The Book of Illumination

by Mary Ann Winkowski

  We heard a couple of toots; Declan was back. Down in the driveway, the truck door slammed and a lively conversation ensued.

  “You’re really sure about next weekend?” Kelly asked. “Because my mom’s more than happy to—”

  “Absolutely!” I said, interrupting. “We can’t wait.” Some people would find it strange that Kelly and Dec would leave the girls with me, the other woman, while they go off to celebrate their anniversary. But the children are used to spending weekends together, and Henry never gets to have Nell and Delia overnight at our house.

  Because he’s a little older, and a boy, they’re intensely curious about all aspects of his life: Max and Ellie; Homer, the St. Bernard a few doors down, famous for spectacular feats of flatulence; the fact that Henry’s allowed to play in the attic, where there is a real sword; the strange foods they sometimes find in our fridge—artichoke hearts and mozzarella floating in brine. Henry’s flattered enough by their adoration to overlook the fact that they are girls. As for me, I look forward to being the selfs acrificing one for a change, making it possible for Kelly to spend a romantic weekend at a seaside B and B in Maine with the man whose heart she clearly won—not once, but twice.

  “Sorry about the mud,” I said as Declan appeared on the stairs.

  He just shrugged. The barber had cut his hair a little too short, revealing borders of pale skin at the hairline. He looked kind of goofy. Actually, he looked like his son. I smiled.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. Kelly glanced over, her gaze landing on the flat, rectangular doughnut box in his hand. “You forgot my muffin,” she said glumly.

  Declan produced a bag from under the box and held it up. Kelly smiled.

  “Thank you,” she said, and, promising to be in touch with me about the weekend arrangements, she was out the door.

  “Want some coffee?” Declan asked.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Doughnut?” He opened the box, which, unfortunately, contained my favorite: cream-filled with chocolate frosting. But there was only one.

  “Whose is this?” I asked, pointing.

  “Yours,” he said, filling the coffeepot with water. “So am I making a full pot here, or a half?”

  “Full, I guess.”

  He poured the water into the coffeemaker and filled a paper cone with the fine, dark powder.

  “I talked to a couple of the guys,” he said, pushing the On button.

  I took a paper napkin from the wrought-iron holder and laid my doughnut on top of it. “Yeah?” I so wanted a bite, but I was going to discipline myself and wait for the coffee, like a mature human being.

  “I might have something.”

  “Really? That was quick.”

  He sat down opposite me and shrugged a funny shrug, a gesture that said, Hey, I’m good.

  “We’re, uh …we’re workingwith a fellow,” he said.

  “What kind of fellow?”

  He gave me a look.

  “The kind I shouldn’t ask any questions about?”

  “Right you are. Lad’s been in and out of Cedar Junction for years. Real slick operator. Been at the art game, one way or another, all his life. Probably knows where the Gardner pieces are, or knows somebody who knows. Anyway, a month or two back, we caught him in a sting—bloody fool; he’d only been out of jail a few weeks. But I suppose he was broke.” Declan paused, obviously trying to figure out how little he could tell me. “For a certain … sum, he was able to procure a painting for one of our lads.”

  “Procure, as in steal?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No, but he works with the guys that do. The painting was from a home out in Weston, real high-profile case, so he’s in a fairly tight spot right now. He’s looking at serious time, unless he—”

  “Cooperates?”

  Declan got up, took two mugs out of the cabinet, and placed one in front of me. He shook a pint of half-and-half and, determining that it was almost empty, located another in the back of the refrigerator. He poured my coffee and casually slipped a plate under my doughnut.

  “He’ll lend a hand. No choice, poor sod.”

  “That’s really great,” I said. “Thanks.”

  Declan nodded and had a sip of his coffee, black, the way he always takes it. I poured half-and-half into mine, swished it around, and had a sip.

  “We had some luck, too,” I said.

  “Luck?” He grinned. “Your opinion is that I was just lucky?”

