"All right-Jake. I have have to study this ma.n.u.script. Would it be possible for us to take it back to your place?" to study this ma.n.u.script. Would it be possible for us to take it back to your place?"

My first instinct as a lawyer was, of course, to refuse. Lawyers famously have free access to money and valuables belonging to others, and the first step on the slippery slope is handling these with anything but the most rigid propriety. Carry a ma.n.u.script out of the office for the perusal of a putative heiress and pretty soon you're hanging the client's Renoir in the small bedroom and taking the family to Saint Bart's on the decedent's yacht.

Yes, that, but she was looking at me with hope, her cheeks still aflush with the thrill of discovery, and here I thought of Amalie, who never asked me for anything, who expected me to know what she wanted through mystic bonds of affection. At which I inevitably failed. It's nice to be asked. So I said that I supposed that would be all right, since legally they would not be out of my personal possession. I obtained a stiff folder and placed the Bracegirdle material into it. I called Omar, grabbed an umbrella and my briefcase, and after speaking with Ms. Maldonado about various things, I left the office with Miranda beside me. As it happened, I had promised to pick my children up at school and take them home. This was somewhat awkward, but Miranda was after all a client and not radioactively intimate with Daddy, or not yet, anyway. I made the pickup, introduced the kids, and it was a perfectly pleasant ride. Imogen was unusually charming and wanted to know if Miranda spoke French, being Canadian, and was told she (embarra.s.singly) had no talent for languages at all, and Niko entertained us all by making knots in a piece of rope, many many knots, all carefully explained as to provenance and use and topological features. I was delighted that Miranda was kind to the boy-many people are not, including me-and thought it presaged well for our future.

After dropping them off, we continued south (slowly, because of the gloom and the increasing rain), and during this ride, after the obligatory compliments about the kids, Miranda was uncharacteristically chatty about the wonders of Bracegirdle's screed. I should recall this conversation but I do not and don't feel up to fabricating it, as I have the others above. It's nearly three and I will need to get some sleep shortly. In any case, we arrived. Omar departed.

But no sooner had his taillights vanished around the corner than we heard the high whine of spinning tires against wet paving and a large black SUV, a Denali, came barreling around the Greenwich Street corner, skidded to a halt in front of us, and disgorged three men. These men were all wearing hooded sweats.h.i.+rts and leather gloves, and they all three came rapidly toward us in a menacing manner. One of them made a grab for Miranda and I stabbed him in the face (quite ineffectively I'm afraid) with the ferrule of my umbrella. This was wrenched from my hand by the larger of the other two men while his companion slipped behind and grabbed my arms. The big fellow moved in to deliver a disabling blow to my midsection; probably he was planning a few others to make up for the umbrella-stabbing.

I am not much of a fighter, but I have spent a good deal of my free time in saloons, and there is a certain species of feisty little guy who, when loaded, cannot resist picking a fight with a big guy, especially when they look somewhat out of shape and un-Schwarzeneggerish, as I do. So I was not as unused as most men in my profession are to physical violence. There are not that many heavyweight lifters around, and these people simply had no idea what I was.

First I flexed my arms and broke the grip of the man behind me and in the next instant I had squatted down and spun on my heel, so that I faced the thighs of my erstwhile captor. I grabbed both his legs around the knees. My hands are immense and very, very strong. I felt the big man on whom I had just turned my back starting to clutch at my neck, but now I stood up again, raising both arms above my head. The man I had grabbed only weighed about 180, so he went up quite easily. I took a step away, pivoted again, and hit the big man on the head with his friend. A human body makes a very inefficient club, but as a demonstration of strength and as a way to demoralize one's opponents, especially the club person, it is hard to top. The big fellow staggered back, slipped on the wet pavement, and went down on his b.u.t.t. I whipped my club around my head a couple of times and flung him out into the street.

Regrettably, in order to perform these feats I had to drop my briefcase, and the man who had grabbed Miranda threw her roughly against the side of my building, s.n.a.t.c.hed up the briefcase, shouted something to the others in a foreign tongue, and made for the Denali. The others picked themselves up from the ground and also fled, screaming imprecations. The vehicle screeched away too quickly for me to get the plate numbers. I went to see if Miranda was all right, which she was, although her wrist was strained and bruised where the thug had held her and her hand and knee were sc.r.a.ped.

