The Hours of the Virgin (12 page)

There was nothing in that for me, so I let it float down the Thoroughfare.

At length we slowed down and entered a room the size of the Tomcat Theater. That was where the similarities ended. The twelve-foot ceiling was made entirely of stained glass, with ambient lighting installed above. This cast colors onto a mosaic floor designed to incorporate the patterns that resulted. Between them stood a hundred thousand books on shelves behind leaded panes. On three Eastlake easels rested loose yellow leaves of what I now knew to be vellum, each the size of a page from a world atlas and crusted over with elaborately wrought lettering in gold and tarnished silver and crushed semiprecious stones. A massive refectory table rested upon six seated lions carved from ivory, every square inch of its top stacked high with volumes bound in cracked calfskin, moldy buckram, and discolored silk. The room smelled of stale leather and genteel decay, like an old woman waiting patiently for the lover who had jilted her to return after sixty years. Somewhere a hidden air-recycler whirred, the white noise of the bibliomaniac.

Somewhere too, quieter than that, a dog-eared punch-card found its slot and dropped in. A tired brain turned over with a thud and started clicking.

“You collect?” I asked.

“An occupational inevitability, I'm afraid. Barbers pursue razors, farmers antique tractors. Publishers—well, you're not blind.” He put his scooter into a spin on the Biblical pastoral scene assembled at our feet and stopped on Cain's face, looking at me. “You know my history?”

“Some of it.”

“Then you may understand my obsession. Hundreds—thousands of obscure men with dangerous ideas traded their lives for what's written in these books. They were burned, hanged, broken on the rack, drawn and quartered. Their eyes were gouged out and molten lead poured into the sockets to cauterize the profanity they had read and written. The only time I truly feel I'm not alone is the time I spend in this room.”

“I get it. Thomas More gave up his head so you could publish pictures of naked ladies.”

“The subject matter isn't important. Certainly it made no difference to the man who swung the axe. Or the inbred morons who incited the crowd that put me astride this machine. The man who buys the paper stock should be able to put what he wants on it without trading his life or his legs for the privilege.”

He swept a hand about the room. “Obviously, I felt this way long before the attack. I assembled the core of my library when I was still living in rented rooms. Back then you could put together a world-class book collection for a fraction of what a Japanese CEO spent on one Raphael at Sotheby's. That was before Hollywood entered the market. Even a movie star can manage to appear literate by dumping half his gross points on a Shakespeare First Folio.”

“Do you know the Plymouth Book of Hours?”

He lowered his hand. “I know
of
it. I've never seen it. Great Britain has it.”

“Not all of it.”

“The Hours of the Virgin.” He nodded. “Lost, as I recall, at the time of the Civil War. England's, not America's.”

“One expert told me it was lost during the Blitz. Another said the Reformation. All everyone seems to agree on is that it's lost.”

“We can settle it with some bloody quick research.” He laid rubber to the huge table, lifted a volume bound in green fabric off a stack, and spread it open on his handlebars. He spent a few minutes turning the brittle pages by their edges. He stopped and studied. The print was tiny, laid out in dense narrow columns four to a page, but he read without bifocals and without using a finger. Finally he boomed the book shut, returned it to the stack, and swung back my way. “My source, a primary one, says the complete folio was known to be in the possession of Charles the First when he met the headsman. It resurfaced late in Cromwell's reign, minus the Virgin. The question remains whether the Roundheads found something in that section to offend them and destroyed it or a Royalist spirited it away to prevent that from happening. Perhaps your expert confused the Restoration with the Reformation. So many high-sounding names for such lowlife acts. Nothing changes except the terminology.”

“What would you say if I told you I saw the first page of the Hours of the Virgin three days ago?”

He didn't fall off the scooter. I don't know if I wanted him to. I didn't even know why I told him, except that sword was getting heavy and it was either swing it or forget it. What he did was smile. His teeth were white and even; they had probably been fashioned for him after his original set was kicked down his throat in Little Rock.

