Dec had refused to let Sylvia come. It was bad enough, he’d insisted, his being responsible for the presence of one “civilian” (me); there was no way in the world that he would consent to Sylvia’s tagging along. For that matter, he hadn’t wanted me to come, either, but I had leverage, and I’d begged. Mercilessly.
“Who’ll identify the book?” I had asked.
“You.”
“But I’ve never seen it. What if it’s the wrong one?”
“The wrong twelfth-century illuminated manuscript?” He gave me a wry look.
“Yeah.”
“I guess we’ll just have to take our chances,” he’d said.
The location was on our side, he explained as we nursed burned coffee and split a bag of chips in the ferry snack bar. I wouldn’t have minded having a beer—being on the boat made me feel almost as though I was heading off on a vacation—but as it was, I had barely talked Declan into letting me come. I had to be on my best behavior. He wouldn’t have looked kindly on my nursing a brew at eleven o’clock in the morning.
“First off,” he said, “it’s kind of a hilly, duney part of the island. At least that’s the word I got. And there’s a lot of private security in that area. Guys patrolling the dune roads in cars pretty much nonstop.”
“How come?” I took a sip. God, how could this coffee be so bad?
“They’re all high rollers out there, in that area. New money. Big money. They want their privacy, and they spare no expense building the dream house on a big plot of land. But they’re vulnerable, too, being way out there in the dunes. Off-season, the houses are sitting ducks.”
“What does this have to do with us?” I asked.
Dec finished his coffee, stood up, and tossed his Styrofoam cup into the trash. He sat back down. “People are used to seeing guys on the local force, and guys from the private security companies, crawling around the dunes in their cars. Nobody’ll give a second thought to a couple of black Crown Royals.”
I nodded, gazing easily at the familiar features of the man sitting opposite me. That was the moment when I realized that I was not going to go out with Julian again, not even for a drink. Sure, there had been a buzz between us, and that had felt really, really nice. I wasn’t angry about what happened, not anymore, and certainly not after the roses. But when you’ve been lucky enough in your life to have had the real thing, you know it when you feel it again. And if you don’t, and you’re pretty sure you never will, what, really, is the point of a drink?
I was trying to act blasé, but I was anything but. The Interpol agents had booked several private rooms at the historic inn, which wasn’t the sort of place built for business travelers needing to rent impersonal spaces for semiprivate work meetings.
Nope, I was in a bedroom. A frilly, overheated bedroom, with fancy French wallpaper and Mary Cassatt reproductions on the walls and a massive mahogany four-poster bed taking up most of the space in the room. The bed looked so inviting, with its stiff, white sheets and down comforter and what looked to be a whole range of pillows, all the way from fluffy to firm. I wanted nothing more than to lie down and close my eyes for just a few minutes. But I wasn’t alone. There in the room with me were two burly State Police Officers. You know the kind—huge, intimidating, all decked out in their jodhpurs and black leather motorcycle boots.
They weren’t especially … chatty. At least not with me, whom I gathered they had been assigned, at least unofficially, to babysit. They had set up shop on the far side of the room, commandeering a delicate ladies’ writing desk. They looked like figures in a Norman Rockwell illustration, or in a children’s picture book: two grizzly bears having a tea party.
That left me the wing chair by the window overlooking the street, so I sat down and tried to pay attention. To what, though, I wasn’t sure. I had no idea what was going on. Busy and serious-looking men, and a couple of women, could be heard chatting on phones and with one another in the room beside ours and the one beyond that. Cell phones were ringing and walkie-talkies were crackling, but I could rarely make out more than “Copy that.”
Dec poked his head in once or twice, winked at me without smiling, and left. Gradually, as the hours wore on, I found it harder and harder to fight the soporific hum of all those quiet conversations from which I was excluded, and the heat we had tried to turn down, and the lingering effects of all the champagne I had drunk with Sam and Sylvia and the restless night that had followed, as I tossed and turned, worrying that I would oversleep and Dec would leave without me. I lay my head back against the wing of the chair and decided to close my eyes for just a couple of minutes.
