'til every taste is on the tongue

In Milan, Joe misses out on an edition of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest in the time it takes him to realize he’s forgotten his umbrella. There can only be so many collectors purchasing American detective stories from the rare bookstores of Europe, and fewer still who prefer to pay cash. The place looks like a dump anyway, run-down and wet-smelling; it reminds him sharply of home, not the sterile safety of the reading-room but the kind of Fourth Avenue dive where the clerks would be happier to ignore you. The graduate student behind the counter looks just as happy to turn him down as to sell him something.

“I’m sorry, the book is no longer available for purchase.”

“But I just spoke to you on the telephone. You told me half an hour ago you had it ready for pickup, cash on the barrelhead.”

The bookseller’s forehead furrows, but Joe can’t tell if she’s puzzled by the idiom or by the presence of a blond blue-eyed American having an outburst at the front desk.

These little undertakings are an exercise in busywork — Joe pays cash, Joe gives no name, Joe goes on his way to the next sleepy suburban retailer or some rare book collector’s private collection, all carefully notated and locked away for safekeeping. His collection can never grow too big for a suitcase, so it exists in a state of perpetual turnover. He buys to read and to scrutinize, and if a book passes from his hands then it’s part of the life cycle he’s now living — nothing lasts. He’s only visiting.

It’s just as well he didn’t get the book anyway, because when he steps outside onto the front step the rain is guttering down like there’s no tomorrow. The mist is rising off the pavement, and for a moment he can see what this place must have looked like before the war, before everything.

Standing by his bicycle is a tall man in a camel-colored overcoat. Once Joe might have thought, some guy in the neighborhood is out here sneaking a cigarette, but now he lets his hand go to the handgun holstered against his back. Blond hair indistinguishable from white, a smooth barbered nape — Joe knows the broad line of those shoulders, or else he just thinks he does.

Joe calls out: “What’s on your mind, pal?”

The man does not answer him, and before Joe can make up his mind to go after him he’s vanished into the rain

*

There must be a pattern to what’s taken and what’s left behind for him. In Lyon, a slim volume of English wartime poetry is bundled in with his hardbound acquisitions, which Joe only discovers when he undoes the brown-paper wrapping. Sitting in his train compartment, he assesses what he’s found.

Oxford University Press, 1944, authored by a pair of initials — a first printing in softcover, an octavo volume gowned in cream paper darkened at every edge by the touch of human hands. It’s barely more than a chapbook, not even fifty pages, and it hardly weighs anything at all. Joe reads the whole thing by the overhead light, with pencil in hand to underline and annotate.

Pompeii has nothing to teach us,
we know crack of volcanic fissure,
slow flow of terrible lava,

pressure on heart, lungs, the brain
about to burst its brittle case
(what the skull can endure!)

Some book. He’s developed the bad habit of biting the eraser-ends of his pencils. By the time he’s finished, he’s worried loose the metal band between his teeth.

Joe Turner, no middle initial, is a man without a country. He has no mother and no father, and no wife, and no children. He picks up odd jobs, translating textbooks, porno books, war stories, and all the money goes into hostels, train tickets, more popular ephemera from the America he’ll never see again. He’ll never publish now, so he writes only for himself, cramped stories of chance meetings and dark implications scrawled in handwriting too rotten to revisit. There are other Americans abroad, men and women he meets in train stations and terminals reading their newspapers and checking their Mickey Mouse watches for the time, but each and every one of them is beyond his reach. Joe is tremendously lonely, and angry. He has nothing to do but read.

…

the flesh? it was melted away,
the heart burnt out, dead ember,
tendons, muscles shattered, outer husk dismembered

yet the frame held:
we passed the flame: we wonder
what saved us? what for?

Someone is sending him a message, and it’s somewhere here between these lines. Somebody somewhere is watching him. Or maybe they aren’t — maybe this is all luck, like crossing paths with an old friend outside a department store, at the orchestra, in the doctor’s waiting room.

*

Six months later in Lucerne, he finds two more books have been bought out from under him. They aren’t particularly valuable books — a duet of obscure French-language detective stories in fair condition, corners dog-eared and covers mildewed — or even especially memorable ones, which makes it increasingly hard to believe in coincidence. It doesn’t matter — Joe finds them again, a hundred kilometers away in Bern, being indexed by a quizzical clerk at the front desk. The clerk notes down the foxing and the cut-out pages. Provenance unknown.

This man is just teasing him, the old bastard. He’s playing games with him now. There isn’t an ounce of malice in it, but it’s goddamn irritating nonetheless. Joe’s been living out of a suitcase, drifting between the places he’s never been, looking over his shoulder, living behind locked doors — can’t even talk to himself without the fear of being overheard. All he has is the written word. It’s goddamned unsportsmanlike.

