“Sure it does,” I said. I closed the Mr. and Mrs. North mystery-hardcover, no dust jacket, spine shaky, some pages dog-eared-and put it back where I’d found it. “I haven’t got time for a murder, not to commit and not to solve. I’m tired. I want to turn in soon and sleep until the snow melts.”
“You can’t sleep, Bern.”
“Want to bet?”
“Even if you want to,” she said. “Remember? You’re going to be up all night. You’ve got a book to find.”
“That’s what you think.”
“You’re giving up? Well, I’m disappointed, but I can’t honestly say I blame you. It’d be like looking for a needle in a haystack, except it wouldn’t.”
“I see what you mean.”
“You do?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s the opposite of a needle in a haystack, isn’t it? It’s more like a needle in a needle stack. Not just any needle, but one particular needle in the midst of all the others.”
“A needlestack,” I said thoughtfully. “I don’t think I’ve ever come across one.”
“So? When’s the last time you saw a haystack?”
“I’m sure I wrote it down,” I said, “but I don’t have my notebook with me. What’s the point?”
“The point is every room is crawling with books, and the library alone has more volumes than you’ve got in your store, including the back room. So it may be an easy place to find something to read, but it’s an impossible place to find something specific, even if it’s there to start with, which it probably isn’t.” She took a deep breath. “So I can understand why you’re abandoning the hunt.”
“Is that what I’m doing?”
“What else? I said you’ve got a book to find, and you said, ‘That’s what you think.’”
“Right.”
“Meaning you’re not going to bother looking.”
“Meaning I don’t have to look.”
She looked at me.
“Meaning I already found it,” I said. “So why shouldn’t I treat myself to a good night’s sleep?”
“The top shelf,” I said. “You see the section closest to the wall?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, it’s the section immediately to the right of it. See the one I mean?”
“I think so,” she whispered. “I don’t want to look directly at it.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to arouse suspicion, Bern.”
“We’re in a library,” I said, as indeed we were, having gone there directly from the Morning Room. “Looking at books is a natural occupation in a room like this. And it’s a lot less suspicious to stare right at them than it is to glance furtively.”
“Is that what I was doing? Glancing furtively?”
“Well, it looked furtive to me. I don’t think it made any impression on anybody else because nobody else noticed.”
Not that we were alone. The two guests we’d seen earlier were gone. The intense man with long dark hair who’d been writing letters (or ransom notes, or working out the square root of minus two, for all I knew) was nowhere to be seen, and the older woman (whom Gordon Wolpert had identified as a Mrs. Colibri, a widow of undetermined origin) had gone off as well, leaving The Eustace Diamonds on the table next to the couch. But two others had taken their place. Leona Savage, Millicent’s mother, was reading a Bruce Chatwin travel book and periodically consulting the globe, and a very fat man who’d been introduced to us earlier as Rufus Quilp was dozing in an armchair, with a book open on his ample lap.
“All right,” Carolyn said. “The top row of shelves, the second section in from the fireplace wall. I’m looking right at it, Bern.”
“What do you see?”
“Books.”
“Four or five books in from the left-hand edge of that section,” I said, “there’s an oversize volume, The Conrad Argosy. See it?”
“I see a thick book that’s a lot taller than the others. I can’t read the title from here. Can you?”
“No, but I recognize the book. I’ve had copies in the store. Now to the right of it there are three dark books, and then one with a sort of yellow cover, and next to that one-”
“Next to the one with the yellow cover?”
“Right. Just to the right of the yellow book is one in a dust jacket, and you probably can’t read that title from here, and neither can I. But it’s The Big Sleep.”
“By Raymond Chandler.”
“That’s the guy.”
“And you can’t read the words on the spine, but you can recognize it anyway?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Is it a first edition, Bern? Is it inscribed? Can you tell that from here, too?”
“I don’t have magical powers,” I said. “What I do have is eyes that look at books all day long. I can identify hundreds of books, maybe thousands, on the basis of a quick glimpse from the other side of the room. I probably haven’t read it and I may not know the first thing about the contents, but I can tell you the title and author and who published it.”
“Who published The Big Sleep?”
“Knopf in the U.S. and Hamish Hamilton in England. That’s the Knopf edition over there. Otherwise I wouldn’t have spotted it, because I don’t know what the British edition looks like. And it most likely would have been a copy of the American edition that Chandler brought east to give to Hammett.”
“He brought it for George Harmon Coxe, Bern. Remember? He gave it to Hammett on a whim.”
“At the time it was on a whim,” I said. “Now it’s on a shelf. We’re looking at it.”
“‘Here’s looking at you, Chandler.’”
“It’s a genuine piece of American literary history,” I said. “And we tracked it down, and there it is.”
“Assuming that’s the right copy.”
“A first of The Big Sleep’s a rare book to begin with. If they’ve got any copy at all, it’s pretty sure to be the one Chandler gave to Hammett. It’s not like Anthony Adverse, with at least one copy in any old collection of books.” I drew a breath. “That’s the Hammett copy on the shelf. The Hammett association copy. When they write about it-no, that’s ridiculous.”
“What is?”
“I was thinking it might go down in bibliographic literature as ‘the Rhodenbarr copy.’ Silly, huh?”
“I don’t think it’s silly.”
“You don’t? Well, it won’t happen. Be nice, though.” I got to my feet. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll buy you a drink, and then I’m about ready to turn in. What’s the matter?”
“You’re just gonna leave it there?”
“I’m not going to wheel the library steps over there and climb up them in the middle of the night. Not with other people in the room.”
“Why not? You told me it was okay to look at the book. It’s a library, you said. It’s natural to look at books in a library. Well, it’s every bit as natural to take them off the shelf and start reading. Where does it say look but don’t touch?”
I shook my head. “Later. It’s not going anywhere.”
CHAPTER Eight
Let’s say you had this old tweed jacket.
It’s a fine old jacket, woven of wool from the thick fleeces of Highland sheep, crafted in a croft or crofted in a craft, something like that. If you look closely enough you’ll find threads of every color of the rainbow, with more hues and shades and tints and tones than in the biggest box of crayons Crayola ever made.
You bought it years ago, and even when it was new it looked old. Now it has leather patches on the elbows and leather piping on the cuffs, and by this time the leather itself is worn. And the pockets bulge from all the things you’ve stuffed into them over the years. And you’ve worn that jacket for long moonlit walks on the moors and spirited rambles in the fells. You’ve worn it on horseback, and your high-spirited dog has marked it with his muddy paws. It’s been rained on, and dampened by the mist. It’s soaked up the smoke from campfires in the open and peat fires in thatched cottages. And there’s sweat in it, too, honest human sweat. And human joy and human grief-and, if you look closely enough, you’ll be able to distinguish more hues and shades and tints and tones of emotion than there are crayons in the biggest box Crayola ever made.