The Hemingway Thief by Shaun Harris Page A

set against Toulouse’s death ever since.
    â€œYou’re a murderer, Coop. I don’t know how else to characterize it,” Ox said. We had been referring to Toulouse’s impending doom with such casual hyperboles for a while now. I knew he only meant it as a joke, but in the light of the last two hours it wasn’t funny anymore. The phone became cold and clammy in my hand.
    â€œListen, Ox,” I said as calmly as I could. “Help me out with some research.”
    â€œYou think I have the time to do your research for you? You think I’ve got all day?” Ox said. He probably did have all day, and most of the next as well. His agency had three clients, and two of them hadn’t written anything in five years. While Ox was an unabashed bibliophile, he had zero feel and even less ambition for literary-agenting. It was more of a hobby than a profession for a man whose personal wealth rivaled that of small nations. The money had been passed down for so many generations that not an Oxblood alive could remember how it was made in the first place. The most popular rumor was that an ancient Oxblood had invested in the original East India Trading Company.
    Ordinarily I’m not the type to consort with a man so deeply embedded in the upper crust, but Ox had three things that appealed to me. The first is that he actually thought I was a decent writer. He liked my early work on its merits as much as my latest work for its profitability. The second was that he was also a Notre Dame alumnus, which always buys someone a place in my heart. The third reason was that the upper crust, what would otherwise be his birthright, had thoroughly rejected Ox from the time he was in diapers. They just didn’t like him. He had as much insight and understanding into the mercurial world known as Society as I had, and far less interest in it. For reasons unknown to either Ox or his parents, he simply did not get it. He moved through that world with all the grace of a mule in an evening dress. On the other hand, in a twist that would make O. Henry groan, his breeding, education, and money made it nearly impossible for him to relate to anyone who’s net worth was less than on par with Bill Gates.
    â€œDo you know anybody into rare books?” I said, pressing on.
    â€œMaybe,” he grumbled.
    â€œCan you ask around about a guy named N. Thandy? Rare book dealer, maybe out of Atlanta.”
    â€œI want the first draft of the new MacMerkin by the end of the month, and I want you to do that anthology I asked you about.”
    â€œThose are your terms?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œOh come on, Ox,” I said, aware of the whine in my voice. “An anthology of stories set around a celebrity reality-show contest? You really want me to do that?”
    â€œ Dancing with the Dead has a lot of great writers attached to it,” Oxblood said. “And they’re offering a lot of money to do it. But, if you think it’s beneath you, then maybe I don’t have the energy to poke around about this Thandy fellow.”
    â€œFine,” I said. “When did you suddenly learn how to negotiate?”
    â€œThat hurts, but I’ll let it go,” he said, almost giddy. “Why do you need to know about this guy?”
    â€œResearch,” I said. “For a new novel.”
    â€œUh-huh.”
    I said good-bye and hung up. The thing to do with Ox was to get off the phone as soon as you got what you wanted.

Chapter Seven
    We took the Hummer I’d been renting for the last four weeks. The road to Ensenada was a sidewinding, potholed business cut into the side of the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir. The edge of each precarious turn was decorated with prismatic flurries of flowers and wooden crosses, memorials for those who didn’t have the dexterity or the sobriety to safely complete it. Graveyards of Detroit’s finest scrap metal decorated the mountainside below. These harbingers