He did. She drank. “Okay, look we don’t have time for the long version. Bookbinding-I took the kids to a doctor one day, for shots for school, and while I was waiting in the office…I saw this book. It was part of the decorations, you know? How some people have fancy bookcases with old hardcover books in them? Well, this doctor had one of those and Emmett and Molly were playing with them, taking the books down and using them like blocks and the receptionist told them they had to stop and I replaced them on the shelf and there was one of them that was called The Bookbinder’s Art and I swiped it. It was bound in half-calf with gold tooling. I don’t know why I took it. Maybe it was, it felt so rich, the feel of the leather and the paper, it was so not Braddock, like a piece of a different world that fell there by accident, right there in my hand, like a jewel. And when I got home I hid it and read it at night, every night, for months, and the idea that people could just make books by hand and they would be beautiful things…I don’t know why but it just got under my skin. And then Emily died and he started beating on me and I knew if I didn’t get out I’d be as dead as Emily, either he’d do it or I would, or I’d kill him. So I left. The first time, he caught me and locked me in the cellar and beat me so bad I could hardly walk. The next time I waited for his payday and I took five hundred in cash while he was sleeping and walked away and hitched a ride and ended up in New York and stayed in a shelter. I got a job cleaning buildings at night. I found my loft through that job. It was illegal and toxic, like I told you, but it was dirt cheap because the owner wanted someone on the property so scavenger gangs wouldn’t rip out the copper. That was the first time I heard Shvanov’s name.”
“Why?”
“Because he owned the building, or part of it. Able Real Estate Management. Okay, so I had a place to stay and I was a cleaner for over two years, working nights, spending all my spare time in the library reading about bookbinding and about the book business and learning what I had to know to fake a résumé. Then I quit the cleaners and got a job in a midtown restaurant waiting tables because I needed to look at regular people, see how they dressed, how they talked, the gestures. I converted myself to a middle-class person. That took the better part of another year. And then I got the job with Glaser. My sad story. Now, do you want to hear about the manuscript?”
“I do.”
“I knew Bulstrode from before-I think I told you that in New York. Sidney introduced us, and I took a course he gave on manuscripts at Columbia General Studies. As soon as I saw the pages I took out of the Churchill I knew it was a big find.” She sipped at her drink and looked out the window at the black night. “And you want to know why I lied about owning the carcasses, why I pretended it was nothing much, and why I lied about being a fugitive so that you’d sell the pages to Bulstrode for spare change.”
“I’m all ears.”
“Okay, I’m a bookstore clerk who found a manuscript in what’s supposedly a back I bought for pennies from my employer. I have no resources and it’s going to take significant resources to get the thing authenticated and sold at auction and as soon as I go public with it Sidney is going to come out swinging and-”
“What do you mean, swinging?”
“Oh, I see you don’t know Sidney. He’s going to say that I opened the covers and found this manuscript and then swindled him into selling me the books as backs. So there’s immediately a cloud on the title and no auction house will touch it. Sidney’s a big gun in that world and I’m nobody. So I needed a front man and I thought of Bulstrode. I called him while you were waiting in the street that morning, told him what we’d found, and set up what went down in his office. He said that if it was genuine he’d give me five grand for it over and above what he gave you. So then it was Bulstrode’s manuscript. Even if he’d been fooled once, he’s still a major scholar and paleographer with access to tons of manuscript sources. There wouldn’t ever have to be a connection with me or Glaser.”
“Right, but Carolyn, I still don’t get why you didn’t tell me this off the bat.”
“Oh, for God’s sake-I didn’t know you. You could have mentioned it to Glaser the next day-hey, Carolyn found a priceless Jacobean manuscript in those books you sold her for junk, ha-ha. So I had to pretend to involve you in the scam without at the same time letting you know what the manuscript really was.”
“I see. And what happened afterward, that night-that was part of the scam too?”
For almost the first time that evening she looked him right in the face. Crosetti’s father had once told him that pathological liars always looked the interrogator right in the eye and kept the stare for longer than was natural, and he was happy to see that Carolyn did not do this. Her look was tentative and, he imagined, a little ashamed.
“No,” she said, “that wasn’t part of the plan. I knew you were pissed off at me, and I’d told you that porker about Uncle Lloyd and I thought you’d just walk away, and when you didn’t and you did all those nice things…look, in my whole life I never had a single other day like that, someone taking me places, that beautiful music, and buying me things, just because they cared about me as a person and not just because they wanted to paw me…”
“I did want to paw you.”
“I meant someone I wanted to get pawed by, someone my age, someone sweet. I was never a kid, never a teenager. I never hung out at the drive-in with boys. I mean, it was like drugs.”
“So, you like me?”
“Oh, I adore you,” she said, in a tone so matter-of-fact that it was more convincing than any sighing avowal. His heart actually gave a little thump. “But so what? You’re so much too good for me that it’s ridiculous, and that doesn’t even count my kids, you really need to get saddled with that mess, and so I figured, okay, just one night of…I don’t know, what you said, one night of youth, the kind of things regular people do when they’re our age and after that it was like the end of Cinderella, except there was no glass slipper and no prince. The next day I got together with Bulstrode to plan out what to do next, and he said he had a source for the money he needed and we went to meet Shvanov. Did you ever see Osip Shvanov?”
“No. Only people who work for him.”
“Oh, he’s something rare. Very smooth, except around the eyes. He reminded me of Earl Ray Bridger.”
“I’m sorry…?”
“A felon my mom once went out with for a while, who I don’t want to talk about right now. Anyway, I spotted him for a bad guy right away, but poor Bulstrode didn’t have a clue, and for sure I wasn’t going to tip him off. He did his little pitch about the Shakespeare play to Shvanov. He said the Bracegirdle document itself was worth fifty to a hundred grand, but if we found the Shakespeare manuscript, there was no way to calculate how high the price would go. A hundred million? A hundred fifty? And Shvanov would risk nothing because even if we came up empty on that, he’d still have the Bracegirdle to sell. Anyway, Shvanov gave him twenty large and told him to take off for England immediately to research Bracegirdle and Lord Dumbarton and get on the trail of the play. Which he did. And I went with him-”
“Without a good-bye. Don’t you think that was a little harsh?”
“That was the best thing about it, knowing you weren’t ever going to be involved with that son of a bitch.”
“You were protecting me?”
“I thought I was,” she admitted, and then added defensively, “and don’t think you didn’t need it. You don’t know this guy.”
“Speaking of whom-how did a Brit scholar happen to know a thug like Shvanov anyway?”
“I have no idea. A mutual friend hooked them up. I thought it was some loan shark deal-Bulstrode was stony broke and maybe he tried to raise money on the street for this thing and it led him up the chain. God, I’m so tired! Where was I?”