The Testament of James (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens) (16 page)

Chantal’s fingers rolled across the keyboard, something Matthew, a three-finger typist, had never been able to master. “OK, eight copies. Wow, two to four hundred apiece, so we’re actually at the low end.”

“We try to be. In a dust jacket?”

“Yes, looks like they all have dust jackets. Oh.”

“Yes. That price would be for a jacketed book.”

“So where’s the dust jacket for this one?” Chantal knew the quickest way to cut the value of a book in half was to throw away the dust jacket. In fact, some rare and fragile dust jackets from the ’20s or ’30s could be worth ten, 20 times the price of the jacketless book, if you didn’t get fooled by a modern photocopy. They were always having to explain to sellers that their jacketless books weren’t worth a fraction of what they thought, since they’d been looking up first editions in original jackets.

“Where’d this book come from?” Matthew asked, thinking out loud.

“Bob would already have had a pretty big book in his hand, a quarto like that one. They’re usually on the bottom shelves, ’cause of the weight. And we both saw him moving back in this direction.”

Chantal stood up to join Matthew as he moved toward the back of the front room between the closest rows of bookcases, as Robert had.

“He’s in pain, not much time. He’s looking for a match in size, with a dust jacket. As soon as he spots a group of books the right size he stops here, in the animal section. That book he’ll carry back to the desk, slide under the repair stack where he knows we’ll find it eventually, leave us a note that no one else would be likely to understand. What he wants is to open up a piece of shelf space the right size . . .”

Chantal dropped to one knee, lowering her head sideways to read the titles on the bottom shelf. “But he’d leave the dust jacket. . .”

She reached out, there it was, a book wearing the jacket of
Birds of the World, Volume 3
. Sliding it out, she opened it, gingerly, across her knee.

“Yes?” asked Matthew, still standing, his own shadow partially blocking the light.

“I know this. This is papyrus. This is old. But it looks like Greek.” She handed the book up to him.

“If it’s a later copy, Greek would be. . . . No, look. Only the first page is Greek.”

“I saw the old monk start to write in Greek,” Chantal said.

“You did?”

“I did.”

“The rest is in Hebrew.”

“Is it missing the title page?”

“Little one, Hebrew . . .”

“OK, I’m an idiot; that’s the back. Turn to the front. I mean the other front.”

“Hard to read in this light.”

“Well let’s take it out where you can see, grandpa.”

He set the book carefully on the desk.

“Very old. And it’s a different Hebrew from what I know, which isn’t much. We’re going to have to give Richard a look at this, he’s the guy for your old scroll or codex. But the start is clear enough.” He traced the words with his finger, careful not to actually rub the browned and fragile paper. “‘This is the Testament of Ya’acov, called something-or-other, of the lines of King David and something-or-other Aaron, probably the high priest Aaron, brother of Yeshua Ben-Yosef; known to the Romans . . . I guess that would be . . . as Jesus, who opened the, something, who united us in the sacrament, who was . . . executed? Not sure I know the Hebrew for “crucified,” by . . . Pilate, probably, on Passover, no, make it on the day before Passover in the . . . can’t read the number . . . in the something-or-other year of the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, and . . .’”

“And?”

“‘. . . and survived.’”

Matthew came downstairs to the store at dawn. Marian was already at her desk.

“You’re in early.”

“Do you mind?”

“Of course not.”

“Les isn’t a morning person. He writes almost till dawn. But I was up, so I figured I’d check the net.” She had brewed a hot cup of tea and was eating something repulsive out of a plastic cup — Matthew could never see the point in wasting good fruit by stirring it into a cup of rotting milk product.

“And how’s it going?”

“Buyers in Germany and Barcelona both want a discount on the same book.”

“And are they going to get it?”

“For
The Schillinger System of Musical Composition
, both volumes? I don’t think so. It’s scarce as hen’s teeth over there, and the next thing they’ll whine about is the shipping, although I warned them. We’re already below market, and nobody else seems to have a matching set just now. I told them we’d actually been thinking of raising our price, but I’ll hold it for one more day; it’ll go to the first one who stops whimpering.”

