No Questions Asked

2

The Adelphi apartment hotel that they were going to tear down and evict me from, although not in that order, had been built back in the early twenties about the time that the claw-footed bathtub was beginning to disappear from the American scene.

Because a long series of owners had refused to spend what they should have on maintenance, the Adelphi had skipped middle age and instead had gone directly into advanced senility. The heating system wheezed and drooled. The elevators were spiteful, the way a mean old lady can be spiteful, and kept letting you off on the wrong floor. The walls were cracked and stained and a musty grey, although they once must have been an oyster white. The carpets were worn and patched, and you kept tripping over them. The bar and restaurant off the lobby was patronized largely by utter strangers who tried it only once by dreadful accident. And then there was Eddie, the sinister bell captain.

Eddie was one of those persons who make a lot of tourists loathe New York. His was the elbow that dug into them in the subway. His back was what they saw getting into the taxi that they knew was theirs. And his was the voice that promised them twenty-year-old blondes, but delivered forty-five-year-old hookers instead.

After ten years of diligent effort Eddie had almost given up trying to hustle me. But not quite. I think he thought of me as a worthy opponent who put him on his mettle. If you wanted a service performed, such as having your dog walked or somebody’s arm broken, Eddie would do it or get it done. If you needed a broad, booze, dope, or a desert lot, Eddie would sell it to you. For a price he would lie to your boss, stall the collection agency, or even get you a cab, which is what I had in mind when I got off the elevator carrying my suitcase.

“I want a four-bit cab,” I told him as he took my bag.

“Whaddaya mean four bits? That’s all you ever tip.”

“And that’s the kind of cab you always hail. You know, the kind with the broken shocks, the ripped upholstery, and the driver who speaks nothing but Kurdish.”

“We like to kid a little this morning, don’t we? Where to?”

“La Guardia. Eastern shuttle.”

“Washington, huh? You always get in trouble when you go to Washington.”

“Not always. I didn’t get in trouble that time I took my son down to see the cherry blossoms.”

“How is he? I ain’t seen him in a while.”

“He’s okay.”

“What is he now, ten?”

“Yeah. Ten.”

“You know what I hear? I hear his new daddy took a real bath in the market. That’s what I hear.”

“I’ve sort of been worrying about that,” I said. “He must be down to his last thirty or forty million.”

We were outside on Forty-sixth by now and Eddie was using his fingers to whistle up a cab, but I could see that his heart wasn’t in it yet.

“Your ex really done all right for herself, didn’t she, I mean by leaving you and marrying what’s-his-face with all that dough?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He probably doesn’t pick up his pajamas either.”

Eddie gave another whistle through his fingers and then turned to me with his usual sly and crafty look. “I sent the eviction letter up with your lawyer this morning.”

“I forgot to thank you for it, didn’t I? How long have you known, six months?”

“Nah. Just a couple of months. Maybe three.”

“You can certainly keep a secret, Eddie.”

“I tipped off a couple of people. Y’know, the ones who’ve took care of me good.”

“Well, I’ve tried not to fail you. I’ve tried terribly hard.”

“Yeah, shit. Well, these people I tipped off, I sort of helped them find a new place, y’know?”

“You’re not only generous, you’re sweet.”

“Yeah, well, I thought maybe you’d want me to sort of help you out. I know a place that’d just suit you down to a T. Over on West Fifty-sixth. Hell of a nice place. One bedroom, big living room, air-conditioned.”

“How much?”

“Not bad. Not bad at all. Six twenty-five a month.”

“I don’t mean how much for the rent. I mean how much for the key?”

Eddie shrugged, spotted a cab, and gave another blast through his fingers. The cab started nudging its way through the traffic toward the curb. “Well, you know how these things work,” he said. “You gotta grease a few palms.”

“How much key money, Eddie?”

“Seeing how it’s you, only three grand.”

“Forget it.”

“Think it over,” he said as he put my bag in the front seat and turned with his hand out. I put two quarters into it.

“I don’t have to think it over,” I said. “But just out of curiosity, who owns the building, your brother-in-law?”

“Nah,” Eddie said and smiled. “I do.”

To the best of my knowledge nobody has ever written a song entitled “April in Washington,” and it’s not hard to understand why. It was April 15, a little after one in the afternoon, when I arrived at National Airport and took a cab to the Hay Adams hotel. It was a warm, even balmy, day, and scores of government workers were still picnicking out of their brown bag lunches in Lafayette Square.

