An Honest Living E-Book

Dwyer Murphy

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 372

Beschreibung

Brooklyn, mid-2000s. After leaving behind the comforts of a prestigious law firm, a restless attorney attempts to make ends meet by picking up odd jobs from a colourful assortment of clients. When the mysterious Anna Reddick turns up at his apartment with ten thousand dollars in cash and asks him to track down her missing husband, he trusts it will be an easy case. That is until the real Anna Reddick shows up - a magnetic but unpredictable literary prodigy - and he finds himself out of his depth and drawn into a series of deceptions involving Joseph Conrad novels, unscrupulous booksellers and seedy real estate developers. Set against the tail end of the analogue era, An Honest Living is a gripping story of artistic ambition, obsession, and the small crimes we commit against one another every day.

Leseprobe

Praise for An Honest Living

‘It is precisely style and atmosphere that give An Honest Living so much electricity and dimension. Like the best noir practitioners, Murphy uses the mystery as scaffolding to assemble a world of fallen dreams and doom bitten characters… Murphy’s hard-boiled rendering of the city is nothing short of exquisite… For anyone who wants a portrait of this New York, few recent books have conjured it so vividly’ The New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice

‘Murphy’s engrossing debut is a book made for summer reading. It’s a smart, leisurely read, richly layered with movie references and philosophical reflections’ Minneapolis Star-Tribune

‘[Murphy] knows not just where the bodies are buried but how readers want them to be discovered’ Boston Globe

‘This territory-marking debut is seductively steeped in motifs reminiscent of the golden age of noir. Fans of the genre will likely be nodding appreciatively from the introduction of a mysterious woman out to get her husband, which launches this story, to the concluding shot of a vintage car’ Shelf Awareness

‘A rain-spattered love letter to a bygone New York, a wry homage to a classic of the genre, and a delightfully meta work of neo-noir… [B]rilliantly assured… The mystery is beautifully constructed, the writing crackles on every page, and Murphy’s portrait of early 2000s New York City is nothing short of exquisite. If you’re looking to lose yourself inside a smart, atmospheric literary crime novel, An Honest Living will not disappoint’ LitHub, Our 38 Favourite Books of 2022

‘A lyrical valentine to New York City and literature’ Oline Cogdill, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

‘Quietly brilliant… The novel explores the ways in which we’re nothing without our curiosities – even if those curiosities, in the end, undo us’ Los Angeles Review of Books

‘An Honest Living is a novel about ambition and obsession, shadow and light, smoke and mirrors – a shimmering, often surprising, exploration of how fact and fiction reflect one another until the boundaries disappear’ BookTrib

‘If Cara Black’s Aimee Leduc smoked pot, or if Michael Connelly was from Paris, their books might read a little something like Dwyer Murphy’s absurdly entertaining and extremely literary debut’ CrimeReads, “Most Anticipated Crime Books of 2022”

‘An Honest Living hits all the right notes… [a] smart and seductive page-turner’ Fine Books & Collections

‘For those who covet “reading in a bar with lousy lighting and good air conditioning,” this one is pure pleasure’ Booklist

‘An Honest Living is a smartly updated literary noir set in pre-financial crisis Manhattan; it’s suffused not only with risk-taking and critical thinking, but with Murphy’s generosity of spirit. The novel is playful and welcoming, coaching the reader to think the best of its cast of oddballs and misfits’ Study Hall

‘An impressive debut noir from the CrimeReads website’s editor in chief… Murphy’s writing is smart, ruminative, and referential… [A] lovingly rendered snapshot of an already-bygone city, with details reeking of authenticity, down to the last barstool’ Library Journal

‘A bittersweet love letter to New York and times gone by… fans of noir fiction will feel right at home’ Kirkus Reviews

‘Murphy, the editor-in-chief of CrimeReads, writes with authority about the New York book world and literary references abound, from Edith Wharton to Cormac McCarthy’ Publishers Weekly

‘Dwyer Murphy’s debut novel, An Honest Living, is a noir love letter to New York City. It is a sublime trip through a city teeming with professional idlers, hustlers, poets, politicians, insurance scammers, and real estate developers, all vying for their share of New York’s divinity’ Walter Mosley, author of Blood Grove

‘An Honest Living is an electrically good time meted out in fine, sharp, crackling prose that somehow manages to be an homage, a send-up, and a reinvention all at once’ Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger’s Wife and Inland

‘A witty, observant debut that’s as much a love letter to New York as it is a slick noir’ Andrea Bartz, author of We Were Never Here

