The Book of Air and Shadows

2

On the evening of the little fire, the revelatory fire that changed his life, Albert Crosetti was working in the basement as usual, and so was the first one to detect it. He was there because Sidney Glaser Rare Books kept its computer in the basement. Mr. Glaser did not like the devices and resented that they were now essential to earning a living in the book trade. He preferred to proffer his treasures by hand, in a well-lit, paneled, carpeted room like the showroom in his shop. But some years ago, when in the market for a bookshop clerk, he had accepted the current reality and enquired of all candidates whether they knew enough about computers to set up and maintain a Web-based catalog, and he had hired the first nonsmoking person answering in the affirmative. This was Albert Crosetti, then age twenty-four. Crosetti came from Queens, and still lived there in a brick bungalow in Ozone Park, with his mother. She was a retired research librarian and widow, with whom he enjoyed a relationship minimally fraught with Freudian katzenjammer. Crosetti wished someday to make films and was saving up money to go to the famous film school at New York University. He was a graduate of Queens College and had started working for Glaser within a month of receiving his diploma. He liked his job; the hours were regular, the pay fair, and while Glaser could be something of a nut when it came to antique books, the old man knew he had a good thing in Crosetti and let him handle the mail-order business and its electronic impedimenta almost without supervision.

His workspace consisted of a tiny alcove whose walls were shelves and glass cabinets and crates, all packed with books. Here he updated the online catalog, working from lists drawn by Mr. Glaser’s fountain pen in the beautiful penmanship of bygone days. He also kept the inventory current and accessed the various systems whereby requests for items were transmitted from bibliophiles around the world, printing these off for the proprietor’s later attention. Beyond that, his duties included unpacking and shipping books and other factotum work associated with the trade. He rarely ventured upstairs to the showroom, where quiet, well-dressed people handled old volumes with the care and tenderness due newborn babes.

The only unpleasant aspect of this work was the smell, compounded of old books, mice, the poisons laid to keep these at bay, drains, heated paint, and beneath all-an olfactory bass note-the stink of frying grease. This last came from next door, an establishment called the Aegean, a joint typical of midtown New York, purveying danish pastries, toast, eggs, and weak coffee in the morning, and sandwiches, fried substances, and fizzy drinks for a couple of hours around noon. It was somewhat past that hour just now, on a fine July day, and Crosetti was wondering whether he should stop tweaking the Web site and take a lunch break or just phone and have the kid bring over a sandwich.

Or he could skip lunch. He often thought that he was probably taking in from the Aegean sufficient calories through his lungs, mainly fat. Crosetti was not an exerciser, and he enjoyed his mother’s cooking: a bit of a spare tire hung around his waist, a face more jowly than he liked stared back at him from the mirror when he shaved. He considered asking the upstairs clerk to join him, assuming that Carolyn Rolly lived upon substances grosser than air scented by old books. She occasionally ate with Glaser, he knew; they would close up the upstairs and go out, leaving Crosetti laboring below. He allowed this fantasy a brief bubble of life, then shrugged it away. Rolly was a book person, and he was, at bottom, not, even though he had learned a good deal about the book business (prices and conditions and so on) as part of his work with the computer. She was not a beauty by the prevailing standards of meat magazines or movies, being tall enough but somewhat more solidly built than was the current fashion. Crosetti had read somewhere about women who looked better out of clothes than in them, and he thought Rolly was one of these. Clothed, certainly, she was undistinguished: she wore black like everyone else.

But there was something about her that drew the eye. The shiny, smooth dark hair hung neck length, held away from her face with a silver clasp. The nose was sharp and seemed to have more than the usual number of component bones making odd little corrugations all over it. Her lips were unfashionably thin and pale, and when she spoke you could see that her teeth were odd too, the incisors especially long and dangerous looking. Her eyes were ridiculously blue, like (duh!) the sky in summer with, he thought, unnaturally tiny pupils. If not a book person, Crosetti was still a reader, his tastes in novels running largely to fantasy and science fiction, and sometimes he entertained the notion that Ms. Rolly was a vampire: it would explain the dark clothes, the physical presence, those teeth-although a vampire who came out in the day.