When I came out of the hotel two hours later the temperature had dropped twenty-five degrees, it was threatening to spit snow, and the talkative cab driver I got told me that they were thinking of closing the government offices early.

“They’re just thinking about it though,” he said. “By the time they make up their mind it’ll be five o’clock and there’ll be six inches of snow on the ground.”

“Is that what the weather forecast says?”

“Nah. That’s what I say. We didn’t used to have weather like this in this town. Only in the past two or three years. Before that we used to have pretty good weather. You know what I think caused it?”

“What?”

“Watergate.”

“That’s a thought.”

“Way I figure it, Watergate got people all steamed up, I mean it really affected the temperature of their bodies, and all this steam had to go someplace, so it went up and made clouds and so that’s why we got a lot more rain and snow now than we used to.”

We were going east on Pennsylvania Avenue, and a new building that I hadn’t seen before appeared on the left. It seemed to cover an entire block. “What’s that?” I asked.

“That there?” the driver said. “That there’s the new FBI building. Guess who they named it after?”

“Bobby Kennedy.”

“Nah. J. Edgar Hoover. You know what he really was, don’tcha?”

“No. What?”

“He was the biggest fag in town, that’s what he was. Jack Kennedy found out about it, and that’s why Hoover had him shot down there in Dallas.”

“I’ll be damned,” I said.

The driver nodded gloomily. “You drive a cab in this town and keep your ears open, you learn a lot of things.”

We reached the First Street Southeast entrance to the Library of Congress without any more bulletins from the driver. “I wonder what they really do in there?” he said, eyeing the old building with what seemed to be faint suspicion.

“I think they lend books,” I said.

“You know what I hear they got in there?” he said. “I hear they got the world’s biggest collection of dirty books, but they won’t let nobody but Congressmen or government big shots check ’em out.”

“What a pity,” I said, handed him the fare, and started to get out of the cab.

“You wanna know something else?”

I turned back to look at him. He was staring up at the Library with a moody expression. “I bet I ain’t read a book in twenty-five years.”

“It hardly shows at all,” I said, got out of the cab, and went in search of a Mr. Hawkins Gamble Laws III, who was going to tell me all about a book that had been borrowed without permission and wouldn’t be returned until somebody came up with a quarter of a million dollars.

I asked a couple of tweedy gentlemen with short beards and thoughtful expressions where I could find the Rare Book Division. One of them turned out to be from Paris, judging from his accent, while the other volunteered the information that he was from Italy, Bologna to be exact, and had been working at something interesting, which I didn’t quite catch, in the Hebraic Section of the Orientalia Division for the last twenty-one years. We had a nice little chat about that, and then I went off on my own, armed with their directions, and got lost only twice, probably on purpose, because the Library of Congress is an interesting place to wander around in. I especially liked the main reading room with its high ceiling, hushed atmosphere, and dedicated scholars, who were looking into things that I had the feeling I would like to know about.

The Rare Book Division was on the second floor of the east wing of the building. I wandered into its reading room first through a pair of fine bronze doors that were worth a look. There were three panels on each door emblazoned with printers’ names and devices, and I recognized the device of Fust and Schoeffer, a couple of printers who supposedly used to work with Johann Gutenberg, the man who started it all. I also recognized the printer’s mark of William Morris, the man who founded the Kelmscott Press, not the talent agency, and who, probably more than anybody else, got the country interested in fine printing again back in the 1890s.

The reading room of the Rare Book Division turned out to be a peaceful place with twenty-foot ceilings and an air of determined concentration. There were a couple of rows of nicely lit tables with comfortable-looking chairs occupied by perhaps a dozen persons who wore rapt expressions and didn’t move their lips while they read.

The office that the government provided for the Chief of its Rare Book Division wasn’t overwhelming. There was a nice desk and some upholstered chairs and a few pictures, but there wasn’t anything for show, and it could have been the office of the brigadier general out at the Pentagon who buys all of the Army’s machine guns. Government offices tend to look pretty much alike.

