Glenn Cooper: Book of Souls

He flipped pages, making comments and pointing here and there with his gloved forefinger. “It’s a chronicle of births and deaths. Look at this one: Nicholas Amcotts 13 1 1527 Natus. Seems to announce that a Nicholas Amcotts was born on the thirteenth of January 1527. Straightforward enough. But look at the next one. Same date, Mors, a death, but these are Chinese characters. And the next one, another death, Kaetherlin Banwartz, surely a Germanic name, and this one here. If I’m not mistaken, this is in Arabic.”

In a minute, he had found Greek, Portuguese, Italian, French, Spanish, and English names, and multiple foreign words in Cyrillic, Hebrew, Swahili, Greek, Chinese. There were some languages he could only guess at. He muttered something about African dialects.

He pressed his gloved fingertips together in contemplation. “What kind of town has this population diversity, not to mention this population density in 1527? And what about this vellum? And this rather primitive binding? The impression here is something quite a bit older than sixteenth-century. It’s got a decidedly medieval feel to it.”

“But it’s dated 1527.”

“Well, yes. Duly noted. Still, that is my impression, and I do not discount my gut feelings, nor should you. I think we will have to obtain the views of academic colleagues.”

“What’s it worth?”

“I’ve no idea. Whatever it is, it’s a specialty item, a curiosity, quite unique. Collectors like uniqueness. Let’s not worry too much about value at this stage. I think we will do well by this piece.” He carefully carried the book to the far end of the table and put it on its own spot away from the others, a pride of place. “Let’s sort through the rest of the Cantwell material, shall we? You’ll be busy entering the lot into the computer. And when you’re done, I want you to turn every page in every book to look for letters, autographs, stamps, et cetera. We don’t want to give our customers freebies, do we?”

In the evening, with young Nieve long gone, Toby returned to the basement. He passed quickly by the whole of the Cantwell collection, which was laid out on three long tables. For the moment, those volumes held no more interest to him than a load of old Hello! magazines. He went straight for the book that had occupied his thoughts all day and slowly laid his ungloved hands on its smooth leather. In the future, he would insist that at that moment he felt some kind of physical connection with the inanimate object, a sentiment unbefitting a man with no inclination to this kind of drivel.

“What are you?” he asked out loud. He made doubly sure he was alone since he imagined that talking to books might be career-limiting at Pierce & Whyte. “Why don’t you tell me your secrets?”

WILL PIPER WAS never much for crying babies, especially his own. He had a vague recollection of crying-baby number one a quarter of a century earlier. In those days he was a young deputy sheriff in Florida, pulling the worst shifts. By the time he got home in the morning, his infant daughter was already up-and-at-’em, doing her happy-baby routine. When he and his wife did spend a night together, and Laura cried out, he’d whine himself, then drift back to sleep before Melanie had the bottle out of the warmer. He didn’t do diapers. He didn’t do feedings. He didn’t do crying. And he was gone for good before Laura’s second birthday.

But that was two marriages and one lifetime ago, and he was a changed man, or so he told himself. He’d allowed himself to be molded into something of a twenty-first-century metrosexual New York father with all the trappings of the station. If, in the past, he could attend crime scenes and prod at decomposing flesh, he could change a diaper. If he could conduct an interview through the sobs of a victim’s mother, he could deal with crying.

It didn’t mean he had to like it.

There had been a succession of new phases in his life, and he was a month into the newest, an amalgam of retirement and unfiltered fatherhood. It had been only sixteen months from the day he abruptly retired from the FBI to the day Nancy abruptly returned to work after maternity leave. And now, for at least brief stretches of time, he was left on his own with his son, Phillip Weston Piper. Their budget didn’t allow for more than thirty hours per week of nanny time, so for a few hours a day he had to fly solo.

As lifestyle changes went, this was fairly dramatic. For much of his twenty years at the FBI, he’d been a top-of-the-heap profiler, one of the most accomplished serial-killer hunters of his era. If it hadn’t been for what he charitably called his personal peccadilloes, he might have gone out large, with accolades and a nice postretirement gig as a criminal-justice consultant.

But his weaknesses for booze and women and his stubborn lack of ambition torpedoed his career and fatefully led him to the infamous Doomsday case. To the world, the case was still unsolved, but he knew better. He’d broken it, and it had broken him in return.

Its legacy was forced early retirement, a negotiated cover-up, and reams of confidentiality agreements. He got out with his life-barely.

On the bright side, fate also led him to Nancy, his young Doomsday partner, and she had given him his first son, a six-month-old, who sensed the rift when Nancy closed the apartment door closed behind her and had started to work his diaphragm.

Mercifully, Phillip Weston Piper’s high-pitched squall was squelched by rocking, but it abruptly resumed when Will put him back in his crib. Will hoped beyond hope that little Phillip would burn himself out and slowly backed out of the bedroom. He put the living-room TV onto cable news and tweaked the volume to harmonically modulate the nails-on-chalkboard squeal of his offspring.

Even though he was chronically sleep-deprived, Will’s head was awfully clear these days, thanks to his self-imposed separation from his pal, Johnnie Walker. He kept the ceremonial last half-gallon bottle of Black Label, three-quarters full, in the cabinet under the TV. He wasn’t going to be the kind of ex-drunk who had to purge the place of alcohol. He visited with the bottle sometimes, winked at it, sparred with it, had a little chat with it. He taunted it more than it taunted him. He didn’t do AA or “talk to someone.” He didn’t even stop drinking! He had a couple of beers or a generous glass of wine fairly regularly, and he even got buzzed on an empty stomach. He simply prohibited himself from touching the nectar-smoky, beautiful, amber-his love, his nemesis. He didn’t care what the textbooks said about addicts and abstinence. He was his own man, and he had promised himself and his new bride that he wouldn’t do the falling-down-drunk thing again.

He sat on the sofa with his large hands lying dumbly on his bare thighs. He was set to go, kitted out in jogging shorts, T-shirt, and sneakers. The nanny was late again. He felt trapped, claustrophobic. He was spending way too much time in this little parquet-floored prison cell. Despite best intentions, something was going to have to give. He was trying to do the right thing and honor his commitments and all that, but every day he grew more restless. New York had always irritated him. Now it was overtly nauseating.

The buzzer saved him from darkness. A minute later, the nanny-troll, as he called her (not to her face), arrived, launching into an attack on public transport rather than an apology. Leonora Monica Nepomuceno, a four-foot-ten-inch Filipina, threw her carrier bag on the kitchenette counter, then went right for the crying baby, pressing his tense little body against her incongruously large breasts. The woman, who he guessed was in her fifties, was so physically unattractive that when Will and Nancy first learned her nickname, Moonflower, they laughed themselves to exhaustion. “Ay, ay,” she crooned to the boy, “your auntie Leonora is here. You can stop your crying now.”