Captain Hoberman? No, I decided, after a moment’s reflection. Definitely not Captain Hoberman. But definitely familiar, definitely a voice I’d heard before.
Oh.
I reached for the phone, hesitated, then went ahead and made the call. This time the fellow answered on the first ring, and at first he didn’t say anything, which was almost enough in itself to confirm my hunch. Then he said, “Hello,” and made assurance doubly sure. It was him, all right.
I broke the connection.
“Hell,” I said aloud, and picked up my drink and frowned at it. How had I gotten in this mess? Was this where I deserved to be after fifteen nights in a row of Humphrey Bogart movies?
I should have been watching Laurel and Hardy.
CHAPTER Four
Of all the bookstores in all the towns in all the world, she walked into mine.
She did so exactly two weeks earlier, at three o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. I was behind the counter with my nose in a book. The book was Our Oriental Heritage, the first of eleven volumes of Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization. Over the years the Book-of-the-Month Club has been distributing the books as if it were the Gideons and they were the Bible, and it’s a rare personal library that doesn’t include a complete set, usually in pristine condition, the dust jackets intact, the spines uncracked, and the pages untouched by human eyes.
There had been a set in inventory when I acquired Barnegat Books from old Mr. Litzauer, and over the years I had bought a set every now and then, and occasionally sold one. I hadn’t sold quite as many as I’d bought, and so I generally had a few sets on hand, one on the shelves and a couple in cartons in the back. On this particular Wednesday I had four sets in stock, because I’d bought one the previous afternoon, not out of a mad passion to corner the market but because it was part of a lot that included some eminently resalable Steinbeck and Faulkner firsts. By the time I closed the store Tuesday I’d recovered my costs by placing To a God Unknown and In Dubious Battle with a regular customer, and I was thus feeling well disposed toward the Durants, so much so that I decided I might as well find out what they had to say about the sum total of human history.
So that’s what had my attention when she walked into my store, and into my life.
It was a perfect spring day, the kind of magical New York afternoon that makes you wonder why anyone would voluntarily live anywhere else. My door was wide open, so the little bell attached to it did not tinkle at her entrance. My cat, Raffles, often greets customers, rubbing against their ankles in a shameless bid for attention; on this occasion he lay on the windowsill in a patch of sunlight, doing his famous impression of a dishrag.
Even so, I knew I had a visitor. I got the merest glimpse of her out of the corner of my eye, then caught a whiff of her perfume as she crossed in front of the counter and disappeared behind a row of bookshelves.
I didn’t look up. I was somewhere in the second or third chapter, reading about cannibalism. Specifically, I was reading about some tribe-I forget who, but you could look it up, I’ll give you a good price on the books-some tribe that never held funerals, never had to make the hard choice between burial and cremation. They ate their dead.
I tried to read on, but my mind was awhirl with a vision of a modern world in which the practice had become universal. Frank Campbell, I realized, would be a society caterer. Walter B. Cooke would own a great chain of fast-food restaurants. In Queens, the Long Island Expressway would be lined not with graveyards but with hotdog stands, and-
“I beg your pardon.”
The first thing I noticed about her was her voice, because I heard it before I actually looked up and saw her. Her voice was low in pitch, husky, and her accent was European.
It got my attention. Then I looked across the counter at her. I don’t suppose my heart actually stood still, or skipped a beat, or did any of those things that give cardiologists the jimjams, but it certainly took notice.
How do you describe a beautiful woman, short of littering the page with tiresome adjectives? I could tell you her height (five-seven), her hair color (light brown with red highlights), her complexion (light, clear, and flawless). I could inventory her features, striving for clinical detachment (a high, broad forehead, a strong brow line, large well-spaced eyes, a straight and slender nose). Or I could let my inventory reveal that I was smitten (skin like ivory that had learned to blush, brown eyes deep enough to drown in, a mouth made for kissing). Sorry, I can’t do it. You’ll have to imagine her for yourself.
Of all the bookstores in all the towns in all the world, she walked into mine.
“I did not want to disturb you,” she said. “You seemed so deep in thought.”
“I was reading,” I said. “Nothing important.”
“What are you reading?”
“The history of civilization.”
She raised her perfect eyebrows. “Nothing important?”
“Well, nothing that can’t wait. The Sumerians have been waiting for thousands of years. They can wait a little longer.”
“You are reading about the Sumerians?”
“Not yet,” I admitted. “They’re the first civilization in the book, but I haven’t gotten to them yet. I’m still back there in prehistory.”
“Ah.”
“Early Man,” I said. “His hopes, his fears, his dreams of a better tomorrow. His endearing customs.”
“His endearing customs?”
I couldn’t seem to help myself. “This one tribe in particular,” I said. “Or maybe it was more than one.”
“What did they do?”
“They ate their dead.” For God’s sake, why was I talking like this? She didn’t say anything, and my eyes dropped to the page, where a sentence caught my eye. “The Fuegans,” I reported, “preferred women to dogs.”
“As companions?”
“As dinner. They said that dogs tasted of otter.”
“And that is bad, otter?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I suppose it tastes of fish.”
“Fuegans. I have never heard of them.”
“Until now.”
“Well, yes. Until now.”
“I never heard of them, either,” I said. “I gather Darwin wrote about them. They lived in Tierra del Fuego, at the southernmost tip of South America.”
“Do they live there still?”
“I don’t know. I’ll tell you, though, if I ever go visit them I’m taking my own lunch.”
“And your own woman?”
“I don’t have a woman,” I said, “but if I did I don’t think I would take her to Tierra del Fuego.”
“Where would you take her instead?”
“It would depend on the woman. I might take her to Paris.”
“How romantic.”
“Or I might take her to the movies.”
“Also romantic,” she said. A smile played on her lips. “I want to buy a book. Will you sell me a book?”
“Not this one?”
“No.”
“Good,” I said, and closed Our Oriental Heritage, and set it on the shelf behind me. She’d been holding a book, and she placed it on the counter where I could see it. It was Clifford McCarty’s Bogey: The Films of Humphrey Bogart, the hardcover edition published thirty years ago by Citadel Press. I checked the penciled price on the flyleaf.
“It’s twenty-two dollars,” I said. “And, because I’m honest to a fault, I’ll tell you that there’s a paperback edition available. The title’s slightly different but it’s the same book.”
“I have it.”
“It’s around fifteen dollars, if memory serves, and sometimes it does.” I blinked. “Did you just say you have it?”