Lethal Legacy (22 page)

Mercer was walking the length of the room, bending
down to check beneath the desktops, examining the volumes along the wall.

Yuri followed behind him like a shorter, stubby
shadow, protecting his turf.

At the far corner of the room there was a narrow
opening.

“Where does that lead to?” Mercer asked.

“Goes nowhere. Is attic. Is only air handlers for
the building,” Yuri said.

“Is there an exit up there?”

“Is nothing, I told you.”

Jill Gibson waved them off. “Nothing there. No one
except engineering’s allowed in the attic. The public doesn’t have access.”

“But is there an exit from the library?” Mercer
asked.

Yuri was beginning to stutter. He had a burly
build, and he lurched forward, swinging his thick arms as he walked. “You—you
want see? Is just roof.”

Mercer stepped aside as Yuri turned the corner,
and the three of us followed. A small caged elevator was the only thing in the
small dark space behind the reading room.

We all fit in it, tightly crunched together.

It was a quick ride—maybe fifteen seconds—up to
the attic, literally, to the rafters below the library roof.

“Careful, miss,” Yuri said, pointing to the
catwalk. “No slip.”

The space was remarkably clean and open, with
giant metal pipes that circulated fresh air throughout the building.

I held on to the wooden railing as Yuri led us
along the open walkway to a narrow ladder, and above it, a small hatch. Mercer
climbed up behind him and stepped outside for a few seconds before rejoining
us.

“Where does it go?” Mike asked.

“No egress to the street. Kind of a dead end,”
Jill said. “It’s an interior courtyard, and it’s covered.”

“What if the guy was a jumper?”

“I’m afraid he’d go right through the glass roof
directly below. You didn’t want to take my word for it, but that hatch is above
the Bartos Forum. That’s the part of the library covered entirely in glass, to
replicate the old Crystal Palace. Have you had enough, gentlemen?”

Jill seemed anxious to move us out of this space.
She started along the catwalk, leading us back to the elevator.

“What are those things?” Mike asked, pointing at
two huge cylindrical tanks.

I knew he was as surprised as I that the attic was
so exposed, not likely to have been used to conceal a body.

“Water tanks, Mike. More than a century old.
Cork-insulated barrels that sit right on top of the world’s largest plaster
ceiling, with the library’s entire water supply running through them,” Jill
said, pausing to look over at the giant casks. “Fire and water, Detective, are
the two things a librarian has most to fear.”

Mike steadied himself on the beam and crouched
down, looking under the barrels to make certain nothing was behind them.

“Hold on, folks,” he said, shimmying himself
forward till his head and shoulders disappeared beneath one of the water tanks.
“You more afraid of fire and water than dead bodies in your belfry?”

We all stopped in a line behind Jill Gibson.
“What?” she asked in a shrill voice.

“You’re moving too fast for me, lady,” Mike said.
“I just wanted to get your attention. There’s no body in here, but it looks
like a nice pile of overdue library books. Might get yourself a healthy fine
paid, if you come across the thief.”

Mike worked himself back out from underneath the
tank, and Yuri scrambled to help him up on his feet.

“Ms. Gibson, I swear,” Yuri said. “Was here
yesterday, eleven o’clock in the morning. Once every twenty-four hours, check
under tank for leaks. No leaks. Was nothing there. Myself did it. Myself.”

“We’ll discuss that later, Yuri. Be still.” Jill
wasn’t interested in his protestations. She stepped off the catwalk and I
followed her over to where Mike had moved the small pile of books. “May I have
them, please?”

“I think they’re ours for the time being,” Mike
said, removing gloves from his pants pocket before he lifted the cover of the
first slim volume. “
Tamerlane,
1827. Edgar Allan Poe.”

“One of thirteen existing copies in the world,
Detective. Fifty printed—his first published poem. A treasure, to say the
least.”

“From…?”

“It was kept in a vault in the Berg Collection.
That’s on the second floor, Mike. I’ll show you where.”

“Walt Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass,
1860,”
Mike said. “You caught a break here. It’s only a third edition.”

“That particular copy has actually got greater
value than the firsts,” Jill said, nervously poised over Mike’s shoulder. “It’s
called the Blue Book. Whitman kept it at his desk while he worked as a clerk at
the Department of the Interior, constantly making edits in it. The secretary
found it and thought it so obscene that Whitman was fired on the spot.”

The four books beneath that were larger. Three
were brilliantly colored illuminated manuscripts of Petrarch’s poems, Horace’s
works, and Aesop’s fables, all with spectacular calligraphy done on ancient
vellum. Mike read the titles aloud to us, including the fourth one, which was
an archive of the paintings of Asher Durand.

Jill Gibson exhaled. “That will raise some board
eyebrows.”

“Why’s that?” Mercer asked.

“Durand was a nineteenth-century artist,” she
said. “His work helped define the Hudson River School. And it’s his great
painting—
Kindred Spirits
—which was bequeathed to us and which we sold
for a fortune in 2005.”

“Over the heated objection of many of your
trustees,” I said.

“That’s putting it mildly.”

“Can you give us a breakdown later of who was for
and against it?” Mercer said.

“Certainly.”

Mike lifted the oversize folio that had been at
the bottom of the pile. “John James Audubon,
Birds of America,
volume
one.”

