Secret of the Seventh Sons

by Cooper, Glenn

  Toby reached his hand into the inside pocket of his form-fitted Chester Barrie suit and extracted his thin white-cotton specimen gloves. Decades earlier, his boss had steered him to his Savile Row tailor, and ever since, he had clothed himself in the best fabrics he could afford. Clothes mattered, and so did grooming. His bristling mustache was always perfectly trimmed and visits to his barber every Tuesday at lunchtime kept his gray-tinged hair unfailingly neat.

  He slid on the gloves like a surgeon and hovered over the first exposed binding. “Right. Let’s see what we have.”

  The top row of spines revealed a matched set. He plucked out the first book. “Ah! All six volumes of Freeman’s The History of the Norman Conquest of England. 1877-1879, if I recall.” He opened the cloth cover to the title page. “Excellent! First edition. Is it a matched set?”

  “All firsts, Toby.”

  “Good, good. They should go for six hundred to eight hundred. You often get mixed sets, you know.”

  He laid out all six books carefully, taking note of their condition before diving back into the crate. “Here’s something a bit older.” It was a fine old Latin Bible, Antwerp, 1653, with a rich worn calf binding and gilt ridges on the spine. “This is nice,” he cooed. “I’d say one fifty to two hundred.”

  He was less enthusiastic about the next several volumes, some later editions of Ruskin and Fielding in dodgy condition, but he grew quite excited at Fraser’s Journal of a Tour Through Part of the Snowy Range of the Himala Mountains, and to the Source of the Rivers Jumna and Ganges, 1820, a pristine first. “I haven’t seen one of these in this state for years! Marvelous! Three thousand, easily. My spirits are lifting. Tell me, there wouldn’t be any incunabula in the collection?”

  From the perplexed expression on the youth’s face, Toby knew he was tapping a dry hole. “Incunabula? European printed books? Pre-1501? Ring a bell?”

  The young man was clearly stung by Toby’s irritability and he flushed in embarrassment. “Oh, right. Sorry. No incunabula whatsoever. There was something on the oldish side, but it was handwritten.” He pointed helpfully into the crate. “There it is. His granddaughter wasn’t keen on parting with it.”

  “Whose granddaughter?”

  “Lord Cantwell. She had an unbelievable body.”

  “We don’t, as a habit, make reference to our clients’ bodies,” Toby said sternly, reaching for the broad spine of the book.

  It was remarkably heavy; he needed two hands to securely drag it out and lay it on the table.

  Even before he opened it, he felt his pulse race and the moisture dissipate from his mouth. There was something about this large, dense book that spoke loudly to his instincts. The bindings were smooth old calf leather, mottled, the color of good milk chocolate. It had a faintly fruited smell, redolent of ancient mold and damp. The dimensions were prodigious, eighteen inches long, twelve inches wide, and a good five inches thick: a couple of thousand pages, to be sure. As to weight, he imagined hoisting a two-kilo bag of sugar. This was much heavier. The only markings were on the spine, a large, simple hand-tooled engraving, incised deeply into the leather: 1527.

  He was surprised, in a detached way, to see his right hand trembling when he reached out to lift the cover. The spine was supple from use. No cracking. There was a plain, unadorned creamy endpaper glued onto the hide. There was no frontispiece, no title page. The first page of the book, the color of butter, roughly uneven to the touch, began without exposition, racing into a closely-spaced, handwritten scrawl. Quill and black ink. Columns and rows. At least a hundred names and dates. He blinked in a large amount of visual information before turning the page. And another. And another. He skipped to the middle. Checked several pages toward the end. Then the last page. He tried to do a quick mental calculation, but because there was no pagination, he was only guessing—there must have been well over a hundred thousand listed names from front to back.

  “Remarkable,” he whispered.

  “Martin didn’t know what to make of it. Thought it was some sort of town registry. He said you might have some ideas.”

