Huckleberry Fiend (2 page)

“Some people might. But you’ve gotta remember, I’m fucked up.”

Sardis gave it a go: “It must make you feel left out. And sad probably.”

I had a better idea: “And kind of like burgling, I’ll bet.” He looked sheepish. “He’s been dating this Japanese stew named…”

“Sukiyaki?”

“…this Nisei flight attendant— Isami Nakamura. Nice girl about twenty-three; two years of college, probably; no intellectual pretensions. But nice, like I said.” He shrugged. “I don’t know; something came over me. I hit her last night.”

“You mean you broke into her house— and found
this?
”

“Yes. But I don’t think it’s hers. It was in her roommate’s closet— another stew named Beverly Alexander.”

Sardis said, “Flying’s a good job for smuggling. What’s the airline?”

“Trans-America. A new no-frills one that only flies to New York.”

“Oh.”

I just couldn’t take it in. The original Huck Finn in a flight attendant’s closet? I said: “It must be a fake. Or maybe just a copy.”

“Who’d copy it? It can’t be that. Now, it
could
be a forgery… but I’ll tell you something. That thing gives me goose bumps.”

I knew what he meant.

“Suppose it
is
the real thing— then what was Beverly Alexander doing with it? I’ll tell you what— almost certainly something criminal. Maybe she stole it from some collector— somebody it really meant a lot to. Or listen, maybe it belongs to a university. Maybe even Cal. They’ve got a huge Mark Twain collection.”

“But if something this important had been stolen, wouldn’t it be news?”

“Maybe not. If you stole it, maybe what you’d do is, you’d hold it for ransom. The insurance company would quietly pay off— some sum less than it would cost them if the manuscript were lost— and the police would never come into it.”

“Wait a minute, Booker— are you thinking of collecting some ransom money yourself? Or maybe just making a simple sale?”

“I can’t believe you said that.”

“Said what?”

“I just can’t believe you don’t know me well enough to think a thing like that. In the first place, if I had any original Mark Twain manuscript— not even Huck Finn, which must be worth hundreds of thousands— I would never sell it. Never, never, never. I’d keep it and cherish it, and love it…”

“And honor and obey it.”

“Oh, can it, Mcdonald— you know how much I love my paintings? I’d trade all of them for that. If it’s real.” Booker had a spectacular art collection— probably not worth hundreds of thousands, but he did dote on it. “The thing is, it’s not right, don’t you understand? Just because I’m a burglar, do you think I don’t have any morals? If that’s a genuine Mark Twain manuscript, I personally feel it should be in a university library, where everyone can see it. But if it belongs to a private collector, I figure it’s someone who knows how to appreciate it. And I want it returned.”

“You want it returned.” I’d been a bit slow on the uptake, but there’s no predicting the twists and turns in people’s private codes of ethics. I, for one, could never understand why Sam Spade felt he had to avenge the partner whose wife he was happily boffing. Booker’s position made a damned sight more sense than that; I just hadn’t seen it coming.

“I do,” said Booker. “And I’ll pay you to do it for me.”

“Why not do it yourself?”

“I’d rather not be associated with it— due to my eccentric line of work.”

“What if it’s authentic, and Beverly’s the rightful owner?”

He shrugged. “Then give it back. For all I know, she’s a Mark Twain scholar who saved up for it by high-altitude hash-slinging. I wouldn’t deprive her.”

“But why me?”

“You know why you. You’re an investigative reporter— of sorts, when you get off your ass. And you’ve got the time. And you need the money.”

“How much?”

“What do you charge for freelancing?”

“Forty-five dollars an hour.”

“I’ll make it fifty-five, with a five-hundred-dollar minimum. I mean, say the thing turns out to be worthless, and you find out in half an hour, and then mail it to Bev. You’ll still get the five hundred. But if you need a month to work on it, take it.”

“Done.”

Sardis said, “Okay. Now where’s my present?”

“Already installed,” said Booker. “But don’t worry, I didn’t force the lock.” He held up a fistful of keys and picks.

If Booker ever quit burgling, he had a great career as a decorator. Sardis’s gift was a small tree (
ficus benjamina
, according to the proud owner) and it made all the difference in her living room.

