The Book of Air and Shadows (3 page)

He didn’t like this part either. Surely not, he said. What ever happened to finders keepers? What about possession being nine-tenths of the law?

To which I answered that these saws were true enough, but also that should he publish or perform such a work he should be prepared to have the Crown come after him, and if he published or performed in the U.S., he might have a hard time defending his copyright from outright piracy; and now would he care to leave the hypothetical and tell me what was going on?

I said this in a manner that suggested I was about to wish him good day were he not prepared to be more forthcoming. He considered the request for some time in silence, and I observed that sweat beads had accumulated on his forehead and upper lip, although it was cool in my office. At the time I thought he might be ill. It did not occur to me that he was badly frightened.

I have been in this business long enough to tell when a client is being frank and when not, and Professor Bulstrode was clearly in the latter class. He said he had come into possession (that’s a phrase that always raises my hackles) of documentary evidence, a manuscript from the seventeenth century, a personal letter from a man named Richard Bracegirdle to his wife. He thought this manuscript was genuine, and that it revealed the existence of a certain literary Work, of enormous potential
import to scholarship, the existence of which had never been suspected. This manuscript alone was enough to launch a field of study, but to have The Work itself…

When he said The Work, I heard the capital letters and so I include them here.

What is The Work? I asked.

Here he demurred, asking instead about the protocols of confidentiality between lawyer and client. I explained that our normal retainer was twenty-five hundred dollars and that once his check was in my hands no power on earth could extract the substance of any conversation the two of us might have, save only an admission that he was about to commit a felony. With that, he drew out a leather-covered checkbook, wrote out the check, and handed it over. Then he asked me if we had a safe on the premises. I said we had locked, armored, fireproof files. Not good enough. I said we had an arrangement with the Citibank downstairs, a large safe-deposit box. He opened his briefcase and handed me a heavily taped manila envelope. Would I secure this for him, temporarily?

There’s that engine noise again.

T
HE
B
RACEGIRDLE
L
ETTER
(1)

O
n the evening of the little fire, the revelatory fire that changed his life, Albert Crosetti was working in the basement as usual, and so was the first one to detect it. He was there because Sidney Glaser Rare Books kept its computer in the basement. Mr. Glaser did not like the devices and resented that they were now essential to earning a living in the book trade. He preferred to proffer his treasures by hand, in a well-lit, paneled, carpeted room like the showroom in his shop. But some years ago, when in the market for a bookshop clerk, he had accepted the current reality and enquired of all candidates whether they knew enough about computers to set up and maintain a Web-based catalog, and he had hired the first nonsmoking person answering in the affirmative. This was Albert Crosetti, then age twenty-four. Crosetti came from Queens, and still lived there in a brick bungalow in Ozone Park, with his mother. She was a retired research librarian and widow, with whom he enjoyed a relationship minimally fraught with Freudian katzenjammer. Crosetti wished someday to make films and was saving up money to go to the famous film
school at New York University. He was a graduate of Queens College and had started working for Glaser within a month of receiving his diploma. He liked his job; the hours were regular, the pay fair, and while Glaser could be something of a nut when it came to antique books, the old man knew he had a good thing in Crosetti and let him handle the mail-order business and its electronic impedimenta almost without supervision.

His workspace consisted of a tiny alcove whose walls were shelves and glass cabinets and crates, all packed with books. Here he updated the online catalog, working from lists drawn by Mr. Glaser’s fountain pen in the beautiful penmanship of bygone days. He also kept the inventory current and accessed the various systems whereby requests for items were transmitted from bibliophiles around the world, printing these off for the proprietor’s later attention. Beyond that, his duties included unpacking and shipping books and other factotum work associated with the trade. He rarely ventured upstairs to the showroom, where quiet, well-dressed people handled old volumes with the care and tenderness due newborn babes.

The only unpleasant aspect of this work was the smell, compounded of old books, mice, the poisons laid to keep these at bay, drains, heated paint, and beneath all—an olfactory bass note—the stink of frying grease. This last came from next door, an establishment called the Aegean, a joint typical of midtown New York, purveying danish pastries, toast, eggs, and weak coffee in the morning, and sandwiches, fried substances, and fizzy drinks for a couple of hours around noon. It was somewhat past that hour just now, on a fine July day, and Crosetti was wondering whether he should stop tweaking the Web site and take a lunch break or just phone and have the kid bring over a sandwich.

