Booking In. Jack Batten
nimble enough to repeat the squatting and the close eyeballing of the lock.
“This is clean as a whistle,” Maury finally said.
“May I ask that you be less cryptic?” Fletcher said.
“You got a nice Abloy on here,” Maury said. He was standing erect now. “Very good security with a lock like an Abloy. High-class Swedish product. Whoever came through here last night didn’t leave a mark on this particular Abloy, not a scratch when he picked it, which is what he would have had to do. But there’s no giveaways I can see that the Abloy was opened in the last weeks or probably ever by somebody without a key.”
“You seem unnecessarily impressed.”
“This would have to be a super talented person at work.”
“I suppose I should feel complimented.”
I said to Maury, “Biscuit might be worth consulting for ideas about guys who could have done the job on the safe and on this door we’re looking at.”
Maury said, “I’ll set up a lunch with him for you and me in the next couple days.”
I turned to Fletcher. “But first,” I said to him, “I know Maury will agree we have a significant question to ask you.”
“Very friggin’ significant,” Maury said.
In tandem, Maury and I stepped closer to Fletcher.
“Anything within reason,” Fletcher said, giving Maury and me nervous looks.
“Just tell us, Fletcher,” I said, “what in the name of sweet Jesus was in the safe?”
Chapter Five
For lunch, Maury and Fletcher ordered what were in all respects hamburgers. I asked for something that was really a grilled vegetable sandwich. These descriptions weren’t how the menu listed our dishes. The restaurant was a French place Fletcher took us to a block west of his store, and everything on the menu had a French name. In truth, it was more a Frenchified lingo than the real thing, but the language was easy enough to interpret. Each of us also ordered a glass of wine, white for me, red for other two.
“Do you gentlemen care to take notes, written or digital?” Fletcher said.
“No bother,” I said. “With Maury and me, the kind of material you’re going to lay out for us has a tendency to stick.”
Fletcher didn’t look happy with this note of informality, but he pitched in anyway.
“Before I get down to specifics,” he said, “what I’m going to tell you must remain confidential until I say otherwise. Tell no one the information I’m about to impart.”
Maury and I looked at one another, then back at Fletcher.
“Not always possible, Fletcher,” I said. “But we’ll do our best to keep mum on whatever you say.”
“If you hire us, man,” Maury said, “you got to give us a little rope.”
Fletcher spread his hands on the table, palms down. “Very well,” he said. “But I don’t want to be left hanging in an embarrassing position.”
“That’ll work for us, Fletcher,” I said. “Now, what is it we’re going to be confidential about?”
Fletcher cleared his throat. “In the safe,” he said, “there were two sets of papers from two different clients of mine. Both sets were stolen last night.”
He glanced from me to Maury and back again to me. Neither of us spoke.
“One set is quite well known, the Walter Hickey papers.” Fletcher paused and did the double-glance routine again. “You’re aware of who Walter Hickey was?”
“A novel of his was on a Canadian literature course I took thirty years ago in my second or third year of university,” I said. “The Man With the Arctic Face. Not Hickey’s best book, but I see it in Indigo to this day. They got whole rows of all his novels in a special softcover edition. Hickey still sells — the great Canadian novelist of his generation.”
“Is Hickey the guy that got in the fight with the other famous writer?” Maury said. “They duked it out in a ring, had the gloves on, a referee, the whole nine yards. That guy?”
“You’re more or less correct,” Fletcher said.
“Hickey drilled the other guy, what was his name, Miller?”
“Mailer,” Fletcher said. “Norman Mailer.”
“For a guy who doesn’t subscribe to The New York Review of Books,” I said to Maury, “you’re not bad on literary history.”
“I try to keep up,” Maury said. He winked at me.
Our food and wine arrived, and between sips and mouthfuls, Fletcher spent the next twenty minutes setting the scene and describing the aftermath of the big fistic showdown between Walter Hickey and Norman Mailer. It had taken place in the summer of 1969 at a party thrown by The Paris Review. The setting was an abandoned church on Welfare Island in the East River just off Manhattan, and the guest list included everyone who counted on the eastern seaboard’s literary scene. At the time, Mailer had long since established his worldwide reputation as a novelist and journalist, while Hickey, already as well known as Canadian novelists got in their own country in those days, was just at the beginning of making an international success. The two guys got into an argument over their respective talents, and that led to the boxing match in a ring that happened to have been set up in the gym downstairs in the former church. Everybody from the party, many of them fellow authors of high status, crowded into the gym for the big bout.
“I’m right about Hickey cleaning Mailer’s clock?” Maury said, interrupting Fletcher’s flow.
“That was in dispute by Mailer and his clique,” Fletcher said. “But your version is generally accepted.”
“Tell us this, Fletcher,” I said. “Can we assume the Hickey papers that were swiped last night mostly deal with the fight?”
“Virtually all the papers are letters, and virtually their only subject is the boxing match. Mailer wrote exhaustively to Hickey; Hickey answered in like fashion. Each insisted he’d outfought the other. People from The Paris Review wrote letters in favour of one side or the other. George Plimpton, William Styron, Irwin Shaw. The controversy went on for three years, people writing back and forth, the whole crowd of novelists getting into the argument, and Hickey saved every scrap of paper. Some people say it was Hickey’s wife who did the saving. Either way, the collection was absolutely complete.”
The three of us had finished eating. Each dish had come with a pile of frites that were the best I’d tasted this side of Paris. I made a mental note to tell Annie about the place. She was mad for great frites.
Fletcher went on, “Hickey is, of course, dead now. Practically everybody who was present at the fight is dead. But Hickey’s daughter kept the correspondence that her father passed down to her. She’s Acey, the daughter, and she’s the one who retained me to find a buyer for the papers.”
“What kind of name is Acey?” Maury asked.
“Her full name is Anita Carmen, but she goes by Acey. Running the first letters of the two names together, if you follow. Rather a lower-class naming device, I would say. Common.”
“Her parents pinned it on her?” Maury said.
“Let’s not waste time on irrelevancies,” Fletcher said. “The point is I take my instructions from Acey, and in order for me to carry out her wishes, the papers have been in my safe for the past six months.”
“Until last night,” I said.
“Alas, yes.”
“They’re worth how much?” I asked. “The Hickey letters?”
“One