A Slepyng Hound to Wake Page 5

  Still, they had learned a lot together. She was a good lady, but she had never learned how to give in when the time came.

  As much as he had liked it at Alcott & Poe, he had never regretted leaving. He had made so many stupid moves. Breaking with Barbara had been a right one. She liked being the boss a little too much. She had never understood his craving for a simpler way of doing things. Or why he was so easily aggravated by customers. He could forgive people their ignorance—he certainly forgave himself for enough of that. But he could not forgive meanness. She did not understand why he would rather work sixteen hours a day instead of only twelve. She had wanted kids. Probably still did. How would he have been able to take care of kids? He would have been as bad at that as his own father had been.

  Barbara was a survivor. He could not have known that then. Little rich girls come and go. Very few learn the right lessons in life before they run out of their parents’ money. Barbara had. Her personality hadn’t changed, but she was a lot more woman now than she was then, in many ways—and he liked the extra weight. “Zaftig” was the word she used, but she exaggerated.

  The morning sunburned, even through the curtains.

  Henry lowered the back of his Morris chair and closed his eyes again. He had been reading most of the night, caught in the wave of a story he had picked up casually the night before with no expectation. He loved it when that happened. The author, Robert W. Chambers, had been the Alexander Dumas of his time. Much like George Duggan was today. After reading through a collection of historical romances that he had picked up for next to nothing at an auction, he was coming to the conclusion that Chambers was underrated. Maybe one day he would be rediscovered. Perhaps it would be worthwhile putting together a small set of first editions in dust jacket. It would not cost all that much.

  He was startled when the phone rang again. He had begun to dream again. The sun was into an afternoon slant against the wall.

  “Sorry to wake you.” It was Della.

  “I was reading.”

  “Why do you always say you were reading when you were really sleeping? Are you guilty about sleeping? Everybody does it.”

  She always knew too much, and let him know it.

  “Why did you call?”

  “I wondered what you were doing.”

  “I was sleeping.”

  “You want to go out? We could get ribs at the Blue Ribbon.”

  “I’m feeling poor.”

  “Pulled pork sandwiches then, on me.”

  “Sounds messy, but interesting.”

  “I need to get out,” she said.

  “All right. Pulled pork on you, and then we go out.”

  “Stop it! It’s too early. I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

  He climbed in the shower and stood with his head right below the nozzle, as if he could wash the dream he had been having from his mind. He had been dreaming about Barbara, and that surprised him. They had worked together for seven years. In his memory now he had worked harder at keeping the distance between them than he had worked at selling books. Their romance had come only at the end, the year before he quit. Even if he was glad he had left, he had never shaken the heat of their relationship just before it was over.

  When he turned off the shower, he could hear the phone ringing again.

  Barbara began to speak before he had a chance to say hello.

  “Henry, I thought about this before calling you back. I had something else on my mind, and I shouldn’t have hesitated before. But what are my options? I need your help.”

  Barbara always had something else on her mind.

  “What do you need?”

  As he said it, the image of Barbara from his dream came back again. It was funny to him how he often imagined her naked, but always as she was now, never as the skinny kid she had been when they were together.

  “A friend of mine needs some help. You know her—Sharon. Well. The problem is. … You know how these things kind of work off each other. The idea occurred to me when I read your name in the story about Eddy Perry getting murdered.”

  A bit of warm June air blew through the curtains at the window and cooled his skin. He looked down at the puddle of water at his feet.

  “What can I do for you, Barbara?”

  “Do you remember reading about the murder of the Harvard instructor on the street a couple of years ago?”

  “No. I don’t.” He seldom read the papers. She knew that, just as he knew she read both the local papers and the New York Times as well.

  “Well, his name was James Frankowski. He taught ancient history. It was a tragedy. He was mugged one night on his way to his office.”

  “Yeah …” He thought again of Eddy Perry. And hadn’t Albert mentioned something about others who had been killed in Cambridge in the last few years?

  “Well, he was Sharon’s boyfriend. They were, like, married, only without the certificate. They had been living together for years.”

  “Yes. …”

  “It’s Sharon who needs some help. I can’t really do so much. I’ve had to let half the part-timers go. Sharon and I are at the store at least ten hours a day. More! Seven days a week. There’s no time left. And the police can’t do anything. They haven’t done anything, or they won’t do anything.”

  “You mean, about his murder?”

  “Yes, but that’s not it. She thinks that—”

  There was a familiar knock at the door, probably Della’s.

  “Hold on.” He held the phone in one hand as he pulled the coils in the cord straight and opened the door. Della was wearing the same dress again from the night before. He let her in.

  “Who’s that?” Barbara said on the phone.

  “It’s Della.”

  “I thought you weren’t seeing her anymore.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  There was a brief silence. Henry looked at Della, who was shaking her head without even knowing what Barbara was saying.

  Barbara took a new breath that was clearly audible. “Well, look, can we get together over a cup of coffee this evening and talk about this? It’s important to me.”

  Whatever it was, Henry was not in the mood for Barbara’s pushing.

  “Not tonight. Tomorrow. We can have a cup of coffee before you open in the morning.”

