Lethal Legacy

THIRTEEN

“Did I startle you, Mr. Chapman?” Herrick asked. “I don’t want you putting me at the scene of the crime without getting to know me a little better.”

“You called me on that one, sir. I’m sorry if I was rude.”

“Just obvious, Detective. I was born without a hand-a defect the doctors assume was caused by the medication my mother was taking during pregnancy. I’m used to people’s stares and gasps. I’ve got a modern prosthesis I wear when I’m out, in case you’re wondering. But this is what I had when I was growing up, and it suits me fine. Now what were we discussing?”

“Mike and I are trying to get to know the world that Tina Barr moved in,” I said. “It’s hard to imagine that books and maps, and the quiet reading rooms of the public library, would expose her to danger, but the two attacks this week took place in her apartment. Perhaps you could tell us about some of the people she worked with. You, Mr. Herrick, tell us about yourself.”

Herrick crossed the center of the long room and seated himself at a desk near my chair. I wanted to understand Tina Barr, and if my appeal to his vanity guided me to learn about things in which she had immersed herself, it would be time well spent.

“I don’t like talking about myself, Ms. Cooper, but I can tell you all you want to know about these beautiful things,” he said, sweeping his good arm around in a circle.

“When did you start collecting?”

“My life has been a matter of great good luck, after a very bumpy start,” Herrick said. “I was deposited on the steps of an orphanage in Oxfordshire, or so I’m told, by a single mother-a teenager herself-who must have been overwhelmed at the prospect of taking care of a child as handicapped as she thought I would be. I don’t remember anything about that part of my life, so you needn’t imagine all sorts of stories about eating gruel and being forced to pick pockets as a child. Shortly before my fourth birthday, I was adopted by the Herricks, a local family who had lost their only son to polio about five years earlier.

“My adoptive father, Charles, was a wonderfully kind man, a barrister who made a respectable living. They gave me a loving home, and an introduction to material comforts.”

“I wouldn’t think many barristers could afford these digs,” Mike said.

“About the time I was a teenager, my father came into a large inheritance, Mr. Chapman. You know about primogeniture, of course. He was the third son of a third son and so on. But when his uncle died without any heirs-his uncle Algernon, in fact, for whom I was named when they adopted me-the old fellow left most of his estate, including his home and his library, to my father. Hence to me.”

“I like stories with happy endings.”

“So do I, Detective, so do I. And yes, I’ve tried to make a contribution of my own. If Jill hasn’t told you, I’ve been a member of the Council of the Stock Exchange. Investments and such. Very lucky indeed,” Herrick said. “Have either of you ever heard of Lord Wardington?”

“No, no, I haven’t,” I said.

“He was a mentor of my father’s, known to everyone as Bic. His family had built a spectacular library over several centuries, and he himself amassed the greatest collection of atlases in England. I used to spend hours at Wardington Manor as a child. I was painfully shy-because of this,” Herrick said, examining his hook as he spoke. “So I was more than happy to spend my time in the silence of the great reading room there.”

“That’s easy to understand.”

“Bic was incredibly generous to me. He saw that I loved old books-I loved smelling them and touching the rich Moroccan leather. There were early English Bibles and Shakespeare Folios, incredibly fine incunabula-”

“What’s that?” Mike asked.

“Books from the infancy of printing, Detective. From before 1500. The books were my friends-my only friends, in fact, for a long time-but it was maps that fascinated me the most. My father had a pair of globes. Not as fine as this one, but they were brightly colored and they towered above me, and I never tired of making them spin.

“And it was at Wardington Manor that I discovered atlases,” he went on. “Bic continued the tradition of acquiring books for the family library, but he became obsessed, much as I have, with maps.”

“Why is that?” I asked. “They’re quite beautiful, but what makes them so special to collectors?”

Herrick opened the oversize leather-bound book in front of him and turned to look at the pages he had selected. “Think of how the ancients must have imagined the world, Ms. Cooper, long before most of them were ever able to travel it, to take measure of it in their journeys. There have been maps as long as there have been walls or vellum on which to write and draw. Who was the first man to give us a mathematical picture of the universe? Do you know?”

Both Mike and I shook our heads.

“Ptolemy, of course, in his Cosmographia, which was based on voyages and itineraries of early travelers, and on their fantasies as well. About AD 150. His was the first account to locate places in terms of longitude and latitude. For hundreds of years afterward, monks and madmen all over Europe were able to draw maps of what they believed to be the world.”

“Where’s Mercer when we need him?” Mike said.

“Excuse me?”

“We’ve got a friend named Mercer Wallace whose father was a mechanic at LaGuardia Airport,” Mike said. “Has a thing for maps, too, only not rare ones. His dad used to hang all the airline routes on the walls in Mercer’s room when he was a kid, teaching him about faraway places. So he also grew up on maps. Bet he’d love to hear this.”