But if you didn’t remember the office, you remembered the man who occupied it. For one thing, Hawkins Gamble Laws III was probably one of the politest men I ever met in my life. After I was ushered in by his secretary, he shook my hand as if it were indeed the great pleasure he claimed it to be, saw to it that I got the room’s most comfortable chair, dispatched his secretary for coffee, and then inquired solicitously about how he could best be of service. I got the feeling that if I had told him that I was down on my luck and needed a hundred until next Tuesday, he would have dug down into his own pocket and offered it without hesitation, except for the comment that if Tuesday didn’t prove convenient, Friday would do just as well.

“The first thing you might tell me,” I said, “is what was stolen from whom.” I used whom because I thought that if I had said who it would have made him uncomfortable, although he would have been far too polite to have shown it I noticed that he himself spoke a kind of mandarin English, touched up with plenty of commas and semicolons, which you don’t run across too often in the United States unless you subscribe to The Economist.

“I really must apologize for not telling your attorney, Mr. Greene, the name of the book in question,” Laws said. “However, when I explained my reasons he grasped the situation immediately, although it was an ungodly hour when circumstances forced me to telephone him.”

“Myron’s fairly quick in the morning,” I said.

“He seemed a most perceptive chap. Sugar?”

“Please.”

Instead of shoving the sugar bowl across the desk to me he rose, walked around, and held the bowl while I spooned what I needed into my cup. The sugar bowl looked to be silver, as did the cream pitcher and the tray they rested on. The cups were of a thin, translucent china, and I got the idea that when it came to personal possessions, Laws liked to have nice things around, although I noticed that his catalog of nice things didn’t include a silver-frame portrait of the wife and kids. I decided that he must have felt his home life was a personal matter and not something that needed advertising.

Laws was somewhere in his late fifties, a tall man, really tall, but slightly stooped, as if he were afraid that his height might make him miss something that he should be attentive and polite about. He wore a nicely cut grey flannel suit, the shade of old pewter, which went with his hair, and he was one of the few men I ever saw who didn’t seem in the least self-conscious about the Phi Beta Kappa key that he wore on the gold chain across his vest.

He had a big, squarish head, almost too big, but not quite, and he kept cocking it to one side to show that he was both interested and attentive. His eyes were the twinkling kind, as brown and as friendly as a cocker pup’s, and they didn’t seem to need glasses, which I thought unusual. He smiled often and easily, as though he found the world a rather interesting, pleasant place to live in because it was populated with wonderful people like me, and after a few minutes in his beaming presence I had to forgive him for the fact that he parted his hair in the middle and wore a bow tie.

I sipped my coffee and complimented him on it, and he seemed genuinely pleased that I liked it. After that he gave his big chin a couple of reflective strokes, cocked his head to the other side as if to make sure that I was as comfortable as possible, hurriedly found an ashtray when I produced a cigarette, and leaned forward and lit it with a package of matches, which he insisted that I keep. I kept them, after first noting that they were from the Sans Souci, which is where all the important folks in Washington like to eat lunch.

“I take it then,” he said, “that you have accepted the assignment to serve as intermediary in the return of the purloined book. Dear me, that must be the first time that I’ve used purloined in thirty years.”

“You don’t hear it much anymore,” I said.

“We were, Mr. St. Ives, most distressed to learn that the book had been stolen, although our distress was somewhat alleviated by the fact that it was not stolen from the Library itself.”

“So I understand.”

“The book in question is quite old and quite rare and hence, quite valuable.”

“How valuable?”

“That’s difficult to say. On today’s market, taking inflation into consideration, I should think that it would be snapped up at five hundred thousand dollars. It could bring as much as three-quarters of a million.”

“It’s not a Gutenberg Bible, is it?”

“Oh, dear me, no. I do believe we would have called out the National Guard if one of them had been stolen. We have three, you know.”

“I didn’t. Out of curiosity, what would one of them bring on today’s market, if there is such a thing as a market for Gutenberg Bibles?”

Laws had to think about it. He gave his big chin another couple of reflective rubs, tugged at an ear-lobe, and took a sip of his coffee. “I would hesitate to say, but I think at least several million dollars. Back in 1930 the Library acquired Dr. Vollbehr’s collection of three thousand incunabula, which at the time included one of the three known perfect copies on vellum of the Gutenberg Bible. It took a special Act of Congress, but we paid one and a half million dollars for the entire Vollbehr collection. However, Dr. Vollbehr himself had paid nearly three hundred and fifty thousand dollars for that particular Gutenberg, which made it at the time the highest price ever paid for a printed book. That, however, was nearly fifty years ago. Today?” Laws shrugged and let the question answer itself.

