Booking In Page 13

  “Very wise,” I said. “And Fletcher was one of those who came to you?”

  “Fletcher is different in every respect,” Hughie said. “He wasn’t one of the people who rushed to me for a loan as soon as they learned of my good fortune. As a matter of fact, Fletcher didn’t approach me about the loan until just a few months ago. That made a difference in my decision to lend him what he wanted.”

  “Very wise,” I said.

  “Fletcher is a friend of my mother’s, and that also put him in a different category. I always respected Fletcher as a great antiquarian book dealer and a very distinguished gentleman. I didn’t hesitate to make him the loan, though I went through the usual drill of sending my accountant in to check out Fletcher’s financial state.”

  “And how was it?”

  “Sound enough on a long-term basis,” Hughie answered. “My accountant thought Fletcher had recently lost his business focus and gotten himself rather in debt. Took his eye off the ball, was the way my accountant described it.”

  “What was Fletcher looking at when he should have been looking at the ball?”

  “Mostly girls. Or rather, women, in Fletcher’s case, an older man like him.”

  “This didn’t concern your accountant?”

  “He said the bookstore was a solid and well-established business, and it would get back to its former money-earning ways as soon as Fletcher returned his nose to the grindstone.”

  “Which you now assume he’s done?”

  “I ran into Fletcher at a cocktail party thrown by one of our family’s old neighbours not so long ago. He intimated he had a fine deal in the works for his business. Funds were expected momentarily.”

  “How about the situation with the women he was turning his eyes to instead of the ball?”

  Hughie shrugged. “There’s always a girl around him. Each one seems only to stay a short period, then Fletcher’s on to a different good-looker. He strikes me as quite confident of himself, both with the girls and with money. Some of the money is, of course, mine.”

  “You’re not worried?”

  “I expect repayment on schedule,” Hughie said. “That’s partly where you come in, am I not right?”

  “You bet.”

  I swallowed some more green tea, choked noisily, and apologized to Hughie.

  “Probably went down the wrong way,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said, my voice sounding thick. “Lodged in the windpipe.”

  “Well, then, Mr. Crang, anything else you’re still in doubt about?”

  “Concerning the loan?”

  “Isn’t that the subject we’re discussing?”

  “Right,” I said. “This deal Fletcher mentioned, the one that’s going to put him in the chips, have you any idea what’s cooking with it?”

  “Shouldn’t you already know about that, being the lawyer on the matter?”

  “Just a test question, Hughie.”

  “Not testing me, surely.”

  I sipped some more tea and choked again. “No, no,” I said. “The question was more a case of me sizing up Fletcher’s conduct with respect to the loan repayment to you.”

  I held my breath, hoping to avoid another gasping fit and to wait out Hughie’s reaction. Would he swallow my bunkum answer to the question I’d raised about Fletcher’s possible fancy tricks with the alleged Reading Sonnets?

  “I can’t help you there, Mr. Crang,” Hughie said. “All I know is I expect Fletcher to repay me on the first of September, and I have every confidence he’ll be in funds that day.”

  “Good to hear, Hughie.”

  “Now,” Hughie said, “that green tea of yours is getting a little cool. How about we both treat ourselves to a fresh cup?”

  My throat involuntarily seized up in a fresh round of coughs.

  “Nice of you to offer, Hughie,” I said between hacks. “But I’ll need to get to my office about now.”

  “The thing about a green tea diet,” Hughie said, “it’s a health food challenge.”

  “Hell of a challenge all right.”

  Hughie looked at me speculatively. “A healthy challenge, wouldn’t you judge?” he said.

  “Oh, healthy, definitely.” I choked a little, held my breath to head off a full-blown attack, and felt myself blushing furiously.

  “Your face has gone an unnatural red, Mr. Crang.”

  “Just a harmless condition, Hughie,” I said. “Similar to gout.”

  I reached into my pocket for the cellphone. “Excuse me while I rustle up a cab. I’d better be on my way. It’s best for the condition if I get to a location where I can take an ingredient I’m sure Trina’s kitchen doesn’t keep in stock.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  As soon as I got into the taxi for the ride from Hughie’s house, I told the driver to stop some place that dealt in takeout coffee.

  “How strong?” asked the driver, an Ethiopian guy. “I know where very strong is available.”

  “Ethiopian brand?”

  “The only kind for a man like me to drink.”

  “I’m a Sumatra guy myself.”

  “Pussy coffee compared with what I get you.”

  “Go for it.”

  The driver, whose name was Asun, as I read on the cab licence pinned to the back of the driver’s seat, pulled over at a hole-in-the-wall shop on Dundas West called Rocket Fuel. Asun brought two large cups back to the car, one for each of us. I took a deep swallow of mine and knew instantly I was on the way to obliterating the taste of green tea, maybe forever. My brainpower might be shrinking, but my personal impetus was on the rise.