Having climbed the stairs to see it, we had no strength left for the Schwarzenegger movie, and barely enough to make it to the bedroom, where we collapsed in a pitiful heap. I dreamed blissfully of life on the Mississippi, and found you feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft. I was smoking my corncob pipe, trailing toes in the water and feeling all warm from the sun when the idyll turned into a horrible nightmare. A hideous harpy suddenly swooped from the sky and tore the very pipe from my mouth. Soaring again, she opened her talons flat-out, showing each gleaming claw in the light and dropping the pipe in a gesture of utmost contempt. Then she dive-bombed, beating me with her wings, soaring again to reconnoiter. She laughed the laugh of the Wicked Witch of the West and shrieked in the voice of Margaret Hamilton: “I’ll civilize you, young man!” And I knowed, as Huck would say, who she was; not to mention who she warn’t: not the witch and not the Widow Douglas and not Aunt Sally nor Aunt Polly nor Miss Watson. She was Sardis.

Fully awake and staring at the ceiling, I wondered what on earth I’d have dreamed if we
had
moved in together.

Something told me Sardis had been right not to push things. I lit out for the Territory.

My own personal territory, downstairs. But certainly not because of that thoroughly silly and childish dream. I can’t imagine what my unconscious was thinking of and hasten to say it in no way reflected the views of the management.

I left because I couldn’t get back to sleep and didn’t want to wake Sardis with my tosses and turns. I made myself a cup of hot chocolate and repaired to my living room-cum-everything-else to sip it. And there before me, reposing in a couple of common shoeboxes on my ugly coffee table, lay the mystery manuscript.

Booker had had the forbearance not to touch it through an endless night of longing and staring. And he had actually forbidden wine in the same room with it. Surely only a hooligan and a Philistine would finger it with a cup of hot chocolate at hand. But I was like a teen-ager pumping hormones— absolutely unable to keep my mitts off.

What a beautiful hand it was written in. The very definition of “flowing.” It seemed to have a kind of motion of its own, as if the author were writing and thinking at the same felicitous rate. Ripping through, I saw hardly any changes. Here and there a word or a paragraph crossed out; that was all. Could anyone write so well in first draft? Still, Mark Twain had been a journalist. I knew from experience one chance was all you got in that life. Maybe he’d just gotten used to it.

I settled back with the first shoebox. I’d come to a decision and I only regretted it wasn’t as properly respectful as Booker’s had been. On the off chance that I actually had in my hand what I considered America’s greatest novel, penned by the actual hand of America’s greatest novelist, humorist, and possibly journalist (if you didn’t care much for facts), I was going to damn well read it. Perhaps a bit of genius would fleck off.

Mumbling “Damn the torpedoes!” I poured brandy into my hot chocolate. By sun-up, I’d been through both shoeboxes, about four hundred of the little half-sheets, and I was in a perfect haze of delight. Sleepy and sated. Thinking,
God, that last scene was great!

It was the one where Huck goes into town to put up handbills for the king and the duke and old Boggs rides in, “drunk and weaving about in his saddle,” sassin’ and cussin’.

“I wisht old Boggs’d threaten me,” says one of the rustics, “cuz then I’d know I warn’t gwyne to die for a thousan’ year.” Old Boggs, alas, doesn’t live out the hour— he’s shot dead for his insults by the arrogant Colonel Sherburn.

So sad when Boggs’s sixteen-year-old daughter throws herself on her dead father. So funny when people start elbowing for a peek at the corpse: “ ’Taint right and ’taint fair, for you to stay thar all the time, and never give nobody a chance; other folks has their rights as well as you.”

So thoroughly satisfying.

And so was the two-hour nap I grabbed before it was time to go over to the Cal library and ask some questions. Drinking coffee, I pondered. I had to think up a whopper for the scholars and it had to be plausible. I could say I was doing my dissertation, but I’d be unmasked as a Twain ignoramus in seven seconds. Or was it Clemens ignoramus? I didn’t even know how scholars referred to the great man. Ah, but then it came to me— there was one kind of researcher with a license to know nothing. I hunted up my old press card.

By ten o’clock I was at the library, following the fourth-floor signs that said “Mark Twain Papers.” I knew what was there: a $22-million collection of notebooks, correspondence, and other treasures, most of them given to the university by Clemens’s daughter, on the condition that it publish them all. I was glad when I came to a door that would have foiled the Barrow gang— scholars could be so careless.

