“Herrick told us he’d been stopped for drunk driving back in England,” I said.
“And the Brits do DNA on every infraction, no matter how minor,” Mike said. “So Scotland Yard has Herrick’s DNA profile in the hopper.”
“Frankly, I don’t see him playing dress-up,” I said. “And he certainly didn’t do Jane Eliot. She described a young man.”
Mercer stood by the window and dialed his phone. “Hey, Loo. Get on the horn with that deputy inspector in London who owes you. Alger Herrick-he’s got a genetic fingerprint on file there. Ask them to transmit it to the lab, stat, will you?”
Peterson must have assured him he would before Mercer thanked him and hung up.
“Jonah Krauss is another story,” Mike said. “Walked out of his office gym all pumped and ready to fly out of town. No question he’s strong enough to heave that garden ornament.”
“Kinky enough for the first night attack on Tina?” Mercer asked.
“Hey, his favorite display item is a book made out of human skin,” Mike said. “Plus he has access to all those subterranean spaces in the library.”
“Don’t forget his connection to Minerva Hunt,” I said.
“That’s a pretty slimy trio-Krauss, Minerva, and Forbes the map thief, all trying to figure out how to find the panels of the great treasure.”
Bea Dutton had been assembling the pieces of the photocopied map. It covered almost the entire top of the dining table. “Want to see what I’ve been up to?”
“Sure,” Mike said, throwing down the cards and walking toward her.
I stood and stretched, and we all took up positions on one side of the table, our backs to the window with the high, sweeping view over the city.
Bea stood in the center, flattening the enormous map with her small hands. “Okay. So we’ve talked about the twelve panels, right?”
She reached to a chair beside her and raised the image we had found earlier in the day. “You asked if this fake could fool anyone, Alex, and I’d have to say the answer is not anyone knowledgeable, and not for very long. The paper isn’t a fit, it’s probably been stained by tea-yes, just an ordinary tea bag-to discolor it a bit, age it some. The drawing itself is rather crude.”
Bea juxtaposed the parchment next to its copy on the map. It formed part of the border on the right, in the midsection.
Mike looked at the pieces side by side. “I kept thinking of Karla Vastasi when we found this thing in the apartment today,” he said, referring to Minerva Hunt’s housekeeper.
“Why Karla?” I asked.
“’Cause she was set up, Coop. No doubt in my mind that Minerva sent her in, dressed in the madam’s clothes, to meet someone who wouldn’t have a clue if she was Minerva Hunt or not.”
“Rules out Alger Herrick,” Mercer said. “And Jonah Krauss.”
“But rules in the possibility that she had brought that tote bag to carry something out-something just about the size of one of these panels,” Mike said, pointing to the map. “And she wouldn’t be expected to know if it was genuine or not.”
“She had the psalm book, too,” I said.
“Maybe she-or the killer-found it there. If Tina Barr is the one who stole it from Talbot Hunt’s apartment, she might have been hiding it on her own.”
“Waiting for the best offer,” Mercer said.
“I smell a cross,” Mike said. “Somebody double-teaming someone else. Mild-mannered Tina Barr, the pawn in a treacherous double cross, with stakes so high she couldn’t even imagine what a dangerous position she put herself in working with any of these greedy bastards.”
“So this document is a fake,” Mercer said, turning his attention back to Bea. “Let’s start with that. What else can you tell us?”
“Let’s take this puzzle piece by piece. There’s got to be a logic to the way Jasper Hunt broke it up and concealed the panels.”
“Like his son said, Bea, you can’t assume that with a complete eccentric.”
“Nonsense, Mike. Maybe what Hunt did won’t seem logical, but there had to be some kind of method to his madness, especially if he ever hoped to see these pieces reunited.”
And especially if Jasper Hunt ever hoped to leave this map as part of his legacy.
“What makes you think so?” I asked.
“So far, the two panels found weren’t hidden randomly,” she said. “What’s the most important feature of the piece you found yesterday morning in the library?”
Mike was quick to answer. “The inset about the New World as a separate continent, with the portrait of Amerigo Vespucci. Mr. America, himself.”
“And where did you find it, Mike?” Mercer said, following Bea’s lead. “Tucked inside a rare volume of Audubon’s Birds of America. Not all that crazy, is it?”
I thought of Jane Eliot’s story and looked at the photocopy of the large map, placing my finger on the lower right section that featured Ceylon and Madagascar. “Jasper put this one in the back of his very unique edition of Alice in Wonderland because it made him-the Mad Hatter of the family-think of Ceylonese tea.”
“Ten to go,” Mike said. “All we need is a list of the double-folio-size books that Jasper Hunt bequeathed to the library. Feeling lucky, Bea?”
“You get the commissioner to open the doors for us tonight, give me a handful of curators,” Bea said, “and maybe I’ll give you the world. Jasper Hunt’s world.”
THIRTY-NINE
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 car
ried 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.”
Lethal Legacy Page 30
