Lethal Legacy (16 page)

THIRTEEN

“Did I startle you, Mr. Chapman?” Herrick
asked. “I don’t want you putting me at the scene of the crime without getting
to know me a little better.”

“You called me on that one, sir. I’m sorry if I
was rude.”

“Just obvious, Detective. I was born without a
hand—a defect the doctors assume was caused by the medication my mother was
taking during pregnancy. I’m used to people’s stares and gasps. I’ve got a
modern prosthesis I wear when I’m out, in case you’re wondering. But this is
what I had when I was growing up, and it suits me fine. Now what were we
discussing?”

“Mike and I are trying to get to know the world
that Tina Barr moved in,” I said. “It’s hard to imagine that books and maps,
and the quiet reading rooms of the public library, would expose her to danger,
but the two attacks this week took place in her apartment. Perhaps you could
tell us about some of the people she worked with. You, Mr. Herrick, tell us
about yourself.”

Herrick crossed the center of the long room and
seated himself at a desk near my chair. I wanted to understand Tina Barr, and
if my appeal to his vanity guided me to learn about things in which she had
immersed herself, it would be time well spent.

“I don’t like talking about myself, Ms. Cooper,
but I can tell you all you want to know about these beautiful things,” he said,
sweeping his good arm around in a circle.

“When did you start collecting?”

“My life has been a matter of great good luck,
after a very bumpy start,” Herrick said. “I was deposited on the steps of an
orphanage in Oxfordshire, or so I’m told, by a single mother—a teenager
herself—who must have been overwhelmed at the prospect of taking care of a
child as handicapped as she thought I would be. I don’t remember anything about
that part of my life, so you needn’t imagine all sorts of stories about eating
gruel and being forced to pick pockets as a child. Shortly before my fourth
birthday, I was adopted by the Herricks, a local family who had lost their only
son to polio about five years earlier.

“My adoptive father, Charles, was a wonderfully
kind man, a barrister who made a respectable living. They gave me a loving home,
and an introduction to material comforts.”

“I wouldn’t think many barristers could afford
these digs,” Mike said.

“About the time I was a teenager, my father came
into a large inheritance, Mr. Chapman. You know about primogeniture, of course.
He was the third son of a third son and so on. But when his uncle died without
any heirs—his uncle Algernon, in fact, for whom I was named when they adopted
me—the old fellow left most of his estate, including his home and his library,
to my father. Hence to me.”

“I like stories with happy endings.”

“So do I, Detective, so do I. And yes, I’ve tried
to make a contribution of my own. If Jill hasn’t told you, I’ve been a member
of the Council of the Stock Exchange. Investments and such. Very lucky indeed,”
Herrick said. “Have either of you ever heard of Lord Wardington?”

“No, no, I haven’t,” I said.

“He was a mentor of my father’s, known to everyone
as Bic. His family had built a spectacular library over several centuries, and
he himself amassed the greatest collection of atlases in England. I used to
spend hours at Wardington Manor as a child. I was painfully shy—because of
this,” Herrick said, examining his hook as he spoke. “So I was more than happy
to spend my time in the silence of the great reading room there.”

“That’s easy to understand.”

“Bic was incredibly generous to me. He saw that I
loved old books—I loved smelling them and touching the rich Moroccan leather.
There were early English Bibles and Shakespeare Folios, incredibly fine
incunabula—”

“What’s that?” Mike asked.

“Books from the infancy of printing, Detective.
From before 1500. The books were my friends—my only friends, in fact, for a
long time—but it was maps that fascinated me the most. My father had a pair of
globes. Not as fine as this one, but they were brightly colored and they
towered above me, and I never tired of making them spin.

“And it was at Wardington Manor that I discovered
atlases,” he went on. “Bic continued the tradition of acquiring books for the
family library, but he became obsessed, much as I have, with maps.”

“Why is that?” I asked. “They’re quite beautiful,
but what makes them so special to collectors?”

Herrick opened the oversize leather-bound book in
front of him and turned to look at the pages he had selected. “Think of how the
ancients must have imagined the world, Ms. Cooper, long before most of them
were ever able to travel it, to take measure of it in their journeys. There
have been maps as long as there have been walls or vellum on which to write and
draw. Who was the first man to give us a mathematical picture of the universe?
Do you know?”

Both Mike and I shook our heads.

“Ptolemy, of course, in his
Cosmographia,
which was based on voyages and itineraries of early travelers, and on their
fantasies as well. About AD 150. His was the first account to locate places in
terms of longitude and latitude. For hundreds of years afterward, monks and
madmen all over Europe were able to draw maps of what they believed to be the
world.”

“Where’s Mercer when we need him?” Mike said.

“Excuse me?”

“We’ve got a friend named Mercer Wallace whose
father was a mechanic at LaGuardia Airport,” Mike said. “Has a thing for maps,
too, only not rare ones. His dad used to hang all the airline routes on the
walls in Mercer’s room when he was a kid, teaching him about faraway places. So
he also grew up on maps. Bet he’d love to hear this.”

“Then you must bring him with you next time,”
Herrick said, smoothing the page and running his forefinger over the outline of
the northern coast of Africa. “Everything changed with the invention of the
printing press, of course. Imagine the amazement of people seeing printed maps
for the first time.”