  She hesitated. “Eight-thirty. At the place next-door to the shop.”

  “Right.” Henry managed to fit the word in before Barbara hung up.

  Della stopped shaking her head.

  “You’re not eating enough fatty foods. You need some barbeque. You’re getting too skinny.”

  When he looked down, the first thing he noticed were his wet footprints.

  Chapter Four

  Barbara was not alone. Sharon was taller, as blond as Barbara was brunette, and as thin as Barbara had once been. They were sitting at a table at the rear, and their eyes reflected the bright sun from the street behind him as well as his shadow, as he approached.

  It was Sharon who had taken over Henry’s job at Alcott & Poe years before. She had done a better job of it, he had to admit that. Henry had always liked finding the books in the first place, while Sharon seemed to enjoy the detail of research. Barbara was the one who ran the shop day to day, ordered the new books, and bought the used stock that people carried in the door. Both Sharon and Barbara went to the book auctions together, but it was Sharon who cataloged the old ones and worked on the displays. Customer relations had always been Barbara’s strong suit. Because of that division of labor, Henry had spoken to Sharon very little over the years, and had not formed much of an opinion about her.

  The chairs in the cafe had thin wire backs to discourage staying too long. He ordered a cup of coffee as he sat down. Sharon seemed to be studying him as if she had never seen him before. He hoped he had remembered his zipper.

  He said, “I’m here at your command.”

  Barbara did not skip the beat. “We need some help … Sharon needs some help.”

  Alw
ays sincere, Barbara could express concern with the look in her eye better than most people. Everything was always important. She was not given to joking, which was why Henry tried so hard not to be serious when he was with her.

  Sharon smiled. Henry’s eyes were captured by the look of her mouth. Her teeth were perfectly set within full lips. Her lips had the fine edge of sculpting. The pale blue of her eyes did not hold his attention in the same way. She certainly was not a match for the usual picture of a used book merchant—nails manicured, hair styled fashionably short. He did not think the blond of her hair was natural. A very good-looking woman, Henry thought, even if she lacked Barbara’s assets.

  Sharon said, “I’m trying to avoid getting involved in something I can’t afford, but I do need help,” Her diction was precise.

  Barbara quickly added, “She thinks George Duggan plagiarized the last book Jim wrote.”

  Henry actually felt his jaw drop a little. He had been prepared even to hear of some unfortunate connection between Eddy Perry and James Frankowski. After Barbara’s call, he had tried not to imagine himself involved somehow in the work of a serial murderer stalking the side streets of Cambridge. He had unsuccessfully suppressed the image of himself, Walter Mitty–like, lurking at dark corners in pursuit of a fiend. It had been at least twenty-five years since he had filled the imagined shoes of Sherlock Holmes in the dark alleys of London, but the fantasy had come back to him easily. He had no idea what Barbara wanted, and he smiled now at his own foolishness. She misunderstood his smile.

  “I’m not kidding Henry. It’s serious.”

  Barbara was a contrast to Sharon in most ways. Her brown hair was pulled back too severely to the grip of a rubber band. “Unmanageable,” she always said. Her nails were cut short and darkened underneath with the soil of book dust. The weight she had put on over the years was not unpleasant, but she hid her bosom behind a vest jammed with pencils and erasers. She wore jeans, as she had the day he had first met her in 1980, just a few months after she had opened the store.

  “Duggan?” Henry asked. He could not help the escape of a short laugh, and tried to squelch it with words. “As a matter of fact, I just saw him at a ballgame the other day. Looks like he’s enjoying the good life. He has a gorgeous redhead for a gal pal. What makes you think he’s a plagiarist?”

  Sharon spoke now, holding her hand up as if to keep Barbara silent. He looked at Barbara’s blank face and knew this bothered her. Sharon’s voice was not calm.

  “It was something out of the blue. We received an advance reader’s copy of the new George Duggan book a few months ago. I just threw it aside. Why would I need to look at it? We don’t order new bestsellers. We can’t compete against Barnes & Noble discounts. He’ll sell another million copies anyway. But a name caught my eye. The main character is named Scipio. Not a lot of Scipios running around.”

  “Nor Hannibals.” Henry offered.

  Barbara laughed. “I told her you’d know who Scipio was.”

  Henry shrugged off the implied compliment. “There were actually several. I just guessed.”

  Sharon held her hand up again and continued her story.

  “So I started reading it. Well, the words are different, but the story is the same as the last novel that Jim wrote before he died. Just the same! Jim’s book was called Hannibal’s Dance. Duggan’s book you know is called Dreams of Bithynia. They both take place for the most part around the court of Prusias.” Henry sat back and held up his own hand to interrupt.

  “That’s just history. If the words aren’t the same, that’s not plagiarism. Anyone can write about the same subject.”

  Sharon leaned forward, her thin neck extended above the table, her face pulled tight. He thought he could see a flare of her nostrils. She had a very pretty nose.