‘Dwyer Murphy’s An Honest Living is a deliciously smart PI novel set in New York’s antiquarian book world that channels Chandler and Chinatown to take us into a recent past that already feels like a bygone era. A brisk, funny, and fabulous debut’ Adrian McKinty, author of The Island

‘Dwyer Murphy’s An Honest Living is the lawyer-book-collector noir you never knew you craved. Evocative and suspenseful, the book hums along in an unusual space somewhere in the constellation of Roberto Bolaño, Julio Cortázar, and the Coen Brothers – an ontological puzzle nested inside a shaggy dog story, or the reverse’ Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn

‘A terrific book’ Don Winslow, author of City on Fire

‘Dwyer Murphy beautifully intertwines a noir mystery with the lore of New York. A captivating, beguiling novel right up to its shocking conclusion’ Samantha Downing, author of My Lovely Wife

‘An Honest Living feels like an instant classic – a polished gem of a PI novel that’s wonderfully atmospheric and full of wit. Fast-paced as this book is, it’s also a smart read you’ll want to savour’ Alison Gaylin, author of The Collective

‘An Honest Living is a sublimely literate, literary, and crafty novel – an homage to PI fiction that transcends the genre with style and inspiration to spare. Lovers of crime fiction and lovers of books of all types (as well as those of us who miss the old Brooklyn) will be equally transported’ Ivy Pochoda, author of These Women

‘A many-layered, fascinating novel about the collisions that come with city living, of people devoted to old books and those determined to construct new buildings. In this swift-moving noir debut, Dwyer Murphy has conjured a fantastically vivid homage to New York’ Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew

‘An Honest Living is a superb debut novel by a supremely gifted writer. It’s as if Roberto Bolaño and Lawrence Osborne got together to reimagine Chinatown. I was as gripped by the mystery at the heart of this book as I was by Dwyer Murphy’s perfect prose’ Jonathan Lee, author of The Great Mistake

‘The best kind of private eye novel – one that feels wholly modern but timeless. Dwyer Murphy evokes the greats like Elmore Leonard and George V. Higgins without losing his own sharp voice. A stylish, memorable debut’ Alex Segura, author of Secret Identity

For Carolina and Eloisa

Part I

THE DECORATION OF HOUSES

1

The first time I saw Newton Reddick he was drunk outside the Poquelin Society building on East Forty-Seventh Street. He was leaning against a cart filled with dollar paperbacks, looking pretty jaunty and not at all minding the cold. The Poquelin was a private library that had been started during the Gilded Age by a gang of bank clerks who believed reading during their lunch hours would make them into Rockefellers and Carnegies. It was still a private library in 2005 and also a scholarly society dedicated to the art, science, and preservation of the book, whatever that meant. Its membership rolls included a lot of academics, rare-book dealers, and a few unfashionable, old-money eccentrics who came down from the East Seventies on the chance of finding a literary evening. Newton Reddick was one of the book dealers, or had been anyway. I was told he was mainly a collector now. ‘Collector’ seemed to me an overly polite term but at least it conveyed the fact he wasn’t making any money at it. He was living off his wife, a much younger woman with inherited wealth to whom he’d been married just under ten years. That earned him a certain pride of place among the library’s members, it appeared. He was holding court outside the Poquelin, leaning against that paperback cart and waving a cigarette around in his free hand while a trio of red-faced old-timers hugged themselves against the cold and seemed to hang on his every word. His voice, a crisp tenor, bounced off the skyscrapers and carried across the street to where I was standing with a coffee from the bodega on the corner of Fifth and Forty-Seventh.

He was talking about somebody named Richardson. ‘The problem with Richardson,’ he was explaining to the others, ‘is the man has no sense of history, no feeling of a higher purpose. He thinks a Pulitzer makes a book worthy.’

The error of that kind of thinking was obvious to the little assembly outside the Poquelin, and before stubbing out their cigarettes and going back inside, they had a few more choice words for the Richardsons of the world, the ones who can’t see the forest for the trees, who wouldn’t know greatness if it walked up and punched them square in the nose. They were a lively bunch, those old bookmen. On another night, under different circumstances, I might have enjoyed listening to their fool talk. It was a Tuesday in November, just before Thanksgiving. All over the city people were drinking more than they should and visiting friends. It was the season for parties and parades and little flings that didn’t mean anything.

