anyhow,” Carter went on, when he remembered where he had been thinking,
“
I’d like to read that book tonight anyway, and I don’t suppose you’d want it to leave the house. And I’m always ready for steak.”

While Jeanette broiled the steaks, the two men hunted through the books McElroy kept stored in the attic, among which he was sure there was a Latin dictionary. Sure enough, Carter turned up a thick copy of Andrew’s Freund. It wasn’t the best to be hoped for—it was an 1850 edition—but it was better than anything Carter had in his room and saved a trip as well. Rather than start reading only to be interrupted by dinner, Carter set both books aside and talked to McElroy about Dungeness until Jeanette opened the kitchen door and called them to eat.

It was a pleasant meal, relaxed and comfortable to Carter who was used to sharing the kitchen with seven other men and bolting his food to get out of the way. The steaks were done to his taste although they hadn’t been thawed before broiling. Even better, there were little side dishes of morels fried in butter. Carter remembered that McElroy had said something about having gone mushroom hunting last spring.

And it was nice to eat with a girl with as much going for her as Jeanette had. Without a wife, Carter reminded himself; your big trouble is that you’re horny and likely to stay that way. He wasn’t particularly shocked at the thought of adultery, but McElroy was about as much friend as Carter had, whatever Jeanette thought of the idea.

After dinner the men went back into the hall. Some of the girls were going out on study dates—it was Tuesday—but the door closing the entrance alcove and the central heating kept the room comfortable. The occasional snatches of conversation passed over Carter as he began to concentrate on his reading not bothering to write down the translation. McElroy had a pole lamp in one corner rigged with a 120-watt cone of light, isolated from the rest of the dimly lit room. He read more easðily as he became used to the odd cursive letters.

After doing the dishes Jeanette came out and sat at the desk, across from her husband. They exchanged a few words; then she continued her letter and no one spoke for several hours.

Carter read, and the words began to crawl through his mind of their own accord. At first it was just another translation exercise, complicated by the print and the unclassical diction. Then, slowly, Carter began to realize what he was reading; that it wasn’t Ovid writing of myths or Pliny of some Never-Never Land of travelers’ imaginations. Carter felt less of wonder or horror than of shock at the writer’s stunning nonchalance. He rarely used the dictionary and when he did, the word sought was frequently not in it. Occasionally one of the girls still upstairs said something loud enough to be heard. These voices, the wind, the scrape of Jeanette’s pen—all were lost in the sibilant rustle of the ancient vellum.