I crouched to see what it was. A dead pigeon, but larger than a New York pigeon, its buff-colored feathers shaded to cream and ivory, rose and iridescent green. One wing was awry, pinions outspread like fingers. There was no other sign of an injury.
I prodded the wing with my finger. Maybe a rat had gotten it. Or poison. I started to straighten when I saw a glint beneath the streetlamp: like a syringe but with a wedge of red plastic at one end, like a dart.
“You coming?”
I turned to see Gryffin waiting impatiently. “Yeah. Sorry.”
At the edge of the parking lot, I paused again. Black feathers appeared to have exploded on the broken concrete, as though someone had dropped a balloon full of black ink.
I frowned. “Huh. An owl must’ve gotten it.”
“More likely rats,” said Gryffin. “Don’t touch it.”
We left the parking lot. Immediately it was as if we’d been transported to a tiny English village: winding streets so narrow it would have been difficult for two cars to pass at once, row houses of yellow London brick nestled alongside stone cottages still adorned with Christmas fairy lights. Cars were parked in front of some residences, late-model Priuses and Vauxhall hybrids, a vintage poison-green Karmann Ghia. Range Rovers dwarfed front gardens the size of a tablecloth. A single modest apartment building might have been an effort at council housing. You could live here and never know you were in London.
“Nice, isn’t it?” Gryffin stopped in front of a cobblestoned alley where another antique streetlamp glowed. “Harold’s just down that way.”
We walked along the passage, my boots clattering loudly on the cobblestones. I felt like I’d trespassed onto a movie set. Any second, studio security would appear to throw me out.
“Who lives here?” I asked.
“Very small people with pointy shoes and hats.” Gryffin snorted. “Who do you think? Normal boring people.”
I stopped to regard a stroller parked in front of an orange door. The stroller resembled something ILM might design for a near-future movie featuring Googleplex employees in distress. I bet the door’s paint color was called something like Misty Kumquat.
“You mean normal boring rich people,” I said.
“Artists live here, too. One woman just celebrated her ninety-eighth birthday—she’s still painting.”
“Yeah, and when she croaks, they’ll roll dice on her canvases for her studio space.”
“Remember what I said about pretending? Look, this is Harold’s house.”
Chapter 6
A white picket fence bordered a pocket garden that in spring would be an explosion of roses and other flowers, now reduced to tangles of thorn and blackened leaves. The house was three stories high, its uppermost floor truncated, as though a giant had put his hand on top of the building and very gently pushed down. Wizened ropes of clematis clung to the whitewashed brick. A sturdy old bicycle leaned beside the front door, no Kryptonite lock or reinforced chain on its wheels. The door was painted a faded sailor blue. On the wall beside it a small brass plate read BIBLIOTECA DE BABEL.
Gryffin pushed open the gate—hardly necessary, I could have stepped over it with no effort. But I was trying to pretend, so I diligently followed him to the door, where he knocked. From inside I could hear Scott Joplin, “Stoptime Rag.” A rush of footsteps down the stairs, and the door was flung open.
A tall, beaming man stood framed in a rectangle of yellow light: thin and angular, with shiny, side-parted brown hair, bird-bright black eyes, and a wide laughing mouth. He wore a seersucker suit, creamy yellow and white, a buttercup-yellow button-down shirt, and a fastidiously knotted bow tie patterned with what appeared to be golf balls but which on closer inspection turned out to be eyeballs. His long, bony feet were bare.
“Come in, come in!” He beckoned Gryffin inside, shook his hand heartily, then noticed me. “Oh, hello! Is this your lady friend?”
“Just a friend.” Gryffin’s cheeks pinked, and I felt an unreasonable prick of jealousy. “Monica’s in Malibu for some kind of sea lion summit.”
“Harold Vertigan.” Harold grasped my hand. Despite a youthful, reedy voice and that glossy caramel flow of hair, he must have been close to my age. “And you are?”
“Cassandra Neary. Cass.”
“Well, please, come in!”
