The Map Thief (5 page)

Detective Buonfiglio waited behind the corner of the building, watching through the glass as Smiley stopped and put his briefcase down on the low concrete wall edging the Beinecke’s courtyard. Smiley opened the briefcase and looked around to either side before closing it and continuing. Buonfiglio followed twenty feet behind as Smiley crossed to a pedestrian walkway heading south toward the art museum, keeping a screen of pedestrians between Smiley and himself as they walked (
Figure 2
).

FIGURE 2
SMILEY’S NEW HAVEN (SHOWING SMILEY’S ROUTE, JUNE 8, 2005).

After a few dozen yards, the walkway opened up into a large courtyard in front of the Sterling Memorial Library. Buonfiglio was glad Smiley didn’t enter the building, where it would be difficult to follow him
without being noticed. Even so, he faced a dilemma. If Smiley was heading to his car, then Buonfiglio had only a few moments in which to make an arrest. But without probable cause, he had no right to stop and search him. If it came to it, he could do an illegal search—at least he’d get back whatever Smiley stole, even if he failed to get the pinch.

As he followed behind Smiley, he kept trying to reach Lieutenant Holohan for orders, but again the calls went to voice mail. He had to make up his mind on his own. For a moment, he thought he lost Smiley as he reached the end of the pedestrian walkway at Elm Street, a busy avenue with three lanes of fast-moving traffic. Buonfiglio looked around wildly before just spying the back of Smiley’s head continuing down High Street. The detective quickly crossed behind him. The street narrowed, with heavy stone buildings on both sides casting cool shadows over the sidewalk. Smiley stopped just before the Harkness Tower, Yale’s landmark two-hundred-foot clock tower, where he once again put down his briefcase on another stone wall. Again he opened it, looked both ways, and closed it.

Smiley was oblivious to the detective on his tail, still preoccupied with the weight of his indecision about whether or not to go to London. He crossed the street and continued walking for a half block before realizing he’d passed his destination, the Yale Center for British Art. Walking down the other side of the street, Buonfiglio closed the distance, thinking Smiley was heading for a parking lot behind the museum. When Smiley turned around, Buonfiglio ducked into a barbershop, watching him as he entered the door to the museum on his left. Almost immediately, Smiley realized that he had entered the museum’s gift shop, rather than the main entrance, and left as soon as he went in.

Warily, Buonfiglio crossed back to the other side of High Street and followed Smiley as he turned the corner and once again passed the museum. He froze as Smiley suddenly turned back, walking right past him, then finally turning right under a stone arcade that covered the entrance. Inside, the lobby of the museum was mercifully cool. Smiley crossed the lobby, passing by two sculptures—a bronze of an armored man striding confidently forward with laurels on his head, and a modern stone sculpture of a woman looking back over her shoulder, one eye a gaping hole.

He handed over his briefcase at the coat check and began walking toward the elevator. That was when he heard a voice behind him asking
him to stop. He turned around to see a tall mustached man wearing a jacket and tie approaching him.

“Hi, I work for Yale. Were you just over at the Beinecke?” asked Buonfiglio.

“Yes,” Smiley said quickly. “I’m a researcher. I go there a lot.”

“Is this yours, by any chance?” Buonfiglio asked, unwrapping the X-Acto knife blade from the tissue paper and showing it to Smiley.

“Yes, it is. I must have dropped it,” Smiley replied, adding a bit nonsensically, “I have a cold.”

Buonfiglio tried his best to appear nonchalant, knowing Smiley had no obligation to cooperate. “Well, folks over there think you might have taken something by mistake,” he said. “Do you mind if I take a look at your briefcase?”

“Of course,” Smiley said. “No problem.” He walked back to the desk, retrieved the briefcase, and opened it up to the policeman, revealing a jumble of papers that included several maps. “I’m a collector,” Smiley said. “These are my maps.”

Buonfiglio could see that Smiley had gone pale and that thick white saliva had begun to form in the corners of his mouth, sure signs of nervousness. “Look, I don’t know what’s what and who belongs to who,” Buonfiglio said after a glance at the maps. “Would you mind coming back with me to the library?”

