The Book of Air and Shadows

Library and he used to come in for books. You just
knew
? It was like that.”
    “Yeah, but, honey, that was mutual. I didn’t pack my bags and split after the first date.”
    “I thought it was mutual too. I thought this was going to be it. And if it wasn’t, I mean if it was all something I cooked up in my head, then, well, where am I? I must be crazy.”
    “Please, you are not any kind of maniac, take my word for it. I would be the first one to tell you if you were going off the rails. As I would expect you to do for me when senile dementia rears its ugly head.” She clapped her hands briskly, as if to demonstrate how very far off lay that event, and said, “Meanwhile, what are we going to do about this?”
    “We?”
    “Of course. Now, clearly, everything revolves around this Professor Bulstrode. What do we know about him?”
    “Ma, what’re you talking about? What does Bulstrode have to do with Carolyn disappearing? He bought the papers, he split. End of story. Although I did run a search on him and he’s sort of a black sheep.” Here Crosetti explained about the famous quarto fraud, which, as it happens, she recalled.
    “Oh,
that
guy,” she exclaimed. “Well, the plot thickens, doesn’t it? Now, the very first thing we have to do is get Fanny in on this, just like you should’ve done originally.” He stared at her blankly and she went on. “Albert, you don’t imagine that Bulstrode gave you the real translation of that thing! Of course he lied. You said your gut was telling you that you were getting rooked, and you wouldn’t have sold it to him if that woman hadn’t turned on the waterworks and told you those whoppers. They were in it together.”
    “That’s impossible, Ma…”
    “It’s the only explanation. She played you like a fish. I’m sorry, honey, but the fact is, we sometimes fall in love with unsuitable people, which is why Cupid carries a bow and arrows and not a clipboard with a stack of personality tests. I certainly did when I was a kid, and not just once.”
    “For example,” said Crosetti with interest. His mother’s supposedly wild past was a subject of fascination to all her children, but one she only mentioned in the form of admonitory hints like this one. Her answer when questioned was invariably, as now, “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” She added, “In any case, my boy, I’ll call Fanny right now and set it up. You can see her after work on Monday.”
    Against which Crosetti had no compelling argument. Thus at six that day he presented himself with the papers in their mailing tube at the manuscript department of the New York Public Library. He found Fanny Doubrowicz at her desk. She was a tiny woman, less than five feet tall, with a pleasantly ugly pug face and bright mahogany eyes, deep sunk behind thick round spectacles; her coarse gray hair was drawn back in a librarian’s bun, stuck with the canonical yellow pencil. She had come over as an orphan from Poland after the war and had been a librarian for over fifty years, most of them at the NYPL, specializing in manuscripts for the last twenty or so. Crosetti had known Aunt Fanny for his whole life and considered her the wisest person within his circle of aquaintance, although when complimented upon her encyclopedic brain, she always laughed and said, “Darling [or
dolling
], I know nothing [
nozhing
] but I know where to
find
everything.” When he was a child he and his sisters had tried to think of facts that would be impossible for Aunt Fanny to discover (how many bottles of Coke got sold in Ashtabula in 1928?), but she always defeated them and provided remarkable stories of how the information had been obtained.
    So: greetings, questions about his sisters, his mother, himself (although Crosetti was sure she had been elaborately briefed on this by Mary Peg), and swiftly to business. He drew the pages out of the tube and handed over the roll. She carried them to a broad worktable and spread the sheets out in three long parallel rows, the copies of what he had sold Bulstrode and the retained originals.
    When she had them spread out she uttered some startled words in what he supposed was Polish. “Albert, these eighteen sheets…they are
originals
?”
    “Yeah, they’re what looks like enciphered letters. I didn’t sell them to Bulstrode.”
    “And you are rolling them up like calendars? Shame on you!” She walked off and came back with clear plastic document envelopes, into which