Perhaps he would invite her to lunch and ask her. It would be a conversation starter; he could not imagine what else they might have to talk about. She had been working for the shop when Crosetti started there, and over the course of several years they had yet to share more than a few formal sentences at a time. She came to work on a bicycle, which suggested that she lived more or less in the neighborhood. The neighborhood being Murray Hill, this meant she had money, because one could not afford to live locally on what Glaser paid. In Crosetti’s experience, young, attractive, and wealthy Manhattan women did not yearn for semihefty Italian guys who lived with their mothers in Queens. Rolly might be an exception, though; one never could tell…

Crosetti was working on a particularly tricky bit of hypertext markup language at the same time as he was thinking these amusing thoughts. He was thinking about Rolly’s eyes, the element of the electric in her glance that made him wish for more eye contact than he ordinarily got. His mind was so thoroughly occupied with those eyes and the computer work that it took a good while before he noticed that the frying smell had waxed unusually strong, was more than a mere odor, was actual smoke. He rose, coughing a little now, and made his way to the back of the basement so that he faced the party wall that divided the bookshop basement from that of the restaurant. The smoke was thicker here, he could actually see the sooty tendrils creeping from cracks in the old brick. And the wall was warm under his hand when he touched it.

Quickly he clattered up the wooden stairs to the shop proper-deserted, and the sign with its paper back-at clock hung in the door, for it was lunchtime, and Glaser had obviously taken his protégée for a bite. He went out to the street, where he discovered a small crowd milling around the entrance to the Aegean, from the door of which issued plumes of greasy gray smoke. Crosetti asked one of the crowd what was going on. Some kind of fire, the man said, in the kitchen. Now he heard sirens. A police car rolled up and the officers started to clear people away. Crosetti darted back into the shop and down the stairs again. The smoke had become dense, choking, bearing a nauseating tang of ancient grease. Crosetti pulled his backup CD from the computer and then ran upstairs, directly to the locked case where the most valuable items were kept. Glaser had the key, of course, and after a brief hesitation Crosetti kicked in the glass. The first thing he grabbed was the McKenney and Hall History of the Indian Tribes of North America, in three folio volumes, the prize of the establishment. Out of the case, onto a table. On top of that the three-volume Pride and Prejudice first edition, and then the Leaves of Grass, another prime first, giving him a short stack worth a quarter of a million retail. He picked these up, made for the door, halted, and uttered a despairing curse as he recalled that the new Churchill Voyages was still downstairs. He hung there in an agony of indecision-rescue these in hand or go down for the Voyages?

No, he had to go down again. He put the books back on the table, but as he reached the head of the basement stairs, a heavy hand grabbed the back of his jacket and demanded to know where the fuck he thought he was going. It was a big fireman in a smoke mask, who was apparently also not a book person, although he did let Crosetti come out with the three precious titles from the case. The young clerk was standing on the sidewalk outside the security line the cops had established, gasping, filthy, clutching these to his breast when Glaser and Rolly arrived. Glaser took in what his clerk was holding and asked, “What about the Dickens?”

He meant the 1902 edition with extra watercolor illustrations by Kyd and Green. Sixty volumes. Crosetti said he was sorry. Glaser tried to push past a pair of cops, who stopped him, grabbed him, yelled angry words, which Glaser returned.

Looking up at Crosetti, Rolly asked, “Did you manage to get the Churchill out of the basement?”

“No. I was going to, but they wouldn’t let me.” He explained about the big fireman.

She sniffed the air. “Everything in there is going to smell like bad french fries. But you saved the Indian Tribes at least.”

“And Jane and Walt.”

“Yes, them too. Sidney doesn’t think you know anything about books.”

“Just what they cost,” he said.

“Yes. Tell me, if that firefighter hadn’t shown up, would you have dashed into the flames to save the Voyages?”

“There weren’t any flames,” he said modestly, “or hardly any.” She gave him the first smile that ever she gave him, the toothed grin of a young wolf.

The next day they took stock and discovered that, aside from some smoke damage, and the smell, the showroom and its contents were unharmed. It turned out that in the kitchen of the restaurant next door was a hole in the floor, and into this hole over the years the cooks had poured odd lots of grease when the main grease barrel was full or when they were too pressed or lazy to carry the stuff to where it belonged. This had pooled down in the basement, between the walls, and somehow ignited. The firefighters had smashed through the party wall in their efforts to halt the burning, and as a result much of what had occupied the bookstore’s basement was wrecked by heat, collapsed brickwork, or water. The packing case containing the six volumes of Awnsham and John Churchill’s Collection of Voyages and Travels (1732 edition) had unfortunately taken the brunt of the wall’s collapse. These volumes now lay upon a worktable amid the ruins, around which table stood Mr. Glaser, Crosetti, and Rolly, like cops examining a murder victim, or rather the two young people were like cops-Mr. Glaser was like the victim’s mom. Tenderly he ran his fingers over the crushed, soaked, and blackened full-calf cover of volume one.