She impatiently dismissed my concern over her injuries and asked, "Did they get your briefcase?"

"I'm afraid they did and I hated to lose it. I've had it since I pa.s.sed the bar."

"But the ma.n.u.script ma.n.u.script...," she wailed.

"The ma.n.u.script is perfectly safe," I a.s.sured her. "It was in the lining pocket of my raincoat." I was about to tell her that I always carry items of particular value on my person, since the day when, still in law school, I had left my old briefcase on the Boston subway and in it the only copy of a Con law paper representing several hundred hours of tedious work, but instead she seized my face and kissed me on the mouth.

THE B BRACEGIRDLE L LETTER (7) (7).

Now on a daye some weekes after oure coming Mr Keane was killed by a great balle: one moment I spake him & the next there stoode he without a head & fell. And where was I then? The gonnes were let to another maistre who hadde his owne people & so stoode I in Sluys with scarce a dodkin in purse & no Dutch in my mouth neither: but one day wandering idel by the harbour there I spied the Groene Draek & went on it & spake to Captain & sayde I can serve gonnes as well as anie man & he said well I know lad but say thee, knowest thou my trade? For he spake good Englishe & I saying no sir he sayde I am a pirate & a smuckler, a word I knew not & he opened the meaninge as: one who defraudeth His Majesty of duties, tonnage poundage &c. Soe will you serve my gonnes in that trade he asketh, it be bloudie & cruel, but we earne gold. And I sayde yes sir being verie hungrie & I said to myself privilie well it is but papistes we kill. And I wished verey earnest to have gold.

Wee sayled out from Sluys & othere portes of Hollande a scourge to the Spanish s.h.i.+pping from the German Sea to Biscays Bay & took many a vessel & slew many Spanish & some French & also ran in to England by night & landed cargoes of silks, spices, wines & spirites under the noses of the coste guardes. Meantimes whilst wee layde in port I made perfect my fancie of a distance-quadrant, having a man in Rotterdam fas.h.i.+oun one out of bra.s.se, the lines cut in with aqua fortis upon the quadrantes with thereto a little mirroir so one could see through bouth sightes at one glance. With this set upon a raile wee then laded all oure gonnes with such quant.i.tie of poudre as would carry shotte a certayne distance, I will saye eight hundred yards. Thus ready I peer into my device set with the angle before-figured to that distance on the moveable arm & peering down the sight I wait until the target appears in both mirroir & plain sight & there you have your range exact & give the order to fyre & all balles striking home all at once without warning or casteing shottes they are surprized & overcome & we board & take them easie.

Soe two yeares on the seas & I have 80 sovereigns in gold that I left with a Jewe of Sluys to keep. For the crew spent all in drink & wh.o.r.es but not I. In the Yeare Nine as all knoweth a truce wase signed between the King of Spain & the Dutch & the Stadthouder orders no more robbyng of Spainish s.h.i.+ppes. But Van Brille says wee are not ordered to stoppe smuckling as that is no affayre of the Stadthouder d-mn his eyes. So we continued in this wise but I was uneasey & one daye I went to my Jewe & he writes me a bill of paper saying that what Jewe soever I should shew it to from Portugale to Muscovy will give me suche a sum in gold. Wee went over to England one night & whilst wee were ash.o.r.e a-trading oure stores with certayne men of Plymouth I walked off into the darke & was done with smuckling or so I thought.

In Plymouth some daies pa.s.sed at the Anchor Inn thinking upon what I should do when comes a man seekyng mariners & others for the voyage of the Admiral Sir Geo. Somers to Virginia in the New World & I thought me this be a sign what I should do & I says to hym I am a gonner afloat or dry & can take the starres in sight by crosse-staff or back-staffe to tell lat.i.tudes & can make survey if required. & he says canst walk upon water too or need you a boat, & all there a.s.sembled laughed: but he bade me come with him to see Mr Tolliver the master of the flag-s.h.i.+p Sea Adventure. He greetes me kindly & askes I show him my mettel: soe I doe & he being well-satisfied I can doe all I profess with pa.s.synge skille I sign as maistre gonner 1s 4d diem.

