Into the Lion's Den

by Linda Fairstein

  “It’s a tough program,” he said to her, “and a good one.”

  “Getting ready for college, are you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Only five grades to go, Booker.

  “Do you have a library pass, too?”

  “Sure. I’ve never been in the Map Division before, but my teachers all send us to the NYPL for assignments. This time I got lucky. I know you have a great collection.”

  “We certainly do. I’m Martha Bland, Mr. Dibble. How can I help you today?”

  “I’d like to begin with an atlas, Ms. Bland. I’d like to have a look at Gerard Mercator’s Geographic Description of the World. I think it’s the 1636 edition I want. Two volumes, ninety-five maps?”

  “Well, that’s starting at the top, young man,” she said. “I guess that you’ve got a serious interest in maps if you want to see that particular atlas.”

  “A recent interest,” Booker said. “Recent but serious.”

  Truer words were never spoken.

  “Mercator is always popular here, Mr. Dibble. He coined the word ‘atlas,’ if you didn’t know that. But there must be something special going on.”

  “Really?”

  “These volumes are usually kept off-site. They’re the kind of rarities that you need to call for and order in advance, which is just a piece of advice I have for you going forward.”

  “That will be helpful. Thanks so much for telling me.”

  “But I’ve had three people in this week—two of them yesterday—who wanted the very same volumes,” Ms. Bland said. “It’s probably the most valuable atlas in the world.”

  9

  “Here’s a pair of gloves for you, Mr. Dibble,” the librarian said, reaching under the counter and coming up with the white cotton page protectors. “Settle yourself down at a table, and I’ll go back and search for the Mercator.”

  “Wouldn’t you like me to sign in, Ms. Bland?” Booker asked. “I was instructed to sign your log. I know you must keep very accurate records.”

  “We’ll get to that. Not to worry.”

  She walked away to the secured area where all the books were stored. I went back to my seat and made room for Booker in the middle of the long table, closest to Liza.

  “Dude, you are the man,” I whispered to him. “College-bound map scholar, as of the last hour, and Ms. Bland is buying into your entire act.”

  Booker opened his notebook and started to write in it. “What happens when she brings me a Mercator atlas?” he asked. “Then what do I do?”

  “I never thought you’d get it this fast,” I said. “I thought she’d hassle you and we’d have time with the sign-in book. We have to get the tall man’s name right before we can figure out what book he was ruining.”

  “If she brings the book instead of the sign-in log, what am I looking for?”

  “A missing page.”

  “Well, how do I find it if it’s missing, Dev? If it’s not there, I won’t know it’s not there, right? Use your brain.”

  “I saw the man slice a page from a book,” Liza said. “I don’t know which book, but there should be a sliver of paper left that attached the page into the binding of the book.”

  “Why would someone do something like that?” Booker asked.

  “Could be he’s just a crazy person,” Liza said, “or could be there’s something valuable on that particular page.”

  “How valuable could a single page be?” he said.

  “Here she comes,” I said to Liza. “Let’s get up and look at your globe.”

  Martha Bland was carrying a very oversized book. She had cotton gloves on, too, and was holding it in her arms, which were stretched out in front of her with the big book on its side, like she was making an offering of something precious to Booker.

  She rested the book on the table, right next to the seat where I had placed my tote bag.

  “Here you go, Mr. Dibble,” she said. “Mercator’s Atlas of the World. Volume One.”

  “Thanks so much, ma’am,” he said as she swiveled it around to face him.

  “Now, exactly what is it you’re looking for?” I heard her say as I leaned in toward the globe and pretended to whisper something to Liza about it.

  “My—uh, my instructions were sort of just to spend the first afternoon exploring the book,” he said. “Turning the pages and enjoying the history of it.”

  “That’s a wise approach,” the librarian said. “But I’ve got good news and there’s bad news for you. Which would you like to hear first?”

  “I’ll take the good news,” Booker said with a smile.

