A Killer's Guide to Good Works

by Shelley Costa

  Greta kissed her own fingers and set them against Val’s cheek. “Let’s see where it goes,” and she motioned to the very old Bible box as Lorton slowly raised the attached lid.

  The interior had a soft sheen to it, and it was exactly the right size for the manuscript set inside. Val leaned closer, admiring the still legible script hundreds of years old. The gently curling letters, the centuries-old orthography, the Spanish that conveyed something dangerous and heretical. After a moment, Lorton piped up, “Tell me, what happens if you’re right?” She was looking directly at Greta. “If what we’re looking at is…is a theft?”

  Greta was matter-of-fact. “Then it becomes a matter for the police.”

  “Out of your hands?”

  “Of the Agency? Yes. Mostly our work is routine.” Greta took a pair of thin gloves from the monitor and drew them quickly over her hands. “For documents or artifacts with terrific provenance, we’ve got our rubber stamp—” she smiled “—and into this country or across state lines it goes with our imprimatur. When that isn’t the case, when questions arise at the point of importation about the authenticity of an artifact, that’s when we launch an investigation. In other words, if there had been any question at the time J.P. Morgan acquired Item #JPML 17-203, the Agency wasn’t even in existence. With enough chicanery, anything could have come into Morgan’s poor unsuspecting hands.” As Lorton sputtered, Greta pressed on: “But we’ll never know unless some researcher catches it, right, and draws our attention to it.” Greta gave a short laugh.

  “Are you saying we’ve got some fakes in the collection?”

  “Without a doubt. But the Artifact Authentication Agency can only investigate what’s specifically brought to our attention. That’s our mandate. Limited funding, limited human resources.” Here she gestured in the direction of Val. “Now, in the case of what Professor Bensoussan has brought to our attention, Item #JPML 17-203 in the Rare Books and Manuscripts holdings from the Mexican Inquisition, the situation is a little different.”

  “How so? A fake is a fake.”

  “Ah, but what he has stumbled on here is that the holding he’s been studying over the last two years is not the same one he first saw. It’s a substitute, you see. Much beyond that he hasn’t told me, which means we’ll have to—”

  At the sound of footsteps heading in their direction, Val turned. It was Saul Bensoussan wearing a Yankees jacket over brown lightweight wool pants. He was nicer looking than she remembered, with his lively hazel eyes and Van Dyke beard; he was also older than she remembered, maybe putting him two years closer to Greta Bistritz in age, and he had an average sort of height and build that seemed more attractive given his air of ease. The good professor was one of those men with the kind of understated confidence she always found appealing. Bale had it. Nothing to prove. Nothing even to hypothesize. He smiled and nodded at Val while he set a hand lightly on the back of Greta’s neck. “Ah,” was the extent of Greta’s greeting. To Alice Lorton, she explained, “May I introduce Professor Saul Bensoussan of Hunter College.”

  Val muttered slyly, “Sometimes you have such quaint speech, darling.”

  Greta raised an eyebrow at her.

  Bensoussan reached between his legs and slid a chair into place. It was a grand, richly dark, book-lined room he apparently knew well, with its glass display cases holding the permanent exhibits—a Mahler score, an early typed letter from J.D. Salinger, among other things—and he glanced affectionately at the shelves. Shifting in her seat to face him, Alice Lorton folded her hands. “Ms. Bistritz has informed me that you believe we’ve been robbed.”

  “I’d say so, yes.”

  She went on: “That this,” her gloved fingertips hovered over the open box, “is not the original holding. That someone has stolen the original satire and replaced it with a forgery.”

  The professor cocked his head. “No, that’s not it at all.”

  “What?” said Greta softly, her eyes fixed on him.

  “Oh, Greta, I’m sorry I wasn’t clear.” He set a hand on her shoulder. “I have no complaint about the satire.” With that, he circled his hand lightly over the manuscript pages five hundred years old. “This is authentic.” He quickly pulled out a crumpled pair of thin latex gloves and slipped them on, then lifted the first couple of pages of the satire settled in the old Bible box. Eyeing them carefully, he smiled at Alice Lorton. “No, this is the very same manuscript I’ve been studying for the last two years.”

