The Dirty Book Murder (2 page)

God, it was hot—sticky hot, the kind that causes a neck rash even after using a clean razor—and the odor of two hundred sweaty armpits was enough to make a middle-school janitor blanch.

It didn’t take long before a sallow-faced woman skittered from the room, clutching a lace hanky to her mouth. The auctioneer, oblivious to her abrupt departure and the heaving sounds she made in the hallway, prattled on about the virtues of the original Naugahyde bar stools that had taken center stage.

“Now what am I bid …”

I had decided to give him ten more minutes when I spotted my fiercest competitor in the antiquarian trade standing by a table loaded with books, most of which were covered by a pale yellow bedsheet.

Blessed with the charm of an Afghan warlord and the subtlety of a cement mixer, Gareth Hughes had once wrenched a copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird
from the hands of an elderly woman at a library sale. When it turned out to be a worthless book club edition, he tossed it back on the table without apologies.

He tried a similar tactic with me when I was new to the business. Only I wasn’t old, little, or a lady. It came down to bare knuckles in somebody’s living room with an audience of horrified suburban bargain shoppers. Fortunately, “Jumbo” Ralph Sadecki was in charge of that particular estate sale and he parted us before the police had to be called.

I saw Hughes a few weeks later at a book fair in St. Louis. By mid-afternoon each of us had acquired our quota of Americana and sat down at a table to share talk and a pitcher of beer.

Having grown up in Cardiff, he spoke with a Welsh accent, but traces of other languages muted the musical lilt of his native tongue. He said he admired me for standing up to him. I countered by acknowledging his expertise and his ability to survive without having an open shop. If his ethics weren’t up to Plato’s standards, they were no worse than most of the lawyers encountered in my prior career.

A solitary man, grossly fat and opinionated, Gareth Hughes could be as touchy as a polar bear with an ass full of razor blades. Once, near the end of a long drinking session, he admitted to never having known the companionship of a woman. The only surprise to me in that revelation was that he appeared to deeply regret the situation.

Curmudgeons are not uncommon in the antiquarian trade. When asked, most will admit to preferring books to people. And why not? What personality could be more charming than a 1910 edition of
Pervigilium veneris
bound by the Doves Press; or more amusing (and rare) than Beau Brummel’s
Unpublishable Memoirs
, a little volume that was published, the title notwithstanding, in 1790?

In Gareth’s case, however, the noble thoughts contained in the classics and the beauty of illustrations in old manuscripts meant nothing to him other than how they enhanced the material value of the object.

Despite his limitations, he had a fine knowledge of collectibles and enough line of credit to buy what he wanted in the mid range. He wasn’t in the rarefied league of great bookmen on the East and West Coasts—people like Ken Lopez, Peter Stern, and Ed Glaser—but he held his own in the Midwest.

The only other person I recognized in that squalid River Market warehouse was Richard Chezik, a former book scout who now sold exclusively on eBay. He was a squat, one-armed lout with stringy hair that cascaded to his shoulders as if he were a lost member of Black Sabbath.

Among other misdemeanors, he cadged beers off unsuspecting locals at dive bars by claiming he’d lost his wing to an IED in Fallujah (the enemy in fact being a guardrail on I-29 and a fifth of McCormick’s vodka). I’d kicked him out of my shop a year earlier for selling books to Prospero’s Bookstore that had mysteriously vanished, unpaid for, from mine.

Staying clear of Chezik, I snuck up to Hughes and gave him a friendly nudge. It startled him more than I intended.

“Jaysus, you bloody shite,” he said with a hard glance. “What brings your sorry ass down here? Auctions and flea markets are my territory.”

I pointed to the partially covered books.

“It’s nothing but old Bibles, magazines, and encyclopedias,” he told me. “Go back to your store where people bring books to you.”

“What about the erotica?”

His feigned look of innocence confirmed that whatever the sheet concealed was enough reason to stick around in the airless, hundred-degree heat.