We sayled on second June the Yeare Nine. After the Groene Draeck I find the s.h.i.+p like almost the palace of some lord so s.p.a.cious was it & well-appointed & the food far better, no Dutch cheese & fish & hock wine but goode beer & English beefe: soe I wase well contente. I fell in friendlie with Mr Tolliver & learned from him more of the art of the compa.s.s & use of the back-staffe & how to figure longitude from the starres, a thyng most difficult to doe well. He was a most strange man his lyke I had never met before this, for he did not credit G.o.ds grace & thought there wase not a farthing to chuse between the papist superst.i.tioun & the reformed faith: for he believed G.o.d had made the worlde & then left it to be what it might, like a wyfe setting cakes out to cool & cared not for us creatures a whit. Wee would argue such matteres on the night watch til dawn brake: but it booted little for wee never did agree as he would not accept the authoritie of Scripture at all. Wast thou there he sayde when it was took down? Nay? Then how know you it is G.o.ds word & not wrote by some foole such as yoursen? He had no feare of h.e.l.l-fyre neither, sayde he had never seen a devil nor an angel nor had hee ever met one fellow (saveing a few mad) who ever had. He thought church could doe no harme for the moste of mankynde & went glad enough o' Sunday but cared not what was the service or the sermon: if the Kinges grace should saye wors.h.i.+pe a mere stone or else the Pope he wold be content to doe it. It was all one to hym: & I was amazed at this for how could all the world think these thynges the most grave of all thynges & hym not: & hym yet a goode, kynde man with all his wittes?

8.

Crosetti's mother, Mary Margaret Crosetti (Mary Peg as she was universally known), possessed a number of personal characteristics useful for both a high-end research librarian and a mother, including a prodigious memory, a love of truth, a painstaking attention to detail, and an industrial-strength bulls.h.i.+t detector. Thus, while she tried to give her son the privacy suitable to the adult he was, the ordinary business of life in a smallish Queens bungalow produced enough mother-son interactions to give her a good idea of his interior state of being at any particular moment. Ten days ago this state had been extraordinarily fine. Al tended to the dour, but she recalled that for a day or so he sang in the shower and glowed from within. He's in love, she thought, with the mingling of joy and trepidation that this perception raises in most parents, and then, shortly thereafter, came the crash. He's been dumped, she concluded, and also that it was an unusually quick end to what had appeared to be an unusually intense joy.

"I'm worried about him," she said on the telephone to her eldest daughter. "This is not like Albert."

"He's always getting dumped on, Ma," said Janet Keene, who besides being her mother's chief coconspirator was a psychiatrist. "He's a nice guy with no smarts about women. It'll pa.s.s."

"You're not here, Janet. He's moving like a zombie. He comes home from work like he spent the day in the salt mines. He doesn't eat, he goes to bed at eight-thirty-it's not natural."

"Well, I could see him...," Janet began.

"What, as a patient patient?"

"No, Ma, that's not allowed, but if you want a second opinion."

"Look, darling, I know when my children are crazy and when not, and he's not crazy-I mean not crazy crazy crazy. What I'm going to do is this Sat.u.r.day I'll make a nice breakfast, I'll sit him down, and I'll get it out of him. What do you think?" crazy. What I'm going to do is this Sat.u.r.day I'll make a nice breakfast, I'll sit him down, and I'll get it out of him. What do you think?"

Janet, who in her wildest professional fantasies could hardly imagine having her mother's ability to make people spill their guts, produced some noncommittal affirmative remarks. Affirmative remarks were what were required when Mary Peg called to ask for advice, and Janet did her duty. She thought the main thing her baby brother needed was a girl, a decent job, and to vacate his mother's roof, in ascending order of importance, but she declined to pursue that line of argument. She and her two sisters had bailed out at the earliest opportunity: not that they didn't dearly love their mother, but she cast a good deal of very dense shade. Poor Allie!

Mary Peg always felt better after soliciting professional advice from Janet and was pleased that this accorded so well with her own instincts. She was one of seven children of a subway motorman and, unusually for one of her cla.s.s and culture, had succ.u.mbed to the lure of the '60s and gone the whole countercultural route-rock band groupie, communard in California, a little drugging, some casual s.e.x-and then the semishame-faced resumption of real life in the form of a B.A. from City College and an M.S. in library science. Her own parents had known nothing of the wilder part of this history, for she was not one of the many of that time who were naughty to get back at the folks; naughtiness for its own sake had been quite sufficient. But she had always felt a bracing Catholic guilt at deceiving them and had resolved, when she came to have children of her own, that intergenerational deception was not going to be part of the deal. She occasionally thought that this was why she had married a cop.

