“Thank God you’re going to be there.”
“Yeah, lucky me.” I smiled and glanced around the room. My apartment had been broken into once when I lived on Commonwealth Avenue. It had been easy for the thief, or thieves; the building’s outer doors didn’t lock properly, and the lock to my apartment was loose and old. They just popped the bolt with a screwdriver, scooped up a bag of my stuff, and were out the door in a couple of minutes. The only thing that shattered me was losing my mother’s engagement ring.
“What else did they take?” I asked Sylvia gently, remembering the sorrowful task of making a list for the police, who acted as though the break-in was my own fault, for being so lax about the locks.
“That’s the thing,” she said urgently. “Nothing.”
“Nothing? Only the book?”
Sylvia buried her face in her hands and let out a little moan.
Declan was there within the hour. I try to keep my mind on business when he’s in detective mode, but it’s hard. He just smells so … he seems so … Okay, I am not going down that road.
The book had been taken from Sylvia’s bedroom. On Tuesday, the same day she and I read the letters from James Wescott and Paola Moretti, she’d taken the book home and placed it on a shelf in her closet. Arriving home from work today, she’d gone into the kitchen, where everything seemed fine. She poured herself a glass of wine and went into the living room to read the Globe. After ten or fifteen minutes, she was cold, so she went into the bedroom to get a sweater.
Her closet door was open, and her bedroom had been messed up, but pretty halfheartedly, when you looked at things closely. A couple of drawers had been pulled out and their contents casually tossed, and a jewelry box was tipped over on the bureau, spilling pins and necklaces onto the floor. But it was the sight of a gold bracelet and a pair of expensive emerald earrings, worn to a family dinner over the weekend and lying in plain sight on a bedside table, that sent Sylvia flying to the closet.
That, she told me, was when she first suspected that the thief or thieves weren’t after jewelry or money. In the panicked moments after realizing the manuscript was gone, she said, she’d wandered through the apartment in a state of shock. They hadn’t touched the PowerBook on her desk. The rose-gold flute on her music stand was just where she had left it. Whoever broke in had been after one thing, and only one thing. And they had gotten it.
I’d related these details to Declan over the phone, and now he was making a thorough inspection of Sylvia’s doors and windows. The door to her back hallway had been locked, and was still locked, from the inside. So was the window opening onto her fire escape, the only one accessible from the street. That left only her front door, made of solid oak, which locked by itself when you closed it. There was a second deadbolt, which Sylvia admitted to being casual about locking, as the main lock seemed so secure, but she was absolutely sure she had locked it every morning since Wednesday of this week, being mindful that she was leaving the book inside.
“Who has keys to the place?” Declan asked, examining the area around the doorknob. The finish was undamaged; it seemed pretty unlikely that access had been gained by crowbar or screwdriver.
“My parents,” Sylvia said. “They live in Providence. And my brother in Medford. And a friend of mine from San Francisco. She stayed with me last summer and took them home with her by mistake.”
Declan glanced at me, then back at Sylvia. “Any … other visitors?”
“You mean men?”
“Not necessarily,” Declan said, open-mindedly.
She shook her head. He nodded and wrote something on his notepad.
“Have you had any work done in here lately?” he went on. “Painting or carpentry? Anyone in to fix anything?”
Sylvia shook her head and let out a little sigh.
“Window washers?”
She glanced at me. I suspected she was getting impatient. We all knew this wasn’t a crime of opportunity. There were plenty of valuable items in sight, objects easily tucked into a pocket or a backpack and sold for quick cash.
Declan must have read her mind. He stopped short of asking her if she’d noticed suspicious cars idling in the street or spooky strangers hanging around in the halls. He put down his notepad.
“I’d say he picked the lock. Cheeky bastard.” Dec shook his head and gave Sylvia his lopsided grin, which, together with his tone and inflection, had the effect of entirely transforming the atmosphere in the room. Suddenly we weren’t dealing with a frightening villain, someone potentially capable of murder or rape. We were dealing with …a burglar! The cheeky kind. The brilliant and ingenious kind. The kind who wore a funny black half mask and quiet slipper shoes and who swung from a rope, scaling the wall like a cat. It might not be true, but we sure felt better.