“Then you must bring him with you next time,” Herrick said, smoothing the page and running his forefinger over the outline of the northern coast of Africa. “Everything changed with the invention of the printing press, of course. Imagine the amazement of people seeing printed maps for the first time.”

Herrick prodded the book with his hook to swivel it around, allowing us to see the two-page illustration, colored in red and green inks, the seas a pale blue, with odd-looking creatures lurking on the corners.

“This is Ptolemy’s Atlas. The very first one ever printed, Ms. Cooper. Presented in Bologna in 1477.”

The images were breathtaking in their complexity and surprising in their accuracy depicting the landmasses bordering the Mediterranean.

“Twenty-six maps in the volume, done with double-page copperplate engravings, and then hand-colored. Taddeo Crivelli’s work-he was a genius. There are only thirty-one copies of this atlas in the world, and only two in private hands. Go ahead, touch it. I promise it won’t bite.”

Mike reached over me to feel the paper. He lifted the page and studied the image on the underside before sitting back.

“Did that say anything to you, Mr. Chapman?”

“Like what?”

“Like whether what I’m telling you is true? I’m teasing you, Detective, but Tina Barr is skilled enough to call my bluff on that. The real Bologna Ptolemy that I own is in England under lock and key. That one’s worth more than a million pounds. I bought it at Sotheby’s, when Lord Wardington sold most of his collection a few years ago. This is a much later edition-you’ll even find America in here-and it’s damaged by those small wormholes and some tears in its margin. Hasn’t nearly a fraction of the value of the Bologna printings. The green coloring has seeped through the paper, as sixteenth-century green often does.”

“I’ll give you a hundred bucks for it,” Mike said, smiling.

“I’m afraid you’d be fifty thousand pounds short.” Herrick smiled. “You must understand that with the Age of Discovery, Detective, came an explosion of new information. Sea monsters disappeared from the edges of the ocean and distant places began to take on more precise shapes. California is discovered, as you see in these subsequent volumes. For two hundred years-to the European mind-it was drawn as an island. Brilliant to watch the history of the world unfold through these documents. There was a military purpose to them, too.”

“That must have been critical,” Mike said.

“Usually a hanging offense for a merchant or soldier to share a country’s maps with a foreign power. That handsome example on the wall that you were admiring earlier,” Herrick said to me, “is the Neptune François, a collection of sea atlases commissioned by Louis XIV to give the French navy an important advantage over the British. Meticulous engravings they were-all about navigation-so soundings and rhumb lines and the markings for every little coastal port were of major importance.”

“Did it help the French in battle?”

“Well, it would have, Mr. Chapman, if the charts hadn’t been copied quite so quickly by the Dutch and distributed abroad. With the advent of printing, scholars of every nation were able to compare and revise, leading to a considerable advance in geographical knowledge.”

“Help me understand,” I asked. “What’s more valuable? The individual maps, like those hung on the walls here, or the bound atlases?”

“Ah, now you’ve hit on a point of contention. Scratch the surface of this and you’ll find real scoundrels, Ms. Cooper.”

I was looking for a stronger word to describe our perp, but I’d settle for some direction instead.

“Unlike rare books,” Herrick said, “maps were not greatly prized by collectors until thirty or forty years ago. Lord Wardington’s a perfect example. The family amassed books for generations, going back over four hundred years. He focused his attention on maps and created what was indisputably the world’s best private collection in the last four decades.”

“Why the disparity?”

Herrick pursed his lips and frowned. “Indvidual maps-the kind that sailors and traders and explorers used every day-were just utilitarian pieces of paper. Not many were considered works of art, with elaborate decorations and fine calligraphy-the kind that wind up bound in atlases. They were essentially untethered documents to be used in their own time-not carefully maintained, without any record of their provenance-just meant to get the traveler or the sailor from one place to another.

“The better maps wound up in books-printed, then hand-colored, and bound in all of the wonderful ways you see in collections. They were only sold separately when the books were damaged. You want to point a finger at the enemy?” he said, chuckling softly. “It’s the modern dealers.”

“Dealers?” I asked.

“They’re the atlas-breakers. They’re the ones who manipulate the market, trying to keep up with old-fashioned supply and demand.”

“What’s an atlas-breaker?”

“Remember I told you that this was a purely visual passion, not a scholarly one?” Herrick said. “The desirability of old maps-out of books and on the walls-was strictly a result of the fact that fashionable interior designers discovered how attractive they are, back in the 1970s and ’80s. English country style, if you will. The maps became more highly sought after than the books that held them, so dealers started hoarding the atlases and dismembering them. Taking the maps out and selling them separately was far more profitable than finding one buyer for the whole book.”

“Are there many of these dealers around New York?” Mike asked.

“You’re both too young to have known Book Row,” Herrick said. “ Fourth Avenue, between Union Square and Astor Place, was a bibliophile’s paradise for almost a hundred years. All that’s left of it these days is the Strand. So, in fact, there are only a handful of serious dealers at this point, working in the price range we’re talking about. I can tell you exactly who they are, if that’s what you need.”