  “But wait. It is. Jim wrote the whole thing first. He set most of the story after the battle of Magnesia, with Hannibal alone in defeat, encountered by Scipio in a goatherd’s shelter during a storm. The two generals had never actually met face to face before and never met again. Jim used to get very excited about things. Obsessed, really. He thought it was too much of a coincidence that both Hannibal and Scipio, the great lifelong enemies, men of such honor and mutual respect, died within a year of one another. The rest of the story is divided between Scipio’s farmhouse in Italy and Hannibal’s refuge in Bithynia. Jim imagined it like the deaths of Jefferson and Adams, both men wondering if the other still lived. Except in this case, instead of being elder statesman, they were hounded to their deaths. Scipio, by not taking up the reins of Counsel after his great victory, and thus not becoming the ruler of Rome, had unleashed the forces of politics. Hannibal, by continuing to support the enemies of Rome, had ensured the ultimate destruction of his beloved Carthage and the domination of Roman culture.” Both her hands rose now, fingers spread. “And in their final moments, each separately recall, and retell, to an illiterate female servant slave—the only ears to listen—their own version of the one time they met face to face—alone—when there had been a climactic contest just between the two of them, which had determined the future of Rome and thus the Western world—how they had only recognized each other in the heat of the struggle. And that Hannibal had won, and then chosen to let Scipio live, which becomes the reason the Roman had refused to take the mantle of power when he returned …” she paused for dramatic effect. “Jim staged that moment as the end of the ancient age of myth and heroes and the beginning of the modern world of politics and mediocrity. That’s not actual history. There is no real record of that. That was Jim’s idea.”

  Barbara raised an eyebrow and tilted her head down far enough to put folds in the skin of her neck.

  “Now, you have to admit, that’s not a likely coincidence. What are the options? Mr. Duggan somehow manages to put out more than a book a year. He’s like a machine. Is it a coincidence he would write a book with that story at the same time as Jim, with goatherd huts and female servant slaves and all? And it’s Duggan’s biggest book in about four years. Number one on the New York Times bestseller list, first week out. And he’s already sold the rights to some big movie outfit and it’s going to make him millions more.”

  Barbara was always too worried about money. The idea that Duggan might be making a fortune off the work of James Frankowski would infuriate her. But Duggan stealing another man’s work still seemed difficult to comprehend.

  Henry shook his head, “But you say he didn’t use the same words. Then it’s not plagiarism, is it? Don’t the words have to match, or something close to that?”

  “He wouldn’t be that stupid,” Sharon said. Her tone went from sarcastic to hurt. “But it’s the same material. And it was Jim who made it all up. It never happened. It’s not history. The story never existed until Jim created it. It was Jim’s answer to a gap in historical knowledge that might reveal the cause of something that changed everything that came after. And George Duggan stole it. It’s not fair. It’s not right.”

  Henry had to ask, “But how did he get it?”

  “From one of his publishing friends, I think. Jim had sent the book out a bunch of times to be read.”

  Henry was confused.

  “What do you expect me to do?” He realized as he said it, there was a tone to his voice. He was sorry for that. He could not help but wonder if Barbara might be using this problem to get him involved with her again. Still, he owed her a great deal.

  “Help us find out when he stole it,” Barbara jumped at the question. “Find out how he stole it. We need to know the way it happened, in order to make a case. This can be settled out of court. Lawyers will just see it as a feeding frenzy. Duggan has a reputation to protect. And who knows how he got hold of Jim’s idea? Who knows what goes on? He might have gotten the idea from someone and not even realized the source. There’s no reason to make a stink, if it can be settled. It’s a matter of fairness to Jim and Sharon. But we need a little help. Sharon’s not much of a hound. Behind that smile, she has a temper. S
he gets angry.” Barbara raised an eyebrow and looked at Sharon. “That’s why we keep her doing the cataloging and research and I take care of the customers. …”

  Sharon had begun to smile before Barbara’s final words brought her forehead to a frown.

  Henry leaned back in his chair. The thin wire of the chair back sagged uncomfortably behind him.

  “I’m not a detective. I am a bookseller.” It was a weak defense, he thought.

  Barbra was ready for more of an excuse than that. “You’re a hound. You see stuff other people don’t. I know that. You notice things. You always have. … And we’ll pay you. I can’t afford to lose Sharon to all this. She’s done too much for me. I need her work in the store. And Sharon has agreed.”

  The two women exchanged glances and smiled weakly at one another. There was friction there, Henry thought. Barbara could be overbearing. He imagined Sharon had to work to keep her reactions under control if she had a temper.

  “You agreed to what?” he asked.

  “To let you help,” Barbara said. She might just as well have added “of course!”

  “Help what? What am I supposed to do?” He had asked the wrong question again. This would only give her an opportunity to tell him.

  “Figure out how it happened.”

  Sharon held her hand up again.

  “After Jim’s previous publisher rejected it, he sent it to half a dozen other places. Duggan must have seen a manuscript. One of those people Jim sent his manuscript to must have shown it to Duggan. He must have read it.”

  Henry thought this made little sense. Was Barbara too quick to think badly of Duggan just because he was—Duggan? The Duggan. Duggan the great. Duggan the powerful. Duggan the rich.

  He asked the obvious, “Do you have a particular publisher in mind?”

  Sharon’s eyes widened. The pale blue caught the sunlight reflected from a car on the street and suddenly flashed.