The Book of Illumination (38 page)

Today, though, we had opted for speed: one hour, dock to dock. We were set to meet up with the folks from Interpol, who had taken a room at the Jared Coffin House, an old inn right on the main square in Nantucket proper. Since Interpol didn’t have jurisdiction over the island, they’d had to coordinate their efforts with both the Massachusetts State Police and an art theft task force of the FBI. Based on information Declan had obtained from Scully, the State Police, working with officers on the Nantucket force, believed they had pinpointed the house in which the
meeting was set to take place: an
Architectural Digest—type
home built in the past few years in a secluded area of Madaket, on the western side of the island.

Dec had refused to let Sylvia come. It was bad enough, he’d insisted, his being responsible for the presence of one “civilian” (me); there was no way in the world that he would consent to Sylvia’s tagging along. For that matter, he hadn’t wanted me to come, either, but I had leverage, and I’d begged. Mercilessly.

“Who’ll identify the book?” I had asked.

“You.”

“But I’ve never seen it. What if it’s the wrong one?”

“The wrong twelfth-century illuminated manuscript?” He gave me a wry look.

“Yeah.”

“I guess we’ll just have to take our chances,” he’d said.

The location was on our side, he explained as we nursed burned coffee and split a bag of chips in the ferry snack bar. I wouldn’t have minded having a beer—being on the boat made me feel almost as though I was heading off on a vacation—but as it was, I had barely talked Declan into letting me come. I had to be on my best behavior. He wouldn’t have looked kindly on my nursing a brew at eleven o’clock in the morning.

“First off,” he said, “it’s kind of a hilly, duney part of the island. At least that’s the word I got. And there’s a lot of private security in that area. Guys patrolling the dune roads in cars pretty much nonstop.”

“How come?” I took a sip. God, how could this coffee be so bad?

“They’re all high rollers out there, in that area. New money. Big money. They want their privacy, and they spare no expense building the dream house on a big plot of land. But they’re vulnerable, too, being way out there in the dunes. Off-season, the houses are sitting ducks.”

“What does this have to do with us?” I asked.

Dec finished his coffee, stood up, and tossed his Styrofoam cup into the trash. He sat back down. “People are used to seeing guys on the local force, and guys from the private security companies, crawling around the dunes in their cars. Nobody’ll give a second thought to a couple of black Crown Royals.”

I nodded, gazing easily at the familiar features of the man sitting opposite me. That was the moment when I realized that I was not going to go out with Julian again, not even for a drink. Sure, there had been a buzz between us, and that had felt really, really nice. I wasn’t angry about what happened, not anymore, and certainly not after the roses. But when you’ve been lucky enough in your life to have had the real thing, you know it when you feel it again. And if you don’t, and you’re pretty sure you never will, what, really, is the point of a drink?

I was trying to act blasé, but I was anything but. The Interpol agents had booked several private rooms at the historic inn, which wasn’t the sort of place built for business travelers needing to rent impersonal spaces for semiprivate work meetings.

Nope, I was in a bedroom. A frilly, overheated bedroom, with fancy French wallpaper and Mary Cassatt reproductions on the walls and a massive mahogany four-poster bed taking up most of the space in the room. The bed looked so inviting, with its stiff, white sheets and down comforter and what looked to be a whole range of pillows, all the way from fluffy to firm. I wanted nothing more than to lie down and close my eyes for just a few minutes. But I wasn’t alone. There in the room with me were two burly State Police Officers. You know the kind—huge, intimidating, all decked out in their jodhpurs and black leather motorcycle boots.

They weren’t especially … chatty. At least not with me, whom I gathered they had been assigned, at least unofficially, to babysit. They had set up shop on the far side of the room, commandeering a delicate ladies’ writing desk. They looked like figures in a Norman Rockwell illustration, or in a children’s picture book: two grizzly bears having a tea party.

That left me the wing chair by the window overlooking the street, so I sat down and tried to pay attention. To what, though, I wasn’t sure. I had no idea what was going on. Busy and serious-looking men, and a couple of women, could be heard chatting on phones and with one another in the room beside ours and the one beyond that. Cell phones were ringing and walkie-talkies were crackling, but I could rarely make out more than “Copy that.”

Dec poked his head in once or twice, winked at me without smiling, and left. Gradually, as the hours wore on, I found it harder and harder to fight the soporific hum of all those quiet conversations from which I was excluded, and the heat we had tried to turn down, and the lingering effects of all the champagne I had drunk with Sam and Sylvia and the restless night that had followed, as I tossed and turned, worrying that I would oversleep and Dec would leave without me. I lay my head back against the wing of the chair and decided to close my eyes for just a couple of minutes.

“Anza,” I heard a man say.

My eyes flew open and I sat up. It was dark out. Where was I?

“Time to head out,” the officer said.

“Oh! Sorry. I—”

I stood up so abruptly that I almost lost my balance. I was still half asleep. The state police guys were standing by the door, and I had that sick, disoriented feeling you sometimes have when
you’ve fallen dead asleep during the day, and when you wake up, it’s dark.

One of the cops flipped the switch that killed the bedside lights; the other was jangling his keys, watching with not a hint of amusement as I fumbled around in a daze, trying to locate all my things.