“Ah, hell,” he conceded, nodding in Chezik’s direction. “Just don’t let that parasite see that we’re interested in them.”

“It’s too late,” I said. “Anyway, he’s only keen for contemporary firsts.”

“Ya think so? With you and me hovering over this pile like a hen on her chicks? He’ll do his best to be a player when he gets a peek at what’s under the sheet.”

Edging past Gareth, I pulled the cloth up for a closer inspection. What I found astonished me. When I looked back at him and silently whistled my appreciation, he answered with a peevish frown instead of the knowing wink of a fellow booklover.

As predicted, Chezik gravitated toward me as soon as I picked up the first leather-bound book. Carefully opening it, mindful not to let sweat drop on its beautifully illustrated cover, I saw that it was in French. That gave me an advantage since I could read and speak a fair amount of the language.

L’École des biches
, the title read,
ou moeurs des petites dames de ce temps (School for Courtesans, or habits of the little ladies of today)
, number fifty-three of a limited edition of sixty-four copies.

A dozen short vignettes graced its pages, at least two of which centered on lesbianism. It was in perfect condition with a supple leather binding that gave slightly
when handled. The linen-threaded pages displayed a strong yet feathery texture that had maintained its cream color for over a century. Although there were no illustrations, the feel of the book conveyed its own sense of tactile sensuality.

Laying
L’École
down gently, I turned my attention to an oversized book of etchings and ink drawings by André Masson that reeked of violent sex. Etching number seventy-two displayed a couple kissing, tears flowing from the woman’s closed eyes as a dagger sliced into her shoulder. A more colorful and delightful book of watercolors followed. It was by the female Danish artist Gerda Wegener, whose charming illustrations were filled with costumed characters diving under petticoats and into trousers merrily seeking the not-quite-hidden forbidden fruit.

Each book I handled topped its predecessor in beauty or perversion, the common denominator being exceptional condition and, despite their subject matter, surprising literary merit. It was enough to make me forget about the Shunga until Gareth pointed to a large Japanese scroll.

I untied the silk bow and carefully unrolled the rice linen paper as the auctioneer started the bidding for a dozen bar stools. The watercolor revealed a beautifully robed geisha engaged in intercourse with a handsome young warrior. His bow and quiver of arrows leaned against a table as they made love. Although he was obviously about to explode, she maintained a chilling aloofness.

Unrolling the horizontal scroll further, I saw couples engaged in a variety of artfully arranged debaucheries, the men looking comical with their lustful grimaces while the women maintained a look of slightly bored obedience. This subjugation of the female lover, I gathered, was the essence of the Shoku-hon prints in reinforcing the precept of the master-servant principle.

Intended to excite patrons of bordellos in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century Japan, the prints portrayed better than words how courtesans and geishas were trained to satisfy men without regard to their own pleasure. They were also used as how-to books for blushing brides of the middle classes.

I knew from reading Edmond de Goncourt’s
Outamaro, le peintre des maisons vertes
(along with English lit, art history was one of the few classes I never cut as an undergrad) that after Utamaro died, in the early 1830s the erotic ukiyo-e prints lapsed, with the exceptions of Kunisada and Hokusai, into a coarser style portraying little more than crude posturing. But to my untrained eye, the work before me seemed more like fine art than the decadent efforts of the later period. It also represented an important find.

With Chezik hovering nearby, I hid my enthusiasm by shrugging my shoulders and turning away from the table. I needn’t have bothered. This bottom-feeder of the book
trade may not have had a thousand disposable dollars to his name, but Chezik wasn’t an idiot. He answered my posturing with a knowing smile.

Still, I figured that only Gareth Hughes stood in the way of my winning those treasures and while he was worth far more than the likes of Chezik, he didn’t have the resources to outbid me on most of them.

Being a practical man, the Welshman whispered to me a proposal that made a great deal of sense.

“They’re worth tens of thousands, but we can get them for a pittance. Why don’t we come to some arrangement so as not to outprice each other?”