Normally I kept away from divorce work, but the case had come to me on referral. A woman calling herself Anna Reddick had shown up at my apartment the previous week, on Thursday evening, saying that she had met my friend Ulises Lima at a party. Ulises was a Venezuelan poet who sent me a lot of work. He thought it was awfully funny that I was a lawyer, not an artist or a writer or a poet like everyone else. He thought it was even funnier that I refused to work any longer at one of the big law firms in Midtown and was trying to make a go of it on my own in a careless and not very profitable way. He had sent around a good number of prospective clients for consultations. There were always people in his world who needed help and hadn’t any ideas where to begin looking for it. Some had money and others would try to pay me with paintings or meals. Sometimes I took them up on it, though I didn’t have an eye for that kind of thing, the visual arts, and I would have to ask someone, Ulises or another friend, to come by and appraise the thing for me. It was an endless cycle of imaginary economies, small profits, and favors done impulsively or not at all. That was fine so long as your rent was controlled. Anna Reddick came with cash in hand – ten thousand dollars. She had the bills neatly stacked and facing the same direction, the way a waitress arranges her tips at the end of a shift.

‘Catch him at it,’ she said, ‘and you’ll get a bonus, paid out in cash, check, wire, money order, however you’d like, your choice.’ It had been a lean few months, and I was in no position to turn her down. Something about the case bothered me from the start. Whatever it was, I managed to put it out of mind.

The job, as I understood it, was essentially a controlled buy, just as you might have bought some weed on the street or a box of Motorolas that had fallen from the back of a truck or a hundred other things whose provenance and ultimate destination you couldn’t be sure of. Only in this case the weed was books. I had a list of five titles written for me on a note card. Any one of them would do, she said, and I didn’t need to worry about actually buying them, so long as I received an offer of sale from her husband, the one she was about to divorce, and would swear to it in an affidavit. She believed he was trying to sell the books, which belonged to her. They had been passed down by her family. Her attorneys said she would need some proof to back her claim and advised her to get another lawyer involved, in order to cloak the job in privilege. That was just the kind of thing a divorce attorney would think of. Layering the secrecy until the truth was almost meaningless, so thoroughly and finally obscured you could hardly find your way back to daylight. The titles of the books were unusual. Long, ornate, and grisly. The Last Confessions of Tom Mansfield Who Corrupted and Murdered His Servant. Notes on the Investigation of Charles Mandell and of the Final Killingof Luke M. Johnston. They were legal volumes, apparently.

On the surface, it was all very sensible. A lawyer in need of books. It happens all the time.

I followed Reddick and his disciples inside and went up a narrow staircase to the third floor, where there was a banquet hall decorated with chandeliers and threadbare rugs thrown over the hardwood floors. It was debate night at the Poquelin and open to the public, though from the looks of it I was the only one who had taken them up on the offer. Seventeen old men in shirts buttoned to their chins. A few paintings on the walls and books on display. The speeches had already been delivered and the members had moved on to the drinking portion of the evening. I kept an eye on Reddick from across the room. He was long and slim and made an effort to hold himself up, propping his hands on the small of his back the way a pregnant woman does. He was sixty-three years old. His wife was in her early thirties. I suppose a part of me was bristling and judging him harshly, thinking meanly that if a man that age had been lucky enough going on ten years to hold on to a young woman of independent means, a really quite attractive woman in her own peculiar way, he ought at least to be modest and civilized about it when she finally came to her senses. He shouldn’t go around selling her family’s books. There was nothing worse than a shameless cuckold. Anyhow, that was the train of my thoughts as I carried a drink around the banquet hall and told the old men my story, which was meant to lure in Newton Reddick and eventually did. The story was more or less true: I told them I was a lawyer, an IP litigator. I was interested in the history of the Poquelin Society, but more immediately I was interested in buying a few books to decorate my office, preferably legal books, historical, rare.

Reddick came over with two drinks, one for each of us, and introduced himself.

‘I understand you’re just starting out,’ he said.

He gave me the drink and we touched glasses. His grip was unsteady and his smile looked like the smile of a man who naturally trusts the strangers he meets and their intentions. There was a guilelessness about him, that is, or else the whiskey had stripped him of whatever he had. We spoke for a while, in general terms, about the Poquelin and about the city. He wanted to tell me how it had changed. In those years you often found yourself in conversations like that, and what the other person was really trying to say was that they had been there, in New York, a long time, longer than you quite possibly, and that was supposed to mean something. I didn’t feel that from Newton Reddick. He was telling me about the city, but his memories seemed innocent somehow, the way you might talk about a childhood home that had long since been sold. In that way we came back around to the subject of books and the collection I was considering acquiring.

