Читать книгу The Secret of Lost Things - Sheridan Hay - Страница 14

They’re a peculiar pair, Oscar, don’t you think?” I asked after watching Geist, and puzzling over him. “Pike and Geist. A strange couple of fellows.”

“Oh, Rosemary, d’you think they’re any more peculiar than anyone else who works here? What’s strange anyway?” Oscar asked rhetorically. “Perhaps it’s all just strange to you because you’re a stranger—in New York, I mean. To some people a young girl with wild red hair from Tasmania, with no parents, who lived above a hat shop her whole life, is unusual.”

“I suppose,” I said. “But I don’t seem the least bit unusual to myself.”

“Well, you wouldn’t, of course. Any more than I seem odd to myself, or even Walter seems to himself. Really, though,” Oscar conceded, “I suppose Walter truly is unusual. Can’t help but be.”

“I saw him in your section, reading with a book inches from his face,” I said. “I thought I might ask him, you know, about the loan. But he seemed so intent, and so…well, vulnerable, I didn’t want to disturb him. It occurred to me he needed privacy.”

What I didn’t tell Oscar was that I saw something in him revealed, as if I’d seen him naked.

“He’s often in my section,” Oscar confirmed. “But I can’t help him much with the books he’s after. I don’t have much that’s current on the brain, or neurology. He also wants books on anthropology, but anything current just doesn’t come into a place like the Arcade. I have something intriguing on phrenology, but of course that’s very out of date, although not without interest…”

His voice trailed off as if his mind was following another, more interesting thought, and his hand stroked his own head, perhaps attempting to read his prominent occipital bone. Was he feeling for indications of adhesiveness?

“How long has Mr. Geist been here, Oscar?” I asked, trying to bring him back to the subject.

Oscar didn’t know exactly how long Geist had worked at the Arcade; but having spent his own adolescence in correspondence with either Pike or Mr. Mitchell, searching for books to satisfy his peculiar interests, he assumed Walter Geist was older than he was. Geist was actually not much past forty, despite the quaint figure he cut, which gave him an eternally aged aspect.