“A leech who moonlights in the false antiquities trade. Your tastes are more expensive than I thought. And just where did you happen to stumble upon this El Dorado?”

“The last place you'd expect. The Detroit Institute of Arts.”

“Indeed. I'm a patron member. I missed it on the last list of acquisitions.”

“It didn't get that far. When I saw it, it came out of a briefcase in a storeroom at the DIA. The briefcase belonged to a man named Harold Boyette.”

“Ah,” he said.

13

The air recycler whirred through the little silence.

“‘Ah' means what?” I asked.

“It means that the very same embarrassing details that the DIA directors would withhold from me as a patron are common gossip in the tiny village of private collectors. I'm aware of the reason for Mr. Boyette's dismissal.”

“What reason is that?”

“He was in league with forgers to defraud the museum; but you know that as well as I. You claim to be a detective.”

“I just wanted to make sure the reason you heard was the same one I did. A lot of stories keep changing. Someone ought to write them down. Do you think the Hours is a fake?”

“It seems likely on several levels. How closely did you examine the manuscript?”

“I saw one page. What I don't know about fifteenth-century illuminata would fill—what's the name of a big empty space on Grosse Ile?”

“There isn't one.”

“You get the idea. The page had a crab louse stuck in the ink. It looked convincing, but that might have been the intention. Boyette said the manuscript was stolen from his office, only he hasn't had an office at the DIA for more than six months. The thief sent him the first page, he said, and demanded a hundred grand for the return of the rest. I went with him to the drop to hold his hand. I made a mistake and let go. He's gone and so is the money. If there was money. All I saw was a big envelope.”

“I suppose the page disappeared with him?”

“It's a theory. Anyway no one's seen it.”

He sat back with his hands on his knees. “Are you always this incompetent?”

“This time I had help. That's what I want to see your wife about.”

“My wife has been away for a week.”

“Does she own a silver fox coat?”

“Yes, but she wouldn't have taken it with her to Louisiana.”

“Could we take a look in her closet?”

“We will not.”

I moved a shoulder. “I'll wait and ask her.”

“Just who are you working for?”

“I told you. Harold Boyette.”

“But he's missing.”

“That's why I'm still working for him. He hired me to help him get back the Hours. I haven't done that, and he hasn't been around to tell me I'm fired. There's also the matter of a ten percent finder's fee on a hundred thousand.”

“Now the fog lifts,” he said. “Is ten thousand dollars a lot of money to you?”

“It's a lot of money to ninety percent of the population, Mr. Strangeways. I'm an unsuccessful man in a business that went out when Silicone Valley came in. If I get back the Hours I get to stay in business for another year, but only if I get Boyette back too. The manuscript was removed from England illegally. The British government won't pay me for returning something that shouldn't have been taken in the first place.”

“There are private collectors who would pay more than ten thousand for it. You'd be surprised how many distinguished men and women don't care a jot about rightful ownership when it comes to something they want.”

“Does that include you?”

“I'm not a distinguished man. I did not steal the Hours. If I did I certainly wouldn't offer to sell it back for a piddling hundred thousand.”

“But you didn't sell it back. The thief didn't sell it back. It's still out there, if it hasn't been destroyed.”

He rested his hands on the handlebars. “If the manuscript is genuine, chances are it's survived. That psalter on the easel nearest you dates back to the tenth century. It predates the invention of cheap self-oxiding ink and acid-content paper by nearly a thousand years. Barring fire or deliberate destruction, it will still exist in a state close to the original a century after all the reference books in which it appears have returned to corruption. Modern books are doomed at birth, their every line impregnated with the spores of its own death. Figure in a regard for venerable things that increases in direct proportion to their irrelevance, and you see before you the nearest thing there is to immortality. Something that was never alive can never die.”

“You mentioned deliberate destruction.”