  “That’s the spirit,” she said, sitting down opposite him, keeping one eye on her desk, in case of another visitor. “This is one of the most extraordinary books in the world.”

  Martha Bland reached across and opened the cover of the atlas. She turned pages until she reached the first map, and Booker let out a whistle as he lowered his head to look at it.

  “Is that the book you saw yesterday?” I asked Liza.

  “I can’t be sure. The one I saw was definitely as big as that.”

  “Isn’t it magnificent?” Ms. Bland asked. “Think that this work is almost four hundred years old, Mr. Dibble. Four centuries since Mercator sat down to create these drawings, imagining a world that he had never seen, putting on paper shorelines and borders that explorers from different countries reported back to the kings and queens who financed their voyages.”

  Booker didn’t have to fake enthusiasm. He was so smart and such a curious guy that I could see he was able to completely put himself into his assignment.

  “So Mercator was doing this in part from information of people who had traveled the world, mostly sailors and soldiers,” Booker said, slowly turning the pages, “and in part … ?”

  “From places he dreamed about,” Ms. Bland said. “That’s all it could have been in those early times. A man with a brilliant imagination. He created the first atlas—all European countries and principalities—because there was a young prince who was planning to take his grand tour of the continent and wanted the most up-to-date vision of places that existed and what their boundaries were.”

  Ms. Bland kept an eagle eye on Booker’s hand as he lifted each of the very colorful pages of the volume.

  “But there were maps before Mercator,” Booker said.

  “Yes, indeed. He didn’t invent mapmaking. His genius was connecting a map of country A to a map of the adjoining territory in country B. He bound them together for the first time, so that you could see the flow from border to border as you traveled, not just a series of independent maps that didn’t appear to relate to one another.”

  Booker looked up at me and I mouthed two words to him. “Bad news?”

  He got it. “By the way, Ms. Bland, what’s the bad news?”

  “Don’t take any of this personally, Mr. Dibble, but there are two things. First is that I can only let you see one volume at a time.”

  He gave her that Dibble-dazzle smile. “That’s no problem. I can’t appreciate two at once,” he said. “Couldn’t even turn the pages of these big guys at the same time.”

  “Very well,” she said. “The other thing is that I have to sit here with you while you look at the Mercator. Watch you the entire time you have the book.”

  I almost interrupted with a What? Not trust Booker Dibble?

  “But you seem to be here alone today,” Booker said, much more diplomatically. He made it all about her and not about himself. A good trick for me to remember. “I can’t possibly put you to that trouble.”

  “It’s not just because you’re a student, Mr. Dibble, or that you’re young. I respect your intelligence, of course.”

  “Other people seem to be working from atlases and books, Ms. Bland,” Booker said, keeping his cool. “There’s no eagle eye on any of them.”

  “None of them have the Mercator,” she said, reaching across to run her gloved fingertip along the top of the page it was opened to
and stroking it lightly. “If I were to put this book up for sale tomorrow, Mr. Dibble, a rare book collector would probably offer me at least one million dollars for the two volumes.”

  “A million dollars!” Booker said, a little bit louder than he’d meant to do, as his hands jumped from the atlas onto his lap. “You must be kidding?”

  “It’s no joke at all. That price at the very least.”

  “But—but I’m not going to walk out of here with it, Ms. Bland.”

  “Calm down, Mr. Dibble. I know you’re not,” she said. “One of us librarians sits with any scholar who looks at the Mercators. And with lots of other books that are as rare an antique as this, too. It’s simply a rule.”

  Booker looked over at me and raised his eyebrows. I gestured with my hand that he should keep on turning pages.

  “I wish I could put our most valuable books under bulletproof glass,” the librarian said, pointing at the Hunt-Lenox Globe that Liza and I were gazing at. “But that doesn’t work when there are pages that need to be turned.”

  “Do you think I’ll get it dirty?” Booker asked. “Or that I’ll accidentally tear a page and ruin its value?”