“I don’t know,” he said in a little creaky voice, “I don’t know if it’s even worth the effort. What a colossal loss!”

“Wasn’t it insured?” asked Crosetti. They both stared at him in distaste.

“Of course it was insured,” Glaser replied tartly. “That’s hardly the point. This is probably the finest set of the Churchill 1732 in the world. Or was. It was in the library of one of the minor Godolphins, probably untouched and unread from the time it was delivered until the library was broken up at the death of the last heir in 1965. Then it belonged to a Spanish industrialist for nearly forty years and then I purchased it at auction last month. It was perfect, not a trace of wear or foxing or…oh, well. Impossible to recover. They’ll have to be broken for the maps and illustrations.”

“Oh, no!” exclaimed Rolly. “Surely they can be restored.”

Glaser peered at her over his thick half-glasses. “No, it simply doesn’t make economic sense, when you calculate what restoration would cost and what we might realize from a rebound and doctored set.” He paused, cleared his throat: “No, we’ll have to break them, I’m afraid.” This in the tone of an oncologist saying “stage four melanoma.”

Glaser issued an immense sigh and waved his hands weakly, as if chasing gnats.

“Caro, I’ll leave it in your hands; do it quickly before the mold starts.” He shuffled away to his private office.

“He wants you to break the volumes?” Crosetti asked.

“It’s not a complex task. But we have to dry the set out,” she replied, a distracted look on her face. “Look, the fact is I’m going to need some help.” She seemed to notice him again, and an appealing expression came to her face, a look he rather liked. He mimed searching for someone behind him and said, “Oh, not me! Man, I failed finger painting. I never once colored completely inside the lines.”

“No, this involves handling paper towels. The drying operation has to go on all day and night, maybe for days.”

“What about our jobs?”

She gestured broadly to the environs. “This place’ll be closed for a month while they fix it up, and you can run the mail-order operation from any computer, can’t you?”

“I guess. Where are you going to work out of?”

“My place. I have a good deal of space. Let’s go.” She hoisted two of the folio volumes onto her hip.

“You mean now?”

“Of course. You heard what Glaser said: the faster we begin, the less damage from the damp. Get the rest of them. We’ll wrap them in paper for the trip.”

“Where do you live?” he asked, lifting the ruined volumes up against his chest.

“In Red Hook.” She was already at the shipping desk, stripping brown paper from a large roll.

“You come from Red Hook on a bicycle?” Crosetti had never been to Red Hook, a region on the southeastern coast of Brooklyn behind what used to be the Brooklyn docks. There are no subway stops in Red Hook, because until the shipping industry moved to New Jersey, everyone in the area worked longshore jobs and walked to work, nor was there any reason for outsiders to go there, unless they wanted their heads busted.

“No, of course not,” she replied as she wrapped volume six. “I bike over to the river and take the water taxi from the Thirty-fourth Street pier.”

“I thought that was real expensive.”

“It is, but my rent is cheap. You should put those in plastic.” Crosetti looked at the book he was holding. It had oozed a sooty liquor down the front of his tan trousers. For the first time he regretted not dressing entirely in black, like so many of his hipper peers; or like Carolyn. She excused herself and went upstairs, leaving him to wrap the rest of the volumes.

When this had been done, the two of them took off east, with their burden stuffed into the wire panniers of Rolly’s bike, a heavy, worn vehicle of the type favored by food delivery personnel or, some years ago, by the Vietcong. His few attempts to make conversation being greeted by short answers, he fell silent; we’re not on a date, bub, seemed to be the message. On the other hand, it was a fairly pleasant day, in the low eighties, the humidity somewhat less than tropical, and being paid to stroll across town with even a silent Carolyn Rolly beat the hell out of doing inventory in a grease-smelling basement. Crosetti looked hopefully ahead to what might occur in the woman’s apartment.

Crosetti had never been on a water taxi. He found traveling on one greatly superior to a subway journey. Rolly secured her bike to the rails at the front of the craft and stood by it, and he stood by her, with his hand on the same rail. The other people on the boat seemed to be tourists.

“Are you all right?” Rolly asked him as they bounced down the middle of the East River.

“Of course. I’m an old sailor. I spent half my life when I was a kid out on Sheepshead Bay fishing in crummy little rental boats. Would you like me to hold you out over the prow like Kate Winslet on the Titanic?”