‘It’s an exciting moment,’ he said. ‘I remember my firsts. I was sniffing around Book Row – you wouldn’t know the shops, this was before your time. I worked in the back office of an insurance company but after hours I often found myself wandering downtown, toward Fourth Avenue, without really knowing why. I owned books, of course. Club editions. Boxes of dog-eared paperbacks. I had never given any thought to building a real collection, a library of my own.’

He had an odd glint in his eye. If I had been feeling mean I would have said it was greed, but the conversation had softened me, and I felt it was more generous than that, his memory.

‘What was the book?’ I asked.

‘The Decoration of Houses,’he said. ‘Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, 1919 edition.’

‘Was it very valuable?’

‘Not especially. But it set me on a course.’ He smiled sadly and ran his hands down the curve of his back. ‘You remember the books you lose more than those you keep. Steel yourself.’

I took a slow sip from the whiskey he’d brought and pretended to be steeling myself for a long, melancholy future of book acquisition and loss. It didn’t seem so dire to me. His library of late had been paid for with his wife’s money and now that he had lost it, or was about to lose it to the divorce attorneys, at least he had his scholarly society to go to and they would treat him well and listen to his stories. All over New York, across the world, old men were suffering worse fates than that, disease and penury and loneliness, and they didn’t have any book societies to go to.

That’s what I told myself, though the truth is I liked him. He had an odd, upright quality.

‘Do you care for Edith Wharton?’ he asked.

‘I like her fiction. The rest, I haven’t read.’

‘Most people your age don’t know anything about her. I’m told she’s unfashionable these days. Not modern enough. I can’t imagine how that figures. The only book of hers anyone wants to collect now is The Age of Innocence, and then they only want it because it won her the Pulitzer. They collect sets. Pulitzers, Bookers, Nobel laureates. A man was here last month who said that he owned every non-fiction Pulitzer finalist with a blue dust jacket. Can you imagine it?’

I couldn’t. I didn’t try to. After a while I said something vague about The House of Mirth. It was a book I had read many times at another stage in my life, when I first arrived in New York and was living by the Brooklyn Museum, above a jerk chicken shop that sold dinners on flatware through the window. You would bring back the clean dish the next day if you wanted more. It was a long subway ride to law school on 116th Street and I used to read all kinds of books over and over again. Edith Wharton was the best of them. Sometimes you would miss your connection to the local, reading books like that, and you would have to backtrack or walk from Harlem.

For some reason, I wanted to tell Newton Reddick about all that, but decided not to.

‘Lily Bart,’ he said, ‘is an admirable figure. Forceful. So for you, a literary collection?’

‘Sure, why not?’

‘So long as it doesn’t hew to the prizes. Nothing vulgar.’

‘No, nothing vulgar.’

I checked my watch. It was nearly midnight.

‘I’m also interested in legal documents,’ I said.

He was looking down into his glass, thinking still about Edith Wharton, maybe, or about the young people who declined to read her and all the people who would never know her thoughts on decorating houses. It took him a moment to regain himself. I wondered how many sales he had lost over the years drifting off that way into reveries and private disappointments.

‘Legal documents,’ he said. ‘Yes, of course. There I can be of service to you.’

‘What would you recommend?’

‘There’s a fine tradition in the area of legal documents. And, of course, lawyers themselves have been great book collectors over the years. There was Pforzheimer at Yale, Walter Jr, not Carl Allyn Peck and the rest of them at Harvard. It all depends on what area of the law captivates you.’

‘I’m thinking about something more particular than a few Blackstones.’

‘More particular?’

‘Curious. Something readable would be nice.’

It took him a moment but when the idea arrived, he smiled a kind, distant smile. I got the impression he had spent a lot of time and suffered some heartache looking for curious things. Tallied up, he had probably spent a good portion of his life stooped over in bookshops.

‘I’d like to show you something,’ he said. ‘Will you come with me?’

He was good and drunk by then. His eyes were glass, like a lake at morning.

I followed him down a hall and through a series of reading rooms, each outfitted with armchairs and inlaid shelves filled with books. None of the rooms were occupied and I got the feeling, a strange feeling that I didn’t quite know how to articulate or reckon, that the floors we were walking belonged to the books, everything in that building did, and it didn’t matter whose name was on the deed or who joined the society or didn’t join it, the books would be there regardless and there would always be old men to shuffle through the rooms and look after them.

