“So what was in this for you?” Mike asked.
Krauss leaned over and picked up his little toy. “Like I said. I put up a couple of million dollars. A few partners kicked in. We find this sucker? Forbes told me it would sell for maybe twenty million today.”
“Sell…to the library, you mean?” I asked.
“Not likely. We’d get a much bigger bang from a private collector. That’s what Eddy Forbes did. He helped these map nuts build their collections. The whole time, he was probably stealing from one of them to feed the others.”
“Maybe it’s naïve of me,” I said, “but I just assumed that as a member of the board, your loyalty would be to the library.”
Krauss launched the whirlybird again and this time it circled his desk and came to a gentle landing on the table beside me. “You know why I get in trouble at the library? ’Cause I happen to think the place should be all about books. Screw the maps, screw the art. That’s why so many of those guys have no use for me.”
“But the maps-” I started to say, thinking of Alger Herrick’s description of their beauty and importance.
“So your cousin Sally marries a dentist from St. Louis and moves out there, Ms. Cooper. You stroll up Madison Avenue to some overpriced gallery looking for a wedding present and you buy a map of the city as it looked in 1898, framed and all. Three hundred bucks. Probably sliced out of an atlas in a library-maybe even by the master thief himself, Mr. Forbes,” Krauss said, standing up and walking to a bookshelf behind his desk. “Or your buddy builds himself a ranch in Montana -Jewish investment banker cowboys-we’re resettling Montana and Wyoming like they were the promised land. Some shyster will sell you a hand-colored print of whatever prairie town you want, at whatever your price point. It’s not great art, it’s not even a book you can hold and read and reread. What’s the point?”
“Did you inherit your collection?” Mercer asked.
“I didn’t inherit squat, Detective. My father sold used cars in Merrick, Long Island.”
“How did you get into this…this…”
“Addiction. That’s what it is. The first time I ever bought a book-I mean an old book, something I didn’t have to read for school or to get me through a long plane ride-I was in Paris, walking around those little shops on the Left Bank after dinner one night. It was my first time there, I was flush with my first Wall Street bonus and some serious Bordeaux, and I stopped to look at the titles. I needed something for the flight home. I saw Gatsby and picked it up. I’d always loved the story when I was in college, figuring out how I could get me a piece of the American dream. You should have heard the proprietor scream when I pulled that copy off the shelf.”
“Why?” Mike asked.
“F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby. I’m not talking about the paperback you read in high school,” Krauss said, moving his hand along the bookshelf and lifting out a small volume, running his hand lovingly over the dust jacket, protected in its mylar sleeve. “This is the first edition. Modern firsts, that’s how I started. Have you ever seen a more perfect image? It’s totally iconic.”
Jonah Krauss handed me the book. The jacket was cobalt blue, and the features of a woman’s face looked down on an amusement park version of New York City at night.
I turned it over and noted the faint spots on the rear cover and the slightly faded lettering on the spine.
“Open it.”
“That’s okay?”
“Open it,” he said again.
I lifted the cover and read. Ernest-I think this book is about the best American novel ever written. Scott Fitz. 1925.
“See what I mean?” Krauss took the book back and turned the pages. “Fitzgerald handled this himself. You touch these things, you imagine who held them before you did, you smell them and breathe in the print, the history, the romance. Guess what I paid?”
I had a few modern firsts, but nothing like this. “I can’t.”
“Fifteen years ago, thirty-five thousand bucks. My entire bonus and then some, gone in a flash,” Krauss said, snapping his fingers.
“I’ll be lucky if my pension’s that good,” Mike said under his breath.
“Stopped the Frenchman in his tracks when I told him to wrap it up for me. At auction today, it would draw double. After that I had to have everything Fitzgerald I could find. Hemingway next. Dos Passos. Wolfe. It’s totally addictive.”
“You obviously moved on to older collectibles, too,” I said, scoping the room.
“I had to teach myself about them. See, the great private libraries have been amassing rare books for centuries.” Krauss crossed the room, pausing in front of the Bloomberg, then continued on to shelves stocked with leather-bound books of all sizes. “I didn’t know Keats from Yeats, Samuel Johnson from Samuel Pepys. But I’m a quick study.”
He stopped in front of a shelf on which an open book rested in a cradle, two matching volumes standing beside it. He picked them up and offered them to Mike and me to admire. Each was bound in black leather, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. “Beautiful, huh?”
The silver writing, embellished with an intricate floral design, announced that we were looking at Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. “Three volumes, 1847. The library has a set of its own, without the inlay. It’s even got the writing desk Brontë used when she traveled.”
His excitement seemed quite genuine, and he clearly wanted us to appreciate the collection.
“Do you have any atlases?” Mike asked. I figured he was testing Krauss about his interest in maps.
“Not my thing,” Jonah Krauss said, as he saw Mercer reach for a book that was displayed on a shelf at the far end of the room. “Whoa, you don’t want to pick that one up, Detective. Some of the pages are loose.”
“Sorry,” Mercer said, replacing the large book on its stand and repeating the title on the spine. “It looks like the court record of an old English trial. The 1828 proceedings against the murderer Aaron Keyes.”