  I ignored him. “The woman across the hall ran into a guy on Sylvia’s landing. He was just coming out of her place.”

  “No kidding.”

  “We got a description and everything.”

  Declan grabbed a pen from the table behind him and the sports section of the Globe from a chair. He jotted down the physical particulars I described, penning his notes on a full-page ad the Globe had taken out for itself in its own paper. He promised to pay a visit to Carlotta that afternoon, then sat back and sighed.

  “Well done,” he said.

  “Don’t act so surprised.”

  At last, I took a bite of my doughnut. It was heavenly. The volume of cream was generous to the point of obscenity, and only one thing would have made my pleasure more complete: not to have Declan watching me eat it. Which might be the only time in my life I have ever thought, God, I wish he wasn’t here.

  I wiped my mouth. “Are you just going to watch me eat this?”

  “I thought I might.” He was deadpan.

  “Aren’t you having one?”

  “I’m watching my figure.”

  “I see.”

  From the volume of the hooting and squealing outside, where the kids were no doubt wreaking muddy havoc with the hose, I judged that my time alone with Declan would soon be ending. The wet, dirty, joyful hysteria we were overhearing couldn’t go on much longer without dissolving into a crisis of tears and bitter recriminations.

  The morning sun had thrown a wide swath of rainbow against the far wall. I glanced around, trying to locate a prism or a crystal that would have split the light that way, creating this glimpse of such fleeting and singular beauty, but I couldn’t. I pointed it out to Declan, and he smiled.

  Two hours later, I was sitting across from Sylvia at a cozy upstairs table in Café Algiers in Harvard Square. I had called to tell her of Declan’s progress as soon as I got home, and she answered immediately, as though she had been sitting by the phone. She’d finally been able to make contact with Sam. As we’d suspected, he’d been invited by all his British colleagues and friends at Harvard to join in the weekend’s festivities. He couldn’t get out of attending a morning lecture on the plays of Denis Johnston, several of whose original typescripts were among Lady Barnes’s gifts to Houghton Library, but he could meet Sylvia for lunch. She asked if I wanted to come. Given that my afternoon would otherwise have involved laundry, utility bills, and an hour or two with fairly ineffectual “green” cleaning products, I was happy to say yes.

  I haven’t lived in Cambridge long enough to miss the “old” Harvard Square, but I’ve heard my share of melancholy rhapsodies about the lost lunch counters and cafeterias, the dark little taverns and folk clubs and quirky bookstores and curio shops that are lodged in the memories of generations of Harvard students. Little of that place remains. At street level now are the locked and empty lobbies of banks and cell phone companies, spilling their harsh fluorescent lighting brightly onto the evening sidewalks and offering passersby all the charm of operating rooms. Creepy, gazeless mannequins haunt the windows of trendy clothing boutiques. Urgent new merchants riding one wave or another surf grandly into town and back out just as quickly, which is probably of cold comfort to the shopkeepers their landlords displaced, genteel old eccentrics who tended their businesses like petunias.

  Café Algiers—like Casablanca, the Brattle Theatre, and Club Passim—has been around for a long time. It was a little too chilly to sit on the patio, so we chose a table on the second floor, t
ucked in under the steeply sloping wooden ceiling. I ordered a beer and perused the menu, which was studded with tantalizing North African pastes and tagines. We decided to get some hummus with cucumbers to tide us over until Sam arrived.

  “What’s this guy’s name?” Sylvia asked, squeezing lemon into her iced tea. “This … crook?”

  I shrugged, scooping hummus onto a cucumber slice.

  “Does Declan think he did it? How does he know?”

  I shook my head. My mouth was full. I was used to the murky ways in which Declan and his fellow detectives went about their jobs, whispering quietly to friends and felons, dangling favors and pardons, prosecutions and plea bargains, but I could see that it was going to take some explaining.

  “They caught him in a sting,” I finally managed to say. “He delivered a stolen painting to an undercover cop. But he couldn’t have taken your manuscript himself because he’s still in custody.”