She gave him one of her formal deadpan looks and turned forward again. Definitely not a date.

Carolyn Rolly lived on the second floor of a Civil War-era warehouse made of blackened brick, on the corner of Van Brunt and Coffey streets. Crosetti held the folios while she hauled her bicycle up the dark, splintery stairs. There was a heavy smell in the air he could not identify, sweetish and chemical at the same time. The door to her apartment was thick wood strapped with iron, painted battleship gray.

Inside was a loft, and not the kind millionaires move into in SoHo. It was a room around sixty by thirty feet in area, with dark-stained wood-planked floors, from which there rose at intervals cast iron columns reaching to the gray stamped-tin ceiling high above. The walls were red brick, edged roughly with crumbling, filthy mortar. The room was oriented east-west, and light flooded in from tall dirty windows on either end, some of whose panes had been replaced by squares of plywood or grayish, tattered plastic sheeting.

Rolly leaned her bike against a wall by the door, walked toward the window, and placed one of the folio packages on a long table. Crosetti followed, looking about curiously for some door or hallway that led to the living quarters. Rolly was already unwrapping a book. Coming closer, Crosetti observed that the table was handmade, its top composed of many short boards laminated edge-on and sanded to a satiny finish. The six stout legs were constructed of what looked like yellow fiberglass. He placed the rest of the books down on it. It felt as solid as a marble plinth and had the simple elegance of the sort of thing you saw in the design showrooms.

She unwrapped the folios and lined them up on the table. Even he could see that two of the volumes had sustained irreparable damage to their covers.

“Nice place,” Crosetti said, when it became clear that Rolly was not about to start a conversation, or offer tea or a beer. No response. Her head was bent down over the ravaged cover of volume one.

“What’s that smell?” he asked.

“Mainly malt. There was a brewery here for about a century and then they stored chemicals.”

“Mind if I look around?”

Rolly answered this with “There’s a big package of paper towels on those shelves on the south wall. Bring it over here.”

Crosetti took his time and made a slow circuit around the huge room. In one corner he found stacks of wooden pallets, dozens of them, and also stacks of boards resulting from their disassembly. The south wall was almost entirely occupied with shelving and cabinets constructed from this wood, sanded smooth, stained, and varnished. The shelving was packed with books, all hard-covered, most with dust jackets, some with plastic covers. He looked in vain for any personal items, framed photos, souvenirs.

The work surfaces in the kitchen (which consisted of a double hot plate, a tiny microwave oven, and a small, chipped porcelain sink) were made of the same edge-on, tightly laminated planking as the big worktable, but coated thickly with amber-colored resin. Along the east wall he found a pallet of pallets, with a futon neatly rolled up on it and a table made from a cable spool and two of the sort of chairs one finds on trash heaps, all competently restored and painted cream. A chair for her and one for a visitor? Spoke to a social life and he wondered who. In the southeast corner an enclosure had been built, also out of pallet wood, within which he assumed was her toilet. Against this leaned a large battered wardrobe, hidden from the rest of the room by a folding screen of laquered wood and decoupaged paper. Interesting: she lived alone but had rigged a privacy screen. Spoke to sexual activity.

He was about to take a peek behind this screen when Rolly called out testily. He found the six-pack of paper towels and rejoined her. Between every ten pages in the damp volumes a pair of paper towels had to be interleaved, and these towels had to be changed every hour. While they dried, the wet volumes were laid flat on the worktable and weighted down with cloth-covered steel plates to prevent swelling.

“What I don’t get,” said Crosetti when the books were all interleaved and weighted, “is why you’re drying the whole of the set if you’re just going to break them for the maps and illustrations. Why not just pull the good stuff and junk the rest?”

“Because it’s the right way to do it,” said Rolly after a brief hesitation. “The plates would curl if you pulled them wet.”

“I see,” he said, not seeing at all, seeing the young woman in an entirely new and not very attractive light. He sat on a stool and studied her profile. “So…this is kind of interesting,” he said. “Watching books dry. I don’t think I ever did it before. Maybe you could point out the highlights, so I don’t miss anything.”

He grinned at her and was rewarded with a tiny azure spark in her eyes, while her mouth assumed the set of one trying not to smile. “You’re welcome to read a book while you wait,” she said. “I have a good many of them.”

“Alternatively, we could converse. I could tell you all my hopes and dreams and you could tell me yours, and the hours would fly past, and we could get to know each other.”

“Go ahead,” she replied after a brief pause, uninvitingly.

