Booking In Read online

  “Right here,” Ms. Berrigan said, her voice rising. “In Toronto. At least, that’s the location we suspect.”

  “Really?” I said. “Based on what kind of evidence?”

  “For the most part it’s the flimsy kind. None of our associates at important libraries in England or the United States have heard a whisper from the collectors they have connections with of any sort of trade in Reading Sonnets. It seems to be strictly a Toronto phenomenon.”

  “And not widespread in Toronto, I’m betting.”

  “Just one collector at the moment as far as we’ve divined,” Ms. Berrigan said, speaking cautiously again and giving me an eagle-eyed look.

  “And you’ve got a name for the collector in question?”

  “If it isn’t the client of the person you represent, I’ll be very surprised.”

  “We’re talking Meg Grantham?”

  Ms. Berrigan shifted in her chair. She’d lost the eagle-eyed look, and when she spoke again, it was in a more relaxed tone.

  “Meg Grantham’s name was known to everybody around here at the library. I mean, who hasn’t heard of the richest woman in Canada? But she doesn’t have a reputation as a collector of any kind of books. So when she emerged as the potential owner of a supposed Reading Sonnets, all of us in the Fisher were at a complete dead end.”

  “You don’t have any ideas about where Ms. Grantham bought the forgery?”

  “We’re quite sure it wasn’t by way of dealers in Europe or the United States.”

  “You made inquiries through your contacts in libraries abroad?”

  Ms. Berrigan nodded. “Such a sale was news to them.”

  “What about Fletcher Marshall?”

  Ms. Berrigan paused, looked me in the eye, and smiled. “Well,” she said, “now I assume you’re revealing to me by implication the identity of your client in whatever negotiations are going on over the Reading Sonnets, real or faked?”

  “Fletcher, yes,” I said with a smile.

  “You’re asking if I think he might have sold the document to Ms. Grantham?”

  “I guess I am.”

  “Mr. Crang, do you take me for a nitwit?”

  “That’s the last thing I’d take you for,” I said. “But Fletcher’s the only person I know who’s independently in the antiquarian book trade.”

  “There have been a few more, but that’s not the issue.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “All of us Fisher people have heard it said that Fletcher’s the man hired by Ms. Grantham to verify the validity of her Reading Sonnets.”

  “So your reasoning is that Ms. Grantham wouldn’t hire the man from whom she’d bought the sonnets to do the independent validating job on the same sonnets?”

  “Not unless Fletcher was a truly Machiavellian manipulator.”

  “He’s good, but probably not that good is what you’re saying?”

  “Approximately.”

  “I haven’t asked about price,” I said. “What do you suppose a copy of the Reading Sonnets would go for today, if authentic?”

  “Close to two hundred thousand dollars, we think. Say one hundred and seventy-five at the most conservative estimate.”

  “Not an immodest figure,” I said.

  I moved a little in my seat, providing a different angle on my view up to the soaring heights of the library. Any way I looked at it, this was a glorious building.

  “What about the other Toronto traders in antiquarian books you referred to a minute ago, presumably Fletcher’s contemporaries?” I said. “Anybody I should look into?”

  “You’re asking me to, ah, finger somebody?”

  “Do you read police procedurals?”

  “You’re wondering where I got the jargon?

  “‘Finger’ is good.”

  “Well,” — Ms. Berrigan looked like she was putting deep thought into the question — “there are fewer dealers than ever these days, especially those who have a particular fondness for Victorian literature.”

  “I’m not going to accuse anyone of anything,” I said. “I’m just looking for people who might have some ideas that’ll lead me to a useful path.”

  “If you put it that way, there’s of course old Christopher Thorne-Wainwright. You must know of him.”

  “You’ll have to enlighten me,” I said.

  “He’s generally considered a kind of long-time wizard of the business.”

  “You don’t know what he’s currently up to?”

  “He let his store go four or five years ago,” Ms. Berrigan said. “Since then, he’s not been that much in evidence, not to me at any rate. I’ll ask about him among my colleagues here at the library and let you know if I learn anything that might help you.”

  I typed Thorne-Wainwright’s name into my iPhone. Ms. Berrigan supplied the names of two other veteran dealers. I typed them in too, but almost immediately Ms. Berrigan told me to forget about both. One guy was in his late eighties and having forgetfulness issues. The other had dropped out of the antiquarian book business and opened a fishing guide operation in northern Manitoba. Both were unlikely to be still dealing in books, forged or otherwise.

  “What I thought earlier,” Ms. Berrigan said, “was that you could take some kind of action, whereas all of us at the library can only gossip. That’s why I decided on the spot to be frank with you.”

  “I get the impression you library people don’t kid around when you figure someone’s playing fast and loose with the subject of your life’s work.”

  “Treating books without respect — is that what you mean?”

  “It is.”

  “People think of librarians as milquetoast characters.”

  “But that’s not the whole story.”

  “Under the surface,” Ms. Berrigan said, “in certain circumstances, as with book fraudsters, we’re seething with total vexation.”