“Of course,” Smiley said again.

As they were leaving, Buonfiglio finally received a call back from his superior, Lieutenant Holohan, who arranged to pick them up outside the museum. As they drove toward the Beinecke, Smiley mentioned that he might miss his train. “Don’t worry,” said Buonfiglio. “If I have to, I’ll drive you to New York myself.”

—

WHEN THEY ARRIVED
at the Beinecke, the officers asked Smiley to stand in the back of the mezzanine near the lockers, while they spread out the maps from his briefcase atop a glass display case. While he’d been gone, staff members had been frantically looking through the books he’d examined to see if any maps were missing. That wasn’t as straightforward as it might seem. Rare books might have any number of maps inside them—and different editions might have different maps, or have
been missing maps before they even arrived at the library. Most of the cataloguing, meanwhile, was maddeningly incomplete, sometimes referring simply to the number of maps in a book, or including just the generic word “maps” without additional information.

One exception was the Smith book, which the catalog record clearly listed as containing his map of New England. Looking through the documents the police officers had recovered, however, library supervisor Ellen Cordes didn’t see the Smith map among them. She asked Smiley if he had the map, and he demurred, only saying he knew of the map and it was rare. But he continued to insist he had brought with him all of the maps he had. By this time, Smiley felt strangely calm, his mind almost blank, as if the whole experience was happening to someone else. He’d get out of this, he told himself, and when he did, he would make some big changes in his life. The only strong sensation he felt was the pain in his back, which throbbed more acutely the longer he stood.

Holohan stayed upstairs with Smiley as Buonfiglio went back and forth to the office downstairs to consult with Cordes. “You’ve got to tell tell me what he stole,” he said impatiently. “Otherwise I got to release this guy.”

“Did you search him?” asked security head Ralph Mannarino, telling Buonfiglio how he had seen Smiley fidgeting with his coat.

“I’m lucky I even got him back here,” said Buonfiglio. But when he got back upstairs, he mentioned Smiley’s fidgeting to Holohan.

“Would you mind just showing us if you have anything in your pocket?” Holohan asked. Smiley pulled a credit card from the inside pocket of his blazer. As he did, however, Holohan noticed there was still a bulge there. “What else do you have in there?” he asked.

Smiley pulled out a folded piece of paper, saying, “Oh, I forgot about that.”

Back in her office, Cordes unfolded the paper to see the portrait of John Smith staring out of the upper left-hand corner, along with the familiar outlines of the New England coast. In the bottom margin was writing in pencil she recognized as belonging to Henry C. Taylor, a benefactor of the Beinecke who had donated many maps and had a distinctive way of writing his
s
’s.

“That’s our map!” she cried.

“Are you sure?” asked Buonfiglio.

“There is no doubt in my mind.”

Buonfiglio brought the map back upstairs and asked Smiley where he’d gotten it.

“I bought it from Philip Burden, a map dealer in London,” he answered.

Buonfiglio pressed him: “So if I call this guy, he’s going to know you, and he’s going to know you bought this map from him?”

Smiley put his hands to his head, pressing his fingers into his temples for a few moments. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Maybe I didn’t get it from him.”

Buonfiglio had heard enough. “You are under arrest for larceny in the first degree,” he said, turning him around as another officer handcuffed him. Buonfiglio led Smiley outside, reading him his Miranda rights as a cruiser from the New Haven Police Department pulled up to take him to headquarters to spend the night there in jail.

—

AS SMILEY WAS GRAPPLING
with his sudden reversal of fortune, the librarians at the Beinecke were doing the same thing. They put the maps in a safe while continuing to go through the books Smiley had looked at that day. And they finally looked at the security tape from the reading room and saw what they’d missed before: Smiley furtively ripping another map out of an atlas.

