a bother, but… He was told someone would check it out immediately.
He hung up. Even if security didn't find the guy, still he thought the appearance of several security personnel, all clearly looking for someone, would either delay his pursuer, or perhaps discourage him completely, and he'd wait outside, to pick Benjamin up when he exited the library.
But he had another plan to deal with that eventuality.
Benjamin left the office and walked down the hall to the preservation storage area. There was indeed someone on duty inside, an employee named Larry that Benjamin knew slightly.
'Benjamin!' Larry greeted him-a little too loudly for his comfort. 'Back from that think tank already?'
'Sort of,' Benjamin hedged. 'They needed me to check on something in the storage room, see if it's still here.'
'And they sent you all the way down here to do that? Why not just call?'
'Hey,' Benjamin shrugged, 'it's their dime, right?'
Larry laughed, patted him on the back. 'Yeah, wish it was my dime, ya know?'
He unlocked the room, switched on the dull blue lights overhead.
'You know the drill,' Larry said. 'Knock when you're done.'
Benjamin nodded, thanked him, and Larry closed and locked the door from the outside.
And it suddenly occurred to Benjamin: if they had wanted to trap him here, they'd just done it.
The room was essentially a large warren of shelves, the shelves composed of bins, and the bins labeled according to subject, date, and, in some cases, donor. Benjamin thought back: the bin he'd been working on when he'd encountered the diary had contained case history files from some of New England's more infamous asylums for the insane from the Colonial and nineteenth-century millennial period.
But first he went to a small podium set near the door, opened a cabinet, and took out a pair of latex gloves from a box that was always kept there. Many of the documents in this room-where the humidity and temperature were carefully controlled-were sensitive to even the small amounts of acid in human sweat.
Walking carefully past the bins, he tracked down the section devoted to medical records, and then worked backward to the period 1750-1820. Set very far back in the room, almost hidden in the cul-de-sac formed by three shelves, he found the original crate he'd been examining all those months before: documents donated by the American Medical Association. And then, right next to it, just as he remembered, was a smaller crate, with the name MORRIS, S.-1968 written by hand on a small index card and taped to the crate.
Benjamin pulled the crate very carefully forward on the shelf. He peered over the edge into the dim interior. He realized he'd been holding his breath for some minutes. The blue-tinted lights barely illuminated the contents. Regular lighting was too yellow for sensitive paper, and fluorescents were out of the question.
He pulled the crate a little farther forward-and suddenly its weight shifted, and the crate came tumbling toward him off of the shelf. He fell to the floor but managed to stop the crate from hitting his body. He stopped, listening, worried that the sound would bring Larry to see if everything was okay. But after a moment he realized the sound hadn't been nearly as loud as he feared.
He gently set the crate on the floor. He reached in, toward a large clear plastic container, one of the hermetically sealed bags used to contain specimens prior to restoration. There was no identifying information, which was unusual. Inside the bag was what appeared to be shapeless brown wrapping of some kind. Leather-so old it was almost as stiff as cardboard.
He lifted the bundle carefully out of the crate. Very carefully he unsealed the bag and extracted the bundle, then folded back the flaps of the leather.
Inside he could see the first page of a book, yellowed with age and discolored with mildew. In the middle of the page were perhaps a dozen handwritten lines… or once had been. Now, the lines were unreadable: faded, smeared, disintegrated. All that remained was a single line of text.
R 6:12-HPB
Just as he'd remembered.
He carried the bundle to a small table nearby, switched on the specially filtered reading lamp, and set it down.
Pulling back the leather wrapping as carefully as possible, he could now see that, while the book had a hard cover of black leather on the back, there was no matching front cover. Examining the spine, he could just make out evidence of a very clean cut. Someone had neatly removed the front cover and first page.
They'd been willing to multilate such a treasure, but not destroy it? Strange priorities, Benjamin thought.
He lifted the book and examined the top edge. He could see that many of the pages were practically melted together with age. To open it at the wrong place would be to tear these pages, or perhaps rip them out of the binding. He would have to be very careful, indeed.
Very slowly, he lifted the first page of the book.
Benjamin's hands were trembling.
He lifted them, watched until the trembling stopped. Then he rose, went back to the podium in the front of the room, and reopened the cabinet. Inside was a large yellow legal pad and several pens. He took the pad and one of the pens and returned to the table.
He sat down and, checking the edge of the page, made sure it was one that could be turned without damage. It was. He turned the page and began to read.
Almost immediately he began making notes on the legal pad. When he was done, again he examined the page's edge, but this one was clearly sealed to the next one. He simply couldn't risk trying to separate them, and he discovered he had to turn to several pages farther on.
Working this way, reading a page or two, then forced to skip several that were inseparable, he continued to make notes. He filled one of the legal pad pages, then another.
And another.
CHAPTER 30
Benjamin sat across from Anton, the small oval coffee table in his second-floor study between them. Spread across the table were a dozen yellow sheets from the large legal pad, covered with notes in Benjamin's tidy, squarish printing-so similar, he realized, to his father's.
Benjamin sat slumped against the back of the overstuffed couch. Ever since he'd returned to Anton's from the library, he'd felt the desperate urge to simply collapse and fall asleep. But his mind was far too excited by what he'd discovered to allow him to do that. And, if he was to attend the reception that evening at the Russian Cultural Center, he needed, somehow, to stay awake.
So he was drinking yet another cup of coffee-or rather glass of coffee. Anton had handed him the tall, flat- bottomed glass set on a saucer, warning him it was 'black as the Devil's heart.' Benjamin could see a sludge of grounds in the bottom, but he'd tried it anyway, discovered he liked it. First strong scotch, now strong black coffee… What other risky tastes remain undiscovered? he wondered.
As far as his 'tail' at the library, feeling rather proud of himself, Benjamin had explained to Anton how he'd ditched him. Exiting the library when he was finished with the diary, he'd gone straight to the tunnel that ran from the basement of the Jefferson Building, under Second Street, to the James Madison Memorial Building. The tunnel was only accessible to library staff, and he'd known his shadow would never gain entry without identification; probably didn't even know of its existence. Once outside the Madison building, he'd immediately caught a cab to Anton's row house in Georgetown.
'Anyway, it's all there,' Benjamin said, waving toward the yellow pages. 'That is, everything I could get from the undamaged pages of the diary. But I don't know how you're going to enter it into Dr. Fletcher's program.'
Besides the coffee, Anton had brought Benjamin some cheese and bread, but Benjamin hadn't touched any of it. He was simply too tired, and too energized, simultaneously, to even think about food.
