Into the Lion's Den

by Linda Fairstein

  “How about if we catch a crook? Does that get me the gold?”

  “I’d pin it on you myself,” Sam said.

  “Show it to Liza, will you please?”

  Sam took his gold shield out of his pocket and passed it to Liza. It was the coveted prize in the NYPD, the shiny gold badge trimmed with cobalt blue enamel, engraved with the name DETECTIVE SAMUEL CODY and his shield number. He had earned his with brilliant and courageous investigative work.

  “No catching crooks, girls. That’s what my force is in business to do,” my mother said. “Natasha told me your assignment took you to the public library. Sounds interesting. What’s that about?”

  “You start, Liza,” I said, writing the letters DNA on my potatoes with the meat gravy stuck on my knife while I tried to think through how to look for the tall man’s genetic fingerprints at the scene of the crime.

  “So in our class about world culture, the teacher added a project in which we each have to go to the library, pick one of the famous objects there, and write a paper about it by the end of the summer session.”

  “You mean you choose a book?”

  “No, Ms. Quick. Actually an object from the collections of the library. There are a hundred of them on display now. Like dance cards from nineteenth-century balls and an etching of a turkey that Picasso made. Things that you wouldn’t expect a library to own, so not books.”

  “What are you writing about, Liza?” Sam asked.

  “Well, there’s a globe in the collection that is one of the rarest in the world. It’s made out of copper and it’s only five inches around. Nobody knows who made it. It’s called the Hunt-Lenox Globe, after the architect who designed a private library for a rich patron named Lenox, but it was created just a little bit after the discovery of the New World.”

  “Why did you choose it?”

  Liza grinned at Sam and her braces glistened. “It was the first representation of the New World known to geographers, and it shows only one continent in the entire Western Hemisphere. Only South America.”

  “And you think sometimes we Americans believe we’re the center of the universe, don’t you?” Sam said, returning her smile. “You plan to prove otherwise with the visuals on this globe. Pretty cool idea.”

  Liza blushed and thanked him.

  “Can you top that one, Devlin?” he asked.

  “It’s not a competition, Sam. I think I chose well, too.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that.”

  “So my object has to do with Charles Dickens.”

  “Brava,” my mother said to me. She loved great literature and was constantly prodding me to upgrade my reading tastes.

  “He had this fascination with taxidermy. Did you know that?”

  My mother shook her head.

  “He once had a pet raven that he had stuffed after it died and kept in his home. Grip. The raven’s name was Grip. He’s the very bird that was the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s poem.”

  “Really?” my mother asked, giving me that sideways glance of disbelief.

  “Totally true factoid, Mom. There’s a lot of correspondence about the raven between Poe and Dickens.”

  “I don’t know where this is going,” Sam said, “but probably not in the direction of your mother’s bookshelf.”

  “So Dickens also had a favorite out of all his cats, who sat with him whenever he wrote,” I said. “His name was Bob. And when Bob died, Dickens was so heartbroken that he had Bob’s paw, well, preserved—you know, stuffed, just like his raven—and made into a letter opener.”

  My mother poured herself another glass of wine. “The cat’s paw?”

  “On the blade of the letter opener it’s actually engraved ‘C.D. In Memory of Bob 1862.’ I think that’s totally amazing.”

  “You have such a natural attraction to the bizarre and grotesque,” my mother said.

  Liza laughed.

  “You can’t humor her all the time, Liza,” my mother joked. “Dev often does things like that just to get attention.”

  “Not this time, I didn’t.”

  “Where did I go wrong, Dev, darling? There’s a Gutenberg Bible in that library’s collection. Couldn’t you have—?”

  “No books, Mom.”

  “There’s Charlotte Brontë’s writing desk.”

  “You know how I feel about the Brontës. Not possible.”

  “Let it go, Blaine,” Sam said. “It’s a full-on Devlin Quick. A cat’s paw with literary tentacles to Dickens and Poe. You should write your paper in the cadence of ‘The Raven,’ kid. ‘Quoth Charles Dickens, Nevermore.’”

  “Totally, Sam. I might do that.”

  “Okay, now tell your mother exactly why you went to her office afterward.”

  I whipped my potatoes into a frenzy. “Don’t tell me you’re a snitch now, Detective Cody. I thought you had my back.”

  “I’ll always have your back, Devlin,” Sam said. “I just have to know what’s going on in that brain of yours at the same time. When you’re on overload, I might need extra guys to keep you covered.”

  “Today was all my fault, Mr. Cody,” Liza said. “It was my idea to report what I saw to the police.”

  I snapped my head around to look at Liza’s face. She was taking the weight so my mother didn’t blame me for going overboard. I was impressed. “But, Liza, that’s not—”

  “Of course it’s the truth, Dev,” Liza said. “While your daughter was upstairs doing her work, Ms. Quick, I was in the private area of the library called the Map Division.”

  “I know it well. It’s a spectacular room.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I was examining the famous globe, which was in a glass display case, when I saw this gentleman—”

  “He’s not a gentleman, Liza,” I said. “He’s a criminal.”

