Moving Target

by Elizabeth Lowell

  Anyone who already knew about Warrick’s distaste for the newly discovered pages didn’t need, like, help picking out a really nice example of early-twelfth-century British illumination in the archaic Insular Celtic style.

  Chapter 52

  People are still jammed around the book,” Serena said as she watched the discreet shoving match that resulted from people trying to get closer to the fair’s multimillion-dollar attraction.

  Erik didn’t look up. He appeared to be concentrating on a selection of leaves from an Italian lady’s Book of Hours, but his attention was on two men in suits who sat with their chairs against the wall. Their bodies were turned toward each other and they leaned close together, as though to shut out the rest of the room. The men must have believed the low rumble of background noise in the ballroom would cover their conversation. In most cases, it would have. But Erik had exceptional hearing and the man who was doing the selling had the kind of voice that carried.

  “. . . to pay a million. She doesn’t know what she has. There hasn’t been anything of this quality since the Book of Kells.”

  “Are you certain she doesn’t know?”

  “If she did, she would have a multimillion-dollar price tag on it, wouldn’t she? It’s a repeat of that fine Italian Gospel last year. One inheritance. One dumb heir. One good buy for us.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Look,” he cut in, “anyone who doesn’t appreciate what they own doesn’t deserve to own it. If she takes a few thousand dollars for a multimillion-dollar piece of art, well, that’s the price she pays for being a cultural moron.”

  “As long as it’s legal.”

  “No problem. They haven’t managed to pass laws against being stupid yet.”

  Neither of the men mentioned ethics, because neither of them was interested.

  “So you think you can get the manuscript for a few thousand?”

  “Maybe. I might have to go as high as a hundred thousand, because she’s being coy and saying she doesn’t have the whole thing but word is that she does. She’s just milking the price. You front the cash and I’ll take twenty percent of the resale.”

  “Fifteen. And that’s half again what a finder’s fee would be.”

  “Yeah, but without me you—”

  “Fifteen,” the money man cut in impatiently.

  “Okay. Fifteen. But I’ll need the money fast. Word is already out about the leaves she sent to Warrick.”

  “Yeah. And the word I’ve heard is that they’re fake.”

  “Fake, schmake. My source says they’re solid gold.”

  “Who’s your source?”

  “Same as always.”

  “Yeah? Who’s that?”

  “A little bird.”

  Erik was still looking at an illustration of a fifteenth-century artist’s idea of what the Epiphany looked like when one of the two men strode past in a hurry. It was the man whose voice carried so well, the one who talked to little birds.

  “Sell anything yet?” the man asked over Erik’s shoulder.

  “No,” said the proprietor, a young woman named Marianne who was watching Erik from the corner of her eye. “You?”

  “Hell, no. Nobody buys at affairs like this. We’re just a free floor show.”

  When the man cut over to another aisle and began querying every other proprietor about sales, Erik looked up. “Who was that?” he asked Marianne.

  “V. L. Stevenson. He has a booth down by the front, but he’s never in it.”

  “Probably why he hasn’t sold anything,” Serena said.

  Marianne’s eyes said she would just as soon Erik had been alone, but her voice was polite. “You’re probably right. Most proprietors will share duties with nearby booths, but . . .” She shrugged and didn’t say the obvious—with a wanderer like V. L. Stevenson, sharing was a fool’s game. She leaned closer to the page Erik was studying and pointed at a picture with a blush-pink fingernail. “The interesting part of this manuscript, in addition to its use of gold foil, is the fact that it is one of the earliest known examples in which the Pepysian model book was used for the decoration.”

  “What’s that?” Serena asked.

  “Medieval clip art,” Erik said. “It was a book of sketches of birds and such that illuminators and miniaturists copied from when they were decorating manuscripts.”

  “No such thing as copyright back then.”

  “No need. Copying was a requirement if there was to be any spread of literacy or religion at all. Before page numbers, the illuminated capitals and miniatures served as a way to remember which page a particular sermon began on, so the decorations got copied, too.”

