“What?”
Pete dug into his back pocket, took out a folded sheet of paper, and handed it to Mr. Ricker. “I went looking on the Internet for book dealers here in town that buy and sell first editions, and I found these three. I know you’re sort of a book collector yourself—”
“Not much, I can’t afford serious collecting on my salary, but I’ve got a signed Theodore Roethke that I intend to hand down to my children. The Waking. Very fine poems. Also a Vonnegut, but that’s not worth so much; unlike Rothstein, Father Kurt signed everything.”
“Anyway, I wondered if you knew any of these, and if you do, which one might be the best. If I decided to let him give me the book . . . and then, you know, sell it.”
Mr. Ricker unfolded the sheet, glanced at it, then looked at Pete again. That gaze, both keen and sympathetic, made Pete feel uneasy. This might have been a bad idea, he really wasn’t much good at fiction, but he was in it now and would have to plow through somehow.
“As it happens, I know all of them. But jeez, kiddo, I also know how much Rothstein means to you, and not just from your paper last year. Annie Davis says you bring him up often in Creative Writing. Claims the Gold trilogy is your Bible.”
Pete supposed this was true, but he hadn’t realized how blabby he’d been until now. He resolved to stop talking about Rothstein so much. It might be dangerous. People might think back and remember, if—
If.
“It’s good to have literary heroes, Pete, especially if you plan to major in English when you get to college. Rothstein is yours—at least for now—and that book could be the beginning of your own library. Are you sure you want to sell it?”
Pete could answer this question with fair honesty, even though it wasn’t really a signed book he was talking about. “Pretty sure, yeah. Things have been a little tough at home—”
“I know what happened to your father at City Center, and I’m sorry as hell. At least they caught the psycho before he could do any more damage.”
“Dad’s better now, and both he and my mom are working again, only I’m probably going to need money for college, see . . .”
“I understand.”
“But that’s not the biggest thing, at least not now. My sister wants to go to Chapel Ridge, and my parents told her she couldn’t, at least not this coming year. They can’t quite swing it. Close, but no cigar. And I think she needs a place like that. She’s kind of, I don’t know, lagging.”
Mr. Ricker, who had undoubtedly known lots of students who were lagging, nodded gravely.
“But if Tina could get in with a bunch of strivers—especially this one girl, Barbara Robinson, she used to know from when we lived on the West Side—things might turn around.”
“It’s good of you to think of her future, Pete. Noble, even.”
Pete had never thought of himself as noble. The idea made him blink.
Perhaps seeing his embarrassment, Mr. Ricker turned his attention to the list again. “Okay. Grissom Books would have been your best bet when Teddy Grissom was still alive, but his son runs the shop now, and he’s a bit of a tightwad. Honest, but close with a buck. He’d say it’s the times, but it’s also his nature.”
“Okay . . .”
“I assume you’ve checked on the Net to find out how much a signed first-edition Runner in good condition is valued at?”
“Yeah. Two or three thousand. Not enough for a year at Chapel Ridge, but a start. What my dad calls earnest money.”
Mr. Ricker nodded. “That sounds about right. Teddy Junior would start you at eight hundred. You might get him up to a grand, but if you kept pushing, he’d get his back up and tell you to take a hike. This next one, Buy the Book, is Buddy Franklin’s shop. He’s also okay—by which I mean honest—but Buddy doesn’t have much interest in twentieth-century fiction. His big deal is selling old maps and seventeenth-century atlases to rich guys in Branson Park and Sugar Heights. But if you could talk Buddy into valuing the book, then go to Teddy Junior at Grissom, you might get twelve hundred. I’m not saying you would, I’m just saying it’s possible.”
“What about Andrew Halliday Rare Editions?”
Mr. Ricker frowned. “I’d steer clear of Halliday. He’s got a little shop on Lacemaker Lane, in that walking mall off Lower Main Street. Not much wider than an Amtrak car, but damn near a block long. Seems to do quite well, but there’s an odor about him. I’ve heard it said he’s not too picky about the provenance of certain items. Do you know what that is?”
“The line of ownership.”
“Right. Ending with a piece of paper that says you legally own what you’re trying to sell. The only thing I know for sure is that about fifteen years ago, Halliday sold a proof copy of James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and it turned out to have been stolen from the estate of Brooke Astor. She was a rich old biddy from New York with a larcenous business manager. Halliday showed a receipt, and his story of how he came by the book was credible, so the investigation was dropped. But receipts can be forged, you know. I’d steer clear of him.”
“Thanks, Mr. Ricker,” Pete said, thinking that if he went ahead with this, Andrew Halliday Rare Editions would be his first stop. But he would have to be very, very careful, and if Mr. Halliday wouldn’t do a cash deal, that would mean no deal. Plus, under no circumstances could he know Pete’s name. A disguise might be in order, although it wouldn’t do to go overboard on that.
“You’re welcome, Pete, but if I said I felt good about this, I’d be lying.”
Pete could relate. He didn’t feel so good about it himself.
???
He was still mulling his options a month later, and had almost come to the conclusion that trying to sell even one of the notebooks would be too much risk for too little reward. If it went to a private collector—like the ones he had sometimes read about, who bought valuable paintings to hang in secret rooms where only they could look at them—it would be okay. But he couldn’t be sure that would happen. He was leaning more and more to the idea of donating them anonymously, maybe mailing them to the New York University Library. The curator of a place like that would understand the value of them, no doubt. But doing that would be a little more public than Pete liked to think about, not at all like dropping the letters with the money inside them into anonymous streetcorner mailboxes. What if someone remembered him at the post office?