  “I’ve got lots of them. Unfortunately, they don’t hang together. Look at the pages.” He lifted one clear of the others. “This isn’t paper, you know. It’s vellum, very high-quality stuff. I can’t be sure, but I think it’s uterine vellum, the crème de la crème. Unborn calf skin, soaked, limed, scudded, and stretched. Typically used in the finest illuminated manuscripts, not a bloody town registry.”

  He flipped pages, making comments and pointing ad hoc with his gloved forefinger. “It’s a chronicle of births and deaths. Look at this one: Nicholas Amcotts 13 1 1527 Natus. Seems to announce that a Nicholas Amcotts was born on the thirteenth of January 1527. Straightforward enough. But look at the next one. Same date, Mors, a death, but these are Chinese characters. And the next one, another death, Kaetherlin Banwartz, surely a Germanic name, and this one here. If I’m not mistaken, this is in Arabic.”

  In a minute, he had found Greek, Portuguese, Italian, French, Spanish, and English names and multiple foreign words in Cyrillic, Hebrew, Swahili, and Chinese. There were some languages he could only guess at. He muttered something about African dialects.

  He pressed his gloved fingertips together in contemplation. “What kind of town has this population diversity, not to mention this population density in 1527? And what about this vellum? And this rather primitive binding? The impression here is something quite a bit older than sixteenth century. It’s got a decidedly medieval feel to it.”

  “But it’s dated 1527.”

  “Well, yes. Duly noted. Still, that is my impression and I do not discount my gut feel, nor should you. I think we will have to obtain the views of academic colleagues.”

  “What’s it worth?”

  “I’ve no idea. Whatever it is, it’s a specialty item, a curiosity, quite unique. Collectors like uniqueness. Let’s not worry too much about value at this stage. I think we will do well by this piece.” He carefully carried the book to the far end of the table and put it on its own spot away from the others, a pride of place. “Let’s sort through the rest of the Cantwell material, shall we? You’ll be busy entering the lot into the computer. And when you’re done, I want you to turn every page in every book to look for letters, autographs, stamps, et cetera. We don’t want to give our customers freebies, do we?”

  In the evening, with young Nieve long gone, Toby returned to the basement. He passed quickly by the whole of the Cantwell collection, which was laid out on three long tables. For the moment, those volumes held no more interest to him than a load of old Hello! magazines. He went straight for the book that had occupied his thoughts all day and slowly laid his ungloved hands on its smooth leather. In the future, he would insist that at that moment he felt some kind of physical connection with the inanimate object, a sentiment unbefitting a man with no inclination to this kind of drivel.

  “What are you?” he asked out loud. He made doubly sure he was alone, since he imagined that talking to books might be career-limiting at Pierce & Whyte. “Why don’t you tell me your secrets?”

  Will Piper was never much for crying babies, especially his own. He had a vague recollection of Crying Baby #1 a quarter of a century earlier. In those days he was a young deputy sheriff in Florida pulling the worst shifts. By the time he got home in the morning, his infant daughter was already up-and-at-’em, doing her happy-baby routine. When he and his wife did spend a night together and Laura cried out, he’d whine himself, then drift back to sleep before Melanie had the bottle out of the warmer. He didn’t do diapers. He didn’t do feedings. He didn’t do crying. And he was gone for good before Laura’s second birthday.

  But that was two marriages and one lifetime ago, and he was a changed man, or so he told himself. He had allowed himself to be molded into something of a twenty-first-century metrosexual New York father with all the trappings of the station. If, in the past, he could attend crime scenes and prod at decomposing flesh, he could change a diap
er now. If he could conduct an interview through the sobs of a victim’s mother, he could deal with an infant’s crying.

  It didn’t mean he had to like it.

  There had been a succession of new phases in Will’s life and he was a month into the newest. Nancy was back to work after maternity leave. For at least brief stretches of time, he was left on his own to experience fatherhood unfiltered. In the morning, when Nancy closed the apartment door behind her, the six-month-old would sense the rift and start working his diaphragm. Their budget didn’t allow for more than thirty hours per week of nanny time, so for a few hours a day Will had to fly solo.

