Then Greta laid her hand on the side of Val’s head. “Keep me in the loop.”
Wordlessly, Bensoussan set the scrap in the shallow secret drawer, along with the substituted piece of writing. “Saul,” said Val quietly, as she picked up her photocopy of the replacement, “I’d like to do a comparison myself—”
With a smile, he handed her his copy of the original piece he had discovered hidden in the ancient box. “My pleasure. In fact, when you’re done with it—” His eyes slid to Greta Bistritz. With a nod, Val tucked both sheets into her purse, and wondered how soon she could meet with Avital Korngold, Master of Situations. And, Val was hoping, classical Hebrew. On some level she couldn’t understand, Val sensed the little leather scrap of Hebrew text was an oversight.
The thief—and the thought that the thief had stolen more than an earlier translation or tortured story was deeply frightening to her—had overlooked this scrap.
It had decayed right off a much larger document that was now exactly…where? Replaced by what she was increasingly certain could only be a translation of the full Hebrew document, a place marker, really, a queer little mystery, meant to quell any probing questions about what would otherwise be a secret drawer, standing empty.
As the others packed up slowly, Alice Lorton rejoined them, holding a safe deposit box for the holding and a slip of paper. “The last full-time librarian might be able to shed some insight,” she said, waving the slip. “It was before my time, so I can’t tell you how helpful this lead will be for us, but still…He lives in Gramercy Park.” Val took the name and address from Lorton’s hand. “His name is Guy Everett.”
Although Alice Lorton had mentioned the former librarian in Rare Books and Manuscripts had been fired on the spot, apparently, for wigging out and being spectacularly offensive to a patron, he had always been considered pretty knowledgeable. Whether he was still at the Gramercy Park address nobody knew. After all, it had been several years since anyone had last seen him. But, considering he had been permanently forbidden to enter the Library—the patron he had insulted was on the Board of Directors—that was to be expected. And Everett had never fraternized outside of work. The couple of Morgan employees who remembered him referred to him as eccentric, but they weren’t even positive of that, maybe they were just remembering him charitably. Maybe, when all was said and done, Guy Everett was an uptight, old-school librarian who finally, one afternoon, and with the wrong patron, broke.
Val gave Ivy League Ivy a quick call to let her know she was going to be late getting back to the office, and then headed briskly down Madison to 23rd Street, cutting over to Park Avenue South and the Gramercy Park address on Lorton’s slip of paper. What looked like two adjoining brownstones presented a flat, inscrutable front to the public.
Over the dark blue double doors on the right flew a blue and gold flag fluttering no harder than a butterfly’s wings in the light April breeze. Two elaborate, interlocking initials—R.C.—was all the flag held.
Whatever stone steps the building on the right had once were obviously replaced, not all that long ago, with a concrete handicapped ramp with switchbacks leading up to the entrance. Enclosing both brownstones was a black wrought-iron fence. Val sprang the latch and stepped onto the short walkway to the front steps of 44 Gramercy Park West, which was flanked by lamps resembling Victorian streetlights.
Running lightly up the ten steps to the entrance to Guy Everett’s home, she passed traditional-looking urns holding identical spiral topiaries, and rapped the brass knocker against the rather grand, white double doors.
After a minute, she heard a slow rustling inside, followed by an even slower opening of one of the doors. Framed in the doorway stood a slight man in a three-quarter length dark blue tunic leaning slightly on two canes. In a gaunt, pale face two rosy spots clung to his cheeks. He might be as young as fifty, or as old as seventy. Not happy, not well, not—something. His lips barely moved. “Yes?”
“My name is Val Cameron and I’m looking for Guy Everett.”
The man in the tunic raised thin gray eyebrows. “What’s the nature of your business?”
She tipped her head at him. “I represent the Artifact Authentication Agency.”
One hand lifted a cane and waved vaguely to the street. “My manservant isn’t home right now.”
She was confused. “Is Mr. Everett your manservant?”
