Then he said, “Kipling wrote the poem in 1923. He’d hoped to give out copies to close friends for Christmas that year, but the holiday had come and gone before Smithwick was able to make delivery. So Kipling decided to hold them over for Christmas of ’24, but sometime in the course of the year he seems to have come to his senses, recognizing the poem as a scurrilous piece of Jew-baiting tripe and bad verse in the bargain.
“As was his custom, Kipling had presented his wife, Carrie, with an inscribed copy. He asked for it back. He’d given another copy to a Surrey neighbor of his named Lonsdale as a birthday gift in early spring and he managed to get it back as well, giving the man several other books in exchange. These two books, as well as the other bound volumes, the printer’s proofs, and the original holograph manuscript plus the typed manuscript from which Smithwick set type-all of this went up the chimney at Bateman’s.”
“Bateman’s?”
“Bateman’s was the name of Kipling’s house. There’s an undated letter to a London acquaintance, evidently written in the late summer or early fan of ’24, in which Kipling talks of having felt like an erring Israelite who had just sacrificed a child by fire to Moloch. ‘But this was a changeling, this bad child of mine, and it was with some satisfaction I committed it to the flames.’ ” Whelkin sighed with contentment, sipped coffee, placed his cup in its saucer. “And that,” he said, “was the end of The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow.”
“Except that it wasn’t.”
“Of course not, Mr. Rhodenbarr. The Rider Haggard copy still existed. Kipling, of course, had given a copy to his closest friend almost as soon as he received the edition from Smithwick. Had it slipped his mind when he set about recalling the other copies? I don’t think so.
“Haggard, you see, was in failing health. And Kipling had dedicated the book to Haggard, and had added a personal inscription to Haggard’s own copy, a paragraph running to over a hundred words in which he hailed Haggard as a kindred spirit who shared the author’s vision of the peril of Jewish-inspired holocaust, or words to that effect. I believe there’s a letter of Rider Haggard’s in the collection of the University of Texas acknowledging the gift and praising the poem. After all that, Kipling may have been understandably reluctant to disown the work and ask for the book’s return. In any event, the copy was still in Haggard’s possession upon his death the following year.”
“Then what happened to it?”
“It was sold along with the rest of Haggard’s library, and no one seems to have paid any immediate attention to it. The world didn’t know the book existed, and no doubt it was sold in a lot with the other copies of Kipling’s works, and for very little money, I’m sure. It came to light shortly after Kipling’s death-not the copy, but the realization that Kipling had written an anti-Semitic poem. The British Union of Fascists wanted to disseminate it, and Unity Mitford was rumored to have been on the trail of the Haggard copy when war broke out between Britain and Germany.
“Nothing further was heard until after the war, when the Haggard copy turned up in the possession of a North Country baronet, who sold it privately. There were supposed to have been two or three additional private transactions before the volume was scheduled to appear in Trebizond amp; Partners auction of effects from the estate of the twelfth Lord Ponsonby.”
“You say scheduled to appear?”
He nodded shortly. “Scheduled, catalogued and withdrawn. Six weeks ago I took one of Freddie Laker’s no-frills flights to London with the sole purpose of bidding on that book. I calculated that the competition would be keen. There are some rabid Kipling collectors, you know, and his reputation’s been making a comeback. The University of Texas has a well-endowed library and their Kipling collection is a sound one. I expected there would be buyers for other institutions as well.”
“Did you expect to outbid them?”
“I expected to try. I didn’t know just how high I myself was prepared to go, and of course I had no way of knowing what levels the bidding might reach. Upon arriving in London, I learned there was a Saudi who wanted that particular lot, and rumor had it that an agent for some sort of Indian prince or Maharajah was paying extraordinary prices for top-level Kiplingana. Could I have outbid such persons? I don’t know. The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow is interesting and unique, but it hasn’t been publicized sufficiently to have become important, really, and the work itself is of low quality from a literary standpoint.” He frowned, and his eyebrows quivered. “Still in all, I should have liked the chance to bid in open auction.”
“But the lot was withdrawn.”
“By the heirs prior to sale. The gentleman from Trebizond ’s was quite apologetic, and reasonably indignant himself. After all, his agreement with the heirs precluded their making private arrangements. But what could he possibly do about it? The buyer had the book and the heirs had the money and that was the end of it.”
“Why arrange a private sale?”
“Taxes, Mr. Rhodenbarr. Taxes. Death duties, Inland Revenue enquiries-the tax laws make finaglers of us all, do they not? What voice on earth speaks with the volume of unrecorded cash? Money in hand, passed under the table, and the heirs can swear the book was set aside as an heirloom, or destroyed in a flash flood, or whatever they choose. They won’t be believed, but what matter?”
“Who bought the book?”
“The good people at Trebizond ’s didn’t know, of course. And the heirs weren’t telling-their official line was that the book hadn’t been sold at all.” He put his elbows on the table and placed his fingertips together. “I did some investigatory work of my own. The Deliverance of Fort Bucklow was sold to Jesse Arkwright, an artful dabbler in international trade.”
“And a collector, I suppose?”
“An acquirer, sir. Not a collector. A gross ill-favored man who surrounds himself with exquisite objects in the hope that they will somehow cloak his own inner ugliness. He has a library, Mr. Rhodenbarr, because to do so fits the image he would like to project. He has books, some of them noteworthy, because books are the sine qua non of a proper library. But he is hardly a collector, and he most certainly does not collect Kipling.”
“Then why-”
“Should he want this book? Because I wanted it, Mr. Rhodenbarr. It’s that simple.”
“Oh.”
“Do you remember the Spinning Jenny?”
“It was a dance craze, wasn’t it?”
He looked at me oddly. “It was a machine,” he said. “The first machine capable of producing cotton thread. Sir Richard Arkwright patented it in 1769 and launched the modern British textile industry.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “The Industrial Revolution and all that.”
“And all that,” he agreed. “Jesse Arkwright claims descent from Sir Richard. I’m no more inclined to take his word on that point than any other. His surname means builder of arks, so perhaps he’ll next hire a genealogist to trace his roots clear back to Noah.”
“And he bought the book to keep you from having it?”
“I once acquired something that he wanted. This seems to have been his way of paying me back.”
“And he won’t sell it.”
“Certainly not.”
“And there’s no other copy extant.”
“None has come to light in half a century.”
“And you still want this particular copy.”
“More than ever.”
“How fortunate that you happened to pop into Barnegat Books this morning.”
He stared.
“You called me by name before I had a chance to supply it. You came into the shop looking for me, not for Mr. Litzauer. Not because I sell secondhand books but because I used to be a burglar. You figure I’m still a burglar.”