Morris was carrying a brown paper bag he’d grabbed from the kitchen. From it he took one of Rothstein’s notebooks and put it on the table, being careful to avoid the puddle of spilled coffee. “A sample. One of a great many. At least a hundred and fifty. I haven’t had a chance to do a count yet, but it’s the total jackpot.”
“Put that away!” Andy was still whispering like a character in a bad spy movie. His eyes shifted from side to side, always returning to the notebook. “Rothstein’s murder is on the front page of the New York Times and all over the TV, you idiot!”
This news came as a shock. It was supposed to be at least three days before anyone found the writer’s body, maybe as long as six. Andy’s reaction was even more of a shock. He looked like a cornered rat.
Morris flashed what he hoped was a fair approximation of Andy’s I’m-so-smart-I-bore-myself smile. “Calm down. In this part of town there are kids carrying notebooks everywhere.” He pointed across the street toward Government Square. “There goes one now.”
“Not Moleskines, though! Jesus! The housekeeper knew the kind Rothstein used to write in, and the paper says the safe in his bedroom was open and empty! Put . . . it . . . away!”
Morrie pushed it toward Andy instead, still being careful to avoid the coffee stain. He was growing increasingly irritated with Andy—PO’d, as Jimmy Gold would have said—but he also felt a perverse sort of pleasure at watching the man cringe in his seat, as if the notebook were a vial filled with plague germs.
“Go on, have a look. This one’s mostly poetry. I was paging through it on the bus—”
“On the bus? Are you insane?”
“—and it’s not very good,” Morris went on as if he hadn’t heard, “but it’s his, all right. A holograph manuscript. Extremely valuable. We talked about that. Several times. We talked about how—”
“Put it away!”
Morris didn’t like to admit that Andy’s paranoia was catching, but it sort of was. He returned the notebook to the bag and looked at his old friend (his one friend) sulkily. “It’s not like I was suggesting we have a sidewalk sale, or anything.”
“Where are the rest?” And before Morris could answer: “Never mind. I don’t want to know. Don’t you understand how hot those things are? How hot you are?”
“I’m not hot,” Morris said, but he was, at least in the physical sense; all at once his cheeks and the nape of his neck were burning. Andy was acting as if he’d shit his pants instead of pulling off the crime of the century. “No one can connect me to Rothstein, and I know it’ll be awhile before we can sell them to a private collector. I’m not stupid.”
“Sell them to a col— Morrie, do you hear yourself?”
Morris crossed his arms and stared at his friend. The man who used to be his friend, at least. “You act as if we never talked about this. As if we never planned it.”
“We didn’t plan anything! It was a story we were telling ourselves, I thought you understood that!”
What Morris understood was Andy Halliday would tell the police exactly that if he, Morris, were caught. And Andy expected him to be caught. For the first time Morris realized consciously that Andy was no intellectual giant eager to join him in an existential act of outlawry but just another nebbish. A bookstore clerk only a few years older than Morris himself.
Don’t give me your dumbass literary criticism, Rothstein had said to Morris in the last two minutes of his life. You’re a common thief, my friend.
His temples began to throb.
“I should have known better. All your big talk about private collectors, movie stars and Saudi princes and I don’t know who-all. Just a lot of big talk. You’re nothing but a blowhard.”
That was a hit, a palpable hit. Morris saw it and was glad, just as he had been when he had managed to stick it to his mother once or twice in their final argument.
Andy leaned forward, cheeks flushed, but before he could speak, a waitress appeared with a wad of napkins. “Let me get that spill,” she said, and wiped it up. She was young, a natural ash-blonde, pretty in a pale way, maybe even beautiful. She smiled at Andy. He returned a pained grimace, at the same time drawing away from her as he had from the Moleskine notebook.
He’s a homo, Morris thought wonderingly. He’s a goddam homo. How come I didn’t know that? How come I never saw? He might as well be wearing a sign.
Well, there were a lot of things about Andy he’d never seen, weren’t there? Morris thought of something one of the guys on the housing job liked to say: All pistol and no bullets.
With the waitress gone, taking her toxic atmosphere of girl with her, Andy leaned forward again. “Those collectors are out there,” he said. “They pile up paintings, sculpture, first editions . . . there’s an oilman in Texas who’s got a collection of early wax-cylinder recordings worth a million dollars, and another one who’s got a complete run of every western, science fiction, and shudder-pulp magazine published between 1910 and 1955. Do you think all of that stuff was legitimately bought and sold? The fuck it was. Collectors are insane, the worst of them don’t care if the things they covet were stolen or not, and they most assuredly do not want to share with the rest of the world.”
Morris had heard this screed before, and his face must have shown it, because Andy leaned even farther forward. Now their noses were almost touching. Morris could smell English Leather, and wondered if that was the preferred aftershave of homos. Like a secret sign, or something.
“But do you think any of those guys would listen to me?”
Morris Bellamy, who was now seeing Andy Halliday with new eyes, said he guessed not.
Andy pooched out his lower lip. “They will someday, though. Yeah. Once I get my own shop and build up a clientele. But that’ll take years.”
“We talked about waiting five.”
“Five?” Andy barked a laugh and drew back to his side of the table again. “I might be able to open my shop in five years—I’ve got my eye on a little place in Lacemaker Lane, there’s a fabric store there now but it doesn’t do much business—but it takes longer than that to find big-money clients and establish trust.”
Lots of buts, Morris thought, but there were no buts before.
“How long?”
“Why don’t you try me on those notebooks around the turn of the twenty-first century, if you still have them? Even if I did have a call list of private collectors right now, today, not even the nuttiest of them would touch anything so hot.”
Morris stared at him, at first unable to speak. At last he said, “You never said anything like that when we were planning—”
Andy clapped his hands to the sides of his head and clutched it. “We planned nothing! And don’t you try to lay this off on me! Don’t you ever! I know you, Morrie. You didn’t steal them to sell them, at least not until you’ve read them. Then I suppose you might be willing to give some of them to the world, if the price was right. Basically, though, you’re just batshit-crazy on the subject of John Rothstein.”
“Don’t call me that.” His temples were throbbing worse than ever.
“I will if it’s the truth, and it is. You’re batshit-crazy on the subject of Jimmy Gold, too. He’s why you went to jail.”