The Hemingway Thief by Shaun Harris Read Free Book Online

though most of this affection was born from pity. He had been an important man once. Someone the Caesars of the London underworld had come to for advice and succor. He had been a man of letters and science and, if his story was true, of women. Going from there to sometime nurse for drunks and drugged-up surfers was a long way to fall. And so I didn’t blame him for reveling in our attention; for taking a long drink from that fountain. Grady, on the other hand, did not suffer such things.
    â€œCome on Doc, for chrissakes,” he growled, “what makes you say that?”
    â€œWould you buy a car without checking to see if it ran?” Doc said with a light chuckle. He placed his spectacles back onto his bony nose. “You see the problem is there is no way of telling if the manuscript is real or not just by looking at it. At least not at first blush. I imagine the initials on the portfolio are for Harry Brague, the original editor who helped Hemingway’s last wife put the book together. If that’s the case, then I would love to know how it came to be in a random trunk at an auction, selling for twenty dollars.”
    â€œHow the hell should I know?” Milch said, and it came off more defensively than Doc’s statement had warranted. Doc gave a solemn nod.
    â€œYes, of course,” he said. “But you have to understand it would take a team of scholars from several disciplines to determine its authenticity. You’d need a literary scholar, at the very least. Preferably someone with a heavy background in Hemingway. There are chemical tests to determine the age of the paper. You could get access to Hemingway’s typewriters and compare the ink and typing structure to determine if the pages came from one of them. There are ways, gentlemen, indeed there are ways, to determine if this is truly the work of Ernest Hemingway; but I assure you, taking a look through a magnifying glass, even one with a little light on it, is not one of them.”
    â€œWell, someone thinks it’s real,” Milch spat. “I got a guy lined up in Ensenada to buy it.”
    â€œIs that N. Thandy from Atlanta?” I asked.
    Milch flinched again, this time almost imperceptibly. His visible eye narrowed, and he looked at me down along the line of his nose.
    â€œHow do you know that name?” he asked. I took the business card out of my pocket and tossed it at him like throwing a playing card into a hat. Milch looked at it for a moment, checking both sides.
    â€œIt was in the portfolio,” I said.
    â€œYeah, well, he was the first guy I brought the manuscript to,” Milch said, sticking the card in his shirt pocket.
    â€œAnd you went all the way to Atlanta to meet him?” I said with a raised eyebrow.
    â€œNo, smart guy. In California. I found him on the Internet and he was already in Cali on a thing. So I met him up in Modesto. That’s where he did his thing with the magnifying glass and the little light. Told me he thought it was real, offered the five grand, but, see, the guy I’m meeting up in Ensenada is named Norwood, Philip Norwood. Seventy grand he’s offering. That’s why I’m down here. I figured I could use the money to pay off my debt.”
    â€œBut Dell and Andy thought you were lamming it, right?” Grady said.
    â€œâ€˜Lamming it’?” Milch said. “Who are you? James Cagney? Yeah, they thought I’d rabbited, but I’d told them about the manuscript and how I was going to get the money to pay them. I owed them thirty grand. I guess they wanted the whole thing.”
    â€œSeventy thousand?” Grady said. He adjusted his weight on the orange crate with a series of clicks. “That sound right to you, Doc?”
    â€œWho knows,” Doc said, and pulled on the end of his nose as he thought about it. “Of course, I’d be suspicious of anybody offering money for it at this stage, especially that kind of