  “Well, he had ordered some special book from the librarian, kept behind the counter in the room that the public can’t access, and I saw her hand him a pair of cotton gloves and then this oversized book.”

  “The man walked right past Liza, Mom. Right to the table farthest away from the librarian, in a corner of the room. That’s what she told me. Go on, Liza.”

  When Liza finished reporting her observations, my mother began a rapid-fire series of questions.

  “What kind of book was it?”

  “I don’t know that, Ms. Quick. I couldn’t see it.”

  “What did the knife look like?”

  “I—I never saw the actual knife. I just heard the sound of something metal dropping on the floor, right after the man had sliced a page out of the book.”

  “So you can’t say if it was a knife, or a pair of scissors, or a blade of some kind—or a little metal box with breath mints in it—that dropped to the floor?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “You just heard the sound of something metal hitting the floor and you made an assumption,” my mother said. “What did the man do with the piece of paper you say he ripped from the book?”

  Liza just shrugged and slumped back in her seat. She was getting the point that she was up against a relentless adversary.

  “Did he have a briefcase or a notebook or something to carry this oversized piece of paper in?”

  “Look, Mom, we only know what we’ve told you so far. It’s just the beginning of the investigation. We’ll figure all that out in time.”

  “Can you describe the man to me?”

  “He was tall,” Liza said, “with very pale skin and rimless glasses.”

  Weird how my memory of the glasses was different from Liza’s.

  “Anything more than that?”

  Liza shook her head.

  “Can you do any better than that, Dev?”

  “Here’s a photograph I took on my phone.”

  My mother squinted at the image. Then she squinted at me. “Really?”

  “That’s why we went to your office. I asked Tapp to run it through facial recognition software.”

  “Use words, Dev. Describe the
man to me. You can’t rely on an out-of-focus photograph. What kind of features does he have?”

  “This is a devastating cross-examination, Commissioner,” Sam said, picking up two of the dinner plates and taking them to the sink. “You ought to save that talent for someone your own size, you know what I mean?”

  “It’s Dev’s turn to do the dishes, Sam. If she chooses to play detective, she’s got to stand up to the questioning.”

  “I think you both did exactly the right thing,” Sam said to Liza and me. “If more people were as observant as you were today, Liza, there’d be a lot less crime. But you were also smart to tell Sergeant Tapply and the two of us. We’ll take over from this point on.”

  “C’mon, Sam,” I said, carrying the rest of the dishes to the sink. “You and Mom are hunting international terrorists and fraudsters and banks that launder money for the bad guys. You’ll give this a really low priority. I know you will.”

  “But I promise you I’ll get it assigned, Devlin. Fair enough?”

  I hesitated as I filled the sink with soapy water. “Sure, Sam. Sure thing.”

  “Do you young ladies have homework?” my mother asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Liza said.

  “So do I. You’re welcome to set up on my table if you want to keep me company.”

  “An hour of TV when we finish?” I asked.

  “Okay. Pick something the three of us can watch together.”

  Sam was headed for the door. “What time in the morning, Blaine?”

  “How is seven forty-five? I’d like to walk the girls over to Ditchley.”

  “Mom! You’re not coming in to complain about Dickens’s cat paw, are you?”

  “No, dear. I know that would be futile. I just want to spend time with both of you. Make a plan for what we might take Liza to do this weekend.”

  “Good night, Sam,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

  I was relieved that my mother wasn’t going to get in the way of our case investigation. If I zipped through tonight’s homework fast enough, I’d be able to do an Internet search about book thieves. I needed some focus for our investigation. It had never occurred to me before today that danger could be lurking in the public library.

  5

  “Thanks for trying to take the blame for what I did today, Liza,” I said as I got into bed and pulled the sheet up to cover me. We had done our homework, walked the dog together, and watched the rerun of an old TV show.

  “No reason for you to get in trouble for what I started,” she said. “Did you finish all the readings about the French Revolution?”

  “Yes.” I reached out and turned off the lamp that was on the narrow nightstand between our beds. “And I had time to check something out online, too. Get this. There’s an organization called the Latitude Society.”

  “What is it?”

  “All the members are interested in maps and cartography and rare books that have drawings of antique maps in them. That’s where I’ll start my research, I think.”

  “Can anyone use the society to get information?”

  “Oh, no. You have to be a member. It’s normally very expensive, but students get a really big discount.”

  “So you joined?”

  “Nope. I signed you up for membership, Liza. You’re the one who knows about globes and all that stuff. I promise I’ll pay for it out of my allowance.”

  She was quiet.

  “Do you mind if I ask you some questions, Dev? I mean, personal ones.”

  “No problem.” I figured I owed her that much. And I had spent a lot of last night asking her about her family, so I expected curiosity in return.

  I had learned that both her parents were schoolteachers, which helped account for her being such a brainiac. She was a scholarship student at the American School in Buenos Aires, just as she was for this summer program at the Ditch. Liza had two older sisters and a younger brother, the kind of sibling connections that always sounded so good to an only child.

  “Is that man Sam your mother’s boyfriend?” she asked.

  “In my dreams.”