As planned, she presented the nice breakfast, her son shuffled up to the table, sipped some fresh orange juice, took a few forkfuls of French toast, and announced that thanks but he wasn't really very hungry, at which point Mary Peg banged a teaspoon against a gla.s.s in a good imitation of a fire alarm. He jerked and stared.

"Okay, spill it, Buster!" she said, fixing him with her eyes, these being the color of gas flame and, just now, about as hot.

"What?"

"What, he says. You've been doing a scene from The Night of the Living Dead The Night of the Living Dead for nearly two weeks. You didn't think I noticed? You're a wreck." for nearly two weeks. You didn't think I noticed? You're a wreck."

"It's nothing, Ma...."

"It's something. It's that girl, what's-her-name, Carol."

"Carolyn." Followed by a great sigh.

"Her. Now, you know I never pry into the personal lives of my children..."

"Ha."

"Don't be fresh, Albert!" And in a milder tone, "Seriously, I'm starting to worry about you. You've broken up with girls before but you never acted all weird like this."

"It's not a breakup, Ma. It's not...I don't know what it is. That's the problem. I mean basically we had one date, very nice, but then she...I guess she sort of vanished."

Mary Peg sipped coffee and waited, and in a few minutes the whole confused story came out, the convoluted tale of Rolly, and the ma.n.u.script, and Bulstrode. Her husband had described any number of interrogations to her, for he was not among the majority of police detectives who thought their spouses too tender to listen to cop stories; nor was she. This was how it was done, she knew, a sympathetic ear, an encouraging word. She was disturbed to learn that her son had abetted what an unsympathetic person might regard as a felony, nor did she like anything of what she heard about Ms. Rolly. But she declined comment; and now her son arrived at the period subsequent to their first date: he had not of course filled in the moister details, but she had the experience and imagination to provide these herself.

"Well, like I said, we had a nice time and I was feeling pretty good. I went to work the next day expecting to find her in the shop, but she wasn't there. I asked Glaser and he said she'd called and said she had to go out of town for a couple of days. I thought that was a little peculiar, I mean I thought we had something going, that she would've called me me, but like I said, she was a strange bird. So I was, you know, cool about it. Anyway, the day comes when she's supposed to come back and no Carolyn. Mr. Glaser calls her-the phone's disconnected, so now we're a little freaked and I told him I'd go by after work and see what was up. And when I got to her street there was a big dump truck parked outside and a wrecking crew was all over her building. They were just finis.h.i.+ng up for the day, but I could see they had set up one of those chutes that wreckers use to slide debris and stuff down to the Dumpster and it was stuck in her window on the top floor. I talked to the crew chief and he didn't know anything. He'd gotten a call from the building management that they needed a rush job, the building had to be gutted down to the brick sh.e.l.l and made ready for renovation. I got the name of the management company from him but he wouldn't let me go into the building. Like I told you, Carolyn had built all this furniture out of pallet boards, beautiful work, and there it was, all smashed up, her worktable and everything. It was like seeing her corpse."

Crosetti seemed to s.h.i.+ver. He pushed French toast around with his fork.

"In any case, I couldn't do anything there, and I was, like, totally stunned. I started to walk away and I noticed that the street and the sidewalk were strewn with sc.r.a.ps of paper. It was a windy day and I guess some of the lighter stuff had blown off the truck, or the wind had picked it up between the chute and the pile of trash in the truck. So like an idiot I went down the street bent over picking up stuff, thinking to myself, Oh, she'll want this, this photograph, this postcard, whatever; stupid really, because she would've taken whatever she wanted."

He took out his wallet and showed her a folded postcard, a folded photograph.

"Pathetic, right? Carrying this stuff around? It's like magical thinking, if I hold on to something of hers, there's still a connection, she hasn't totally vanished...." He placed the items back in his wallet and looked so forlorn that Mary Peg had to control an atavistic urge to take him on her lap and kiss his brow. Instead she said, "What about these famous volumes? You think she took those?"

