The Book of Illumination

by Mary Ann Winkowski

  “She can hear every word,” I said.

  “You’re absolutely sure she’s there?” he whispered.

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  It was Amanda, Sam informed us. She was the one who was cutting up the book. There wasn’t a shred of doubt in his mind.

  “What?” said Sylvia. “Amanda?”

  A wave of anger swept through me as I remembered that day in the bindery, how she had been checking me out over her precious little glasses. Wearing four-inch heels.

  Sylvia turned to me. “Then why aren’t the ghosts hounding her?”

  “Maybe they are, or trying to, at least,” I said. “Not everyone feels their presence. Besides, the manuscript’s been here in the bindery, with you, and before that, with Finny and you. You’re the person associated with the book.”

  Sam looked on gravely. I glanced at the clock. It was seven twenty-two, and I really should have been on my way, in case there were delays on the T, but I sat tight. This was a story I had to hear.

  “It’s not the first time,” he said, pacing sadly. Sylvia and I exchanged shocked glances as we waited for him to continue. He didn’t speak for a long time. Finally he stopped and looked up. With a tone of steely resolve in his voice, he said, “But it’s going to be the last.”

  “Sam!” Sylvia said. “What do you know? Tell us!”

  Sam took a deep breath, then sighed. He came back over and sat down.

  “Two years ago,” he began, “I was at an antiquarian’s conference in Seattle. There are often two parts to these things, a symposium where people present papers and give talks, and a market, where dealers offer prints and books and such for sale. Anyway, I had some time on my hands, and I stopped by the booth of a well-known dealer, an English fellow who’s been in business for decades. On the walls of his booth, obviously the showpieces of his current collection, were some stunning prints, gorgeously matted and framed.”

  “For sale?” I asked.

  Sam nodded, took a breath, and continued. “I recognized them! I was sure I had seen them before. There were eight in all. Four were maps, eighteenth-century maps of Japan and Indochina, and four were copper plates. A plate of the whole Celestial Planisphere, and one each of the constellations of April, May, and June.

  “Now, this dealer’s not a fly-by-night guy. He’s been in business for … oh, probably forty years. He had to have a provenance on the prints, or he couldn’t have been asking the prices he was asking—people aren’t going to plunk down thousands, or in a couple of cases tens of thousands, of dollars if there’s a chance the prints are just reproductions and not first editions.

  “Anyway, I chalked it up to my having spent too many years staring at books of prints, all the ones I worked on and too many others. But I couldn’t let it go. Where in the world had I seen them?

  “One morning, a few weeks later, I woke up and I knew. It was like my brain had been searching my memory, day after day, and had suddenly come up with the answers. We owned the books that the prints were in! They were the property of the Athenaeum!

  “I couldn’t wait to get to work. I came right in, didn’t have breakfast, didn’t even have coffee—just hopped on the T and got here as fast as I could. I knew exactly where the books were. And when I opened them, sure enough, the pages were gone. Removed with a razor blade.”

  Sam broke off briefly, then repeated a version of his last sentence, to make sure we understood its importance. “The prints I’d seen framed on the walls of Cecil Kennedy’s booth had been removed with a razor blade from valuable first editions owned by the Athenaeum.”

  He broke off for a minute, shaking his head.

  “I didn’t tell anyone. I closed the books and put them back on the shelves, went about my business as though nothing at all had happened. But I started doing a little detective work. I went to London and paid a visit to Kennedy. I knew he’d been taken in by somebody, and somebody very, very savvy. He’s a top guy; he’s got no interest in selling stolen goods. It’d be the end of his reputation if word got out, if not the end of his business. He immediately took the prints off the market and agreed to help me trace them.”

  “And the trail led back to Amanda,” I guessed.

  Sam nodded. “I should have gone right to the police. Right then and there. But I didn’t. It was the biggest mistake I ever made. I went to see her first. I wanted to give her a chance to explain. To tell you the truth, I couldn’t really believe she was involved in this. I just couldn’t get my head around that fact.”

