Lethal Legacy

EIGHTEEN

“Where are the books?” Mike asked. “I don’t see a frigging book in here.”

Mike, Mercer, and I were standing in the middle of Astor Hall, one of the most magnificent interior spaces in New York. Jill had gone off to find the chief security officer to ask him to guide us through the enormous building.

“It’s not a lending library, Mike. It’s a home for scholars to use, for research,” I said. “Books have to be accessed through a formal system. They’re not out on open shelves, and they never leave.”

“Unless they’re stolen. So where the hell are they?”

“Upstairs, in carefully maintained private collections,” I said. “And under your feet, in the stacks. You’ll see.”

Mercer was walking around the great vaulted space. “Looks like we’ve time-traveled back to inside a medieval castle.”

The great hall, dressed entirely in white marble, had a self-supporting vaulted ceiling that covered the space between the two broad staircases leading up to the second floor. Four giant torchères-also marble-stood sentry around the large, empty room.

“Did you see her hand shake?” I said, whispering so that my voice didn’t echo throughout the hall.

“Jill’s?” Mercer asked. “I missed that.”

“When Battaglia and I were talking to her yesterday and McKinney jumped in, he referred to Tina Barr as a thief and a forger.”

“And you said Jill didn’t seem to buy in to that.”

“Yes. But someone working in here must think so.”

“What’s your point?” Mike asked, standing under one of the arches across the room.

I walked toward him so that I didn’t have to shout. “How can Jill say for sure that the writing on the call slip wasn’t done by Tina?”

“You mean, if Tina was capable of forgery, maybe she intentionally wanted it to look like someone else wrote it out?”

“That’s possible. Once she turned in the original slip, it would become the permanent record that the library would have for the request. That’s who they’d look to if the book went missing.”

Mercer came up behind me. “It’s also possible Jill got the shakes ’cause she recognized the penmanship on the slip, Alex. Maybe it’s given her an idea about who wrote it but she chose not to tell you just yet.”

We heard her approach on the marble staircase and stopped talking.

“Why don’t you come this way?” Jill said, pausing halfway down.

We crossed the room, our footsteps echoing throughout the hall, and followed Jill as she turned and walked up to the second floor. At the top, a man about my height with a thick build was standing cross-armed, dressed in a drab green uniform.

“This is Yuri,” Jill said, introducing him to each of us. “None of the security supervisors is here yet. He’s one of our engineers, so just tell us what you’d like to see and we can get started.”

“Top to bottom,” Mike said. “Entrances, exits, any way in or out of this place.”

“Obviously,” Jill said, “we’ve just come in the front door.”

“Is that how the public enters?”

“Most of the time, Detective. There’s also a smaller entrance on the Forty-second Street side. Yuri,” she said, “why don’t we start upstairs and work our way down?”

“What’s your security like?”

“Since September 11 it’s been a lot tighter. Our doors open at ten most weekdays. Guards check bags on the way in and on the way out.”

“I saw two metal detectors at the door,” Mike said. “They good enough to catch a thief with a razor blade or knife coming through?”

“So you know how the bad guys used to cut out the desirable pages?” Jill was a few steps ahead of us, with Yuri. “A thing of the past, Mike. Between metal detectors and the arrest of a few major map thieves, those particular tools have become obsolete.”

Yuri was leading us up another flight of stairs.

“You mean people don’t steal old prints or maps out of books anymore?”

“Sadly, the thefts go on. It’s just that the methods change. The bad guys have moved on to dental floss.”

“Floss?”

“Try it, Detective. Wet some floss. Soak it for a while to stiffen it up. Keep it moist by balling it up inside your cheek when you get to the library. The thieves have found it just as effective for ripping out pages with exactly the same result. Takes about ten minutes to soften up the old paper by applying the floss to it, so it’s a bit more nerve-racking than the old-fashioned technique. But it works just fine.”

“Not even against the penal law. Armed with a dangerous instrument-wet dental floss,” Mike said, trying to catch up with Jill. “You sure got a lot of steps.”