"I hope so. I didn't see them. For all I know they were at the bottom of the truck. That'd be ironic, like the gold dust in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre The Treasure of the Sierra Madre."

That last made Mary Peg feel a little better; if he was making movie references, he couldn't be that far gone. She said, "You called the building manager, of course."

"Of course. I even went up to their offices. Able Real Estate Management, up near Borough Hall in Brooklyn. A receptionist who knew zip and a boss who was never in. When I finally got him on the phone, he said he didn't know any Carolyn Rolly, and that the top floor had never been rented out as a residence, that it wasn't certified for human occupancy in any case, which was why they were gutting the building. I asked him who owned the building and he said that was confidential. A consortium, he said. Then I called Professor Bulstrode, and the departmental secretary said he'd left for England the previous day and they weren't sure when he'd be back. Visiting professors were more or less free to go where they pleased when they had no cla.s.ses to meet and he didn't. It was the summer. She wouldn't give me his number in Oxford."

He gave her a look so bleak that it zapped a little shock of pain through her heart. "I don't know what to do, Ma. I think something happened to her. And somehow I think it's my fault."

"Well, that's just nonsense. The only thing you did wrong was to go along with this scheme of hers. Look, I know you were fond of this girl, but why isn't it likely that she simply absconded with her ill-gotten gains?"

"Ill-gotten gains? Ma, it's not like she knocked over a liquor store. She was a bookbinder. She was fixing a beautiful set of books that their owner had given up for sc.r.a.p. Glaser wouldn't suffer a penny of loss-he only wanted the money he would've gotten from the sale of the prints...."

"Which he didn't get, don't forget."

"Hey I'm not making excuses, but if she was a crook, she was a certain kind of crook. There was stuff she wouldn't do, and bugging out like this and not giving Glaser what he had coming were in that zone. I mean, she was in the middle of a project that she really wanted to do, and...you didn't see her place, but she'd created this whole little world in this crummy loft in Red Hook, I mean she'd built it with her own hands, it was her work s.p.a.ce, and work was all she had. She never would've just ditched it."

"I don't know, darling: she seems like a very unpredictable young woman and almost...can I say 'unstable'? I mean according to her she's been horribly abused. And you said she was some kind of fugitive-maybe that caught up with her? You're shaking your head."

"No, and I'm not sure about the fugitive part either. I did a ma.s.sive search on the Internet. You'd think an incident like a guy named Lloyd keeping a girl named Carolyn Rolly locked up for ten years as a s.e.x toy would have generated some hits, but I came up blank. I called the Kansas City Star Kansas City Star and the and the Topeka Capital-Journal Topeka Capital-Journal and the and the Wichita Eagle Wichita Eagle a couple of other Kansas papers, and got zilch: n.o.body had ever heard of the case. Okay, she could've changed her name but still...so I called Patty." a couple of other Kansas papers, and got zilch: n.o.body had ever heard of the case. Okay, she could've changed her name but still...so I called Patty."

Mary Peg noted that her son's face showed a tinge of embarra.s.sment at this admission, as well it should have, she thought. Patrica Crosetti Dolan, the second eldest girl, had followed her dad into the New York City Police Department and risen to detective third grade. Members of the NYPD are not supposed to do little investigative tasks for their families, but many do anyway; Mary Peg had occasionally availed herself of her daughter's connections in this way while doing research, had taken substantial flak off her son on the subject as a result, and now ha-ha!

She refrained from gloating, however, satisfying herself with a simple but freighted "Oh?"

"Yeah, I asked her to do a records check, whether she was a fugitive or not."

"And..."

"She didn't show up, not as Carolyn Rolly anyway."

"You mean she lied? About the uncle and about being a fugitive?"

"I guess. What else could it be? And that's what sort of knocked the stuffing out of me. Because...I mean I really liked this woman. It was chemical; you know, you and Dad always talked about the first time you saw each other when you were working behind the desk at the Rego Park Library and he used to come in for books. You just knew knew? It was like that."

"Yeah, but, honey, that was mutual. I didn't pack my bags and split after the first date."

"I thought it was mutual too. I thought this was going to be it. And if it wasn't, I mean if it was all something I cooked up in my head, then, well, where am I? I must be crazy."