  “Here’s a sad fact, Mr. Dibble,” she said, tapping her finger on the library table. “If you did decide to rip out a page of this atlas—and I’m not suggesting that you ever would—or perhaps even cut it out neatly with a pair of scissors, or a knife—”

  I could hear Liza’s intake of breath.

  Ms. Bland looked up in our direction and scowled at Liza, then turned back to Booker. “You would accomplish two things if you did that.”

  Booker put his hands on the table beside the great atlas. “I’d ruin this beautiful work of art, Ms. Bland. I understand that. That’s one thing.”

  “Correct. Its value would go from a million dollars to a fraction of that price,” she said, “and it would break the heart of each of us who have cared for these precious treasures over the years.”

  “Yeah. I’m sure of that. But what else?”

  “A person who steals a single page out of this book could sell it to a collector, or a dealer, as an individual map. Something rare that could be framed and hung in the private library of a person’s home. An atlas sits closed on a shelf, while a Mercator map would dominate an entire wall. And without struggling to carry this volume out of the library and risk getting caught, a single page might sell for as much as half the entire book.”

  “Half a million dollars for one of these pages?” Booker asked, lifting the map of a section of China between his fingers.

  “Indeed,” Ms. Bland said. “Libraries have three enemies, Mr. Dibble. We hold the history of the world within our doors, for all the public to see, but we fear three things.”

  “Fire,” Booker said. “That would have to be one. And water. I know that floods from the beginning of time have been a terrible threat to all kinds of antiquities.”

  “Entirely right, young man. Entirely right. And then there are the third enemies, the horrible human beings, not accidents or forces of nature, but people who would deface books and destroy their value, all for personal profit,” Ms. Bland said, shaking her gloved finger in front of his face. “Those terrible villains are the map thieves.”

  10

  “Did you say ‘thieves,’ ma’am?” I said, swiveling from the globe to step toward the table. I dropped my tote from the seat to the floor and parked myself right next to Ms. Bland. “Where?”

  I saw my opportunity to inject myself into the situation. Maybe we should just tell her what Liza saw yesterday.

  She held her forefinger to her mouth and gave me that classic library Sssssssh!

  “Thieves?” Liza followed my cue and rushed back to her seat next to Booker.

  “Girls, girls, girls,” Ms. Bland said. “Keep your voices down, please. There are absolutely no thieves in this library. I was just telling this young man a story.”

  “What’s the story? May we hear it, too?” I asked as Booker kept turning pages. “What a beautiful book that is.”

  “Mercator’s atlas,” he said. “Shows every country in the world from the sixteenth century. Every one except Transylvania, if my teacher told me right.”

  I was kneeling on the chair and leaning in to look at the pages. “Transylvania fascinates me. It’s where Count Dracula is from.”

  “Is there really a place called Transylvania?” Liza asked.

  “Yes. It’s part of Romania now,” I said. I wanted the map librarian to warm up to us. I needed her to know that Booker wasn’t the only smart one in the room. “There are supposed to be really strong magnetic fields in Transylvania, which gave lots of the people there extrasensory perception powers. That’s part of the Dracula legend, anyway.”

  Miss Bland cocked her head and looked at me with a vague hint of a smile. “Very good, dear. Now, how would you happen to know that?”

  “My school librarian. We studied the novel Dracula this year in class,” I said. “We’re going to do Frankenstein next. I just love my librarian.”

  “That’s so good to hear. Your feelings for your librarian, that is. Not necessarily her choice in fiction.”

  Okay, maybe it was a bit too smarmy of me, but Ms. Bland seemed to fall for it.

  “But my friend and I like maps and globes even more than a lot of books,” I said. “That’s why we’re studying the Hunt-Lenox.”

  I had Ms. Bland right where I wanted her. She was torn. She glanced longingly toward the tiny copper globe, clearly wanting to tell us more about it. Then she looked across at the Mercator and sat tight.