He held the door for us, and I followed Gryffin into a small, elegant entry hall. Everything had the same warm glow as Harold’s hair—polished hardwood floor; plaster walls painted a soft umber; elegant bentwood chairs. On the walls, silver-framed mirrors reflected light from gas fixtures that had been retrofitted to hold LED bulbs. A striped Swedish rug ran the length of the hall.
Harold gestured to a closet. “You can hang your things in there. Is it cold out? It looks cold.”
Gryffin tugged the lapel of Harold’s seersucker jacket. “That’s because you’re dressed for summer.”
“I live in hope, I live in hope.”
He waited as we stored our coats. I dropped my bag on the closet floor, but Gryffin kept tight hold of his. There was plenty of room in the closet—I’ve slept in smaller places—but he was obviously taking no chances, not even with a trusted colleague. And he definitely wasn’t taking any chances with me.
As we stepped back into the hall, Harold clapped his hands.
“What can I get for you? Some tea? Coffee? A brandy?” His gaze fell upon the messenger bag, swiftly moved to Gryffin’s face. “If that’s what I think it is—what I hope it is—there’s a bottle of something we can open later, to celebrate.”
He spun and headed down the hall. Gryffin shot me a grin and took off after him. I walked more slowly, casing the place. A half-open door gave me a glimpse of a powder room. There was a small, well-turned-out kitchen, with copper-bottomed pots hanging from a ceiling rack, an AGA gas stove, white pottery bowls lined up on a pink granite countertop. A beautiful old copper coffee machine and a wine rack that probably held a small fortune in claret and Sauternes. In the hall, old prints of parrots, beautifully framed. A small console table held six neatly stacked volumes. I picked up the top one: Edward St. Aubyn’s Bad News. The inscription inside read For Harold, who only brings good news.
“I’m not a collector.” Harold sounded apologetic. He glanced at Gryffin, waiting for us at the end of the hallway. “Some dealers, they use their shop as a way to maintain their own collections. The only books I keep are the ones I truly love. Everything else?” He flexed his fingers as though releasing handfuls of dry leaves. “This house is just a way station. The books, I provide them haven until they find their final home. Come, I’ll show you.”
He guided me into a room, brightly lit with a leaf-green rug. Custom-built bookshelves covered the walls from floor to ceiling. Several freestanding bookcases stood near windows half hidden behind green-and-white toile curtains. Beside the door, a small wall panel showed LED readouts for humidity and air temperature. I saw no sign of a security system, which might make Harold Vertigan’s the only shop in London without CCTV.
Harold walked to a Gustavian desk, like everything else a model of restrained elegance. He leaned over a laptop, checking something, then nodded. “Looks like we’re all set. Are you sure I can’t offer you a drink?”
Gryffin put his messenger bag onto a low table and sank onto the sofa in front of it. “Maybe that bottle of celebratory something you mentioned.”
“Absolutely. Back in a flash.”
Gryffin shut his eyes. Seconds later, he began to breathe heavily. He’d matched me drink for drink, but obviously didn’t have the stamina for it.
While he napped, I examined Harold’s wares. There was a handful of volumes for the casual buyer, but most of this stuff would have been kept under lock and key back in the rare-book room on the Strand’s fourth floor. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century firsts—Conrad, Beckett, Lessing, Pynchon, Plath. As for the twentieth century, David Foster Wallace’s stock still ran high—an inscribed Broom of the System went for four thousand
pounds—but you could get a mint JT LeRoy for only fifty quid.
I crossed to where the toile curtains hid a set of French doors. I pulled aside a fold of fabric, peeked out at a walled garden bedded down for winter, and let the curtain drop. Beside the doors, a glass-fronted case held some older volumes, each housed in a bespoke clamshell slipcase, with the volume’s title embossed on the spine in gilt letters. I gingerly opened a clamshell to display the treasure within, Roger Bacon’s Opus Majus. There were also pamphlets—octavos and quartos, all in Italian.
I turned to Gryffin, dozing on the sofa as though in a hammock, his long legs stretched in front of him, fingers linked behind his head. I held up one of the pamphlets.
“What’s this? Nuovo Luciadario de Secreti.”
He blinked awake, squinting at the pamphlet. “Secreti italiani—the mass-market paperbacks of the early sixteenth century.”