  Sylvia looked befuddled.

  “They’ve got him on conspiracy, possession of stolen property, and trafficking. He’s facing jail time, but if he’s willing to work with the police on this—and probably on some other things—they might be able to—”

  “Get him off?” she asked, her eyes widening.

  “No, not totally. Maybe get the charges reduced, or arrange for a plea.”

  She sat back in her chair and took a deep breath. “What makes them think he knows anything?”

  I sipped my beer, and it was very strange. I’d been intrigued by the description, but the beer itself reminded me of the Christmas pomanders we used to make in Brownies, by sticking dozens of pin-sharp cloves into an unsuspecting orange.

  “They know he’s really connected. They’re pretty sure he’s behind a whole string of robberies from college museums all over New England. They even think he knows where the Gardner paintings are, or knows somebody who knows.”

  “Really?” she said.

  I nodded. Visiting Boston’s Gardner Museum, formerly the home of art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, is like stepping into a cool, Venetian palace. The air is heavy with floral fragrance from a glorious indoor courtyard.

  In 1980, security guards let two Boston policemen into the museum in the middle of the night. The cops said they were responding to an alarm that indicated a fire in one of the upper galleries. Once inside, their true identities were revealed: they weren’t cops; they were art thieves. They tied up the security guys and made off with $300 million worth of uninsured paintings and drawings, works by artists like Rembrandt, Degas, and Manet. Not one of the stolen pieces has ever been found and nobody’s ever been caught.

  “What would this guy do?” Sylvia asked.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe he’d put the word out that he’d been contacted by somebody, a person who knew that the manuscript had been stolen and would pay a lot of money to get it. But I’m just guessing. Dec didn’t get into that.”

  Suddenly Sylvia’s expression brightened and she half stood up. She was blocked in by the table, though, so she quickly sat back down. A man I took to be Sam was approaching us, and he seemed to have brought a friend.

  “Good morning,” Sam said cheerfully.

  It was afternoon, but never mind.

  “You’re looking lovely, as usual,” he went on, kissing Sylvia on the cheek. “This,” he said, emphasizing the word in a way that held a meaning I didn’t understand, “is Julian Rowan.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I said.

  “Pleasure,” he responded.

  “Sylvia Cremaldi,” Sylvia said, extending her hand. “And this is my friend Anza O’Malley. She’s … doing some work with me at the Athenaeum.”

  The name Julian Rowan sounded familiar, but I couldn’t recall from where. He was tall and about my age, with hair the color of wet hay and paws big enough to palm a basketball, and he was wearing a long silk scarf that had fluttered in his wake, like overly feminine aftershave. Sam, on the other hand, brought to mind the kindly, distracted professors who made up my college’s English department, daffy devotees of Milton and Chaucer and bow ties and Scotch.

  Julian folded himself into a chair and Sam squeezed in beside Sylvia.

  “Julian’s here from London for the fall semester,” Sam explained.

  “Teaching at Boston College,” Julian went on.

  “And …?”Sam urged, like a parent prompting a child to add “please” to the end of a sentence.

  “And collaborating on a book with a professor at Harvard.”

  “Wow!” I said. “You’ve got your work cut out for you.”

  “Indeed,” Julian said. “I thought I’d be exploring the Berkshires and popping off to Martha’s Vineyard—or ‘the Vineyard,’ as they say—but …” He trailed off, shrugging. “Not so far.”

  “Julian’s collaborator, Rory Concannon, is an old friend of mine,” Sam offered. “He’s brilliant, but also a little—”

  “Crazy?” Julian offered.

  “Well, I was going to say eccentric, or unconventional.”

  Rory Concannon, I thought. Another familiar name. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I remember where I’d heard these names? Was I getting early-onset Alzheimer’s?

  “No,” Julian said. “He is crazy, but in the best possible way.”