  Lorton frowned. “What then? The box?”

  “No,” he replied. “Not even the box.” He patted the sides of the old box like an affectionate uncle. “We know the satire is five hundred years old. I’d say the box that holds it is considerably older.”

  Val was interested. “How do you know?” she asked quietly.

  Bensoussan lifted the box with both gloved hands and rotated it slowly so they could get a good look. “From what I can tell, this old Bible box—or what we’re assuming is an old Bible box—is made out of red acacia wood. Not a native species in New Spain.” As the point hung in the air, they all fell silent. Then Val watched Greta set her iPhone on the table and tap through to the record button on the Voice Memos app. When she gave him a quick nod, Bensoussan began. “When I first requested Item #JPML 17-203, a sixteen-page loose-leafed manuscript dated 1595 set in an antique acacia wood box of indeterminate age, it struck me as a little odd.”

  “Why?”

  “Red acacia is native to North Africa and one of the very few species indigenous to the wilderness areas described in the Bible. The aron chodesh—Ark of the Covenant—and Egyptian coffins, for example—red acacia wood. But here was this beautiful red acacia wood Bible box holding an untranslated Spanish satire that was turned into the Inquisition in Veracruz in 1595. Do you see the problem?”

  Greta’s eyes narrowed. “A whole half world away…”

  He smiled. “I figured the box had made a transatlantic trip with a family seeking adventure or asylum in the New World. The box had been somebody’s heirloom. Not, as it turned out, a big mystery. How it came to be in the hands of that priest, we will never know, unless it was the priest’s own family heirloom.” That wasn’t—here Bensoussan shrugged—what interested him.

  Still, he photographed it in the event that down the road he could use some shots in the book he was writing, his translation of the satire, “The Entertainment of Spain,” plus literary critical analysis of the work, plus cultural context…“It’s an academic coup,” said Bensoussan, “finding this satire, this untranslated treasure from the early days of the Mexican Inquisition.” He took pictures of the holding from every angle and with the lid both opened and closed.

  The lid was elaborately carved with stylized date palms and rock outcroppings that—to his eye, at least—resemble any picture he’s ever seen of Qumran, site of the Dead Sea Scrolls…and in each of the four corners, Hibiscus syriacus. “Otherwise known,” he said, “as Rose of Sharon.”

  Lorton interrupted him, raising her hands helplessly. “I take it you’re saying this—this box dates back to Biblical times? Can you really base that opinion on a species of wood and a native flower?” She glanced at Val and Greta. “Much as I’d like to think J.P. Morgan acquired something even more wonderful than he knew, I really don’t think—”

  The way Saul Bensoussan held up a hand made Val appreciate his patience. “I agree,” he said. “Those things alone are not enough for authentication, although—” here he glanced at Greta, “I’m assuming the Artifact Authentication Agency has experts at its disposal.”

  “Of course,” murmured Val’s aunt with a thin smile.

  “Then let’s give them everything we can,” whispered the professor, whose thumbs were poised over the corners of the box. With slow deliberation, he pressed the carving of the Hibiscus syriacus in the lower right-hand corner. Soundlessly, a slim drawer slid open. The base of the red acacia
box had a secret drawer. Val took in a sharp breath, but it was Greta who murmured, “Ah,” and smiled with delight at her lover who brought something to the table even better than a bottle of kosher wine. Set inside the secret drawer was a sheet of paper.

  The four of them looked at each other, and Lorton got to her feet. “Wait,” she said. Then she walked to the center of the Rare Books and Manuscripts room and announced to the half dozen patrons who were leaning over materials at other tables, “Please excuse us for the next half hour, but we need to clear the room. Now.” Five minutes later, Lorton had closed the doors, instructed a guard to stand outside the room, and returned to her seat. “Well, Professor Bensoussan,” she said with some energy, tipping her close-cropped head to Item #JPML 17-203, “what have we got?”