I replaced the pamphlet on the shelf. “He seems to have a lot of this stuff.”
“Something for everyone. Harold’s a matchmaker—you fall in love with an antiquarian volume, he does his best to find it for you. Makes sure its hair is combed and it’s wearing the right shoes. No missing pages, no illustrated plates removed to be sold off separately. No cheap morocco binding, unless that’s the very last resort. The British Library deals with him. Patti Smith deals with him—he found her a copy of Swinburne’s Atalanta in Calydon, inscribed to Arthur Rimbaud.”
“And you deal with him.”
“Right.”
From behind us came the soft slap of bare feet on the floor. Harold appeared, bearing a bottle of champagne and three flutes. Gryffin stood somewhat woozily. “You’re sure this isn’t premature?”
Harold grinned. “I think it was your idea. But no. The time is always right for fine champagne with friends.”
The bottle was Dom Pérignon, the glasses Waterford. I tried not to look impressed as Harold reverently opened the bottle, filled the flutes, and handed them round. He raised his glass and saluted each of us in turn.
“To The Book of Lamps and Banners. ‘When a student understands all the wisdom and materials of all the world’s devices and creations, all things will serve him and he will serve none.’”
Harold sipped from his glass. I downed mine and reached for the bottle, but Gryffin beat me to it. He refilled our flutes, set his on the low table, moved aside an issue of the Times Literary Supplement, and reached for his messenger bag.
“Time for the great unveiling,” he announced. “All will be revealed.”
He opened the battered leather satchel and withdrew a plastic shopping bag. Inside was a brown paper bag, and inside that a large green-and-white bag that had once held several pounds of Starbucks Caffe Verona but now contained a number of ziplock bags, one inside another. Gryffin opened each of these with the care and precision I associated with cocaine dealers in Alphabet City, circa 1983.
At last he withdrew a small object wrapped in rust-colored cloth. Painstakingly, he removed the cloth, revealing a book the size of a trade paperback. An unprepossessing volume, half bound in leather, its dilapidated covers held together with twine.
For a long moment he stared at it, his expression at once avid and utterly forlorn, as though he gazed into the face of a lover he was bidding farewell during wartime. With a sigh, he turned and handed it to Harold.
“There you go,” Gryffin said. He picked up his glass and finished the champagne in one swallow.
Harold said nothing, only stared at the book in his hand. After a moment he glanced up at me. “There’s another bottle in the fridge. Would you bring it in and do the honors?”
I did, and fast. For once I didn’t bother to check the bathroom for a medicine cabinet. I was pretty sure there wouldn’t be one. I popped the cork on the second bottle in the kitchen, gulped some down, and wiped my mouth before returning to the library.
Harold sat staring at the small volume while Gryffin paced unhappily by the French doors. I felt for him: Who wants to stick around and watch some other guy fuck your ex-girlfriend?
Or maybe he was nervous that Harold was going to find something wrong with the book, and the deal would fall through. I refilled our glasses and gave Gryffin his.
“Bottoms up,” I said.
Gryffin forced a smile. “Cheers.”
Harold ignored his champagne. He placed the book on the low table in front of him. For almost a minute he gazed at it, rubbing his chin. Finally he reached into a pocket of his seersucker jacket and withdrew a pair of white cotton gloves. He pulled them on and undid the twine, gingerly grasped one leather board and opened the book. Reaching into another pocket, he withdrew a magnifying glass. He leaned over the volume, examining the endpapers.
“Whoever re-bound this did a good job,” he said. “Two-thousand-year-old papyrus is tough to match—they must have found some in an Egyptian sarcophagus for the endpapers and frontispiece. That’s one thing the Victorians were good for. Stealing things from other people and putting them to their own use.”
Gryffin seemed to relax. “That’s what I thought,” he said, and sat next to Harold.
I squeezed in beside Gryffin. “So this belonged to a Victorian collector?”
“Among others,” replied Harold, still peering through the magnifying lens. “Probably many, many others. If this is authentic, it would have been valuable even when it was first written. Aristotle and Alexander were rather well known in their own lifetimes.” He laughed. “My guess is that it was in private hands after Aristotle’s death, and then in a library—probably the library at Alexandria, until Julius Caesar burned it down.”