“No, ladies first. You look like you’ve had a lot more interesting life than I have.”

A shocked expression appeared on her face. She gaped, then snorted, then blushed. “Sorry,” she said. “Oh, God! That is so opposite from the case. Why would you imagine that? That I have an interesting life?”

“Oh, this place, for one thing. You live in a warehouse in Red Hook…”

“It’s a loft. Thousands of people in the city live in lofts.”

“No, they live in apartments in loft buildings. And usually they have furniture they bought in stores, not made out of pallets. Are you even legal here?”

“The landlord doesn’t mind.”

“Assuming he knows. Also you’re a bookbinder. Unusual, wouldn’t you say? How did you get into it?”

“And how about your hopes and dreams?”

“And, see? You’re secretive too. There’s nothing more interesting than that. Okay. Here’s the whole deal. I’m twenty-eight and I live with my mom in Queens, Ozone Park. I’m saving money so I can go to film school, which at the rate I put it away will be a month after my fifty-second birthday. I should take out a loan, but I’m scared of getting into debt.”

“How much do you have saved?”

“About three and a half grand.”

“I have more than that.”

“I bet. Glaser probably pays you more than he pays me, you get commissions on sales, you live in Red Hook, and you own two outfits, what you’re wearing now and the one with the collar. What are you saving for?”

“I want to go to Gelsenkirchen in Germany and take an apprenticeship at the Buchbinderei Klein.” When he didn’t react, she added, “Obviously, you’ve never heard of it.”

“Of course I have. Buch-whatever Klein. It’s like the Harvard of the bookbinding world. But I thought you already knew all about it. You have all the gear…” He gestured to the racks of tools laid out on the worktable, the cutting press and plow, whetstones, knives, leather pillows, and paste pots. It all looked very eighteenth century; Crosetti imagined that the Churchill Voyages had been bound with tools quite like these.

“I barely know anything,” she protested.

“Really.”

“I mean compared with what you have to know to make a book from scratch. I can do repairs. It’s like…it’s like the difference between being able to repair a cracked Ming porcelain vase and making one out of clay and glazes.”

“Uh-huh. And while we’re sharing confidences like this, getting cozy and all, why don’t you tell me what you’re going to do with the Churchill when you’ve got it doctored?”

“What? I’m not doctoring them. I’m going to break them.”

Red splotches appeared on her cheeks and her eyes darted-picture: girl caught in lie.

“No,” he said confidently. “If you were going to break them you would have just airfreighted them to Andover and had them vacuum dried. No muss, no fuss. You get them back dry and clean and snip snip. You look surprised. I’m not what you’d call a book guy but I’m not stupid either. So what are you going to do with the doctored books?”

“Sell them,” she said, looking down at the sodden volumes.

“As doctored?”

“No. Everyone knows we own an extremely fine set. There are private clients who like discretion. They have funny money they want to stash in collectibles. Glaser does it all the time. Look, he’s going to declare these a total loss to the insurance company, and show them the invoices for the broken-out items. They’ll come to, I don’t know, not more than twenty-five hundred, and the insurance company will pay him the difference between that and what he paid for the set, figure around twenty thousand dollars.”

“Which is approximately the amount you’re planning to divert to your own pocket when you sell to your shady character. Isn’t there a word for that? Begins with an…?”

“It’s not…it’s nothing like stealing. He told me to break the books. As far as Glaser’s concerned, the set no longer exists. He’s made whole by the insurance company and I’m profiting from my own skill. It’s no different from making things out of pallets that’re being thrown away.”

“Um, no, actually it’s not the same thing at all, but that’s my Jesuit high school education talking. See, you are an interesting person. Devious is interesting. How are you going to produce the invoices for the illustrations, since you’re not really breaking the books?”

She shrugged. “Sidney never bothers with broken items. It depresses him. He calls it vulture food.”

“Not answering the question. But I figure you’re going to sell the set for twenty-two K, give Sidney a couple of grand, let him collect from the insurance, meanwhile phonying up the accounting system with fake invoices. You’re simultaneously screwing the insurance company, Glaser, your shady client, and the tax people. That’s quite a plan.”

“You’re going to rat me out!” Crosetti had heard of blazing eyes but had never actually seen any outside a movie screen until now. Little blue sparks were whizzing around in there.

“No,” he said, smiling. “That would be boring. So…how’re you going to fix the broken covers?”

He saw the relief on her face as she turned away from ethical issues to the moral neutrality of technique.

