“Did you help arrange for Mr. Fergins to review evidence in the case of the great book pirate that was later dismissed?”
“Do you see this courthouse?” I nodded that I indeed saw the massive, three-story building that overshadowed the entire park. He went on: “The funds that were raised to build this very building were also used to line the pockets of city officials, friends of mine in many cases, some of whom still rot for it in the Tombs for their foolish corruption. But what of those so-called bookaneers? They stole a much rarer resource than money; they stole the creative ideas plucked right out of the best minds on both sides of the Atlantic—scoundrels like that man we had in chains and, from what we learned, even some depraved women made a practice of it, a virtual profession of dishonesty. Yet, nobody saw fit to punish them, not even to try. I tried, hand to God, I tried. I have contributed to the most humbling of tasks, rebuilding a bridge connecting two great lands. Did we fail to secure justice? I shall answer it this way. When I have the honor to be Senator Salisbury, I will proudly declare I tried to give one of those pirates what he deserved.”
After his speech, he continued on his way without a farewell. He may have been half-English, but he was all New Yorker.
I shouldn’t blame Mr. Fergins’s departure for the fact that the romance of the railroad was lost to me, especially since so many train routes had already been permanently unhooking their restaurant cars to save money. Maybe I have a better way to put it, which is this: once reading books lost a little romance, so did living in New York City and, in some related way, so did being a railroader. I suppose Mr. Fergins’s story had a part in my moving on from this era of life, though at the time the reverse seemed true. It seemed as though Mr. Fergins, having found in me a willing recipient for his narrative, had finally freed himself from the memory he carried around of those events and had been able to return to his humdrum but contented existence in London without another thought.
I cannot remember ever conceiving of a book as a piece of property before meeting Mr. Fergins. Or if I ever had stopped to think such a thing, it was that the book I held in my hands belonged to me, or to Mr. Fergins, who had loaned it to me, or to my father, or a public library. I suppose it might have occurred to me that the book belonged to the author, too, but this would have seemed remote, something that mattered only in the past. Now I understood that intellectual property, as it was called in the language of the law, was always in danger and the reason began with my own impressions. It had seemed natural and right that the contents, the ideas should belong to me as much as to their creator, and in a nutshell that explained the whole existence and history of the bookaneers.
I had trouble looking at a book the same way I had before Mr. Fergins told me his incredible tales. He once said to me that books can make you do things without your realizing. For example, he said, when a book describes someone opening his mouth slightly and licking the outlines of his lips, you cannot help but touch your tongue to your own lips. If it is a bit more specific, say, describing the tongue running along each tooth under your upper lip, your own tongue will perform the act involuntarily sooner or later. A trivial example, of course, but he cautioned me that the pages of a book can influence our thinking and our actions in ways we never comprehend, and that the world of publishing has always been well aware of it. I have revered books, but now I never read a page without sensing the various demons fighting for control of the words, control of me. There were times when I cursed myself for it, and cursed Mr. Fergins for peeling the ink from the page and showing me what lay between.
A new book cart, smaller and creakier, appeared on the train before the winter was out. The vendor’s New York accent seemed strange and modern when expecting Mr. Fergins’s lively and soothing English. This impostor’s cart never made a stop, never even slowed down, unless a paying customer snapped fingers or waved a hand. This made Mr. Fergins’s removal from my life sting more.
Another few months went by. There used to be a small bookstore in the city, not far from where I was enjoying what passed for outdoors in that metropolis. In the window, I noticed the name Robert Louis Stevenson on a book under a placard announcing, “Newly Published!” I picked it up straightaway, expecting that Stevenson’s masterpiece, the source of the battle between the two greatest bookaneers, had finally been published, and would give me some answers. As I held it in my hands, Belial’s face, his proud and repulsive scowl, appeared in my mind. But this was no novel at all. It was called A Footnote to History, a long essay of sorts on Samoa. I could only read a few pages in the store before the glare of the bookseller paralyzed me. Mr. Fergins told me a bookseller can determine almost immediately whether one who enters his store can afford to buy a book or not, and, as usual, I fell into the latter category. Before I returned it to the table, I happened to notice the name of the publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons of New York—the same firm where Belial had been taken by the police.