“Heads will roll,” Jill said. “That’s from the
Hunt Collection—one of its jewels—and worth a king’s ransom today. If Jasper
gets word that we haven’t had the ability to protect the best things he’s given
us, we stand to lose all the rest.”

Mike gently lifted the cover. “Talk about the
emperor’s new clothes. These birds either flew the coop, Coop, or somebody beat
us to them.”

He held the book up for us to see inside, and it
was clear that pages had been sliced out of it. Only blank parchment was left
between the ends of the fine leather bindings.

As Mike stood up with the heavy tome in his arms,
he flipped through the few remaining sheets in it. He turned the last page, and
a two-foot-long fragment of a larger antique map—not bound into the old
book—slipped out and fluttered to the floor.

Jill reached down for it as Mike yelled out,
“Don’t touch it.”

I kneeled beside her and looked at the detailed
engraving: a piece of the Asian continent, and the figure of a man standing
beside a map of the world. The cartouche over his head proclaimed him to be
Amerigo Vespucci.

“What’s he got to do with birds?” Mike asked.

“Nothing at all,” Jill said, steadying herself
with one hand on the floor, the other clasped to her chest. “What you may be
looking at is a piece of the most valuable map ever made, in a little village
in France, in 1507.”

“How valuable is it? Worth enough to kill for?” he
said, trying to make out the detail in the woodcut engraving.

“If all twelve sections of this puzzle actually do
exist, there’s only one other map like it in the world. The price tag on it
would be close to twenty million dollars.”

“That’s a staggering number,” I said. “Maybe
enough to turn Tina Barr into a thief.”

“I don’t know why she wouldn’t have been tempted
by it,” Jill Gibson said. “Half the members of my board would sell their souls
to own this map.”

NINETEEN

“If you’re looking for the Holy Grail of rare
maps,” the petite librarian said to us, grinning as she gazed at the woodcut
that Mike had placed on the table in front of her, “this is as good as it
gets.”

Bea Dutton was in charge of the map division of
the library, home to more than half a million of them and more than twenty
thousand atlases and books about cartography. Jill had called her to come in to
the office early, moments after Mike made his find, and she appeared within the
hour.

“Did you know this map was missing?” Mike asked.

“What do you mean?” Bea said. Her white cotton
gloves—a tool of her trade—looked more civilized than Mike’s plastic ones. She
was short and slight, and leaned her elbows on the long trestle table to get a
good look at her subject.

“I’m sure you must know exactly when something as
precious as this disappeared from your collection.”

“You’ve made a bad assumption, Detective. We’ve
never had a map like this under our roof. I can’t even imagine what this
portion of it was doing here. I’ve been waiting a professional lifetime to see
if another one of these treasures came to market. The only known original in
the world is in the Library of Congress. Didn’t Jill tell you?”

“This is your bailiwick, Bea,” Jill said. “I’ve
seen it on your wish list but really didn’t know whether or not we owned any of
the individual panels.”

“Let me explain what you’ve found here,” Bea said,
inviting Mercer, Mike, and me to sit around the table. We were on the first
floor of the library, in an elegant room with dark wood paneling, three long
tables, and copies of antiquarian maps of all varieties mounted in gilded
frames along its walls. Only the coat of arms of the City of New York on each
pedestal of the tables betrayed that we weren’t being entertained in a fancy
British manor home. “That is, if I can take my eyes off it. You’re looking at
one of the pieces of what many people call America’s birth certificate.”

Mercer looked closely at the ancient drawing. “How
so?”

“This panel is part of a map that was the very
first document in the world on which the word ‘America’ appears as the name for
a body of land in the Western Hemisphere.”

Mike bent forward to look for the notation.

“Not on this particular fragment, Mike. Remember,
there are twelve pieces of this beauty, each the same size as this. Once joined
together, the map is four feet tall by eight feet wide. It’s quite an unusual
masterpiece.”

“Who created it?” I asked. “What made it so
special?”

“The primary author was Martin Waldseemüller, a
German cleric and cartographer who spent his life in Saint-Dié, France, part of
a small intellectual circle there. Until this was published in 1507, the
European body of knowledge about the world’s geography was entirely based on
the second-century work of Ptolemy. This map,” Bea said, tapping her gloved
finger on the table, “radically changed the worldview.”

“In what way?” Mike asked.

“Think of it, Detective. The Spanish and
Portuguese kept returning to Europe at the end of the fifteenth century with
dramatic news of explorations down the African coast and across the Atlantic,
where no Europeans had ever been before. To us, this map looks incredibly
accurate, but to his contemporaries, Martin’s map ignited a great deal of
debate. It presented a revolutionary vision of the world.”

“Why?”

“This was the first document ever created that
depicted a Western Hemisphere, standing alone between two oceans, the first to
represent the Pacific as a separate body of water, and the first to give the
new world its own name: ‘America.’ In those times, they were completely radical
ideas.”

Mercer’s huge frame was bent over the table as he
examined the fine print in the woodcut. “Used to be, according to Ptolemy, the
Atlantic stretched from Europe and Asia right over to Japan, Cathay, and India,
with a little bit of terra incognita along the way.”

“Exactly,” Bea said.

“What about Columbus?” Mike asked. “He was over
here before Vespucci. How come he didn’t get the whole caboodle named for
Christoforo instead of Amerigo?”