The Changeling. Victor LaValle

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      “ESTATE SALE” sounds posh, but for Apollo it might mean traveling all the way to New Rochelle to inspect one garbage bag full of water-damaged books in the basement of some Victorian Colonial. Then again he might find four bookshelves of perfectly preserved first editions at a townhouse in Sugar Hill. The suspense, the surprise, mattered nearly as much as the profit.

      Apollo had found his calling early, but his first great find in the field—his Baudelaire moment—didn’t happen till he was thirty-four. He’d moved out of Lillian’s apartment at nineteen and found a studio in Jackson Heights, the place so crammed with books he hardly had room for a twin bed. He crossed the country on his book hunts. Occasionally he looked up from the frontispieces and margins to take in the sights, date a woman, but after a few good moments he always got back to work.

      The big day, though, was at an estate sale in the basement of a Bronx apartment building, forty-two containers of books—from sneaker boxes to an old orange milk crate scavenged from a supermarket. In them were some of the rarest books on magic and the occult that Apollo had ever seen. A loving couple, Mr. and Mrs. D’Agostino, died within months of each other and left behind a collection that creeped out their four children and eleven grandchildren. He found a snapshot of the old duo tucked in the pages of a grimoire. They looked like the old man and wife from that movie Up, but this version of Carl and Ellie Fredrickson had been stockpiling volumes of sorcery. The homely photo and the otherworldly collection were so incongruous, Apollo had to fight hard not to laugh in front of the family.

      He made a lowball offer right there, and because he’d been the first dealer willing to come out to the South Bronx, he got the sale. He rented a van that afternoon and took the stuff home. It took a week to catalog everything and upload the relevant info for the books. As he leafed through them, he found scribbled notes here and there in the margins, in two different kinds of handwriting.

      As he examined a third edition folio of a lighthearted little book called Witch Hunter Manual of the Blood Council, out slipped a postcard addressed to the D’Agostinos. The plain postcard hadn’t yellowed as much as he would’ve expected since the date stamped on it read 1945. The addresser’s name, his signature absolutely clear, was Aleister Crowley. A quick check online verified Crowley had been a famed occultist in the early 1900s, called “the wickedest man in history.” Accused of Satanism. A recreational drug user and sexual adventurer back when such a thing was scandalous rather than just a part of one’s online dating profile. Ozzy Osbourne wrote a song about the guy in 1981. And apparently Domenico and Eliana D’Agostino had received a postcard from him. Apollo read Aleister Crowley’s note to the couple.

      Some men are born sodomites, some achieve sodomy, and some have sodomy thrust upon them.

      Thinking of you both.

      Well, how did you like that? The D’Agostinos had been certified freaks!

      Even before the postcard this haul had been Apollo’s best. Now, if he could authenticate the card, this find could become legendary. Carlton Lake got Baudelaire’s corrected texts; Apollo Kagwa got a horny postcard from Aleister Crowley. He read the card again and laughed. He held it up to share the joke with someone else—but he sat alone in the living room. The find of his life, and no one there to share the news. Now he felt surprised, overcome, with a different emotion.

      Apollo Kagwa felt fucking lonely.

      He looked again at the books he’d bought from the family; he scanned the postcard. Mr. and Mrs. D’Agostino had been up to some wild stuff, it seemed, but the two of them had been on their occult adventure together. The handwriting in the margins, two different styles, suggested husband and wife both spent time studying these tomes, exchanging marginalia, an ongoing conversation that spanned decades. Apollo suddenly understood all these books as more than just an excellent payday. They were the evidence of two lives intertwined.

      At three in the morning, in his one-bedroom apartment, surrounded by a small library of occult texts, Apollo Kagwa, thirty-four years old, realized his biological clock had gone off.

      APOLLO HIT LIBRARY sales less regularly than estate sales, or used bookstores, but he’d been in Washington Heights anyway—for a fruitless estate sale—so he stopped at the Fort Washington branch of the NYPL.

      Library sales were usually a mix of old books the branch hoped to sell off rather than recycle and books that locals had donated. You weren’t going to find something like the D’Agostino haul at a library, but you could buy a book for fifty cents, then sell it for five dollars. Almost any small business succeeded or failed by such margins. It wasn’t romantic, but reality rarely is. Apollo tended to come to library sales for things like large print editions of crime novels, the kind of stuff he sold to retirees who’d found his website and wanted the stuff shipped. Selling those books reminded him of his first business model—People magazine to Mrs. Ortiz in apartment C23.

      The Fort Washington branch stood three stories tall, but the sale was being held in the basement, in a nook off the reading room. One of the librarians had to cover both the sale and her desk. Apollo reached the basement to find her helping a mother with two kids pick through shelves of well-worn picture books. The younger kid had taken on the vital task of pulling every third book to the floor. The mother didn’t seem to notice, or had decided not to notice, so the librarian now had a third job—cleanup crew. Then, from the reading room, a man’s voice called out loudly. Because the space had been so quiet, it sounded as if he was using a megaphone.

      “Hello! Hello! I am in distress!”

      The librarian shuttled from the book sale back into the reading room, where an enormous man stood at her desk. He wore a bulky old backpack and carried crammed shopping bags in each hand. A one-man pack mule.

      “This is dire!” he shouted. “I am in need of a toilet!”

      The librarian made her way around the man, and his bags, to the other side of her desk. She stood narrow at the shoulders, fuller at the hips. The man had a good two feet on her. From a distance you’d have thought you were watching an ogre and an elf square off.

      The other patrons, mostly elderly, looked up from their newspapers and magazines but seemed wary of doing more. Apollo moved closer, ten more steps, and he’d be there to help.

      “Listen to my voice,” the librarian said to the big man. “Can you hear me?” The librarian smiled when she said this, but her volume and her posture suggested something more commanding.

      “I got ears, don’t I?” He leaned forward, as if he was going to throw himself across СКАЧАТЬ