The Book of Air and Shadows (4 page)

When this had been done, the two of them took off east, with their burden stuffed into the wire panniers of Rolly’s bike, a heavy, worn vehicle of the type favored by food delivery personnel or, some years ago, by the Vietcong. His few attempts to make conversation being greeted by short answers, he fell silent; we’re not on a date, bub, seemed to be the message. On the other hand, it was a fairly pleasant day, in the low eighties, the humidity somewhat less than tropical, and being paid to stroll across town with even a silent Carolyn Rolly beat the hell out of doing inventory in a grease-smelling basement. Crosetti looked hopefully ahead to what might occur in the woman’s apartment.

Crosetti had never been on a water taxi. He found traveling on one greatly superior to a subway journey. Rolly secured her bike to the rails at the front of the craft and stood by it, and he stood by her, with his hand on the same rail. The other people on the boat seemed to be tourists.

“Are you all right?” Rolly asked him as they bounced down the middle of the East River.

“Of course. I’m an old sailor. I spent half my life when I was a kid out on Sheepshead Bay fishing in crummy little rental boats. Would you like me to hold you out over the prow like Kate Winslet on the
Titanic
?”

She gave him one of her formal deadpan looks and turned forward again. Definitely not a date.

Carolyn Rolly lived on the second floor of a Civil War–era warehouse made of blackened brick, on the corner of Van Brunt and Coffey streets. Crosetti held the folios while she hauled her bicycle up the dark, splintery
stairs. There was a heavy smell in the air he could not identify, sweetish and chemical at the same time. The door to her apartment was thick wood strapped with iron, painted battleship gray.

Inside was a loft, and not the kind millionaires move into in SoHo. It was a room around sixty by thirty feet in area, with dark-stained wood-planked floors, from which there rose at intervals cast iron columns reaching to the gray stamped-tin ceiling high above. The walls were red brick, edged roughly with crumbling, filthy mortar. The room was oriented east-west, and light flooded in from tall dirty windows on either end, some of whose panes had been replaced by squares of plywood or grayish, tattered plastic sheeting.

Rolly leaned her bike against a wall by the door, walked toward the window, and placed one of the folio packages on a long table. Crosetti followed, looking about curiously for some door or hallway that led to the living quarters. Rolly was already unwrapping a book. Coming closer, Crosetti observed that the table was handmade, its top composed of many short boards laminated edge-on and sanded to a satiny finish. The six stout legs were constructed of what looked like yellow fiberglass. He placed the rest of the books down on it. It felt as solid as a marble plinth and had the simple elegance of the sort of thing you saw in the design showrooms.

She unwrapped the folios and lined them up on the table. Even he could see that two of the volumes had sustained irreparable damage to their covers.

“Nice place,” Crosetti said, when it became clear that Rolly was not about to start a conversation, or offer tea or a beer. No response. Her head was bent down over the ravaged cover of volume one.

“What’s that smell?” he asked.

“Mainly malt. There was a brewery here for about a century and then they stored chemicals.”

“Mind if I look around?”

Rolly answered this with “There’s a big package of paper towels on those shelves on the south wall. Bring it over here.”

Crosetti took his time and made a slow circuit around the huge
room. In one corner he found stacks of wooden pallets, dozens of them, and also stacks of boards resulting from their disassembly. The south wall was almost entirely occupied with shelving and cabinets constructed from this wood, sanded smooth, stained, and varnished. The shelving was packed with books, all hard-covered, most with dust jackets, some with plastic covers. He looked in vain for any personal items, framed photos, souvenirs.

The work surfaces in the kitchen (which consisted of a double hot plate, a tiny microwave oven, and a small, chipped porcelain sink) were made of the same edge-on, tightly laminated planking as the big worktable, but coated thickly with amber-colored resin. Along the east wall he found a pallet of pallets, with a futon neatly rolled up on it and a table made from a cable spool and two of the sort of chairs one finds on trash heaps, all competently restored and painted cream. A chair for her and one for a visitor? Spoke to a social life and he wondered who. In the southeast corner an enclosure had been built, also out of pallet wood, within which he assumed was her toilet. Against this leaned a large battered wardrobe, hidden from the rest of the room by a folding screen of laquered wood and decoupaged paper. Interesting: she lived alone but had rigged a privacy screen. Spoke to sexual activity.

