“I’m Eliza Dunwidge,” she said. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Soter.”
And there was something in the way she said my name that made me believe she already knew of me, although I had not perceived a similar response in her father when first we met. That benighted man seemed to take courage in his daughter’s presence, and was now looking at me with his arms folded and an expression of satisfaction on his face, as if to say, “Now, here’s the thing, and a pretty thing it is. She’ll set you right, oh yes. She’ll scatter the pigeons and come back with feathers in her mouth. . . .”
As if in response to such imagined thoughts, Eliza Dunwidge’s hands emerged from behind her back, as though ready to wring the neck of the nearest bird. They were thin and delicate and entirely without lines or blemishes. They resembled the hands of a mannequin that had been fused to her own limbs. Their nails were perfect, and gleamed as they caught the light in the room.
“Mr. Maulding is a good customer,” she said. “We always look forward to seeing him here.”
“Did he visit you often?”
“May I ask why you’re inquiring after him? We maintain the utmost discretion when it comes to our clients. As you may have gathered already, we offer a very specialized service. There are those who frown upon what we sell, which is why we choose not to display our wares in a shopwindow on Charing Cross Road.”
“Mr. Maulding is missing,” I said. “He has not been seen for a week—”
I thought of the calendar on Fawnsley’s desk, and added, “or more. I’ve been employed by his lawyer to inquire into his condition.”
Eliza Dunwidge did not seem unduly taken aback by this announcement. Perhaps people disappeared around her on a regular basis. There might even be a section in the shop containing works alluding to such practices: People, Disembodiment of. Still, she found it in herself to say the appropriate words under the circumstances, even if she gave no sign that she meant them.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said. “I hope that no harm has come to him.”
“As you say, he was a good customer. Wouldn’t want to go losing too many of those, would you?”
Her head tilted slightly. She was examining me in a new light, although it wasn’t clear if she liked what she saw.
“No, Mr. Soter, I would not.”
“I,” not “we.” Interesting. It was easy to see who was the principal partner in this particular firm. They would have been better off naming their business Daughter & Dunwidge.
I moved away from her and paused in front of the locked cabinets.
“Are these valuable?”
She joined me. She did not use perfume, and her body gave off a musky odor that was not unpleasant.
“Every book is potentially valuable. It depends upon the person who wants it as much as the book itself. Value is linked to age, rarity, condition, and, of course, affection for the volume in question—or simply the desire to acquire it. Eventually, of course, some books acquire an agreed-upon value. The works in that cabinet are among them.”
“Do you sell many books with an agreed-upon value that might be higher than most?”
“Some.”
“What is the most expensive book that you have in stock?”
“Off the top of my head, there are some sixteenth-century occult volumes that we would price in the high hundreds, but the demand for them is low.”
“And the thousands? Do you have books that cost more than a thousand pounds?”
She shook her head.
“Oh no, not here. To sell a book worth that much, one would need to have a buyer to hand. We would not be in a position to make a speculative purchase of a book worth so much simply in the hope that we might be able to sell it at a later date. It would bankrupt us.”
“But there are such books?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Occult books?”
There was a pause before she answered.
“A few. Not many.”
“Was Lionel Maulding looking for such a book?”
She was staring at me intently now. Her face didn’t give much away, but I knew she was considering how much I might know, and how much she could give away, if anything, before she was obliged to start lying or clam up entirely. I understood, too, that she was a strong woman but also a vain one. I had felt her dislike of me from the moment we set eyes on each other. To be caught in a lie would humiliate her and wound her pride. To remain silent would be little better, for it would be a tacit admission that I was on the right track, and any further inquiries on my part would catch her on the back foot. Either result would also mean that I had won the first stage of whatever game was being played here.
So she went for the truth, or some of it.
“Yes, he was seeking a very rare book,” she said.
“What was it?”
“It’s a work so unusual that it doesn’t have a fixed title, or rather, it’s known by a number of names, none of which quite captures the essence of it, which is apt under the circumstances. Mr. Maulding wasn’t sure at first that it even existed, but the nature of his researches meant that he had begun consulting books that were more and more obscure, and each obscurity led to further obscurities, like the branches of a tree growing thinner and thinner. Eventually, he was destined to find references to works that were more whispers than actual volumes, to books that contained within them the myths of books.”
I waited. She was enjoying herself now. Experts love a captive audience.
“The title by which he knew it, and one by which I had heard it described in the past, was The Atlas Regnorum Incognitorum, usually translated as The Atlas of Unknown Realms, although it has also been called The Atlas of Geographical Impossibilities and The Fractured Atlas. It has no known author, and no confirmed genesis. It is mentioned in other texts, but without any specific references to its contents. It is a book of which only a handful have any knowledge, but which none have actually seen.”
“And what does it contain?”
“Maps of worlds, it seems. Worlds other than this one.”
“You mean planets? Mars and suchlike?”