  Bensoussan removed the sheet of paper, unfolded it, smoothed it out, and set it on the table. Half standing, Val peered at it: handwritten, in English, with a ballpoint pen on paper that could have been bought at Office Max. Lorton raised her eyebrows as she eyed each of them. “Copies, anyone?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “I’ll take one.”

  “And you, Saul?” Greta turned to face him. He was the only one of them who hadn’t spoken.

  From his breast pocket, the Hunter College professor pulled a folded sheet of paper. “I already made my own copy a few weeks ago. Just out of interest. After all, it’s the downstairs neighbor to my satire, right?” He laughed. “You can all see—” he said pointing to the sheet he had removed directly from the secret drawer and spread out on the table, “there’s nothing of any real interest to it. Cheap printer paper, a ballpoint pen. Go ahead and read it. Lots of cryptic pronouncements, lots of concrete details. Thorns, iron, death, inheritance, life everlasting—so what is it? A translation from some part of the satire I haven’t reached yet in my own translation? Or something altogether different? Some tortured piece of creative writing by a college student who should get himself pronto to the counseling center? What?”

  Greta had reached the end of the sheet Bensoussan had spread out on the table. Whipping off her reading glasses, she gave a little shrug. “Do we even care?”

  Val sat very still. As she finished reading, all she knew was that the word “thorn” had appeared three times in the short piece. The word “crown” once. Greta could tell something was wrong, and shot her a questioning look. Picking up the paper from the center of the table, Lorton sprang up. “I’ll make some copies,” she muttered, heading toward the door marked No Admittance.

  “Here’s why we should care,” said Bensoussan as he unfolded his own copy of the paper from the secret drawer. “I made this copy several weeks ago, when I accidentally triggered the drawer for the first time. At that point, my mind was wrapped up with the satire from the Mexican Inquisition. I wasn’t paying any attention to the box, the drawer, the paper inside. Old box, funky little drawer, overwrought story by a late adolescent. But when I came again to continue slogging through the nightmare of late sixteenth century orthography, I took a break and idly pressed the corner of the box, and out slid the drawer just as before.”

  “And?” Greta folded her arms.

  Saul Bensoussan spread his own copy out on the table. “The copy I made no longer matched the sheet in the secret drawer.”

  Val felt breathless. “What are you saying?” Thorns, three times. Crown, once.

  Bensoussan pushed back his chair, stood, and shoved his hands into his pockets. “The original paper, the paper I had copied for my files, was gone.” He gestured at his copy. “This may be all we have of the original, and I for one am glad we have it.” He glanced up at Alice Lorton, who was heading toward them with sheets held out in front of her like an offering. “Somebody, sometime in the last few weeks, stole the original translation and replaced it with a copy, altered in a few significant respects.”

  Lorton passed out copies of the substituted sheet of paper. “What did I miss?”

  Greta tugged at her fine, long nose, mulling it over. “But, Saul, what on earth does it matter? My job is to authenticate artifacts, not decide which is the better story, the original or the rewrite that some college kid stuck as a lark in a holding at the Morgan Library.” Her voice rose. “That’s not a job for the Agency.” By then, all four of them were standing around the research table.

  Saul Bensoussan slipped an arm around Greta’s shoulders and gave her a quick hug. “I know that, Greta. But then there’s this—” While they watched, he took a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket and explained that the same day he discovered the switch he teased something out that had become lodged in the slim space, set back a couple of inches, between the box and the drawer. After he had a look at it, he replaced it as carefully as he could, because he deemed it the safest place it could be, and called the Artifact Authentication Agency.

  While Val shined the flashlight on her phone at the spot, Bensoussan slid the knife into the narrow space, and he gingerly worked at making contact with whatever lay inside. Gently flicking at an object out of reach, when he snagged it, he bit his lip and slid a look at each of the others hovering nearby. Then with great control, he pulled slowly on the knife, and very slowly the prize came into view.

  A scrap of leather.

  No, even smaller than a scrap.

  Thin, old, dried, irregularly shaped. As though it had fallen away from a larger piece.

  Shorter but slightly wider than a shoelace, which is how it first looked to Val.

