“I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Pavlakis, but I’ve had a busy day and I’m facing a full evening. If you’d called earlier . . .”
“Apologies, dear lady”—he choked as he downed a peanut—”on my way to Victoria, unexpected stopover. I thought I would take a minute to catch you up. But some other time . . .”
“So long as there is no delay in the schedule we discussed, you don’t need to trouble yourself to report to me,”
she said. He had a very expressive face; she could have sworn that his mustache drooped, that his hair had just lost some of its curl. Her own expression hardened.
“What’s the problem, Mr. Pavlakis?”
“There is no problem, I assure you. We will be ready on time. No problem. Some additional costs we must absorb . . .”
“There is a problem, then.”
“Our problem, dear lady. Not yours.” He smiled, displaying fine white teeth, but his eyes were not smiling with them.
Sylvester contemplated him. “All right then. If in fact there’s no problem please wire me tomorrow, here at the hotel, reconfirming your intention to begin loading cargo within two weeks, as agreed.” When he nodded glumly she added, “Until then, we won’t need to talk again.”
Pavlakis muttered, “Good night, dear lady,” but she was already marching away.
VI
London had not fared as well as Manhattan in the new century; it was as cramped and soot-blackened as ever, as severely Balkanized by differences of accent, skin color, class. In a moment one’s square black taxicab passed from elegant brick townhouses and clever converted carriage houses on quaint mews into steaming, crumbling slums.
The weather was as foul as ever, too, with gray-bellied clouds excreting thin drizzle and the occasional riverbottom fog bringing equal parts romance and respiratory disease.
Nevertheless Sondra Sylvester liked the place—if not as much as she liked Paris or Florence, which were even less changed from what they had been, still rather better than she liked New York, which was no longer real. Living on Port Hesperus, Sylvester got her fill of artificial luxury ten months out of the year; when she took her annual trip to Earth she wanted the thing itself, the dirt with the polish, the noise with the music, the sour with the sweet.
The taxi stopped in New Bond Street. Sylvester pushed her sliver into the taxi’s meter slot, then opened the door and stepped to the damp pavement; while she waited for the machine to record the transaction she adjusted the line of her silk skirt and pulled her chinchilla coat closer against the clinging fog. The sliver rebounded and the cab’s robot voice said, “Much obliged, m’um.”
She pushed through hungry-looking crowds on the sidewalk and walked briskly into the building, nodding to a rosy-cheeked young staffer at the door who smiled back in recognition. She entered the cramped auction room where the book and manuscript sales were held. She’d been here often, as recently as yesterday afternoon, when she’d come to preview today’s offerings. Up for sale were bits and pieces of two private collections, one of them from the estate of the recently deceased Lord Lancelot Quayle, the other anonymous. The two collections had been broken into a hundred lots—most of them of little interest to Sylvester.
Although she was early the room had begun to fill. She took a folding chair in the middle of the room and sat down to wait. It was like being early to church. There was a little transeptlike wing to her right, difficult to see into from her position; bidders who preferred anonymity often seated themselves there. The oldest booksellers, Magg’s, Blackwell’s, Quaritch, the rest, were already at their traditional places around the table in front of the podium.
The first rows of folding chairs had been grabbed by outlandishly dressed viddie people whose demeanor was less than dignified. All that preening and squawking! Surely they would be asked to leave if they continued making so much noise. . . .
Two items drew the entertainers and the rest of the unusually large crowd. One of them was a distinct oddity.
As a result of Lord Quayle’s lifelong Romish mania, his library had tossed up, among the miscellany, what purported to be an eyewitness account—scrawled in squid ink on fragmented parchment in execrable Greek by a fellow named Flavius Peticius, an undereducated, obviously gullible Roman centurion (or perhaps written by his nearly illiterate scribe)—of the crucifixion of one Joshua of Nazareth and two other malefactors outside the Jerusalem wall, early in the first century A.D.
