Читать книгу The Hemingway Caper - Eric Wright - Страница 13

Back at the college, I called in on Bert Tensor, the department bibliophile. Bert likes books; books as objects, I mean, not just as reading matter. Myself, I have a few hundred books which indicate what I do for a living—some texts I was assigned as an undergraduate, all of Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, William Trevor—these are the books I keep to reread while crossing the Atlantic at night. I don’t collect books, I don’t hoard the ones I get, and I have managed to get past the desire to ivy-league my office with them. What the students make of the empty bookcases behind me I don’t know, probably nothing.

Bert Tensor is the opposite of me in every way. He still has every book he has ever bought; his office and most of the rooms in his house, including the basement, are lined with books he keeps moist and claims to have read, or looked at. He certainly knows if he owns a book, the real test of a bibliophile.

On Saturday afternoons he is released from the house and kids for three hours by his wife to prowl the secondhand bookshops, on his own. In exchange, he looks after the kids on Sunday afternoons while she looks at houses that are for sale. He is the only member of the department whose book collection is distinct from his profession of teaching literature. The rest of us play tennis or watch baseball or garden, or even repaint our bathrooms, but Bert’s hobby is books, and in the course of pursuing his hobby he has become the department’s expert resource.

“Jason Tyler,” I said. “He has a bookshop on College Street.”

“I know Tyler,” he said. “What do you want to know about him?”

“Whatever you know. Is he shady? Squeaky clean? An expert in any field? Most of all, what kind of person is he? His, whatdoyoucallit, character?”

“I haven’t cultivated his acquaintance. I don’t like him, his stock isn’t very interesting, and it doesn’t change much.”

“You know anything about his personal life?”

“No.”

“Why don’t you like him?”

“No good reason, just an immediate instinctive antipathy. If I knew him I might like him, but I don’t want to know him. And don’t ask me why.” He made a face to keep the remark airy.

“But you don’t know of anything dishonest, disreputable?”

“No, I told you. Now if you’d ask me about his predecessor in that store I could tell you a story.”

“Tell me anyway. How long has Tyler been the owner?”

“Two years, maybe. A bit less. Not long, anyway. I used to go in all the time when James Curry owned it. I haven’t been in twice since it changed hands. The last time a woman in there asked me if she could help me. I said I was just browsing. She asked me for what, maybe she could point me in the right direction. I never went back.”

“Why?”

“A salesperson coming on strong in an antiquarian bookshop, even one as tatty as Tyler’s?”

“Well, it is a shop,” I reminded him.

“So it is.” He gave up on me as one of the people who could not differentiate between a bookshop and a used car lot, and went back to his reading. I said, “So tell me about James Curry.”

Tensor searched the air for the name. “Huh?”

“The story about the predecessor.”

He laid his book aside and prepared to get rid of me. “Here’s a story, then. Once upon a time someone left a valuable manuscript with Curry to evaluate, and Curry lost it. He said it was stolen, along with some other odds and ends, but it never turned up in the trade. I think that the owner of the manuscript threatened to assault him. But the manuscript was never recovered.”

“What was it a manuscript of?”

“One of the moderns.”

By “moderns” Tensor means anybody after Beaumont and Fletcher. “Which one?”

“The one who worked for the newspaper.”

“Christ. Hemingway?”

“Hemingway. Yes, that sounds like it.” Tensor gave a small smile to show he was teasing, but I know he doesn’t think much of Hemingway. He was shrinking him by affecting to have barely heard the name.

I said, “There’s a story about Hemingway and the Toronto Star, isn’t there?”

“You see? You already know it. Is that it, then?” He picked up his book.

“Was the theft news at the time? When was this? What was it the manuscript of?”

Tensor said, “Some poems, I think. Did he write poetry? He did, didn’t he? Awful doggerel.” He grinned to show he was only playing about, then leaned forward, the body language of engagement and seriousness. “I think it must have been news or I wouldn’t have heard of it. I don’t read newspapers, and I don’t remember Curry saying anything. I probably heard it on one of those three-minute Arts programs the CBC puts on before the real news. When was it? About twenty years ago, not long after I joined the department, because I didn’t know Curry well enough for him to have chatted to me about it. As I remember, the manuscript wasn’t the beginning of a book but a collection of drafts of stories that Hemingway had saved, knowing he would be famous one day, the way writers these days save up their drafts in the hope of one day persuading a library to buy them.”

“That’s your story about Curry?” I asked after waiting for more.

“What kind of story are you after? I’ll tell you another one, a human interest story. Curry never answered the phone.”

“Why did he bother to have a phone at all if he didn’t answer it?”

“So that his address could be listed in the phone book, the Yellow Pages. And to be able to call out to get Swiss Chalet to deliver. And some of the messages were important; they just weren’t urgent.”

“But what if they were urgent. Some must have been.”

“Try keeping a diary. How many life-or-death messages do you get? People adjusted to him. They gave him a day to answer his machine. Very occasionally, a friend would want to let him know that a book he was interested was available if he were quick, then they used a courier. Curry said couriers were today’s version of the telegrams the Bloomsbury crowd used to invite each other to tea with.”

This wasn’t fascinating, but it had given me a chance to think. “Do you think there really was a Hemingway manuscript?”

“Papers; not manuscript, papers. Oh, yes.”

“What do you think happened?”

“I think they were stolen. Not by Curry, I should say. For an antiquarian bookseller, Curry was very honest.” He looked at his watch. “And that’s all I know about Mr. Hemingway’s papers. Perhaps you should talk to David.”

“He told me the story once.”

“Make him do it again.”