Lethal Legacy (45 page)

The combined forces of Commissioner Keith
Scully and District Attorney Paul Battaglia were enough to open the great doors
of the New York Public Library on Saturday evening at seven p.m.

Jill Gibson, obviously not pleased to be in the
dark about what had prompted the gathering of her senior curators and her own
police escort, stepped out of a patrol car as we approached the side door.

Uniformed cops had been stationed at all the
entrances for almost forty-eight hours now, as investigators continued to work
on processing the vast spaces within the sub-basements of the library.

“Excuse me, Alex?” Jill called out. “May I talk
with you a minute?”

“Whatcha got, Jill?” Mike said, stepping between
us.

“I’d like to ask Alex a few questions.”

Mike tapped my shoulder to keep me moving. “She’s
fresh out of answers, but we’re looking, Jill. We’re holding court in the map
division.”

The sergeant in charge moved us through the doors
of the old carriage entrance and down the twisting corridors until we could see
our way to Bea’s department at the farthest end of the main floor.

Curators from the various private collections were
seated at the trestle tables. Arents, Berg, Pforzheimer, and the rare books
division were represented. A dozen young cops, at Mike’s request, stood around
the room, ready to help.

Mike sat on the edge of one of the tables and
started to explain what he wanted the librarians to do.

“How fast can you get together a list of the
volumes donated to this institution by Jasper Hunt the Second?” Mike asked.

Jill Gibson didn’t wait to be acknowledged. “If
you’ll allow me to go to my office, I can print that out for you immediately.”

Mike looked toward one of the rookie cops at the
door and told him to take her there. Jill seemed shocked to be under guard in
her professional home.

One of the men spoke up before she left. “It’s not
that simple, Detective. Many of the Hunt gifts have been in and out of the
library over time. I think each of us, in our own collections, could be more helpful
than any master list.”

Jill’s lips clamped together.

“What do you mean?” Mike asked.

“Take World War Two, for example. You know the
windows in the reading room were entirely blacked out,” the man said. “There
were legitimate fears of an air raid, and decisions had to be made about the
safety of the most valuable books.”

“I get it.”

“The Gutenberg Bible, Washington’s Farewell
Address, the Medici
Aesops,
” he went on. “Things like these were
actually carried off-site for protection.”

“And some of the books that were taken away were
once the property of Jasper Hunt?” Mike asked. “Is there some confusion about
where they were housed after they were returned?”

“That, of course, Mr. Chapman. As well as the fact
that some of the finest volumes simply never came back to us.”

“Because the Hunts kept them?”

The man looked to Jill Gibson before he answered,
aware that he was crossing a line. “That’s my understanding. Jasper Hunt Jr.,
as well as several trustees, decided, rather quietly, it might be a good time
to reclaim some of the things they’d given away.”

“Don’t wait around, Jill,” Mike said. “Something
you already knew, apparently, and didn’t feel the need to tell me. Go ahead and
get me your list anyway.”

Then he turned to Dutton. “You’re up, Bea. Tell
them what you need.”

She addressed her colleagues, apologized for not
being able to say exactly what we were after, and asked them to brainstorm for
any insights that went beyond card catalogs, computer lists, and digitization.

“Let’s talk about the Napoleonic
Description de
l’Égypte
,” Bea said.

She was starting with the most obvious hiding
place—the one in which Prince Albert of Monaco had found the copy that Jasper
Hunt Jr. purchased in 1905. It was logical that Hunt might have chosen to mimic
the Grimaldis. Talbot had told us the day before that his father—probably
unknowingly—had given a set of the twenty-volume classic to the library just
two decades ago.

“Orientalia,” one of the men said. “I believe we
have three sets of the Napoleonic expedition, all in Orientalia.”

“You know that’s not politically correct,” the
older woman beside him joked. “It’s the Asian and Middle East department now.”

“Yeah. Rugs are the only things left you can call
Oriental,” Mike said. “People—and I guess books—are Asian.”

I could tell he liked his new team. They were
smart and sincere, and seemed to love the rare objects in their care.

“Any of you seen them, these books?”

A man in a madras plaid shirt, with a crew-neck
sweater tied around his shoulders, raised his hand. “I’m Bruce. Bruce Havens. I
used to work in that department. The Napoleonic expedition volumes have been
completely digitized. You can view the entire thing online, without leaving
home. The originals are locked away. Only scholars with a really good reason to
see them can get access under a curator’s supervision.”

“Do you know the three copies, Bruce?”

“Let’s say I’ve seen them, Bea. Is that what you
mean?”

“Provenance, Bruce. What’s their provenance?”

“Whew. It’s a tough issue in that particular
collection. Much of what came in was without designation.”

Bea turned to us to explain. “Bruce means a lot of
the photographs and foreign-language volumes were—what’s a polite
word?—pilfered by explorers during their travels.”

“Sort of like the Elgin Marbles?” Mike asked.

“You got it,” Bea said to him. “Bruce, do you know
the donors of the three Egyptian sets?”

“The prize of the three was a Lenox endowment. An
absolutely pristine set of books, in a contemporary French speckled calf, board
edges with gilt roll tool. Exquisite.”

“Under lock and key now?”

“Yes, it is. I know you’re interested in whether
any of them are Hunt acquisitions,” Bruce said, “but I simply don’t know.”

“Any of them submitted to the conservators for
repair?” I asked.

“Possibly, but not on my watch. They were actually
shelved in the stacks.”

Mike heard the word “stacks” and stood up,
signaling to one of the cops. “This gentleman’s going to take you downstairs to
look for something. Stay with him.”

“I wouldn’t have access, Detective.”

“Why not?”

“In each department, there are cages—metal cages,”
Bruce said. “Sort of wire mesh, where the rare books are locked.”