“Anza,” I heard a man say.
My eyes flew open and I sat up. It was dark out. Where was I?
“Time to head out,” the officer said.
“Oh! Sorry. I—”
I stood up so abruptly that I almost lost my balance. I was still half asleep. The state police guys were standing by the door, and I had that sick, disoriented feeling you sometimes have when you’ve fallen dead asleep during the day, and when you wake up, it’s dark.
One of the cops flipped the switch that killed the bedside lights; the other was jangling his keys, watching with not a hint of amusement as I fumbled around in a daze, trying to locate all my things.
Damn! How long had I been asleep? Where was Dec? I was furious at myself for having drifted off and furious at Dec for having let me! How could he have left me in the mortifying position of being conked out in a chair while I was supposed to be helping? He and the Staties had probably had a good laugh about that, shaking their heads at the useless wannabe, fast asleep in the chair. I hoped to God that my mouth hadn’t been hanging open and that I hadn’t been snoring.
“Where are we going?” I asked, stumbling down the hall behind them. Everyone else seemed to have left.
“Madaket, ma’am,” came the reply.
Two hours later, I couldn’t have been more awake. For one thing, I was deathly cold. I was sitting in the backseat of the cruiser, which was tucked just out of sight in one of the Madaket dunes. I had all I could do to keep my teeth from chattering, but there was no way I was going to ask them to turn on the heat, not after they probably spent the afternoon making jokes about Sleeping Beauty in the chair. I’d die of frostbite before I’d request any special treatment.
I could see the house a little way off. It was a beautiful, modern place with decks all around and big glass windows overlooking what the cops said was Capaum Pond. There were a couple of cars parked outside the house—one that looked like a nondescript sedan and another that had to be a sporty Mercedes or some kind of Jaguar. I had gathered from hearing the police chat that there were three other unmarked cars in our immediate vicinity and two more cruisers back on Madaket Road. I didn’t know exactly what we were waiting for, but I wasn’t about to ask.
Suddenly, I saw three black cars with their headlights off crawling slowly toward the house. My heart began to beat wildly, and I found myself praying that Declan was not in one of them. He always downplays the risks of being a cop, but there in the darkness, I had a terrifying feel for the danger and uncertainty that are part of his job. I bit my lip and leaned forward, squinting to see as much as I could. The cars pulled to a quiet stop and twelve or fourteen people piled out. They didn’t close the car doors. They quietly approached the house on foot and seemed to fan out around it, maybe blocking the other exits.
The moon had not yet risen, so I couldn’t see very much. Occasionally, there would be the flash of a reflective vest. I heard a dog begin to bark. That was all.
“What’s happening?” I whispered.
“They’re going in,” the policeman whispered back.
Then there were shouts of “FBI! Police! Open up!” There was a lot of commotion outside, and the cops turned on the engine and flicked on their lights. We heard shouts, and people yelling, and the splintering of the front door as the agents gained entry. Thank God we heard no shots. But suddenly, I glimpsed a shado
wy figure on one of the second-floor decks.
“Look!” I said. “There’s someone up there. Look!”
In a flash, not waiting to see if any other officers or agents had caught sight of the fugitive, the cops were out of the car. They pulled their guns and shouted for the man to stop, but he didn’t. He dropped down awkwardly from the deck and stumbled off in the darkness toward the edge of the pond. I caught a flash of silver hair.
The officers took off after him. I could see him struggling to get away, but his progress was hobbled by deep sand and grass. They all disappeared over a dune. I wanted to get out of the car, but I was afraid; both that something might happen to me and that I would do something to piss off Declan, when I’d promised to stay out of the way.
I wasn’t in suspense for long, though; in less than a minute, my buddies reappeared, half-dragging the man, who was handcuffed and held firmly by the arms, up over the ledge and toward the house. He was tall and slim and appeared vaguely familiar to me. But that was crazy. No, it had to be a movie star I was thinking of, someone like Richard Gere.