Krauss looked nervous. He stepped in front of Mercer and rested his fingers on the open page. “It’s, uh…different.”
“Different how?” Mercer asked.
“It’s…it’s an anthropodermic binding, Mr. Wallace. Extremely rare. Most unusual to find.”
“Anthropodermic?” Mike asked. “Help me out, Coop. Means what?”
“Don’t know.”
“The binding is made from human skin,” Jonah Krauss said, folding his arms and speaking quietly. “That inquest record is bound in the skin of the murderer, Detective.”
Mike lowered his head. “It doesn’t get much creepier than that.”
“Aaron Keyes raped and killed a young girl in the English countryside. He was sentenced to be hung, and after that his skin was tanned and used to make this binding.”
“Human skin?” Mike asked. “You’re not joking?”
“Not at all, Detective. Most libraries don’t want books like these, of course-although Harvard has a few-but many private collectors do. It’s a very specialized market, human skin. Not for everyone’s taste.”
Krauss turned away from the book and went back to his desk. His lips parted and the whitener on his teeth reappeared. “Lighten up, guys. It’s from the murderer, not the dead girl.”
Mike Chapman wasn’t amused. “Like you said, Mr. Krauss. Your library is your portrait.”
TWENTY-FIVE
“That’s frigging sick,” Mike said, when Krauss stepped out of the room to give Britney a new ETA for his pilots.
“Doesn’t make him a killer,” Mercer said.
“Sorry,” Krauss said when he returned. “What else can I do to be useful?”
“Let’s go back to your last conversation with Tina Barr, when she asked you about the consortium looking for the map,” Mike said.
“I didn’t have anything more to say,” Krauss said, packing some folders into a soft leather briefcase. “I told her it was a bust, okay? I thought maybe she was getting mixed up with the wrong people. I cautioned her to be careful.”
>
“Careful of the wrong people? Alger Herrick? Minerva Hunt, or her father? That’s who Tina was working for most recently.”
“When she asked me the question, I was actually worried that Eddy Forbes had gotten to her. He’s a very seductive guy.”
“You think he went after Tina as a romantic interest?” I asked.
Jonah dismissed me with the back of his hand. “Not that kind of seductive. He was a genius at scamming the best collectors. Had his own gallery and a handful of rich clients who trusted his judgment implicitly. Forbes had the cunning to steer some of these serious collectors to donate important works to the library, and once the transaction was complete, he stole from those very treasures.”
“Don’t people bother to ask what the source of a rare sixteenth-century map is when they go to buy it?”
“A guy like me might hondel a bit, Ms. Cooper. Bargain hard, ask questions, get tough in a negotiation. That’s my nature. Eddy just has to whisper in the ears of those old buzzards that some fourth-generation blowhard had gone through the family fortune and had to break up the jewels. All hush-hush, ’cause every one of these dynasties has had deadbeat offspring who might come to the same end. Circle the wagons. Building, inheriting, and disposing of these library pieces has a tremendous element of secrecy involved.”
“Secrecy?” I asked.
“In the antiquarian business, knowing where the books are-the atlases, the maps-whose hands they’re in, that knowledge is power. It’s money. And a great many of these things that have been in families for generations aren’t even insured. They couldn’t possibly be, at today’s prices. There are things inventoried in the great private collections of the world that haven’t been seen for decades, so it’s impossible to know what’s become of them,” Krauss said, holding his forefinger to his lips. “That’s why I told Tina Barr to be careful.”
I didn’t like Jonah Krauss, and he could smell that.
“You want to tell us about yesterday afternoon? About where you were last night?” Mike asked.
“You guys are serious, right? I don’t believe this. I ran a meeting in our conference room till six-thirty. Britney can give you the names of all the attendees. Then my driver picked me up and took me to the Bronx. Is that a crime?” Krauss reached into his warm-up jacket and pulled out the thinnest phone I’d ever seen. He pressed an icon and then hit zoom. “Have a look, Detective. Yankee Stadium with my boys. Right up until the bitter end.”
“Great seats,” Mike said, passing me the phone. Krauss had taken snapshots of his two young sons from his box, right over the dugout.
I handed him back the phone and he put both hands up in the air. “Who sent you here, really? Some of those trustees just hate my guts, don’t they? Try to mix me up in a murder case.”
“Who hates you?” Mercer asked. “And why?”
“Now, that’s something I really don’t have time to answer today.”
“Put your bag down, Jonah, and take a seat,” Mike said. “Give it a try.”
“If you had any idea of the turmoil inside the public library-inside most libraries-you’d be able to understand the depth of the animosity, Detective. It all looks so scholarly and benign from the outside, but there are real battles being fought,” Krauss said, refusing to sit.
“Over what?”
“Start with the future of the library. What do you think the biggest problem is?”
“Funding,” I guessed. “Money to keep a facility like this-”
“We’re pouring money into it, Ms. Cooper. The problem is that ten years from now, who’s going to need a library?” Krauss was snarling at me. “Our attendance has been plunging for years, not just in New York but all over the world. Research libraries like ours in particular. The computer and the Internet are killing us, making us obsolete. We’ve been given a conservative estimate that at least ninety-five percent of all scholarly inquiries begin on Google.”