The one inside wasn’t opening up to just anybody. She sang out (as Huck would say): “Who is it? Do you have an appointment?”

“Paul Mcdonald from the
Chronicle
. I was just taking a chance I could talk to someone.”

“Sorry. The general editor’s on vacation.”

“I’m not picky. How about a specific one?”

“Could I ask what this is about, please?”

“I don’t think I ought to yell it through the door. What about if I go downstairs and call you on a pay phone?”

“Oh, never mind.” She opened the door and stepped out. “I’m Linda McCormick. May I see your press card?”

I showed it to her. “Are you the one?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The specific editor.”

She laughed uneasily, as if not sure I was joking. “I’m the best you’re going to get, at any rate. What can I do for you?”

“I’m doing a story about manuscript collecting.”

“God. Have you come to the right place.” She stepped aside and let me in, leading the way down a hall lined with pictures of Mark or Sam. To tell the truth, I preferred looking at her.

Though she wore a rather shapeless and loosely belted dress, I could see movement inside. I liked her face even better. She was thirty-five perhaps, had dark curly hair and looked a little sleepy. Sleepy-looking women always inspire me to picture them on a pillow. Picturing Linda, I was actually a little overwhelmed at how impressed I was.

When she sat me down across from her, I saw that her eyes were a lovely hazel and rather smeary, which was probably what caused the sleepy effect. One of the endearing things about academic women is that they never quite seem to learn their way around a makeup kit.

“I gather from your response that a lot of people collect Twain. Or should I say Clemens?”

“Anthony Burgess said, ‘T.S. is the only Eliot and George Eliot is an unabbreviable pseudonym, like Mark Twain.’ That more or less reflects the views of the senior generation. Around here, we tend to say Clemens, but we don’t think ‘Twain’ is terrible, the way our forefathers did. As a matter of fact, the old boy even signed some letters ‘Mark’.”

“If you can’t trust the man himself—”

“But then he stopped. Perhaps the recipients didn’t much care for it.” I could have sworn the way she looked at me was the least bit flirtatious. She blushed a little, too, but perhaps that meant she was embarrassed about losing her train of thought. “I’m sorry,” she said, “you asked about collecting. It’s kind of a hot thing, actually. The letters alone sell for a thousand dollars a page. Actually, that might even be a little low.”

“And the manuscripts?”

She gave me an intimate look. “Megabucks.”

“How about the biggie?”

“Huck?”

I nodded.

“A sad story about that one. Part of it’s lost. The Buffalo Public Library has the rest.”

“What part is known to exist?”

“Oh, about the last three-fifths. Except that’s not quite right, because some of the material is from the front of the book. He wrote the first two-fifths mostly in 1876— up to about the middle of Chapter 12, and including most of Chapters 15 and 16. The part they have at Buffalo is the middle of Chapter 12 through 14, and from Chapter 22 through to the end.”

“He went back and put some stuff in later?”

She nodded. “The Walter Scott Episode and the King Solomon Debate.”

I couldn’t remember either from earlier readings, and certainly hadn’t read them the night before. I was getting goose bumps again. “He wrote in longhand?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. But being extremely modern, he did have his books typed for the printer. The printer’s typescript is missing as well.”

“So what they have in Buffalo is a holograph.”

“Yes. By the way, there’s a published facsimile of it.”

I tried not to jump off my chair.

“Do you have it, by any chance?”

“Can you cure warts with spunk-water?”

I must have looked blank, because she flushed again. “A little joke. From
Tom Sawyer
.”

“It’s coming back to me. I prefer the dead-cat method.” She smiled. “I can send the facsimile to the reading room if you’d like to see it.”

“I’d love to. I think I’m getting a hook for my story.”

“Oh?”

“I think I’ll build it around the lost part of the Huck Finn manuscript, and what would happen if it turned up.”

“Ah.” I was beginning to figure her out. She said hardly anything except on the subject of Twain, and plenty when she got on that.

“What do you think
would
happen?”

“Everyone would want it, of course.”

“How much would it be worth?”

She shrugged. “If you figure it at the going rate of letters, you’d have to say conservatively a thousand dollars a page.”