“No, I mean realms of existence, universes beyond our own.”
“The multiverse,” I said, recalling something of what the young man at Steaford’s had mentioned.
Again, I saw her reappraising me in her head, although I felt that I was operating under false pretences as I couldn’t recall the name of the chap who had come up with the word to begin with, and I wasn’t sure that I could explain the concept in any depth even if a gun was put to my head.
“Yes,” she said, “I suppose you could call it that.”
“And how much would this book be worth, should a copy of it come on the market?”
“Ah, but that’s the thing,” she said. “There are no copies. There is only the original, and that, if it ever existed, has long been lost.”
“No copies? Why not?”
I could almost see the twists of her mind reflected in the tense movements of her body. We were reaching the limits of what she was prepared to share, for now. She settled for her first lie, but I smelled it on her. Even her body odor changed, growing more bitter.
“One can’t duplicate what one cannot see,” she said. “To create a copy would require the presence of the original. Despite some lengthy searches, we were unable to meet Mr. Maulding’s needs.”
I inhaled the scent of the untruth and touched my tongue to my lips to test its flavor. It stank of nettles and tasted of copper.
“And if someone found out where this atlas was, and there was a buyer to hand, would ten thousand pounds cover the cost of it?”
“Ten thousand pounds would cover the cost of many things, Mr. Soter,” she said, and followed it with a strange remark, if one could ascribe degrees of strangeness to a conversation that had been peculiar as soon as it had begun.
“Ten thousand pounds,” she said, “may even buy a soul.”
She excused
herself, informing me that her father would see me out. She stamped her way slowly up the stairs. A door opened and closed again above our heads, and then the house was quiet.
But I could sense her listening.
“Hope that was helpful to you,” said Mr. Dunwidge.
“Somewhat,” I replied. “Tell me, are there other booksellers in London who deal in similar material?”
“None like us,” he said, “but I can give you some names. I don’t see why we should be the only ones to have the pleasure of your company.”
He scribbled a handful of addresses on a sheet of notepaper, but he insisted on escorting me to the door before he handed over the list.
“ ’Bye, now,” said Mr. Dunwidge as he released me back into the night. “Mind how you go.”
“I’ll be seeing you again, I think,” I said.
“I’ll let my daughter know,” said Mr. Dunwidge. “She will be pleased.”
And he closed the door in my face.
VII
I spent much of the following day working through the names on Dunwidge’s list, but I gained little from the experience. I was familiar with some of the businesses already, having seen their receipts among Maulding’s records, but in every case it appeared that Maulding’s dealings with them had been relatively minor, and involved few volumes of significant value. When I raised the title of The Atlas of Unknown Realms, I was met variously with blank stares or denials of its possible existence. Meanwhile, any mention of Dunwidge & Daughter elicited largely negative responses, underpinned by what I thought might have been a degree of unease.
Steaford’s was still doing business when I arrived, for it stayed open later than most stores of its kind in order to cater to the students whose formal studies absorbed all the hours of daylight. I asked after Young Mr. Blair and was told that he was fetching his hat and coat and would be leaving by the front door. I waited for him there, night now fully descended, the fog embracing the city. I blew my nose to clear it of some of the filth, and wondered, not for the first time, what the air in the city was doing to my lungs. Those I could not purge so easily.
Young Mr. Blair emerged from the shop like an infant being pushed from the womb, forced from a warm, familiar place into the cold, hostile world without. He took a final, fond glance back at the interior before placing a cloth cap on his head, carefully adjusting it so that as much of his ears as possible might be covered. His brown leather briefcase, weathered but not worn, rested by his right leg, his umbrella by his left. I could see him wrestling with the apparent familiarity of my face as I approached before the light of recognition illuminated his features. There was a benignity to him that I liked, a happy disengagement from the futilities and ugliness of life’s toil that one encountered in those who had discovered a way to take something for which they had only love and gratitude and make it their means of support.
I greeted him, and asked if I might walk with him for a time, to which he assented with a nod and what I thought were the words “Of course” and “Pleasure, dear fellow,” although they were so interspersed with various ums and ahs and unintelligible phrases that it was difficult to be sure. Together we headed toward Tottenham Court Road and onto Oxford Street. As we passed the first of the Lyons Tea Rooms he sniffed wistfully at the air, and required little convincing to enter.
A Gladys took an order for tea and sandwiches, and while we waited for them to arrive Young Mr. Blair sat with his hands clasped in his lap and a pleasant smile on his face, taking in the bustle and life around him. It must have constituted quite the racket compared to the near monastic silence of Steaford’s, but Young Mr. Blair basked happily in it all. I could see no ring on his finger, and I could not imagine that the junior members of the staff spent much of their leisure time with Young Mr. Blair once Steaford’s closed its doors. With the passing of his nemesis, Old Mr. Blair, he was now the most senior bookseller, and there would have been few peers to keep him company, even if they could have understood more than a fraction of what he was saying.