I watched them all climb the steps and disappear inside. Then I sat there alone, shivering, for what felt like half an hour. Finally, Declan appeared on the porch, hopped down the steps, and headed toward my car.
“All clear there, love,” he said, opening my door. “You can come in.”
I got out slowly and threw my arms around him.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Course I am,” he said, shaking his head as though I was silly to have worried. All of a sudden, I wanted to cry. I paused and took a breath, and forced back the tears that were gathering in the corners of my eyes. Seeing this, Dec put his arm around me and gave me a squeeze.
Inside, he steered me right down the hall toward the back of the house. Cops and agents wearing FBI jackets were talking on phones and taking notes, drifting around the house and checking out the art and the furnishings.
And there, suddenly, was the manuscript, right on the dining room table. I felt a wave of faintness, but I took a deep breath and crossed the room.
The book was larger than I had expected—maybe a foot by fourteen or fifteen inches. I didn’t want to touch it. I gazed in awe at the dazzling variety of shapes and colors that had been squeezed into the four rectangular panels of the cover.
I looked up at Declan.
“That’s your book, then?” he asked.
“Could be,” I said, smiling. “Looks about right.”
Declan grinned. “All right. Let’s get out of here. Leave the boys to their work.”
“Can we take it with us?”
“No.”
“Can I just peek in?” I asked. I was suddenly dying to see what was going on in the front room, and more important, who it was that my officer pals had tackled in the dunes outside.
Declan nodded curtly. The gesture said, Make it quick.
I crossed the hall and walked toward the room with all the noise and activity. A man I took to be Van Vleck was sitting there, dressed in a caramel-colored sports jacket and tight beige jeans. He looked oddly disengaged from the swirl of activity around him, as though he had imagined this scene many times before and was now rewatching a dull and familiar film.
With all the bustle and noise, it took a minute for me to locate the other man the officers had arrested. I almost did a double take as my brain struggled to make sense of an image that didn’t seem right. It couldn’t be … wait a minute … no, this was wrong … it was a mistake. I recognized the person in the chair, and he couldn’t possibly be involved in this! He was respected all over the world! He was important! But he was handcuffed and sitting in the chair in the corner, surrounded by men and women in FBI vests.
It took several moments for me to believe that I really could trust my eyes.
It was Jim Wescott.
We learned the story in bits and pieces. We didn’t know everything for close to a year, when a long article on the tawdry little scandal in the art world appeared in the New York Times Magazine.
Amanda was serving time by then, at a regional women’s correctional facility in Chicopee. She’d made a deal with federal authorities: in exchange for helping them to recover all the plates she had stolen and sold in the course of her career, she received a reduced sentence: three to five years, with the possibility of parole for good behavior.
It made a certain amount of sense, once a couple of important facts came to light.
From the time that James Wescott received Finny and Sylvia’s letter, he had set his sights on acquiring the Book of Kildare for the British Library. From the details in their description, from his knowledge of comparably dated manuscripts, and from extensive research he had swiftly undertaken in European archives and scholarly journals, Wescott had arrived at a firm conviction that the manuscript in Finny and Sylvia’s possession was, indeed, the inspired treasure of the Irish scriptorium.
He wanted it. He was consumed with frustration that such a valuable and important work of art should be in the hands of a rich American dabbler. Where it belonged, he believed, was with him, in England, at the British Library. Trinity College had the Book of Kells, and come hell or high water, he decided, he, Jim Wescott, was going to get the Book of Kildare into the British Library. He was coming up on retirement. The Harrison Collection had slipped right through his fingers, and the Henry Moore pieces and the Banville papers. The “discovery” of this precious lost volume and its acquisition for the British Library would get his train back on the tracks.