“All part of the master plan. The first floor has that grand open space, and a periodical room that the public was allowed to use from our earliest days. Then up to the second floor-you’ll see our offices later-where the private collections are housed, and then up to the third level, to the great reading room. The nineteenth-century design idea was to lift the scholars away from the noise and pollution of the street so they could get their work done in the lightest, airiest part of the library. Still a good idea. Is this where you did your college research, Alex?”

“The reading room? Yes, it is.”

“It’s been completely restored to its original condition. You’ll hardly recognize it,” Jill said, pausing at the top of the steps.

Yuri took a key from among the many on the ring that dangled from his belt. While he unlocked the massive wooden doors, I looked up to the barrel vault on the ceiling, at the brilliant painting of Prometheus bringing the gift of fire to man, which soared in the rotunda overhead.

He stood back to let us into the room. Mike and Mercer entered before me, and both seemed stunned by the beauty-and size-of the Rose Reading Room.

“Go ahead,” Jill said. “There’s a quarter of an acre of space in here, meant to accommodate seven hundred scholars. It’s one of the largest uninterrupted rooms in the city-almost the full length of two blocks. For me, it’s the heart of the place.”

Library table after library table with aisles on either side lined up in rows from end to end. Atop each were lamps and ports to service laptops at each station.

“It practically glows in here now,” I said.

The large multipaned windows that flanked the room flooded it with morning light. “Can you imagine?” Jill asked. “That glass was all painted black during World War Two, and stayed dark until only a few years ago, with this recent renovation.”

I walked along the parquet floors in search of the table at which I’d situated myself day after day to work on my senior thesis more than fifteen years ago. I looked up at the ceiling-perhaps the most beautiful in the city-for a marker among the hanging chandeliers, a gilded cherub whose once-tarnished wings now gleamed again. She was still surrounded, as I remembered her, by coffers ornamented with angels and satyrs, and luminous paintings of blue skies and puffy white clouds in the style of the old masters.

I sat in one of the chairs and leaned back to take in the murals and all the detail that seemed to have been refurbished to its original brilliance.

“Don’t get too comfortable, Coop,” Mike said. “What’s the process, Jill? Say Tina wanted to get this book, this particular edition of Alice in Wonderland. What would she have had to do?”

Jill walked to the center of the long room, which was divided by the catalog area.

“She would have come here, as she’d done many times before,” Jill said, placing her hand on the top of the counter. “Tina-or any researcher-hands in the call slip to the clerk and is given a delivery number. The clerk figures out where the book is, whether in a collection upstairs or below us in the stacks, and sends for it using a pneumatic tube system.”

“Pneumatic tubes?” Mike asked. “I thought they went out with covered wagons.”

“Old systems die hard in the library business. We’re trying to convert to something a little more current-electronic-but that will still take years to effect.”

“Did she need a letter of introduction?”

“Tina’s credentials are well established here, Detective. As newcomers, each of you would have to start out with references, but not someone with whom we’re familiar. The letters in support of her application would still be on file.”

“Makes an inside job even easier to pull off,” Mike said. “Your staff develops a comfort level with the researcher when they see her here regularly.”

“Quite true.”

Mike took the papers out of his pocket again and smoothed them on the countertop.

“So how does the clerk know which copy of Alice in Wonderland to fetch?”

Jill had her back against the wooden partition and was talking to all of us. “She would have asked Tina to specify that. They’d have looked in the card catalog to see where the different volumes are.”

“Let’s do that,” Mike said. “Where’s the catalog?”

“Not in little wooden boxes anymore, Detective, if that’s what you’re thinking. Those books against the wall-eight hundred of them-reproduce the original catalogs. Everything else is online now. It’s a program called CATNYP-Catalog of the New York Public Library. One can access it here, of course, but also from anywhere in the world.”

“So Tina, or anyone she was working with for that matter, might have looked for the existence of a book from a computer in her own apartment?”

“Quite easily.”

“Why don’t you show us how?” Mike said.

Jill didn’t seem eager to comply. She looked at her watch, but it was still too early to be expecting anyone on staff to appear.

