McMurtry, Larry - Novel 05 (12 page)

 
          
 
"Which would you rather have if you had
to choose?" I asked. "The icon or the trunk?*'

 
          
 
The pen remained poised. "I am normal in
some respects," she said. "I'd rather not have to choose."

 
          
 
She smiled a slightly more subdued smile.

 
          
 
"I'd rather be able to buy everything I
want, like you do," she said. "You're pretty lucky, you know. Not
everyone can indulge themselves that way."

 
          
 
"When can I come see your shop?"

 
          
 
She frowned. "Do you really want to?"
she said. "I don't think I have anything that's in your class."

 
          
 
Naturally I really wanted to, in order to see
more of her. Selling her the trunk had been a way of forging a small link.

 
          
 
"I was thinking of coming this
afternoon," I said.

 
          
 
She peered at me from the blue depths of her
coat for a moment.

 
          
 
"O. Kay," she said slowly, making it
into two words. Then she wrote the check.

 
          
 
"You don't believe in letting any grass
grow, do you?" she asked.

 
          
 
I just smiled.

 
          
 
"Okay," she said, more briskly.
"The address is on the check. But if you come after three you better be
prepared to deal with a couple of real kids.”

 
          
 
Then she climbed into the camper and eased
away, driving very cautiously, with both hands on the wheel.

 
          
 
While I was watching her, a pimp in a
pearl-white suit came up and tried to buy my Cadillac.

 
          
 
"Oh, come on, man!" he said, when I
demurred. "Don't you see? It matches my threads."

 
          
 
Impressed as I was with Jean Arber, making her
acquaintance had not left me entirely bereft of professional instincts. Blink
Schedel was in
Washington
, and it was not likely he had come solely for the pleasure of leaning
on the Coke machine. If he was there, it meant he was onto something, and I
wanted to know what.

 
          
 
Besides, my other set of instincts—those that
guided me, so to speak, through the swap-meets of love—suggested that it would
not do to crowd Jean too hard. Better to let her have a few hours to herself,
to contemplate all the beautiful things I might have, not to mention the
extraordinary trunks I could procure.

 
          
 
I make my share of mistakes, but one I never
make is to underestimate the power of things. People imbued from childhood with
the myth of the primacy of feeling seldom like to admit they really want things
as much as they might want love, but my career has convinced me that plenty of
them do. And some want things a lot worse than they want love.

 
          
 
By good luck, when I returned to the auction
the first person I encountered was Brisling Bowker himself. He had finished his
stint as auctioneer and was standing at the front of the auction room, lord of
all he surveyed.

 
          
 
Specifically, what he was surveying was one of
his minions attempting to auction the fixtures from a bankrupt pet store. The
pet fixtures consisted mostly of cages for rabbits and hamsters, whose smell
lingered after them. The rabbits and hamsters might have gone on to happy
homes, but their cages stank like shit, which is perhaps why the minion had so
far only been able to raise a bid of $16 for the fifty or sixty cages, plus
several packs of unused kitty litter.

 
          
 
Brisling watched the proceedings impassively,
out of frosty gray eyes, outwardly unmoved when his minion ceased prodding the
unresponsive crowd and sold what was left of a pet store for $16.

 
          
 
Some auctioneers are mesmerized by the ebb and
flow of their own junk, and will watch it for hours, as beach goers watch
waves, but Brisling was not so easily mesmerized. His frosty eyes restlessly
scanned the crowd, keeping tabs on the suckers, the thieves, and the
scroungers. Some of the latter were perfectly capable of discreetly chipping a
teapot or tearing the fabric on an armchair in the hopes of getting the object
a little cheaper.

 
          
 
"I thought
Texas
was a big state," he said, glancing at
me. "How come you can't stay in it?"

 
          
 
"Not enough icons down there," I
said.

 
          
 
He looked distant and uninterested. For him
the icon had become as remote as World War I, although it had been propped up
ten feet from us less than an hour before.

 
          
 
"I’ve been told
it's
Byelorussian," I said.

 
          
 
He looked at me as if I were a complete idiot.

 
          
 
"Armenian," he said.

 
          
 
In truth, I wasn't very interested in the icon
myself, anymore. Something more interesting, namely Jean Arber, had popped into
view. I can be fickle, but not so fickle as to forget Blink Schedel.

 
          
 
"I guess the Smithsonian must be for
sale," I said. "Otherwise Blink wouldn't be up this early."

 
          
 
Brisling, normally as stolid as a sleeping
walrus, looked as if he'd just been harpooned.

 
          
 
"How'd you know?" he said, too
shaken to be able to hold his tongue.

 
          
 
"How'd I know what?" I asked.

