The Book of Air and Shadows

you’re a bookbinder. Unusual, wouldn’t you say? How did you get into it?”
    “And how about
your
hopes and dreams?”
    “And, see? You’re secretive too. There’s nothing more interesting than that. Okay. Here’s the whole deal. I’m twenty-eight and I live with my mom in Queens, Ozone Park. I’m saving money so I can go to film school, which at the rate I put it away will be a month after my fifty-second birthday. I should take out a loan, but I’m scared of getting into debt.”
    “How much do you have saved?”
    “About three and a half grand.”
    “I have more than that.”
    “I bet. Glaser probably pays you more than he pays me, you get commissions on sales, you live in Red Hook, and you own two outfits, what you’re wearing now and the one with the collar. What are you saving for?”
    “I want to go to Gelsenkirchen in Germany and take an apprenticeship at the Buchbinderei Klein.” When he didn’t react, she added, “Obviously, you’ve never heard of it.”
    “Of course I have. Buch-whatever Klein. It’s like the Harvard of the bookbinding world. But I thought you already knew all about it. You have all the gear…” He gestured to the racks of tools laid out on the worktable, the cutting press and plow, whetstones, knives, leather pillows, and paste pots. It all looked very eighteenth century; Crosetti imagined that the Churchill
Voyages
had been bound with tools quite like these.
    “I barely know anything,” she protested.
    “Really.”
    “I mean compared with what you have to know to make a book from scratch. I can do
repairs
. It’s like…it’s like the difference between being able to repair a cracked Ming porcelain vase and
making
one out of clay and glazes.”
    “Uh-huh. And while we’re sharing confidences like this, getting cozy and all, why don’t you tell me what you’re going to do with the Churchill when you’ve got it doctored?”
    “What? I’m not doctoring them. I’m going to break them.”
    Red splotches appeared on her cheeks and her eyes darted-picture: girl caught in lie.
    “No,” he said confidently. “If you were going to break them you would have just airfreighted them to Andover and had them vacuum dried. No muss, no fuss. You get them back dry and clean and snip snip. You look surprised. I’m not what you’d call a book guy but I’m not stupid either. So what are you going to do with the doctored books?”
    “Sell them,” she said, looking down at the sodden volumes.
    “As doctored?”
    “No. Everyone knows we own an extremely fine set. There are private clients who like discretion. They have funny money they want to stash in collectibles. Glaser does it all the time. Look, he’s going to declare these a total loss to the insurance company, and show them the invoices for the broken-out items. They’ll come to, I don’t know, not more than twenty-five hundred, and the insurance company will pay him the difference between that and what he paid for the set, figure around twenty thousand dollars.”
    “Which is approximately the amount you’re planning to divert to your own pocket when you sell to your shady character. Isn’t there a word for that? Begins with an…?”
    “It’s not…it’s
nothing
like stealing. He told me to break the books. As far as Glaser’s concerned, the set no longer exists. He’s made whole by the insurance company and I’m profiting from my own skill. It’s no different from making things out of pallets that’re being thrown away.”
    “Um, no, actually it’s not the same thing at all, but that’s my Jesuit high school education talking. See, you
are
an interesting person. Devious is interesting. How are you going to produce the invoices for the illustrations, since you’re not really breaking the books?”
    She shrugged. “Sidney never bothers with broken items. It depresses him. He calls it vulture food.”
    “Not answering the question. But I figure you’re going to sell the set for twenty-two K, give Sidney a couple of grand, let him collect from the insurance, meanwhile phonying up the accounting system with fake invoices. You’re simultaneously screwing the insurance company, Glaser, your shady client, and the tax people. That’s quite a plan.”
    “You’re going to rat me out!” Crosetti had heard of blazing eyes but had never actually seen any outside a movie screen until now. Little blue sparks were whizzing around in there.
    “No,” he said, smiling. “That would be boring.