  Sam went over to the watercooler and poured himself a glass of water. He had a long sip.

  “She didn’t even try to deny it. It was as though she always expected to be caught. Oh, she made all the excuses: she was deeply in debt, she’d made bad investments, her divorce had ruined her. To tell you the truth, I always thought there was something a little off about her: she was two years here, two years there, never staying in a job for very long. There was an incident at the Tate that I got wind of. All very hush-hush, but I know they let her go, under a cloud.”

  “So why didn’t you bust her?” I burst out.

  “I couldn’t,” he said.

  “Why not?” asked Sylvia, glancing at me.

  “Because she had a secret weapon. Something she could use against me.” Sam paused for a moment and then went on. “I rebound those books. Most people on staff didn’t know they existed, and even if they did, they wouldn’t have been able to tell when pages were missing. I was the only one who’d really worked with the books—handled them, taken them apart and put them back together.”

  “But what could she have on you?” Sylvia asked. “You’re one of the nicest and most honest—”

  Sam held up his hand, closing his eyes and shaking his head. “You know. Ben,” he said quietly.

  “Of course.”

  “My son,” Sam continued, looking now at me, “has a drug problem. He’s been clean now for over a year, but it was tough sledding for a very long time. Two years ago, he was in rehab at a program in Connecticut, and he was doing really well. He made it through the whole twelve weeks, which was a first, and when he got out, he came to live with me. His mother and I are divorced.”

  I knew all this, of course. Sylvia had told me the story. But I acted as though I hadn’t heard it before.

  “I got him a job here,” Sam continued. “Nothing too difficult, just a pleasant, easy job to give a little structure to his life. He was doing really well, but then, around the holidays, this girl he’d been seeing broke up with him and he … slipped. He started using again. To finance his habit, he stole—and fenced—a couple of small items from the library.”

  “Books?” I asked.

  Sam shook his head. “A Greek bronze, a bust of a young boy. Ironically, it could have been Ben at the age of four or five—looked just like him. He also took some letters and sketches. And small amounts of money from some staff members’ purses.

  “Amanda suspected Ben and confronted him. He admitted it and offered to try to help get the objects back. Out of respect for me, Amanda said, and all the years I’d worked here, they wouldn’t go to the police. She’d handle it internally. In the end, they were able to retrieve the bust, the sketches, and one of the letters. I paid back the money, and that seemed to be the end of it.

  “At the time I was enormously grateful. Little did I know that it was all part of her plan, in case I ever discovered what she was doing.”

  “She blackmailed you,” I said.

  Sam nodded. “When I confronted her about the plates in Cecil’s collection, she claimed to know about more things Ben had stolen—claimed she had absolute proof of his having gotten away with stealing an antique coin collection, book of Audubon engravings, and a folio of architectural drawings by Alexander Parris.”

  “Which she stole,” I suggested, catching on.

  “That’d be my guess,” answered Sam.

  He slumped down into a chair.

  “So let me get this stra
ight,” I said. “You confronted her about the prints—the maps and the constellations.” Then I lost the thin thread I was following.

  “And she said that if I went to the police, she’d reveal what she knew about Ben. Not only about the bronze and the letters and the sketches, but a slew of other thefts only she knew about.”

  “But she was lying!” Sylvia said.

  “I know,” Sam said sadly. “But who knows what ‘evidence’ she had cooked up? Ben could have gone to jail. He could have served time! He couldn’t have taken it, not just then. We would have lost him once and for all. Besides, I needed my pension. I needed my health insurance. I was sixty-six years old. She gave me a choice: keep quiet, take an immediate, voluntary retirement, or—”

  “Or what?” I asked, feeling my fury gathering into an impotent storm.

  “Or she’d go public with everything. She had files, she claimed. She had friends. If I wanted to end a long and honorable career with my reputation and my retirement package intact, I had only one option—announce my decision to step aside. If I refused, she’d bring down the whole house of cards.”

