The Lions of Fifth Avenue: A Novel

CHAPTER SIX

New York City, 1993

The day after Pearl’s death, a few of her friends stopped by Lonnie’s town house to pay their respects and seemed to be in no hurry to leave, so Sadie ordered Chinese takeout, waiting for it to be delivered as the ladies talked among themselves around the kitchen table about canasta and hip replacements. As soon as the food came, Sadie grabbed one of the plastic containers and motioned for Valentina to join her at the dining room table, where they slurped up sesame noodles, while back in the kitchen LuAnn and Lonnie patiently answered the ladies’ questions about final arrangements.

It was nice to have LuAnn back, the rudder to their family ship. When Sadie first met LuAnn, she’d been intimidated by Lonnie’s elegant new girlfriend, but LuAnn never failed to draw Sadie out, asking about her job, or her favorite books, and then, once Valentina was born, they’d shared the intimate joy of loving the little creature before them. LuAnn always looked glamorous, even today, pairing jeans with a bright silk scarf, a tennis bracelet glistening on one wrist. Once Lonnie and LuAnn had married and taken over the family residence, his new wife had accessorized Pearl’s leftover furniture with the same panache, adding bright pillows in the living room and hanging French movie posters on the walls.

Sadie put down her chopsticks. The peanut sauce suddenly tasted like glue and she couldn’t eat another bite. “Valentina, I’m sorry I was short with you yesterday, when we were playing the game.”

“What do you mean?” asked Valentina.

“I got upset when the game didn’t buzz, and was a little short with everyone. I’m sorry about that.”

“I don’t remember. You’re silly, Aunt Sadie.”

Relief flushed through her. She’d been feeling terrible about sullying Valentina’s last moments with her grandmother, when in fact Valentina hadn’t even registered it. Funny what kids noticed and what they didn’t.

As Sadie waited for Valentina to finish up, she inspected the display of silver-framed photos of the family on the wall: her mother sitting on a park bench, holding baby Valentina in her lap and smiling broadly; LuAnn and Lonnie on their wedding day; Sadie and Lonnie standing stiffly in front of a Christmas tree, next to their mother. Sadie’s awkward stage had come and never left, unfortunately. She still had the same thick eyebrows and too-small mouth. She stepped closer to the photo and studied it carefully, noticing that on top of all that, one of her eyes was slightly larger than the other, making her look loopy. She glanced in the mirror to check. Still loopy-looking.

Before, when she was married, there had been a wedding photo of her and Phillip on the wall, one of her favorite shots of herself. She was smiling up at her new husband in profile—she’d always liked the curve of her nose from that angle, and her hair had been perfect that day, falling down her back in waves. Too bad she couldn’t have just cut Phillip out. Although he had looked rather sweet in it as well, a shy smile on his face, blushing as if he’d landed a princess. They had loved each other, once.

Sadie moved in closer to the one photo of their grandmother, taken in London before the war. She was standing by a rosebush, with a faint smile on her face. Laura Lyons didn’t seem like the jolliest of types. Her eyes were guarded, suspicious. The photo would have been taken around the time Virginia Woolf started writing her diaries. Maybe they’d bumped into each other, had tea together. Why had one woman saved her diaries for future generations, while the other demanded all her personal effects be destroyed after her death?

The missing diary. Where on earth could it be?

Sadie caught herself. She should be mourning the death of her mother, but instead the missing diary weighed more heavily. Or was she focusing on work to avoid dealing with the most recent family tragedy? If her mother were alive, she’d have been in the kitchen baking scones or some kind of fruit-filled pastry as a balm to their pain. The realization that she wasn’t here to do that smashed into Sadie’s solar plexus with a thud. She let out a sound that was half coughing, half choking, and suddenly it was as if a hole had opened up in her chest, leaving a void where her heart would be.

LuAnn stepped into the room, one hand on the doorway. “Everyone all right in here?”

“Sure, Mom,” answered Valentina. “Are there fortune cookies?”

“In the kitchen. Go for it.”

LuAnn came up behind Sadie as Valentina ran off. “The family photos.” She picked up one of Lonnie at his college graduation. “His best years. Look at all that hair.”

