Lethal Legacy

by Linda Fairstein

  Mike worked himself back out from underneath the tank, and Yuri scrambled to help him up on his feet.

  “Ms. Gibson, I swear,” Yuri said. “Was here yesterday, eleven o’clock in the morning. Once every twenty-four hours, check under tank for leaks. No leaks. Was nothing there. Myself did it. Myself.”

  “We’ll discuss that later, Yuri. Be still.” Jill wasn’t interested in his protestations. She stepped off the catwalk and I followed her over to where Mike had moved the small pile of books. “May I have them, please?”

  “I think they’re ours for the time being,” Mike said, removing gloves from his pants pocket before he lifted the cover of the first slim volume. “Tamerlane, 1827. Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “One of thirteen existing copies in the world, Detective. Fifty printed-his first published poem. A treasure, to say the least.”

  “From…?”

  “It was kept in a vault in the Berg Collection. That’s on the second floor, Mike. I’ll show you where.”

  “Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, 1860,” Mike said. “You caught a break here. It’s only a third edition.”

  “That particular copy has actually got greater value than the firsts,” Jill said, nervously poised over Mike’s shoulder. “It’s called the Blue Book. Whitman kept it at his desk while he worked as a clerk at the Department of the Interior, constantly making edits in it. The secretary found it and thought it so obscene that Whitman was fired on the spot.”

  The four books beneath that were larger. Three were brilliantly colored illuminated manuscripts of Petrarch’s poems, Horace’s works, and Aesop’s fables, all with spectacular calligraphy done on ancient vellum. Mike read the titles aloud to us, including the fourth one, which was an archive of the paintings of Asher Durand.

  Jill Gibson exhaled. “That will raise some board eyebrows.”

  “Why’s that?” Mercer asked.

  “Durand was a nineteenth-century artist,” she said. “His work helped define the Hudson River School. And it’s his great painting-Kindred Spirits-which was bequeathed to us and which we sold for a fortune in 2005.”

  “Over the heated objection of many of your trustees,” I said.

  “That’s putting it mildly.”

  “Can you give us a breakdown later of who was for and against it?” Mercer said.

  “Certainly.”

  Mike lifted the oversize folio that had been at the bottom of the pile. “John James Audubon, Birds of America, volume one.”

  “Heads will roll,” Jill said. “That’s from the Hunt Collection-one of its jewels-and worth a king’s ransom today. If Jasper gets word that we haven’t had the ability to protect the best things he’s given us, we stand to lose all the rest.”

  Mike gently lifted the cover. “Talk about the emperor’s new clothes. These birds either flew the coop, Coop, or somebody beat us to them.”

  He held the book up for us to see inside, and it was clear that pages had been sliced out of it. Only blank parchment was left between the ends of the fine leather bindings.

  As Mike stood up with the heavy tome in his arms, he flipped through the few remaining sheets in it. He turned the last page, and a two-foot-long fragment of a larger antique map-not bound into the old book-slipped out and fluttered to the floor.

  Jill reached down for it as Mike yelled out, “Don’t touch it.”

  I kneeled beside her and looked at the detailed engraving: a piece of the Asian continent, and the figure of a man standing beside a map of the world. The cartouche over his head proclaimed him to be Amerigo Vespucci.

  “What’s he got to do with birds?” Mike asked.

  “Nothing at all,” Jill said, steadying herself with one hand on the floor, the other clasped to her chest. “What you may be looking at is a piece of the most valuable map ever made, in a little village in France, in 1507.”

  “How valuable is it? Worth enough to kill for?” he said, trying to make out the detail in the woodcut engraving.

  “If all twelve sections of this puzzle actually do exist, there’s only one other map like it in the world. The price tag on it would be close to twenty million dollars.”

  “That’s a staggering number,” I said. “Maybe enough to turn Tina Barr into a thief.”

  “I don’t know why she wouldn’t have been tempted by it,” Jill Gibson said. “Half the members of my board would sell their souls to own this map.”

