The Book of Illumination (34 page)

“So why didn’t you bust her?” I burst out.

“I couldn’t,” he said.

“Why not?” asked Sylvia, glancing at me.

“Because she had a secret weapon. Something she could use
against me.” Sam paused for a moment and then went on. “I rebound those books. Most people on staff didn’t know they existed, and even if they did, they wouldn’t have been able to tell when pages were missing. I was the only one who’d really worked with the books—handled them, taken them apart and put them back together.”

“But what could she have on you?” Sylvia asked. “You’re one of the nicest and most honest—”

Sam held up his hand, closing his eyes and shaking his head. “You know. Ben,” he said quietly.

“Of course.”

“My son,” Sam continued, looking now at me, “has a drug problem. He’s been clean now for over a year, but it was tough sledding for a very long time. Two years ago, he was in rehab at a program in Connecticut, and he was doing really well. He made it through the whole twelve weeks, which was a first, and when he got out, he came to live with me. His mother and I are divorced.”

I knew all this, of course. Sylvia had told me the story. But I acted as though I hadn’t heard it before.

“I got him a job here,” Sam continued. “Nothing too difficult, just a pleasant, easy job to give a little structure to his life. He was doing really well, but then, around the holidays, this girl he’d been seeing broke up with him and he … slipped. He started using again. To finance his habit, he stole—and fenced—a couple of small items from the library.”

“Books?” I asked.

Sam shook his head. “A Greek bronze, a bust of a young boy. Ironically, it could have been Ben at the age of four or five—looked just like him. He also took some letters and sketches. And small amounts of money from some staff members’ purses.

“Amanda suspected Ben and confronted him. He admitted it and offered to try to help get the objects back. Out of respect for
me, Amanda said, and all the years I’d worked here, they wouldn’t go to the police. She’d handle it internally. In the end, they were able to retrieve the bust, the sketches, and one of the letters. I paid back the money, and that seemed to be the end of it.

“At the time I was enormously grateful. Little did I know that it was all part of her plan, in case I ever discovered what she was doing.”

“She blackmailed you,” I said.

Sam nodded. “When I confronted her about the plates in Cecil’s collection, she claimed to know about more things Ben had stolen—claimed she had absolute proof of his having gotten away with stealing an antique coin collection, book of Audubon engravings, and a folio of architectural drawings by Alexander Parris.”

“Which
she
stole,” I suggested, catching on.

“That’d be my guess,” answered Sam.

He slumped down into a chair.

“So let me get this straight,” I said. “You confronted her about the prints—the maps and the constellations.” Then I lost the thin thread I was following.

“And she said that if I went to the police, she’d reveal what
she
knew about Ben. Not only about the bronze and the letters and the sketches, but a slew of other thefts only she knew about.”

“But she was lying!” Sylvia said.

“I know,” Sam said sadly. “But who knows what ‘evidence’ she had cooked up? Ben could have gone to jail. He could have served time! He couldn’t have taken it, not just then. We would have lost him once and for all. Besides, I needed my pension. I needed my health insurance. I was sixty-six years old. She gave me a choice: keep quiet, take an immediate, voluntary retirement, or—”

“Or
what?”
I asked, feeling my fury gathering into an impotent storm.

“Or she’d go public with everything. She had files, she claimed. She had friends. If I wanted to end a long and honorable career with my reputation and my retirement package intact, I had only one option—announce my decision to step aside. If I refused, she’d bring down the whole house of cards.”

“That bitch!” I said. “Pardon my French.”

“No, no,” Sam said. “It took two of us to dance that dance. If it had only involved me, I think I would have taken her on. It just about killed me to see her getting away with this.”

“But there was Ben,” Sylvia whispered.

“There was Ben,” echoed Sam.

We sat in silence for several moments.

“How could I not have noticed?” Sylvia finally said.

“Oh, come on,” I answered. “You can’t blame yourself for this.”

“But I do.”

“What was the book, four hundred pages?” I glanced at Sam, whose expression was sympathetic.

“Three eighty-six,” Sylvia said sadly.

“And how thick was the vellum?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Some pages were like leather, others were as thin as tissue paper.”

“Right. And it probably wasn’t the leather pages she cut out. So unless you were going through the manuscript regularly, page by page, there’d have been no way of noticing.”

“I tried to handle it as little as possible.”

“Of course you did!” said Sam. “As you should have done!” Sylvia nodded but seemed unconvinced.

“What I don’t get,” I said, “was how she knew where it was—how she actually found it.”

“Well,” Sylvia said, “she had that phone call from New York, probably from Paola Moretti. She told me about that when she
called me into her office that day. And we know she ran into Wescott at that Harvard symposium and he apparently mentioned
something
about a manuscript.”

“But he didn’t believe us,” Sylvia said. “He didn’t believe there
was
such a thing as a Book of Kildare.”

“No,” I said, “but it was still a valuable manuscript, Kildare or not. It was still a book that the Athenaeum had been lucky to get, assuming it had actually come with the collection.”

“There was nothing in the database, though,” Sylvia said, “because she told me she tried to look it up.”