Herrick prodded the book with his hook to swivel
it around, allowing us to see the two-page illustration, colored in red and
green inks, the seas a pale blue, with odd-looking creatures lurking on the
corners.

“This is Ptolemy’s Atlas. The very first one ever
printed, Ms. Cooper. Presented in Bologna in 1477.”

The images were breathtaking in their complexity
and surprising in their accuracy depicting the landmasses bordering the
Mediterranean.

“Twenty-six maps in the volume, done with
double-page copperplate engravings, and then hand-colored. Taddeo Crivelli’s
work—he was a genius. There are only thirty-one copies of this atlas in the
world, and only two in private hands. Go ahead, touch it. I promise it won’t
bite.”

Mike reached over me to feel the paper. He lifted
the page and studied the image on the underside before sitting back.

“Did that say anything to you, Mr. Chapman?”

“Like what?”

“Like whether what I’m telling you is true? I’m
teasing you, Detective, but Tina Barr is skilled enough to call my bluff on
that. The real Bologna Ptolemy that I own is in England under lock and key.
That one’s worth more than a million pounds. I bought it at Sotheby’s, when
Lord Wardington sold most of his collection a few years ago. This is a much
later edition—you’ll even find America in here—and it’s damaged by those small
wormholes and some tears in its margin. Hasn’t nearly a fraction of the value
of the Bologna printings. The green coloring has seeped through the paper, as
sixteenth-century green often does.”

“I’ll give you a hundred bucks for it,” Mike said,
smiling.

“I’m afraid you’d be fifty thousand pounds short.”
Herrick smiled. “You must understand that with the Age of Discovery, Detective,
came an explosion of new information. Sea monsters disappeared from the edges
of the ocean and distant places began to take on more precise shapes.
California is discovered, as you see in these subsequent volumes. For two
hundred years—to the European mind—it was drawn as an island. Brilliant to
watch the history of the world unfold through these documents. There was a
military purpose to them, too.”

“That must have been critical,” Mike said.

“Usually a hanging offense for a merchant or
soldier to share a country’s maps with a foreign power. That handsome example
on the wall that you were admiring earlier,” Herrick said to me, “is the
Neptune
François
, a collection of sea atlases commissioned by Louis XIV to give the
French navy an important advantage over the British. Meticulous engravings they
were—all about navigation—so soundings and rhumb lines and the markings for
every little coastal port were of major importance.”

“Did it help the French in battle?”

“Well, it would have, Mr. Chapman, if the charts
hadn’t been copied quite so quickly by the Dutch and distributed abroad. With
the advent of printing, scholars of every nation were able to compare and
revise, leading to a considerable advance in geographical knowledge.”

“Help me understand,” I asked. “What’s more
valuable? The individual maps, like those hung on the walls here, or the bound
atlases?”

“Ah, now you’ve hit on a point of contention.
Scratch the surface of this and you’ll find real scoundrels, Ms. Cooper.”

I was looking for a stronger word to describe our
perp, but I’d settle for some direction instead.

“Unlike rare books,” Herrick said, “maps were not
greatly prized by collectors until thirty or forty years ago. Lord Wardington’s
a perfect example. The family amassed books for generations, going back over
four hundred years. He focused his attention on maps and created what was
indisputably the world’s best private collection in the last four decades.”

“Why the disparity?”

Herrick pursed his lips and frowned. “Indvidual
maps—the kind that sailors and traders and explorers used every day—were just
utilitarian pieces of paper. Not many were considered works of art, with
elaborate decorations and fine calligraphy—the kind that wind up bound in
atlases. They were essentially untethered documents to be used in their own
time—not carefully maintained, without any record of their provenance—just
meant to get the traveler or the sailor from one place to another.

“The better maps wound up in books—printed, then
hand-colored, and bound in all of the wonderful ways you see in collections.
They were only sold separately when the books were damaged. You want to point a
finger at the enemy?” he said, chuckling softly. “It’s the modern dealers.”

“Dealers?” I asked.

“They’re the atlas-breakers. They’re the ones who
manipulate the market, trying to keep up with old-fashioned supply and demand.”

“What’s an atlas-breaker?”

“Remember I told you that this was a purely visual
passion, not a scholarly one?” Herrick said. “The desirability of old maps—out
of books and on the walls—was strictly a result of the fact that fashionable
interior designers discovered how attractive they are, back in the 1970s and
’80s. English country style, if you will. The maps became more highly sought
after than the books that held them, so dealers started hoarding the atlases
and dismembering them. Taking the maps out and selling them separately was far
more profitable than finding one buyer for the whole book.”

“Are there many of these dealers around New York?”
Mike asked.

“You’re both too young to have known Book Row,”
Herrick said. “Fourth Avenue, between Union Square and Astor Place, was a
bibliophile’s paradise for almost a hundred years. All that’s left of it these
days is the Strand. So, in fact, there are only a handful of serious dealers at
this point, working in the price range we’re talking about. I can tell you
exactly who they are, if that’s what you need.”

“I think what we need is to figure out where Tina
Barr fits in this picture,” I said. “What kind of person is she?”

“I can’t help you there. I only know her
professionally. She’s incredibly well trained and has a great eye for detail.
That’s one she finished for me just last week.”

I walked to the wall between two tall windows and
studied the minuscule calligraphy on another exquisitely rendered old map.