Called
Speculum Orbis Terrarum
(Latin for “mirror of the world”) and published by Flemish cartographer
Gerard de Jode in Antwerp in 1578, the book contained dozens of exquisitely etched maps hand-painted in blues, greens, and pinks. Right after the cover page, de Jode had included a two-page world map copied from his fellow cartographer Abraham Ortelius before the two had become rivals (
Figure A
). After the first edition, he swapped it out for another world map, making copies of it extremely rare. On the open market, it could fetch as much as $150,000—if it could be sold. The trouble was, all the copies of de Jode’s atlas had been well catalogued, making an unknown copy near impossible. Out of recklessness or desperation, Smiley had taken it anyway, ripping it from the binding of the 427-year-old book. As he did, some of the fragile paint flaked, opening a small tear in the middle of Persia.

The
other maps from Smiley’s briefcase that the Beinecke was able to claim after examination weren’t quite as valuable, but they were still significant. One rare map came from a small book with a blue leather binding by English explorer Luke Foxe recounting his 1631 expedition to find the Northwest Passage across America. Due to its scarcity, the map was worth about $50,000. The last map the Beinecke identified came from a brown leather book redolent of tobacco smoke called
The Principall Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation.
Written by geographer Richard Hakluyt in 1589, it contained a rare world map copied from Ortelius that was worth more than $75,000.

As the librarians looked through Smiley’s briefcase, however, they quickly realized it contained more maps than they could identify as their own. Of the eight maps inside, only four came from books Smiley had viewed that day. The fact begged the obvious questions: Where had the others come from? Had they been stolen too? Buonfiglio contacted the FBI, which sent out an alert to rare-book libraries around the country. One by one, they began to call with panicked reports of maps missing from books in their collections as well. As they did, more questions began to reverberate through the insular world of map libraries, collectors, and dealers: Why had a respected and successful antiquarian dealer turned against those who trusted him and stolen the things he loved most? And how long had he been getting away with it?

SMALL HOPE

FIGURE 3
JEAN TALLMAN. “BEDFORD CENTER.” NEW HAMPSHIRE. 1979.

1956–1985

IT WAS IN AN
effort to answer those questions that I found myself on a ferry from Cape Cod to the island of Martha’s Vineyard on a shimmering August day in 2011. More than six years had passed since that day of his arrest at the Beinecke, and Smiley had never told his story to a reporter. I wanted to find out what had led him down the path to his crimes, turning him from map dealer to map thief. The boat glided past the breakwater into the harbor, where gray cottages and white church steeples climbed the hill. Finally it bumped up against the dock, where I joined a line of passengers clutching duffel bags and beach satchels on their way down the gangway.

I easily picked out Smiley’s glasses and pushed-back gray hair on the other side of a line of waiting taxicabs. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” he said, greeting me with a wide grin. “Did you have a good trip in?” He seemed fit and tan, not at all the shrunken, defeated figure I’d seen in newspaper reports about his crimes. After some small talk, we drove ten minutes to a nearby café, where we took our coffees to an outside picnic table. Removing his wooden coffee stirrer, he began to worry it apart as he told me the story of his life—not stopping for nearly four hours.

He got into the map trade “by accident,” he told me. After graduating from college in the spring of 1978, he followed a girlfriend to London, where she worked at Sotheby’s auction house. The relationship didn’t last, but Smiley’s interest in the world of rare books and manuscripts had been piqued. “It was like buying and selling parts of puzzles,” he said. “I began to understand how it worked, and how dynamic the relationship was between buyers and sellers, and I wanted to be a part of that world.”

When he returned stateside in 1979 at age twenty-three, he looked for an entrée, finding it in the rare-books department of
B. Altman and Co., a department store at Thirty-Fourth Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City. Founded just after the Civil War, Altman’s was quieter and more elegant than its rivals in the Manhattan department store world, the bustling Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s. With plush, carpeted floors and Waterford chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, it was better known for furnishings than fashions—selling rugs, crystal, and china to the “carriage trade” of Upper East Side doyennes. Every winter, its windows filled with elaborate holiday displays featuring life-size figures of elves, animals, and people in traditional Christmas scenes.

