No Questions Asked

3

Laws and I talked a little longer. I tried to get as many details as I could, and he tried to tell me everything he knew about the theft, which really wasn’t very much more than he had already said, and soon we found ourselves going over the same ground.

When I rose to leave he insisted that he give me a personally conducted tour of some of the Library’s treasures, and I got to inspect one of the Gutenberg Bibles, plus a second edition of the first book printed in England in 1477, The Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, and the only known presentation copy of Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which I thought was rather neat.

I also made a careful examination of the Library’s copy of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis. It was a thick, heavy folio about eighteen inches tall with perhaps seven hundred pages. Its binding was of heavy boards, probably oak, covered with stamped leather.

I turned to Laws. “The one that was stolen was printed on vellum, you say?”

He nodded. “The only one that was. It increases not only its value enormously, but also its weight. I should say that it weighs approximately forty pounds.”

“It would be difficult to fake it, wouldn’t it?”

“Fake it?”

“Come up with a forgery,” I said.

Laws shook his head. “Virtually impossible, but please note that I said virtually. Of late, there have been some really magnificent forgeries, true works of art actually, but mostly they have been forgeries of documents rather than books. To forge a book like this would pose immense technical problems. To reconstitute the vellum and then chemically age it would demand a master craftsman. The binding presents an equally difficult problem, one that is almost insurmountable. But again, I say almost.”

“It couldn’t be done in, say, a week or ten days?”

“No. No it couldn’t. Impossible.”

I thanked him again for his courtesy, promised that I would keep him informed, shook his hand because he seemed to feel that it would be the polite thing to do, and then left to find a cab to take me back to the hotel.

There weren’t any cabs, of course. There weren’t any cabs because it was 4:35 in the afternoon and the government workers were streaming out of the Library and the Capitol and the Senate and the House office buildings, and besides that, it was snowing.

They haven’t quite yet decided what to do about snow in Washington. When it snows really hard the government shuts down, the schools close, and everybody goes home and waits for it to melt. It was snowing hard now, big fat thick wet flakes that stuck to everything they hit. It looked to me as though it would never end and that Washington might not dig its way out until Mother’s Day.

I decided to try for a taxi anyway. The only alternative was a mile-and-a-half walk back to the hotel. My reasoning was that if I were going to catch pneumonia, I needed to conserve my strength. So I stood there at the corner of First and Independence Southeast and yelled and waved my arms and whistled and attracted a number of amused looks and smug smiles from homeward-bound commuters, but no taxi.

I was just about to give up when the black Plymouth sedan let go with a growl from its siren, frightened some cars out of its way, and edged over to the curb. Its right-hand door opened, and I heard a voice say, “Get in, St. Ives. You look ridiculous.”

I brushed some of the snow off, got in quickly, and said, “You promised not to be late again.”

“Still the wise-ass,” the man behind the wheel said and threatened a couple of more cars with a growl from the siren. The cars fell back, and he squeezed the Plymouth sedan over into the slow-moving traffic.

His name was Herbert Fastnaught, and in the six or seven years since I had last seen him he had lost his youth. Some policemen do that, grow old in a week, and it seemed to have happened to Fastnaught. When I had last seen him he had been a boyish, pink-cheeked, gum-chewing detective sergeant in the Metropolitan Police Department’s robbery squad. Now he chewed on a thick unlit cigar, and the pink cheeks had sagged down into heavy jowls, and the curly blond hair that I remembered was turning grey at the sides and thin on top. He looked forty-five, although I knew that he couldn’t be much more than thirty-seven.

“I thought you’d be at the Madison,” Fastnaught said, not looking at me, but staring at the bumper of the car ahead. “So I called there, but they said you weren’t registered and I thought to myself, the Hay Adams, that’s about the next most expensive hotel in town, and sure enough, you were registered there, but you weren’t in. So I called Laws, and he said you’d just left. I took a chance that you couldn’t find a cab and there you were waving your arms around and looking silly.”

“I hear you made lieutenant,” I said. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks. You ain’t changed much.”

“I exercise, try to watch my diet, and drink a lot of Scotch,” I said. “It does wonders.”

“This book you’re go-betweening.”

“The Pliny.”

“Yeah, the Pliny book. You can buy me some expense account Scotch, and we’ll have a little talk about it.”

“All right. You still in robbery?”

“Nah, I’m not in robbery anymore.”

“What happened to that partner of yours, Demeter?”

“Demeter? Well, Demeter was all set to retire, he had three weeks to go, and then he goes into this place that he’s got no business going into, a pad over on Ninth and T, and some dude takes the left side of his head off with a shotgun, just like that, and him three weeks away from retirement.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” I said.

“Yeah. So was his wife.” Fastnaught took out a disposable lighter and used it to light his cigar. He blew some smoke at the windshield, still not looking at me, still looking at the car ahead. “What about you, you still in New York?”

“Still there.”

“You aren’t married again, are you?”

“No,” I said.

“I didn’t think so. I got married.”

“Really? Congratulations.”

“Don’t bother,” he said. “It’s not working out too good.”

We didn’t seem to have any more old times to catch up on, so we drove in silence until we got to the hotel. The bar we chose was downstairs, a small place that was presided over by an elderly bartender and a waiter who might have been his uncle. There were only two other persons in the bar, a young man and a girl, but they were unaware of anything except each other.

Both Fastnaught and I ordered Scotch and water, and after the old man served the drinks Fastnaught took a big, thirsty swallow of his, and then took another one, quickly, as if the first swallow hadn’t done for him quite what he had hoped it would do.