Finally, we came to the place Reddick wanted me to see. It was a room like all the others we had passed, small and confidential, decorated in the handsome style of Edith Wharton’s New York. Reddick held out his arms. He seemed to think its glory was manifest.

‘The legal collection,’ he said.

It smelled like an autumn rot. There were no windows and only a dim light.

He took a book off one of the shelves and handed it to me. It was cheaply bound, cheaply made, flimsy even, nothing I would ever think to collect or to display on the shelves of my office, the imaginary office I had come to the Poquelin Society in order to begin decorating. The title of the book was The Life and Crimes of Mordechai Hewitt, Murderer Late of New York. It was a trial pamphlet. The top shelf was filled with them. That was the source of the rotting smell.

I pretended to flip through the pamphlet, to admire it. Reddick was watching me closely.

‘It’s just the thing,’ I said. ‘It’s perfect.’

‘Isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Like holding on to time itself.’

Something had come over him since we’d entered the room. A quickening of the blood. He seemed twenty years younger, which reminded me again of the wife he was losing. Even shedding those couple of decades, he had no real business with her. That was the unavoidable truth.

‘Could you sell me something like this?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he said, solemnly. ‘Not these, but there are others. Plenty of others.’

‘As many as you can give up.’

‘I’m glad you appreciate them. Truly.’

Without having to be asked again, he found a notepad and pen on a reading lectern in the corner of the room and began to write. When he was done, he ripped the sheet from the pad and handed it to me. There were ten titles there and next to each one an annotation with the name of a publisher and the year, presumably, that the book was printed, and finally a column for the price. The numbers were dashed off very faint, like he was embarrassed at having to do it, embarrassed for the both of us at being vulgar. They were awfully expensive pamphlets.

‘Those books would make a fine start to a specialized collection,’ he said. ‘Take this home with you. Study the volumes, consider the figures. Reflect. Then call me. We’ll see to it.’

‘See to what?’ I asked, a little stupidly.

‘Your library,’ he said. ‘This is only the beginning.’

I asked him if he wouldn’t mind signing his name to the sheet. As a keepsake.

He did it gladly, without question or suspicion. We were on the cusp of a great journey, he and I. Of course, we would gather souvenirs.

I thanked him and put the sheet in my pocket. It was evidence now.

Before I left, he wanted to shake hands, but I found a way around it without being rude.

2

It seemed at the time like the easiest money a person could make. The next day I typed a declaration and affidavit, attached Reddick’s handwritten, signed offer sheet as exhibit A, and emailed the documents to Shannon Rebholz at Rebholz and Kahn, Anna Reddick’s attorney for the divorce. The next week, a courier showed up at my door with a sealed manila envelope. Inside was some fine stationery and another roll of hundred-dollar bills, fifty of them. Together with the retainer, that made fifteen thousand dollars. Not a bad haul for a few hours of work. I put most of it under the mattress and promised myself I would look into the bond market straightaway. With what was left, I treated Ulises Lima to a steak dinner at Peter Luger. I wanted to thank him for sending me such a brief, surprisingly lucrative case. He ordered the porterhouse with a baked potato and toward the end of the meal, after we’d both drunk a good deal, he was hell-bent on making a toast. It started out as a toast about loyalty and friendship and ended with him talking about Jorge Luis Borges and his early poetry, how truly awful it was, so awful it must have been part of a long con the great man was playing on the Argentines. We spent the rest of the meal trying to figure out what the con could have been, whether it involved a fake encyclopedia like the Codex Seraphinianus or a pack of gauchos. It was one of those nights. We were happy and well-fed. The work had come easily, without either of us having to search for it.

Ulises was probably my closest friend in the city at that point, but if you had asked me how we first met, I couldn’t have told you. He claimed it was in a bookshop on the Lower East Side, a place that sold paperback mysteries and anarchist literature, but he couldn’t remember the name. He had me confused with somebody else. New York was full of small, dying shops then and it could have just as easily been a record store or a luncheonette or a news kiosk. Ulises had a good, sharp mind that was always misremembering things. That was what made him a poet, he would tell you. If he had wanted to recall things in the order they occurred he would have become a detective or a lab assistant. Memories were speculative. That was his theory, anyway, and it all tied back to Borges’s poetry in a roundabout way and to some of the lesser-read works of Roberto Bolaño, another writer Ulises admired. Bolaño died two years before, in Barcelona somewhere, supposedly of liver failure. Since then he had become fairly popular and you would sometimes see people on the subway trying to read one of his books in the original Spanish, especially 2666,the novel he wrote while waiting on a new liver that never arrived. It was all pretty inconvenient for Ulises, who had named himself after one of Bolaño’s characters. He had done it back when he first arrived in New York and had been counting on the reference remaining obscure for a long while, possibly forever. His real name was Juan Andres Henriquez Houry. Everyone called him Ulises. He had friends all over the city, a lot of unusual, interesting people.