  “That bitch!” I said. “Pardon my French.”

  “No, no,” Sam said. “It took two of us to dance that dance. If it had only involved me, I think I would have taken her on. It just about killed me to see her getting away with this.”

  “But there was Ben,” Sylvia whispered.

  “There was Ben,” echoed Sam.

  We sat in silence for several moments.

  “How could I not have noticed?” Sylvia finally said.

  “Oh, come on,” I answered. “You can’t blame yourself for this.”

  “But I do.”

  “What was the book, four hundred pages?” I glanced at Sam, whose expression was sympathetic.

  “Three eighty-six,” Sylvia said sadly.

  “And how thick was the vellum?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Some pages were like leather, others were as thin as tissue paper.”

  “Right. And it probably wasn’t the leather pages she cut out. So unless you were going through the manuscript regularly, page by page, there’d have been no way of noticing.”

  “I tried to handle it as little as possible.”

  “Of course you did!” said Sam. “As you should have done!” Sylvia nodded but seemed unconvinced.

  “What I don’t get,” I said, “was how she knew where it was—how she actually found it.”

  “Well,” Sylvia said, “she had that phone call from New York, probably from Paola Moretti. She told me about that when she called me into her office that day. And we know she ran into Wescott at that Harvard symposium and he apparently mentioned something about a manuscript.”

  “But he didn’t believe us,” Sylvia said. “He didn’t believe there was such a thing as a Book of Kildare.”

  “No,” I said, “but it was still a valuable manuscript, Kildare or not. It was still a book that the Athenaeum had been lucky to get, assuming it had actually come with the collection.”

  “There was nothing in the database, though,” Sylvia said, “because she told me she tried to look it up.”

  “I’ll tell you just exactly what she did,” Sam said firmly. “She came down one night when no one was here and just started snooping around. Believe me, I’ve seen it all before. If she took the book, someone would have noticed, so she couldn’t do that. So instead, she took plates and left the book.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  HENRY WAS GOING to be a hammer.

  How he and Ellie had arrived at this decision, I had no idea. By the time I got to see the kitchen/costume shop in full steam, Max had been promoted to chief construction officer, having made a series of ill-advised cracks criticizing Ellie’s efforts with plywood strips, a stapler, and chicken wire.

  The idea had been to create a tube that would enclose Henry up to his head. The tube would then be covered with brown fabric, and the fabric painted to mimic wood grain. The head of the hammer would be a separate piece and would sit on Henry’s shoulders. Ellie was a whiz with a glue gun. She was confident that she could fashion a wire frame out of old coat hangers, which she could then upholster with hot adhesive and gray felt.

  I immediately saw some problems.

  First of all, Henry would roast inside a hammerhead of felt.

  Second, he would not be able to sit down, or even visit the boys’ room, if need be.

  Third, his arms would be pinned to his sides, which would be particularly tricky because he would not be able to see, given that he would never, ever agree to cut eyeholes in the hammerhead. This would immediately give it away as a kid’s costume and not a real hammerhead.

  If there was one thing that drove my son crazy on occasions that called for costumes, it was anything that compromised the illusion he hoped to create. He wouldn’t wear a jacket over his Halloween costume when he was three, because bees didn’t wear jackets, nor when he was four, because Batman needed only his cape. Efforts to reason with him failed. The cape was for flying, I insisted, to no avail. Nor would he wear a sweater under his costume, because that would make him feel—if not look—like a baby, and not the grown-up four-year-old trick-or-treater he was.

  He wouldn’t troll for candy in rain boots. He wouldn’t be caught dead with an umbrella. Nor would he carry a flashlight or let me walk beside him with my flashlight. I had to stay way behind, preferably out of sight, because to have your mother hovering around when you are trying to pass for a bee or Batman, well, that gave everything away.

