The Book of Illumination (10 page)

“Henry!” I said sharply.

He did it again, this time aiming at the mound of earth with all the watery power he could squeeze. Mud leapt from the pile onto both girls as Nell screamed, “Don’t!”

I grabbed the hose from Henry, getting soaked in the process.

“What did I just say?”

“It was on!”

“Girls,” I heard Kelly call from the top of the stairs. “Everything okay?”

Kelly offered to put on coffee, but I’d already had too much. She was dressed in cropped yoga pants and a T-shirt and looked as though she was just waiting for Dec to get back so she could go for her run. The kitchen had a Saturday morning feel—the dishwasher was humming, emitting little clouds of steam, and in the air hung the commingled scents of bacon and toast. Crumbs and spots of jelly—grape, it looked like—dotted the tablecloth, and Kelly was folding a load of lights. I watched as she absentmindedly smoothed Declan’s boxers into tidy rectangles.

“How are you?” she asked. If she resents or feels sorry for me, she manages not to show it.

“Oh, fine. Thanks again for last weekend. He had a great time.”

Kelly smiled. “It’s so easy up there. They spent the whole weekend making a fort.”

“They did?”

“We could barely get them in at night. They had every flashlight in the house. It was quite the production.”

I smiled. Henry’s lucky to be part of an extended family with eight or nine kids under twelve. That’s not something I could give him. My oldest brother, Joe, is gay, we think, though he has never actually made an announcement. I suppose that doesn’t preclude children, at some point, but he and Alan have been living in Portland for three years and they both really like it out there. If and when Joe ever becomes a father—and I hope he does—it will probably happen in the Northwest. My other brother, Jay, lives in Chicago. He and his wife, Louise, who’s on the partner track at her law firm, just got a puppy. We’ll see how that goes.

We heard a couple of toots; Declan was back. Down in the driveway, the truck door slammed and a lively conversation ensued.

“You’re really sure about next weekend?” Kelly asked. “Because my mom’s more than happy to—”

“Absolutely!” I said, interrupting. “We can’t wait.” Some people would find it strange that Kelly and Dec would leave the girls with me, the other woman, while they go off to celebrate their anniversary. But the children are used to spending weekends together, and Henry never gets to have Nell and Delia overnight at our house.

Because he’s a little older, and a boy, they’re intensely curious about all aspects of his life: Max and Ellie; Homer, the St. Bernard a few doors down, famous for spectacular feats of flatulence; the fact that Henry’s allowed to play in the attic, where there is a real sword; the strange foods they sometimes find in our fridge—artichoke hearts and mozzarella floating in brine. Henry’s flattered enough by their adoration to overlook the fact that they are girls. As for me, I look forward to being the selfs acrificing one for a change, making it possible for Kelly to spend a romantic weekend at a seaside B and B in Maine with the man whose heart she clearly won—not once, but twice.

“Sorry about the mud,” I said as Declan appeared on the stairs.

He just shrugged. The barber had cut his hair a little too short, revealing borders of pale skin at the hairline. He looked kind of goofy. Actually, he looked like his son. I smiled.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. Kelly glanced over, her gaze landing on the flat, rectangular doughnut box in his hand. “You forgot my muffin,” she said glumly.

Declan produced a bag from under the box and held it up. Kelly smiled.

“Thank you,” she said, and, promising to be in touch with me about the weekend arrangements, she was out the door.

“Want some coffee?” Declan asked.

“No, thanks.”

“Doughnut?” He opened the box, which, unfortunately, contained my favorite: cream-filled with chocolate frosting. But there was only one.

“Whose is this?” I asked, pointing.

“Yours,” he said, filling the coffeepot with water. “So am I making a full pot here, or a half?”

“Full, I guess.”

He poured the water into the coffeemaker and filled a paper cone with the fine, dark powder.

“I talked to a couple of the guys,” he said, pushing the On button.

I took a paper napkin from the wrought-iron holder and laid my doughnut on top of it. “Yeah?” I so wanted a bite, but I was going to discipline myself and wait for the coffee, like a mature human being.

“I might have something.”

“
Really?
That was quick.”

He sat down opposite me and shrugged a funny shrug, a gesture that said,
Hey, I’m good
.

“We’re, uh …we’re workingwith a fellow,” he said.

“What kind of
fellow?”

He gave me a look.

“The kind I shouldn’t ask any questions about?”

“Right you are. Lad’s been in and out of Cedar Junction for years. Real slick operator. Been at the art game, one way or another, all his life. Probably knows where the Gardner pieces are, or knows somebody who knows. Anyway, a month or two back, we caught him in a sting—bloody fool; he’d only been out of jail a few weeks. But I suppose he was broke.” Declan paused, obviously trying to figure out how little he could tell me. “For a certain … sum, he was able to procure a painting for one of our lads.”

“Procure, as in
steal
?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No, but he works with the guys that do. The painting was from a home out in Weston, real high-profile case, so he’s in a fairly tight spot right now. He’s looking at serious time, unless he—”

“Cooperates?”

Declan got up, took two mugs out of the cabinet, and placed one in front of me. He shook a pint of half-and-half and, determining that it was almost empty, located another in the back of the refrigerator. He poured my coffee and casually slipped a plate under my doughnut.

“He’ll lend a hand. No choice, poor sod.”

“That’s really great,” I said. “Thanks.”

Declan nodded and had a sip of his coffee, black, the way he always takes it. I poured half-and-half into mine, swished it around, and had a sip.