He was about to take a peek behind this screen when Rolly called out testily. He found the six-pack of paper towels and rejoined her. Between every ten pages in the damp volumes a pair of paper towels had to be interleaved, and these towels had to be changed every hour. While they dried, the wet volumes were laid flat on the worktable and weighted down with cloth-covered steel plates to prevent swelling.

“What I don’t get,” said Crosetti when the books were all interleaved and weighted, “is why you’re drying the whole of the set if you’re just going to break them for the maps and illustrations. Why not just pull the good stuff and junk the rest?”

“Because it’s the right way to do it,” said Rolly after a brief hesitation. “The plates would curl if you pulled them wet.”

“I see,” he said, not seeing at all, seeing the young woman in an entirely new and not very attractive light. He sat on a stool and studied
her profile. “So…this is kind of interesting,” he said. “Watching books dry. I don’t think I ever did it before. Maybe you could point out the highlights, so I don’t miss anything.”

He grinned at her and was rewarded with a tiny azure spark in her eyes, while her mouth assumed the set of one trying not to smile. “You’re welcome to read a book while you wait,” she said. “I have a good many of them.”

“Alternatively, we could converse. I could tell you all my hopes and dreams and you could tell me yours, and the hours would fly past, and we could get to know each other.”

“Go ahead,” she replied after a brief pause, uninvitingly.

“No, ladies first. You look like you’ve had a lot more interesting life than I have.”

A shocked expression appeared on her face. She gaped, then snorted, then blushed. “Sorry,” she said. “Oh, God! That is so opposite from the case. Why would you imagine that? That I have an interesting life?”

“Oh, this place, for one thing. You live in a warehouse in Red Hook….”

“It’s a loft. Thousands of people in the city live in lofts.”

“No, they live in apartments in loft buildings. And usually they have furniture they bought in stores, not made out of pallets. Are you even legal here?”

“The landlord doesn’t mind.”

“Assuming he knows. Also you’re a bookbinder. Unusual, wouldn’t you say? How did you get into it?”

“And how about
your
hopes and dreams?”

“And, see? You’re secretive too. There’s nothing more interesting than that. Okay. Here’s the whole deal. I’m twenty-eight and I live with my mom in Queens, Ozone Park. I’m saving money so I can go to film school, which at the rate I put it away will be a month after my fifty-second birthday. I should take out a loan, but I’m scared of getting into debt.”

“How much do you have saved?”

“About three and a half grand.”

“I have more than that.”

“I bet. Glaser probably pays you more than he pays me, you get commissions on sales, you live in Red Hook, and you own two outfits, what you’re wearing now and the one with the collar. What are you saving for?”

“I want to go to Gelsenkirchen in Germany and take an apprenticeship at the Buchbinderei Klein.” When he didn’t react, she added, “Obviously, you’ve never heard of it.”

“Of course I have. Buch-whatever Klein. It’s like the Harvard of the bookbinding world. But I thought you already knew all about it. You have all the gear….” He gestured to the racks of tools laid out on the worktable, the cutting press and plow, whetstones, knives, leather pillows, and paste pots. It all looked very eighteenth century; Crosetti imagined that the Churchill
Voyages
had been bound with tools quite like these.

“I barely know anything,” she protested.

“Really.”

“I mean compared with what you have to know to make a book from scratch. I can do
repairs
. It’s like…it’s like the difference between being able to repair a cracked Ming porcelain vase and
making
one out of clay and glazes.”

“Uh-huh. And while we’re sharing confidences like this, getting cozy and all, why don’t you tell me what you’re going to do with the Churchill when you’ve got it doctored?”

“What? I’m not doctoring them. I’m going to break them.”

Red splotches appeared on her cheeks and her eyes darted—picture: girl caught in lie.