"Please, you are not any kind of maniac, take my word for it. I would be the first one to tell you if you were going off the rails. As I would expect you to do for me when senile dementia rears its ugly head." She clapped her hands briskly, as if to demonstrate how very far off lay that event, and said, "Meanwhile, what are we going to do about this?"

"We?"

"Of course. Now, clearly, everything revolves around this Professor Bulstrode. What do we know about him?"

"Ma, what're you talking about? What does Bulstrode have to do with Carolyn disappearing? He bought the papers, he split. End of story. Although I did run a search on him and he's sort of a black sheep." Here Crosetti explained about the famous quarto fraud, which, as it happens, she recalled.

"Oh, that that guy," she exclaimed. "Well, the plot thickens, doesn't it? Now, the very first thing we have to do is get f.a.n.n.y in on this, just like you should've done originally." He stared at her blankly and she went on. "Albert, you don't imagine that Bulstrode gave you the real translation of that thing! Of course he lied. You said your gut was telling you that you were getting rooked, and you wouldn't have sold it to him if that woman hadn't turned on the waterworks and told you those whoppers. They were in it together." guy," she exclaimed. "Well, the plot thickens, doesn't it? Now, the very first thing we have to do is get f.a.n.n.y in on this, just like you should've done originally." He stared at her blankly and she went on. "Albert, you don't imagine that Bulstrode gave you the real translation of that thing! Of course he lied. You said your gut was telling you that you were getting rooked, and you wouldn't have sold it to him if that woman hadn't turned on the waterworks and told you those whoppers. They were in it together."

"That's impossible, Ma...."

"It's the only explanation. She played you like a fish. I'm sorry, honey, but the fact is, we sometimes fall in love with unsuitable people, which is why Cupid carries a bow and arrows and not a clipboard with a stack of personality tests. I certainly did when I was a kid, and not just once."

"For example," said Crosetti with interest. His mother's supposedly wild past was a subject of fascination to all her children, but one she only mentioned in the form of admonitory hints like this one. Her answer when questioned was invariably, as now, "That's for me to know and you to find out." She added, "In any case, my boy, I'll call f.a.n.n.y right now and set it up. You can see her after work on Monday."

Against which Crosetti had no compelling argument. Thus at six that day he presented himself with the papers in their mailing tube at the ma.n.u.script department of the New York Public Library. He found f.a.n.n.y Doubrowicz at her desk. She was a tiny woman, less than five feet tall, with a pleasantly ugly pug face and bright mahogany eyes, deep sunk behind thick round spectacles; her coa.r.s.e gray hair was drawn back in a librarian's bun, stuck with the canonical yellow pencil. She had come over as an orphan from Poland after the war and had been a librarian for over fifty years, most of them at the NYPL, specializing in ma.n.u.scripts for the last twenty or so. Crosetti had known Aunt f.a.n.n.y for his whole life and considered her the wisest person within his circle of aquaintance, although when complimented upon her encyclopedic brain, she always laughed and said, "Darling [or dolling dolling], I know nothing [nozhing] but I know where to find find everything." When he was a child he and his sisters had tried to think of facts that would be impossible for Aunt f.a.n.n.y to discover (how many bottles of c.o.ke got sold in Ashtabula in 1928?), but she always defeated them and provided remarkable stories of how the information had been obtained. everything." When he was a child he and his sisters had tried to think of facts that would be impossible for Aunt f.a.n.n.y to discover (how many bottles of c.o.ke got sold in Ashtabula in 1928?), but she always defeated them and provided remarkable stories of how the information had been obtained.

So: greetings, questions about his sisters, his mother, himself (although Crosetti was sure she had been elaborately briefed on this by Mary Peg), and swiftly to business. He drew the pages out of the tube and handed over the roll. She carried them to a broad worktable and spread the sheets out in three long parallel rows, the copies of what he had sold Bulstrode and the retained originals.

When she had them spread out she uttered some startled words in what he supposed was Polish. "Albert, these eighteen sheets...they are originals originals?"

"Yeah, they're what looks like enciphered letters. I didn't sell them to Bulstrode."

"And you are rolling them up like calendars? Shame on you!" She walked off and came back with clear plastic doc.u.ment envelopes, into which she carefully placed the enciphered sheets.

"Now," she said. "Let us see what we have here."