Here was spectacle, the very stuff of epic! Not to mention timely publicity—and this is what drew the movie folk—for the BBC had recently mounted a lavish production of Desiree Gilfoley’s “While Rome Burns,” featuring the lissome former model, Lady Adastra Malypense, in an acting debut made memorable by the fact that in only one of her many scenes had Lady Malypense appeared wearing any clothes at all, and those in the Egyptian mode of pleated linen, which is to say transparent.
Perhaps Lady Malypense herself was among the noisemakers in the front row; Sylvester would not have recognized her, clothed or otherwise.
As far as Sylvester was concerned they could have been auctioning a piece of the True Cross—so much for the intrinsic value of the parchment. Sonya Sylvester and most of the serious collectors had been attracted by lot 61, a single, thick volume; ironically, had its text not formed the basis of a classic British film of the previous century, the news media might have overlooked it, which Sylvester would have preferred.
She had inspected it yesterday on the plain bookshelf behind the podium, where it was guarded by burly porters in their dust coats and discreetly watched over by the business-suited young men and women of the staff. The book rested open to reveal a scrap of paper lying on its title page, written in an irregular vertical hand: “To Jonathan . . .”
Using this pseudonymous address, the last of the truly great, truly mad English adventurers—who was also the first of the great, mad philosophers of modern war—had conveyed his book into the hands of a close friend. Who could trace its travels since? Not Sotheby’s.
Valuable books—fortunately or unfortunately, depending upon one’s point of view—had never been as valuable as, for example, valuable paintings. Even the rarest printed book was understood to be one of a set of duplicates, not a unique original. Conversely, the rarest painting, while unique, could easily be reproduced in a hundred billion copies, its likeness distributed throughout the inhabited worlds in hardcopy texts and magazines and stored electronic images, thus becoming widely known—while no book, rare or common, could be so casually copied or so casually apprehended. Printed books were not unique, thus subtracting from their value. But printed books could not be easily reproduced, thus subtracting from their fame— and so again subtracting from their speculative market value.
Rarely there came upon the auction block a book both famous and unique. Lot 61 was such a book, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom in its first, private, and very limited edition—different from subsequent editions not only in its printing and binding but by almost a third of its text.
Before today’s auction only one copy had been known to exist, all others having disappeared or been destroyed; the survivor resided in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Not even the Gutenberg Bible could combine fame with such rarity; this was the only available original copy of an acknowledged masterwork of 20th century literature.
Sylvester’s hopes of acquiring the book were not unreasonable, although every major collector and library on this and the colonized planets would be represented at the sale. Quaritch would be acting for the University of Texas, who were surely frantic to add this missing and most precious piece to their extensive collection of the author’s works and memorabilia. Sotheby’s staff held orders from other bidders, and some of them flanking the auctioneer’s podium already had their heads cocked to the phone-links in their ears, receiving last minute instructions from far places. But all the bidders would have their top limits, and Sylvester’s was very high.
Promptly at eleven the auctioneer stepped to the podium.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Sotheby and Company.” He was a tall man, striving to overcome the East End and to achieve Oxbridge in his speech and demeanor, and he got the sale moving without delay. Although there were flurries of interest over 16th century English translations of Caesar’s Commentaries and Plutarch’s Lives, most of Quayle’s library was disposed of rapidly.
Then the crucifixion parchment came up, and the mediahounds zeroed in with their photogram cameras. The viddie denizens of the front row cooed and fluttered. Sure enough, someone addressed the blond woman who made the first bid as “Adastra, darling,” in a stage whisper loud enough to be heard at the back of the room. After a few quick rounds only Lady Malypense and two other serious bidders remained. A Sotheby’s staffer was representing one of them, and Sylvester suspected that the bidder was Harvard, perhaps hoping to acquire a crucifixion account to match the one Yale already possessed. The third bidder was behind her, a man with the accent of an Alabama preacher. It became a two-way contest when Harvard dropped out; the Southern churchman was implacable.