He grinned at her and was rewarded with a tiny azure spark in her eyes, while her mouth assumed the set of one trying not to smile. “You’re welcome to read a book while you wait,” she said. “I have a good many of them.”
“Alternatively, we could converse. I could tell you all my hopes and dreams and you could tell me yours, and the hours would fly past, and we could get to know each other.”
“Go ahead,” she replied after a brief pause, uninvitingly.
“No, ladies first. You look like you’ve had a lot more interesting life than I have.”
A shocked expression appeared on her face. She gaped, then snorted, then blushed. “Sorry,” she said. “Oh, God! That is so opposite from the case. Why would you imagine that? That I have an interesting life?”
“Oh, this place, for one thing. You live in a warehouse in Red Hook…”
“It’s a loft. Thousands of people in the city live in lofts.”
“No, they live in apartments in loft buildings. And usually they have furniture they bought in stores, not made out of pallets. Are you even legal here?”
“The landlord doesn’t mind.”
“Assuming he knows. Also you’re a bookbinder. Unusual, wouldn’t you say? How did you get into it?”
“And how about your hopes and dreams?”
“And, see? You’re secretive too. There’s nothing more interesting than that. Okay. Here’s the whole deal. I’m twenty-eight and I live with my mom in Queens, Ozone Park. I’m saving money so I can go to film school, which at the rate I put it away will be a month after my fifty-second birthday. I should take out a loan, but I’m scared of getting into debt.”
“How much do you have saved?”
“About three and a half grand.”
“I have more than that.”
“I bet. Glaser probably pays you more than he pays me, you get commissions on sales, you live in Red Hook, and you own two outfits, what you’re wearing now and the one with the collar. What are you saving for?”
“I want to go to Gelsenkirchen in Germany and take an apprenticeship at the Buchbinderei Klein.” When he didn’t react, she added, “Obviously, you’ve never heard of it.”
“Of course I have. Buch-whatever Klein. It’s like the Harvard of the bookbinding world. But I thought you already knew all about it. You have all the gear…” He gestured to the racks of tools laid out on the worktable, the cutting press and plow, whetstones, knives, leather pillows, and paste pots. It all looked very eighteenth century; Crosetti imagined that the Churchill Voyages had been bound with tools quite like these.
“I barely know anything,” she protested.
“Really.”
“I mean compared with what you have to know to make a book from scratch. I can do repairs. It’s like…it’s like the difference between being able to repair a cracked Ming porcelain vase and making one out of clay and glazes.”
“Uh-huh. And while we’re sharing confidences like this, getting cozy and all, why don’t you tell me what you’re going to do with the Churchill when you’ve got it doctored?”
“What? I’m not doctoring them. I’m going to break them.”
Red splotches appeared on her cheeks and her eyes darted-picture: girl caught in lie.
“No,” he said confidently. “If you were going to break them you would have just airfreighted them to Andover and had them vacuum dried. No muss, no fuss. You get them back dry and clean and snip snip. You look surprised. I’m not what you’d call a book guy but I’m not stupid either. So what are you going to do with the doctored books?”
“Sell them,” she said, looking down at the sodden volumes.
“As doctored?”
“No. Everyone knows we own an extremely fine set. There are private clients who like discretion. They have funny money they want to stash in collectibles. Glaser does it all the time. Look, he’s going to declare these a total loss to the insurance company, and show them the invoices for the broken-out items. They’ll come to, I don’t know, not more than twenty-five hundred, and the insurance company will pay him the difference between that and what he paid for the set, figure around twenty thousand dollars.”
“Which is approximately the amount you’re planning to divert to your own pocket when you sell to your shady character. Isn’t there a word for that? Begins with an…?”
“It’s not…it’s nothing like stealing. He told me to break the books. As far as Glaser’s concerned, the set no longer exists. He’s made whole by the insurance company and I’m profiting from my own skill. It’s no different from making things out of pallets that’re being thrown away.”
“Um, no, actually it’s not the same thing at all, but that’s my Jesuit high school education talking. See, you are an interesting person. Devious is interesting. How are you going to produce the invoices for the illustrations, since you’re not really breaking the books?”
She shrugged. “Sidney never bothers with broken items. It depresses him. He calls it vulture food.”
“Not answering the question. But I figure you’re going to sell the set for twenty-two K, give Sidney a couple of grand, let him collect from the insurance, meanwhile phonying up the accounting system with fake invoices. You’re simultaneously screwing the insurance company, Glaser, your shady client, and the tax people. That’s quite a plan.”
“You’re going to rat me out!” Crosetti had heard of blazing eyes but had never actually seen any outside a movie screen until now. Little blue sparks were whizzing around in there.
“No,” he said, smiling. “That would be boring. So…how’re you going to fix the broken covers?”
He saw the relief on her face as she turned away from ethical issues to the moral neutrality of technique.
“Well, I think I can save the leather cover on volume one. The boards are cracked and the spine, but I can strip the leather off of it and replace the boards.”
With that she pulled a thin spatulate tool from a can and started to peel back the marbleized paper that held the leather cover to the boards. She worked carefully, and Crosetti was content to watch her small skillful hands at their task until the kitchen timer she had set previously rang out and he had to change the towels between the drying pages. When he had finished with this, he saw that she had the leather cover loose. Underneath it, between the leather and the cracked pasteboard were damp sheets of paper with closely set lines of handwriting on them. She put these aside and held the leather up to the light from the window, examining it closely.
“What’re these papers?” he asked, idly separating the damp sheets. They were covered with writing in rusty black ink on both sides.
“Just padding. They used wastepaper to plump out the covers, and protect the leather from internal abrasion from the boards.”
“What language is this in?”
“English probably. Just some old wastepaper they used.”
“It doesn’t look like English. I can read English-unless the guy had really terrible handwriting…”
She took the paper from him carefully and peered at it. “That’s funny. It looks like Jacobean secretary hand.”
“Excuse me?”
“I mean I’m not a paleographer, but that hand doesn’t look contemporary with the publication of this book. It looks a lot earlier than 1732. Funny.”
“What, someone hid an old manuscript in the binding?”
“No, of course not. Bookbinders used scrap paper to back boards, any kind of scrap, but you’d expect, oh, contemporary proofs or old handbills, not an antique manuscript.”
“Why would they have done that? I mean an old manuscript would’ve been valuable in its own right, no?”
“Not at all. No one gave a hoot about old paper until much later. Original manuscripts got recycled when they were set in type, pulped, or used to start fires or line baking pans. Only a handful of antiquaries had any idea that preserving artifacts from the past was important, and most people thought they were nut cases. That’s why practically the only handwriting that survives from the early modern period is in legal or financial records. Literary stuff had no value at all.”