Authors: Fairstein Linda
“Top to bottom,” Mike said. “Entrances, exits, any
way in or out of this place.”
“Obviously,” Jill said, “we’ve just come in the
front door.”
“Is that how the public enters?”
“Most of the time, Detective. There’s also a
smaller entrance on the Forty-second Street side. Yuri,” she said, “why don’t
we start upstairs and work our way down?”
“What’s your security like?”
“Since September 11 it’s been a lot tighter. Our
doors open at ten most weekdays. Guards check bags on the way in and on the way
out.”
“I saw two metal detectors at the door,” Mike
said. “They good enough to catch a thief with a razor blade or knife coming
through?”
“So you know how the bad guys used to cut out the
desirable pages?” Jill was a few steps ahead of us, with Yuri. “A thing of the
past, Mike. Between metal detectors and the arrest of a few major map thieves,
those particular tools have become obsolete.”
Yuri was leading us up another flight of stairs.
“You mean people don’t steal old prints or maps
out of books anymore?”
“Sadly, the thefts go on. It’s just that the
methods change. The bad guys have moved on to dental floss.”
“Floss?”
“Try it, Detective. Wet some floss. Soak it for a
while to stiffen it up. Keep it moist by balling it up inside your cheek when
you get to the library. The thieves have found it just as effective for ripping
out pages with exactly the same result. Takes about ten minutes to soften up
the old paper by applying the floss to it, so it’s a bit more nerve-racking than
the old-fashioned technique. But it works just fine.”
“Not even against the penal law. Armed with a
dangerous instrument—wet dental floss,” Mike said, trying to catch up with
Jill. “You sure got a lot of steps.”
“All part of the master plan. The first floor has
that grand open space, and a periodical room that the public was allowed to use
from our earliest days. Then up to the second floor—you’ll see our offices
later—where the private collections are housed, and then up to the third level,
to the great reading room. The nineteenth-century design idea was to lift the
scholars away from the noise and pollution of the street so they could get
their work done in the lightest, airiest part of the library. Still a good
idea. Is this where you did your college research, Alex?”
“The reading room? Yes, it is.”
“It’s been completely restored to its original
condition. You’ll hardly recognize it,” Jill said, pausing at the top of the
steps.
Yuri took a key from among the many on the ring
that dangled from his belt. While he unlocked the massive wooden doors, I
looked up to the barrel vault on the ceiling, at the brilliant painting of
Prometheus bringing the gift of fire to man, which soared in the rotunda
overhead.
He stood back to let us into the room. Mike and
Mercer entered before me, and both seemed stunned by the beauty—and size—of the
Rose Reading Room.
“Go ahead,” Jill said. “There’s a quarter of an
acre of space in here, meant to accommodate seven hundred scholars. It’s one of
the largest uninterrupted rooms in the city—almost the full length of two
blocks. For me, it’s the heart of the place.”
Library table after library table with aisles on
either side lined up in rows from end to end. Atop each were lamps and ports to
service laptops at each station.
“It practically glows in here now,” I said.
The large multipaned windows that flanked the room
flooded it with morning light. “Can you imagine?” Jill asked. “That glass was
all painted black during World War Two, and stayed dark until only a few years
ago, with this recent renovation.”
I walked along the parquet floors in search of the
table at which I’d situated myself day after day to work on my senior thesis
more than fifteen years ago. I looked up at the ceiling—perhaps the most
beautiful in the city—for a marker among the hanging chandeliers, a gilded
cherub whose once-tarnished wings now gleamed again. She was still surrounded,
as I remembered her, by coffers ornamented with angels and satyrs, and luminous
paintings of blue skies and puffy white clouds in the style of the old masters.
I sat in one of the chairs and leaned back to take
in the murals and all the detail that seemed to have been refurbished to its
original brilliance.
“Don’t get too comfortable, Coop,” Mike said.
“What’s the process, Jill? Say Tina wanted to get this book, this particular
edition of
Alice in Wonderland.
What would she have had to do?”
Jill walked to the center of the long room, which
was divided by the catalog area.
“She would have come here, as she’d done many
times before,” Jill said, placing her hand on the top of the counter. “Tina—or
any researcher—hands in the call slip to the clerk and is given a delivery
number. The clerk figures out where the book is, whether in a collection
upstairs or below us in the stacks, and sends for it using a pneumatic tube
system.”
“Pneumatic tubes?” Mike asked. “I thought they
went out with covered wagons.”
“Old systems die hard in the library business.
We’re trying to convert to something a little more current—electronic—but that
will still take years to effect.”
“Did she need a letter of introduction?”
“Tina’s credentials are well established here,
Detective. As newcomers, each of you would have to start out with references,
but not someone with whom we’re familiar. The letters in support of her application
would still be on file.”
“Makes an inside job even easier to pull off,”
Mike said. “Your staff develops a comfort level with the researcher when they
see her here regularly.”
“Quite true.”
Mike took the papers out of his pocket again and
smoothed them on the countertop.
“So how does the clerk know which copy of
Alice
in Wonderland
to fetch?”
Jill had her back against the wooden partition and
was talking to all of us. “She would have asked Tina to specify that. They’d
have looked in the card catalog to see where the different volumes are.”
“Let’s do that,” Mike said. “Where’s the catalog?”
“Not in little wooden boxes anymore, Detective, if
that’s what you’re thinking. Those books against the wall—eight hundred of
them—reproduce the original catalogs. Everything else is online now. It’s a
program called CATNYP—Catalog of the New York Public Library. One can access it
here, of course, but also from anywhere in the world.”
“So Tina, or anyone she was working with for that
matter, might have looked for the existence of a book from a computer in her
own apartment?”
“Quite easily.”