After the steaks we went to Fortaleza Café and kept on talking about work. The regular crowd was there. Some of them Ulises knew and others were people I had done jobs for in the past, acquaintances and neighbors and the woman who ran the bakery on Graham Avenue, who the summer before had wanted to trademark a drawing of the blue stove her grandmother passed down to her, a simple case that only required a filing with the Patent and Trademark Office and earned me a lot of free muffins for a time. Warm, unruly muffins overflowing with berries. She was wearing a baggy sweater and dancing with another woman. I thought I recognized the other woman. Possibly she was a colleague from the bakery. The ends of her sleeves, around the wrists, were dusted with confectioners’ sugar. It was just after eleven and Fortaleza brought in music during the week. They didn’t charge anything at the door, they only passed around a hat. You could ignore the hat if you wanted, but Miss Daniela, who owned and managed the café and who may or may not have come from Fortaleza – I never checked – would be sitting at the bar, watching who contributed and who didn’t. Plenty didn’t, but I never saw them there again.

‘You two are always working,’ Miss Daniela said, when Ulises and I were sitting at the bar. She was three stools down, watching the band, which was a guitar, a drum, and a singer performing samba. Whenever a train passed overhead, crossing the Williamsburg Bridge, the band would speed up the tempo and play louder as the rattling of the tracks and the bridge’s undergirding tried to drown them out but never managed to. It was all done very naturally. They played there every Thursday night, the same band, from around nine o’clock until midnight.

Miss Daniela changed stools to get a little closer. Closer to Ulises and to the band.

Ulises told her what we were discussing. The Newton Reddick case. Borges. Divorce. She hadn’t really thought we were working – it was all a joke. She liked to tease Ulises. They were neighbors, she used to say, her from Brazil and him from Venezuela, they shared a border, why not a bed now and again, for laughs, for fun, for exercise? She wore her hair in great, old-fashioned hives wrapped with silk scarves. In the prior year she had been fined twice for violating the city’s cabaret laws. The cabaret laws in New York were like nowhere else in the country, maybe in the world. You could only dance in a few places around town, in clubs and in the old discos, several of which were still hanging on thanks to the dancing. The fines weren’t too exorbitant, but they added up for a small place like Fortaleza, which had only ten tables, the barstools, and a kitchen out back with four burners. The city used to send plainclothes officers around on weeknights looking for violators. The cabaret laws had been designed to keep Latin and Black neighborhoods under thumb. It was enough to make a businesswoman paranoid, especially one who brought in music, samba no less. But Miss Daniela couldn’t bear to have her place any other way. I told her the next time she was fined I would fight it out for her, pro bono. She asked if Ulises would come along for the fight, pro bono, and he said that he would try, he would be honored to do it, but you can’t fight city hall. That was something he had heard once.

‘You know, I’ve divorced five men,’ Miss Daniela said. ‘Two in Brazil, three here. Every one a class act. Didn’t take anything that was mine. Didn’t hire lawyers. Just signed the papers when I brought them by. If I saw them on Sundays at church, they all tipped their hats.’

‘You chose good men to divorce,’ I said.

‘You have to. You have to think about how it’s going to end.’

‘You should have been a litigator. That’s the same thing they teach us.’

‘Lawyers don’t dance,’ she said. ‘No music, no dancing. Just fines, tickets, divorces.’

She had us all figured out. Even still, she asked if I wanted to dance with her.

‘What about the fines?’ I asked.

‘I got my lawyer right here,’ she said.

She was patting Ulises on the shoulder, flirting, though he wasn’t listening to us anymore. He was talking to the waitress, a woman he knew who was a few decades younger than Miss Daniela, but what did she know about starting a marriage or carrying through a divorce? We went down to the end of the bar, Miss Daniela and I, where there was just enough space to dance between the service area and where the band was set up. The J train passed overhead and the rhythm quickened and I had no hope of keeping pace, though I worked up a good sweat trying. Miss Daniela moved gracefully. In the air you could smell the cheese balls they were always cooking and pushing out to accompany the sugary drinks. Afterward I dropped a twenty in the hat. It was a lot more than I was used to tipping, but we were celebrating the end of a good case. That was my reasoning as I dropped the bill in and watched the hat disappear.