“Well, I think I can save the leather cover on volume one. The boards are cracked and the spine, but I can strip the leather off of it and replace the boards.”

With that she pulled a thin spatulate tool from a can and started to peel back the marbleized paper that held the leather cover to the boards. She worked carefully, and Crosetti was content to watch her small skillful hands at their task until the kitchen timer she had set previously rang out and he had to change the towels between the drying pages. When he had finished with this, he saw that she had the leather cover loose. Underneath it, between the leather and the cracked pasteboard were damp sheets of paper with closely set lines of handwriting on them. She put these aside and held the leather up to the light from the window, examining it closely.

“What’re these papers?” he asked, idly separating the damp sheets. They were covered with writing in rusty black ink on both sides.

“Just padding. They used wastepaper to plump out the covers, and protect the leather from internal abrasion from the boards.”

“What language is this in?”

“English probably. Just some old wastepaper they used.”

“It doesn’t look like English. I can read English-unless the guy had really terrible handwriting…”

She took the paper from him carefully and peered at it. “That’s funny. It looks like Jacobean secretary hand.”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean I’m not a paleographer, but that hand doesn’t look contemporary with the publication of this book. It looks a lot earlier than 1732. Funny.”

“What, someone hid an old manuscript in the binding?”

“No, of course not. Bookbinders used scrap paper to back boards, any kind of scrap, but you’d expect, oh, contemporary proofs or old handbills, not an antique manuscript.”

“Why would they have done that? I mean an old manuscript would’ve been valuable in its own right, no?”

“Not at all. No one gave a hoot about old paper until much later. Original manuscripts got recycled when they were set in type, pulped, or used to start fires or line baking pans. Only a handful of antiquaries had any idea that preserving artifacts from the past was important, and most people thought they were nut cases. That’s why practically the only handwriting that survives from the early modern period is in legal or financial records. Literary stuff had no value at all.”

“So it could be valuable now. This document.”

“I don’t know. It depends on what it is. And who wrote it, of course.” She held it up to the light. “Oh, I get it now. This sheet was printer’s copy. It’s got corrections on it in lead pencil. Interesting-so it became a book, probably printed by whoever did the Churchill books for John Walthoe.” She unweighted and opened the first volume and examined the imprint. “Peter Deane. We might as well change the blotters now.”

After this was done, Crosetti asked, “Aren’t you curious to know what book it was the manuscript for? What if the rest of the backing is from the same book? What if it’s someone famous, like, I don’t know, Donne or Milton or Defoe? A holographic manuscript from someone like that’d be worth a pile, no?”

“It’s probably the musings of an obscure clergyman. Commentaries on the Epistles.”

“But we don’t know that. Why don’t you open the other covers and see?”

“Because it’s more work. I’d have to make them right again. And I don’t have a lot of time.”

“We have time now,” he said, “watching the books dry. Come on, I’d consider it a favor. I’m doing you one.”

She gave him a flat blue stare, acknowledging the manipulation, he thought. “If it’ll make you happy,” she said and picked up her little spatula.

An hour later, Crosetti regarded with pleasure what looked like a line of washing hanging from strings he had rigged between the support columns that held up the roof of the loft. They were the damp folio pages that had served as backing in the six volumes, four sheets from each cover, forty-eight pages in all. For reasons that were not entirely clear to him, the discovery of manuscript pages that had not seen the light for over two and a half centuries made him less uneasy about what he knew in his heart was participation in an act of fraud. He had rather shocked himself by how brazenly he had manipulated her into opening the covers to yield this manuscript, and he consequently desired that the papers hold some historical or literary importance. It was with great impatience that he waited for the sheets to be dry enough to handle.

In the meantime, the interleaving had to be changed on the hour. Rolly seemed content to let him do it unsupervised after she determined during the first few changes that he could manage it correctly. The main thing was to make sure not to rush the process by shoving in too many towels or interspersing the blotting medium between groups of fewer than ten leaves. If they did that, she’d explained, the book would swell out of shape and burst its bindings. Around six, Crosetti announced that he was hungry and learned that ramen noodles and take-out containers of varying ages constituted virtually all of her available foodstuffs. He could see why she went so often to lunch with Glaser. Crosetti ran out and braved the mean streets of Red Hook, returning with a couple of bottles of Mondavi red and a large pizza.

“You bought wine,” she said when he came in and placed the bag on the table. “I never buy wine.”

“But you drink it.”

“Oh, yes. This is very nice of you. Thank you.” Again that little wolf’s smile; number two.

