Lethal Legacy (32 page)

I handed him back the phone and he put both hands
up in the air. “Who sent you here, really? Some of those trustees just hate my
guts, don’t they? Try to mix me up in a murder case.”

“Who hates you?” Mercer asked. “And why?”

“Now, that’s something I really don’t have time to
answer today.”

“Put your bag down, Jonah, and take a seat,” Mike
said. “Give it a try.”

“If you had any idea of the turmoil inside the
public library—inside most libraries—you’d be able to understand the depth of
the animosity, Detective. It all looks so scholarly and benign from the
outside, but there are real battles being fought,” Krauss said, refusing to
sit.

“Over what?”

“Start with the future of the library. What do you
think the biggest problem is?”

“Funding,” I guessed. “Money to keep a facility
like this—”

“We’re pouring money into it, Ms. Cooper. The
problem is that ten years from now, who’s going to need a library?” Krauss was
snarling at me. “Our attendance has been plunging for years, not just in New
York but all over the world. Research libraries like ours in particular. The
computer and the Internet are killing us, making us obsolete. We’ve been given
a conservative estimate that at least ninety-five percent of all scholarly
inquiries begin on Google.”

“But these rare books in research libraries are so
unique,” I said.

“And sooner or later, every one of these beauties
will be digitized. We’ve got fifty-three million items in this library, and
already, the images from hundreds of thousands of them are available on the
Web. How do we stay relevant? What if we just become a damned book museum?
Those are some of the things we fight about.”

“Where are you in these battles?”

“I’m trying to move the dinosaurs forward. That’s
part of their animosity. Within the next decade, Google will have digitized
fifteen million of our works. I’m all for scanning the great libraries of the
world. Sit at home in Dubuque with your laptop and look at everything we’ve
got. Why not?”

“Because there’s something so different to holding
the physical book,” I said, remembering my own research in the great reading
room. “Coleridge and Keats—each of them annotated the margins of their books
with their thoughts, their ideas. You can see what mattered to them when you
read their own work, and how that affected their creative process.”

“Paper disintegrates, Ms. Cooper. Books crumble,
unless you can provide the environment in which to protect them, as I can.”

“There are things a computer will never be able to
tell us. I remember doing my thesis research at my regular seat in the reading
room, next to the same quiet guy every day. He was a medical historian, trying
to track down the history of disease outbreaks in eighteenth-century England,”
I said, talking more to Mercer and Mike than to Jonah Krauss, who finished
packing up his briefcase. “I couldn’t understand why he kept sniffing the
papers he was studying. It seemed so odd.”

“You cross-examine him?” Mike asked.

“Gently. He told me he was reading letters from an
archive that came from the Cotswolds. At the time, people took to sprinkling
vinegar on the correspondence, in hopes that it would disinfect them and stop
the spread of cholera. He could still trace the scent on some of the old
paper.”

“A very romantic notion, Ms. Cooper, but it’s not
the future. Any chance I can be released for the weekend?”

“What’s the source of your disagreements with the
Hunts?” Mercer asked.

“Look, Detective, we’ve buried the sword. It’s
been almost five years. I assume Jasper’s gotten over it. You might want to
keep an eye on Tally. I think he’d pull out the rug from everything to get his
father’s bequests.”

I thought of the bejeweled book that had been
found with Karla Vastasi’s body. Minerva Hunt said it had been given to the
library years earlier, when her grandfather died, but the “Ex Libris” plate
bore Talbot Hunt’s name.

“Why do you say that?”

“Five years ago, Ms. Cooper, when I led the charge
to deaccession an Asher Durand painting, Jasper Hunt literally threatened my
life,” Jonah Krauss said, spreading his palms as he leaned on the desk. “Check
with your commissioner. I had police protection 24/7.”

“All because of a painting?” Mike asked. “This
library’s got more action than any crack den in Bed Stuy.”

“A very famous work of art, detective.
Kindred
Spirits,
it’s called.”

“What’s so deadly about that?”

“It was one of the library’s sacred cows, Mr.
Chapman. My committee made a decision to sell it, and quite frankly I thought
the board would just rubber-stamp us. Turned out I was wrong.”

“What’s the story?”

“Durand is one of the best-known artists of the
Hudson River School founded by Thomas Cole. Landscape paintings. Cole’s best
friend was the poet William Cullen Bryant,” Krauss said.

“Bryant Park?” Mike asked.

“Exactly. Together, Cole and Bryant became leaders
of New York City’s civic and cultural life.”

“Why was the painting in the library in the first
place, and not an art museum?” I asked.

“You’re catching on, Ms. Cooper. Bryant’s daughter
gave the painting to the Lenox Library in 1904. So when this building opened,
and the park was created in her father’s name, it seemed like a fitting home.
But it just moved around from one end of a dark hallway to another. In my view,
it didn’t belong here at all.”

“So your committee decided to sell it. Was there
an auction?”

“That was another one of my problems,” Krauss
said. “We didn’t hold a public auction. You know that like most other major
cultural institutions, our endowment dropped precipitously after September
eleventh. We figured a healthy sale of a few pieces of our art would rally some
investment income to buy important books that we wanted. We are, after all, a
library.”

“So there was a silent auction instead?”

“Yes. Sotheby’s acted as our agent, and interested
parties were invited to submit sealed bids.”

“How much did it bring?” Mike asked.