“C’mon. I’d like to see the way it works.”

Jill walked behind the counter and logged on to one of the computers. We watched as she typed in the request. Mike stepped in to look over her shoulder.

“We’ve got several early copies in the Central Children’s Room, but that collection isn’t housed in this building anymore. Tina knew that, so she wouldn’t have been looking for any of those by putting a slip in here,” Jill said, moving her finger down the screen. “Okay, in the Special Collections section, we have one in Arents. An 1866 edition.”

“What’s Arents?”

“George Arents was an executive at P. Lorillard in the early part of the last century. You know, one of the big tobacco companies. He bequeathed us his library in 1944-it’s called the Tobacco Collection, because every book and artifact in it is related to that subject.”

“So why would Alice in Wonderland be shelved there?” Mike asked.

“The caterpillar with the hookah,” I said. “Smoking opium on his mushroom.”

“Exactly. Then I see another 1866 edition in the Berg Collection,” Jill said. “Quite the rare piece. Very valuable. It’s the author’s presentation copy to Alice Liddell, inscribed by Carroll to her. The first approved edition, bound in blue morocco. You can certainly have a look at that one.”

“Alice Liddell’s father was the dean of Christ Church in Oxford,” I explained to Mike and Mercer. “Charles Dodgson-he used the pen name Lewis Carroll-was a math tutor at the college, and friendly with the Liddells. He first told his stories of a girl’s adventures after falling in a rabbit hole to Alice, who was believed to be his inspiration for them, and later published the book.”

Jill Gibson was scanning the catalog. “That’s all I find for 1866.”

“How about in the Hunt Collection?” Mercer asked, leaning his elbows on the counter.

“Let me see,” she said, scrolling down to that field. “There’s an 1865 edition, but that one was never approved. The author and illustrator didn’t like the quality of the drawings. And there are letters of Carroll’s, some of his correspondence. There are also originals of some of the pictures he took of Alice. You may not know, but Carroll’s hobby was photography.”

“I’ve seen some of the images-ten-year-old Alice posed half naked,” I said. “Guess that’s what started the speculation that Lewis Carroll was a pedophile.”

“We’ll never know, will we?” Jill said.

“Coop would have gotten to the bottom of it. Load the old boy’s hookah with something to suppress the urge and pack him off to prison,” Mike said, pushing the copy of the call slip in front of the keyboard. “You know, Jill, I kind of got the feeling you’ve seen this handwriting before.”

She kept her eyes on the screen in front of her. “I never said that. Maybe I spoke too quickly. It’s quite possible Tina printed the words herself. I shouldn’t have jumped to another conclusion. Here’s the original of Lewis Carroll’s diary covering the period he wrote the book. That’s in the Hunt Collection.”

“Pat McKinney thinks Tina was a forger, Jill. Do you?”

“She was an artist, Detective. Very skilled at her work.”

“I’d like you to look at this slip of paper again, Jill. Why won’t you do that?”

She clasped her hands and rested them on the countertop, looking down at the copy.

“You were so emphatic a short time ago that the words on here weren’t written by Tina Barr. Isn’t that because you recognized the penmanship as someone else’s?” Mike asked. He was standing so close to her that he seemed to have her pinned in place, pressuring her to answer. “You shook like a leaf when I handed you this paper outside the library. Why, Jill?”

She pushed Mike’s arm away from her and turned to face him. “There are people in the library-employees as well as board members-who didn’t trust Tina. Alex knows that. Mr. McKinney was talking to many of them for his investigation, and all the while I’ve been defending the girl. Then you show me this,” Jill said, picking up the paper from the countertop. “I’d hoped never to see this writing in one of my libraries again.”

“Who do you think it is?”

“A man named Eddy Forbes. I don’t suppose you know about him.”

“A map thief,” Mike said. Alger Herrick had talked about Forbes yesterday. Herrick said he’d been released from jail and was involved in some kind of deal with Minerva Hunt.

“The most prolific map thief we’ve ever come up against. And a lot of what he stole was from the Beinecke Library in New Haven, during my tenure there,” Jill said, bowing her head.

