Linda Fairstein - Lethal Legacy

Bea was calling on the remaining curators. “Think Hunt, ladies and gents. And then give me regions of the world. Japan, China, Africa, America-North and South.”

“I’ve got a huge box that Jasper Hunt donated,” a young woman said. “Erotic color prints of the Ming period. Sort of Chinese sex life from Han to Ch’ing.”

“We’ll take it,” Bea said.

“You got pornography here?” Mike asked.

“Art, Mr. Chapman,” Bea answered with a laugh. “Only the French library system has the backbone to exhibit the stuff, if that isn’t true to type. The rest of us just keep it hidden. Handwritten manuscripts by the Marquis de Sade, English ‘flagellation novels,’ Parisian police reports about nineteenth-century brothels, and shelves full of Japanese prints and Chinese illustrations. Some of them courtesy of Jasper Hunt.”

“Sounds like the Jasper Hunt who collected photographs of Alice Liddell,” I said.

“The Slavic and Baltic Collection has an elephant-folio chromolithographed account of the coronation ceremonies of Alexander the Second, the Tsar Liberator,” another voice chimed in, catching Bea Dutton’s enthusiasm for her task.

Mike paired the young man with a cop, and they were off to search.

“We’ve got several editions of the Edward Curtis American Indian photographs that are in folio form in our rare-books division,” a man said, standing and ready to move.

“You want Americana, Detective, we should give those a shot.”

“Tell me more.”

“Curtis took more than two thousand photographs of native Americans between 1907 and 1930 in an effort to document their lives. Tried to sell five hundred sets but went bankrupt before he could.”

“Are they Hunt connected?”

“The set I know was donated by J. P. Morgan. That usually made Hunt try to find something as good, or more elegantly bound. I’d like to look.”

“Go for it.”

Mike, Bea, and I were now alone in the room with a few of the officers still waiting to be assigned to a task. I imagined the library coming alive at night, just like in Jane Eliot’s stories, with curators and cops unlocking the cages and exploring the deep recesses of storage areas and stacks.

“I want you to see my thinking,” Bea said, unfolding and respreading the copy of the 1507 map on one of the trestle tables. “Track these books and drawings as they report back to us.

“It’s going to be a long night, guys, but maybe we can match some of these panels to the parts of the world they represent.” She cleaned the lenses of her glasses on the hem of her sweater, then took a red marker from her pocket and numbered each of the map sections from one to twelve, starting in the top left corner. “Keep an eye on me, Mike. I’ve got some atlases to search, too.”

“I’d trust you with my firstborn, Bea. Need any help?”

“Come into my cage, if you don’t mind.”

We walked through the room and behind the reference desk, past Bea’s personal work area. She removed a key chain from her pants pocket and shuffled through the assortment until she found the one that opened the gate to a space that reminded me of safe-deposit vaults.

“These are where the oldest maps are stored,” she said, weaving between chest-high rows of long metal filing cabinets with large horizontal drawers. “The loose ones, of course.”

Farther back, out of sight from the front desk, was shelf after shelf of old books, all oversized and many of them splendidly decorated.

“All the great cartographers are represented here,” she said. “Mercator, Ortelius, Blaeu, Seller.”

“Are you looking for something in particular?” Mike asked.

“One of my favorite map-meisters, Detective. Claudius Ptolemaeus.”

“I know. I know all about Ptolemy,” Mike said, looking at the shelves above Bea’s head. “First guy to give us a mathematical picture of the universe. AD 150, right?”

He was quoting the information he had learned from Alger Herrick.

“You’re a quick study, Mike.”

His head was moving from side to side as he scanned the shelves. “The guy is everywhere. What do you want?”

“Once the printing press was invented, illustrated books of every kind became available. Ptolemy’s work was translated from the Greek text into all the European languages. The Romans tried to outdo the Florentines, Strassburg’s scholars thought they could color the maps more beautifully than in Ulm. Vicenza, Basel, Venice, Amsterdam-all over the continent printers were racing to get these maps in the hands of the rich and the royal. First, second, third editions. It may seem like a lot of them to you, but each volume in its own way is quite rare.”

“Any of these come from Jasper Hunt’s collection?” I asked.

“Sore point, Alexandra,” Bea said.

“Why?”

“There it is, Mike. You mind lifting it down?” Bea had spotted the volume she wanted. “It’s a Strassburg Ptolemy. 1513.”

He handed her the large book, and she caressed it as she carried it to her desktop. “Contemporary Nuremberg binding of blind-stamped calf over wooden boards.”

The front cover was decorated in an elaborate fleur-de-lis pattern with a leafy border, gilt flowers, and gryphons adding to its striking appearance.

“Only thirty-three copies of this work survived,” Bea said. “And before the Second World War, this library owned a pair.”

“The gift of Jasper Hunt?” I asked.

“At the time, yes, it was. He decided to take one of these atlases back. Long before my time, mind you, but no one here ever saw it again, though I’ll bet Jill will still include it on the list of our acquistions she gives you tonight.”

“Sure, rather than agitate-or challenge-any of the Hunt heirs,” Mike said. “Why are you looking for this version?”

“Because it might have been exactly the kind of idea that would have amused our eccentric friend Jasper Hunt Jr.,” Bea said. “Remember-no use of the word ‘America’ appeared in any cartography until the 1507 map. It certainly never entered into anything Ptolemaic. But with the development of the press and the incorporation of all the new explorations of the period, the Strassburg Ptolemy of 1513 was the first book to print a solo map of America. Only America. The first map devoted uniquely to this continent.”

Bea was turning pages in the great volume with painstaking care as she talked.

“A fitting place for Jasper to hide the panel from our map that depicts America,” Mike said.

“Yes, but I think I’m striking out,” she said, separating and flattening the pages as she went.

“There is a second copy of this book though,” I said. “It never surfaced again?”

“Only in rumors,” Bea said. “And then from the mouth of Eddy Forbes.”

“How reliable was he at gossip?”

“Almost as good as he was at stealing,” she said. “In the 1940s, the deals between collectors were a lot different than they are today. With the Internet, we can all keep track of books and maps-who’s got something to sell and who’s in line to buy. Back then, there was much more discretion, many more one-on-one interactions, and lots of secrecy.”

“What did Eddy tell you?” Mike asked.

“His story was that after the war, Jasper Hunt sold the second Strassburg atlas to Lord Wardington. He was always unhappy when the library didn’t treat his bequests like they were their most important gifts of the year. He represented to the buyer, of course, that he had the title free and clear.” Bea pushed the glasses to the top of her head. “It didn’t take long for Wardington, who was a real gent, to learn the truth. He returned the map to Hunt at once to let him make amends with the library.”

“But Hunt never did that,” Mike said.