The rare-books department was an afterthought, located on the eighth floor next to the Charleston Garden restaurant, a favorite rendezvous for the theater matinee crowd. On their way to or from lunch, some of its patrons would stop to flip through the books, autographs, and celebrity memorabilia lining the shelves. An even smaller division, where Smiley was placed, sold rare maps, atlases, and globes. Despite knowing little about the topic, he bent himself to the task. “
Most maps are bad,” his supervisor, Rosejeanne Slifer, told him. “But they are bad for a reason.” French and English maps of the Ohio Valley drew different boundary lines in a cartographical land-grab before the French and Indian
War. English mapmakers kept the fantasy of the Northwest Passage alive for centuries to please the merchant companies that funded their expeditions. John Smith asked Prince Charles to put a fictitious London and Oxford in the middle of the wilderness of New England to spur his countrymen to colonization. Understand hidden motives like those, and not only could you identify the stories behind the maps; you could also determine which were worth buying and selling.

He learned more
technical lessons as well—such as how to tell the difference between the chunky lines of woodblock prints and the finely drawn curves of copper-plate engravings, and how to spot “original color,” paint applied by hand at the time the map was made, over “modern color” applied decades or centuries after the fact. He learned to identify the “rhumb lines” that crisscrossed antique maps to provide bearings to navigators and the elaborately drawn “cartouches,” containing the name of the map and its creators. Depending on the map, up to five people could take credit for making it—including the surveyor, cartographer, engraver, publisher, and map seller. Different maps were attributed differently according to the fame and influence of their contributors, making it difficult for novice map collectors to keep track of which map was whose.

Smiley became fascinated by the combination of history and craftsmanship that lay behind this specialized art. Since childhood, he had been drawn both to beautiful, well-made objects and to esoteric knowledge, and maps were the perfect manifestation of both. Here was a world where knowledge mattered, and not just for bragging rights, but for real money.

—

DESPITE HIS ELITIST-SOUNDING NAME,
E. Forbes Smiley III grew up solidly middle class in suburban New Hampshire, the son of a physicist who worked for a local defense contractor. The original Edward Forbes Smiley—Smiley’s grandfather—was born in Connecticut, descended from a line of Congregationalist ministers. After graduating from Harvard in 1917 he became one himself, spending most of his career as a small-town preacher. Smiley’s father,
Edward Forbes Smiley II, took a different tack, earning his degree in engineering from the University of Connecticut in 1946, followed by a master’s from Brown in 1949 and a PhD from Catholic University in Washington, DC, in 1953.

The elder Smiley married young, fathering a daughter,
Marilyn, who was born in May 1945 before his first wife died. A few years later, he met
Adele Moreau, a Chicago girl who had married a military colonel and traveled with him as far afield as Panama before he, too, died suddenly in 1950. After a brief courtship, the two married and had three more children: Marion in July 1953, and Forbes and his twin sister, Susan, on April 13, 1956. By that time, Smiley had decided to leave the city and look for a small town close to his New England family roots.

He found it in
Bedford, New Hampshire, where he began work as a physicist for nearby defense contractor Sanders Associates. Today, Bedford is a tony bedroom community next door to the City of Manchester, with winding back roads filled with big brick houses and a commercial district along the highway teeming with upscale shops. Islanded in their midst, the historic district where Smiley grew up consists of a square mile of older houses and municipal buildings ranged around the iconic white bell tower of the town’s Presbyterian church (
Figure 3
).

The town was founded in 1750 by Scotch-Irish immigrants who planted hard-rock farms before expanding into gristmills and granite quarries. It hit its stride in the 1850s with the widespread planting of hops for making beer—briefly becoming the hops capital of New England. Another boom came a century later, in the 1950s, as a host of transplants came after World War II to work in jobs in Manchester’s burgeoning manufacturing and technology center, and the population tripled from two thousand to six thousand in a matter of decades.

One of the newcomers was Smiley’s father, who bought a white-and-pink farmhouse a half mile from the church in December 1958. The house was a classic New England farmhouse, combining two Greek Revival homes with an ell that has since been converted into a double garage. Behind it sprawled nearly two acres of rolling backyard with a swimming pool, some thickety woods, and a culvert on one side—a young boy’s perfect playground.

