The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“Hmmm,” said Officer Lambiase. “You’re probably right at that. Going back to what we were talking about before. As a cop, my problem with the story is the timeline. Like, she puts the beef—”

“Lamb.”

“Lamb. So she kills the guy with the frozen lamb chop then she puts it in the oven to cook without even thawing it. I’m no Rachael Ray, but . . .”

Nic had begun to freeze by the time they had pulled her car out of the water, and in the morgue drawer her lips had been blue. The color had reminded A.J. of the black lipstick she’d worn to the book party she’d thrown for the latest vampire whatever. He hadn’t cared for the idea of silly teenage girls prancing about Island in prom dresses, but Nic, who had actually liked that damned vampire book and the woman who wrote it, insisted that a vampire prom was good for business and also fun. “You remember fun, right?”

“Dimly,” he had said. “Long ago, back before I was a bookseller, back when I had my weekends and my nights to myself, back when I read for pleasure, I recall that there was fun. So, dimly, dimly. Yes.”

“Let me refresh your memory. Fun is having a smart, pretty, easy wife with whom you get to spend every working day.”

He could still picture her in that ridiculous black satin dress, her right arm draped around the porch column and her comely stained lips in a line. “Tragically, my wife has been turned into a vampire.”

“You poor man.” She crossed the porch and kissed him, leaving a lipstick trace like a bruise. “Your only move is to become a vampire, too. Don’t try to fight it. That’s the absolute worst thing you could do. You gotta be cool, nerd. Invite me in.”

The Diamond as Big as the Ritz

1922 / F. Scott Fitzgerald

Technically, a novella. But then novella is something of a gray area. Still, if you find yourself among the kind of people who bother to make such distinctions—and I used to be that type of person—it is best that you know the difference. (If you end up going to an Ivy League college,* you are likely to run into such people. Arm yourself with knowledge against this bumptious lot. But I digress.) E. A. Poe defines a short story as readable in a single sitting. I imagine a “single sitting” was longer back in his day. But I digress again.

Gimmicky, oddball story of the challenges of owning a town made of diamonds and of the lengths the rich will go to protect their way of life. Fitzgerald is in fine form here. The Great Gatsby is unquestionably dazzling, but that novel occasionally seems overgroomed to me, like a garden topiary. The short-story format is a roomier, messier affair for him. “Diamond” breathes like an enchanted garden gnome.

Re: its inclusion. Shall I do the obvious thing and tell you that just before I met you I too lost something of great, if speculative, value?

—A.J.F.

*I have thoughts about this. Remember that a fine education can be found in places other than the usual.

Though he can’t remember how he got there or having taken off his clothes, A.J. wakes in bed wearing only his underwear. He remembers that Harvey Rhodes is dead; he remembers being an asshole to the comely Knightley Press rep; he remembers throwing the vindaloo across the room; he remembers the first glass of wine and the toast to Tamerlane. After that, oblivion. From his point of view, the evening had been a triumph.

His head is pounding. He walks out to the main room, expecting to find the vindaloo detritus. The floor and the walls are spotless. A.J. digs an aspirin out of the cabinet while silently congratulating himself for having had the foresight to clean up the vindaloo. He sits down at the dining-room table and notices that the wine bottle has also been thrown out. Odd for him to have been so fastidious but not unprecedented. He is nothing if not a neat drunk. He looks across the table to where he’d left Tamerlane. The book is gone. Maybe he only thought he’d taken it out of the case?

As he walks across the room, A.J.’s heart is pounding in competition with his head. Halfway to the bookcase, he can see that the combination-locked, climate-controlled glass coffin, which protects Tamerlane from the world, is wide open and empty.

He pulls on a bathrobe and throws on his running shoes, which haven’t gotten much mileage on them of late.

A.J. jogs down Captain Wiggins Street with his dingy plaid bathrobe flapping out behind him. He looks like a depressed, malnourished superhero. He turns onto Main and runs straight into the sleepy Alice Island Police Station. “I’ve been robbed!” A.J. announces. It was only a short run, but A.J. is breathing hard. “Please, someone help me!” He tries not to feel like an old lady with a stolen handbag.

