Lethal Legacy (25 page)

“Indeed. And it was founded by Albert—in 1906.”

“One year after your grandfather met with him.”

“And thanks to Grandpapa’s largesse,” Talbot Hunt
said. “You see, Princess Alice—the rich American wife—left Albert a few years
earlier, after he slapped her in the face during an evening at the opera, when
he learned she was having an affair with a famous composer.”

“Like you say, Coop”—Mike pointed at me—“nothing
new about domestic violence.”

“And when Alice walked out, she took her sizable
dowry with her. By selling the 1507 world map to my grandfather, Prince Albert
pocketed a small fortune for himself and was able to establish the
oceanographic museum and library, which is still thriving today.”

“Nobody in the principality complained that he was
deaccessioning such a rare document?”

“Ms. Cooper, I daresay not many people knew of its
existence. My father claims that Albert told Grandpapa that the panels of the
great map had been protected because they were inside a series of books—books
that had intrigued Albert from the time he was a young child.”

“Do you know which books?” I asked.

“Certainly. Some time after the Grimaldis returned
to power in 1814, the royal library acquired the entire collection of the
Description
de l’Égypte.
All twenty-four volumes. Where the pieces of the map had been
stored for safekeeping during the revolution, I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.
But whoever found them thereafter decided that the double elephant folios of
the Napoleonic expedition would be just the right size to protect the panels.”

“What are they?” Mike asked.

“The Description of Egypt was the largest
publication in the world at that time—in its physical size, not in the number
of copies—and a very prized possession, too,” Jill Gibson explained. “Napoleon
led a failed invasion of Egypt in 1798.”

“I know that. The British defeated him in the
Mediterranean and his troops were cut off from France,” Mike said. “He
abandoned his army and went home.”

“But a horde of civilians accompanied the
military, and stayed on in Egypt to create an exhaustive and meticulously drawn
catalog of everything from the obelisks and large statues along the Nile, to
the great tombs, to the flora and fauna,” Jill said.

“And the very last volume of the first edition of
the Description of Egypt is an atlas—the book that captured the imagination of
the young Prince Albert, and the one in which he found the even older map,”
Talbot Hunt said. “The map he sold to Jasper.”

“Do you know where your grandfather kept his
panels?”

“I wouldn’t be searching for them today if I knew
where they were.” Hunt stood up and frowned at Mike.

“I mean, did he display them, or did he hide them
inside other volumes?”

“He was a bookman, Mr. Chapman. Ten, twenty,
thirty years after he bought the world map, there had never been another peep
about the original one. Nothing about its existence or its value since the
first news accounts of its discovery. My father told me that Grandpapa lost
interest in it, just like everyone else.”

“So Jasper Hunt bought this map a hundred years
ago,” Mike asked, “let me guess—for sport?”

“Why do very rich men collect rare objects, Mr.
Chapman? Paintings, coins, motor yachts, Arabian stallions, Ming vases?”

“Got me on that one. I gave up on collecting when
my mother threw out nine shoe boxes full of my baseball cards after I moved out
of the house.”

“So other very rich men can’t claim the ultimate
prize,” Hunt said. “If there were two of these maps in the world, and a
reclusive prince owned one of them, then Jasper Hunt Jr. wanted the other. It
sat in his library, in a specially made leather box, for thirty years after the
idea of owning it had captured his fancy, and by then no one in the world
seemed to give a damn about it. He was long onto other, more talked-about
treasures. He didn’t live long enough to see the revived interest in his
forgotten map.”

“Does anyone—perhaps your father—understand why
the twelve panels of your grandfather’s map became separated?” I asked.

Talbot Hunt cleared his throat. “You can’t make
sense of an eccentric. If my father knows why, he’s never told me.”

Either that was true or Hunt wasn’t letting go of
any other family secrets in front of Bea Dutton and Jill Gibson.

“Did your grandfather own a first edition set of
this Na poleonic expedition?”

“Yes, he did, Mr. Chapman,” Hunt said. “But my
father gave that to the library—oh, I’d say twenty years ago or more. Our
curator—and the accountants—will have a record of that gift.”

“Bea,” Mike said, standing up and rapping on the
trestle table with his fisted hand. “So where’s the atlas? Let’s have a look.”

“We can locate it for you, certainly. And pull
it,” Jill said. “Why do you ask?”

“That’s the volume in which Prince Albert found
his copy of the map. Maybe Jasper was playing on that fact, if he was such a
prankster. This panel we just found,” Mike said, sweeping his arm over the
trestle table, “was nested inside the Audubon folio, which used to belong to
Grandpa Hunt. Maybe the killer was looking for places the map might have been
concealed by the old man as one of his tricks, in another one of his books. Was
that his brand of eccentricity?”

Talbot Hunt nodded. “Grandpapa wanted to keep my
father on a leash, never assuming he would inherit everything without working
at it.”

“Wouldn’t an atlas be part of the collection in
this very room?” Mike asked.

“You want to know how things disappear, Mr.
Chapman?” Hunt said, almost bellowing. “Certainly there are maps and atlases in
here. But there are more maps in the general stacks, and yet again others in
the various rare-book rooms. We’ve got one collection in the building—the
Spencer—that’s just about rare bindings. The curator there doesn’t give a damn
if he’s got roadways or rodents between the covers—it’s all about the leather
and decoration on the outside of the books. If there’s even a drawing of a
tobacco leaf—say, in a depiction of the Virginia colony—in one of the
cartouches, then that map might be housed in the Arents Collection. The maps
are spread out everywhere throughout the library.”