Sylvia let out a surprised little laugh. Her gaze went from Declan, to me, then back to him. A flush of color rose to her cheeks.
Get in line, I thought.
According to Sylvia, the building was managed by a realty corporation and did not have a live-in superintendent. This made our task a little simpler: we didn’t have to deal with a suspicious old curmudgeon who had keys to every apartment, a nose for intrigue, and an inclination to place a matter like breaking and entering hastily and irrevocably into the hands of the Boston Police Department.
We had our own detective, thank you very much, and several good reasons for keeping this quiet for now. First of all, on paper at least, the book didn’t actually exist. Sylvia didn’t own it. Nor did the Athenaeum—it was not on any of the lists compiled and cross-checked when the museum took possession of Finny Winslow’s collection. Of course, there was a newly rebound second edition of Hoeffler’s Mysterium Musicum that was going to be a little hard to locate at the moment, should anyone care to look. But since Sylvia had been responsible for entering (or in this case, not entering) Finny’s books into the library’s database, no one was going to be looking.
Tad didn’t own the manuscript, either, though the letters from Moretti and Wescott had certainly piqued his curiosity. What was this rare and ancient volume? he’d asked us before handing over the letters. Why hadn’t he ever seen it or heard about it? When had his father acquired it, and where? Sylvia sidestepped Tad’s thrusts and parries with commendable dexterity, finally reassuring him that the book was safe and sound at the Athenaeum and was clearly not what they had once dared to hope it was. Still, he should come down and see it. It was really something. She’d be delighted to show it to him.
“It’ll never happen,” she’d whispered to me as we’d left the mansion on Commonwealth Avenue. “He just smells money.”
If we reported the theft, it would come out that Sylvia had been bending the rules a little, to put it mildly. Or, to put it not so mildly, she had deliberately defrauded both the Athenaeum and the Winslow heirs, and acted in a manner that would certainly cost her her job and likely her professional reputation. She might even go to jail.
Declan has no problem with jail, or with any kind of punishment that people have rightfully earned. But he does have a soft spot for Kildare, a county in which one of his favorite uncles still lives. Maybe he was intrigued by the idea of helping out old Saint Brigid, icon of the homeland. Imagine delivering into her hands, at least symbolically, the priceless treasure. Pull off a coup of that magnitude for a saint like Brigid, and, come time for the Big Tally in the Sky, he might even find his slate wiped clean of … me.
I doubt Declan really thinks that way. It was probably just my own guilty conscience spinning webs. All he said was, “Let’s give this a day or two before we let it out of the bag.”
He knew, because we’d explained it all, that if the manuscript really was the Book of Kildare, and it was located and authenticated, everybody and their brother would get involved in a fierce public battle for ownership and disposition rights. There would go the one and only chance we ever might have to do the right thing with it, whatever that might be. Although Declan plays by the rules, he
does appreciate the occasional distinction between what’s legal and what’s right. Up to a point. The point was Monday morning. If he, or we, hadn’t made any progress in tracking down the book by then, he was going to insist that we bring in the bigger guns.
He told us he would start with a couple of guys who “worked art.” They’d been full-time on the Gardner Museum case for a couple of years and knew most of the art-world lowlifes on the eastern seaboard. I had hoped that Dec and I would have a few minutes alone together, if only while walking out to our respective vehicles, but it was not to be. He was now in detective mode. He left, and left to us the job of canvassing the residents in the building, just in case anyone had buzzed in an unfamiliar repairman or noticed someone tiptoeing around wearing a little black mask.
We decided to tell Sylvia’s neighbors a partial truth: that there had been a robbery. But we’d leave out the fact that Sylvia’s lock had been picked; there was no sense alarming everyone in the building, when the thief was so obviously disinterested in the baubles and doodads of the average Brookline pad.