“The book that was stolen was what?”

“It was Pliny’s Historia Naturalis,” Laws said. “Are you familiar with it?” He asked it politely, and when I shook my head no he smiled understanding without any trace of condescension.

“No, I don’t suppose too many people are nowadays, but it was the first scientific classic to be printed. Pliny the Elder, of course, was Gaius Plinius Secundus, the Roman naturalist, encyclopedist, and writer who lived from A.D. 23 to 79. The book was actually one of the chief repositories of scientific knowledge that scholars had available to them during the Middle Ages. This first edition that we’re speaking of was one of the earliest books to be printed in Venice by Johaness de Spira.”

“When was that?” I said.

“Prior to the eighteenth of September, 1469. Contemporary accounts reveal that only one hundred of the books were printed. Fortunately, the Library has another copy, which is part of the Rosenwald collection. But this particular volume, the one that was stolen, is the only one printed on vellum and is in much better condition than ours and, of course, is far, far more valuable. We were terribly upset by its theft.”

“Tell me about it.”

“The theft?”

“Yes.”

“First, I should make it clear that the book was only on deposit with the Library. This means, in effect, that its owner had lent it to us with the understanding that we would use our own discretion in making it available to interested scholars. We were, I should add, awfully pleased to acquire it, even on a deposit basis. Last week, last Tuesday to be precise, the owner informed us that the book was to be withdrawn from deposit. We expressed our dismay, of course, but when the owner proved adamant, we offered to return the volume under special security arrangements.”

“What kind of arrangements?” I said.

Laws took a sip of his coffee. “It depends upon the book, of course. But for one as valuable as the Pliny volume we would dispatch one of our senior staff members accompanied by an armed guard.”

“But this didn’t happen.”

“No. The owner demurred and made other arrangements.”

“Which were?”

“A private investigator, a Mr. Marsh, arrived yesterday morning and presented his credentials. We checked them carefully and turned the book over to him. Mr. Marsh has not been heard from since.”

“What do the police say?”

“Quite frankly, Mr. St. Ives, I believe that the police are stumped. A Lt. Fastnaught is in charge of the investigation.”

“Does he have curly blond hair and shiny blue eyes?”

“Why, yes, do you know him?”

“When I knew him he was only a sergeant, but he seemed ambitious. I guess it paid off. He hasn’t got any leads, huh?”

“None, I’m afraid, but he hasn’t exactly taken me into his confidence.”

“The owner of the book?” I said.

“Yes?”

“Is he some kind of a nut?”

Laws smiled. It was a sad little smile which seemed to say that no, the owner wasn’t a nut, just eccentric, more’s the pity. “The owner is a she, Mr. St. Ives, a Miss or perhaps Ms. Maude Goodwater. Does the name Joiner Goodwater mean anything to you?”

“It rings a bell, but faintly,” I said. “It has something to do with a lot of money that was made fast.”

“Uranium,” Laws said. “In the spring of 1947 Joiner Goodwater was a teacher of high-school science in Salt Lake City. That summer he went out into the Utah desert equipped with not much more than an army surplus Jeep, a canteen of water, a case or two of K rations, and a Geiger counter. When he came back in from the desert in late August he was an incredibly rich man.”

“I remember,” I said. “He found some of the richest uranium deposits in the country, and the papers started calling him the Uranium King. I also sort of remember that he spent it as fast as he made it.”

“Not quite,” Laws said. “But he seemed driven by the need to establish the Goodwater name as being among the principal art patrons of the country along with Guggenheim and Frick and Mellon and Rosenwald and even, I suppose,” and here Laws sniffed a little, “Hirshhorn. Well, to make a sad story as brief as possible, he bought fine paintings by the yard and rare books by the case, but unfortunately the paintings that he bought were either not terribly good or masterful forgeries. He became, I regret to say, in art circles, at least, something of a laughingstock. Fortunately, he was more successful in the field of rare books. He concentrated on collecting rare scientific works and succeeded in putting together quite a nice little collection, the principal piece being, of course, the Pliny volume. It was placed on deposit with us a little more than ten years ago with the tacit understanding that upon Mr. Goodwater’s death it would become part of our permanent collection.”

“He died, didn’t he,” I said. “About five years ago.”

“Six,” Laws said. “I think he died a broken, bitterly disappointed man. I knew him slightly, and he struck me as a man who — and I’m not being unkind — should have stayed in his high-school science laboratory. He was utterly unequipped for the business world in which he found himself.”