“But these rare books in research libraries are so unique,” I said.
“And sooner or later, every one of these beauties will be digitized. We’ve got fifty-three million items in this library, and already, the images from hundreds of thousands of them are available on the Web. How do we stay relevant? What if we just become a damned book museum? Those are some of the things we fight about.”
“Where are you in these battles?”
“I’m trying to move the dinosaurs forward. That’s part of their animosity. Within the next decade, Google will have digitized fifteen million of our works. I’m all for scanning the great libraries of the world. Sit at home in Dubuque with your laptop and look at everything we’ve got. Why not?”
“Because there’s something so different to holding the physical book,” I said, remembering my own research in the great reading room. “Coleridge and Keats-each of them annotated the margins of their books with their thoughts, their ideas. You can see what mattered to them when you read their own work, and how that affected their creative process.”
“Paper disintegrates, Ms. Cooper. Books crumble, unless you can provide the environment in which to protect them, as I can.”
“There are things a computer will never be able to tell us. I remember doing my thesis research at my regular seat in the reading room, next to the same quiet guy every day. He was a medical historian, trying to track down the history of disease outbreaks in eighteenth-century England,” I said, talking more to Mercer and Mike than to Jonah Krauss, who finished packing up his briefcase. “I couldn’t understand why he kept sniffing the papers he was studying. It seemed so odd.”
“You cross-examine him?” Mike asked.
“Gently. He told me he was reading letters from an archive that came from the Cotswolds. At the time, people took to sprinkling vinegar on the correspondence, in hopes that it would disinfect them and stop the spread of cholera. He could still trace the scent on some of the old paper.”
“A very romantic notion, Ms. Cooper, but it’s not the future. Any chance I can be released for the weekend?”
“What’s the source of your disagreements with the Hunts?” Mercer asked.
“Look, Detective, we’ve buried the sword. It’s been almost five years. I assume Jasper’s gotten over it. You might want to keep an eye on Tally. I think he’d pull out the rug from everything to get his father’s bequests.”
I thought of the bejeweled book that had been found with Karla Vastasi’s body. Minerva Hunt said it had been given to the library years earlier, when her grandfather died, but the “Ex Libris” plate bore Talbot Hunt’s name.
“Why do you say that?”
“Five years ago, Ms. Cooper, when I led the charge to deaccession an Asher Durand painting, Jasper Hunt literally threatened my life,” Jonah Krauss said, spreading his palms as he leaned on the desk. “Check with your commissioner. I had police protection 24/7.”
“All because of a painting?” Mike asked. “This library’s got more action than any crack den in Bed Stuy.”
“A very famous work of art, detective. Kindred Spirits, it’s called.”
“What’s so deadly about that?”
“It was one of the library’s sacred cows, Mr. Chapman. My committee made a decision to sell it, and quite frankly I thought the board would just rubber-stamp us. Turned out I was wrong.”
“What’s the story?”
“Durand is one of the best-known artists of the Hudson River School founded by Thomas Cole. Landscape paintings. Cole’s best friend was the poet William Cullen Bryant,” Krauss said.
“Bryant Park?” Mike asked.
“Exactly. Together, Cole and Bryant became leaders of New York City ’s civic and cultural life.”
“Why was the painting in the library in the first place, and not an art museum?” I asked.
“You’re catching on, Ms. Cooper. Bryant’s daughter gave the painting to the Lenox Library in 1904. So when this building opened, and the park was created in her father’s name, it seemed like a fitting home. But it just mov
ed around from one end of a dark hallway to another. In my view, it didn’t belong here at all.”
“So your committee decided to sell it. Was there an auction?”
“That was another one of my problems,” Krauss said. “We didn’t hold a public auction. You know that like most other major cultural institutions, our endowment dropped precipitously after September eleventh. We figured a healthy sale of a few pieces of our art would rally some investment income to buy important books that we wanted. We are, after all, a library.”
“So there was a silent auction instead?”
“Yes. Sotheby’s acted as our agent, and interested parties were invited to submit sealed bids.”
“How much did it bring?” Mike asked.
”Thirty-five million dollars. Highest price ever paid for an American painting,” Krauss said, the side of his mouth pulling up, as though he couldn’t suppress a smile. “Me, I’m not the sentimental type. I thought it was a great deal.”
Mike whistled. “What museum had that kind of money?”
“The Met was outbid, Detective. The Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton bought the Durand for a small museum her family plans to open soon in Arkansas.”
“Attention all Wal-Mart shoppers! At that price, it went to a discount store? What were you smoking, Jonah?”
“The art critics wanted to stone me, the Times said the sale was the crime of the century-that Kindred Spirits is a national treasure that belongs in New York-and the rest of the board caved in to the public outcry.”
“What spooked Jasper Hunt to go after you personally?” Mike asked.
“He said that we’d never be able to attract future donors. They’d be put off by the fact that their own bequests might eventually be disposed of in some secret way. But I think it was all about Hunt himself.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
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