*

His French pronunciation isn’t so bad that the confusion on the man’s face is warranted. At a bookstore in the town of St.-Pierre-de-Clages, it all snaps into place.

The clerk repeats himself. “Your books, sir.”

Joe shakes his head. His stomach is tight, and his throat is dry. “I only came to pick up the one. Did someone — leave something for me?”

“Look, I have three volumes here for you, all of them paid for. Your colleague paid for them this morning. All you need to do is sign for them.”

The Phantom Lady, Dark Passage, Street Of The Lost. All American, lurid cover paintings, first editions, pocket-sized. Joe buries his hands in his coat pockets and grimaces.

“What did he look like?”

“Fair hair, like you, but taller.”

Something slides into place, some piece of foreshadowing. In a moment of pique, Joe signs the register Joubert.

*

At an ordinary bookshop in Vienna, Joe finally catches his culprit. He corners him in the converted cellar, which can only mean he wants to be caught — that tall slim figure is at the end of a long row of metal bookcases, head cocked to read the spines of books on an upper shelf.

The volume is something about the uniforms of the Napoleonic Wars — an illustrated cover and a sharp flash of color as he tugs it out by the spine with careful fingers. He handles books like a surgeon, deftly but dispassionately.

Joe is close enough to cross the distance between them in a second, to jostle him against the plastered wall and grope for a gun. But he is empty-handed here, with his politely concealing overcoat folded over his arm, and the line of his body is interrupted by the shape of a holster, beneath his clothes there is only the smooth progress of a body.

He’s never thought too much about what he must look like off the clock — in his mind Joubert is always the man he was on that winter day in Maryland, a man with a gun.

Joe closes the distance between them, grabbing Joubert impetuously by the sleeve. The gesture lands closer to the skin than he means it to, and it’s a shock to meet with warmth beneath the surface. The force that’s been bedeviling him as he wanders through Europe’s lousiest bookshops is flesh and blood, not metal and wire.

Joubert shifts the angle of his body just enough to look at him, and it’s as if he’s greeting an old friend. Behind his glasses, his blue eyes are so pale as to appear without color. In the yellow light from the overhead bulb, his features are stark, like a medieval carving.

“Hey, what’s all this about? How the hell have you been poaching my books?” Joe lowers his voice, like they’re in a library and not in a subterranean vault full of pressboard and pulp.

“I offered more money for them than you did.”

“I meant how did you follow me? If this is how you treat your old friends you can’t have that many.

“The first time was pure accident. After that, I felt I had to make it up to you. Hello, Condor.”

He has something to tell him, or he has something else for him — he can’t mean to kill him or he’d have done it already. So what?

Joe’s full of nerves — something is rattling around in his chest like first-date jitters, and he fumbles in his coat pockets for a cigarette. He tries not to foster too many distinctive habits these days — books are his one vice and the only thing he can afford to be precious about. Right now he’s smoking Memphis cigarettes, and the pack comes back crumpled, empty.

Joubert offers him a French cigarette from a silver case, and Joe accepts. In another life, with those manners, he’d be an old-world gentleman and not a hired gun. Joubert’s eyes are on his hands as he holds the match to light it; he is considering.

“So you’ve found me out. Come to dinner with me. I insist.”

“Why the hell would I do that?”

“I didn’t come all this way for business. I’ve been following you out of curiosity. You’ve been highly entertaining.”

Where else is there to go?

*

They take up a small table at the far end of the room, in the corner — warm and airless, but with no surprises, no chance of unseen assailants creeping up from behind. In imperfect German, Joe orders a wine he’s only ever read about. Joubert seems touched by this, and for a moment he thinks he’s made some tactical blunder.

But it isn’t about the supper, though it’s the first real meal Joe’s had for a long while, and he’s the only one in here wearing blue jeans to dinner. They talk about books until they’re talking about books no longer.

“You’re a man in high demand back home. A young man at the American embassy told me he knew the New York Times informant personally, but he must have been mistaken.”

“Were you there to kill him?”

Joubert shrugs. He’s discarded his jacket; beneath he wears a black sweater so dark it seems to absorb all light. His hair must have been blond once, but it’s faded now to the color of pale ash — even in his prime, he must have been a memorable-looking man. He’s certainly memorable now.

“Does it matter? Tell me where you’re headed.”

“Berlin.” Joe doesn’t bother to lie. The New York Times informant is going to Berlin.

“You’re a man without a country. East or west – a person might get nervous, seeing you there.”

“That was the plan, anyway.”