“You were blamed for the lax security?” Mercer asked.

“By some. There were others who thought worse.”

“That you partnered with him on proceeds of what he stole from your library?”

“Yes, Alex. I fought that battle once and won. I was lucky I had friends among the trustees here who believed in me. They let me come back to work. That won’t be the case a second time, if it turns out Eddy Forbes had a plan to use Tina-and perhaps someone else on the inside.”

“I thought his specialty was maps,” I said. “That doesn’t seem at all connected to Alice and her adventures underground.”

“If Forbes is involved, count on the fact that there’s a map in the mix.”

“Was Tina capable of imitating someone’s signature?”

“Probably so. In this digital age, the ability to copy or even to forge has been made so much easier by all the technology available. Almost anyone could do it, let alone someone as artistically gifted as Tina.”

“Why did Pat McKinney tell me-tell the district attorney-that Tina Barr was a forger and a thief?” I asked.

“I haven’t known Minerva Hunt and her brother, Talbot, to be aligned on very many issues for as long as I’ve been around. But both of them have accused her, to the president, of stealing from the family collection in the past few months.” Jill Gibson started to lead us out of the catalog area, back to the hallway. “Quite frankly, until I looked at this call slip and made the link between Tina and Eddy Forbes, I didn’t believe it for a minute.”

Mercer was walking the length of the room, bending down to check beneath the desktops, examining the volumes along the wall.

Yuri followed behind him like a shorter, stubby shadow, protecting his turf.

At the far corner of the room there was a narrow opening.

“Where does that lead to?” Mercer asked.

“Goes nowhere. Is attic. Is only air handlers for the building,” Yuri said.

“Is there an exit up there?”

“Is nothing, I told you.”

Jill Gibson waved them off. “Nothing there. No one except engineering’s allowed in the attic. The public doesn’t have access.”

“But is there an exit from the library?” Mercer asked.

Yuri was beginning to stutter. He had a burly build, and he lurched forward, swinging his thick arms as he walked. “You-you want see? Is just roof.”

Mercer stepped aside as Yuri turned the corner, and the three of us followed. A small caged elevator was the only thing in the small dark space behind the reading room.

We all fit in it, tightly crunched together.

It was a quick ride-maybe fifteen seconds-up to the attic, literally, to the rafters below the library roof.

“Careful, miss,” Yuri said, pointing to the catwalk. “No slip.”

The space was remarkably clean and open, with giant metal pipes that circulated fresh air throughout the building.

I held on to the wooden railing as Yuri led us along the open walkway to a narrow ladder, and above it, a small hatch. Mercer climbed up behind him and stepped outside for a few seconds before rejoining us.

“Where does it go?” Mike asked.

“No egress to the street. Kind of a dead end,” Jill said. “It’s an interior courtyard, and it’s covered.”

“What if the guy was a jumper?”

“I’m afraid he’d go right through the glass roof directly below. You didn’t want to take my word for it, but that hatch is above the Bartos Forum. That’s the part of the library covered entirely in glass, to replicate the old Crystal Palace. Have you had enough, gentlemen?”

Jill seemed anxious to move us out of this space. She started along the catwalk, leading us back to the elevator.

“What are those things?” Mike asked, pointing at two huge cylindrical tanks.

I knew he was as surprised as I that the attic was so exposed, not likely to have been used to conceal a body.

“Water tanks, Mike. More than a century old. Cork-insulated barrels that sit right on top of the world’s largest plaster ceiling, with the library’s entire water supply running through them,” Jill said, pausing to look over at the giant casks. “Fire and water, Detective, are the two things a librarian has most to fear.”

Mike steadied himself on the beam and crouched down, looking under the barrels to make certain nothing was behind them.

“Hold on, folks,” he said, shimmying himself forward till his head and shoulders disappeared beneath one of the water tanks. “You more afraid of fire and water than dead bodies in your belfry?”

We all stopped in a line behind Jill Gibson. “What?” she asked in a shrill voice.