“I’m drinking too much,” he said.

“So is everybody.”

“Nah, I’m getting close to the edge. I can tell. I’ve watched too many guys get close to the edge and then slide over. I don’t know whether I’m going to slide over or not. Either you do or you don’t. I worry about it.”

“Drink something you don’t like,” I said. “If you like Scotch, switch to rye or Irish.”

“Does it help?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The guys who told me about it are all in A.A. now.”

“Maybe I’ll do that. Just quit altogether.”

“Maybe you will.”

“But not right now,” he said and signaled the old waiter for another round.

After it came, Fastnaught took a swallow, relit his cigar, which had gone out, and blew some smoke up into the air. I noticed that he inhaled the cigar smoke. “Like I said,” he told me, “I’m not in robbery anymore. In fact, I haven’t been in robbery for five years. I was in homicide for quite a while, which was kinda interesting, but now I’m in the government liaison section. In fact, I am the government liaison section, me and a girl who answers the phone and does the typing.”

“I don’t think I’m going to congratulate you again,” I said.

“No. Don’t. You wanta know what the government liaison section does? Well, it tries to make sure that if somebody gets busted who shouldn’t, the public doesn’t have to get all worried about it. Hell of a job for a grown man, isn’t it?”

“Does it keep you busy?” I said because I felt I should say something.

“There are about three or four thousand people in this town who, if you’re an ordinary cop, it’s better not to mess with. You got the members of Congress, that’s one. Then there’s the Cabinet, the other government big shots, and the diplomatic corps. And then there’s the heavy money crowd, which is about the same as it is in any town. Well, sometimes these people get in jams. Maybe they get tanked up and drive their car into the reflecting pool, or maybe they knock their wife or girlfriend around a little, or maybe they go pick up a nigger whore over on Thirteenth or Fourteenth and get in trouble with her pimp. My job is to sort of smooth these things over and maybe, if it’s not too bad, keep it out of the papers and off of the TV.” Fastnaught took another big swallow of his drink and a gloomy look settled over his face. “I’ve had what maybe you could call some notable failures.”

“I can think of a couple,” I said.

“But most of the time you know what I do?”

“What?”

“I fix parking tickets.”

“Well, I guess somebody has to do it.”

Fastnaught shook his head. “I gotta get out of it. I either gotta get out of it or I gotta quit. And that’s where you come in, St. Ives.”

I shook my head. “You know how I work,” I said.

“Yeah, I know. You stay in the go-between business because you’ve built yourself up a reputation with the thieves. They know you’ll do what you say you’re gonna do. And the cops don’t mind working with you because after you get through go-betweening, you tell ’em anything they wanta know, and the thieves don’t mind that because by then they’ve got the money, and they’re spending it down in Mexico or someplace. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s close.”

“Well, when the book got stolen the department touched base with me because the Library of Congress is just what its name says it is, it’s part of Congress and if possible Congress don’t want something like this written up in the papers, because it might give somebody else ideas about how they could do the same thing.”

“It wasn’t stolen from the Library,” I said. “It was stolen after it left the Library.”

Yeah, I know all that. But I sort of brushed over that when I made my pitch down at headquarters.”

“What pitch?”

“I told them that I’d worked with you before and I knew how you operated. I told them I thought I’d better be assigned to this thing full-time and stick close to you, and when you got through paying the quarter of a million and got the book back all nice and safe, then I could make my move and box in whoever stole the book before he got the chance to spend the money. Well, they didn’t buy it.”

“Too bad.”

“Yeah. Well, maybe you’ve sorta guessed that I don’t sit too well over there on Indiana Avenue. My name isn’t mud over there, it’s shit, and maybe it’s my fault and maybe it isn’t, but I know if I don’t work a big one like this, something they’ll have to sit up and notice, then I’m gonna be fixing parking tickets for the rest of my life. Either that or I quit and I don’t wanta quit because I don’t know what else I could do.”

“Did you ever think of going into selling?” I said. “You’d make a terrific salesman.”

“Funny. Jesus, you’re real funny, St. Ives, you break me up.”

“You worked it somehow,” I said. “I know you worked it, or otherwise you wouldn’t be sitting here telling me about it.”

“Yeah, I worked it. About a year ago I got a Senator out of a jam. A real bad jam, the kind that if I hadn’ve got him out of Jack Anderson would have told all about it in about eight or nine hundred papers. Well, nobody knows about this jam except me and the Senator and a couple of other parties who aren’t gonna give him any trouble anymore. I never reported it in like I’m supposed to and the Senator’s sort of grateful, if you know what I mean.”

“The Senator put the squeeze on for you.”

“That’s right. He put it on in a real smooth way so that they didn’t even know he was putting it on for me. This morning they called me back in and said that they’d changed their minds, and that maybe I’d better liaise with you after all. Liaise isn’t really a word, is it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“They use it all the time down there, but I didn’t think it was really a word.”

I leaned back in my chair and looked at him. The drinks had spread to his face, giving it a shiny, wet flush. He was huddled over his glass, clutching it with both hands. The cigar had gone dead in his fingers. There was a wet stain on his tie. He looked tired and middle-aged and a little desperate.

“What do you want?” I said.

“I want the thief.”

I shook my head. “Not from me. I don’t serve them up. You know that.”

“Your rules,” he said. “We play by your rules.”

“My rules sometimes give the thief an edge.”

“Let me worry about that.”

“All right,” I said. “I will.”