“Who’s got the keys?” Mike asked.

Bea answered. “We each have control of our own
section. The front office has all the masters.”

Mercer walked to the door. “I’ll take them to Jill
Gibson and make sure she gives up the key. You keep at it with Bea.”

“What’s next?” Mike asked her.

“The Most Noble and Famous Travels of Marco
Polo,”
Bea said. “How many different versions of
that would you think we have?”

“Jill will know,” one of the men said.

“Forget Jill.” Bea was on a tear.

The older woman spoke. “We’ve got the Elizabethan
translation by John Frampton in the Berg Collection. It was an Astor gift,” she
said. “Not the Hunts’.”

“I know,” Bea said. “I’ve got a version with large
folding maps, but it came to us recently out of Lord Wardington’s collection.”

I recognized Wardington’s name. He had been a
mentor to Alger Herrick.

“There must be half a dozen of those spread
around,” another man said.

“You.” Mike pointed at him as he spoke. “Take two
cops and scout them out. Any copies you find come right back to this room
before anyone cracks the cover, okay?”

Bea was calling on the remaining curators. “Think
Hunt, ladies and gents. And then give me regions of the world. Japan, China,
Africa, America—North and South.”

“I’ve got a huge box that Jasper Hunt donated,” a
young woman said. “Erotic color prints of the Ming period. Sort of Chinese sex
life from Han to Ch’ing.”

“We’ll take it,” Bea said.

“You got pornography here?” Mike asked.

“Art, Mr. Chapman,” Bea answered with a laugh.
“Only the French library system has the backbone to exhibit the stuff, if that
isn’t true to type. The rest of us just keep it hidden. Handwritten manuscripts
by the Marquis de Sade, English ‘flagellation novels,’ Parisian police reports
about nineteenth-century brothels, and shelves full of Japanese prints and
Chinese illustrations. Some of them courtesy of Jasper Hunt.”

“Sounds like the Jasper Hunt who collected
photographs of Alice Liddell,” I said.

“The Slavic and Baltic Collection has an
elephant-folio chromolithographed account of the coronation ceremonies of
Alexander the Second, the Tsar Liberator,” another voice chimed in, catching
Bea Dutton’s enthusiasm for her task.

Mike paired the young man with a cop, and they
were off to search.

“We’ve got several editions of the Edward Curtis
American Indian photographs that are in folio form in our rare-books division,”
a man said, standing and ready to move.

“You want Americana, Detective, we should give
those a shot.”

“Tell me more.”

“Curtis took more than two thousand photographs of
native Americans between 1907 and 1930 in an effort to document their lives.
Tried to sell five hundred sets but went bankrupt before he could.”

“Are they Hunt connected?”

“The set I know was donated by J. P. Morgan. That
usually made Hunt try to find something as good, or more elegantly bound. I’d
like to look.”

“Go for it.”

Mike, Bea, and I were now alone in the room with a
few of the officers still waiting to be assigned to a task. I imagined the
library coming alive at night, just like in Jane Eliot’s stories, with curators
and cops unlocking the cages and exploring the deep recesses of storage areas
and stacks.

“I want you to see my thinking,” Bea said,
unfolding and respreading the copy of the 1507 map on one of the trestle
tables. “Track these books and drawings as they report back to us.

“It’s going to be a long night, guys, but maybe we
can match some of these panels to the parts of the world they represent.” She
cleaned the lenses of her glasses on the hem of her sweater, then took a red
marker from her pocket and numbered each of the map sections from one to
twelve, starting in the top left corner. “Keep an eye on me, Mike. I’ve got
some atlases to search, too.”

“I’d trust you with my firstborn, Bea. Need any
help?”

“Come into my cage, if you don’t mind.”

We walked through the room and behind the
reference desk, past Bea’s personal work area. She removed a key chain from her
pants pocket and shuffled through the assortment until she found the one that
opened the gate to a space that reminded me of safe-deposit vaults.

“These are where the oldest maps are stored,” she
said, weaving between chest-high rows of long metal filing cabinets with large
horizontal drawers. “The loose ones, of course.”

Farther back, out of sight from the front desk,
was shelf after shelf of old books, all oversized and many of them splendidly
decorated.

“All the great cartographers are represented
here,” she said. “Mercator, Ortelius, Blaeu, Seller.”

“Are you looking for something in particular?”
Mike asked.

“One of my favorite map-meisters, Detective.
Claudius Ptolemaeus.”

“I know. I know all about Ptolemy,” Mike said,
looking at the shelves above Bea’s head. “First guy to give us a mathematical
picture of the universe. AD 150, right?”

He was quoting the information he had learned from
Alger Herrick.

“You’re a quick study, Mike.”

His head was moving from side to side as he
scanned the shelves. “The guy is everywhere. What do you want?”

“Once the printing press was invented, illustrated
books of every kind became available. Ptolemy’s work was translated from the
Greek text into all the European languages. The Romans tried to outdo the
Florentines, Strassburg’s scholars thought they could color the maps more
beautifully than in Ulm. Vicenza, Basel, Venice, Amsterdam—all over the
continent printers were racing to get these maps in the hands of the rich and
the royal. First, second, third editions. It may seem like a lot of them to
you, but each volume in its own way is quite rare.”

“Any of these come from Jasper Hunt’s collection?”
I asked.

“Sore point, Alexandra,” Bea said.

“Why?”

“There it is, Mike. You mind lifting it down?” Bea
had spotted the volume she wanted. “It’s a Strassburg Ptolemy. 1513.”

He handed her the large book, and she caressed it
as she carried it to her desktop. “Contemporary Nuremberg binding of
blind-stamped calf over wooden boards.”