“Whew. It’s a tough issue in that particular collection. Much of what came in was without designation.”
Bea turned to us to explain. “Bruce means a lot of the photographs and foreign-language volumes were-what’s a polite word?-pilfered by explorers during their travels.”
“Sort of like the Elgin Marbles?” Mike asked.
“You got it,” Bea said to him. “Bruce, do you know the donors of the three Egyptian sets?”
“The prize of the three was a Lenox endowment. An absolutely pristine set of books, in a contemporary French speckled calf, board edges with gilt roll tool. Exquisite.”
“Under lock and key now?”
“Yes, it is. I know you’re interested in whether any of them are Hunt acquisitions,” Bruce said, “but I simply don’t know.”
“Any of them submitted to the conservators for repair?” I asked.
“Possibly, but not on my watch. They were actually shelved in the stacks.”
Mike heard the word “stacks” and stood up, signaling to one of the cops. “This gentleman’s going to take you downstairs to look for something. Stay with him.”
“I wouldn’t have access, Detective.”
“Why not?”
“In each department, there are cages-metal cages,” Bruce said. “Sort of wire mesh, where the rare books are locked.”
“Who’s got the keys?” Mike asked.
Bea answered. “We each have control of our own section. The front office has all the masters.”
Mercer walked to the door. “I’ll take them to Jill Gibson and make sure she gives up the key. You keep at it with Bea.”
“What’s next?” Mike asked her.
“Jill will know,” one of the men said.
“Forget Jill.” Bea was on a tear.
The older woman spoke. “We’ve got the Elizabethan translation by John Frampton in the Berg Collection. It was an Astor gift,” she said. “Not the Hunts’.”
“I know,” Bea said. “I’ve got a version with large folding maps, but it came to us recently out of Lord Wardington’s collection.”
I recognized Wardington’s name. He had been a mentor to Alger Herrick.
“There must be half a dozen of those spread around,” another man said.
“You.” Mike pointed at him as he spoke. “Take two cops and scout them out. Any copies you find come right back to this room before anyone cracks the cover, okay?”
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