“My bike was stolen,” Sylvia lied to the first person who opened a door, a gloomy-looking man in his sixties. The cooking aroma of an unfamiliar meat—something gray, I intuited, and not normally consumed in the continental United States—drifted into the hall. It was carried on strains of what sounded like Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff.
“Oh, no!” he said. Was he looking slightly more cheerful? No, he couldn’t be.
“It’s my own fault—it wasn’t locked,” Sylvia went on. “I thought it would be safe on the landing. I was just wondering if you might have seen anyone. If anyone asked to be buzzed in, or—”
No, no, he hadn’t seen anyone. He’d been at Symphony Hall all day (turned out he was a cellist) and had only been home for an hour.
The woman who lived below him had spent most of the day in the bathroom, she overshared enthusiastically, because she was having a colonoscopy in the morning. So no, she hadn’t been outside of her apartment or heard anything unusual. We wished her luck with her procedure and headed down to the first floor.
Sylvia knew the two guys who lived on the right, married gay men who owned a housewares shop called Chez Nous in the South End. She had been to a couple of their Academy Awards parties, once winning a bottle of Perrier-Jouet for being the only person to predict that Adrien Brody would take home an Oscar for The Pianist. I thought they would be fun to meet. They weren’t home.
Nor was the couple across the hall, a lawyer and her graduate student/high school baseball coach husband, who had just moved in within the past six months. Nor were the occupants of 2A or 3A. Well, we reminded ourselves, it was Friday night.
We hit pay dirt, though, with the woman who lived across the hall from Sylvia. She was a statuesque faux blonde named Carlotta McKay, employed, I later learned, as a writer of technical manuals four days a week. On Fridays, she worked from home, on a screenplay she was writing with her boyfriend, who lived in LA and was trying to break into the film business. If they could sell the screenplay, she was planning to move there.
Carlotta didn’t know anything about the bike—she had never even noticed it in the hallway—but she had met Sylvia’s new friend.
“Oh!” Sylvia said, a smile frozen on her face. She glanced at me.
They had run into each other in the hall. Carlotta had hit a wall with her writing, at about two thirty, and she’d decided to walk down to Trader Joe’s to pick up a few things and get some fresh air. As she was locking her own door—
“What’s his name?” she asked us.
I jumped in with “John.” Dull, but serviceable.
“He was just coming out of your place. You guys must have had a late night!”
“Kind of,” Sylvia said, unconvincingly.
Carlotta liked older guys, too, she volunteered. In fact, Craig, that was her boyfriend, he was going to be forty-three in April, but she was sworn to secrecy on that, because if it got out, it might work against him when he went up for the younger parts. Which was really unfair, because he really did not look his age at all, on account of all the yoga and internal cleansing.
“You didn’t tell me he was older,” I said teasingly to Sylvia, then turned to Carlotta. “How old would you say he is?”
Carlotta looked questioningly at Sylvia.
“Guess!” Sylvia had the presence of mind to respond.
“Forty-five? Forty-six?”
Sylvia nodded. “Pretty close.”
“She’s hardly told me anything,” I confided, girlfriendlike, to the woman I had met thirty seconds ago. “She’s afraid she’ll jinx it. I don’t even know how tall he is.”
“Six one?” Carlotta squinted, shrugging at Sylvia. “Six two?”
“Around there,” Sylvia said.
“Blond?” I asked Carlotta. “Dark?”
Carlotta smiled slyly. “He colors it, doesn’t he?”
“What makes you think that?” Sylvia said. She was kind of getting into this.
“Come on!” Carlotta said. “Not a bit of gray at his age? Except in the eyebrows, like no one notices those. I mean, not to say he isn’t in good shape, and that leather coat was like butter, but he’s a good-looking guy. Rinses are tacky. If he’s going to go for it, he’s gotta really go for it—get some highlights, low-lights.”
“I know,” Sylvia said. “But I can’t say that, not yet.”
“No,” Carlotta said. “No way. You have to wait for him to bring it up. What does he do?”
