The Book of Air and Shadows

go home. You really should’ve talked to me earlier.”
    “Nobody stole anything, Donna,” said her brother. “I explained this to you. Sidney told us to break the books and we broke the books. He got full value for the maps and plates and the rest was fully insured. It was just like a junked car. The junk man pays ten bucks for it and if he finds a CD under the front seat, he doesn’t have to give it back.”
    “Thank you, counselor. I see you went to a different law school than I did. Finders, keepers is only on the playground. If your junk man found a diamond ring in the wrecked car, do you think he could give it to his girlfriend?”
    “Why not?” asked Crosetti.
    “Because he had no reasonable expectation that the car would contain a diamond ring. If the legal owner happened to see the ring on the girlfriend he could sue for replevin and he’d win. When Glaser gave you those books he had no idea that they contained a manuscript worth serious money. When you found it your duty was to inform him of the increased value of his property, not convert it to your own use.”
    “So if I find a painting in a yard sale and I know it’s a Rembrandt and the seller doesn’t, I have to tell her? I can’t just give her ten bucks and sell it for ten million?”
    “A completely different situation. You’d be profiting from your superior knowledge, which is legit, and you would
own
the painting before you sold it. That, by the way, is what Bulstrode did to you. It’s sneaky, but perfectly legal. On the other hand, you never owned the books from which the manuscript emerged. Glaser did and does. In fact, I would suggest you contact him right now and tell him what’s going on.”
    “Oh, get out of here!”
    “Idiot child, focus on this! You
stole
an object worth between fifty and a hundred thousand dollars. In a few minutes, a guy is going to show up who thinks that value is part of an estate he holds in trust. What do you think he’s going to do, as an officer of the court, when we have to tell him that this valuable object actually belongs to someone else, and did when you sold it to his client?”
    “Listen to her, Albert,” said Mary Peg in a stern voice.
    Crosetti rose from the table and stalked out of the room, seething. At some rationalizing level of his mind he had convinced himself that the whole manuscript transaction was something of a prank, on the level of swiping a stop sign from a pole, for which he had been duly punished by Andrew Bulstrode’s scam. Morally, he had argued to himself, the thing was a wash. But now he was sitting with two of the three women in the world he most wished to impress (Rolly being AWOL), and they were agreed that he was a colossal jerk and a felon, and here all the family weight bore down: the disappointment, however veiled by kindness, that he was not the hero his father had been, that he was not an achiever like his sisters, that he
especially
was not a graduate of Princeton
and
Columbia Law School like Donna. He was woozy with wine besides and thought that he might as well go upstairs with his gun and shoot himself, that would save everyone a lot of trouble.
    But what he did instead, since he was in fact a decent young man from a loving family and not the tortured neurotic artist he sometimes imagined himself to be (as, briefly, now) was to pull out his cell phone and call Sidney Glaser in Los Angeles. He had Glaser’s cell phone number inscribed in his own device, of course, and Glaser answered on the third ring. An old-fashioned fellow, Sidney, but he made an exception for cell phones.
    “Albert! Is there anything wrong?”
    “No, the shop’s fine, Mr. G. Something’s come up and I’m sorry to trouble you, but I need an answer right away.”
    “Yes?”
    “Well, um, it’s sort of a long story. Can you talk?”
    “Oh, yes. I was about to go down to dinner but I can talk for a little while. What is it?”
    “Okay, this is in reference to the Churchill. The one that got ruined in the fire and you asked Carolyn to break it?”
    “Oh, yes? What of it?”
    “I was just wondering about the, ah, remainder. I mean the stripped books…”
    A pause here. “Have you had a call from GNY?”
    “No, it’s not really an insurance issue…”
    “Because, ah, what they paid out wasn’t nearly what we could have got at auction and so, ah…look, Albert, if they call, if they
ever
call, please refer them to me, understood? Don’t discuss the breaking of those