“Yes, sir, I—”
“Instead I come on my own. As men of letters, I think it more appropriate that our relationship be based on trust and respect. I am a professor of literature at Leipzig, and I hope to return to that after the war. I cherish the library, this library, any library. Libraries are the font of civilization, do you not agree?”
“I do.”
“Therefore, one of my goals is to protect the integrity of the library. You must know that first of all.”
“I am pleased.”
“Then let us proceed. I represent a very high science office of the Third Reich. This office has an interest in certain kinds of rare books. I have been assigned by its commanding officer to assemble a catalog of such volumes in the great libraries of Europe. I expect you to help me.”
“What kinds of books?”
“Ah, this is delicate. I expect discretion on your part.”
“Of course.”
“This office has an interest in volumes that deal with erotic connections between human beings. Our interest is not limited to those merely between male and female but extends to other combinations as well. The names de Sade and Ovid have been mentioned. There are more, I am sure. There is also artistic representation. The ancients were more forthright in their descriptions of such activities. Perhaps you have photos of paintings, sculptures, friezes?”
“Sir, this is a respectable—”
“It is not a matter of respect. It is a matter of science, which must go where it leads. We are undertaking a study of human sexuality, and it must be done forthrightly, professionally, and quickly. We are interested in harnessing the power of eugenics and seek to find ways to improve the fertility of our finest minds. Clearly the answer lies in sexual behaviors. Thus we must fearlessly master such matters as we chart our way to the future. We must ensure the future.”
“But we have no salacious materials.”
“And do you believe, knowing of the Germans’ attributes of thoroughness, fairness, calm and deliberate examination, that a single assurance alone would suffice?”
“I invite you to—”
“Exactly. This is what I expect. An hour, certainly no more, undisturbed in your rare book vault. I will wear white gloves if you prefer. I must be free to make a precise search and assure my commander that either you do not have such materials, as you claim, or you do, and these are the ones you have. Do you understand?”
“I confess a first edition of Sade’s Justine, dated 1791, is among our treasures.”
“Are the books arranged by year?”
“They are.”
“Then that is where I shall begin.”
“Please, you can’t—”
“Nothing will be disturbed, only examined. When I am finished, have a document prepared for me in which I testify to other German officers that you have cooperated to the maximum degree. I will sign it, and believe me, it will save you much trouble in the future.”
“That would be very kind, sir.”
At last he and the Reverend MacBurney were alone. I have come a long way to meet you, you Scots bastard, he thought. Let’s see what secrets I can tease out of you.
MacBurney was signified by a manuscript on foolscap, beribboned in a decaying folder upon which The Path to Jesus had been scrawled in an ornate hand. It had been easy to find, in a drawer marked 1789; he had delicately moved it to the tabletop, where, opened, it yielded its treasure, page after page in the round hand of the man of God himself, laden with swoops and curls of faded brown ink. In the fashion of the eighteenth century, he had made each letter a construction of grace and agility, each line a part of the composition, by turning the feather quill to get the fat or the thin, these arranged in an artistic cascade. His punctuation was precise, deft, studied, just this much twist and pressure for a comma, that much for a (more plentiful) semicolon. It was if the penmanship itself communicated the glory of his love for God. All the nouns were capitalized, and the S’s and the F’s were so close it would take an expert to tell which was which; superscript showed up everywhere, as the man tried to shrink his burden of labor; frequently the word “the” appeared as “ye,” as the penultimate letter often stood in for th in that era. It seemed the words on the page wore powdered periwigs and silk stockings and buckled, heeled shoes as they danced and pirouetted across the page.
Yet there was a creepy quality to it, too. Splats or droplets marked the creamy luster of the page— some of wine perhaps, some of tea, some of whatever else one might have at the board in the eighteenth century. Some of the lines were crooked, and the page itself felt off-kilter, as though a taint of madness had attended, or perhaps drunkenness, for in his dotage old MacBurney was no teetotaler, it was said.
More psychotic still were the drawings. As the librarian had noticed in his published account of the volume in Treasures of the Cambridge Library, the reverend occasionally yielded to artistic impulse. No, they weren’t vulvas or naked boys or fornicators in pushed-up petticoats or farmers too in love with their cows. MacBurney’s lusts weren’t so visible or so nakedly expressed. But the fellow was a doodler after Jesus. He could not compel himself to be still, and so each page wore a garland of crosses scattered across its bottom, a Milky Way of holiness setting off the page number, or in the margins, and at the top silhouetted crucifixions, sketches of angels, clumsy reiterations of God’s hand touching Adam’s as the great Italian had captured upon that ceiling in Rome. Sometimes the devil himself appeared, horned and ambivalent, just a few angry lines not so much depicting as suggesting Lucifer’s cunning and malice. It seemed the reverend was in anguish as he tried desperately to finish this last devotion to the Lord.
Basil got to work quickly. Here of all places was no place to tarry. He untaped the Riga Minox from his left shin, checked that the overhead light seemed adequate. He didn’t need flash, as Technical Branch had come up with extremely fast 21.5 mm film, but it was at the same time completely necessary to hold still. The lens had been prefocused for 15 cm, so Basil did not need to play with it or any other knobs, buttons, controls. He took on faith that he had been given the best equipment in the world with which to do the job.
He had seven pages to photograph—2, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, and 15—for the codebreaker had assured him that those would be the pages on which the index words would have to be located, based on the intercepted code.
In fact, Sade’s Justine proved very helpful, along with a first edition of Voltaire’s Pensées and an extra-illustrated edition of Le Decameron de Jean Boccace, published in five volumes in Paris in 1757, Ah, the uses of literature! Stacked, they gave him a brace against which he could sustain the long fuselage of the Minox. Beneath it he displayed the page. Click, wind, click again, on to the next one. It took so little time. It was too sodding easy. He thought he might find an SS firing squad just waiting for him, enjoying the little trick they’d played on him.
But when he replaced all the documents in their proper spots, retaped the camera to his leg, and emerged close to an hour later, there was no firing squad, just the nervous Marque, le directeur, waiting with the tremulous smile of the recently violated.
“I am finished, monsieur le directeur. Please examine, make certain all is appropriate to the condition it was in when I first entered an hour ago. Nothing missing, nothing misfiled, nothing where it should not be. I will not take offense.”
The director entered the vault and emerged in a few minutes.