Or he could skip lunch. He often thought that he was probably taking in from the Aegean sufficient calories through his lungs, mainly fat. Crosetti was not an exerciser, and he enjoyed his mother’s cooking: a bit of a spare tire hung around his waist, a face more jowly than he liked stared back at him from the mirror when he shaved. He considered asking the upstairs clerk to join him, assuming that Carolyn Rolly lived upon substances grosser than air scented by old books. She occasionally
ate with Glaser, he knew; they would close up the upstairs and go out, leaving Crosetti laboring below. He allowed this fantasy a brief bubble of life, then shrugged it away. Rolly was a book person, and he was, at bottom, not, even though he had learned a good deal about the book business (prices and conditions and so on) as part of his work with the computer. She was not a beauty by the prevailing standards of meat magazines or movies, being tall enough but somewhat more solidly built than was the current fashion. Crosetti had read somewhere about women who looked better out of clothes than in them, and he thought Rolly was one of these. Clothed, certainly, she was undistinguished: she wore black like everyone else.

But there was something about her that drew the eye. The shiny, smooth dark hair hung neck length, held away from her face with a silver clasp. The nose was sharp and seemed to have more than the usual number of component bones making odd little corrugations all over it. Her lips were unfashionably thin and pale, and when she spoke you could see that her teeth were odd too, the incisors especially long and dangerous looking. Her eyes were ridiculously blue, like (duh!) the sky in summer with, he thought, unnaturally tiny pupils. If not a book person, Crosetti was still a reader, his tastes in novels running largely to fantasy and science fiction, and sometimes he entertained the notion that Ms. Rolly was a vampire: it would explain the dark clothes, the physical presence, those teeth—although a vampire who came out in the day.

Perhaps he would invite her to lunch and ask her. It would be a conversation starter; he could not imagine what else they might have to talk about. She had been working for the shop when Crosetti started there, and over the course of several years they had yet to share more than a few formal sentences at a time. She came to work on a bicycle, which suggested that she lived more or less in the neighborhood. The neighborhood being Murray Hill, this meant she had money, because one could not afford to live locally on what Glaser paid. In Crosetti’s experience, young, attractive, and wealthy Manhattan women did not yearn for semihefty Italian guys who lived with their mothers in Queens. Rolly might be an exception, though; one never could tell…

Crosetti was working on a particularly tricky bit of hypertext markup language at the same time as he was thinking these amusing thoughts. He was thinking about Rolly’s eyes, the element of the electric in her glance that made him wish for more eye contact than he ordinarily got. His mind was so thoroughly occupied with those eyes and the computer work that it took a good while before he noticed that the frying smell had waxed unusually strong, was more than a mere odor, was actual smoke. He rose, coughing a little now, and made his way to the back of the basement so that he faced the party wall that divided the bookshop basement from that of the restaurant. The smoke was thicker here, he could actually see the sooty tendrils creeping from cracks in the old brick. And the wall was warm under his hand when he touched it.

Quickly he clattered up the wooden stairs to the shop proper—deserted, and the sign with its paper back-at clock hung in the door, for it was lunchtime, and Glaser had obviously taken his protégée for a bite. He went out to the street, where he discovered a small crowd milling around the entrance to the Aegean, from the door of which issued plumes of greasy gray smoke. Crosetti asked one of the crowd what was going on. Some kind of fire, the man said, in the kitchen. Now he heard sirens. A police car rolled up and the officers started to clear people away. Crosetti darted back into the shop and down the stairs again. The smoke had become dense, choking, bearing a nauseating tang of ancient grease. Crosetti pulled his backup CD from the computer and then ran upstairs, directly to the locked case where the most valuable items were kept. Glaser had the key, of course, and after a brief hesitation Crosetti kicked in the glass. The first thing he grabbed was the McKenney and Hall
History of the Indian Tribes of North America
, in three folio volumes, the prize of the establishment. Out of the case, onto a table. On top of that the three-volume
Pride and Prejudice
first edition, and then the
Leaves of Grass
, another prime first, giving him a short stack worth a quarter of a million retail. He picked these up, made for the door, halted, and uttered a despairing curse as he recalled that the new Churchill
Voyages
was still downstairs. He hung there in an agony of indecision—rescue these in hand or go down for the
Voyages
?

No, he had to go down again. He put the books back on the table, but as he reached the head of the basement stairs, a heavy hand grabbed the back of his jacket and demanded to know where the fuck he thought he was going. It was a big fireman in a smoke mask, who was apparently also not a book person, although he did let Crosetti come out with the three precious titles from the case. The young clerk was standing on the sidewalk outside the security line the cops had established, gasping, filthy, clutching these to his breast when Glaser and Rolly arrived. Glaser took in what his clerk was holding and asked, “What about the Dickens?”

He meant the 1902 edition with extra watercolor illustrations by Kyd and Green. Sixty volumes. Crosetti said he was sorry. Glaser tried to push past a pair of cops, who stopped him, grabbed him, yelled angry words, which Glaser returned.

Looking up at Crosetti, Rolly asked, “Did you manage to get the Churchill out of the basement?”

“No. I was going to, but they wouldn’t let me.” He explained about the big fireman.