“You mean collude? Why, Mr. Hughes, I’m shocked.”

“You’re as much a pirate as I,” he said with what passed for a grin, “and if Christie’s and Sotheby’s can do a bit of topping, I figure we can, too. I want the Colette.”

“The Colette?”

He nodded. “You missed it entirely. Promise you won’t gouge me on that one?”

“Sure. I’m mainly interested in the Japanese scrolls. But show me the one you’re so keen on.”

We walked back to the table, trailed by Chezik, but ignored by the others whose interests were focused on a set of aluminum napkin holders the auctioneer held over his head.

Gareth pulled back the sheet and reached for a book that he had concealed beneath a 1964 issue of
Fortune
magazine. Titled
L’Ingénue libertine
, by Colette, the cover portrayed a man kneeling before a beautiful girl who held a whip over his bare buttocks. I wasn’t particularly impressed until he opened to the title page containing the following inscription in green ink:

Impressive enough, but the real kicker followed. In blue ink and a different handwriting were the words:

Ernie.”

Wow. From Colette to Beach to Hemingway.

The history of significant possessors of a book could be the most important feature of a collectible work, particularly if it had anything new to say about a major literary figure. For literature scholars, the provenance of this book was the equivalent of baseball’s double-play combination of Tinker to Evers to Chance.

Sylvia Beach had been the founder and owner of Shakespeare and Company in Paris when it was the literary headquarters for Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce. Beach had published Joyce’s
Ulysses
when no one else would touch it.

The inscription meant that Colette, author of
Gigi
and one of the more outlandish personalities of that extravagant era, had given her book to Sylvia in the hope that she would sexually excite Ernest Hemingway. If the ink writings were genuine it would significantly alter the historical perception of Sylvia Beach, a lesbian who had lived happily and, supposedly, faithfully with her lover Adrienne Monnier.

I wondered if Hadley Hemingway ever chanced upon that inscription, and whether her husband used the affair associated with it to write
The Garden of Eden
.

“Any others like that in there?” I asked Gareth.

“Perhaps. I haven’t had time for a proper inspection. You can have all the Japanese stuff. I don’t have contacts in the art world.”

After twenty minutes, Gareth and I had divvied up most of the books and scrolls we would share and were inspecting a few more when the auctioneer directed the crowd’s attention to the table we had by then assumed was ours.

“Now we got some purty books here!”
Colonel Bender bellowed as he lumbered over to us, microphone in hand.
“Some ain’t as nice as the others and some don’t have no pictures at all, but most of ’em is old and all of ’em is saucy.”

The first thing he held up was the Colette.

“Ten dollars,” I bid casually, aiding Gareth with an artificially low start.

“Ten dollars, ten dollars, ten dollar’, ten dol’ … do I hear fifteen?”

“Forty!” Chezik shouted as he stepped away from the pile of Harlequin romances he had pretended to examine.

Gareth and I looked at each other with annoyance, but secure in the belief that the book scout didn’t pose an undue threat to our finances, we looked back to the auctioneer and proceeded to raise the bid in cautious increments.

Surprisingly, Chezik got the bidding up to five hundred dollars before conceding
to Gareth’s ante of another hundred. That seemed to do it, but the auctioneer had to earn his commission.

“Come on, folks,”
the colonel pleaded.
“I know it ain’t got pictures and it’s in a funny language, but these came from a fancy home.”

I held my tongue, but it wasn’t easy honoring my promise to Hughes knowing that the fat bastard was getting an incredible piece of literary history for a tiny fraction of its worth in exchange for my getting some Japanese prints.

“Okay then,”
Colonel Bender exclaimed.
“Going once, going twice, for six hundred—”

“Ten thousand dollars for the lot,” said a voice behind us; a voice that most certainly did not belong to Richard Chezik.

If you’ve ever had a new bicycle stolen on Christmas Day, you might understand how Gareth Hughes and I felt at that moment.

“Did yew jes’ say ten thousand dollars?”
the auctioneer said after recovering his voice.