  It slowly came back to me as we ordered our lunches and chatted about Professor Concannon and Julian’s work. Julian was one of the two people with whom James Wescott, whose letter Sylvia had just received and whom we had apparently missed in Cambridge, had conferred with about what I now thought of as “our” manuscript.

  Julian and a Dr. Something-or-Other, a woman whose name I (naturally) couldn’t recall, had agreed with Wescott that there was no such thing as a Book of Kildare. All three believed that the “lost” manuscript was actually the Book of Kells, which had simply been seen by Gerald of Wales in Kildare and had been safe for centuries in the library at Trinity College, Dublin.

  As for Professor Concannon, I suspected I would like him. He couldn’t be that crazy if he was a Harvard professor with a book contract, though I suppose there are people who would disagree with that. With a name like Concannon, he was probably also Irish, another check mark in my plus column. In her letter to Finny and Sylvia, Paola Moretti had implored them to take the manuscript to Concannon. This all added up to my feeling that he was probably one of the good guys.

  I took a sip of Christmas Past and tried to get my head around all of this. Sylvia had read the letters to Sam over the phone. This I knew. Sam happened to know that one of the people mentioned in one of the letters—James Wescott’s—was here in town. Okay, fair enough. But for Julian to be working on a book with someone we had heard of from an entirely different source: For me, this strained probability. More puzzlingly, at least on the subject of our manuscript, Julian Rowan and Rory Concannon would radically disagree.

  This seemed … too connected somehow. Was it all a coincidence? An act of otherworldly engineering? A week ago, I hadn’t heard of Julian Rowan or Rory Concannon or Sam or Wescott. But it now appeared that they all knew one another. Was it like that phenomenon in which you are introduced to someone you’ve never met before and you then start seeing them every time you turn around?

  “Let me just ask a question,” I said. People looked up from their salads and plates of falafel and couscous.

  “How do you guys all know each other? Sam, did you know every person mentioned in those two letters?”

  “Oh, no,” Sam said. “I don’t know Susan McCasson, though I do know the person she replaced. But James Wescott was at the National Gallery when I worked at the Library of Congress. And, let’s see, I met Rory when he had a Mellon Fellowship at Notre Dame, and he came to the Athenaeum to do research for a couple of weeks.”

  “And I had a Mellon three years later,” Julian explained. “My research overlapped with Rory’s, so when I went back to London, we stayed in touch.”

  “When he was at Stanford?” Sam asked Julian.

  “N
o, before that.”

  “Oh, right, he had that appointment at the Beinecke. I forgot about that. How long was that for?” Sam asked. “Just a year,” Julian responded. “And then he came to Harvard,” Sam said.

  “Right.”

  They both nodded and smiled. Okay, I got it. The world isn’t exactly overrun with people who are fanatical about rare manuscripts, and when you live in a place like Boston, or Cambridge, many of the roads pass through here. I suppose if you were the tuba player for the Boston Symphony, you might have at least a passing relationship with the tuba players at the Metropolitan Opera and in the New York Philharmonic.

  “Did you see James Wescott at the conference?” Sylvia asked.

  “He was at the opening dinner at the faculty club,” Sam said. “But he hasn’t been around for a day or two.”

  “He mentioned going to Vermont,” I said.

  “That’s right,” Sam responded, “he did. He just made the trip as a courtesy to Annabel Barnes, who’s been very good to the British Library. This collection belonged to her late husband, who went to Harvard, which is why it ended up here. But James is keeping an eye on an important benefactor, as he should. They’ve got a capital campaign coming up.”

  Over dessert and coffee, we brought Sam and Julian up to date on the robbery of the manuscript, and on Declan’s preliminary investigation. We made it sound as though the entire Boston Police Department was on the case. Which I suppose they actually were, though informally. At least for two more days.

  Julian confirmed that he did, in fact, doubt the existence of a so-called Book of Kildare. But there was no question that Sylvia had been in possession of an important text. He was happy to enlist the services of his colleagues at the RFIM to help figure out what it was and what ought to be done with it.