  Mercifully, Phillip Weston Piper’s high-pitched squall was squelched by rocking, but it abruptly resumed when Will put him back in his crib. Will hoped beyond hope that he’d burn himself out and slowly backed out of the bedroom. He put the living room TV onto cable news and tweaked the volume to harmonically modulate the nails-on-chalkboard squeal of his offspring.

  Even though he was chronically sleep-deprived, Will’s head was awfully clear these days, thanks to his self-imposed separation from his pal Johnnie Walker. He kept the ceremonial last half-gallon bottle of Black Label three-quarters full in the cabinet under the TV. He wasn’t going to be the kind of ex-drunk who had to purge the place of alcohol. He visited with the bottle sometimes, winked at it, sparred with it, had a little chat with it. He taunted it more than it taunted him. He didn’t do AA or “talk to someone.” He didn’t even stop drinking! He had a couple of beers or a generous glass of wine fairly regularly and he even got buzzed on an empty stomach. He simply prohibited himself from touching the nectar—smoky, beautiful, amber—his love, his nemesis. He didn’t care what the textbooks said about addicts and abstinence. He was his own man and he had promised himself and his new bride that he wouldn’t do the falling-down-drunk thing again.

  He sat on the sofa with his large hands lying dumbly on his bare thighs. He was set to go, kitted out in jogging shorts, t-shirt, and sneakers. The nanny was late again. He felt trapped, claustrophobic. He was spending way too much time in this little parquet-floored prison cell. Despite best intentions, something was going to have to give. He was trying to do the right thing and honor his commitments and all that, but every day he grew more restless. New York had always irritated him. Now it was overtly nauseating.

  The buzzer saved him from darkness. A minute later, the nanny arrived, launching into an attack on public transport rather than an apology. Leonora Monica Nepomuceno, a four-foot-ten-inch Filipina in her fifties, threw her carrier bag on the kitchenette counter, then went right for the crying baby, pressing his tense little body against hers. “Ay, ay,” she sighed to the boy, “your Auntie Leonora is here. You can stop your crying now.”

  “I’m going for a run,” Will announced through a scowl.

  “Go for a long one, Mister Will,” Leonora advised.

  A daily run had become part of Will’s post-retirement routine, a component of his new-man ethos. He was leaner and stronger than he had been in years, only ten pounds heavier than his football-playing weight at Harvard. He was on the brink of fifty, but he was looking younger, thanks to his no-Scotch diet. He was big and athletic, with a strong jaw, boyishly thick, tawny hair, and crazy-blue eyes. Clad in nylon jogging shorts, he turned women’s heads, even young ones. Nancy still wasn’t used to that.

  On the sidewalk, he realized the Indian summer was over and it was going to be uncomfortably chilly. While he stretched his calves and Achilles against a signpost, he thought about shooting back upstairs for a warm-up suit.

  Then he saw the bus on the other side of East 23rd Street. It started up and belched some diesel exhaust.

  Will had spent the better part of twenty years following and observing. He knew how to make himself inconspicuous. The guy in the bus didn’t, or didn’t care. He had noticed the rig the previous evening, driving slowly past his building at maybe five miles per hour, jamming traffic, provoking a chorus of honks. It was hard to miss, a top-of-the-line Beaver, a big, royal blue forty-three-footer, with sides splashed out in gray and crimson swooshes. He had thought to himself, Who the hell takes a half-a-million-dollar motor home into lower Manhattan and drives around slow, looking for an address? If he found it, where was he going to park the thing? But it was the license plate that rang bells.

  Nevada. Nevada!

  Now it looked like the guy had indeed found adequate parking the night before, across the street just to the east of Will’s building, an impressive feat, to be sure. Will’s heart started to beat at jogging speed even though he was still stationary. He had stopped looking over his shoulder months ago.

  Apparently, that was a mistake. Gimme a break, he thought. Nevada plates.