Their employer made up the main subject of their table talk, as they otherwise had little in common. Crosetti’s interest in books as physical objects was as slender as hers in current films. Besides, he was curious about the old man, and Rolly was willing to supply information when pressed, the more so as the wine took effect. He liked watching her eat: she was ravenous, she ate as if the slices were about to be snatched away, she ate the crusts to the last crumb and licked her fingers while she spun out what she knew. The story was that Glaser had entered the trade from his life as a collector, a common progression. His family made its pile two generations ago in department stores, and he had been raised in the upper bourgeoisie of Manhattan. The Glasers had intellectual pretensions-opera boxes, concert tickets, European tours à la mode, and the rest of it; a large apartment near Central Park had held a substantial library. In the course of time the ancestral emporiums had been absorbed by larger firms, the money not well invested, the inheritance scattered thinly among a too-numerous family. By the late 1970s Sidney Glaser had converted his hobby into his livelihood.

According to Rolly, he was not much of a businessman. Crosetti objected that the shop seemed to be a going concern, with many choice items.

“That’s just the problem. He’s got no business buying stuff like that McKenney and Hall for a hundred and fifty thousand. That’s for Baumann or Sotheby’s and the other big boys, and Glaser’s not a big boy. He’s got the clothes and the air but not the resources. Or the eye. Someone on his level should be picking up thousand-dollar books for two hundred, not hundred-thousand-dollar books for eighty-nine five. And they’re going to raise the rent-it already takes nearly half the average monthly profit-I mean paper profit-I doubt he’s made a real profit in years. It’s an old story in the book business. A rich collector thinks, I buy lots of books, why shouldn’t I pay for my hobby out of the profits?”

“Doesn’t it work?”

“On occasion. But like I said, you have to know your level, and work up. You can’t expect to start selling at the level you operated on as a rich collector, unless you’re willing to pour your own money into the business. And then it’s not really a business, is it? It’s a more expensive hobby, with pretensions. Speaking of which, the little New York East Side antiquarian dealer with the paneled shop-it’s a complete anachronism. There’s no way he can pay that rent and compete with both the Internet mail-order dealers and the big-name houses. Glaser’s going down. That fire was the best thing that could’ve happened to him. He’ll diddle the insurance companies on a couple of dozen select items, declare total losses, and sell them as fair to good. It’ll give him some operating capital again, but it won’t last long…”

“You think he started the fire?”

“No, he’s a book man. He’d never knowingly destroy a book. He was practically crying-you saw it-over that Churchill. But since there was a fire, he’s not above taking as much advantage of it as he can.”

“Just like you.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Yes, just like me. But at least I have an excuse, since I don’t live in an eighteen-room apartment on Park Avenue. I need money.” She poured herself more wine, drank a swallow, added, “And how about you, Crosetti? If those sheets you’ve got drying turn out to be the holograph of John Locke’s preface to Churchill, what’ll you do? Take them to Glaser and say, Oh, look what I found, Mr. G., something you can sell to the Widener for ten grand, and can I have a pat on the head?”

“It’s not Locke, if you’re right about it being a Jacobean hand.”

“Oh, now he’s literate, is he? I thought you were a computer nerd movie guy.”

“I read book catalogs.”

“Oh, right. But not books. You don’t even like books, do you?”

“I like them fine.” He examined her in the waning light and found a belligerent thrust to her jaw he hadn’t noticed before this, and a blurred, aggrieved look to her face.

“You’re not going to be a nasty drunk, are you, Carolyn?”

“I will if I want to. It’s my place.”

“Uh-huh. But I don’t have to stay here. My sheets look pretty dry. I could just take them and leave you to change the diapers on your baby every hour all night long.”

And he would have too, except that no sooner were these words out than she burst into tears, horrible, hopeless wails, and, like the decent guy he was, Al Crosetti went around and knelt by her chair and held Rolly while she shook and soaked his shoulder with her tears.

THE BRACEGIRDLE LETTER (2)

So to begin, asking always the favour of almighty God to keep me stricktlie on the path of truthfullnesse as I have muche of the olde Adam in me as thou knowest & mayhap I have told you som of it before nowe, yet you may forget and, which God foirbid, die before oure lad hath reached the age of understanding, soe it is better wrote down.