“You don’t sound like a man who’d be happy to defect. It’s harder than you’d think. A man has to have friends.”

“It’s not like that. I’m meeting somebody there.”

It’d be easier to defect, but what does he know? He knows all kinds of things, but sometimes he still hears Kathy’s voice in his head — look at you, mister secret agent. He’s good at figuring things out, good at finding details, good at finding patterns. That doesn’t make him an asset — in this war that isn’t a war, this peace that isn’t peace. It’s easy to imagine Joubert in that kind of setting, moving through the old world like a knife. Not Joe.

His body is inclined toward him with perfect attentiveness. Anyone walking past would think they were only a couple of old friends, business partners, except for Joubert’s eyes. Joubert holds his gaze.

“I believe you wanted me to find you, Condor.”

This man is more honest than the rest of them and isn’t that sad — a paid assassin, a hitman for money. In books, they’re never half so polite as this. In books, the killers always have some obscure flaw that betrays them for what they are – signature flourishes that mark every kill, esoteric perversions that motivate their life of crime. Joe wants to find out just what this man’s perversion is. Call him curious.

“I just wanted something to happen,” Joe says. “Something to liven things up.”

“You could always take up my line of work. You’d do well. There’s no shortage of opportunities for a sensible person.”

“You think I like living like this? Running from place to place?”

“You seem to be amusing yourself. It’s easier than you might think, Condor. I think if you wanted to you could be very cruel.”

“Call me Joe.”

“All right, Joe. I was glad to see you in Milan. I hoped I’d see you again.”

Under the table, Joubert unfolds his long legs. Joe feels a rising prickle of something he can’t name.

Joe pushes his glass aside. “And now you’ve seen me. Who are you after now?”

“That’s my business.”

Joe Turner is tired — tired of running. He can see it in his own face, when he’s peering in every mirror to catch sight of who’s behind him — he has stress lines in his forehead, shadows under his eyes. The walls in here are all mirrors, the flatware all polished to a mirror shine.

“You didn’t bring me here just to offer me a job, did you?” Joe asks.

“On the contrary, I brought you here to proposition you.”

Joubert’s long-fingered hand is resting on the tabletop beside his own, unflinching. There’s some charm in the thought of somebody who understands it all — someone from the right side of the business. He may be a killer, but he’s honest — he let him go back at Atwood’s place, turned him loose when it could have been easier and more expedient to finish him off. That’s the smallest act of charity anyone’s ever received but it exists between them stretched like a steel wire.

Joe reaches out to knock the ash from his cigarette. He can’t say he’s not considering it.

“If I sleep with you, will you quit buying up all my first editions?”

Joubert smiles.

*

There’s no one there in the street outside, nothing but an expanse of stone and concrete. In the alley Joe presses him to the wall in a kiss — he’s never felt like an especially small man before, but he makes Joubert stoop for him. He is keenly aware of the flush line where their bodies meet, of the pressure of another human body, of the soft rise and fall of Joubert’s breathing.

The thrill of proximity is sparking deep in the pit of him at the meeting of their mouths and the tangible heat of another body. Joubert’s hand draws down the nape of his neck and it makes Joe shiver, open his mouth a little wider.

He must be cracking up.

When they break apart, still face to face at the closest range, Joubert has fixed him with those impossibly blue eyes.

“I could teach you how to kill a man and not feel a thing. You don’t have to do it for a living, of course.”

“I’d make a pretty bad soldier of fortune.”

“You think the Company can’t reach you here?” Joubert’s eyes crease, like this amuses him.

Up close Joubert’s clothes smell like leather and carnation, rosewood and cedar. Joe’s mouth is burning, and he doesn’t know what to do with his hands.

“It’ll be a pain in the ass to try, anyway. I want to give them a run for their money.

“Any other organization would be lucky to have you.”

Joe shakes his head. “Now take me to bed. I need somebody who understands this stuff.”

*

He hasn’t slept in days, not for more than an hour or two at a time. When he falls asleep in Joubert’s bed he is curled in the pocket of warmth his body has left behind. The ache in his body lulls him deeper into the dark and he lets himself surrender all his customary vigilance. He is not alone.

When he wakes up Joubert is in the hotel bathroom; the sound of running water greets him, and the clean white light through the open door. Joe rolls over and fumbles for his glasses.

He’s left him something on the nightstand, like a call girl. A fresh pack of cigarettes and another book: Raymond Chandler’s The Lady In The Lake. Good old Philip Marlowe. The paper dust jacket is splitting at the corners, and the pages are yellowed by decades of cigarette smoke — Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1943. Joe rubs a thumb along the staggered row of pages. Probably a first edition, by the sight of it. He could almost smile.