“Oh, he’s—”
“Let me guess,” Carlotta interrupted. “He’s either a personal trainer or he works construction. You don’t get a build like that by sitting at a desk.”
“You really have an eye for details,” I said. “I can see why you’re a writer.” It was a bit of puffery, but I sort of liked her.
Carlotta beamed.
Chapter Eight
HENRY WAS DUE at Kelly and Dec’s by eleven. Normally, I take him over there after school on Friday, but since he’d been away with them for Columbus Day weekend, we’d decided to start this weekend’s visit on Saturday.
They have a great house. Like a lot of the immigrant Irish, Declan’s father put the money he saved into real estate, buying several rundown properties in Medford and North Cambridge and fixing them up on weekends. Declan took over one of the mortgages when he and Kelly got married. They live on the second and third floors of a Philadelphia-style two-family near Powderhouse Square. His sister Aileen, who got married last year, lives on the first floor with her husband, Alvar, an electrician for Tufts.
Delia and Nell had some kind of digging project going on in the side yard. Being close in age, they tend to argue a lot, but they were united in purpose today. Which was, apparently, to dig as deep a hole as they could. It was my son’s brilliant idea to add a hose to the equation. My heart sank, thinking of the thirty-eight dollars I had just plunked down for the new sneakers he was wearing while his rain boots sat idle in the back hall at home. It was my own fault. I should have packed the boots.
Henry was uncoiling the hose.
“Don’t turn it on yet,” I said.
“Why not?”
I resisted the urge to reply, “Because I said so.” Instead, I answered, “You need to check with Daddy.”
Delia looked up. Her face was streaked with grime. “He’s not here,” she said. Delia has the most extraordinary eyes I have ever seen, the palest blue, like ice.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“He went to get a haircut,” Nell answered.
“And he’s bringing back doughnuts,” Delia went on.
“Did he say it was okay? To be digging here?”
“He doesn’t care,” Delia said, though I noticed she didn’t look at me. Clearly, a conversation with Kelly was in order.
That was when Henry squeezed the handle on the nozzle, spraying both Delia and the pile of dirt. She shrieked, dropped the shovel, and scooted away from the water. Nell, app
arently delighted that her older sister, who can be on the fastidious side, was now both filthy and furious, screeched with enthusiasm.
“Henry!” I said sharply.
He did it again, this time aiming at the mound of earth with all the watery power he could squeeze. Mud leapt from the pile onto both girls as Nell screamed, “Don’t!”
I grabbed the hose from Henry, getting soaked in the process.
“What did I just say?”
“It was on!”
“Girls,” I heard Kelly call from the top of the stairs. “Everything okay?”
Kelly offered to put on coffee, but I’d already had too much. She was dressed in cropped yoga pants and a T-shirt and looked as though she was just waiting for Dec to get back so she could go for her run. The kitchen had a Saturday morning feel—the dishwasher was humming, emitting little clouds of steam, and in the air hung the commingled scents of bacon and toast. Crumbs and spots of jelly—grape, it looked like—dotted the tablecloth, and Kelly was folding a load of lights. I watched as she absentmindedly smoothed Declan’s boxers into tidy rectangles.
“How are you?” she asked. If she resents or feels sorry for me, she manages not to show it.
“Oh, fine. Thanks again for last weekend. He had a great time.”
Kelly smiled. “It’s so easy up there. They spent the whole weekend making a fort.”
“They did?”
“We could barely get them in at night. They had every flashlight in the house. It was quite the production.”
I smiled. Henry’s lucky to be part of an extended family with eight or nine kids under twelve. That’s not something I could give him. My oldest brother, Joe, is gay, we think, though he has never actually made an announcement. I suppose that doesn’t preclude children, at some point, but he and Alan have been living in Portland for three years and they both really like it out there. If and when Joe ever becomes a father—and I hope he does—it will probably happen in the Northwest. My other brother, Jay, lives in Chicago. He and his wife, Louise, who’s on the partner track at her law firm, just got a puppy. We’ll see how that goes.
The Book of Illumination Page 6
