Lethal Legacy

TWENTY

Talbot Hunt was seated at the head of the table, one leg crossed over the other and his hands touching at the fingertips. “For the moment, Detective, wouldn’t you say that I’m in the driver’s seat?”

Mike was pacing, his back to Hunt as he walked away from us. “Coop?”

“I’m not bargaining with possessions-no matter how valuable-in exchange for information connected to two murders, Mr. Hunt. Either you talk to us, or you tell it to the grand jury,” I said. “The decision about who owns these things will be made in a courtroom, not because you’re here to bully us. I assume the library can establish what belongs in this building and what doesn’t. Things that have been donated to the Hunt Collection-”

“And all those other things they are desperately hoping will be left to them,” he said, glaring at Jill Gibson. “Fortunately, while my father is still breathing, everyone here is likely to be on his best behavior. It takes so little time to change a codicil these days.”

“How did your grandfather get the map?” Mike asked. “And how come nobody knows he had it?”

“There are a few people aware of the fact-some more dangerous, more desperate to find it than others.”

“Your sister, Minerva? Is she one of them?”

“Did you ever see a pig looking for truffles, Detective? My sister would have her carefully sculpted snout deep in the dirt if it would help her find the rest of the panels.”

“Why would any of this cause someone to be desperate?” Mercer asked.

“Because the more time that passes before the pieces of the map are reunited, the greater the likelihood they will never be found,” Hunt said.

“And there’s much less value to the individual pieces than to the work as a whole,” Mike said. “But if your grandfather bought it intact, how did it get broken up?”

“Because Jasper Hunt Jr. was mad.”

“Your sister mentioned that.”

“First honest thing I’ve heard out of her mouth in ages,” Hunt said. “We hardly knew him-he died when we were very young-but the stories about him are legion. He was all about games and pranks and tricks, Mr. Chapman. The older he got, the more difficult. Like many rich men, he wanted to take it all with him. Very torn about whether he should create a legacy that would outlive him or go out like a pharaoh, with all his worldly goods surrounding him for the long ride.”

“How did he come to buy the map?” I asked.

“According to my father, Grandpapa was thirty years old when the discovery of this map was made by Josef Fischer. The news spread worldwide, of course, and even though Jasper’s interest was primarily in books, like most collectors he was fascinated with the idea that one could still uncover such treasures, untouched over time, in a personal library. And so he made a plan.”

“And what was that?” Mike asked.

“Jasper asked his curator to study the small royal families of Europe, like the Waldburgs of Wolfegg Castle, where the map was found. Kingdoms, principalities, and duchies that had libraries in 1507, when the great map was printed, and had perhaps managed to hang on to those residences throughout the four intervening centuries. It was well known that royals were among the first to buy these documents at the time they were printed.”

“Sounds reasonable,” Mercer said.

“By the time they finished a careful survey of European history three years later, Jasper was surprised to see how few of the existing properties had not been pillaged or changed hands numerous times. So he and his curator-and his personal banker-decided to embark on a grand tour of the continent.”

“Just to search for that map?” I asked.

“The ostensible purpose was that the great American book collector Jasper Hunt Jr. was making a pilgrimage to Europe ’s oldest royal libraries in order to add to his own. But Grandpapa was also counting on the fact that while many of these princes had retained their titles, they had lost most of their riches and their long-gone feudal lifestyles. Some of them might be ready to offer to sell him valuable works-maybe even the great world map.”

“But wouldn’t there already have been a feeding frenzy, after the announcement of the discovery of the one map?”

“Actually not, Mr. Wallace,” Hunt said. “You see, Prince Waldburg had no intention of selling his. The great excitement at the time was that it existed at all, and in such perfect condition. Cartographers everywhere wanted to see and study it, but the prince made it clear that there was never to be a price tag placed on the map, so it was never assigned a commercial value in the marketplace. A century later-just a few years ago-we all learned that the Library of Congress had made known its interest in acquiring the map.”

“So your grandfather never knew that it was worth millions of dollars?” I asked.

“Grandpapa had a great eye for the rare and beautiful, but not even he could have guessed the price this would have ultimately been worth. No one could have.”

“How did he find it?”

“In 1905, they were traveling through Belgium and the Netherlands, actually making some magnificent purchases of incunabula and very old illustrated manuscripts, when Jasper was summoned by Prince Albert of Monaco-Albert the First,” Hunt said. “The two had known each other for quite some time because Albert had married a rich American girl from New Orleans whose family was well acquainted with the Hunts. It seems that Albert got word of Jasper’s search, and from Jasper’s perspective, the Grimaldi family was high on his list of prospects. They had ruled Monaco since the thirteenth century, and being in such an important strategic position on the Mediterranean seaport, would likely have been interested in a map of the New World at the time it first appeared.”

“Yeah, but the Grimaldis had been chased out of town at least once,” Mike said. “They didn’t retain possession of their palace for that whole passage of time.”