  NINETEEN

  “If you’re looking for the Holy Grail of rare maps,” the petite librarian said to us, grinning as she gazed at the woodcut that Mike had placed on the table in front of her, “this is as good as it gets.”

  Bea Dutton was in charge of the map division of the library, home to more than half a million of them and more than twenty thousand atlases and books about cartography. Jill had called her to come in to the office early, moments after Mike made his find, and she appeared within the hour.

  “Did you know this map was missing?” Mike asked.

  “What do you mean?” Bea said. Her white cotton gloves-a tool of her trade-looked more civilized than Mike’s plastic ones. She was short and slight, and leaned her elbows on the long trestle table to get a good look at her subject.

  “I’m sure you must know exactly when something as precious as this disappeared from your collection.”

  “You’ve made a bad assumption, Detective. We’ve never had a map like this under our roof. I can’t even imagine what this portion of it was doing here. I’ve been waiting a professional lifetime to see if another one of these treasures came to market. The only known original in the world is in the Library of Congress. Didn’t Jill tell you?”

  “This is your bailiwick, Bea,” Jill said. “I’ve seen it on your wish list but really didn’t know whether or not we owned any of the individual panels.”

  “Let me explain what you’ve found here,” Bea said, inviting Mercer, Mike, and me to sit around the table. We were on the first floor of the library, in an elegant room with dark wood paneling, three long tables, and copies of antiquarian maps of all varieties mounted in gilded frames along its walls. Only the coat of arms of the City of New York on each pedestal of the tables betrayed that we weren’t being entertained in a fancy British manor home. “That is, if I can take my eyes off it. You’re looking at one of the pieces of what many people call America ’s birth certificate.”

  Mercer looked closely at the ancient drawing. “How so?”

  “This panel is part of a map that was the very first document in the world on which the word ‘ America ’ appears as the name for a body of land in the Western Hemisphere.”

  Mike bent forward to look for the notation.

  “Not on this particular fragment, Mike. Remember, there are twelve pieces of this beauty, each the same size as this. Once joined together, the map is four feet tall by eight feet wide. It’s quite an unusual masterpiece.”

  “Who created it?” I asked. “What made it so special?”

  “The primary author was Martin Waldseemüller, a German cleric and cartographer who spent his life in Saint-Dié, France, part of a small intellectual circle there. Until this was published in 1507, the European body of knowledge about the world’s geography was entirely based on the second-century work of Ptolemy. This map,” Bea said, tapping her gloved finger on the table, “radically changed the worldview.”

  “In what way?” Mike asked.

  “Think of it, Detective. The Spanish and Portuguese kept returning to Europe at the end of the fifteenth century with dramatic news of explorations down the African coast and across the Atlantic, where no Europeans had ever been before. To us, this map looks incredibly accurate, but to his contemporaries, Martin’s map ignited a great deal of debate. It presented a revolutionary vision of the world.”

  “Why?”

  “This was the first document ever created that depicted a Western Hemisphere, standing alone between two oceans, the first to represent the Pacific as a separate body of water, and the first to g
ive the new world its own name: ‘America.’ In those times, they were completely radical ideas.”

  Mercer’s huge frame was bent over the table as he examined the fine print in the woodcut. “Used to be, according to Ptolemy, the Atlantic stretched from Europe and Asia right over to Japan, Cathay, and India, with a little bit of terra incognita along the way.”

  “Exactly,” Bea said.

  “What about Columbus?” Mike asked. “He was over here before Vespucci. How come he didn’t get the whole caboodle named for Christoforo instead of Amerigo?”

  “Well, that’s another reason this map was so controversial. Both men made several voyages across the Atlantic. Vespucci enjoyed more popularity throughout Europe because he wrote many publications that were read widely by intellectuals and explorers-he was a best seller in his day-and he actually went farther down the coastline of South America, convinced there was another ocean, entirely separate, on the western side of that landmass,” Bea said. “ Columbus, on the other hand, died in disgrace. Do you remember your history?”