—

SMILEY ALWAYS DESCRIBED
his childhood as “idyllic.” Even as Bedford rapidly expanded, it remained in many ways the classic New England village. The town had virtually no industry and only a few stores. One of them, French’s, stood a mile from Smiley’s home at the town’s
main intersection and housed the town post office and general store, where residents stopped by every weekend to pick up gossip along with their mail and groceries. Major issues were settled in town meetings, in which each citizen got one vote. Social life centered around the Presbyterian church, the venue for Boy and Girl Scout meetings, weddings, parties, club meetings, and a nonsectarian kindergarten.

Smiley’s family life also centered around the church. His grandfather, who had moved with the family and occupied an attic apartment, served as an elder; his mother assisted with Sunday school; and Smiley himself was an altar boy. Smiley’s father, meanwhile, tended to be shy and reserved—the kind of person who retreated into his office for hours to read after work. But he was also patient and kind with his children, teaching his son about history and instructing him how to carve and whittle. Smiley’s father was an avid gardener and collected antique gardening books from England, which he eventually began buying and selling out of the back of a bookseller’s trade magazine,
AB Bookman’s Weekly.

Prone to be overweight, Smiley, too, was bookish as a child, spending long afternoons in the library and scouring flea markets for old things to repair. But Smiley was hardly a loner. Unlike his father, his mother was outgoing and gregarious, teaching Sunday School and serving as a Cub Scout den mother, and Smiley picked up on her example as well. After school and on weekends, he and his sisters attracted a group of neighborhood kids who came to the farmhouse to play in the rambling backyard and swim in the pool while his mother made sandwiches in the kitchen.

Even as Smiley was growing up, however, Bedford was changing. The town established a full-time police department in 1964, around the same time the main thoroughfare, Route 101, was relocated outside the town center. A strip of commercial development sprouted, including a Jordan Marsh department store in 1968 and the heralded opening of the Bedford Mall a year later, complete with a supermarket, department store, and cinema. Smiley listened as his father lamented the changes, nostalgic for the small town of his own youth.

Smiley’s father had always emphasized the importance of education while Smiley was growing up. He insisted on intelligent conversation at the dinner table and showed slides in the living room of countries he
visited for work. In the early 1960s, Smiley’s parents joined with several dozen like-minded families to found the
Derryfield School, a private school in nearby Manchester, in order to provide their children with a better education than the one they thought the public education system could provide. Smiley’s sister Marilyn started in the inaugural class in 1964, and Marion, Susan, and Forbes all followed in later years.

Situated on a curve of the Merrimack, it now looks like the quintessential New England prep school, with a sprawling campus of academic buildings, tennis courts, and sports fields. When first founded, though, it proudly called itself an “experimental” school, with a distinctly counterculture vibe. One of Smiley’s friends, Paul Statt, clearly remembered starting at the school when he and his family moved into the area in 1971. There were two types of students, he recalled: children of the children of the sixties, who grew their hair long and embraced their parents’ hippie mind-set, and clean-cut kids who had failed out of Exeter or Andover and retained their preppie mannerisms.

Forbes was neither. The first time Statt met him in English class, Smiley made an indelible impression. Heavyset and sporting a long ponytail like the hippies, he nevertheless dressed conservatively like the preppies. But what caught Statt’s attention most was a screwdriver that Smiley was absently but repeatedly throwing up in the air as he sat having a discussion in a circle with the rest of the group. The action seemed unique and at the same time so self-possessed that Statt immediately fell under his spell. Soon the two had become friends.

Statt came from an unhappy family and spent increasing amounts of time at the Smiley household, where he discovered that Smiley had a host of other talents as well. He could do magic tricks and knife tricks, including rapidly stabbing a knife between his outspread fingers without hurting himself. But he was especially articulate in his love of history and literature. While Smiley’s weight might have gotten him picked on at other schools, he was tremendously popular at Derryfield, known for a booming voice and wisecracking temperament. He sang baritone in the chorus and went out for chess club and drama club, playing Big Julie in
Guys and Dolls.
But his upright Presbyterianism also made him a natural arbiter of student disputes.