‘Twenty bucks,’ Miss Daniela said. ‘You think I’m getting fined tonight?’

I told her I didn’t know. Nobody could know a thing like that.

‘We got any police here?’ she asked. ‘What do you see?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘They’re all at the policeman’s ball.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The Benevolent Brothers’ Christmas Ball. They have it every December.’

‘And none of them dancing? That’s some party.’

Maybe they did dance. I didn’t know anything about it. I hardly knew any police. Lawyers are meant to cultivate friends in the department but I could never quite bring myself to do it. I knew some FBI people, task-force lawyers, but none of them danced, not that I ever saw. I was making up the policeman’s ball, inventing it, though it sounded like something they would do, carpooling in from Staten Island and Long Island with their wives, then driving home plastered, running into deer, and the next day, in the morning, seeing blood on their fenders or the edges of their windshields and wondering what they’d done, asking their wives, who didn’t know, calling their union reps to make sure it could be kept quiet and that nobody had reported any accidents. No, I had never seen the point of hanging around police stations trying to make a lot of friends.

‘No more divorces for you,’ Miss Daniela said. ‘You’re not cut out for that, okay?’

I agreed with her though probably we had different reasons for thinking so.

Ulises and I stayed until close and walked the waitress home, the woman he knew who was covering all ten tables by herself, working like mad, bringing around all the drinks and also the cheese balls, which were called pão de queijo. Her name was Gloria Almeida and she lived on North Eleventh, by the brewery, nearly half a mile out of the way but it didn’t matter, we wanted to see her home. There was snow in the forecast that night, but it hadn’t started falling.

3

It was another week, a quiet Wednesday, and I wanted to get out to see the city decorated for Christmas, so I walked over the bridge and headed north toward the Sotheby’s auction house on York Avenue on the Upper East Side, just shy of the river. Sotheby’s was a good place to pass the time. They were always changing the art on display but there was a great deal of order to the place and the order never seemed to change too much. On the first and second floors were the impressionists, modernists, and Pacific sculptures. Above those were the contemporary paintings, and then as you made your way upstairs you saw the illustrations and selections from private sales and, somewhere in a room I had never found, the gemstones. An escalator ran straight through the guts of the building. If you got all the way to ten, there was a coffee bar where they made good bitter espresso and gave it away for free. It wasn’t at all a bad place to spend the afternoon, and now and again I would pick up a job there. I knew a woman in the watch department. She ran the watch department, in fact, and had thrown me an interesting case the year before: a shipment of watches needed to clear customs, but they wouldn’t say whom the watches belonged to, only where they were headed – Sotheby’s in New York – and where they had come from – Morocco by way of Lausanne. I thought she might like to get lunch, but I took my time getting to the seventh floor to ask her. They had some nautical drawings on display in the section for private sales. Not the heroic British imperial pomp, but nautical drawings from northern India and the plains of Central Asia, places where there was no water around, so the drawings were only the dreams of people who had seen the ocean once or twice in the distant past. By the time I got to the seventh floor, it was nearly two o’clock.

Katya, the woman I knew in the watch department, said she couldn’t leave. She had four or five machines spread out around her desk, performing inscrutable tasks. The whole office was a clamor of activity. ‘That’s all right,’ I told her. ‘Next time I’ll call first or come ready to bid.’

She must have heard something in my voice. A catch. She was used to listening to watches, with all their intricate workings and little hitches and flutters that told you what you needed to know. She asked how Xiomara was doing. She hadn’t seen her around lately.

‘She’s doing fine,’ I said. ‘There’s a show coming up in Paris.’

‘What show?’

I told her about the exhibition. In English it was billed as the ‘Young Voices of Latin America’ – there were different names for it in Spanish and French. A prominent event, the kind that would be cataloged and covered in the art press and maybe beyond that, with write-ups in the culture sections of newspapers in France and elsewhere. A good number of reputations would be made, Xiomara’s included. They were holding it at the Centre Pompidou. For some reason, talking with Katya and telling her what I knew about the show, I feigned having an opinion about the building, the Centre Pompidou, which I had never visited or even seen. That was the kind of thing Xiomara would have laughed at. She believed that was the heart of a lawyer’s job, feigning opinions about events and people never seen, and in that way we weren’t such a poor match, she and I. Our occupations were adjacent.