  “Yeah, I guess he did the first Terra Nova perp walk, didn’t he?” Mike said. “He was the governor of Hispaniola, and the king had him arrested for mismanagement.”

  “Right. He also maintained, till his dying day, that he had reached Asia on one of his voyages. It was Vespucci who realized that both he and Columbus had come upon another continent-not Asia, not the Indies -that most Europeans didn’t know existed. So he got the credit,” Bea said. “It’s kind of remarkable when you think that this single obscure mapmaker-as great as he was-chose the name for the entire Western Hemisphere.”

  “And that he named it for a man who was still alive at the time, Amerigo Vespucci. No waiting for the verdict of history or going the traditional route of naming it for a mythological figure,” Mercer said, straightening up.

  “Then he feminized it,” Bea said. “Don’t forget that, Alex. Asia and Europa got their names from mythical women-so that tradition of the feminine ending of a continent remained intact.”

  “But it’s this little group of clerics and geographers who were so taken by Vespucci’s writings that they placed his name on this map?” I asked.

  “No longer Terra Incognita or Terra Nova, as the new world was called by the ancients. Martin and his team just went ahead and christened these lands America -their very own idea,” Bea said, “and as soon as this work was published, cartographers everywhere adopted that name for the Western Hemisphere.”

  “How many of these maps were printed at the time?” Mercer asked.

  “A very sizable run for those days, actually. One thousand copies.”

  “What became of them all, do you think?”

  Bea smoothed her curly red hair with the back of her glove. “Like many objects of intellectual interest in the sixteenth century, part of the plan was to distribute them as widely as possible across Europe, to spread the new knowledge that the explorers were acquiring with each trip they made. That broad dissemination accounts for the loss of many things, and makes the ones that made it through time, warfare, pillaging, and the usual historical turmoil so very rare.”

  “And its size?” I asked.

  “Another problem indeed. The larger an old map, the rarer it has usually become. The huge size and very inconvenience of form of this one certainly quickened its destruction. It was so much greater than many of the charts of the day, folded once-never bound-inside an elephant folio. So the mere difficulty of keeping twelve large panels like this one in pristine condition, and not allowing the dozen sections of it to be separated, was an enormous obstacle to its survival.”

  “What’s an elephant folio?” Mike asked.

  “It’s the term for a very large book, Detective. Usually greater than two feet tall. That Audubon in which you found the map is actually a double elephant folio-easy to conceal your map in because it’s so large. Let me show you something.”

  Bea got up from the table and disappeared behind the reference desk, returning minutes later with a volume of elephant-folio size.

  “This one is a book of reproductions of famous maps,” she said, placing it beside the piece that Mike found inside the Audubon. “It will give you an idea of how startling the real thing is when you see all the panels joined together, as originally planned.”

  She unfolded the enormous pages and spread them before us. The dozen individual engravings came together as a gigantic rectangular map of the world, separated by the seams of the individual pieces. The portion that Mike had discovered in the library’s attic, stashed under a water tank, was one from the top panel, in the third of four columns.

  “It’s not only beautifully drawn,” I said, scanning the continents and islands, oceans and seas, and their relationships to one another. “But you’re right. It’s incredibly accurate for its time.”

  “Men who’d never left their villages in Europe combined their own dreams of the greater world with this outpouring of information from the explorers,” Bea said. “Today, there is no more terra incognita. From your handheld GPS you can pull up a satellite image of your own backyard, or an atoll in the Pacific. These early maps charted the unknown, and they’re remarkably exciting for that reason.”

  “You say there’s a complete original of this one at the Library of Congress?” Mike asked. “When was that found?”

  “Don’t get too excited, Detective. More than a century ago. This sheet you stumbled over this morning is the first fresh sighting in a hundred years.”

  “Tell us about the last one.”