  There seemed nothing more to discuss after Ms. Berrigan’s small explosion. She stood up and told me to follow her downstairs to her office. She said she had a present to give me before I left. I was glad to obey her every wish. Under the peaches-and-cream complexion, Ms. Berrigan possessed an iron in her character that I didn’t intend to challenge in any way.

  Besides, I loved receiving presents, especially the kind that were unexpected.

  Chapter Nine

  Thursday morning, I was sitting in my office reading a book titled A Long Way from the Armstrong Beer Parlour: A Life in Rare Books, a collection of essays by Richard Landon. The book was the gift that Ms. Berrigan had pressed on me, and from what I had read so far, it was a treasure.

  My office was on the third floor of a badly aging commercial high-rise on the west side of Spadina Avenue, half a block south of Bloor. For a view, the office looked across bustling Spadina to a dandy little parkette on the opposite corner. On most summer days I left the office door open and jacked up the front window. The place had feeble air conditioning, and the combination of open door and jacked-up window gave me a hope of catching the cross breeze. As for physical space, I’d recently smartened up the office. I painted the walls a pleasing shade the manufacturer called Reading Room Red. The furniture was likewise new, made of a medium-brown wood with comfortable built-in cushions, and on one wall I hung a Matisse poster of a woman in a dress of many colours, all bright, a view of the blue Mediterranean through the window behind her.

  “Literary Forgery and Mystifications” was the title of the chapter I was reading in the Landon book. I’d already learned from the book’s introduction that Landon had been with the Fisher from 1967 until his death in 2011, the last thirty of those years as the Fisher’s head person. It was Landon who had led the way in making the Fisher into the great library it came to be. He did what it took in gathering the papers of important Canadian writers and wooing donors for their collections of obscure wor
ks of prose and poetry from all countries and sources. The papers and several hundred thousand books were stored on the Fisher’s shelves. Reading the essays of the man responsible for much of this massive collection, I decided that Richard Landon had known more than anyone I’d ever heard of about books and the people who wrote them.

  I was deep into his stories from the “Literary Forgery” chapter when someone tapped on the frame of my office’s open door. I looked up from the essay, not happy to be deflected from Richard Landon’s anecdotes, and recognized the woman in the doorway. She was Fletcher Marshall’s assistant, Charlotte Watson, known to everybody as Charlie.

  “My apologies, Mr. Crang,” she said, sounding tentative. “I don’t have an appointment.”

  “You might notice my client chairs are empty,” I said. I marked my place in the Landon book, stood up from my chair, and made welcoming gestures.

  Charlie Watson was a smallish woman, at least in height, short and trim, but she had a figure that included plenty of bosom. She was probably in her midthirties but looked younger. Charlie had honey-brown hair, green eyes, and a pert nose. Her clothes were casual, a plain black shirt and tight black jeans, the kind of thing to wear if you spent your days heaving books around.

  “Coffee?” I said. “Fresh-made, sugar and cream on offer.”

  “Black would be nice,” Charlie said. She had a pleasant alto, though it hadn’t yet lost its tentative tone.

  I held out a client chair for Charlie, poured her a cup of coffee from the Cuisinart coffeemaker on the table beside the window, and returned to my own chair on the business side of the desk.

  “You’re wondering why I’m here,” she said.

  “At a guess,” I said, “I’d say it’s about the break-in at your boss’s store.”

  “Fletcher said you’d want to talk to me.”

  “And you prefer to hold our chat out of Fletcher’s earshot.”

  “The thing is, my boss is a sensitive man.”

  “About what?”

  “Pardon?”

  “A guy’s not usually sensitive in the abstract,” I said. “His sensitivity is likely to be generated by a specific source in his everyday life.”

  “Well, all right, in Fletcher’s case right now, it’s money more than anything else.”

  “Quite a lot of it?”

  “You do get right down to business, Mr. Crang.”

  “Saves time.”

  “In money, I’d say the total value of the store.”

  “Is this your way of saying Fletcher’s business is on the rocks?”

  “Totally, unless he stops doing stupid things.”

  “How stupid are the things he’s doing?”

  “Fletcher would kill me if he knew what I’m telling you.”

  “You haven’t told me much yet.”

  Charlie wriggled a little in her chair. It was a movement not without its charm. “I get the impression he’s in hock up to his eyeballs,” she said.

  “To whom?”

  “That’s the trouble. I haven’t a clue what he owes or who he owes it to, but from his attitude around the store, all the worrying and penny-pinching he does, moaning and groaning, complaining about getting a decent night’s sleep, the man is a wreck.”

  I shook my head a little. “You know I’ve seen Fletcher a little bit lately, Charlie?”

  “That’s partly why I chose to come here.”

  “Fletcher strikes me as just the same unyielding guy as ever.”

  “I was pretty sure you’d say that,” Charlie said. “But if you were in my shoes, working alongside Fletcher practically every day, you’d know the man is definitely in some kind of trouble. Almost for sure financial.”

  “In the store the other day,” I said, “the place looked kind of swell. Fresh paint job, for starters. New digital safe. Pretty spiffy item.”

  Charlie shook her head, “That stuff’s all the tip of the iceberg.”