“No,” he said with great dignity. “I’m Everett, but I don’t receive callers unless my manservant is here.”
Manservant? Callers? Val suddenly understood the Victorian streetlights. “I see,” she said. “This shouldn’t take long.” A quick glance into the house, where she could tell Guy Everett wasn’t about to invite her, showed a gleaming wood floor, rugless and ascetic, white walls and woodwork disappearing down a long corridor. Halfway down on the left was a font of some sort, with a small Crucifix mounted on the wall above it.
Guy Everett lifted his chin. “And what is it in regard to?”
“We’ve discovered an irregularity in one of the holdings at the Morgan Library.”
At that, he blinked. “I’m no longer in their employ.”
“I understand that, Mr. Everett,” she said with a smile, “but we’ve been told you’re very knowledgeable.”
His green eyes narrowed at her, one hand moving restlessly on the brass handle of the cane. “And what precisely are you asking me to be knowledgeable about?”
Coming from another kind of man, Val might have taken it as humor. But not in Everett. “Item #JPML 17-203, a holding from the Mexican Inquisition.”
“Offhand,” he said smoothly, “it doesn’t ring any bells.”
She cocked her head at the strange little man with graying hair held impeccably in place with gel. “A satire, written in 1595, contained in a wooden box that is at least that old.”
He appeared to have his eyes on something stepping out of the mists of memory. “I may recall something of it. Who did you say you’re with?”
She fudged it. “I represent the Artifact Authentication Agency, a branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce.” A little fear never hurt. “We’re Feds,” she added in what she hoped was a disarming way.
“Ah. Federal,” he repeated, and Val sensed he was stalling. “And you’re trying to authenticate what, exactly? The satire? The acacia wood box?”
“No,” said Val reasonably, “neither of those. Right now we’re trying to trace patrons’ access to that holding at the time you were still the librarian in Rare Books and Manuscripts.”
He gave her a look. “Why? Has something happened to it?”
Val had to make a quick decision about how much information she could offer. How much and how accurate. “A—compartment in the box contains a sheet of paper that appears to be a rather recent translation into English of—”
“The satire?” He nodded nervously at her in the way people do when they want you to agree. “It would have to be the satire…”
“Good guess, Mr. Everett,” she said in a way she hoped didn’t sound too patronizing, “but our expert in Latin American literature says not. No, it appears to be the translation of a scrap from a document of great antiquity—” On some level she knew she needed to keep the flow of information to a trickle.
He went pale. “A scrap from a document?” breathed Everett.
“A fragment of a fragment.” Val demonstrated with her thumb and forefinger. “Something that became detached—”
“Where’s the document then?” Suddenly he was truculent.
“That’s a very good question,” said Val.
With great effort, he pulled himself up straight. “If the document is gone, then how can you know what it is, or even whether it is? Such leaps are bad—bad—librarianship.”
“I agree. But I’m not a librarian, so I get to make those leaps.”
“You show no method,” he
rocked back on his heels, “no attention to—”
She got a glimpse of the librarian who had raged at a board member seven years ago. Still, she kept her voice even. “We’ll have more conclusive information by the end of this week, Mr. Everett.” Because that’s all the time we have.
He brandished a cane at her. “That’s no excuse for—”
She overrode him as gently as she could. “Can you recall any patron during the latter days of your work at the Morgan Library who showed an unusual interest in Item #JPML 17-203? Any irregularities in the sign-in log? What we’re looking for is—”
Suddenly, Guy Everett stepped back, warding her off with both hands. “I’m sorry, I have no information, I have no recollection,” he was jabbering, “and my manservant isn’t at home.”
She looked at him, baffled. “But I thought you said—”
He cried, “My manservant isn’t at home.”
