Booksellers and bookselling -- Fiction; Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.) -- Fiction; Mystery and detective stories
These references were written in black ink, in a small, neat hand.
Below them, in quite a different script and in pale violet ink, was
written
153 (3) 1, 2
"I suppose these are page numbers," Aubrey thought. "I think I'd
better have a look at that book."
He put the cover in his pocket and went out for a bite of supper.
"It's a puzzle with three sides to it," he thought, as he descended the
crepitant stairs, "The Bookshop, the Octagon, and Weintraub's; but that
book seems to be the clue to the whole business."
Chapter VIII
Aubrey Goes to the Movies, and Wishes he Knew More German
A few doors from the bookshop was a small lunchroom named after the
great city of Milwaukee, one of those pleasant refectories where the
diner buys his food at the counter and eats it sitting in a flat-armed
chair. Aubrey got a bowl of soup, a cup of coffee, beef stew, and bran
muffins, and took them to an empty seat by the window. He ate with one
eye on the street. From his place in the corner he could command the
strip of pavement in front of Mifflin's shop. Halfway through the stew
he saw Roger come out onto the pavement and begin to remove the books
from the boxes.
After finishing his supper he lit one of his "mild but they satisfy"
cigarettes and sat in the comfortable warmth of a near-by radiator. A
large black cat lay sprawled on the next chair. Up at the service
counter there was a pleasant clank of stout crockery as occasional
customers came in and ordered their victuals. Aubrey began to feel a
relaxation swim through his veins. Gissing Street was very bright and
orderly in its Saturday evening bustle. Certainly it was grotesque to
imagine melodrama hanging about a second-hand bookshop in Brooklyn.
The revolver felt absurdly lumpy and uncomfortable in his hip pocket.
What a different aspect a little hot supper gives to affairs! The most
resolute idealist or assassin had better write his poems or plan his
atrocities before the evening meal. After the narcosis of that repast
the spirit falls into a softer mood, eager only to be amused. Even
Milton would hardly have had the inhuman fortitude to sit down to the
manuscript of Paradise Lost right after supper. Aubrey began to wonder
if his unpleasant suspicions had not been overdrawn. He thought how
delightful it would be to stop in at the bookshop and ask Titania to go
to the movies with him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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