  “Then what?”

  “Every police commissioner, just like a lot of officials in government, has a ‘detail.’ That’s what it’s called in the department. Mom has to be bodyguarded twenty-four/seven. Like right now, there’s a patrol car parked in front of our building for overnight, so that there is always protection for my mother.”

  “Sam is part of that detail?”

  “My mother used to be a federal prosecutor, Liza. She handled some of the major cases that were based in this city—things that I wasn’t supposed to know about when I was just a kid, but now I’ve read most of the clippings and understand how serious they were.”

  I was probably four or five when my mother met Sam Cody. Like her, he was tall and lean, and like her, he had straight blond hair. Sometimes I thought they resembled a brother and sister, which is mostly how they acted.

  “Sam is a first-grade detective. He works homicide. There was this terrible case seven years ago that was a joint investigation with the feds and local prosecutors.”

  “What kind of case?”

  “A bunch of really bad guys were kidnapping teenagers in the poorest parts of Europe and bringing them to America with promises of a better life.”

  “Better how?”

  “That they would have jobs in upstate New York, mostly farming and working in fields. Once these teens got here, in some horrible freight ship, they were held by these guys and actually kept like slaves.”

  “You mean trafficking?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I mean,” I said. “Sam was in charge of the NYPD part of the task force, because several of the young men died trying to escape from the freighter to a beach in Queens when they could see how they were being treated. My mother ran the prosecution, and she and Sam became best friends. Have been ever since.”

  “How old is your mother?” Liza asked.

  “Forty-four. The first woman to be police commissioner in New York, and not all the men on the force like that idea. It’s not one of the great feminist strongholds in the country. But Mayor Bloomfield thinks the world of her, and he took the chance to make her PC.”

  “Awesome.”

  “Sam is two years younger than she is. He’s divorced now, with two sons—eight-year-old twins. My mother trusts him with her life, so she asked him to run her detail.”

  “They won their case?”

  “Yeah, the bad guys are away forever, I think.” I rolled onto my side to face Liza. “That’s also how Natasha came into our lives.”

  “How?”

  “She was one of those girls, Liza. From Moldova, in the former Soviet Union. She was orphaned in her country when she was our age, so when her friends introduced her to the men making promises about how much better things would be in America, she thought she had nothing to lose by coming here.”

  “Natasha was a witness in your mother’s case?”

  “She was. And when it was over, she was supposed to go to a foster home. But after everything she’d been through, and all the abuse she’d experienced, she just couldn’t start over with strangers. She and my mother had grown close during the case and they both thought that maybe Natasha could try coming to live with us. So my mother asked her boss if it was possible. And after they worked it out, Natasha got into a good school, and Mom hired a tutor to help her learn English. She’s lived with us ever since, and she’s become part of our family. She was always there to watch over me when I was little, so I love her like a sister. Even though it means that now I have two adults I have to listen to!”

  “That’s amazing. Such a generous thing for your mother to do.”

  “It’s Natasha who’s amazing. She’s kind of like my best friend in the world, even though she’s twenty-two years old. She finished high school and now she’s got one more year at Columbia till she graduates with a degree in history.”

  “You know what I like best about all
this?” Liza said to me. “It’s the way your mother has created a family for both of you. You said you were so envious of me having sisters and a brother, but you’ve got Sam and Natasha and Tapp, and I’m sure there are others. You’ve got a real family, Dev.”

  I looked away, toward the wall, fighting back tears that seemed to well up out of nowhere. I’d give anything just to have my father be alive, even though I loved all the surrogates my mother had gathered around us.

  “Dev,” Liza spoke softly into the darkness of the small room, “how did your father die?”

  I cleared my throat to answer. “He was a journalist. At least that’s what his credentials said. Working for the Wall Street Journal when he met my mom. But my grandmother thinks he was a spy, working for the CIA. She says that investigative journalism was just a front for him to get access to people.”

  “A spy? Really?”

  “That’s one of the things she argues about with my mother, who tells her not to fill my head with those absurd stories.”

  “They met through her work?”

  “Yes, they did. It’s a really sweet love story,” I said, even though there were days I couldn’t bear to hear it, knowing how his death had broken my mother’s heart and spirit. “They got married five months before my father died in an explosion in Paris. My mother was pregnant with me. No one has ever been caught.”

  Liza was quiet. I was hoping she had run out of questions.

  “Is that why you’re taking a journalism course in the fall?” she asked after a couple of minutes of silence. “To do your father’s kind of work?”

  “No way. I want to be exactly like my mother when I get older. Go to college at Vassar, then law school, then get a job as a prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, working my way up to the feds.”

  “Oh, Dev. That must make her so proud, so happy to know.”

  I reached for the tissue box on the night table and blew my nose. “Are you kidding? I’d never tell her that at this point. It would go directly to her head, Liza. She’d be insufferable with me.”

  Liza laughed. “That could never happen.”

  “This way I can learn by stealth. I know how she thinks and study what she says and pick up all kinds of techniques every day that I’m around her. Better that she believes I want to be a forensic biologist for now, which isn’t a bad second choice.”