”Thirty-five million dollars. Highest price ever
paid for an American painting,” Krauss said, the side of his mouth pulling up,
as though he couldn’t suppress a smile. “Me, I’m not the sentimental type. I
thought it was a great deal.”

Mike whistled. “What museum had that kind of
money?”

“The Met was outbid, Detective. The Wal-Mart
heiress Alice Walton bought the Durand for a small museum her family plans to
open soon in Arkansas.”

“Attention all Wal-Mart shoppers! At that price,
it went to a discount store? What were you smoking, Jonah?”

“The art critics wanted to stone me, the
Times
said the sale was the crime of the century—that
Kindred Spirits
is a
national treasure that belongs in New York—and the rest of the board caved in
to the public outcry.”

“What spooked Jasper Hunt to go after you
personally?” Mike asked.

“He said that we’d never be able to attract future
donors. They’d be put off by the fact that their own bequests might eventually
be disposed of in some secret way. But I think it was all about Hunt himself.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“When my committee was figuring out what to
deaccession, we stumbled on a few things that had come in to the library
through Jasper the Second—Hunt’s father,” Krauss said. “Things the library
doesn’t really need. We’ve had a Gutenberg Bible from the time this library was
built, right? Printed in 1455—a simply amazing accomplishment, for the man to
invent a movable press that re-created the finest Gothic scripts of his age.
Maybe one hundred and eighty of them printed, and close to fifty survive. Ours
is usually on display on the third floor. James Lenox donated it when the
library was built—the first Gutenberg that was ever brought to America. You’ve
seen it, haven’t you?”

“Yes.” It was one of the centerpieces of the
library’s collection.

“Well, Jasper Hunt gave us another one, not in
such good shape as the Lenox gift. Questionable provenance. Why do we need it
locked up in a vault somewhere underground when we could sell it for a healthy
price?”

“Still sounds like it would be a pretty desirable
thing to have, from a curator’s standpoint,” I said.

“J. P. Morgan set the standard for Jasper Hunt,
and that’s not a compliment. Neither one was a very picky shopper. They both
bought up English and European estates by the boatload. Morgan’s library has
three Gutenbergs. I say one is enough. His advisors had the good sense to make
him get rid of the objects that didn’t enhance his collection—medieval
tapestries, Egyptian sculpture, second-class art. We could sell the excess and
get things our curators really want and need.”

“Was that what you wanted to deaccession?” Mike
asked. “His Gutenberg Bible?”

“It wasn’t at the top of my list, but it was
there. I would have preferred to start with a gaudy little prayer book that
came from his father’s collection. Extremely rare volume when Jasper Hunt the
First bought it, but then he had it covered in jewels—to commemorate his son’s
birth.”

Mike cocked his head. He was obviously thinking of
the object that had been found with Karla Vastasi’s body.

“Rumor has it that the president of Cartier
offered the Hunts a king’s ransom to buy it. Seems the jewels were chosen and
set by Louis Cartier himself, and the current managers of the business are
peeved that it’s collecting dust in storage.”

It appeared that everyone had lost the
significance of the prayer book’s original purpose.

“What became of Jasper’s death threat?” I asked.

“Sort of withered and lost its energy, just like
he did,” Jonah Krauss said, snapping the lock on his case. “Three or four
months of aggravation, then he was on to his next enemy. Now, I’d like to get a
start on my weekend, Ms. Cooper. Any objections?”

Krauss had the briefcase in his right hand, and
with his left he reached down to pick up a gym bag.

“That looks like it weighs a ton,” Mike said. “Let
me help you out with it.”

“Part of the reason I lift weights, Detective. I’ve
got twenty-five pounds of catalogs for the winter auctions, in addition to my
own paperwork.”

“One last thing, Mr. Krauss. You got any idea
where Jasper Hunt’s little jeweled book is now? I mean, like where in the
library is it, if I wanted to see it today?”

Krauss held open the door for us, then stopped and
turned to answer Mike. “I haven’t a clue. Last I heard, Tally was taking
lessons from the ne’er-do-well son of Brooke Astor. I made such noise about
selling off the things that didn’t belong in our collection that he started to
try all kinds of tricks to break his father’s will, transfer some of the
bequests made to the library ages ago out from under our roof.”

“But how could he do that?” Mike asked.

Krauss pressed a button at the side of the glass
door and it seemed to zap every system in his room, dimming lights, turning off
electronics, and sealing the exit.

“I assume his lawyer explained the legal liability
to him, Mr. Chapman. I guess that’s why he probably resorted to theft.”

TWENTY-SIX

“You see his pecs?” Mike asked Mercer as he
held open the car door and ushered me into the back seat. “Bet Krauss could
lift that armillary sphere with two fingers. Smash the daylights out of Karla
Vastasi. Good we got there in time so nobody skinned her to decorate his
library.”

“There’s no middle ground with you,” I said. “It’s
easy to dislike the guy, but what’s a motive for him to be snooping around
Tina’s apartment? Killing Vastasi?”

“They’re all so greedy, Coop. The Hunts spend
generations coveting and buying and preserving all these things, and this
clown’s ready to discard them all.”

“Krauss is new to the ’hood, but he has surely
learned fast,” Mercer said. “Those Hunts, though, I think it’s in their genes.
I can’t figure how Tina Barr got caught up in this.”