The Book of Air and Shadows

had rather shocked himself by how brazenly he had manipulated her into opening the covers to yield this manuscript, and he consequently desired that the papers hold some historical or literary importance. It was with great impatience that he waited for the sheets to be dry enough to handle.
    In the meantime, the interleaving had to be changed on the hour. Rolly seemed content to let him do it unsupervised after she determined during the first few changes that he could manage it correctly. The main thing was to make sure not to rush the process by shoving in too many towels or interspersing the blotting medium between groups of fewer than ten leaves. If they did that, she’d explained, the book would swell out of shape and burst its bindings. Around six, Crosetti announced that he was hungry and learned that ramen noodles and take-out containers of varying ages constituted virtually all of her available foodstuffs. He could see why she went so often to lunch with Glaser. Crosetti ran out and braved the mean streets of Red Hook, returning with a couple of bottles of Mondavi red and a large pizza.
    “You bought wine,” she said when he came in and placed the bag on the table. “I never buy wine.”
    “But you drink it.”
    “Oh, yes. This is very nice of you. Thank you.” Again that little wolf’s smile; number two.
    Their employer made up the main subject of their table talk, as they otherwise had little in common. Crosetti’s interest in books as physical objects was as slender as hers in current films. Besides, he was curious about the old man, and Rolly was willing to supply information when pressed, the more so as the wine took effect. He liked watching her eat: she was ravenous, she ate as if the slices were about to be snatched away, she ate the crusts to the last crumb and licked her fingers while she spun out what she knew. The story was that Glaser had entered the trade from his life as a collector, a common progression. His family made its pile two generations ago in department stores, and he had been raised in the upper bourgeoisie of Manhattan. The Glasers had intellectual pretensions-opera boxes, concert tickets, European tours à la mode, and the rest of it; a large apartment near Central Park had held a substantial library. In the course of time the ancestral emporiums had been absorbed by larger firms, the money not well invested, the inheritance scattered thinly among a too-numerous family. By the late 1970s Sidney Glaser had converted his hobby into his livelihood.
    According to Rolly, he was not much of a businessman. Crosetti objected that the shop seemed to be a going concern, with many choice items.
    “That’s just the problem. He’s got no business buying stuff like that McKenney and Hall for a hundred and fifty thousand. That’s for Baumann or Sotheby’s and the other big boys, and Glaser’s not a big boy. He’s got the clothes and the air but not the resources. Or the eye. Someone on his level should be picking up thousand-dollar books for two hundred, not hundred-thousand-dollar books for eighty-nine five. And they’re going to raise the rent-it already takes nearly half the average monthly profit-I mean paper profit-I doubt he’s made a real profit in years. It’s an old story in the book business. A rich collector thinks, I buy lots of books, why shouldn’t I pay for my hobby out of the profits?”
    “Doesn’t it work?”
    “On occasion. But like I said, you have to know your level, and work up. You can’t expect to start selling at the level you operated on as a rich collector, unless you’re willing to pour your own money into the business. And then it’s not really a business, is it? It’s a
more
expensive hobby, with pretensions. Speaking of which, the little New York East Side antiquarian dealer with the paneled shop-it’s a complete anachronism. There’s no way he can pay that rent and compete with
both
the Internet mail-order dealers and the big-name houses. Glaser’s going down. That fire was the best thing that could’ve happened to him. He’ll diddle the insurance companies on a couple of dozen select items, declare total losses, and sell them as fair to good. It’ll give him some operating capital again, but it won’t last long…”
    “You think he started the fire?”
    “No, he’s a book man. He’d never knowingly destroy a book. He was practically crying-you saw it-over that Churchill. But since there
was
a fire, he’s not above taking as