Marian took an admirable delight in responding to excessive whining and wheedling with just this kind of rap across the knuckles. The best online customers thanked you for your detailed descriptions and your careful packing and for remitting any overage on the shipping cost. The “can’t you do any better?” whiners were exactly the ones who wanted to pay with a Third Party check on the Third Bank of Botswana, claimed the book hadn’t been delivered when in fact it was waiting for them at their local post office, and then proceeded to complain that a perfectly good book “reeked of tobacco.”

There was something different about Marian, though. Her hair was down, radiating around her shoulders, catching the gold of the sunrise from the leaded glass window behind her. She wore an embroidered linen peasant blouse which actually gave the impression she had full, well-rounded breasts. There was color in her cheeks and when she laughed it was a hearty, full-throated sound, not her previous bird-like twitter.

“You look radiant this morning, by the way.”

“Oh. Thank you,” she smiled.

Chantal had come tripping light-hearted down the stairs by the time Matthew had recovered their treasure from the bigger safe and wrapped it for travel. My, everyone was in high spirits this morning. The fitful wind had died down to few half-hearted puffs as Matthew and Chantal set out to go see Richard. A brooding humidity descended and the sky was a strange bronze color, darker at the horizon — not your typical brisk spring weather, at all.

The next-door neighbor ran a charter boat. He was out loading his battered van. What was unusual was to see him around this late in the morning, at all; he usually clattered out well before dawn.

“Captain Jack, not going out for blues today?” Matthew asked.

“I wouldn’t want to be on a lee shore today, my friend. No, the fish’ll still be there next week. Though it’s tautog we’re after, now, too early for blues. You’ll never make a fisherman, Matthew.”

“I’m afraid you’re right.”

Robinson Hall, at Waterman and Prospect, sat squarely at the northwest corner of the Old Campus. Built in 1878, the three-story cruciform red brick building with its local gray granite facings was decorated with a riot of carved stone mountain lions, owls, and other fauna. In the pointy Victorian High Gothic style, with a roof of wrought iron and slate, it was often mistaken for a church. The central rotunda was open overhead, all the way to the stained glass windows and domed octagonal cupola three stories above, with each upper floor offering galleries and balconies that looked down on the spacious central reading room.

The building was supposed to house the departmental libraries after the newer John Hay Library opened in 1910, but the needed renovations proved too costly and instead the old library was re-named Robinson Hall, after the university president on whose watch it had been built, and turned over to the Economics Department. That marriage worked out for a good century, until the Great Meltdown, at which point all the big universities had come under irresistible pressure to purge their discredited Keynesians and Federal Reserve apologists. It was taking time for the nation’s schools of Economics to re-staff with bona fide Rothbardians — there just weren’t enough to go around, prompting bidding wars — as a result of which the convalescing Economics Department had withdrawn to the upper floors, giving up its ground floor space, which was now home to Richard St. Vincent’s Rare Book and Manuscript operation, and with it that redoubtable gatekeeper and Iron Lady, the austere Miss Finisterre.

“Miss Finisterre, how are you?” Matthew and Chantal encountered her as they skirted the main rotunda, heading for the west wing.

“I keep telling them they need to keep this room locked after hours. This machine is not your storefront photocopier, for lost-cat flyers and amateur pornography.”

“Pornography?”

“A large-format digital scanner comparable in quality to the most precise drum version, attached to a proprietary pre-press computer, it’s a piece of fine custom-made engineering which took years to authorize, capable of storing to disc accurate color separations of the oldest manuscripts, custom filtered for infrared or ultraviolet to bring out even latent text invisible to the naked eye, while providing an instant integrated color proof, and they use it to make color images of their buttocks.”

“Their buttocks?”

“Mind you, the American fascination with buttocks and genitalia is a legitimate study in itself, I know a fine young man who’s working on his Masters. But they remove their undergarments and they sit on the machine.”

“That’s … disrespectful,” said Chantal.