“I’ll tell you just exactly what she did,” Sam said firmly. “She came down one night when no one was here and just started snooping around. Believe me, I’ve seen it all before. If she took the book, someone would have noticed, so she couldn’t do that. So instead, she took plates and left the book.”

H
ENRY WAS GOING
to be a hammer.

How he and Ellie had arrived at this decision, I had no idea. By the time I got to see the kitchen/costume shop in full steam, Max had been promoted to chief construction officer, having made a series of ill-advised cracks criticizing Ellie’s efforts with plywood strips, a stapler, and chicken wire.

The idea had been to create a tube that would enclose Henry up to his head. The tube would then be covered with brown fabric, and the fabric painted to mimic wood grain. The head of the hammer would be a separate piece and would sit on Henry’s shoulders. Ellie was a whiz with a glue gun. She was confident that she could fashion a wire frame out of old coat hangers, which she could then upholster with hot adhesive and gray felt.

I immediately saw some problems.

First of all, Henry would roast inside a hammerhead of felt.

Second, he would not be able to sit down, or even visit the boys’ room, if need be.

Third, his arms would be pinned to his sides, which would be particularly tricky because he would not be able to see, given that
he would never, ever agree to cut eyeholes in the hammerhead. This would immediately give it away as a kid’s costume and not a
real
hammerhead.

If there was one thing that drove my son crazy on occasions that called for costumes, it was anything that compromised the illusion he hoped to create. He wouldn’t wear a jacket over his Halloween costume when he was three, because bees didn’t wear jackets, nor when he was four, because Batman needed only his cape. Efforts to reason with him failed. The cape was for flying, I insisted, to no avail. Nor would he wear a sweater
under
his costume, because that would make him feel—if not look—like a baby, and not the grown-up four-year-old trick-or-treater he was.

He wouldn’t troll for candy in rain boots. He wouldn’t be caught dead with an umbrella. Nor would he carry a flashlight or let me walk beside him with
my
flashlight. I had to stay way behind, preferably out of sight, because to have your mother hovering around when you are trying to pass for a bee or Batman, well, that gave everything away.

What
I
had given away, though, in enlisting Ellie’s help with the costume, was the right to butt in every two seconds with my opinions about armholes and eyeholes and provisions for the needs of Mother Nature. After all, Ellie and Max had managed to raise two kids of their own. They’d work it out with him. And if not, well, how long could the wedding of
Q
and
U
actually last? He’d definitely take the hammerhead off for cupcakes.

Sam was a man on a mission. Within twenty-four hours, he’d made contact with nearly two dozen colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic, enlisting their help in canvassing their region’s dealers in rare prints and books. The purloined plates had yet to surface. But thanks to the dragnet that Sam had laid with his
colleagues, they wouldn’t go on sale in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Dubai, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Zurich, or New York without raising huge red flags. Contacting the Art Loss Register, a massive online database, and the Art Crime Team of the FBI were the steps Sam had wanted to take next, but we’d convinced him of the ongoing need for discretion.

Eighteen hours later, we had our first concrete lead. Sam had been waiting for Sylvia when she got to work on Thursday, and an hour later, when I arrived, they sat me down and Sam repeated his story to me.

He had a friend who worked at The Cloisters, a guy named Florio Something. Florio had been in touch with a rare books dealer in Manhattan, a man called Bruno Dollfus. Dollfus had apprenticed with his uncle Hans in Vienna before opening his own business in New York in the eighties.

In 2006, he had been the curator of “Royal Devotions,” an exhibition of forty-five illuminated manuscripts that had been on display for a month at the Waldorf-Astoria. Having trained at the elbow of his famous and reclusive uncle, one of the world’s premier dealers in illuminated manuscripts, Dollfus had radar he never doubted. And his radar had recently been triggered.

According to Florio, Dollfus had received a call within the past week or ten days from a man looking to sell him some medieval plates. After a lengthy conversation, some snooping around on the Internet, and a day or two spent poring over his reference collection, Dollfus had walked away from the deal. Either the plates were forgeries, he’d concluded, or the seller was reaching out from the darkest, dimmest corners of the black market. In neither case did Dollfus want anything to do with him.

“Does he have a name?” I asked Sam. “Did Dollfus keep the guy’s number?”

“We’re trying to find out. I have a call in to Florio right now.”

“What if he does?” Sylvia asked. “What’ll we do then?”

“I’ll ask Declan,” I said, as my mind raced forward through the possibilities. In the best case, we’d be able to track down the man with the plates. If the wary Viennese book dealer was willing to help, it would make things even easier.

But there was only one person who would be able to verify that the plates in question were the plates cut out of our book: Sylvia. Maybe she could pose as the book dealer’s colleague. How would the seller know?

“If you had to pick up tomorrow and go to New York,” I said to Sylvia, “could you go?”

“For what?” she asked suspiciously.

“To verify the authenticity of the plates. They might not be the ones from our book.”

“What? Meet some thug in an alley? No way!”

“No, no,” I assured her. “It wouldn’t work like that.”

“I’d go with you,” said Sam. “There’s nothing I’d like better than to—” He broke off with a little growl.

“Let’s hear that again, Sam,” I said.

Sam smiled as he growled again. Then again, more loudly. Then with the addition of a couple of punching motions. “Pow!” Sam added.