Talbot Hunt’s furrowed brow suggested his puzzlement at Mike’s display of knowledge, which was doubtless some factoid of military history. “You’re right, Detective. That, too, was part of Prince Albert ’s story.

“Don’t forget that Monaco is built on top of a rock, Detective-literally, a fortress atop a great cliff above a strategic harbor, with ramparts constructed all around to reinforce it. Before the Grimaldis fled the palace during the French Revolution, they were able to stash many of their treasures-crown jewels, the art collection amassed by Prince Honoré, and a good portion of the royal library-inside a series of catacombs built into the rock in medieval times. Everything still high and dry when the next generation was restored to the palace thirty years later.”

“Why did Albert contact your grandfather?”

“Word had spread throughout these European principalities about the questions Jasper was asking during his travels. And Albert was an unusual prince for his time, far more interested in intellectual pursuits than most others. In fact, he is best remembered as an explorer-a very serious oceanographer-which explains his attachment to maps.”

“There’s a great oceanographic museum in Monaco, isn’t there?” I asked.

“Indeed. And it was founded by Albert-in 1906.”

“One year after your grandfather met with him.”

“And thanks to Grandpapa’s largesse,” Talbot Hunt said. “You see, Princess Alice-the rich American wife-left Albert a few years earlier, after he slapped her in the face during an evening at the opera, when he learned she was having an affair with a famous composer.”

“Like you say, Coop”-Mike pointed at me-“nothing new about domestic violence.”

“And when Alice walked out, she took her sizable dowry with her. By selling the 1507 world map to my grandfather, Prince Albert pocketed a small fortune for himself and was able to establish the oceanographic museum and library, which is still thriving today.”

“Nobody in the principality complained that he was deaccessioning such a rare document?”

“Ms. Cooper, I daresay not many people knew of its existence. My father claims that Albert told Grandpapa that the panels of the great map had been protected because they were inside a series of books-books that had intrigued Albert from the time he was a young child.”

“Do you know which books?” I asked.

“Certainly. Some time after the Grimaldis returned to power in 1814, the royal library acquired the entire collection of the Description de l’Égypte. All twenty-four volumes. Where the pieces of the map had been stored for safekeeping during the revolution, I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. But whoever found them thereafter decided that the double elephant folios of the Napoleonic expedition would be just the right size to protect the panels.”

“What are they?” Mike asked.

“The Description of Egypt was the largest publication in the world at that time-in its physical size, not in the number of copies-and a very prized possession, too,” Jill Gibson explained. “Napoleon led a failed invasion of Egypt in 1798.”

“I know that. The British defeated him in the Mediterranean and his troops were cut off from France,” Mike said. “He abandoned his army and went home.”

“But a horde of civilians accompanied the military, and stayed on in Egypt to create an exhaustive and meticulously drawn catalog of everything from the obelisks and large statues along the Nile, to the great tombs, to the flora and fauna,” Jill said.

“And the very last volume of the first edition of the Description of Egypt is an atlas-the book that captured the imagination of the young Prince Albert, and the one in which he found the even older map,” Talbot Hunt said. “The map he sold to Jasper.”

“Do you know where your grandfather kept his panels?”

“I wouldn’t be searching for them today if I knew where they were.” Hunt stood up and frowned at Mike.

“I mean, did he display them, or did he hide them inside other volumes?”

“He was a bookman, Mr. Chapman. Ten, twenty, thirty years after he bought the world map, there had never been another peep about the original one. Nothing about its existence or its value since the first news accounts of its discovery. My father told me that Grandpapa lost interest in it, just like everyone else.”

“So Jasper Hunt bought this map a hundred years ago,” Mike asked, “let me guess-for sport?”

“Why do very rich men collect rare objects, Mr. Chapman? Paintings, coins, motor yachts, Arabian stallions, Ming vases?”

“Got me on that one. I gave up on collecting when my mother threw out nine shoe boxes full of my baseball cards after I moved out of the house.”

“So other very rich men can’t claim the ultimate prize,” Hunt said. “If there were two of these maps in the world, and a reclusive prince owned one of them, then Jasper Hunt Jr. wanted the other. It sat in his library, in a specially made leather box, for thirty years after the idea of owning it had captured his fancy, and by then no one in the world seemed to give a damn about it. He was long onto other, more talked-about treasures. He didn’t live long enough to see the revived interest in his forgotten map.”

“Does anyone-perhaps your father-understand why the twelve panels of your grandfather’s map became separated?” I asked.

Talbot Hunt cleared his throat. “You can’t make sense of an eccentric. If my father knows why, he’s never told me.”

Either that was true or Hunt wasn’t letting go of any other family secrets in front of Bea Dutton and Jill Gibson.

“Did your grandfather own a first edition set of this Na poleonic expedition?”

“Yes, he did, Mr. Chapman,” Hunt said. “But my father gave that to the library-oh, I’d say twenty years ago or more. Our curator-and the accountants-will have a record of that gift.”