“That would require the determination of a Henry the Eighth. We don't get many of those. Look at the detail work on that psalter, five hundred years before the technique reached perfection in the Plymouth Book of Hours. A hand that would cut the throat of an infant without quivering would be struck lifeless before the blade touched one leaf. Human life is worthless compared to that dead animal skin.” He bit off the last three words.

“I thought you liked books.”

“They happen to interest me at this point in my passage. When I was very much younger, I was interested in women, all women. That fixation didn't last, but it was strong enough to make me realize, when I was in a position to do something about it, that a very nice living could be made from those who still suffered from it. Being a crusader for the rights of a free press interested me right up until the moment I heard my spine snap. That's a sound you never forget.” He smacked the side of the scooter. “This is my charger now, but I no longer ride to the sound of the guns, won't even be induced to sign a check for the cause. Life interests me, obviously, or I would have ended mine when they told me I would never walk again or even go to the bloody loo without help. The minute something ceases to hold my attention, I dispose of it.”

That opened up several avenues of conversation. I was still choosing among them when a bell rang.

“That will be Mrs. Strangeways,” he said. “I expected a call before this.”

He executed a neat turn and lifted the receiver off a mahogany-colored telephone mounted on the molding between two sets of bookshelves four feet from the floor. “Laurel? Oh, hello, Jillian.” He listened. “What about her luggage? I see. Did you call the airport in Baton Rouge? They didn't? No, you might as well come back here. There's nothing more you can do there.”

He replaced the receiver, left his hand on it for a moment, then turned back. The scooter's electric motor whined softly.

“She wasn't on the plane?” I asked.

“No. But her bags were.”

14

“How sure are you she was in Louisiana to begin with?” I asked.

The question didn't take at first and he started to ask me to repeat it. Then he decided to get mad.

“If you're suggesting something, put it into words. I'll need the excuse to have Ben and Vernon take you out and throw you down the hill.”

“Two nights ago a woman sat down next to me in the Tomcat Theater and let me light her cigarette. Let's call her Laurel Strangeways, just in case there isn't a pack of women who look like her running around with eyes of two colors. Then someone sitting behind me tried to light my head with a bullet. When I got up from the floor I was a detective without a client.”

“Laurel wouldn't know what to do with a cigarette if you stuck one in her mouth.”

“I doubt that. You don't have to prove you smoke before they sell you a pack. Say it was a coincidence. Say she decided to take up the habit, or had been indulging all along on the sly. She just dropped in to make sure the projectionist in a theater owned by her husband wasn't sneaking a Disney film in between
Leather Love
and
The Silence of the Mams
, and that she happened to pick on me as a likely candidate for a match just as the axe fell. When it did she got smart like everyone else in the joint and took the air. Now swallow all that and explain why she was in town when you and your lawyer thought she was down south burning shrimp.”

“It wasn't she.”

“There's a quick way to prove me a liar. Check and see if her fur coat is hanging in her closet.”

He thought about that. Then he turned back to the telephone on the wall, took down the handset, and pushed a button.

“Is that Ben?” he asked. “Ben, do me a favor and go to Mrs. Strangeways' room and bring me her silver fox coat. I'm in the library.” He hung up. “I'll expect an apology before I throw you out.”

I said nothing. While we were waiting I took a walk and read the titles on some of the ancient spines under glass. I only learned how much I didn't know about old books.

The welterweight came in, making no noise at all on the tiles. He'd shed his coat and cap. He combed his graying hair forward over his creeping forehead and wore a navy turtleneck under a blue twill uniform shirt without patches or other insignia. His hands were empty.

“The coat isn't there, Mr. Strangeways.”

“You checked her closet?”

“The coat isn't there.”

“Very well. Thank you, Ben.”

The guard left. He hadn't looked at me once.

“That doesn't mean anything,” Strangeways said. “I didn't see her when she left the house. She might have worn it on the way to the airport. It certainly doesn't prove she was in the Tomcat the other night.”