“Don’t think I miss the irony in your tone, Miss Stevens, and welcome back, by the way, it’s good to see you. Nor do I fail to grasp the instinct to capture images of oneself while things are still firm and taut, though it’s wasted on the young, as they always say. The point is they’re free riders. Like most young people they don’t consider who foots the bill. This clipboard is here so legitimate users can note the number of copies made, and the department or account to be billed. There’s a handy digital counter. When copies aren’t logged, we have to increase our per copy charge to the departments that sign in properly, requiring them to each pay a weighted share for the use of the freeloaders. Is that fair? An accurate count also helps us properly schedule upkeep and maintenance.”

“But you still have the count, whether they sign in or not … don’t you?”

Miss Finisterre gave the look that was reputed to break glass.

“We were hoping you could tell us if Professor St. Vincent is in,” Matthew said, cheerfully.

“He may be.”

“We wanted to consult him on the age of a text. A text and a binding.”

“Professor St. Vincent specializes in older material, as you know. He takes little notice of new books.”

“Meaning later than 1620.”

“More or less.”

They looked at her, saying nothing.

“Well then.” For the first time, Miss Finisterre looked with interest at the flattened box Matthew carried. “It’s not for nothing that the professor calls himself the Wandering Jew. There are at least three other libraries on campus, as you know. They’re on staggered hours for Spring Break. The Rockefeller is closed entirely today, for example. But with his badge he could still be at any of them.” The badge referred to was a coded plastic card-pass for the college’s electronic locks, not the kind of gold shield carried by police. “Lately there’s been some problem with the 15th century maps at the Hay. Those strange Lovecraft people keep getting in there and moving things around. But before lunch he usually stops back in his office to check for messages. Last door on the left before the rare book room, as ever.”

Richard greeted them warmly, especially when he heard what they’d brought him.

“You’re serious? It turned up? I hope this isn’t going to be another glued-together photocopy that someone baked in the oven till it turned brown.”

“Is that why it smells of pepperoni?”

“Come on, let’s have a look.”

Out of the padded plastic box, about the right size for a pizza delivery, came an old woolen blanket. And out of the blanket came the leather-covered book.

“Ah. Tenth century, says your old friend Rashid?”

“Rashid is missing. But he and Hakim, the brother, are both merchants, middlemen. Part of an extended family that seems to be able to move these materials freely from Egypt through Cyprus to Kurdistan to Kuwait. They’ve come up with some useful finds. Lots of money in it, except when the scrolls turn out to be the inventories of some ancient camel driver.”

“So they can’t actually read them.”

“It’s a professional handicap. I think they trust me because I’ve never lied to them about what they’ve got. The two older brothers speak four or five languages, no Farsi, for some reason, but good English and Italian and French. They’re savvy about value. But they won’t have read a word of it, no. Even if they could read Hebrew, which is doubtful. They’re wrong about the age, aren’t they?”

“Of course. He could be right about the boards, assuming they’re Coptic, not Moslem. They could be 10th century, after the conquest. But we’ve lucked out, here. They didn’t do a full re-bind, they just replaced the original boards with these, attaching the new wood to these tacket stubs with some kind of adhesive, probably vegetable.”

“But the text block is earlier.”

“Much. Papyrus, which makes it Egyptian, almost certainly. We’re lucky these boards are almost off. See, here you can make out the binding. Multiple quires, I make it six, of six sheets each, sewn together through the centerfold holes with a linking stitch. Quite early. Well preserved, blessedly well preserved, though that won’t be true much longer now that it’s been moved to our considerably more humid climate. Ah, the sea air. We should get these pages photographed, then start talking about how to conserve.”

“There are uncertainties about the ownership.”

“Work them out. It’s not going to stand up to much rough handling.”

“How early?”

“We’re taught not to guess, it can make one look silly, which spoils the whole effect.”

“But you don’t have to guess. You know within a century.”

“As you do, I’m sure. So now you’re going to appeal to my better nature, invite me to use my feminine intuition, I presume?” Richard put his palm to the back of his head, struck a glamorous pose.