  “We’re not talking big bucks?”

  “Something like fifteen thousand all told, paint job and everything, that’d be my guess.”

  “Too few dollars to qualify as a major worry?”

  “Just enough to spruce up the building. That’s how Fletcher phrased what it cost. The new look, the painting, plus replacing the old counters in the front room. And the most expensive thing, that stupid damn safe.”

  “You don’t see a need for the safe?”

  “It used to be that we’d put anything we had of a unique value, which was never much you’d call pricey anyway, in a locked cabinet under the main counter. Nothing went wrong with that system. Then Fletcher switched from the cabinet to the idiotic safe, and look what happened.”

  “A break-in.”

  “The first one since I’ve worked there, which is almost four years, I’ve never heard Fletcher speak of a previous one.” Charlie’s voice rose a couple of decibels, and her face flushed pink with what I took to be anger at the uselessness of it all.

  “On the other hand,” I said, “I don’t imagine the store has ever before been minding anything as valuable as the Walter Hickey letters and the forged poems.”

  “That’s true,” Charlie said. “But we’ve never had a robbery before. I’m just saying.”

  “Let’s get back to Fletcher’s supposed heavy new debt,” I said. “You got a theory about that? Is he a gambler? Made some bad business deals? What?”

  “Not cards or dice or any of that. Fletcher’s got a kind of puritan streak in that particular area.”

  “But?”

  “But he seems to have been shaky businesswise the last couple of years. It’s just a feeling I have. The whole antiquarian book industry has gone through tough times for a whole decade. Businesses closed like mad. Fletcher had to let two full-time employees go. He kept me, and we weathered the whole downturn thing.”

  “So here you are, still in business. What’s your worry?”

  “I think it might’ve come at a cost I didn’t really appreciate until now. Maybe Fletcher’s overextended. That’s not a business term I really understand. All I sense for sure is that Fletcher’s worried crazy.”

  “On the other hand, the forged poems and the Hickey letters, he must have been pumped about getting his hands on them?”

  “Especially Meg Grantham’s item,” Charlie said. “He got excited over it like I’ve hardly ever seen him over anything else. The way he acted, those poems were his salvation.”

  “And now they’ve vanished.”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said, sitting up in her chair, looking indignant. “But you’re the man who’s going to get them back.”

  “It’s what I’m good at.”

  Charlie smiled in a manner that some might call seraphic.

  “Let’s just sum up here,” I said. “Fletcher’s been hit with a double whammy. He’s deep in hock to somebody, according to you, and he’s lost the two sets of valuable documents put in his trust by clients, the clients being Meg and the Hickey woman. Now I enter the picture.”

  Charlie nodded, agreeing with my simple statement. She said, “Fletcher’s more frantic than you probably imagined from your meeting with him.”

  “That’s why you’re slipping me these bits of inside information about his probable debt to a person you can’t name? It’s all about his delicate emotional state? You want me to go easy on Fletcher, the guy who hired me?”

  “Not exactly that.” Charlie put her coffee mug on the desk and leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. “It’s more that I want to encourage you to locate the missing documents as soon as you can, for Fletcher’s sake.”

  “Your wish is that I see about fingering the thief?”

  “Exactly.”

  “In that category,” I said, lingering over what I was about to say, “what about yourself, for instance?”

 
“Me?”

  “I imagine you have access to the safe.”

  “So what?” Charlie said. Her initial tentativeness had given way to something more like irritation. Maybe a touch of panic tossed in, too, if I was reading the emotions crossing her face accurately. “I mean, really, that has nothing to do with anything.”

  “Did Fletcher tell you the safe’s combination?”

  “Yes, of course,” Charlie said. “But, really, Mr. Crang, I didn’t come here to be cross-examined this way.”

  “You could get in and out of the safe at any time?”

  “You actually suspect me of taking the letters and the poems?”

  “It’s a matter of elimination, Charlie.” I softened down my tone from what it had been for the preceding couple of minutes. “You have a key to the store, and you can work the safe’s combination. That doesn’t automatically make you a suspect, but if I can rule you out as the burglar, I’m narrowing the list of suspects by one significant possibility.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Where were you Sunday night?”

  Charlie took a sip of her coffee and looked defiant. “I was at my boyfriend’s house that night,” she said.

  “A sleepover? You were there until morning?”

  “Until my boyfriend served coffee in bed.”

  “The two of you didn’t slip out together during the night?”

  “My god.” Charlie looked as close as anybody could get to flabbergasted. “Now you’re trying to implicate my boyfriend as well as me?”

  “I pride myself on a thorough job.”

  “Well, you can forget about me and him.”

  “The boyfriend will back up your story?”

  “Damned straight he will.”

  “And you figure the sleepover at the boyfriend’s place puts you out of the running as the thief?”

  Charlie flipped her hands. “A person can’t be in two places at once.”

  “I’ll need a name. Who’s the boyfriend?”

  “He and I are going for discretion,” Charlie said after a few moments of fiddling with her coffee mug. “There might be issues with other people about our relationship if word got around.”