Belasco’s Rare Books & Antiquities

626 Pirates Alley, in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Every building here has three stories. Wrought iron balconies overhung with Spanish moss. The city is built below sea level, so basements flood.

First floor - a normal bookshop. Overstuffed armchairs in the corners. A gilt-edged mirror in the corner so you can watch yourself read. A stuffed owl on a dead branch keeping an eye on you from the counter, which is staffed about half the time.

On this level the humidity gets into the books. Teetering piles everywhere. Crinkled yellow pages the colour of old teeth. A few minor treasures from upstairs, occasionally rotated out. Pinned butterflies in glass cases. Jarred snakes in formaldehyde. African masks. Colonial maps of the river, and grid plans of the town.

Second-hand books - detective stories, paperback romances and copies of Weird Tales. The Three Musketeers and Huckleberry Finn. Jack London is a favourite, often borrowed and returned. Every Zane Grey book as they come out. Everything on this list.

The local bohemians love to drop in. William Faulkner lives just down the road. You can get back issues of the Double Dealer literary journal, featuring Djuna Barnes and Hart Crane. Some days you will find Belasco absorbed in conversation, sipping absinthe, with half a dozen cartoonists and poets.

Other days, when the moon is full, he blanks anyone who says a word to him. Pretends to be deaf.

A tall, hollow-cheeked man with silvery hair. You can’t place his accent. Rarely leaves the shop, except to smoke one of his awful-smelling black cigarettes. If asked he claims they’re the only thing keeping him alive.

Narrow staircase to a locked brick-coloured door. The second floor is off limits to anyone except the discerning customer. You have to make an appointment. Belasco will take you up himself, unless he decides he doesn’t like you. Which can happen for no reason at all.

This is where he keeps the good stuff. Authentic Renaissance witchcraft manuals. Two framed pages said to be from the Mantua Codex. Hard-to-find first editions, old newspapers and letters from historical personages - Jefferson Davis, Mark Twain.

Roman statues. Ships in bottles. Leather-bound expedition journals. Cast-iron unicorns overgrown with moss. The logbook from the HMS Erebus and a pot-bellied clay figurine from Jaina Island, carrying a Mayan drinking gourd. Pierre de Charlevoix’s History of Paraguay.

Rope from a lynching in Piscataway, Maryland. Moche ceramics of skeleton families sodomising each other. Authentic Dodge City saloon piano. Arapaho ghost shirt with a bullet wedged between the fibres. Ebenezer Baldwin’s An Appendix Stating The Heavy Grievances. Pocket watch said to belong to John Brown.

Wampum belts. Pamphlets from the Boxer Rebellion. Strange inscribed golden plate found in Jackson County, Missouri, by detectives working for Brigham Young. Boar tusk amulet taken by a soldier from the hanged corpse of Macario Sakay. Two sketches by Audobon of a spurious Kentucky quetzal and the hopefully imaginary “lawyer fish”.

The more you look, the more you find. It’s cooler up here. The windows are kept shut.

Belasco deals to private customers. You don’t know their names. Sometimes they arrive in the dead of night, with veiled faces. Or send wan grey-faced lawyers round to haggle on their behalf. You see brown paper packages stamped with addresses in London, in Calcutta, in unrecognisable glyphs.

He can sell anything he gets his hands on.

He needs agents of his own. To go out and find stuff. Bring it back to him.

That’s you.

Hang out at Belasco’s.

He gets strange phone calls sometimes. People call him up whenever they get something odd on their hands, something they don’t know what to do with. He sends his investigators round.

You’re treasure hunters, not private detectives, but the skills overlap. You won’t get caught up to tackle a messy divorce case but somebody might bring you in to figure out if their apartment has a ghost.

Word gets around. People know Belasco’s. It’s a bit of a New Orleans institution. Though not the kind that gets brought up in polite company. Nobody wants to admit there’s a need for it.

Belasco lives on the third floor. It’s kept quite cold up there. He will never let you see it. People joke about him sleeping in a coffin and he smiles but doesn’t say no.

The Half Moon Cafe around the corner does chicory coffee, red beans on rice and excellent beignets. Big Marie, who runs it, knows Belasco - he keeps trying to buy her yellow-headed parrot, Gaston, who can swear in seven languages and is working on the eighth. Do not get powdered sugar on the books.

Very few people know about Belasco’s silent partner.

Jean de Marne. Heavyset. Tall and wide. Owns stakes in a dozen businesses - race tracks, oil wells and grocery stores. Works through white proxies so people don’t know he’s involved. Father was a sharecropper in the Delta, grandfather a slave.

De Marne has bet the demon Asmodeus his soul, against immense magical power, that he can become a millionaire in seven years. When he made the bet he was living in a shotgun shack in Algiers, south of the river, with nothing but a rusty tool box and a few scrawny chickens to his name. Now he’s getting close.

Asmodeus is getting nervous. Twice now de Marne has been attacked by shadow creatures, lurking round his townhouse in the Treme. A private secretary in his employ was found strangled to death in the bath by long spindly fingers, and one of his five daughters drove her car into a ravine.

De Marne intends to win. He’s going to live forever and make himself into a secret chief of the world.

He may need you to keep an eye on Hell though. Just from time to time. Hopefully it won’t come up.