My father was named Richard his family the Bracegirdles were from Titchfield in the Weald, & iron-makeres from an earlie tyme. My father being but a youngere sonne was sent prentice to his nuncle John Bracegirdle who wase iron-factor at Leadenhall. Haveinge done with his prenticeshippe he removed to Fish Streete hard by Fenchurch Street & set hymselfe to be a factor in ironworkes. He throve there oweing to his goode connexiones with the Tichfield Bracegirdles & no lesse I thinke for his haveing a goode head for trade. He wase a grave & sober man, of little learning but a ready witte. Aetat 22 he wase converted to the true Christian religion by Gods grace & the sermons of Dr. Abernathy of Water Street & thereafter lived a blamelesse lyfe. He was bye & large a generous Christian man & no wretch left his doore unfed if he would heare a little of the Word of God: although he could not stande a papiste. All though he traded in the ordinary pots, kettels firebacks, &c his chiefe werke was in bells & gonnes. He oft hath sayde that if a man disired to make a greate noyse in the worlde whether in peace or in warre he had best hie hym to Bracegirdles of Fish Street.

My mother wase called Lucinda. Her family were Warwick-bred & of a higher estate than his, being gentry of the place & related to the Lord Arden: but distantly, distantly as my father all ways sayde. Her father Thomas Arden wase attainted traitor the 10^th year of our late Quene Elizabeth & lost all: afterward, her mother dieing she, aetat eight yeares, wase taken in by Margaret Brandell an aunt of Cheapside. As a girl my mother was prettey enough yet wase not thought a match for any of worshippe in her native countie for not having a groate & the attainder besydes & wished verey much to leave the auntes home: a verey Godly woman so my mother sayde but kept a leane tabel & stanke. It chanced she bought a fyreback from my father on a day, and twelvemonth after were married in St. Giles Cheapside & lyked one another wel enow. She wase not at first of the trew reformed religion but later she came to it: for the man is the heade of the woman as is written in Scripture.

Now after many fervente prayers I wase born on the fifte day of March in the year of Our Lord 1590 for they had by the unknowable judgement of Almightie God lost to fevers three children all infantes yet I wase a lustie babe hale as an ox soe I am told & survived to man’s estate through Gods grace. My mother hadde three more children one lived to six the others not past a yeare, leaving me alone to rise to manhoode. At four yeares I wase put to dame school on our street & learnt my letteres well enow & afterward my father sent me as a scholere to Mr Eddingstone in Deal St where he had hym a scole. It wase my fatheres fancie to breed me up a learned man mayhap a divine but such wase not to bee, for I wase I admit froward & would not learn my Latine far less Greeke: hic haec hoc wase all a muddel to me. Once I asked Mr Eddingstone why it wase, we having englished the Bible we had to learne the tongues of paganes after all but I wase whippt for it & not only that time: & at laste he told my father it would not doe, I wase borne a foole & would remaine so. Then quoth my father what shall we doe with you, why did God send me such a block-heade for a son, can we make a factor of you, pray God at leaste you have a cleare hande. So wase I put to copeying but my hande wase soe crabbed & I made soe many blotts that he wase in dispaire for me. A blacksmythe you shalbe then & earne your bread by the sweat of your browe he sayde a mere blacksmythe for your back is stronge I see and youre handes are all readie black as a smiths with your blottynges: at that my mothere weepeth. She wase ever kinde to me even beyonde the measoure of a woman to a childe, the moreso as my father wase displeazed with mee.

A thinge then happened that changed all, how wondrous is Gods plan for us his creatoures all though we cannot fadom his wayes at the tyme. For we had then a lodger Mr Wenke: from Leiden came he being a nephew of a man that my father did trade with in ironworkes. We laboured chayre by chayre in my fatheres counting-house & one day I saw him doeing workynges with a little pensille & a scrap & I quized him what are you about sir. He sayde look & see. I looked but I could not mayke it out. I will saye now what it was: he was casting sums for our accountes in a fashioun I never saw before, but he kindley instructed me thus: look you we have solde seven & eighty smalle kettels this quarter for 8s. 6d. each & on each profiteth 1s. 2d. What have we gathered in all & what is our gaine? I sayde we must use comptoirs for that, shall I fetch the board? Nay quoth he I can doe it without anie comptoirs & do you watch me as I write & I shall expound upon my methode. Soe he did & I wase amazed so quick did his pensille fly & the grosse & profit all clare & exact. He sayde this is Multiplicatioun by Algorithme a word I never before this moment hearde & he sayde further it is but part of the art Arithmetick lately uzed in the bancks & compting-houses of Hollande & Italy: wold you learn it boy for it shalbe to your verie greate profit? I sayde yea with all my harte.