In the night room Page 0,9
on,” Kohle said. “You must have some kind of problem with trust.”
“If I looked inside that bag, I bet I’d find a receipt with today’s date on it.”
Kohle glowered at him. “Let me ask you a question, Tim. Are you this pricky to all your fans?”
“No, I’m just interested in your explanation.”
“I wanted more.”
“More copies of the same book?”
“I have four at home. But since you’re here, I thought I should get three more, so I’d have three signed, plus four backup copies. One of ’em I’ve read, but that’s all, just one.” He nudged the books still closer to Tim. “Don’t inscribe the second two, just flat sign them and put down the date. On the title page, please.”
“You wanted seven copies of lost boy lost girl?”
Kohle showed his yellow teeth again. “If you want to know the truth, I’d like ten, but I’m not a fucking millionaire, am I?”
“Why would you want ten copies?”
“I collect books!”
“I guess you do,” Tim said. He picked up his pen, opened the topmost book to the title page, and thought for a second before writing:
To Jasper Kohle
a collector’s collector
All Best,
Tim Underhill
After adding the date beneath this inscription, he handed the book, still opened to the title page, to Kohle, who was waiting to receive it like a child, both hands out. Gimme gimme gimme. He yanked the book from Underhill’s hands, turned it around, and dipped his head toward the inscription. Odd, irregular white-gray streaks ran through the thick black pelt on the top of his head. When he snapped his head back up, his eyes held a dull, flat glare, and the skin at the corners of his mouth looked wrinkled and dark with grease.
“What happened to ‘I yam what I yam’?”
“I’m not doing so well this morning, but I don’t think I ever put that in a book,” Tim said.
“Oh yes, you did. That cop, Esterhaz, says it in The Divided Man. ‘I yam what I yam.’ Right at the beginning, when he’s hungover and getting out of bed. Just before he sees the dead people marching around.”
At his worst moments, Hal Esterhaz, an alcoholic homicide detective in Tim’s second novel, had seen an army of the dead trudging aimlessly through the streets. He had not once, however, quoted Popeye.
“I see you don’t believe me,” Kohle said. “No wonder, stupid me—you can’t, because you don’t know. Okay, go ahead, sign the other books, you probably got things you want to do.”
Tim removed the second book from the pile and opened it to the title page. He looked back at Jasper Dan Kohle and found that he could not resist. “I don’t know what, exactly?”
“Mr. Underhill,” Kohle said. “Tim. Let me say this, Tim. And I’m saying this although I know that you will have precisely no idea at all what I’m talking about, because that is guaranteed one hundred percent certain. So first let me ask you: do you have any idea at all why a guy like me would want to collect twenty copies of the same book? A hundred copies, if I had all the money in the world, a likely story, thank you very much?”
“As an investment?” Tim took his eyes off Kohle long enough to sign the second book and pick up the third.
Kohle went through a savage parody of yawning. “I don’t even live in this neighborhood. But I saw you doing your crossword puzzle, and I let my whaddayacallit, my joie de vivre, get the better of me, and the next thing I know, I’m spending a whole lot more money than I should on your new book. Which to tell you the truth is a little lightweight, not to mention kind of rushed at the end.”
“Glad you liked it,” Tim said.
“So why do I want fifteen, twenty copies of a book that isn’t really all that hot, if you don’t mind my saying so?”
“That was my question, yes.” Tim pushed the last two books across the table.
“Listen up now, here it comes.” He leaned over and cupped his mouth with his hands, as April had done. “One of them might be the real book.”
He pulled the three copies of Underhill’s novel into the circle of his arms. “What, you ask, is the real book? The one you were supposed to write, only you screwed it up. Authors think every copy of a book is the same, but they’re not. Every time a book goes through the presses, two, three, copies of the real