Val couldn’t remember any time in her life when a door was slammed in her face, but here it was. Not only had Guy Everett, former librarian, done just that, but she stood in amazement as she listened to him on the other side of the door fumbling locks and sliding a deadbolt. She moved very close to the doors and waited to hear him disappear back down that long hall with the gleaming floor. He didn’t. It struck her that the brittle, ailing little man who used to work at the Morgan Library was waiting for the alarming Val Cameron of the Artifact Authentication Agency to head back down his front steps and disappear forever. She decided to oblige. Nothing to gain by sticking around. Everett wasn’t going to let her in whether the elusive manservant—who calls the help manservants these days?—was at home or not. It felt like a kindness to make a noisy exit off his front steps so the overwrought Everett could stop cowering inside his own home.
As Val walked quickly over to Broadway and headed north to the Flatiron Building, her mind replayed her peculiar doorstep conversation with Guy Everett. He was fine, she thought, hurrying across the street while she still had the light, up to the point she mentioned what she had carefully called a document of great antiquity. For Everett, somehow, that moment was a game changer. He nearly lost it. Defensive, incoherent, with just one immediate goal: get Val Cameron off his front step. She had touched a raw and dangerous place in the sick little man in his blue tunic with his holy water font in the background. Val picked up her pace.
There was no doubt in her mind that Guy Everett had information about the box, the satire, the recent translation…and the scrap of ancient Hebrew. It might be interesting to compare either the first or second sheets of paper found in the secret drawer with something in the files at the Morgan Library that Guy Everett himself had written. At that moment, Val realized, as she neared her office, she really did wish she was a Fed. What possible authority could she exert over whatever information or suspicions—or stolen documents—Guy Everett possessed?
And then it struck her with force that he had let something slip.
The box. She was certain, in her attempts to keep whatever details she offered him to a minimum, she had only called it a wooden box.
But despite his denials, Everett had later referred to it as exactly what it was: a box made of acacia wood.
No recollection, no information, no manservant.
Maybe Guy Everett’s manservant wasn’t at home, but about everything else, he had lied.
25
Antony Bale buzzed Val into Adrian’s building off Columbus Circle. As she pushed her way into the cool foyer, she felt a twinge—this was the first time in many years that it wasn’t Adrian’s finger on the buzzer. Nothing felt right. It was entirely possible that nothing would ever feel right. As she started trudging up the stairs to the third floor, Val shifted the paper bag packed high with takeout containers from Whole Foods. She and Bale had agreed to share chicken wings and a platter of crudités. Plus some kind of flavored San Pellegrino; Val would see what they had.
Ahead was a work session. When she had told Bale over the phone about the trove of finds at the Morgan Library, he was excited to see both Saul Bensoussan’s original translation from the secret drawer and the second, newer one that had replaced it. Bale was baffled. “And being baffled,” he told her, “disturbs me. Puts me right off my wings.” In Val’s purse were the copies Alice Lorton had given her of both translations.
When she had returned to the office after the Morgan—and her run-in with the peculiar Guy Everett—the afternoon ran away with her. Between the defection of a longtime copyeditor, a cookbook author hysterical over the cover art for her next release, and the weekly departmental meeting that had five new items slapped last minute onto the agenda, Val hadn’t had a chance to study the two translations for herself. Added to that was her realization that she had forgotten her raffia tote in Bale’s hotel room, and she’d have to get it at some point.
He stood waiting for her in the doorway to Adrian’s apartment. “I just got here myself.”
Val had always loved Adrian’s place, its warm, funky mix of Crate and Barrel contemporary and oddball pieces from estate sales on Riverside Drive or the Lower East Side, which accounted for the three-paneled folding screen, the washstand minus the crockery, and a bishop’s chair.
Crowding floor space in front of the tall windows were thriving split-leaf philodendrons and dracaenas. And the only thing Adrian Bale collected were antique ceramic art tiles that depicted birds, which she mounted randomly across the wall closest to all the floor plans. The effect was like living in an aviary. Bale had started to pack up his sister’s clothes and books. Coats were piled neatly over the back of the couch.
