“Yeah, but look at this.” The boy drew a second photocopy from his envelope. Drew told himself not to reach for it greedily . . . and reached for it greedily. He was behaving as though he’d been in this business for three years instead of over thirty, but who could blame him? This was big. This was huge. The difficulty was that “James Hawkins” seemed to know it was.
Ah, but he doesn’t know what I know, which includes where they came from. Unless Morrie is using him as a cat’s paw, and how likely is that with Morrie rotting in Waynesville State Prison?
The writing on the second photocopy was clearly from the same hand, but not as neat. There had been no scratch-outs and marginal notes on the fragment of poetry, but there were plenty here.
“I think he might have written it while he was drunk,” the boy said. “He drank a lot, you know, then quit. Cold turkey. Read it. You’ll see what it’s about.”
The circled number at the top of this page was 77. The writing below it started in mid-sentence.
never anticipated. While good reviews are always sweet desserts in the short term, one finds they lead to indigestion—insomnia, nightmares, even problems taking that ever-more-important afternoon shit—in the long term. And the stupiddity is even more remarkable in the good notices than in the bad ones. To see Jimmy Gold as some sort of benchmark, a HERO, even, is like calling someone like Billy the Kid (or Charles Starkweather, his closest 20th century avatar) an American icon. Jimmy is as Jimmy is, even as I am or you are; he is modeled not on Huck Finn but Etienne Lantier, the greatest character in 19th century fiction! If I have withdrawn from the public eye, it is because that eye is infected and there is no reason to put more materiel before it. As Jimmy himself would say, “Shit don’t
It ended there, but Drew knew what came next, and he was sure Hawkins did, too. It was Jimmy’s famous motto, still sometimes seen on tee-shirts all these years later.
“He misspelled stupidity.” It was all Drew could think of to say.
“Uh-huh, and material. Real mistakes, not cleaned up by some copyeditor.” The boy’s eyes glowed. It was a glow Drew had seen often, but never in one so young. “It’s alive, that’s what I think. Alive and breathing. You see what he says about étienne Lantier? That’s the main character of Germinal, by émile Zola. And it’s new! Do you get it? It’s a new insight into a character everybody knows, and from the author himself! I bet some collectors would pay big bucks for the original of this, and all the rest of the stuff I have.”
“You say there are six notebooks in your possession?”
“Uh-huh.”
Six. Not a hundred or more. If six was all the kid had, then he certainly wasn’t acting on Bellamy’s behalf, unless Morris had for some reason split his haul up. Drew couldn’t see his old pal doing that.
“They’re the medium-sized ones, eighty pages in each. That’s four hundred and eighty pages. A lot of white space—with poems there always is—but they’re not all poems. There are those short stories, too. One is about Jimmy Gold as a kid.”
But here was a question: did he, Drew, really believe there were only six? Was it possible the boy was holding back the good stuff? And if so, was he holding back because he wanted to sell the rest later, or because he didn’t want to sell it at all? To Drew, the glow in his eyes suggested the latter, although the boy might not yet know it consciously.
“Sir? Mr. Halliday?”
“Sorry. Just getting used to the idea that this really might be new Rothstein material.”
“It is,” the boy said. There was no doubt in his voice. “So how much?”
“How much would I pay?” Drew thought son would be okay now, because they were about to get down to the dickering. “Son, I’m not exactly made of money. Nor am I completely convinced these aren’t forgeries. A hoax. I’d have to see the real items.”
Drew could see Hawkins biting his lip behind the nascent moustache. “I wasn’t talking about how much you’d pay, I was talking about private collectors. You must know some who are willing to spend big money for special items.”
“I know a couple, yes.” He knew a dozen. “But I wouldn’t even write to them on the basis of two photocopied pages. As for getting authentication from a handwriting expert . . . that might be dicey. Rothstein was murdered, you know, which makes these stolen property.”
“Not if he gave them to someone before he was killed,” the boy countered swiftly, and Drew had to remind himself again that the kid had prepared for this encounter. But I have experience on my side, he thought. Experience and craft.
“Son, there’s no way to prove that’s what happened.”
“There’s no way to prove it wasn’t, either.”
So: impasse.
Suddenly the boy grabbed the two photocopies and jammed them back into the manila envelope.
“Wait a minute,” Drew said, alarmed. “Whoa. Hold on.”
“No, I think it was a mistake coming here. There’s a place in Kansas City, Jarrett’s Fine Firsts and Rare Editions. They’re one of the biggest in the country. I’ll try there.”
“If you can hold off a week, I’ll make some calls,” Drew said. “But you have to leave the photocopies.”
The boy hovered, unsure. At last he said, “How much could you get, do you think?”
“For almost five hundred pages of unpublished—hell, unseen—Rothstein material? The buyer would probably want at least a computer handwriting analysis, there are a couple of good programs that do that, but assuming that proved out, perhaps . . .” He calculated the lowest possible figure he could throw out without sounding absurd. “Perhaps fifty thousand dollars.”
James Hawkins either accepted this, or seemed to. “And what would your commission be?”
Drew laughed politely. “Son . . . James . . . no dealer would take a commission on a deal like this one. Not when the creator—known as the proprietor, in legalese—was murdered and the material might have been stolen. We’d split right down the middle.”
“No.” The boy said it at once. He might not yet be able to grow the biker moustache he saw in his dreams, but he had balls as well as smarts. “Seventy-thirty. My favor.”
Drew could give in on this, get maybe a quarter of a million for the six notebooks and give the boy seventy percent of fifty K, but wouldn’t “James Hawkins” expect him to dicker, at least a little? Wouldn’t he be suspicious if he didn’t?
“Sixty-forty. My last offer, and of course contingent on finding a buyer. That would be thirty thousand dollars for something you found crammed into a cardboard box along with old copies of Jaws and The Bridges of Madison County. Not a bad return, I’d say.”
The boy shifted from foot to foot, saying nothing but clearly conflicted.
Drew reverted to the wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly smile. “Leave the photocopies with me. Come back in a week and I’ll tell you how we stand. And here’s some advice—stay away from Jarrett’s place. The man will pick your pockets.”
“I’d want cash.”
Drew thought, Don’t we all.
“You’re getting way ahead of yourself, son.”
The boy came to a decision and put the manila envelope down on the cluttered desk. “Okay. I’ll come back.”