  “Before mechanical printing, it was an honor and a duty to make your manuscripts available to less fortunate religious orders,” Marianne said. “Rich monasteries would loan out their books to be copied by poorer monasteries who couldn’t afford to commission such expensive works from scratch.”

  Serena looked at the leaf. It was colorful enough, but to her eye badly composed. The birds looked like they had been haphazardly glued in place to keep from falling off the page.

  “Then the printing press came along,” Erik said, turning to another leaf. This one was less colorful. Red initial capitals only on important sections. “That ended the need for hand copying. By modern times, people were sneering at copies as inferior, but before that originality wasn’t prized. Quite the opposite. It was suspect.”

  “Makes sense,” Serena said. “Most of the first books were religious, and in religion, originality is another name for heresy.”

  Erik grinned and ran his fingertips over her long red braid. “Quick, aren’t you?”

  “Quick enough to rap your knuckles if you go after my scrunchie,” she said, referring to the twist of elastic and cloth that secured the end of her braid. She was discovering that he loved unraveling her hair. “You mess my braid up, you put it back together.”

  “I’ll look forward to it.” Smiling, he turned to Marianne. “This manuscript is interesting but it doesn’t quite meet my needs. Do you have any palimpsests, particularly any from the fifteenth century? Miniatures and capital letters are preferred.”

  “Sorry. Our specialty is entire manuscripts. Have you tried Reggie Smythe?”

  “Yes.”

  She frowned and looked around the room as though for inspiration. “Oh, of course! Albert Lars. Down at the end of aisle J. He has a huge collection of illuminated singulars and oddities.” She wrote quickly on a business card. “If you can’t catch him in his booth, try this number. He does a lot of after-hours showings.”

  “Thanks, I will,” Erik said warmly.

  He meant it. He didn’t want to make Ed Heller’s work any easier than he had to, and he had begun to think no one would recommend good old Bert to him, thus giving him an excuse to pursue the other dealer who had a known connection in the past to some pages from the Book of the Learned. Maybe Heller would miss the connection. Maybe not. It was worth a try.

  Erik pocketed the card and began working his way slowly toward aisle J, talking with proprietors and staff all along the way, hoping Heller’s hand would go numb from taking notes on whom they had talked to and what had been said. By the time they got to aisle J, Serena’s eyes were looking a bit glazed.

  “Okay. I think I have it now,” she said. “They’re called miniatures because they were originally done in red paint, which was called minium.”

  “Right. Thus, miniaturist—one who paints in red. Then the other colors came along. The name didn’t change but the meaning did.”

  “Got it. Miniatures are independent of the text rather than part of it like capital letters. In fact, miniatures might not have anything to do with the text at all.”

  “Right.”

  “The plural of codex is codices.”

  “Yes.”

  “I think I already knew that. Just like index, whose plural used to be indices but now is indexes. Think the same thing will happen to codex?”


  “Only if people start using it as a synonym for ‘book.’ “

  “I don’t see that happening. Most people aren’t even sure what synonym means.”

  He laughed.

  She kept talking. It was how she organized disorganized facts in her mind. Picky was used to it. He ignored her. Erik was more fun. He seemed to enjoy her.

  “Chrysography is writing with gold ink,” she said, sorting through the jumble of new terms in her mind. “Glair is the binding medium. Actual powdered metallic gold gives gold ink its color. There was something else . . .” She frowned. “Oh, yes. Glair is made from egg whites. Yuck. Who do you suppose first figured out that it was that sticky?”

  “The mother of the first kid who dropped an egg and glued his pet mouse to the floor with it.”

  Serena snickered. “Hexateuch and incunable are real words. The former means the first six books of the Old Testament. The latter means any book printed before 1501. Primer is another name for the Book of Hours, taken from the Hour of Prime, which was the first hour in the daily cycle of devotion. Since most people learned to read—if they learned to read at all—from the Book of Hours, today we call early teaching books primers.”