“I think what we need is to figure out where Tina Barr fits in this picture,” I said. “What kind of person is she?”

“I can’t help you there. I only know her professionally. She’s incredibly well trained and has a great eye for detail. That’s one she finished for me just last week.”

I walked to the wall between two tall windows and studied the minuscule calligraphy on another exquisitely rendered old map.

“Saxton’s cartographic survey of England and Wales,” Herrick said, “commissioned by Elizabeth the First.”

“Is Tina capable of reproducing something as beautiful as this?”

“These days, Ms. Cooper, digital processing would make it possible for almost anyone to reproduce documents such as that one.”

“I mean, a copy good enough to fool-well, to fool a dealer or a collector.”

“Are you talking about a forgery? Heavens, no, Ms. Cooper. To begin with, one would have to have the proper vellum, which would be pretty difficult to come by these days. The best quality vellum was made from the skins of unborn animals. In England, you know, we still print our Acts of Parliament on it, but you’ll never find something that could be dated and matched to the original. On top of that, she’d have to be a first-rate artist, not just a meticulous restorer. Then I’d say we’d need to give her three or four years to work on it.”

“What is it that Tina did on the map you started her with?”

“Minor repairs, mostly. Decades ago, when maps were mounted for display-like this one was, in Hampton Court-they were first backed with muslin. The glue that held it in place was very destructive. So Tina removed the backing, cleaned up the tears and discoloration, and deacidified it.”

“Where did she do the work?”

“There’s a state-of-the-art facility in the public library-the Goldsmith Conservation Laboratory. She did it there.”

“Are you on the board of the library?” Mike asked.

“No, Mr. Chapman, but I make handsome contributions. You’ll find I’m quite welcome there.”

“You must have a system for doing background checks on your employees,” I said. “I assume you don’t just meet a conservator and invite him in with free access to possessions as valuable as yours.”

Herrick stood up and leaned against the desk. “There’s a very serious vetting process, and Tina passed with flying colors. I never considered her a security risk.”

“There are people at the library who think she-”

“People at the library should take their heads out of their books and stop pointing fingers at the worker bees. Every time there’s been a major problem, it’s a trustee or a donor who was responsible.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“All the new money on the board-hedge fund managers and the like who think that if they splash enough cash around they can buy themselves some instant class-it’s created considerable tension at the library. There’s a man called Jonah Krauss waiting like a vulture for that last great dame to die-the one before Brooke Astor-so he can sell some of her collection.”

Mike was making notes of the names.

“And I can’t think why they’d go after Tina Barr when the real map thief was paroled just a few months ago.”

“The real map thief?” I asked.

“Eddy Forbes, Ms. Cooper. The chap Minerva Hunt was in bed with,” Herrick said. “I don’t mean that literally, but I don’t doubt for a minute that she subsidized his travels.”

“What travels?”

“Eddy Forbes flooded the market with stolen goods, Detective. Some of the finest maps the world has ever seen, stolen right from under the noses of all the brass at the public library, on Jill Gibson’s watch at the Beinecke, from the Boston Library, the British Reading Room, The Hague-shall I go on or do you get my point?”

“How did Forbes get access to all those collections?”

“He was a dealer, of course. A dealer, a scholar-so he liked to think-and a complete fraud. It’s always the inner circle, Ms. Cooper. That’s where you’ve got to look, not at the earnest young worker bees.”

“I don’t understand,” Mike said, reaching out to touch the four folio-size volumes stacked on Herrick’s desk. “How does the librarian, or the security guard, let you get out the door? You walk out of a library and nobody notices you’re carrying these great big books in their fancy leather jackets with shiny gold lettering? Maybe once you could fit one in a shopping bag, but most of these are even too large for that.”

Herrick opened the desk drawer again and removed a small object with his right hand. He rested it on the blotter and closed the finely tooled cover of his sixteenth-century copy of Cosmographia. Then he reached for an even larger black leather-bound book with gold lettering on its spine.

“No need to wince, Ms. Cooper,” Herrick said, holding up an X-Acto knife-a short, sharp blade mounted on a metal body the size of a pen. “I’m not going to cut anyone’s throat.”

With a single swipe, he ran the blade down the length of the page, separating it from the binding of the book. He rolled it up and slipped it through the cuff of his sweater.

“Don’t fret, either. This book was already disemboweled by one of the thieves before I bid on it. Here’s the rub, Detective. Steal a single page from a first folio of Shakespeare and you walk away with nothing of value. An interesting sheet of paper, perhaps, but of no value in the marketplace without the entire folio.”

Herrick held up his arms, as if in triumph for making the page disappear. “But slip just one sheet like this up your sleeve-a single map, say, from John Smith’s great atlas of Colonial America-and you walk out of the library with a ready-to-sell, largely untraceable treasure worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.”