“No,” he said confidently. “If you were going to break them you would have just airfreighted them to Andover and had them vacuum dried. No muss, no fuss. You get them back dry and clean and snip snip. You look surprised. I’m not what you’d call a book guy but I’m not stupid either. So what are you going to do with the doctored books?”

“Sell them,” she said, looking down at the sodden volumes.

“As doctored?”

“No. Everyone knows we own an extremely fine set. There are private
clients who like discretion. They have funny money they want to stash in collectibles. Glaser does it all the time. Look, he’s going to declare these a total loss to the insurance company, and show them the invoices for the broken-out items. They’ll come to, I don’t know, not more than twenty-five hundred, and the insurance company will pay him the difference between that and what he paid for the set, figure around twenty thousand dollars.”

“Which is approximately the amount you’re planning to divert to your own pocket when you sell to your shady character. Isn’t there a word for that? Begins with an….?”

“It’s not…it’s
nothing
like stealing. He told me to break the books. As far as Glaser’s concerned, the set no longer exists. He’s made whole by the insurance company and I’m profiting from my own skill. It’s no different from making things out of pallets that’re being thrown away.”

“Um, no, actually it’s not the same thing at all, but that’s my Jesuit high school education talking. See, you
are
an interesting person. Devious is interesting. How are you going to produce the invoices for the illustrations, since you’re not really breaking the books?”

She shrugged. “Sidney never bothers with broken items. It depresses him. He calls it vulture food.”

“Not answering the question. But I figure you’re going to sell the set for twenty-two K, give Sidney a couple of grand, let him collect from the insurance, meanwhile phonying up the accounting system with fake invoices. You’re simultaneously screwing the insurance company, Glaser, your shady client, and the tax people. That’s quite a plan.”

“You’re going to rat me out!” Crosetti had heard of blazing eyes but had never actually seen any outside a movie screen until now. Little blue sparks were whizzing around in there.

“No,” he said, smiling. “That would be boring. So…how’re you going to fix the broken covers?”

He saw the relief on her face as she turned away from ethical issues to the moral neutrality of technique.

“Well, I think I can save the leather cover on volume one. The boards are cracked and the spine, but I can strip the leather off of it and replace
the boards.”

With that she pulled a thin spatulate tool from a can and started to peel back the marbleized paper that held the leather cover to the boards. She worked carefully, and Crosetti was content to watch her small skillful hands at their task until the kitchen timer she had set previously rang out and he had to change the towels between the drying pages. When he had finished with this, he saw that she had the leather cover loose. Underneath it, between the leather and the cracked pasteboard were damp sheets of paper with closely set lines of handwriting on them. She put these aside and held the leather up to the light from the window, examining it closely.

“What’re these papers?” he asked, idly separating the damp sheets. They were covered with writing in rusty black ink on both sides.

“Just padding. They used wastepaper to plump out the covers, and protect the leather from internal abrasion from the boards.”

“What language is this in?”

“English probably. Just some old wastepaper they used.”

“It doesn’t look like English. I can read English—unless the guy had really terrible handwriting….”

She took the paper from him carefully and peered at it. “That’s funny. It looks like Jacobean secretary hand.”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean I’m not a paleographer, but that hand doesn’t look contemporary with the publication of this book. It looks a lot earlier than 1732. Funny.”

“What, someone hid an old manuscript in the binding?”

“No, of course not. Bookbinders used scrap paper to back boards, any kind of scrap, but you’d expect, oh, contemporary proofs or old handbills, not an antique manuscript.”

“Why would they have done that? I mean an old manuscript would’ve been valuable in its own right, no?”

“Not at all. No one gave a hoot about old paper until much later. Original manuscripts got recycled when they were set in type, pulped, or used to start fires or line baking pans. Only a handful of antiquaries had
any idea that preserving artifacts from the past was important, and most people thought
they
were nut cases. That’s why practically the only handwriting that survives from the early modern period is in legal or financial records. Literary stuff had no value at all.”

“So it
could
be valuable now. This document.”