Lambiase sets down his cup of coffee and takes in the distraught man in the bathrobe. He recognizes him as the owner of the bookstore and the man whose pretty young wife had driven into the lake a year and a half back. A.J. looks much older than the last time he’d seen him, though Lambiase supposes that is to be expected.

“All right, Mr. Fikry,” Lambiase says, “tell me what happened.”

“Someone stole Tamerlane,” A.J. says.

“What’s Tamerlane?”

“It’s a book. It’s a very valuable book.”

“To clarify. You mean someone shoplifted a book from the store.”

“No. It was my book from my personal collection. It is an extremely rare collection of poems by Edgar Allan Poe.”

“So, it’s, like, your favorite book?” Lambiase asks.

“No. I don’t even like it. It’s crap, it’s jejune crap. It’s . . .” A.J. is hyperventilating. “Fuck.”

“Calm down, Mr. Fikry. I’m trying to understand. You don’t like the book, but it has sentimental value?”

“No! Fuck sentimental value. It has great financial value. Tamerlane is like the Honus Wagner of rare books! You know what I’m saying?”

“Sure, my pops was a baseball card collector.” Lambiase nods. “That valuable?”

A.J. can’t get the words out fast enough. “It was the first thing Edgar Allan Poe ever wrote, back when he was eighteen. Copies are extremely rare because the print run was fifty copies, and it was published anonymously. Instead of ‘by Edgar Allan Poe,’ it says ‘by a Bostonian’ on the cover. Copies sell for upward of four hundred thousand dollars depending on condition and the mood of the rare books market. I was planning to auction it off in a couple of years when the economy had had a little time to improve. I was planning to close the shop and retire on the proceeds.”

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Lambiase says, “why would you keep something like that in your house and not in a bank vault?”

A.J. shakes his head. “I don’t know. I was stupid. I liked keeping it close by, I suppose. I liked being able to look at it and be reminded that I could quit anytime I wanted to. I kept it in a combination-locked glass case. I thought it was safe enough.” In his defense, there is very little theft in Alice Island except during tourist season. It is October.

“So, did someone break the case or did someone know the combination?” Lambiase asks.

“Neither. I wanted to get wasted last night. Fucking stupid, but I took out the book so I could look at it. A poor excuse for company, I know.”

“Mr. Fikry, was Tamerlane insured?”

A.J. puts his head in his hands. Lambiase takes that to mean that the book wasn’t. “I only found the book about a year ago, a couple of months after my wife died. I didn’t want to spend the extra money. I never got around to it. I don’t know. A million retrospectively idiotic reasons, the main one being that I am an idiot, Officer Lambiase.”

Lambiase doesn’t bother telling him that it is Chief Lambiase. “Here’s what I’m gonna do. First, you and me are gonna file a police report. Then, when my detective comes in—she’s only on half days during the off-season—I’m gonna send her down to your place to look for fingerprints and other evidence. Maybe something’ll come up. The other thing we can do is call the auction houses and other people who deal in these sorts of items. If it’s as rare a book as you say, people will notice if an unaccounted-for copy comes on the market. Don’t things like that need to have a record of who owned them, a whatchamacallit?”

“A provenance,” A.J. says.

“Yeah, exactly! My wife used to watch Antiques Roadshow. You ever seen that show?”

A.J. doesn’t reply.

“One last thing, I’m wondering who knew about the book?”

A.J. snorts. “Everyone. My wife’s sister, Ismay, teaches at the high school. She worries about me since Nic . . . She’s always bugging me to get out of the store, get off the island. About a year ago, she dragged me to this dreary estate sale in Milton. It was sitting in a box with about fifty other books, all worthless except Tamerlane. I paid five dollars. The people had no idea what they had. I felt kind of shitty about taking it, if you want to know the truth. Not that it matters now. Anyway, Ismay thought it would be good for business and educational or some crap if I put it on display in the store. So I kept the case in the shop all last summer. You never come to the store, I guess.”

Lambiase looks at his shoes, the familiar shame of a thousand high school English classes where he’d failed to do the minimum required reading rushing back to him. “Not much of a reader.”