“I remember reading about some of that,” I said. “He got taken by every slick operator who came along.”

“Not only that,” Laws said, “but he began to have serious tax problems. What the slick operators, as you call them, didn’t get, the tax people and the lawyers did, and when he died he was a relatively poor man.”

“What’s a relatively poor man?”

“Well, he had sold off his entire rare book collection, except for the Pliny volume. After the government collected what it said he owed in taxes, I think his estate consisted of a house in Los Angeles, some terribly well-forged paintings, and perhaps a hundred thousand dollars or so in other assets.”

“What did he go through — a couple of hundred million?”

“Something like that, I think.”

“And now the Pliny book is about all that’s left, except that it’s been stolen.”

“Yes.”

“When the daughter, what’s her name, Maude, decided to withdraw the Pliny volume from deposit, how did she go about it?”

Laws thought for a moment. “Her attorney in Los Angeles wrote to me on his letterhead advising me of her decision. I immediately got in touch with him by telephone, in an attempt to persuade him to help me change her mind.”

“Did you ever talk to her?”

“Oh, yes. Several times. It really is a most remarkable volume, and we were quite reluctant to see it leave the Library. Then, too, there was that tacit understanding that it would become part of the Library’s permanent collection upon the death of Mr. Goodwater. Unfortunately, tacit agreements don’t hold up too well in court, according to the Library’s eminent legal counsel.” Laws smiled faintly. “Of course, I’m not sure that we ever would have gone to court, although we can get rather tigerish when it comes to parting with a book as important as the Pliny.”

“So you couldn’t persuade the daughter?”

He shook his head. “She said that although she would very much like to leave it with the Library as a memorial to her father, she needed the money, and she had received a very generous offer for it, which she had decided to accept.”

“Did she say whom the offer was from?”

“No, because she said the buyer insisted on remaining anonymous. However, she did tell me how much the offer was because I was hoping that if it were not too high the Library might have been able to match or perhaps even better it.”

“But you weren’t?”

Again Laws shook his head. “As I mentioned earlier, the Pliny would have been snapped up at five hundred thousand. Although I knew that we couldn’t have come up with that amount out of our budget, I felt I could have gone to some private friends of the Library and possibly raised it from them, although money, as you know, is terribly tight these days.”

“So how much was the offer that she got?”

Laws sighed. “Three-quarters of a million dollars.”

I didn’t whistle because I felt that Laws might feel that whistling was tacky. “Who has that kind of money?”

“Quite frankly, nobody,” Laws said. “As you may suspect, Mr. St. Ives, we have an old-boy network in the rare book field, and I confess that I employed it in an attempt to find out who was making such an extraordinary offer for the Pliny. The consensus was that nobody was making such an offer, by that I mean nobody who was either a dealer or a collector. So we — the old boys, I suppose one might call us — concluded that someone was buying it as an investment.”

“Would it be a good investment at that price?”

Laws thought about it for a while. Then he nodded and said, “As an extremely long-term investment, yes, but there are very few persons around who could afford to do so. Very few.”

“The Arabs?”

“A possibility.”

“They’re buying up everything else,” I said.

“I have heard rumors that they are going into rare books as an investment, but they are only rumors.”

“How old is the Goodwater daughter?”

“I think she was only a child, or possibly an infant, when Joiner Goodwater made his uranium strike. I suppose she’s thirty now, or almost. Why?”

“I was just trying to get a picture of her,” I said. “Not married?”

“No.”

“Is she odd or eccentric or kooky or somehow unbalanced?”

Laws again shook his head. “No, to the best of my knowledge, at least from what her attorney said, she is a most self-possessed and determined young woman. That was the same impression that I gained by talking to her over the telephone.”

“I was wondering why she turned down your offer to provide security measures for the book’s transfer?”

“About that she was most clear and most adamant.”

“Oh?”

“Yes, she said that the private investigator whom she was sending to pick up the book, a Mr. Jack Marsh—” Laws broke off his sentence as if he were not quite sure how he should complete it.

“What about him?” I said.

“Well, she said that Mr. Marsh was not only a close personal friend, but also highly competent in his field.”

“Did you check with the insurance company about him? They must have had some say-so.”

“Indeed I did. They said he is not just competent. They said that he is the best there is.”