Lethal Legacy (31 page)

“Why’s that?”

Krauss wound the screw on the side of the
helicopter and launched it, watching it crash to the carpet beside him. “I
guess he doesn’t like my style.”

“How about Talbot Hunt?” I asked. “How well do you
know him?”

“Only in the boardroom.”

“Get along?”

“I wouldn’t turn my back on Tally for very long,”
Krauss said. “We have different ideas about the direction the library should be
going. Nothing deadly, I wouldn’t think.”

“Didn’t he have any interest in Forbes’s idea?
After all, the map was supposed to have been his grandfather’s purchase.”

“I don’t think Eddy Forbes and Talbot Hunt are on
the same page either. Would have surprised me if they were even before all of
Forbes’s legal troubles. Besides, Talbot’s sister, Minerva, wanted a piece of
the action. I’m sure once she was in, her brother wouldn’t have been a likely
partner. There’s bad blood between those two.”

“But you know Minerva?”

“We’ve met a handful of times. Eddy introduced us.
She was willing to put up some of the seed money. She’d done that for Forbes
before. I guess she was the one who told him the story of the missing map. He
had access to most of the inner circle then. Minerva got all psyched up when
the Library of Congress bought the only original that was thought to exist,
because she remembered hearing stories about the second one—her
grandfather’s—when she was a kid.”

“So what was in this for you?” Mike asked.

Krauss leaned over and picked up his little toy.
“Like I said. I put up a couple of million dollars. A few partners kicked in.
We find this sucker? Forbes told me it would sell for maybe twenty million
today.”

“Sell…to the library, you mean?” I asked.

“Not likely. We’d get a much bigger bang from a
private collector. That’s what Eddy Forbes did. He helped these map nuts build
their collections. The whole time, he was probably stealing from one of them to
feed the others.”

“Maybe it’s naïve of me,” I said, “but I just
assumed that as a member of the board, your loyalty would be to the library.”

Krauss launched the whirlybird again and this time
it circled his desk and came to a gentle landing on the table beside me. “You
know why I get in trouble at the library? ’Cause I happen to think the place
should be all about books. Screw the maps, screw the art. That’s why so many of
those guys have no use for me.”

“But the maps—” I started to say, thinking of
Alger Herrick’s description of their beauty and importance.

“So your cousin Sally marries a dentist from St.
Louis and moves out there, Ms. Cooper. You stroll up Madison Avenue to some
overpriced gallery looking for a wedding present and you buy a map of the city
as it looked in 1898, framed and all. Three hundred bucks. Probably sliced out
of an atlas in a library—maybe even by the master thief himself, Mr. Forbes,”
Krauss said, standing up and walking to a bookshelf behind his desk. “Or your
buddy builds himself a ranch in Montana—Jewish investment banker cowboys—we’re
resettling Montana and Wyoming like they were the promised land. Some shyster
will sell you a hand-colored print of whatever prairie town you want, at
whatever your price point. It’s not great art, it’s not even a book you can
hold and read and reread. What’s the point?”

“Did you inherit your collection?” Mercer asked.

“I didn’t inherit squat, Detective. My father sold
used cars in Merrick, Long Island.”

“How did you get into this…this…”

“Addiction. That’s what it is. The first time I
ever bought a book—I mean an old book, something I didn’t have to read for
school or to get me through a long plane ride—I was in Paris, walking around
those little shops on the Left Bank after dinner one night. It was my first
time there, I was flush with my first Wall Street bonus and some serious
Bordeaux, and I stopped to look at the titles. I needed something for the
flight home. I saw
Gatsby
and picked it up. I’d always loved the story
when I was in college, figuring out how I could get me a piece of the American
dream. You should have heard the proprietor scream when I pulled that copy off
the shelf.”

“Why?” Mike asked.

“F. Scott Fitzgerald.
The Great Gatsby.
I’m
not talking about the paperback you read in high school,” Krauss said, moving
his hand along the bookshelf and lifting out a small volume, running his hand
lovingly over the dust jacket, protected in its mylar sleeve. “This is the
first edition. Modern firsts, that’s how I started. Have you ever seen a more
perfect image? It’s totally iconic.”

Jonah Krauss handed me the book. The jacket was
cobalt blue, and the features of a woman’s face looked down on an amusement
park version of New York City at night.

I turned it over and noted the faint spots on the
rear cover and the slightly faded lettering on the spine.

“Open it.”

“That’s okay?”

“Open it,” he said again.

I lifted the cover and read.
Ernest—I think
this book is about the best American novel ever written. Scott Fitz. 1925.

“See what I mean?” Krauss took the book back and
turned the pages. “Fitzgerald handled this himself. You touch these things, you
imagine who held them before you did, you smell them and breathe in the print,
the history, the romance. Guess what I paid?”

I had a few modern firsts, but nothing like this.
“I can’t.”

“Fifteen years ago, thirty-five thousand bucks. My
entire bonus and then some, gone in a flash,” Krauss said, snapping his
fingers.

“I’ll be lucky if my pension’s that good,” Mike
said under his breath.

“Stopped the Frenchman in his tracks when I told
him to wrap it up for me. At auction today, it would draw double. After that I
had to have everything Fitzgerald I could find. Hemingway next. Dos Passos.
Wolfe. It’s totally addictive.”

“You obviously moved on to older collectibles,
too,” I said, scoping the room.