  Still, this didn’t have their signature. The watchers weren’t going to come at him in a half-baked Winnebago battle-wagon. If they ever decided to pluck him off the streets, he’d never see it coming. They were pros, for Christ’s sake.

  It was a two-way street and the bus was pointed west. All Will had to do was run east toward the river, make a few quick turns and the bus would never catch up. But then he wouldn’t know if he was the object of somebody’s exercise and he didn’t like not knowing. So he ran west. Slowly. Making it easy for the guy.

  The bus slid out of its space and followed along. Will picked up the pace, partly to see how the bus responded, partly to get warm. He got to the intersection of Third Avenue and jogged in place, waiting for the light. The bus was a hundred feet behind, stacked up by a line of taxis. He shielded his eyes from the sun. Through the windshield he made out at least two men. The driver had a beard.

  On the go again, he ran through the intersection and weaved through the sparse pedestrian sidewalk traffic. Over his shoulder, he saw the bus was still following west along 23rd, but that wasn’t much of a test. That came at Lexington, where he took a left and ran south. Sure enough, the bus turned too.

  Getting warmer, Will thought, getting warmer.

  His destination was Gramercy Park, a leafy rectangular enclave a few blocks downtown. Its perimeter streets were all one-ways. If he was still being tailed, he’d have a bit of fun.

  Lexington dead-ended at 21st Street at the park. Twenty-first ran one-way west. Will went east, along the outside of the park fence. The bus had to follow the traffic pattern in the opposite direction.

  Will started doing clockwise laps around the park’s perimeter, each lap taking only a couple of minutes. He could see the bus driver was struggling with the tight left turns, nearly clipping parked cars at the corners.

  There wasn’t anything remotely funny about being followed, but Will couldn’t help being amused every time the giant motor home passed him on its counterclockwise circuit. With each encounter he got a better look at his pursuers. They failed to strike fear in his heart, but you never knew. These clowns definitely weren’t watchers. But there were other sorts of problem children out there. He’d put a lot of killers in jail. Killers had families. Vengeance was a family affair.

  The driver was an older fellow, with longish hair and a full beard the color of fireplace ash. His fleshy face and ballooned-out shoulders suggested a heavy man. The guy in the shotgun seat was tall and thin, also on the senior side, with wide-open eyes that furtively engaged Will sidelong. The driver stiffly refused to make eye contact altogether, as if he actually believed they hadn’t been made.

  On his third circuit, Will spotted two NYPD cops patrolling 20th Street. Gramercy Park was an exclusive neighborhood; it was the only private park in Manhattan. The residents of the surrounding buildings had their own keys to the wrought-iron gates and the police were visible around there, prowling for muggers and creeps. Will pulled up, breathing heavily. “Officers. That bus over there. I saw it stop. The driver was hassling a little girl. I think he was trying to get her inside.”

  The cops listened, deadpan. His flat, southern drawl played havoc with his credibility. He got a lot of those out-of-town looks in New York. “You s
ure about that?”

  “I’m ex-FBI.”

  Will watched for a short while only. The cops stood smack in the middle of the street and halted the bus, waving their hands. Will didn’t stick around. He was curious, sure, but he wanted to get over to the river for his usual circuit. Besides, he had a feeling he’d see these geezers again.

  To be on the safe side, when he got back home, he’d take his gun out of the dresser and oil it up.

  About the Author

  GLENN COOPER studied archaeology at Harvard before becoming a physician specializing in infectious diseases. After a career in research he became a biotechnology chief executive officer. He has written multiple screenplays and runs an independent film production company based in Boston. He lives in Massachusetts in one of the oldest houses in America. Secret of the Seventh Son is his first novel.

  www.glenncooperbooks.com

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  By Glenn Cooper

  SECRET OF THE SEVENTH SON

  Coming Soon

  BOOK OF SOULS

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SECRET OF THE SEVENTH SON. Copyright © 2009 by Glenn Cooper. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.