Damn! How long had I been asleep? Where was Dec? I was furious at myself for having drifted off and furious at Dec for having let me! How could he have left me in the mortifying position of being conked out in a chair while I was supposed to be helping? He and the Staties had probably had a good laugh about that, shaking their heads at the useless wannabe, fast asleep in the chair. I hoped to God that my mouth hadn’t been hanging open and that I hadn’t been snoring.

“Where are we going?” I asked, stumbling down the hall behind them. Everyone else seemed to have left.

“Madaket, ma’am,” came the reply.

Two hours later, I couldn’t have been more awake. For one thing, I was deathly cold. I was sitting in the backseat of the cruiser, which was tucked just out of sight in one of the Madaket dunes. I had all I could do to keep my teeth from chattering, but there was no way I was going to ask them to turn on the heat, not after they probably spent the afternoon making jokes about Sleeping Beauty in the chair. I’d die of frostbite before I’d request any special treatment.

I could see the house a little way off. It was a beautiful, modern place with decks all around and big glass windows overlooking what the cops said was Capaum Pond. There were a couple of cars parked outside the house—one that looked like a nondescript sedan and another that had to be a sporty Mercedes or some kind of Jaguar. I had gathered from hearing the police chat that there were three other unmarked cars in our immediate
vicinity and two more cruisers back on Madaket Road. I didn’t know exactly what we were waiting for, but I wasn’t about to ask.

Suddenly, I saw three black cars with their headlights off crawling slowly toward the house. My heart began to beat wildly, and I found myself praying that Declan was not in one of them. He always downplays the risks of being a cop, but there in the darkness, I had a terrifying feel for the danger and uncertainty that are part of his job. I bit my lip and leaned forward, squinting to see as much as I could. The cars pulled to a quiet stop and twelve or fourteen people piled out. They didn’t close the car doors. They quietly approached the house on foot and seemed to fan out around it, maybe blocking the other exits.

The moon had not yet risen, so I couldn’t see very much. Occasionally, there would be the flash of a reflective vest. I heard a dog begin to bark. That was all.

“What’s happening?” I whispered.

“They’re going in,” the policeman whispered back.

Then there were shouts of “FBI! Police! Open up!” There was a lot of commotion outside, and the cops turned on the engine and flicked on their lights. We heard shouts, and people yelling, and the splintering of the front door as the agents gained entry. Thank God we heard no shots. But suddenly, I glimpsed a shadowy figure on one of the second-floor decks.

“Look!” I said. “There’s someone up there. Look!”

In a flash, not waiting to see if any other officers or agents had caught sight of the fugitive, the cops were out of the car. They pulled their guns and shouted for the man to stop, but he didn’t. He dropped down awkwardly from the deck and stumbled off in the darkness toward the edge of the pond. I caught a flash of silver hair.

The officers took off after him. I could see him struggling to get away, but his progress was hobbled by deep sand and grass.
They all disappeared over a dune. I wanted to get out of the car, but I was afraid; both that something might happen to me and that I would do something to piss off Declan, when I’d promised to stay out of the way.

I wasn’t in suspense for long, though; in less than a minute, my buddies reappeared, half-dragging the man, who was handcuffed and held firmly by the arms, up over the ledge and toward the house. He was tall and slim and appeared vaguely familiar to me. But that was crazy. No, it had to be a movie star I was thinking of, someone like Richard Gere.

I watched them all climb the steps and disappear inside. Then I sat there alone, shivering, for what felt like half an hour. Finally, Declan appeared on the porch, hopped down the steps, and headed toward my car.

“All clear there, love,” he said, opening my door. “You can come in.”

I got out slowly and threw my arms around him.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“Course I am,” he said, shaking his head as though I was silly to have worried. All of a sudden, I wanted to cry. I paused and took a breath, and forced back the tears that were gathering in the corners of my eyes. Seeing this, Dec put his arm around me and gave me a squeeze.

Inside, he steered me right down the hall toward the back of the house. Cops and agents wearing FBI jackets were talking on phones and taking notes, drifting around the house and checking out the art and the furnishings.

And there, suddenly, was the manuscript, right on the dining room table. I felt a wave of faintness, but I took a deep breath and crossed the room.

The book was larger than I had expected—maybe a foot by fourteen or fifteen inches. I didn’t want to touch it. I gazed in awe
at the dazzling variety of shapes and colors that had been squeezed into the four rectangular panels of the cover.

I looked up at Declan.

“That’s your book, then?” he asked.

“Could be,” I said, smiling. “Looks about right.”

Declan grinned. “All right. Let’s get out of here. Leave the boys to their work.”

“Can we take it with us?”

“No.”

“Can I just peek in?” I asked. I was suddenly dying to see what was going on in the front room, and more important, who it was that my officer pals had tackled in the dunes outside.

Declan nodded curtly. The gesture said,
Make it quick
.

I crossed the hall and walked toward the room with all the noise and activity. A man I took to be Van Vleck was sitting there, dressed in a caramel-colored sports jacket and tight beige jeans. He looked oddly disengaged from the swirl of activity around him, as though he had imagined this scene many times before and was now rewatching a dull and familiar film.

With all the bustle and noise, it took a minute for me to locate the other man the officers had arrested. I almost did a double take as my brain struggled to make sense of an image that didn’t seem right. It couldn’t be … wait a minute … no, this was wrong … it was a mistake. I recognized the person in the chair, and he couldn’t possibly be involved in this! He was respected all over the world! He was important! But he was handcuffed and sitting in the chair in the corner, surrounded by men and women in FBI vests.