Sadie tried to match her breeziness, although her voice was shaky. “Ah, now, he’s still a charmer. How’s the geriatric gang doing?”

“I think they’ll be wrapping up soon.” She looked up as Lonnie joined them.

Sadie turned to her brother. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here for Mom’s death. I feel bad about that.”

Lonnie shrugged. “It was pretty uneventful, she just passed away quietly, in her sleep.”

“We thought she was doing well, though, right? We thought she was getting better.”

“She was recovering from the pneumonia, but in the night her heart stopped. She was eighty-seven, remember.”

“It just seems so sudden.”

But it wasn’t. Lonnie was right. Sudden was waking up in the middle of the night as an eight-year-old, confused, not sure of what she’d heard. It had been a loud thumping sound, like someone had dropped a bag of potatoes. So Sadie had gotten up, drawn to the light of the bathroom, and gently pushed open the door to find her father on the cold tile, his legs askew, hands palms up, the long fingers slightly curved, like he was playing his bass. She’d rushed to her mother and then waited, kneeling on the floor of the hallway as the paramedics came. She still remembered the scratchiness of the carpet runner on her bare legs.

Their father had been a session musician, playing for advertisements and television shows before embracing the new rock ’n’ roll, one of the few older players who welcomed the new sound. He’d taken Sadie to the Brill Building a little north of Times Square a couple of times to listen in, and she’d been surprised at how much like a classroom the studio looked, a dozen folding chairs scattered across a linoleum floor. But her classroom didn’t have wires snaking around chair legs and curling up microphone stands, or a dozen men smoking cigarettes during the breaks and teasing each other. When her father played his double bass, his body swayed like a tree in the wind, like he was dancing with a partner, Fred Astaire holding a maple-and-spruce Ginger in his arms. When he was hired by the rock bands, he’d switched to a shiny electric Rickenbacker, the chunky strings no hindrance at all to his quick fingering. How Sadie missed him, still. Especially today.

She supposed a death in the family did that, made you dredge up the silt from the bottom of your life.

They stood quietly for a moment. “What was the last thing you said to her?” asked Sadie.

“I think I told her to take her pills. She seemed out of sorts, confused.” Lonnie had a strange look on his face. “She mentioned the library, of all things.”

“She did?”

“She looked at me like she was really looking at me, you know? Like she was completely lucid. Then she said something about how she had to leave the library because of the burning book.”

Their mother had said something similar as Sadie was putting away the game. Telling her not to burn a book.

“A burning book was the reason they had to leave the library?” asked Sadie. “What did she mean?”

“No idea. It was eerie. Like she was terrified.” Lonnie brushed away tears. “I comforted her, and she quieted down until, finally, she fell asleep.”

Sadie’s Surviving Spinsterhood book recommended every single girl find a hobby to keep her busy and interesting to others. Suggestions included collecting snuffboxes and antiquing, neither of which appealed. Instead, inspired by happy memories of her father, Sadie had begun seeking out music whenever she could. From the soaring voices of an oratorio in Carnegie Hall to the wild improvisations of a jazz club set in an old perfume factory, there was nothing better after a day of answering questions than to sit quietly in a room and let the melody transport her.

The Saturday after Phillip had left for good, desperate to get out of the apartment, she’d checked the listings in the New Yorker and settled on a small club in the West Village where a trio would be playing. She’d sat at the bar, feeling awkward and alone, but during the first set a woman at a table right up front caught her eye. She had long gray hair and bright red lipstick and wore a fur stole from another era. She moved in time with the music, her shoulders swaying. That’s what I’ll be, decided Sadie. Unashamed, unafraid.

Tonight, though, two days after her mother’s death, jazz wouldn’t do. The stress that crawled up Sadie’s spine and tangled in her brain required stronger fare.

The band onstage at CBGB screamed out lyrics that she couldn’t catch, but that didn’t matter. It wasn’t the point. She had taken her usual spot at the end of the bar closest to the door, where she could observe the room but not feel quite part of it. Tonight’s band was a young punk trio without much flair but a ton of anger. The thick beating of the bass drum blasted itself into Sadie’s head, almost hurting her ears but not quite.