Doubrowicz looked at the copies for a long time, examining each sheet with a large rectangular magnifying gla.s.s. At last she said, "Interesting. You know there are three separate doc.u.ments in all. These copies are of two different ones and these originals."

"Yeah, I figured that part out. Those four sheets are obviously the printer's copy of some sermons and I'm not interested in them. All the rest is the letter from this guy Bracegirdle."

"Umm, and you sold this letter to Bulstrode, your mother said."

"Yeah. And I'm sorry, f.a.n.n.y, I should have come straight to you."

"Yes, you should have. Your dear mother thinks you were cheated."

"I know."

She patted his arm. "Well, we shall see. Show me the part where you thought he mentioned Shakespeare."

Crosetti did so, and the little librarian adjusted a goosenecked lamp to cast an intense beam at the bright paper and peered at it through her lens. "Yes, this seems a clear enough secretary hand," she remarked. "I have certainly had to deal with worse." She read the pa.s.sage aloud slowly, like a dim third-grader, and when she reached the end exclaimed, "Dear G.o.d!"

"s.h.i.+t!" cried Crosetti and pounded his fist into his thigh hard enough to sting.

"Indeed," said Doubrowicz, "you have been well cogged and coney-catched, as our friend here would have said. How much did he pay you?"

"Thirty-five hundred."

"Oh, dear me. What a shame!"

"I could have got a lot more, right?"

"Oh, yes. If you had come to me and we had established the authenticity of the doc.u.ment beyond any reasonable doubt-and for a doc.u.ment of this nature and importance, that in itself would have been a considerable task-then there's no telling what it would have fetched at auction. We would probably not be in it, since it's a little out of our line, but the Folger and the Huntington would have been in full cry. More than that, to someone like Bulstrode, having possession, exclusive exclusive possession, of something like this-why, it's a career in itself. No wonder he cheated you! He must have seen immediately that this thing would place him back in the center of Shakespeare studies. No one would ever mention that unfortunate fake again. It would be like an explosion opening up an entirely fresh field of scholars.h.i.+p. People have been arguing for years about Shakespeare's religion and his political stance and here we find an official of the English government suspecting him not only of papistry but papistry of a potentially treasonous nature. Then you have a whole set of research lines to explore: this Bracegirdle fellow, his history, who he knew, where he traveled, and the history of the man he worked for, this Lord D. Perhaps there are files in some old muniment room that no one has ever explored. And since we know that Shakespeare was never actually prosecuted, we would want to know why not, was he protected by someone even more powerful than Lord D.? And on and on. Then we have a collection of enciphered letters apparently describing a spy's observation of William Shakespeare, an actual detailed contemporary record of the man's activities-an unimaginable treasure in itself, a.s.suming they can be deciphered, and believe me, cryptographers will be fighting with sticks to get hold of them. But at least we have possession, of something like this-why, it's a career in itself. No wonder he cheated you! He must have seen immediately that this thing would place him back in the center of Shakespeare studies. No one would ever mention that unfortunate fake again. It would be like an explosion opening up an entirely fresh field of scholars.h.i.+p. People have been arguing for years about Shakespeare's religion and his political stance and here we find an official of the English government suspecting him not only of papistry but papistry of a potentially treasonous nature. Then you have a whole set of research lines to explore: this Bracegirdle fellow, his history, who he knew, where he traveled, and the history of the man he worked for, this Lord D. Perhaps there are files in some old muniment room that no one has ever explored. And since we know that Shakespeare was never actually prosecuted, we would want to know why not, was he protected by someone even more powerful than Lord D.? And on and on. Then we have a collection of enciphered letters apparently describing a spy's observation of William Shakespeare, an actual detailed contemporary record of the man's activities-an unimaginable treasure in itself, a.s.suming they can be deciphered, and believe me, cryptographers will be fighting with sticks to get hold of them. But at least we have these these in original." in original."

Doubrowicz leaned back in her chair and stared up at the coffered ceiling, fanned herself dramatically with her hand, and laughed her sharp little bark. It was a gesture familiar to Crosetti from his childhood, when the children had brought what they imagined was an utterly insolvable puzzle. "But, my dear Albert, all that, enticing as it is, is mere trivia compared to the real prize."

Crosetti felt his throat dry up. "You mean that an autograph ma.n.u.script might still exist."