“Why don’t you show us how?” Mike said.
Jill didn’t seem eager to comply. She looked at
her watch, but it was still too early to be expecting anyone on staff to
appear.
“C’mon. I’d like to see the way it works.”
Jill walked behind the counter and logged on to
one of the computers. We watched as she typed in the request. Mike stepped in
to look over her shoulder.
“We’ve got several early copies in the Central
Children’s Room, but that collection isn’t housed in this building anymore.
Tina knew that, so she wouldn’t have been looking for any of those by putting a
slip in here,” Jill said, moving her finger down the screen. “Okay, in the
Special Collections section, we have one in Arents. An 1866 edition.”
“What’s Arents?”
“George Arents was an executive at P. Lorillard in
the early part of the last century. You know, one of the big tobacco companies.
He bequeathed us his library in 1944—it’s called the Tobacco Collection,
because every book and artifact in it is related to that subject.”
“So why would
Alice in Wonderland
be
shelved there?” Mike asked.
“The caterpillar with the hookah,” I said.
“Smoking opium on his mushroom.”
“Exactly. Then I see another 1866 edition in the
Berg Collection,” Jill said. “Quite the rare piece. Very valuable. It’s the
author’s presentation copy to Alice Liddell, inscribed by Carroll to her. The
first approved edition, bound in blue morocco. You can certainly have a look at
that one.”
“Alice Liddell’s father was the dean of Christ
Church in Oxford,” I explained to Mike and Mercer. “Charles Dodgson—he used the
pen name Lewis Carroll—was a math tutor at the college, and friendly with the
Liddells. He first told his stories of a girl’s adventures after falling in a
rabbit hole to Alice, who was believed to be his inspiration for them, and
later published the book.”
Jill Gibson was scanning the catalog. “That’s all
I find for 1866.”
“How about in the Hunt Collection?” Mercer asked,
leaning his elbows on the counter.
“Let me see,” she said, scrolling down to that
field. “There’s an 1865 edition, but that one was never approved. The author
and illustrator didn’t like the quality of the drawings. And there are letters
of Carroll’s, some of his correspondence. There are also originals of some of
the pictures he took of Alice. You may not know, but Carroll’s hobby was
photography.”
“I’ve seen some of the images—ten-year-old Alice
posed half naked,” I said. “Guess that’s what started the speculation that
Lewis Carroll was a pedophile.”
“We’ll never know, will we?” Jill said.
“Coop would have gotten to the bottom of it. Load
the old boy’s hookah with something to suppress the urge and pack him off to
prison,” Mike said, pushing the copy of the call slip in front of the keyboard.
“You know, Jill, I kind of got the feeling you’ve seen this handwriting
before.”
She kept her eyes on the screen in front of her.
“I never said that. Maybe I spoke too quickly. It’s quite possible Tina printed
the words herself. I shouldn’t have jumped to another conclusion. Here’s the
original of Lewis Carroll’s diary covering the period he wrote the book. That’s
in the Hunt Collection.”
“Pat McKinney thinks Tina was a forger, Jill. Do
you?”
“She was an artist, Detective. Very skilled at her
work.”
“I’d like you to look at this slip of paper again,
Jill. Why won’t you do that?”
She clasped her hands and rested them on the
countertop, looking down at the copy.
“You were so emphatic a short time ago that the
words on here weren’t written by Tina Barr. Isn’t that because you recognized
the penmanship as someone else’s?” Mike asked. He was standing so close to her
that he seemed to have her pinned in place, pressuring her to answer. “You
shook like a leaf when I handed you this paper outside the library. Why, Jill?”
She pushed Mike’s arm away from her and turned to
face him. “There are people in the library—employees as well as board
members—who didn’t trust Tina. Alex knows that. Mr. McKinney was talking to
many of them for his investigation, and all the while I’ve been defending the
girl. Then you show me this,” Jill said, picking up the paper from the
countertop. “I’d hoped never to see this writing in one of my libraries again.”
“Who do you think it is?”
“A man named Eddy Forbes. I don’t suppose you know
about him.”
“A map thief,” Mike said. Alger Herrick had talked
about Forbes yesterday. Herrick said he’d been released from jail and was
involved in some kind of deal with Minerva Hunt.
“The most prolific map thief we’ve ever come up
against. And a lot of what he stole was from the Beinecke Library in New Haven,
during my tenure there,” Jill said, bowing her head.
“You were blamed for the lax security?” Mercer
asked.
“By some. There were others who thought worse.”
“That you partnered with him on proceeds of what
he stole from your library?”
“Yes, Alex. I fought that battle once and won. I
was lucky I had friends among the trustees here who believed in me. They let me
come back to work. That won’t be the case a second time, if it turns out Eddy
Forbes had a plan to use Tina—and perhaps someone else on the inside.”
“I thought his specialty was maps,” I said. “That
doesn’t seem at all connected to Alice and her adventures underground.”
“If Forbes is involved, count on the fact that
there’s a map in the mix.”
“Was Tina capable of imitating someone’s
signature?”
“Probably so. In this digital age, the ability to
copy or even to forge has been made so much easier by all the technology
available. Almost anyone could do it, let alone someone as artistically gifted as
Tina.”
“Why did Pat McKinney tell me—tell the district
attorney—that Tina Barr was a forger and a thief?” I asked.
“I haven’t known Minerva Hunt and her brother,
Talbot, to be aligned on very many issues for as long as I’ve been around. But
both of them have accused her, to the president, of stealing from the family
collection in the past few months.” Jill Gibson started to lead us out of the
catalog area, back to the hallway. “Quite frankly, until I looked at this call
slip and made the link between Tina and Eddy Forbes, I didn’t believe it for a
minute.”