‘She must be thrilled,’ Katya said.

I agreed. She must be. She was. I was happy for her. There was nothing else to be. Everywhere I went that winter people asked me about Xiomara. She was something for them to talk about, like the weather or delays on the subway. She had been gone just over a month and at home, in the apartment, I would still find her sculptures in odd places sometimes, miniature busts of nudes in classical positions, throes of rapture or torture or something in between, all carved from the most refined materials she could scrounge, including whalebone she sourced from a retired galley cook who was living in the seafarers’ wing of the Prospect Park YMCA. From the neck down they were stark, classical depictions but above that they wore death masks. The masks were colorful and terrifying. I used to find them in between the sofa cushions or in the kitchen, stuck behind a drawer that wouldn’t close all the way no matter how hard you pushed it.

‘Listen,’ I said to Katya, ‘aren’t any of the watches in your auction stolen?’

‘They better not be.’

‘But if they are.’

‘You’ll be my second call,’ she said. ‘Third at the very most.’

The prospect of a long, damp afternoon was stretching out before me. I didn’t have any work at home. Nobody wanted to start a lawsuit with Christmas coming. By the weekend everyone would be drinking in anticipation of the holidays and a few of them would get arrested and that would be something to do, but on a Wednesday in December there’s less hope in the air and less desperation. You had only the Sotheby’s auction house to cheer you up, and the windows of department stores.

Katya told me there wasn’t much going on in the building – everyone was getting ready for the big seasonal shows. But if I was really hard up for distraction, somewhere in the building they were previewing a book auction. She said it like it was just about the dullest thing she could imagine. Compared to watches, I guess it all seemed pretty dreary.

‘Look me up in a few weeks,’ she said. ‘We’ll have all the lunches you can pay for.’

I would, I told her. ‘I’ll call you after New Year’s.’

‘January I’m going to Miami,’ she said.

‘What for?’

‘They’re crazy about watches there. And I hate January in New York. It never snows.’

She liked to leave you on cryptic notes like that, something to keep you wondering what she meant. She was an interesting woman. I was disappointed not to be having lunch with her, though the truth was, I wasn’t hungry. I had filled up on espresso from the tenth floor.

The book preview was way the hell downstairs in the subbasement. They had done a nice job decorating the room with old-fashioned touches that made me think about Newton Reddick and the Edith Wharton book he had described to me, the one she had written on the decoration of houses, the first book that had lit a fire under him about collecting. Probably he was on my mind, too, because it was a book auction, and it looked like just about every book dealer in New York was there at the preview and all of them were wearing tweed of one kind or another. Tweed jackets, tweed pants, there were even a few vests. It was all rather festive, and you could see that the auction was a big event in their world and that everyone was glad to be there. It occurred to me that Reddick might be there and probably he wouldn’t be very happy to see me, not if his lawyers had received the new filing in his divorce, which likely they had. It had been a couple of weeks and divorce attorneys weren’t known for their restraint. I checked around the room and didn’t see him anywhere. Mostly the crowd was made up of dealers and booksellers, it seemed. There weren’t any lawyers, none that I could pick out, so I handed around my business card, thinking there might be an opportunity there, I might carve out a new specialty tracking down rare books and the drunks and divorcées who occasionally stole them. I liked books. Ulises used to say that Balzac had never cost a man so much money as he had cost me. It was true: I did like reading that kind of thing, and not only Balzac but a lot of other authors with outsize, inchoate, and somewhat ridiculous ambitions. Probably those books had filled me with a lot of strange ideas about what I should and shouldn’t do with my life and in that way some money had been lost in the form of salary, which was still quite high at the corporate law firms in those days, and in other benefits, but I didn’t mind. Solo practice suited me. You could read what you liked and when there was nothing else to do you could walk to Sotheby’s and find new worlds opening before you. The books on auction were from American authors and publishing houses. It was a Christmas tradition, apparently. The Sotheby’s fine books, prints, and Americana auction.

There were some wonderful books on display and several others I had never heard of though the reserve prices were high, almost comically so, except that it was Sotheby’s and Christmas was coming up and you never knew what people were going to buy on the Upper East Side. My favorite was a first edition of Mark Twain’s The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. The first had been a special edition with a handsome green cloth cover and in the lower left corner was a frog embossed in gold, starting into his jump, looking like an animal on a crest, rampant. It was Twain’s first book, apparently, but he was already famous by that time because the story had run in a newspaper, the New York Saturday Press,