  What I had given away, though, in enlisting Ellie’s help with the costume, was the right to butt in every two seconds with my opinions about armholes and eyeholes and provisions for the needs of Mother Nature. After all, Ellie and Max had managed to raise two kids of their own. They’d work it out with him. And if not, well, how long could the wedding of Q and U actually last? He’d definitely take the hammerhead off for cupcakes.

  Sam was a man on a mission. Within twenty-four hours, he’d made contact with nearly two dozen colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic, enlisting their help in canvassing their region’s dealers in rare prints and books. The purloined plates had yet to surface. But thanks to the dragnet that Sam had laid with his colleagues, they wouldn’t go on sale in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Dubai, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Zurich, or New York without raising huge red flags. Contacting the Art Loss Register, a massive online database, and the Art Crime Team of the FBI were the steps Sam had wanted to take next, but we’d convinced him of the ongoing need for discretion.

  Eighteen hours later, we had our first concrete lead. Sam had been waiting for Sylvia when she got to work on Thursday, and an hour later, when I arrived, they sat me down and Sam repeated his story to me.

  He had a friend who worked at The Cloisters, a guy named Florio Something. Florio had been in touch with a rare books dealer in Manhattan, a man called Bruno Dollfus. Dollfus had apprenticed with his uncle Hans in Vienna before opening his own business in New York in the eighties.

  In 2006, he had been the curator of “Royal Devotions,” an exhibition of forty-five illuminated manuscripts that had been on display for a month at the Waldorf-Astoria. Having trained at the elbow of his famous and reclusive uncle, one of the world’s premier dealers in illuminated manuscripts, Dollfus had radar he never doubted. And his radar had recently been triggered.

  According to Florio, Dollfus had received a call within the past week or ten days from a man looking to sell him some medieval plates. After a lengthy conversation, some snooping around on the Internet, and a day or two spent poring over his reference collection, Dollfus had walked away from the deal. Either the plates were forgeries, he’d concluded, or the seller was reaching out from the darkest, dimmest corners of the black market. In neither case did Dollfus want anything to do with him.

  “Does he have a name?” I asked Sam. “Did Dollfus keep the guy’s number?”

  “We’re trying to find out. I have a call in to
Florio right now.”

  “What if he does?” Sylvia asked. “What’ll we do then?”

  “I’ll ask Declan,” I said, as my mind raced forward through the possibilities. In the best case, we’d be able to track down the man with the plates. If the wary Viennese book dealer was willing to help, it would make things even easier.

  But there was only one person who would be able to verify that the plates in question were the plates cut out of our book: Sylvia. Maybe she could pose as the book dealer’s colleague. How would the seller know?

  “If you had to pick up tomorrow and go to New York,” I said to Sylvia, “could you go?”

  “For what?” she asked suspiciously.

  “To verify the authenticity of the plates. They might not be the ones from our book.”

  “What? Meet some thug in an alley? No way!”

  “No, no,” I assured her. “It wouldn’t work like that.”

  “I’d go with you,” said Sam. “There’s nothing I’d like better than to—” He broke off with a little growl.

  “Let’s hear that again, Sam,” I said.

  Sam smiled as he growled again. Then again, more loudly. Then with the addition of a couple of punching motions. “Pow!” Sam added.

  “Right in the kisser,” I said.

  “You got that right, baby,” said Sam. And for the first time in almost two weeks, Sylvia laughed.

  There were two messages on my machine when I checked it after dinner. Henry was in his room, working on his homework, copying the numbers zero through nine, ten times each. The numbers were printed on the left side of the worksheet. Henry’s task was to keep his pencil from going outside the lines on the page.

  The first message was from Julian, whom I kept forgetting to call, and the second was from Declan. I decided to call Julian first. I could call Declan’s cell phone any time; apparently he was working until midnight.

  I picked up the phone and dialed the number I had copied down. Just as I thought the call was going to his machine, he answered.