Linda Fairstein - Lethal Legacy

“You gave up on the project?” Mike asked.

“I shouldn’t have gotten involved in the first place. I’m not into maps,” Krauss said. “There was a well-known bibliophile named Holbrook Jackson, famous for saying, ‘Your library is your portrait.’ Look around this room. There’s not a single map on display.”

“So why did you entertain Forbes’s folly to begin with?”

“The deal, Detective. The deal always grabs me. Could have been searching for a rare map or Captain Kidd’s sunken treasure or King Solomon’s mines. It would have been spectacular if the damn thing even existed,” Krauss said, picking up a model helicopter from his desk and twirling the rotors as he talked. “People would have been throwing money at me left and right if I’d come up a winner. Instead I got hosed. Probably all went to Forbes’s defense attorney anyway.”

“And you haven’t heard from Forbes since?”

“That’s one of the conditions of his probation,” Krauss said. “He can’t be anywhere near a library and he can’t communicate with any staff or trustees.”

“Why’d he pick you in the first place if he knew you didn’t care about maps?” I asked.

“Money.”

“Everybody on your board has money.”

“Hard to get those tough old guys to part with their dough. Most of their money is older than they are.” Krauss smiled again. “I figure there’s always more to be made where the last pot of gold came from.”

I was certain that Alger Herrick had told us that Minerva Hunt was involved in a deal with Eddy Forbes.

“Didn’t you try to discuss this consortium idea with Jasper Hunt the Third? Doesn’t he still sit on the board with you?” I asked.

“What was that saying about Boston Brahmins? The Lowells talk only to Cabots, and the Cabots talk only to God?” Krauss asked of no one in particular, reciting the singsong doggerel. “The Hunts talk only to Astors…and maybe to God, as long as he isn’t a Jew or a black man. Or even worse, a woman. Jasper hasn’t been on the scene much the last four or five years. And he’s not exactly a fan of mine.”

“Why’s that?”

Krauss wound the screw on the side of the helicopter and launched it, watching it crash to the carpet beside him. “I guess he doesn’t like my style.”

“How about Talbot Hunt?” I asked. “How well do you know him?”

“Only in the boardroom.”

“Get along?”

“I wouldn’t turn my back on Tally for very long,” Krauss said. “We have different ideas about the direction the library should be going. Nothing deadly, I wouldn’t think.”

“Didn’t he have any interest in Forbes’s idea? After all, the map was supposed to have been his grandfather’s purchase.”

“I don’t think Eddy Forbes and Talbot Hunt are on the same page either. Would have surprised me if they were even before all of Forbes’s legal troubles. Besides, Talbot’s sister, Minerva, wanted a piece of the action. I’m sure once she was in, her brother wouldn’t have been a likely partner. There’s bad blood between those two.”

“But you know Minerva?”

“We’ve met a handful of times. Eddy introduced us. She was willing to put up some of the seed money. She’d done that for Forbes before. I guess she was the one who told him the story of the missing map. He had access to most of the inner circle then. Minerva got all psyched up when the Library of Congress bought the only original that was thought to exist, because she remembered hearing stories about the second one-her grandfather’s-when she was a kid.”

“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.