“Oh!” Val cried. “My white jacket.” Scooping it up, she smiled at Bale. “I forgot I’d lent it to Adrian for the trip.”
“She wore it all the time. It’s yours?”
Val nodded, holding it against her cheek for a moment, thinking of Adrian wearing it in Norfolk. Val could swear it had Adrian’s signature scent—the light, classic l’Air du Temps—and found herself wondering how long it would last. As Antony held a long match to the jets in Adrian’s gas fireplace to take the April chill off the room, Val set the white belted jacket Adrian had worn in Norfolk with her own red plaid coat she had tossed over the back of a chair.
The two of them spread out the wings and crudités, the San Pellegrino, and the translations from the Morgan Library on the shapely wood and glass coffee table Adrian had bought at a craft fair in Easthampton several years ago.
Val settled herself cross-legged on the rug as Antony stood over her, pouring the water. He may have been wearing charcoal gray pants and a collarless white shirt, but he was barefoot. Val may have been wearing her favorite black Ann Taylor ankle pants, but she had thrown on a lightweight purple jersey hoodie—with the hood pulled up, pushing her crazy hank of hair farther over her eye. There in Adrian’s abandoned apartment, it felt like a very domestic evening.
On his way to the kitchen for more napkins, Bale cued up Pandora on Adrian’s laptop, and Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” pierced the air. A beautiful choice for the aviary. If he let her choose keepsakes, Val suddenly knew she wanted the birds of paradise tiles from Adrian’s collection. At least it was something. But nothing was going to be adequate to the memory of Adrian Bale.
As Bale settled himself across the coffee table from her, he sighed noisily. “How do you want to do this?” he asked, sliding a small stack of napkins toward her.
Val squinted at the millwork Adrian had repaired at great expense. “We eat, we drink, we compare.” When he said nothing, Val raised her hand. “All at the same time. Good?”
He nodded once. “Now I call that a party.”
She raised her glass. “But, then, you live in a monastery.”
He laughed hard, and the two of them sorted out the sharing of the chicken wings, the offloading of cut-up vegetables and dip, and the equitable division of an odd number of dill pickles that had
somehow made their way into the takeout. When they finally dug in and chewed while they silently studied the two translations, Val swallowed three Kalamata olives and asked, “How are the wings?”
“All skin and sauce.”
“As they should be.”
“Otherwise, what’s the point?”
“Agreed.” When Bale extended an open bag of chips at her, Val grabbed a handful. “Here,” she said, pushing Saul Bensoussan’s original translation at him. “Why don’t you read this aloud, and I’ll compare it to the second one as you go. Good?”
“Good.” Bale swiped a paper napkin across his mouth and slid a pen through the wreckage of the takeout food to Val. Then he smoothed out the translation Saul Bensoussan had originally come across in the acacia wood box when he had first triggered the secret drawer, and turned it sideways so Val could take a look at the sheet for a moment. Reading the original together seemed a good way to begin. Glancing at Val, he asked, “Ready?” When she nodded he began to read it slowly.
…the Son of God in this night among the olive trees of Gat Smanim. For he says what binds his feet, what pierces his flesh, what crowns his head are the way to life everlasting among the world of living men. So are body and soul healed, and death must find another, one who sees not. He who hungers for what is hidden in the divine must begin with what binds his feet, what pierces his flesh, and what crowns his head. Iron penetrates like faith, and the thorn draws blood and truth.
For in the moment of greatest extremity among the most faithful, it is through the sting of the thorn that life flows forevermore in the world of man. In these days hereafter, iron and thorn are man’s inheritance. Keep them safe from the eyes of the many, for this is a secret inheritance, and taken together they are the bridge for all to the new world among the kingdoms of men, where pain and strife become but chaff cast away in the breath of the Lord. Let it fall to the most righteous among you to let nothing deter and let no one deny. This is the might of Christ in his final affliction and his promise of a kingdom to come in the world of living men.
A Killer's Guide to Good Works Page 19