  “All that and beautiful, too. Awesome.”

  “Ha ha,” she said without emphasis. “Insular Celtic means something different to everyone.”

  Erik laughed. “Only if you’re talking about time periods. That’s why I usually add ‘early twelfth century’ to the description. It’s a shorthand way of saying a Romanesque period manuscript in Insular Celtic style.”

  “So Erik the Learned was an anachronism?”

  “Maybe. And maybe the complex yet exuberant Celtic style spoke to his soul more than the classical Romanesque style. Whatever, it was a choice he made, not a necessity. He wasn’t an ignorant man. He knew what was happening over on the Continent. Perhaps he even fought in one of the Crusades. Certainly he had friends or allies who had fought the Saracen.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The Book of the Learned names one of Erik’s allies as Dominic le Sabre, called the Sword. He was a Norman knight who received his fiefdom in England as a reward for outstanding service in the Crusades.”

  “Generous of the king.”

  “Up to a point. The king of England was one shrewd bastard. He gave his ‘Sword’—the nickname described a hell of a fighter and a leader of men—land and marriage in the borderlands, where the Saxons were still reluctant to bow to the English king. In one swoop the king got rid of a brilliant Norman warrior-leader, put a powerful ally in place on the enemy lines, and smacked the uppity Saxons right in the face.”

  Serena thought of the elegant, lovingly made pages her grandmother had left to her. “Somehow it doesn’t seem possible that such beautiful, intricate art came from a time of political backstabbing. Front-stabbing, too. Did I mention outright war?”

  Erik glanced up in time to catch her swift frown. “Monasteries with high walls and secular castles with palisades and moats existed for a reason. If it wasn’t war, it was bandits or ambitious neighbors. In those days, the force of arms brought more peace than the confessional. The Borderlands, the Disputed Lands, the Scottish Marches, the Lowlands . . . by whatever name, the north of England and the south of Scotland have seen more than their share of bloodshed.” He shrugged. “Blood was probably the first ink.”

  “Cheerful thought.”

  “Realistic.”

  Serena didn’t argue. She had seen the way he casually looked around the crowd every few minutes. The way he was doing now. “Find it?” she asked tightly.

  “What?”

  “Whatever you’re looking for.”

  He caught a glimpse of Heller’s broad face and short, pale hair. “Yeah. I found it.”

  “Who is it?”

  “No one you want to know.”

  Idly Erik thought about letting Heller follow him to some quiet place where they wouldn’t be interrupted by well-meaning bystanders. Then he discarded the idea. Heller wouldn’t know anything more about the mysterious employer than Wallace had. Less, probably. Wallace called the shots in that partnership.

  “Looks like Bert isn’t here,” Serena said.

  Erik stopped watching Heller out of the corner of his eye and looked at Bert’s empty booth.

  “If you’re looking for Mr. Lars’s private showing,” said a slim young man in the next booth, “it’s across the hall in the Silver Room. Don’t worry about being late. He’s not a stickler for formality.”

  “Thanks,” Erik said.

  “What are we going to do now?” Serena asked under her breath.

  “Go to Bert’s party.”

  “We weren’t invited.”

  He gave her a sideways glance. “Buyers are always invited to Bert’s parties.”

  “Then why is it in a private room?”

  “You’ll see.”

  Chapter 53

  Erik gave one of his Rarities Unlimited business cards to the rumpled gatekeeper at the door of the Silver Room. Thirty seconds later, Bert appeared in the doorway, smiling like a crocodile. He was a tall, thin man with wispy blond hair, a raw silk shirt and jeans, a scholar’s stoop, and the sensibilities of an ex­porn producer. He greeted Erik like an old friend or a person with something to sell—warm handshake and a manly punch in the shoulder.

  Bert had been a Hollywood producer in another life. At least, that’s what he told people who cared enough to ask. It was the truth, after a fashion. He had indeed produced movies. Some of them even had dialogue.