She sniffed the air. “Everything in there is going to smell like bad french fries. But you saved the
Indian Tribes
at least.”

“And Jane and Walt.”

“Yes, them too. Sidney doesn’t think you know anything about books.”

“Just what they cost,” he said.

“Yes. Tell me, if that firefighter hadn’t shown up, would you have dashed into the flames to save the
Voyages
?”

“There weren’t any flames,” he said modestly, “or hardly any.” She gave him the first smile that ever she gave him, the toothed grin of a young wolf.

The next day
they took stock and discovered that, aside from some smoke damage, and the smell, the showroom and its contents were unharmed. It turned out that in the kitchen of the restaurant next door was
a hole in the floor, and into this hole over the years the cooks had poured odd lots of grease when the main grease barrel was full or when they were too pressed or lazy to carry the stuff to where it belonged. This had pooled down in the basement, between the walls, and somehow ignited. The firefighters had smashed through the party wall in their efforts to halt the burning, and as a result much of what had occupied the bookstore’s basement was wrecked by heat, collapsed brickwork, or water. The packing case containing the six volumes of Awnsham and John Churchill’s
Collection of Voyages and Travels
(1732 edition) had unfortunately taken the brunt of the wall’s collapse. These volumes now lay upon a worktable amid the ruins, around which table stood Mr. Glaser, Crosetti, and Rolly, like cops examining a murder victim, or rather the two young people were like cops—Mr. Glaser was like the victim’s mom. Tenderly he ran his fingers over the crushed, soaked, and blackened full-calf cover of volume one.

“I don’t know,” he said in a little creaky voice, “I don’t know if it’s even worth the effort. What a colossal loss!”

“Wasn’t it insured?” asked Crosetti. They both stared at him in distaste.

“Of course it was insured,” Glaser replied tartly. “That’s hardly the point. This is probably the finest set of the Churchill 1732 in the world. Or was. It was in the library of one of the minor Godolphins, probably untouched and unread from the time it was delivered until the library was broken up at the death of the last heir in 1965. Then it belonged to a Spanish industrialist for nearly forty years and then I purchased it at auction last month. It was perfect, not a trace of wear or foxing or…oh, well. Impossible to recover. They’ll have to be broken for the maps and illustrations.”

“Oh, no!” exclaimed Rolly. “Surely they can be restored.”

Glaser peered at her over his thick half-glasses. “No, it simply doesn’t make economic sense, when you calculate what restoration would cost and what we might realize from a rebound and doctored set.” He paused, cleared his throat: “No, we’ll have to break them, I’m afraid.” This in the tone of an oncologist saying “stage four melanoma.”

Glaser issued an immense sigh and waved his hands weakly, as if chasing gnats.

“Caro, I’ll leave it in your hands; do it quickly before the mold starts.” He shuffled away to his private office.

“He wants you to break the volumes?” Crosetti asked.

“It’s not a complex task. But we have to dry the set out,” she replied, a distracted look on her face. “Look, the fact is I’m going to need some help.” She seemed to notice him again, and an appealing expression came to her face, a look he rather liked. He mimed searching for someone behind him and said, “Oh, not me! Man, I failed finger painting. I never once colored completely inside the lines.”

“No, this involves handling paper towels. The drying operation has to go on all day and night, maybe for days.”

“What about our jobs?”

She gestured broadly to the environs. “This place’ll be closed for a month while they fix it up, and you can run the mail-order operation from any computer, can’t you?”

“I guess. Where are you going to work out of?”

“My place. I have a good deal of space. Let’s go.” She hoisted two of the folio volumes onto her hip.

“You mean now?”

“Of course. You heard what Glaser said: the faster we begin, the less damage from the damp. Get the rest of them. We’ll wrap them in paper for the trip.”

“Where do you live?” he asked, lifting the ruined volumes up against his chest.

“In Red Hook.” She was already at the shipping desk, stripping brown paper from a large roll.

“You come from Red Hook on a bicycle?” Crosetti had never been to Red Hook, a region on the southeastern coast of Brooklyn behind what used to be the Brooklyn docks. There are no subway stops in Red Hook, because until the shipping industry moved to New Jersey, everyone in the area worked longshore jobs and walked to work, nor was there any reason for outsiders to go there, unless they wanted their heads busted.

“No, of course not,” she replied as she wrapped volume six. “I bike over to the river and take the water taxi from the Thirty-fourth Street pier.”

“I thought that was real expensive.”

“It is, but my rent is cheap. You should put those in plastic.” Crosetti looked at the book he was holding. It had oozed a sooty liquor down the front of his tan trousers. For the first time he regretted not dressing entirely in black, like so many of his hipper peers; or like Carolyn. She excused herself and went upstairs, leaving him to wrap the rest of the volumes.