 
          
 
It was difficult for Brisling Bowker to look
perplexed. Years of selling every imaginable species of object to every
conceivable species of buyer had prepared-him for just about everything. The
secret lusts of the human heart were no secret to him. Nonetheless, I had
clearly perplexed him, a reaction so unexpected that for a moment I couldn't
remember what I had just said.

 
          
 
I looked at him and he looked at me: Then I
remembered. I had said the Smithsonian must be for sale.

 
          
 
Naturally, I had been joking. The Smithsonian
would never be for sale. Even Blink Schedel, with his mysterious fleet of
trucks, couldn't handle a deal that big.

 
          
 
Besides, who could sell it? The Smithsonian
belonged to
America
, or at least so I had assumed.

 
          
 
On the other hand, it is usually a mistake to
assume that something can't be sold.
France
sold
Louisiana
, and most of the West.
Russia
sold
Alaska
.
London
sold its
bridge,
MGM sold its back lot. So probably
America
could sell the Smithsonian, if the right
offer came along.

 
          
 
I was so stunned by the thought that I didn't
say another word. Neither did Brisling Bowker, but he did look at me with
something like respect for the first time since I'd known him.

 
          
 
All of a sudden Brisling's workaday auction
room took on a new ambiance: the ambiance of a spy novel. For all I knew one of
the GS-12s, in their humble woolen hats, might be a liaison man. The
transaction of the century might even then be taking place, somewhere in the
vicinity of Brisling's Coke machine.

 
          
 
Blink was no longer actually leaning on the
Coke machine, but he was still holding his position, poking absently in a table
full of old books that were piled nearby.

 
          
 
To buy time, which is what one must do in a
spy novel, I pretended to be interested in the contents of a row of rusty
filing cabinets that were about to come up. Oddly enough, the contents of the
filing cabinets actually
Were
interesting. Their files
were still in them, in the form of thousands of copies of a pamphlet on the
kangaroo rat. The pamphlet had been written by a retired admiral whose sideline
was mammalogy. Evidently the pamphlet had not sold at all well.

 
          
 
Any other time I would have
bought the cabinets just to get the pamphlets, since I knew a pamphlet
collector in
Mobile
who would have bought
them in an instant.
His
name was Beaufort Kiff, and he was one of the most out-of-control collectors I
knew. Once at an auction in
Pensacola
I saw Beaufort buy 4,000 copies of a pamphlet on terza rima, the last
effort of an Italian diplomat who had, of course, written it in Italian, a
language Beaufort couldn't have told from Finnish.

 
          
 
Several thousand copies of a pamphlet on the
kangaroo rat would have made him deliriously happy, but for once I was derelict
in my duty. If the Smithsonian was indeed for sale, how could I afford to take
time to mail thousands of pamphlets to
Mobile
?

 
          
 
The filing cabinets, with their valuable hoard
of pamphlets, were sold to a couple of junk dealers, while I stood around in a
quandary, unable to decide what to do.

 
          
 
I was tempted to go back over to Brisling and
just ask him point-blank what was going on, but when I looked, Brisling had
vanished. Like many large animals, he could move with stealth when the need
arose.

 
          
 
Blink, meanwhile, had gone nowhere and spoken
to no one, though he was standing next to a dumpy little old woman who was
apathetically wrapping string ^ound a few of the secondhand books.

 
          
 
In spy novels, of course, it is just such
dumpy little women who manage to throw experienced spies off the scent.

 
          
 
Tuck stood nearby. One of the more timid of
the suburban wives had just given him a bid on some Swedish carving knives.

 
          
 
"Who's that little woman?" I asked,
nodding at her as discreetly as possible.

 
          
 
Tuck grinned. "Mrs. Lump?" he said.
"You're telling me you don't know Mrs. Lump?"

 
          
 
I was beginning to feel like an amateur, a
feeling I hate. Like all professionals, I like to feel professional, which in
my case involves knowing, at least by reputation, every important dealer,
scout, or collector in the country. Admittedly it's a big complex country, but
not everyone in it is an antique scout, either. It was chastening to have to
think that I had failed to take note of a woman important enough to be able to
sell the Smithsonian to Blink Schedel.

 
          
 
I always keep a neatly folded $100 bill in my
watch pocket, for just such situations. On the flea-market circuit a hundred
dollars will usually buy a lot of information.

 
          
 
But unfortunately Tuck wasn't a flea-marketer.
He was a professional, too, with dozens of his own games going. When I showed
him the bill he shook his head.

 
          
 
"Keep it," he said. "I don't
know that much about the deal."

 
          
 
"I've got to start somewhere," I
said.

 
          
 
"Start by asking the fat man," he
said. "If God knows more than the fat man I ain't noticed it."