First, he composed a dismissive letter, designed to convince Finny and Sylvia that a “Book of Kildare” had never actually existed. Many scholars shared that opinion, so it wasn’t too hard to add two more naysayers to his chorus: Julian Rowan and Susan McCasson. Wescott hoped that Finny would decide, in his disappointment, simply to sell the manuscript at auction. Wescott could then snap it up for the British Library, legitimately and easily, with honest cash changing hands.
That didn’t work, because Finny passed away. Informed by Tad that the collection had been donated to the Athenaeum, Wescott went next to Amanda. It was Wescott’s inquiry that tipped Amanda off to the possibility of a valuable, not-yet-catalogued manuscript on the Athenaeum’s shelves. She went searching through the bindery when no one was there. She couldn’t actually take the book, of course—Sylvia would have been certain to notice—but she could take pieces from it when no one was watching. No one, it turned out, but the ghosts.
Informed by Amanda that there was no book matching his description in the Athenaeum’s collection, Wescott began to wonder if Finny had willed it, or given it as a gift before his death, to Sylvia. She had signed her full name to that initial letter, so it wasn’t that hard to find out where she lived. She was listed in the Boston phone book, with her street address. One had only to scan the eight names on the polished brass mailboxes in the foyer of her building to know precisely where she resided.
Wescott’s attendance at the Harvard symposium was a cover; that was why he had stayed in Cambridge for only a day before heading up to “Vermont” to see the foliage. He had never gone to Vermont. He had come to stay in a house in Madaket, owned by a contact of the man he had enlisted to help him, the infamous Jannus Van Vleck.
There was a third player in the game, a man named Sanford Suffield. Born in New York, he was the son of a British teacher and a modestly successful merchant in the garment trade—his father manufactured overcoats for the armed services. Suffield, bright and keenly ambitious, had risen quickly through the ranks of his father’s company and become enormously wealthy through partnerships with Chinese and Hong Kong—based clothing manufacturers. He had also fallen in love with and eventually married a British magazine writer. They’d decided to live in London.
Suffield struggled to adapt to his new surroundings; he took to dressing in custom-made suits and bought a country place in Scotland. Branching out from the garment business, he began to make a name for himself local
ly by buying buildings in fashionable areas of London, and eventually, a few restaurants. He bought horses. He invited his wife’s colleagues for weekends in the country and he and Sophie began to pop up in the “Party Scene” pages of Tatler.
What Suffield couldn’t manage to engineer, though, was full inclusion of a social sort. He could own every restaurant in London, he finally realized, and lots of posh apartment buildings, and he would still be seen as a rich American throwing around his money. Socially, his nose might forever be pressed to the glass.
Wescott was acquainted with Suffield and, of course, understood all this. He invited Suffield to dinner and broached the prospect of a unique and, just for the moment, clandestine collaboration. Would Suffield consider providing the capital to “acquire” a priceless, long-lost manuscript, the ownership of which was presently “in flux”? Wescott described his research and whetted Suffield’s desire to help make “art-world headlines.” If all went as planned, Wescott promised, he, Sanford Suffield, would receive much of the credit for one of the most important gifts the British Library had ever received, a priceless treasure long believed to be lost.
It would change everything for him in London, Wescott whispered. To put it bluntly, Suffield would soon find himself being invited to a whole different class of party.
After a day or two of thought, Suffield got back to Wescott. He’d be more than happy to finance the venture, he said. He’d like nothing better than to present a substantial gift to the national library of his adopted home.
Wescott took it from there.
Suffield’s case is still making its way through the British courts. His defense maintains that he was deliberately defrauded. As for Wescott, his quest ended in professional disgrace and prison. Van Vleck’s serving eight to ten in MCI—Concord.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
THE WEDDING OF Q and U went off without a hitch, not counting the fact that I’d run out of confectionary sugar at two a.m. and had to dash out to Store 24. All in all, I baked six dozen cupcakes, finally hitting the hay at close to three thirty. But the look on Henry’s face that morning made it all worthwhile.
The Book of Illumination Page 26