“Why isn’t the Hunt Collection all in one room,
like most of the others?” I asked.

“Because the library didn’t have enough space to
maintain it that way by the time his gift was made,” Hunt went on. “The
Audubons, for example, and the Egyptian expedition volumes—well, he agreed to
the library’s plan to let them reside where its curators deemed they were most
appropriate.”

“So where are these particular books?” Mike asked.

Jill Gibson spoke more calmly. “At the time of
Napoleon’s travels, Egypt was considered part of the Orient. So they’re in our
Orientalia section—Asian and Middle Eastern.”

“You see what I mean, Chapman? They run these
great libraries like a shell game,” Hunt said, walking to the far side of the
room. “I can’t tell you how many millions we’ve given to these people over the
years. I’ve got every damn right to pull the plug and demand an accounting
immediately.”

“Surely the card catalogs have—” I started to say.

“They tell us nothing, Ms. Cooper,” Hunt said.
“Maps are rarely mentioned in library catalogs, and those within the atlases
aren’t ever individually described. Take a razor to a page and it’s hard to
prove what was ever there. They’re unmoored, maps. Unmoored and generally
ignored. Not like books at all.”

Jill looked at her watch. “Perhaps some of the
curators have arrived. I can call and have someone bring us the Egyptian
atlas.”

“I don’t think you understand the plan,” Mike
said. “There are cops at every door of this place by now. No one is touching
any of these books unless we’re along for the ride. And no one’s entering the
building until the crime scene detectives have been over every inch of this
place.”

“That could take days. You can’t close the public
library.”

“Faster than you can say Dewey decimal system,
lady,” Mike said, tapping me on the shoulder. “Coop, call Battaglia. Tell him
to get on the horn with the commissioner. The pair of them can shut this mother
down in a minute.”

“I’ll wait in Jill’s office, then,” Talbot Hunt
said.

“Mercer, why don’t you escort Mr. Hunt to the
nearest exit?”

“These are
my
books, Chapman.”

“That’s not so,” Jill said. “You’ve got no
personal claim to any of the things your grandfather gave to us.”

“Don’t embarrass yourself, Mr. Hunt,” Mike said,
pointing at the neatly embroidered letters—TH—on Hunt’s shirt, just visible
below the sleeve of his jacket. “I don’t have monogrammed handcuffs. You
wouldn’t want to be photographed when I eject you wearing metal bracelets.”

“I’ll hold you personally responsible, Detective,”
Hunt said, turning his back to us.

“For what?”

Hunt’s freshly polished loafers snapped like
gunshots on the bare floor as he stomped toward the exit of the map room. He
was furious, but couldn’t express a reason that made any sense. “For the loss
of…of…of any valuable property that should have been rightfully restored to
me.”

“Shoulda, woulda, coulda. You didn’t even know the
frigging map existed for most of your life,” Mike said as Mercer followed after
Hunt. “Tell me the real story about it, why don’t you? Or sue me. Maybe you
actually need all the savings I got in my piggy bank.”

“Would you mind telling us where you spent the
evening last night?” I asked as Hunt pulled open the door.

“I wasn’t in Bryant Park, Ms. Cooper. I’m not a
baseball aficionado.”

“Strikes me as a much more sporting type, Blondie,
doesn’t he?” Mike said, sneering at Hunt. “Cold-blooded and calculating. Fox
hunting, deer shooting, and all those genteel upper-class pastimes where you
kill things for the fun of it.”

“Tina Barr isn’t worth anything to me dead, Mr.
Chapman,” Talbot Hunt said, glancing back over his shoulder. “You ought to talk
to my sister, Minerva. There’s a girl who knows how to hold a grudge.”

TWENTY-ONE

Bea Dutton and Jill Gibson sat together at the
farthest table from the reference desk, staring off in different directions,
like two schoolkids in detention. I had used the landline to call Paul
Battaglia, to tell him the latest developments and get his help with
Commissioner Scully.

Mercer returned within minutes. “You’re growing
quite a crowd outside, Mike.”

“Front steps?”

“The employees come in through the service
entrance on Fortieth Street. Seems like most of them hadn’t heard any news
reports about the body in the park.”

“Is the detail in place?”

“Yeah. Chief of d’s has everything covered. A
fresh Crime Scene crew is unloading now. They should be in the lobby in five.”

Mike walked to where Bea and Jill were sitting.
“Bea, I’m going to have a uniformed cop sitting here with you for the day. Just
to make sure no one gets past the door and tries to come in.”

She smiled at him wanly. “You mean just so I don’t
start doing my own treasure hunt, don’t you?”

“A little of both.”

“I’ve got an appointment—some engineers from the
city due at eleven.”

“Why?”

“There’s a problem under the old Penn Station
railroad tunnels. They need a footprint—a vertical search—before there’s any
structural damage. It sounds pretty urgent.”

“What can you do for them?”

Bea Dutton explained. “I can search the particular
property or plot of land back before the time of the Civil War, when maps of
the city were created for insurance companies. You can see exactly what
structures existed at any location over time, and what the topographical
conditions are. There was flooding in the sub-basement of the Empire State
Building last spring—”

“Flooding from what?” Mike asked.

“There’s a stream that cuts through the southwest
quadrant of the building, way underground. It shows on the old maps, before
midtown was built up. Because of all the snow last winter, the stream swelled
with the spring melt and dumped six inches of water into that sub-basement. The
engineers need to get into the train tunnels before the snowstorms start, to
make sure they can prevent any potential for collapse.”