“I had to teach myself about them. See, the great
private libraries have been amassing rare books for centuries.” Krauss crossed
the room, pausing in front of the Bloomberg, then continued on to shelves
stocked with leather-bound books of all sizes. “I didn’t know Keats from Yeats,
Samuel Johnson from Samuel Pepys. But I’m a quick study.”

He stopped in front of a shelf on which an open
book rested in a cradle, two matching volumes standing beside it. He picked
them up and offered them to Mike and me to admire. Each was bound in black
leather, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. “Beautiful, huh?”

The silver writing, embellished with an intricate
floral design, announced that we were looking at Charlotte Brontë’s
Jane
Eyre.
“Three volumes, 1847. The library has a set of its own, without the
inlay. It’s even got the writing desk Brontë used when she traveled.”

His excitement seemed quite genuine, and he
clearly wanted us to appreciate the collection.

“Do you have any atlases?” Mike asked. I figured
he was testing Krauss about his interest in maps.

“Not my thing,” Jonah Krauss said, as he saw Mercer
reach for a book that was displayed on a shelf at the far end of the room.
“Whoa, you don’t want to pick that one up, Detective. Some of the pages are
loose.”

“Sorry,” Mercer said, replacing the large book on
its stand and repeating the title on the spine. “It looks like the court record
of an old English trial. The 1828 proceedings against the murderer Aaron
Keyes.”

Krauss looked nervous. He stepped in front of
Mercer and rested his fingers on the open page. “It’s, uh…different.”

“Different how?” Mercer asked.

“It’s…it’s an anthropodermic binding, Mr. Wallace.
Extremely rare. Most unusual to find.”

“Anthropodermic?” Mike asked. “Help me out, Coop.
Means what?”

“Don’t know.”

“The binding is made from human skin,” Jonah
Krauss said, folding his arms and speaking quietly. “That inquest record is
bound in the skin of the murderer, Detective.”

Mike lowered his head. “It doesn’t get much
creepier than that.”

“Aaron Keyes raped and killed a young girl in the
English countryside. He was sentenced to be hung, and after that his skin was
tanned and used to make this binding.”

“Human skin?” Mike asked. “You’re not joking?”

“Not at all, Detective. Most libraries don’t want
books like these, of course—although Harvard has a few—but many private
collectors do. It’s a very specialized market, human skin. Not for everyone’s
taste.”

Krauss turned away from the book and went back to
his desk. His lips parted and the whitener on his teeth reappeared. “Lighten
up, guys. It’s from the murderer, not the dead girl.”

Mike Chapman wasn’t amused. “Like you said, Mr.
Krauss. Your library is your portrait.”

TWENTY-FIVE

“That’s frigging sick,” Mike said, when Krauss
stepped out of the room to give Britney a new ETA for his pilots.

“Doesn’t make him a killer,” Mercer said.

“Sorry,” Krauss said when he returned. “What else
can I do to be useful?”

“Let’s go back to your last conversation with Tina
Barr, when she asked you about the consortium looking for the map,” Mike said.

“I didn’t have anything more to say,” Krauss said,
packing some folders into a soft leather briefcase. “I told her it was a bust,
okay? I thought maybe she was getting mixed up with the wrong people. I
cautioned her to be careful.”

“Careful of the wrong people? Alger Herrick?
Minerva Hunt, or her father? That’s who Tina was working for most recently.”

“When she asked me the question, I was actually
worried that Eddy Forbes had gotten to her. He’s a very seductive guy.”

“You think he went after Tina as a romantic
interest?” I asked.

Jonah dismissed me with the back of his hand. “Not
that kind of seductive. He was a genius at scamming the best collectors. Had
his own gallery and a handful of rich clients who trusted his judgment
implicitly. Forbes had the cunning to steer some of these serious collectors to
donate important works to the library, and once the transaction was complete,
he stole from those very treasures.”

“Don’t people bother to ask what the source of a
rare sixteenth-century map is when they go to buy it?”

“A guy like me might
hondel
a bit, Ms.
Cooper. Bargain hard, ask questions, get tough in a negotiation. That’s my
nature. Eddy just has to whisper in the ears of those old buzzards that some
fourth-generation blowhard had gone through the family fortune and had to break
up the jewels. All hush-hush, ’cause every one of these dynasties has had
deadbeat offspring who might come to the same end. Circle the wagons. Building,
inheriting, and disposing of these library pieces has a tremendous element of
secrecy involved.”

“Secrecy?” I asked.

“In the antiquarian business, knowing where the
books are—the atlases, the maps—whose hands they’re in, that knowledge is
power. It’s money. And a great many of these things that have been in families
for generations aren’t even insured. They couldn’t possibly be, at today’s
prices. There are things inventoried in the great private collections of the
world that haven’t been seen for decades, so it’s impossible to know what’s
become of them,” Krauss said, holding his forefinger to his lips. “That’s why I
told Tina Barr to be careful.”

I didn’t like Jonah Krauss, and he could smell
that.

“You want to tell us about yesterday afternoon?
About where you were last night?” Mike asked.

“You guys are serious, right? I don’t believe
this. I ran a meeting in our conference room till six-thirty. Britney can give
you the names of all the attendees. Then my driver picked me up and took me to
the Bronx. Is that a crime?” Krauss reached into his warm-up jacket and pulled
out the thinnest phone I’d ever seen. He pressed an icon and then hit zoom.
“Have a look, Detective. Yankee Stadium with my boys. Right up until the bitter
end.”

“Great seats,” Mike said, passing me the phone.
Krauss had taken snapshots of his two young sons from his box, right over the
dugout.