  Bensoussan then pulled out a clean chamois cloth, which he set on the table, and a pair of tweezers. With infinite care, he lifted the old leather scrap with the tweezers, and, as he placed it on the cloth, turned it over at the very last second. As Val, Greta, and the Community Liaison of the Morgan Library closed in over the find, he stepped back. What they were looking at was a single line of text in very faded Hebrew.

  Nobody moved. Val felt a shot of heat move murmuring through the vents and out into the room. Somewhere outside the Rare Books and Manuscripts room came the raised voices of ejected patrons. When Greta asked Bensoussan if he could translate the scrap right there on the spot, he gave her a wry smile. “Prayerbook Hebrew, no problem. I’ve known the service by heart since my Bar Mitzvah. But this?” With an upturned palm he pointed to the scrap. “I wouldn’t presume.” Val knew if Adrian were here with them, she could translate the text. But she wasn’t, and the rest of them were either ignorant or unwilling.

  “In case you’re wondering,” spoke Alice Lorton finally, her voice high and strange, “I won’t be making any copies.”

  24

  After some anxious bickering, the four of them agreed to keep the find under wraps for one week. Lorton didn’t want to appear to the Board of Directors to be dragging her feet for some unknown purpose after the news got out. One week gave Greta time through the Artifact Authentication Agency to line up some experts in first century A.D. documents. She expected the process of authentication to be lengthy, but Lorton was immovable: a week was plenty of time to take the next step in the mystery of the scrap. Then she calmed herself down by flinging around some platitudes: one step at a time, one day at a time, all in good time, and the ever popular time will tell.

  One week, said Bensoussan, was enough for him to get through another page of his translation of the satire, pick up his dry cleaning, teach his classes, and take Greta Bistritz out to dinner. With a wry smile, he told them all it was back to his own field for him—he had brought the find to their collective attention, and now he was done. Val herself remained silent. No one questioned how she felt about the Morgan Library’s official media blackout for one scant week. But they were all in agreement that there were a few questions slammed up against the little they knew at that moment.

  Who had replaced the original piece of writing with the new one? Why, and when? Bensoussan’s timeline narrowed down the window of larcenous opportunity to sometime between mid-March
and the beginning of April. Lorton said she could check the log for patrons who had visited the Rare Books and Manuscripts room during that time frame and requested Item #JPML 17-203. In some ways, though, to Val—who suspected a mere check of a sign-in log wasn’t going to be as conclusive as they were hoping—a different question was much more interesting. “Who wrote the original piece about thorns and iron and death, the one Saul copied,” she ticked off on her fingers, “how long has it been in the holding, and—”she felt a sudden flash of something like a terrible insight “—and what exactly was it replacing?”

  Some excited chatter swirled. “Who’s been around here long enough,” Greta practically collared Lorton, “to tell us anything about someone who’s shown an unusual interest in this red acacia box and the satire?”

  Val held up a hand. “Sorry, Saul, but it’s not the box, and it’s not the satire the thief of the Office Max sheet of paper was interested in, otherwise we wouldn’t still be looking at authentic artifacts—namely, this box,” she pointed, “and this satire, which are five hundred years old.” He nodded, agreeing.

  “I’ll see what I can find out,” said Lorton, “without arousing too much interest. We’re underfunded these days, which is why there’s no full-time, permanent librarian in the Rare Books room. Mostly pages retrieve Requested Materials and monitor the room, but…” She trailed off as she headed to the entrance to the Rare Books and Manuscripts room, where faces were jockeying for position in the small glass window. “Step back, please,” Lorton announced and she pushed her way into the hall, disappearing into the clamoring patrons.

  When she was out of sight and the door had closed behind her, Val quickly took half a dozen pictures of the ancient scrap with her iPhone while her aunt and the professor looked on.

  “Let me work on the Hebrew,” she said when she was finished, giving Greta a fierce look. “Not you, not the Agency. I have a source for the Hebrew. And it’s extremely important, Auntie.” As her aunt scrutinized her, and Bensoussan peeled off his gloves and headed to the trash can, all Val had time to add was one whispered word: “Adrian.”