“Bea,” Mike said, standing up and rapping on the trestle table with his fisted hand. “So where’s the atlas? Let’s have a look.”

“We can locate it for you, certainly. And pull it,” Jill said. “Why do you ask?”

“That’s the volume in which Prince Albert found his copy of the map. Maybe Jasper was playing on that fact, if he was such a prankster. This panel we just found,” Mike said, sweeping his arm over the trestle table, “was nested inside the Audubon folio, which used to belong to Grandpa Hunt. Maybe the killer was looking for places the map might have been concealed by the old man as one of his tricks, in another one of his books. Was that his brand of eccentricity?”

Talbot Hunt nodded. “Grandpapa wanted to keep my father on a leash, never assuming he would inherit everything without working at it.”

“Wouldn’t an atlas be part of the collection in this very room?” Mike asked.

“You want to know how things disappear, Mr. Chapman?” Hunt said, almost bellowing. “Certainly there are maps and atlases in here. But there are more maps in the general stacks, and yet again others in the various rare-book rooms. We’ve got one collection in the building-the Spencer-that’s just about rare bindings. The curator there doesn’t give a damn if he’s got roadways or rodents between the covers-it’s all about the leather and decoration on the outside of the books. If there’s even a drawing of a tobacco leaf-say, in a depiction of the Virginia colony-in one of the cartouches, then that map might be housed in the Arents Collection. The maps are spread out everywhere throughout the library.”

“Why isn’t the Hunt Collection all in one room, like most of the others?” I asked.

“Because the library didn’t have enough space to maintain it that way by the time his gift was made,” Hunt went on. “The Audubons, for example, and the Egyptian expedition volumes-well, he agreed to the library’s plan to let them reside where its curators deemed they were most appropriate.”

“So where are these particular books?” Mike asked.

Jill Gibson spoke more calmly. “At the time of Napoleon’s travels, Egypt was considered part of the Orient. So they’re in our Orientalia section-Asian and Middle Eastern.”

“You see what I mean, Chapman? They run these great libraries like a shell game,” Hunt said, walking to the far side of the room. “I can’t tell you how many millions we’ve given to these people over the years. I’ve got every damn right to pull the plug and demand an accounting immediately.”

“Surely the card catalogs have-” I started to say.

“They tell us nothing, Ms. Cooper,” Hunt said. “Maps are rarely mentioned in library catalogs, and those within the atlases aren’t ever individually described. Take a razor to a page and it’s hard to prove what was ever there. They’re unmoored, maps. Unmoored and generally ignored. Not like books at all.”

Jill looked at her watch. “Perhaps some of the curators have arrived. I can call and have someone bring us the Egyptian atlas.”

“I don’t think you understand the plan,” Mike said. “There are cops at every door of this place by now. No one is touching any of these books unless we’re along for the ride. And no one’s entering the building until the crime scene detectives have been over every inch of this place.”

“That could take days. You can’t close the public library.”

“Faster than you can say Dewey decimal system, lady,” Mike said, tapping me on the shoulder. “Coop, call Battaglia. Tell him to get on the horn with the commissioner. The pair of them can shut this mother down in a minute.”

“I’ll wait in Jill’s office, then,” Talbot Hunt said.

“Mercer, why don’t you escort Mr. Hunt to the nearest exit?”

“These are my books, Chapman.”

“That’s not so,” Jill said. “You’ve got no personal claim to any of the things your grandfather gave to us.”

“Don’t embarrass yourself, Mr. Hunt,” Mike said, pointing at the neatly embroidered letters-TH-on Hunt’s shirt, just visible below the sleeve of his jacket. “I don’t have monogrammed handcuffs. You wouldn’t want to be photographed when I eject you wearing metal bracelets.”

“I’ll hold you personally responsible, Detective,” Hunt said, turning his back to us.

“For what?”

Hunt’s freshly polished loafers snapped like gunshots on the bare floor as he stomped toward the exit of the map room. He was furious, but couldn’t express a reason that made any sense. “For the loss of…of…of any valuable property that should have been rightfully restored to me.”

“Shoulda, woulda, coulda. You didn’t even know the frigging map existed for most of your life,” Mike said as Mercer followed after Hunt. “Tell me the real story about it, why don’t you? Or sue me. Maybe you actually need all the savings I got in my piggy bank.”

“Would you mind telling us where you spent the evening last night?” I asked as Hunt pulled open the door.

“I wasn’t in Bryant Park, Ms. Cooper. I’m not a baseball aficionado.”

“Strikes me as a much more sporting type, Blondie, doesn’t he?” Mike said, sneering at Hunt. “Cold-blooded and calculating. Fox hunting, deer shooting, and all those genteel upper-class pastimes where you kill things for the fun of it.”

“Tina Barr isn’t worth anything to me dead, Mr. Chapman,” Talbot Hunt said, glancing back over his shoulder. “You ought to talk to my sister, Minerva. There’s a girl who knows how to hold a grudge.”