The bartender pointed to her beer, but Sadie declined another round, and he gave a slight sneer before turning way, as he always did when she showed up.

The walls and ceiling were covered with a sordid mass of stickers and graffiti, the floor gummy and the beer warm. Bands with names like the Cramps called the club home, and the harsh sounds reflected the harsher realities outside its doors. The city was on edge, still uneasy after a bomb had exploded inside the World Trade Center’s parking garage a couple of months ago. Sometimes she imagined her father playing at CBGB, if he’d lived, delighting in the way the guitarists bent the sound with such ferociousness.

When the club had opened its doors in the seventies, it had been a mecca for a new kind of sound, one that veered sharply away from the shimmery disco beats that were all the rage. Twenty years later, it still thrummed with dark energy. Sadie loved to watch the dancing that wasn’t really dancing, just limbs flailing about. Every few weeks, she’d stop by and recharge her batteries, and then she could go back out in the world and act like a fussy librarian again, sort through questions and supply answers, sink back into the logic and order of the Library of Congress Classification system.

Her desire to keep busy had drawn her back to work earlier that day, even though it was a Saturday and she was technically still on bereavement leave. Lonnie and LuAnn had taken care of the arrangements, which meant there was really nothing much for Sadie to do. At her desk in the quiet of the Berg, she’d left a phone message for Miss Quinn, Laura Lyons’s former secretary and executor in London, before going back to the archives and wading through her grandfather’s boxes again, hoping to find some crumb related to Laura Lyons that she’d missed the first time around. She soon became sidetracked by Jack Lyons’s daily calendars. So many appointments and reminders—the man was certainly meticulous, just as Sadie was with her Filofax. She admired his attention to detail, list upon list of upcoming projects, weekly service appointments, coal prices.

Then she’d reached the very last entry, dated the twenty-third of May 1914. The same month as the letter from the library detective saying that the family was under watch. Jack Lyons had written a short list, consisting of only three items: stepladder, rope, note. A tidy check mark was placed next to each one.

Three words, innocent by themselves but thick with meaning together.

She’d never known what happened to her grandfather, only that he’d died suddenly and the family had left the library. Could he have killed himself?

Yet it seemed strange that he’d write a to-do list, so clinical, unemotional.

What had happened back in May 1914 to Laura Lyons and her husband? And what about Pearl’s deathbed utterances about burning books being the reason they had to leave? The past seemed murkier than ever, and Sadie worried over how the events from eighty years ago might reflect on her role of curator today. And not in a good way.

Sitting at the bar at CBGB, letting the music wash over her, she mulled over what she’d learned. Stepladder, rope, note. If her grandfather had indeed killed himself, then Sadie’s own father’s death might have been even harder on Pearl than Sadie had imagined, even if it had been from natural causes. It also explained Pearl’s reluctance to linger on the past.

A young woman with piercings in her nose and a shaved head threw Sadie a smile as she passed by. That was nice, thought Sadie. She was a semi-regular by now, she supposed, and stood out from the other patrons in her tartan shirtwaist dress, circa 1940. Grunge fashion had nothing on her.

She gathered her tote bag and went to the bathroom, waiting in the cramped space for an open stall.

“Who’s the grandma?”

The voice came from one of the stalls, and was answered by another.

“The one at the end of the bar? That’s just some old bird who sits like a stone and pretends to be part of the scene. Pathetic, really. Gus hates it because she takes up space and never orders more than one beer. God help me if I’m like that when I’m old.”

Old? Sadie was only forty-three, she wanted to answer. But maybe they were talking about someone else, not her.

The stall opened, and the woman who’d acknowledged Sadie earlier stood frozen. “Um, hi.”

Sadie turned, blinking back tears, and walked out, back into the noise and mayhem.

Monday morning, in the basement level of the library, Sadie pushed open the door marked BINDING AND PROCESSING. She could have used up more of her bereavement leave, but she preferred to stay busy, and also didn’t want Claude to swoop in and take her place in her absence.