“You’re moving too fast for me, lady,” Mike said. “I just wanted to get your attention. There’s no body in here, but it looks like a nice pile of overdue library books. Might get yourself a healthy fine paid, if you come across the thief.”

Mike worked himself back out from underneath the tank, and Yuri scrambled to help him up on his feet.

“Ms. Gibson, I swear,” Yuri said. “Was here yesterday, eleven o’clock in the morning. Once every twenty-four hours, check under tank for leaks. No leaks. Was nothing there. Myself did it. Myself.”

“We’ll discuss that later, Yuri. Be still.” Jill wasn’t interested in his protestations. She stepped off the catwalk and I followed her over to where Mike had moved the small pile of books. “May I have them, please?”

“I think they’re ours for the time being,” Mike said, removing gloves from his pants pocket before he lifted the cover of the first slim volume. “Tamerlane, 1827. Edgar Allan Poe.”

“One of thirteen existing copies in the world, Detective. Fifty printed-his first published poem. A treasure, to say the least.”

“From…?”

“It was kept in a vault in the Berg Collection. That’s on the second floor, Mike. I’ll show you where.”

“Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, 1860,” Mike said. “You caught a break here. It’s only a third edition.”

“That particular copy has actually got greater value than the firsts,” Jill said, nervously poised over Mike’s shoulder. “It’s called the Blue Book. Whitman kept it at his desk while he worked as a clerk at the Department of the Interior, constantly making edits in it. The secretary found it and thought it so obscene that Whitman was fired on the spot.”

The four books beneath that were larger. Three were brilliantly colored illuminated manuscripts of Petrarch’s poems, Horace’s works, and Aesop’s fables, all with spectacular calligraphy done on ancient vellum. Mike read the titles aloud to us, including the fourth one, which was an archive of the paintings of Asher Durand.

Jill Gibson exhaled. “That will raise some board eyebrows.”

“Why’s that?” Mercer asked.

“Durand was a nineteenth-century artist,” she said. “His work helped define the Hudson River School. And it’s his great painting-Kindred Spirits-which was bequeathed to us and which we sold for a fortune in 2005.”

“Over the heated objection of many of your trustees,” I said.

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“Can you give us a breakdown later of who was for and against it?” Mercer said.

“Certainly.”

Mike lifted the oversize folio that had been at the bottom of the pile. “John James Audubon, Birds of America, volume one.”

“Heads will roll,” Jill said. “That’s from the Hunt Collection-one of its jewels-and worth a king’s ransom today. If Jasper gets word that we haven’t had the ability to protect the best things he’s given us, we stand to lose all the rest.”

Mike gently lifted the cover. “Talk about the emperor’s new clothes. These birds either flew the coop, Coop, or somebody beat us to them.”

He held the book up for us to see inside, and it was clear that pages had been sliced out of it. Only blank parchment was left between the ends of the fine leather bindings.

As Mike stood up with the heavy tome in his arms, he flipped through the few remaining sheets in it. He turned the last page, and a two-foot-long fragment of a larger antique map-not bound into the old book-slipped out and fluttered to the floor.

Jill reached down for it as Mike yelled out, “Don’t touch it.”

I kneeled beside her and looked at the detailed engraving: a piece of the Asian continent, and the figure of a man standing beside a map of the world. The cartouche over his head proclaimed him to be Amerigo Vespucci.

“What’s he got to do with birds?” Mike asked.

“Nothing at all,” Jill said, steadying herself with one hand on the floor, the other clasped to her chest. “What you may be looking at is a piece of the most valuable map ever made, in a little village in France, in 1507.”

“How valuable is it? Worth enough to kill for?” he said, trying to make out the detail in the woodcut engraving.

“If all twelve sections of this puzzle actually do exist, there’s only one other map like it in the world. The price tag on it would be close to twenty million dollars.”

“That’s a staggering number,” I said. “Maybe enough to turn Tina Barr into a thief.”

“I don’t know why she wouldn’t have been tempted by it,” Jill Gibson said. “Half the members of my board would sell their souls to own this map.”