  Outside my office, I tipped Asun fifteen bucks and rode the elevator upstairs to begin chasing down the rest of the phone messages I’d left the night before, the calls asking for appointments. Kate Berrigan at the Fisher Library held first place on the list. I closed my office door, sat at the desk, and punched in the number I had for Ms. Berrigan. Before the phone rang even once at her end, my door flew open again. I looked up.

  A McGillivray brother stood in the doorway. It was the tall one with the muscles and the low double-digit IQ, Artie McGillivray. He was wearing a wife-beater and a silly expression.

  I clicked off the phone and stood up from my chair, studying Artie for giveaway signs of punches headed my way.

  “How did you get up here, Artie?”

  “Well, like, your name on the board in the lobby said you’re on this floor. The third, like?”

  “What I meant, Artie, was where did my address come from in the first place?”

  “From my brother, Arnie.”

  I put the likely sequence together in my head. Over at Plaid Pants on Sunday, I was pretty sure I remembered Maury speaking my name at least once. Arnie must have caught the name. He’d reasoned correctly there couldn’t be more than one Crang practising law in the city. Ergo, I was the guy in the office on Spadina.

  “Have a seat, Artie,” I said. “But not for long.”

  “I’m not here to ask much,” Artie said, sounding uncharacteristically humble. He sat across from me.

  “Name it,” I said.

  “I never met a girl that looked like her,” Artie said. “All I want is a chance for her to know the real me.”

  “So you’re in the market for the name and address of the young woman in my party at Plaid Pants?”

  “That’s all.”

  “It may be all, but it’s also too much.”

  “You’re not gonna give me even a phone number?”

  “Artie, the woman, who will remain nameless, not to mention addressless and numberless, she already has a boyfriend to whom she is committed.”

  “She’ll dump him if she gets a chance to know me.”

  “I admire your optimism, Artie, but her aforementioned boyfriend happens to be a long-time pal of min
e. You’re asking me to betray him?”

  “He’s that gramps fella from Sunday?”

  “You have a deft hand for characterization, Artie, but older as he is, he’s the one the young woman we’re talking about has chosen. Until she changes her mind, if that’s ever in the cards, I’m obliged to follow their lead.”

  Artie hesitated. “You want to say that again?”

  “I don’t believe I’m capable of an exact repeat.”

  Artie went into a longer silence, which I was just about to break by asking him to vacate the premises when he spoke again.

  “I figured this is what you might say,” he said. “So I thought up a trade you can make with me. You give me the good-looking girl’s name, and I give you a piece of information you don’t know anything about and probably wish you did. What do you say?”

  “I won’t like the terms, Artie. Guaranteed.”

  “You’ll love them, believe me.”

  “Just let me suggest a small adjustment.”

  “You trying to screw me before I even start?”

  “Me? Never.”

  “Do I get a phone number out of the deal?”

  “Listen, Artie, you’ll have to enlighten me about your information package before I think about our possible route to a number.”

  “I know you’ll agree to a trade,” Artie said in a new state of optimistic excitement.

  “Artie, you’re jumping the gun.”

  “Arnie and me got hired again by the Hickey woman!” Artie said at top voice. “She couldn’t find anybody else, so she begged us to come back at a higher fee. We’re gonna crack into the guy’s house!”

  “And steal the Hickey letters from Brent Grantham?”

  “I don’t know the guy’s name. Just that me and my brother are doing a plain break-and-enter, no bashing anybody around, no weapons on our persons.”

  “I, in fact, misstated just then. It’s not a steal of the letters. It’s a re-steal. But under any name, I find this an amazing development.”

  “So what’s the broad’s phone number?”

  “Artie,” I said patiently, “the young lady who is the object of your lusting is not, as you say, a ‘broad.’ Language like that is one reason I’m rejecting the proposed trade.”

  Artie scrambled to his feet and loomed over my side of the desk. “You fucking tricked me into the information!” he shouted at me.

  I held my hands up as a defensive barrier. “Tone it down, Artie. Let me advance an alternate suggestion.”

  “I know it’ll be some kind of trick.”

  “Here’s my proposal. I’ll mention your interest to the young lady and leave it to her whether she contacts you or not. How’s that?”

  Artie sat back down. “She’ll phone me?”

  “Or not.”

  “What do you mean ‘or not?’”

  I wondered to myself whether I’d ever in my life at the criminal bar encountered a member of the subculture as dumb as Artie. A far larger percentage of ignoramuses commit crimes than do people equipped with an ordinary complement of brain cells, but maybe nobody I’d ever encountered for professional reasons was as dedicated to stupidity as the man in my office at that moment.

  “I’ll tell the woman we’ve been discussing about your wish for a date with her,” I said. “She’ll phone you if she thinks it’s an idea she might contemplate. Leave me your phone number.”

  “Tell her to phone Arnie. I don’t have a phone of my own right now.”

  I shoved my notebook and a pencil across the desk to Artie’s side.

  “You can write, can’t you, Artie?”

  “Don’t fucking insult my intelligence.”

  “That might be impossible to avoid.”

  “Huh?”

  “Just write down Arnie’s number.”

  It took a couple of minutes and one false start, but Artie got a number on the piece of paper.