Inside, the room was set up like a mini-factory, with long tables where various tools were laid out, empty save one man, who rose creakily to his feet as she neared, his gray beard almost white in the bright fluorescent lighting.

“Mr. Babenko.”

He greeted her warmly, as he had long ago when she’d first inquired about the hidden apartment. Mr. Babenko wasn’t used to visitors, and had been delighted at Sadie’s interest in the history of the building, as well as his work in the bindery, showing her how incoming books were measured and fitted with Mylar dust jackets, then run through a paste machine before being sent off to the stacks for shelving. She’d shown the appropriate admiration for the chunky metal oversewing machine that stood, no longer used, in one corner, and they’d been friends ever since.

“What’s going on, young lady?”

Young lady. The cruel remarks by the women at CBGB dissipated into thin air. It all came down to perspective, really.

“I don’t know if you’ve heard, but we’ve had something go missing from the Berg Collection.”

“Your curator?”

Of course, Marlene. The news had spread fast. “Right. She took a job in Boston. Chief of collections.”

“Good for her.”

“But this is something else.”

He let out a whistle when she told him about the missing Virginia Woolf diary. “That’s terrible news, just terrible.”

“It certainly is. I have to ask you to keep this between us. Dr. Hooper doesn’t want it leaking out.”

“You have my assurances,” said Mr. Babenko. “Was the diary marked?”

The more valuable books at the New York Public Library were stamped with an identifying mark on page ninety-seven, as a way to prevent thefts. But even Sadie knew that some of the more nefarious bookshop owners were known to buy library books regardless, and would remove the mark by either mutilating that page or using chemicals to fade it. Every library with rare books and maps faced the same quandary: whether to “deface” a book, which made it difficult to sell on the black market, or retain the book’s purity and leave a tempting morsel for thieves.

“The Woolf wasn’t marked, I know that for certain. I want to help find it, if I can, but I’m not sure where to start.”

“For the most part, the people who have access to the books are the most likely suspects. Past thieves who have done the most serious damage to the collection are the same scholars who come to study the books, respected patrons who become so enamored with their own expertise they believe they should be the custodians of the material as well. Or want to sell them for profit.”

Sadie, Claude, and Marlene had always kept a close eye on the Berg’s visitors, who, after all, had to go through a strict approval process before even gaining entry. The intimacy of the room helped in that regard as well. “The librarians’ desks are only a few feet away from the tables where our visitors sit. We’re practically on top of each other.”

“You can’t trust anyone. I remember reading about a case twenty or so years ago, where two Byzantine priests were caught smuggling a rare Dutch atlas out of the Yale library. Turns out they’d taken hundreds of books, not only from Yale, but also from Dartmouth, Harvard, and Notre Dame.”

“What happened to them?”

“They were defrocked and sentenced to a year and a half in prison.”

“A year and half? That’s all?” She must have misheard him.

“That’s all. An absolute shame.”

“Okay, so I’ll be on the lookout for men in robes.” She paused. “On a different note, I have a strange question. Do you remember hearing about anyone who committed suicide in the library, say a really long time ago?”

“Not that I know of. Why do you ask?”

She had to come clean. Well, almost clean. “I discovered a letter that said that the superintendent of the building, the one who lived in the apartment, was a suspected book thief back in 1914. And I think he may have committed suicide.”

“I can’t help you there, but we do have a couple of ghosts who like to wander about.”

“You mean the worker who fell off the scaffolding in the Reading Room when it was being built?” She smiled. The ghost was a common legend among the staff, although no one she’d known had ever seen it firsthand.

“The very one.” Mr. Babenko picked at the dry skin on his hands. “I meant what I said, you know. About the people closest to the Berg Collection being the prime suspects.”

“You mean Claude and Marlene?” The timing of Marlene’s new job had to be a coincidence. Marlene was devoted to the collection, to its preservation. As for Claude, Sadie had been keeping a close eye on him ever since the theft.

“Not just Claude and Marlene,” Mr. Babenko replied. “You, too, Sadie. You, too.”