“So someone saved this one book?”
Harold shrugged. “Many people may have saved many books, though not enough of them. The library at Alexandria was burned more than once—by Romans, by Coptic Christians, by Muslims. This—”
He set down the magnifier to hold the volume in both hands, raising it toward us like an offering. “This was probably passed down from one scholar to another. Or stolen from one by another, for hundreds of years. Thousands. At some point it fell into the hands of a nineteenth-century English antiquarian, who took it upon himself to rebind it. Thus the somber black morocco.”
Harold stopped to eye my brimming champagne glass with mild dismay. “Would you mind terribly?”
“Sorry.” I downed my champagne and set the glass aside. “So, is it legit?”
Gryffin winced. I waited for Harold’s reply, but he had once again picked up the magnifying glass and was now poring over the cover. Eyes widening, he turned to Gryffin.
“The binding’s not morocco—it’s anthropodermic. Did you know that?”
Gryffin shook his head. “Jesus, no.”
“Just as well. Bad enough you brought this into the country in your hand luggage.”
I frowned. “What’s anthropodermic?”
“Human skin,” said Harold. “It’s not exactly common, but there are quite a few in private collections and university libraries. One or two medieval Bibles, and it seems to have been popular among anatomists going back to the sixteenth century. After the French Revolution, copies of the French Constitution were bound in the skins of aristocrats. Then there are the murderers—after they were hanged here in England, the cadavers of several convicted men were used to bind accounts of their trials.”
I pointed at the book. “Any idea who that might be?”
Harold’s mouth twisted into a wry smile. “I’ll leave the carbon dating and DNA tests to Tindra. That might tell us more about how old it is. Some of your more gruesome Victorians went in for that kind of thing, like Richard Burton and his friends in the Cannibal Club. But this binding could be much, much older.”
He rested one gloved hand gently on the cover. “This is a very advanced philosophical artifact. And I can guarantee you that some of the people who’ve owned it over the years knew exactly what it was.”
He turned several pages, all blank, before halting at what appeared to be a
title sheet. Harold sucked his breath in, and I felt my skin prickle.
The page was biscuit colored, its deckled edges darker. It appeared thick and soft to the touch, like heavy silk. Feathery Arabic calligraphy covered the page, as well as Greek letters. At the top was a delicate rendering of hares leaping over three scarlet candles, each alight with a minute flame that must have been drawn with a single filament of sable. Seven circles of varying sizes and colors hung above the hares’ long ears. Dull red and indigo, watery yellow, a lovely fresh violet; orange and black and the brown of crushed mulberries.
“Be careful.”
Harold placed a hand on my arm: without realizing it, I had bent my head to within inches of the page. I stared at him, then at Gryffin, and knew that each of our astonished faces mirrored the others’.
“Extraordinary,” murmured Harold.
He turned to the next page, Greek words scrawled alongside a column of Arabic. The page following was crowded with esoteric symbols and another illustration, a beautiful naked woman with a vermilion scarf bound across her eyes. She had seven arms, and each of her seven hands grasped something: a candle, a mirror, a sword, a fish, a tendril of ivy, a skull, and a book whose cover, no larger than my pinkie nail, bore the same image as that in the book in front of us.
“These pages are parchment, not papyrus,” said Harold. “It looks as though they were bound into the original manuscript. They’re in Arabic, with Greek annotations. Which might make this the oldest example of an illustrated Arabic text, on top of everything else. Oh, dear…”
A loose page protruded from between the others. Delicately, Harold pinched it between his fingers and gazed at it. I could see lines of text that resembled bird tracks, but no illustrations.
“What is it?” Anxiety crept into Gryffin’s voice. “Is it damaged?”
“No, nothing like that,” Harold replied with a reassuring look. “It’s part of the original Arabic text, I think.”
He turned the sheet to peruse the other side. Brightly colored images covered the page now facing me, with a single line of written text across the top: incredibly tiny words, black ants marching across the page. Only these words weren’t in Arabic, or Greek, but English. I leaned closer so that I could read them:
The Book of Lamps and Banners Page 4