  “Will she phone tonight?” Artie said.

  “Anything’s a possibility.”

  Artie didn’t move from his chair.

  “Better get on your way, Artie. Otherwise you won’t be home if and when the young lady places the magic call.”

  “I never thought of that,” Artie said. He rose from his chair and was out of the door in four fast strides. I waited, listening through the unclosed door to the sound of Artie’s footsteps in the corridor. They went toward the elevator, stopped, then came back to the doorway.

  “If you got a girlfriend, Crang,” Artie said, “we’ll have a double date, you, me, and the two broads.”

  “Not ‘broads,’ Artie.”

  “I’m gonna have to remember that in future.”

  “It would clear up one of your social problems.”

  The answer seemed to satisfy Artie for the time being. He went back down the corridor. This time he got on the elevator.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I phoned Kate Berrigan from my office, and she told me with some enthusiasm that I should come over to the Fisher at my earliest convenience. She said a colleague of hers had rounded up documents that I would find of meaningful fascination on the subject of Christopher Thorne-Wainwright. I told her fifteen minutes from that moment would be my earliest convenience. She said she and the colleague would be waiting for me in her office.

  I crossed Spadina at the Bloor lights, wasted no time along Bloor past the school for smart Toronto kids called UTS, cut south on Huron Street one long block and a bit of another, came up behind the Robarts Library, and found my way into the Fisher’s lower level, where the staff had their offices. I checked the clock indicator on my cellphone. Elapsed time from my office to the Fisher: just under eleven minutes.

  A woman at the first desk pointed out Kate Berrigan’s office. Ms. Berrigan wore a big smile, her peaches-and-cream complexion glowing. The colleague, also all smiles, was older, more wrinkled than creamy, and she was holding three cases about the size that would accommodate something large, like over-the-mantle portrait-type paintings. Ms. Berrigan, who told me to please call her Kate, introduced the colleague as Doris Draper. Doris and I would have shaken hands, but her hands were occupied with the three cases.

  “Doris remembered something,” Kate said to me.

  “Yes,” Doris said in a slight Scottish burr. “All the talk around here lately about Chris Thorne-Wainwright reminded me I was the staff member who catalogued Chris’s papers when he donated them to the library.”

  “Doris is the longest-serving member of our staff,” Kate said.

  I wasn’t about to ask Doris how many years the service covered. She might think it rude.

  “Forty-one years I’ve been here, Mr. Crang,” Doris said. “You looked like you’d be interested to know.”

  “Didn’t want to sound churlish by inquiring.”

  Doris smiled forgivingly and busied herself for a moment placing the three cases on Kate’s desk.

  “Chris Thorne-Wainwright donated his papers in four sep­arate groupings spread over thirty-two years,” Dorie said. “Donors get income tax deductions, you know. With many donors, the deductions are beside the point. They just want to make sure the papers reflecting their creative work are preserved as an historical record. But with working writers and other artists — Leonard Cohen was one of our donors, you might be pleased to learn — the deductions count for a lot. It has counted considerably for Chris. The antiquarian book business is quite risky in the financial sense.”

  “I can see where an income tax saving would be an enticement to most donors,” I said, just to keep the subject moving.

  “My initial job with Chris,” Doris said, “as with so many other donors I’ve worked with, was to organize his donations. A lot of people’s papers are just dumped here in liquor store boxes loaded with manuscripts and other random things without the least bit of prior catalogu
ing.”

  “When does the evaluation step come into play?” I asked. “I imagine the income tax people would need to know at what sum the donations are valued before they can calculate the tax break.”

  “Of course,” Kate said.

  “That comes right after I’ve finished organizing,” Doris said. “Then we bring an outside evaluator in, and I assist him in his work.”

  “We don’t need to go into the mechanics of these steps,” Kate said to me.

  “Certainly not,” Doris said.

  “Now then, Mr. Crang,” Kate said, “we’ll get straight to the details you’ll want to hear about Thorne-Wainwright.”

  “You’ll find this quite remarkable,” Doris said.

  “I can hardly wait,” I said.

  “All of this happened in Chris’s second donation of the four,” Doris said. “He brought us these cumbersome things in the cases. Even more than just these three, to be exact. He brought us eight in all, but these three will give you a good notion of what is involved.”

  “These are the items Doris remembered so fortuitously,” Kate said, bestowing a proud smile on Doris.

  “Let me just show you exhibit number one,” Doris said.

  She placed two of the cases on Kate’s desk and opened the third. It proved to be a supersize manuscript suitable, it appeared, for framing. The manuscript covered just a single page of poetry, but the page’s paper was as thick as cardboard. The lines from the poem, written in very large letters in very dark ink, were recorded in a decidedly old-timey fashion, a kind of faux version of script from a much earlier century than the twenty-first. Across the top in even larger letters than the rest of the document appeared the words, “No Man Is An Island by John Donne.” Then followed the rest of Donne’s famous poem, ending with the line about the tolling bell, which Hemingway raided for the title of his novel about the Spanish Civil War.