I recalled that wistful look he had cast back at the store as he left it. Steaford’s was his true home. Wherever he laid his head at night was merely an adjunct to it. When away from the shop, I suspected that Young Mr. Blair was sometimes rather lonely.
So we ate our sandwiches and drank our tea, and when Young Mr. Blair had cleaned his plate by licking an index finger and dabbing it on the china so that not even a single crumb might escape, I suggested some apple tart with whipped cream. I raised a hand to the passing Gladys, and Young Mr. Blair, with only a token effort at resistance, agreed that, yes, some tart would be very nice, and so we continued eating, and had our teapot refilled, and it was while we were letting the food settle in our stomachs that I raised again the subject of Dunwidge & Daughter.
Young Mr. Blair puffed his cheeks, scratched his chin, and drummed his fingers on the table, like a man contemplating the purchase of an item of whose provenance and quality he was profoundly distrustful.
“Dreadful woman,” he said at last, as if the conclusion had ever been in doubt. “Quite, quite dreadful.”
I made it clear that I was not about to disagree with his assessment, and then explained something of my quandary: a mutual acquaintance (at this Young Mr. Blair tapped a finger to his nose and winked theatrically) had sought a book from Dunwidge & Daughter (frown, more puffing of cheeks, “appalling woman”), but the work was so obscure that they were unable to source it. Under such circumstances, I asked, to whom might our mutual acquaintance have turned?
Young Mr. Blair considered the question.
“Occult?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Bad stuff. Ought to have stayed away from it.”
“Probably.”
“Rare?”
“Very.”
“Expensive?”
“Very, very.”
“Maggs,” said Young Mr. Blair decisively. “Maggs is the man.”
“Does he have a first name?”
“Might have. Never uses it. Rotten fellow.”
He leaned across the table and whispered, “Maggs the Maggot,” and nodded his head solemnly.
“Is he a bookseller?”
“Oooooh, no, no, no.”
Young Mr. Blair appeared quite offended at the suggestion, as though by even implying such a thing I had besmirched the reputation of his trade.
“Book scout,” he corrected.
“I don’t know what that is.”
“Looks for rare books. Buys ’em cheap—widows and suchlike, don’t know any better—and sells ’em on to booksellers. Won’t have him in the shop. Thief, um? Cheat, um? But he can find ’em. Can find anything if it’s got a cover on it. Knows his books, does Maggs. Doesn’t love ’em, though. That’s the thing of it. You have to love ’em. No point to it otherwise.”
Young Mr. Blair rubbed his right thumb against the middle and index fingers of his right hand in an unmistakable gesture.
“All about this, you know? Money, um? Nothing else. Bad as the woman. Ought to marry her!”
He laughed at his joke, then glanced at his pocket watch.
“Must be off,” he said.
He withdrew a wallet from the inside pocket of his jacket, but I waved it away.
“A thank-you,” I said. “For your help.”
“Oh,” he said, and I thought that his eyes went moist. “Oh, my dear fellow. Most kind.”
“Just one last thing,” I asked, as he began gathering his belongings. “Where would I find this Maggs?”
“Princelet Street,” he said. “By the synagogue. Don’t know the number. Have to ask. Again, most kind, most kind.”
He tapped my arm.
“Beware of Maggs,” he said solemnly. “Doesn’t love books. Might have done, once, but something happened. Occult. Bad books, bad business. Understand?”
I didn’t, not then, but I thanked him once more. We shook hands, and he headed into the night.
Princelet Street: th
at was in Whitechapel, close to Spitalfields. I knew that part of the city well, and from what I could recall there were two synagogues on Princelet Street: the Princelet Street Synagogue and the Chevrah Torah. I looked at my watch. It was after eight. I could go back to my lodgings, or I could try to find Maggs the book scout. Like Young Mr. Blair, or the domestic vision that I had of him, there was little for me at home, and I realized that I might well have been projecting my own loneliness onto the old bookseller.
No matter. I decided to go after Maggs.
VIII
If it was true to say that nobody in Whitechapel had a bad word to say about Maggs the book scout, then it was only because nobody I encountered appeared to want to waste any words on him at all. I began asking about him in the vicinity of the Chevrah Torah, but was directed gruffly to the Princelet Street Synagogue farther along the way. There, questions about Maggs were greeted with dark looks and, in one case, a veritable fountain of rheumy spittle that missed my boot by an inch. Eventually, an old Hasidic man wearing an ancient spodik on his head directed me to a lane that smelled of cat piss and stagnant water. There a doorway stood open, revealing a veritable warren of small apartments. A young woman, who might well have been a tart, stood smoking outside.
“Do you live here?” I asked her.
“Live—and work,” she said, and the way she tipped her head in the direction of the stairs removed any doubts that I might have had about her profession. When I didn’t bite, she sucked deeply on her cigarette and ran her soft pink tongue over her lips.