  “Could you please give us some of the history of the globe?” I asked. “I’m sure you know everything.”

  “I can’t right this minute. I’m helping Mr. Dibble with his project.”

  “Actually, Ms. Bland, why don’t we take a break?” Booker said.

  He closed the book and pushed it across the table to her waiting hands.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “I’ll reshelve it for now and when you’re ready to finish it and go on to the next half, I’ll get them for you.”

  She picked up the heavy book and padded off again.

  “How much of it did you get to go through?” I asked.

  “I was trying to look for residue of tear marks, not study the maps, and it was hard to do that with her right by me the whole time,” Booker said. “But there doesn’t seem to be anything missing, as far as I got.”

  “Can’t you finish it later?”

  “Didn’t you hear Ms. Bland? She claims nobody gets to use the Mercator without her standing guard. It would be way too lucky if the first book you picked was the one that had been defiled.”

  “Good point, Booker. Then let’s not bother with the second volume. It’s more important that we see the sign-in book,” I said. “Make that happen, okay?”

  “How do I do that?” Booker asked.

  Liza was doing a Google search of the library collection. “Ask for something that’s off-site, at another location,” she said. “Like every other library, this one ran out of storage space. A lot of the books are kept off-site, or they even make you use digital copies.”

  “If it’s off-site,” I said, “you’ll have to fill out a call slip and sign the book that we want to see. Good thinking, Liza. You can be my research assistant anytime.”

  “Assistant?”

  “Partner. I meant to say partner.”

  Ms. Bland stopped to talk to a man who was waiting at the counter with a question. Then she headed back to us.

  “Ask her for something by Thornton. Early seventeen hundreds,” Liza said to Booker.

  “You look so familiar to me,” I said to Booker as she got close to the table. “What school do you go to?”

  “Hunter,” he said, biting his lip to hide a smile. “I think I’ve seen you before, too.”

  “Takes a good library to bring smart people together,” Ms. Bland said. “Anything else you want today, Mr. Dibble?”

 
“Maybe something a little less pricey,” he said. “Do you have anything by Thornton? Eighteenth century?”

  “You’re a quick study, young man.”

  “My classmates are very competitive. Got to stay on my toes.”

  “Most of the Thorntons we have are off-site.”

  Thumbs-up to Liza.

  “If you don’t mind filling out a call slip,” she went on, “I’ll order them in for you. Thornton’s New England maps? New York?”

  “New York would be great. I can come back later in the week.”

  Martha Bland turned away again, stopped at her desk to pick up some call slips, and then reached beneath it and pulled out what looked like a ledger.

  “Should I tell her what I saw the tall man do?” Liza asked me.

  I looked to Booker for guidance.

  “What have you got to lose?” he asked.

  “Well, if Ms. Bland doesn’t believe Liza, or if she’s offended that something bad happened to a library book right under her nose, she might throw us out of the building altogether, and then we’d be nowhere in all this. That’s exactly why I didn’t walk in the door and tell her about him first thing.”

  “Let’s see how it feels when she comes back to us,” Booker said.

  “Wait for the right moment,” I said. “We have no idea how long or short the list of people who requested books is for yesterday. In case she doesn’t let us see it, let’s get ready to split up all the names. Booker, you try to memorize the top third, Liza the middle, and I’ll take the bottom.”

  “Done,” Booker said.

  “Call slips, young man,” Ms. Bland said, seating herself next to me. “Just fill them out with your personal contact information. I’ll throw a wide net. Get you some other items that might interest you.”

  “Thanks very much.”

  She opened the ledger she had to a page that was place-marked with an index card. “You can take off your gloves, Mr. Dibble. It’s just a musty old sign-in log. I need you to write your name, your e-mail address, and your school on today’s page.”

  Booker removed his gloves and picked up the pencil.

  I could see there were only seven or eight names on the page, under today’s date. I needed to distract Ms. Bland so Booker could turn back a day.