  Much to his wealthy family’s relief, he had turned to a more reputable means of expressing himself: he began collecting medieval artifacts. He had quickly moved from arms and armor to more portable items. Jewelry of various kinds and value, with a particular Celtic specialty, had been his passion for a few years. Then he had settled upon illuminated pages. Not entire manuscripts, just pages. As he had said more than once, you can only look at one page at a time anyway.

  “Hey, boy, where ya been keeping yourself?” Bert asked. “Long time no see. Come in, come in. If I’d known you were in town, I’d have sent an invitation by courier.” Without waiting for a response, he gave Serena the thorough twice-over look of a man who knew all the uses of power, ambition, and the casting couch. “Is this your Tush du Jour?”

  Serena managed a thin smile. Men like Bert were the reason she had spent the last four years as a born-again virgin. The only difference between him and some of the men who had cured her of the opposite sex was the calculation in his pale blue eyes.

  Erik started to introduce her, but she cut him off.

  “Don’t bother,” she said easily. “Tushes and horses’ butts don’t need to exchange names.”

  Bert’s smile changed into rough laughter. “Watch it, boy. Those smart ones will be collecting alimony before you see forty.”

  “The smart ones don’t get married,” she said with a glittering smile. “Use ’em and lose ’em.”

  “Wish I’d met you before you grew teeth,” Bert said, and his smile looked genuine.

  “She was born with them,” Erik said. “Trust me.”

  “Never figured you for the dominatrix type.”

  “Neither did I,” Erik said. “Life is full of surprises. The best of them carry black velvet whips.”

  Serena gave him a sideways look that promised retribution. His smile said that he was looking forward to it and had a few ideas of his own.

  “Man, you’re twisted. I like that,” Bert said, drawing them farther into the room. “The goodies are along the far wall. You and Trixie want a drink?”

  Erik almost choked as he made the connection between dominatrix and Trixie. He heard something close to a snicker from Serena’s direction before she coughed.

  “Thanks,” he said, swallowing hard against laughter. “We’re fine for now.”

  “Great. Let me know what you need. It’s yours.” With that, Bert went back to working the small crowd in the room.<
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  “Bert’s one of a kind,” Erik said blandly.

  “Thank you, God,” Serena retorted. “How long do you think it took him to perfect his act?”

  “Sometimes I think it isn’t an act.”

  “You’re scaring me.”

  “Don’t worry, Trixie. I’ll take care of you.”

  “Blow me,” she said succinctly.

  “That, too.”

  Before she could say anything, he took her arm and headed for the far wall. He didn’t know all the players, but he could often tell their home geography at a glance. People from the East Coast wore leather shoes with slacks and open-necked shirts. The local males wore jeans, running shoes, three-hundred-dollar shirts, and two-thousand-dollar sport jackets. Two of the women—local, no doubt—were dressed like sex trophies. The other two women looked like overworked faculty wives at an upscale college. None of the trophies were interested in the pages. The women in dark dresses, sensible pumps, and pearls were very interested in what lay beneath the glass cases.

  So was Erik. Followed by Serena, he did a quick circuit of the offerings. Occasionally he pulled out his hand-sized communications unit, entered notes, or queried the databases at Rarities.

  The pages in the Silver Room were a revelation to Serena, who thought of illuminated manuscripts as proper, even prissy, manuscripts dealing with man’s spiritual aspirations. But like everything else human, illuminated manuscripts came in more than one flavor. Bert collected the flavors that most shocked the twenty-first century’s still fundamentally Puritan view of bodily functions, including but not restricted to sex.

  Serena bent down and looked into a case with horrified fascination. The creatures in the margins were grotesque, their genitals exaggerated, and their actions graphically perverse.

  “I’m afraid to ask, but—“ she began.

  “What are they doing?” Erik cut in, smiling.

  “No! I already know way too much about that. I was just wondering what the text was like.”

  “It’s a fragment of the Gospel according to Mark.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “Then why . . . ?”