  Bea Dutton was as enthusiastic as she was knowledgeable about her cartographic history. “Have you ever heard of a German Jesuit priest named Josef Fischer?”

  None of us had.

  “A brilliant scholar and perhaps a bit of a rogue. There’s a very rare piece at Yale called the Vinland Map, purchased for the library there by the great philanthropist Paul Mellon. Had it been proved to be authentic, it would have shown that the Vikings predated Columbus ’s voyages to this continent by fifty years.”

  “Sounds like you don’t think it’s real,” Mike said.

  “Carbon-fourteen analysis dates the parchment to the 1430s, Mike, but a chemical study of the ink puts us in the 1920s. It’s on old paper-the kind you can slice right out of an ancient book, sad to say-but the ink gave it away.”

  “So Father Fischer’s a fraud?”

  “Well, most of us in the field think the only person he was trying to defraud-and embarrass-with his doctored map was the führer.”

  “Then I’m all for the old boy already,” Mike said. “How’s that?”

  “Hitler was using Norse history as Nazi propaganda. He likened the Norse to Aryans by claiming that their territorial ambitions were similar to his own empire-lust,” Bea said.

  “So Fischer put the Roman Catholic Church in the mix,” Mike said. “Didn’t want the Nazis to get away with their propaganda without a little bit of religion thrown in.”

  “There’s a lot of Catholic imagery in the Vinland Map,” Bea said, pointing out notations with her white glove in the same book of reproductions. “Father Fischer was so outraged by the Nazi persecution of the Jesuits that he just teased Hitler by creating this fake document. If the führer wanted to believe the Vikings led the way to the new world, Fischer wouldn’t let him have that victory unless he accepted that the Catholic Church was also along for the ride.”

  “So what did Father Fischer have to do with finding my map?” Mike asked.

  “See, you’ve got the fever already,” Bea said. “Your map, is it?”

  Mike smiled at her. “I’ve got a lot of empty wall space in my crib. You tell me what I’m looking for and let’s go for the whole dozen panels. I’ll let you come visit any time you’d like.”

  “That’s a deal, Mike,” Bea said, continuing her story. “Fischer was doing research in 1901, in a private library in a German castle. As happens with so many important discoveries in history, Fischer simply lucked upon somethin
g he’d never set out to find-in this case, a dusty portfolio in an obscure corner of a nobleman’s home. Cartographers had been searching for remnants of this particular lost map for so long that they had begun to believe the great Vespuccian model never really existed as such.”

  “A complete accident, then?”

  “Exactly. Prince Waldburg’s ancestors had collected maps for generations. While Fischer was studying papers of the early Norsemen in Greenland -his own personal area of interest-he came across a large manuscript that had been in the family for generations. It was a prize collection of the famous sixteenth-century globe maker named Johannes Schöner that had been acquired centuries earlier. Schöner, we figure, had purchased the Waldseemüller map of 1507 in order to incorporate its new worldview in his work so that he could use it to make his own globes more up-to-date.”

  “What a find,” Mercer said.

  “And especially because the twelve panels had never been assembled. Each one was carefully concealed inside the pages of this enormous folio, untouched for four centuries,” Bea said, shifting her attention back to the segment that Mike had found just a couple of hours earlier. “I’d say this looks just about faultless, too.”

  “What became of the one that Father Fischer found?” Mike asked.

  “It stayed in private hands-at the castle-for another hundred years. In 2003, one century and ten million dollars later, this map became the crown jewel of the Library of Congress. The universalis cosmographia.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “The world map of 1507 is how we know it as librarians. Universalis cosmographia secundum Ptholomaei traditionem et Americi Vespucii aliorumque lustrationes. That’s its formal name.”

  “A map of the world according to the tradition of Ptolemy and the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci,” Mike said, smiling at Bea, who looked surprised by his translation ability. “You don’t think those nuns at parochial school liked me for my good behavior, do you? My Latin wasn’t half bad.”