"You didn't have to be a priest or monk."

"Exactly. And so the monks were jealous, but my concept of this as a boy was all wound up with Wynken, whom I knew to have been influenced by German mysticism and all those popular movements, Meister Eckehart, et cetera, though he worked in a scriptorium and still did old-fashioned parchment prayer books of devotion by hand.

Wynken's books were completely different from those of others. I thought if I could find all Wynken's books I'd have it made."

"Why Wynken, what made him different?"

"Let me tell it my way. See, this is how it happened, the boarding-house was shabby-elegant, you know the kind, my mother didn't get her own hands dirty, she had three maids and an old colored man who did everything; the old people, the boarders—they were on hefty private incomes, limousines garaged around the Garden District, three meals a day, red carpets. You know the house. Henry Howard designed it. Late Victorian. My mother had inherited it from her mother."

"I know it, I've seen it, I've seen you stop in front of it. Who owns it now?"

"I don't know. I let it slip away. I ruined so many things. But picture this: drowsy summer afternoon there, I'm fifteen and lonely, and Old Captain invites me in, and there on the table in the second parlour—he rents the two front parlours—he lives in a sort of wonderland of collectibles and brass and such—"

"I see it."

"—and there are these books on the table, medieval books! Tiny medieval prayer books. Of course, I know a prayer book when I see it; but a medieval codex, no; I was an altar boy when I was very little, went to Mass every day for years with my mother, knew liturgical Latin as was required. The point is, I recognize these books as devotional and rare, and something that Old Captain is inevitably going to sell.

" 'You can touch them, Roger, if you're careful,' he tells me. For two years, he had let me come and listen to his classical records, and we'd taken walks together. But I was just becoming sexually interesting to him, though I didn't know it, and it's got nothing to do with what I have to say until later on.

"He was on the phone talking to somebody about a ship in the harbour.

"Within a few minutes we were off to the ship. We used to go on these ships all the time. I never knew what we were doing. It had to be smuggling. All I remember is Old Captain sitting at a big round table with all the crew, they were Dutch, I think, and some nice officer with a heavy accent giving me a tour of the engine room, the map room, and the radio room. I never tired of it. I loved the ships. The New Orleans wharves were active then, full of rats and hemp."

"I know."