“We had some luck, too,” I said.

“
Luck?”
He grinned. “Your opinion is that I was just lucky?”

I ignored him. “The woman across the hall ran into a guy on Sylvia’s landing. He was just coming out of her place.”

“No kidding.”

“We got a description and everything.”

Declan grabbed a pen from the table behind him and the sports section of the
Globe
from a chair. He jotted down the physical particulars I described, penning his notes on a full-page ad the
Globe
had taken out for itself in its own paper. He promised to pay a visit to Carlotta that afternoon, then sat back and sighed.

“Well done,” he said.

“Don’t act so surprised.”

At last, I took a bite of my doughnut. It was heavenly. The volume of cream was generous to the point of obscenity, and only one thing would have made my pleasure more complete: not to
have Declan watching me eat it. Which might be the only time in my life I have ever thought,
God, I wish he wasn’t here
.

I wiped my mouth. “Are you just going to watch me eat this?”

“I thought I might.” He was deadpan.

“Aren’t you having one?”

“I’m watching my figure.”

“I see.”

From the volume of the hooting and squealing outside, where the kids were no doubt wreaking muddy havoc with the hose, I judged that my time alone with Declan would soon be ending. The wet, dirty, joyful hysteria we were overhearing couldn’t go on much longer without dissolving into a crisis of tears and bitter recriminations.

The morning sun had thrown a wide swath of rainbow against the far wall. I glanced around, trying to locate a prism or a crystal that would have split the light that way, creating this glimpse of such fleeting and singular beauty, but I couldn’t. I pointed it out to Declan, and he smiled.

Two hours later, I was sitting across from Sylvia at a cozy upstairs table in Café Algiers in Harvard Square. I had called to tell her of Declan’s progress as soon as I got home, and she answered immediately, as though she had been sitting by the phone. She’d finally been able to make contact with Sam. As we’d suspected, he’d been invited by all his British colleagues and friends at Harvard to join in the weekend’s festivities. He couldn’t get out of attending a morning lecture on the plays of Denis Johnston, several of whose original typescripts were among Lady Barnes’s gifts to Houghton Library, but he could meet Sylvia for lunch. She asked if I wanted to come. Given that my afternoon would otherwise have involved laundry, utility bills, and an hour or two
with fairly ineffectual “green” cleaning products, I was happy to say yes.

I haven’t lived in Cambridge long enough to miss the “old” Harvard Square, but I’ve heard my share of melancholy rhapsodies about the lost lunch counters and cafeterias, the dark little taverns and folk clubs and quirky bookstores and curio shops that are lodged in the memories of generations of Harvard students. Little of that place remains. At street level now are the locked and empty lobbies of banks and cell phone companies, spilling their harsh fluorescent lighting brightly onto the evening sidewalks and offering passersby all the charm of operating rooms. Creepy, gazeless mannequins haunt the windows of trendy clothing boutiques. Urgent new merchants riding one wave or another surf grandly into town and back out just as quickly, which is probably of cold comfort to the shopkeepers their landlords displaced, genteel old eccentrics who tended their businesses like petunias.

Café Algiers—like Casablanca, the Brattle Theatre, and Club Passim—has been around for a long time. It was a little too chilly to sit on the patio, so we chose a table on the second floor, tucked in under the steeply sloping wooden ceiling. I ordered a beer and perused the menu, which was studded with tantalizing North African pastes and tagines. We decided to get some hummus with cucumbers to tide us over until Sam arrived.

“What’s this guy’s name?” Sylvia asked, squeezing lemon into her iced tea. “This … crook?”

I shrugged, scooping hummus onto a cucumber slice.

“Does Declan think he did it? How does he know?”

I shook my head. My mouth was full. I was used to the murky ways in which Declan and his fellow detectives went about their jobs, whispering quietly to friends and felons, dangling favors and pardons, prosecutions and plea bargains, but I could see that it was going to take some explaining.

“They caught him in a sting,” I finally managed to say. “He delivered a stolen painting to an undercover cop. But he couldn’t have taken your manuscript himself because he’s still in custody.”

Sylvia looked befuddled.

“They’ve got him on conspiracy, possession of stolen property, and trafficking. He’s facing jail time, but if he’s willing to work with the police on this—and probably on some other things—they might be able to—”

“Get him off?” she asked, her eyes widening.

“No, not totally. Maybe get the charges reduced, or arrange for a plea.”

She sat back in her chair and took a deep breath. “What makes them think he knows anything?”

I sipped my beer, and it was very strange. I’d been intrigued by the description, but the beer itself reminded me of the Christmas pomanders we used to make in Brownies, by sticking dozens of pin-sharp cloves into an unsuspecting orange.

“They know he’s really connected. They’re pretty sure he’s behind a whole string of robberies from college museums all over New England. They even think he knows where the Gardner paintings are, or knows somebody who knows.”

“
Really?”
she said.

I nodded. Visiting Boston’s Gardner Museum, formerly the home of art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, is like stepping into a cool, Venetian palace. The air is heavy with floral fragrance from a glorious indoor courtyard.

In 1980, security guards let two Boston policemen into the museum in the middle of the night. The cops said they were responding to an alarm that indicated a fire in one of the upper galleries. Once inside, their true identities were revealed: they weren’t cops; they were art thieves. They tied up the security guys and made off with $300 million worth of uninsured paintings
and drawings, works by artists like Rembrandt, Degas, and Manet. Not one of the stolen pieces has ever been found and nobody’s ever been caught.