“So what was in this for you?” Mike asked.

Krauss leaned over and picked up his little toy. “Like I said. I put up a couple of million dollars. A few partners kicked in. We find this sucker? Forbes told me it would sell for maybe twenty million today.”

“Sell…to the library, you mean?” I asked.

“Not likely. We’d get a much bigger bang from a private collector. That’s what Eddy Forbes did. He helped these map nuts build their collections. The whole time, he was probably stealing from one of them to feed the others.”

“Maybe it’s naïve of me,” I said, “but I just assumed that as a member of the board, your loyalty would be to the library.”

Krauss launched the whirlybird again and this time it circled his desk and came to a gentle landing on the table beside me. “You know why I get in trouble at the library? ’Cause I happen to think the place should be all about books. Screw the maps, screw the art. That’s why so many of those guys have no use for me.”

“But the maps-” I started to say, thinking of Alger Herrick’s description of their beauty and importance.

“So your cousin Sally marries a dentist from St. Louis and moves out there, Ms. Cooper. You stroll up Madison Avenue to some overpriced gallery looking for a wedding present and you buy a map of the city as it looked in 1898, framed and all. Three hundred bucks. Probably sliced out of an atlas in a library-maybe even by the master thief himself, Mr. Forbes,” Krauss said, standing up and walking to a bookshelf behind his desk. “Or your buddy builds himself a ranch in Montana -Jewish investment banker cowboys-we’re resettling Montana and Wyoming like they were the promised land. Some shyster will sell you a hand-colored print of whatever prairie town you want, at whatever your price point. It’s not great art, it’s not even a book you can hold and read and reread. What’s the point?”

“Did you inherit your collection?” Mercer asked.

“I didn’t inherit squat, Detective. My father sold used cars in Merrick, Long Island.”

“How did you get into this…this…”

“Addiction. That’s what it is. The first time I ever bought a book-I mean an old book, something I didn’t have to read for school or to get me through a long plane ride-I was in Paris, walking around those little shops on the Left Bank after dinner one night. It was my first time there, I was flush with my first Wall Street bonus and some serious Bordeaux, and I stopped to look at the titles. I needed something for the flight home. I saw Gatsby and picked it up. I’d always loved the story when I was in college, figuring out how I could get me a piece of the American dream. You should have heard the proprietor scream when I pulled that copy off the shelf.”

“Why?” Mike asked.

“F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby. I’m not talking about the paperback you read in high school,” Krauss said, moving his hand along the bookshelf and lifting out a small volume, running his hand lovingly over the dust jacket, protected in its mylar sleeve. “This is the first edition. Modern firsts, that’s how I started. Have you ever seen a more perfect image? It’s totally iconic.”

Jonah Krauss handed me the book. The jacket was cobalt blue, and the features of a woman’s face looked down on an amusement park version of New York City at night.

I turned it over and noted the faint spots on the rear cover and the slightly faded lettering on the spine.

“Open it.”

“That’s okay?”

“Open it,” he said again.

I lifted the cover and read. Ernest-I think this book is about the best American novel ever written. Scott Fitz. 1925.

“See what I mean?” Krauss took the book back and turned the pages. “Fitzgerald handled this himself. You touch these things, you imagine who held them before you did, you smell them and breathe in the print, the history, the romance. Guess what I paid?”

I had a few modern firsts, but nothing like this. “I can’t.”

“Fifteen years ago, thirty-five thousand bucks. My entire bonus and then some, gone in a flash,” Krauss said, snapping his fingers.

“I’ll be lucky if my pension’s that good,” Mike said under his breath.

“Stopped the Frenchman in his tracks when I told him to wrap it up for me. At auction today, it would draw double. After that I had to have everything Fitzgerald I could find. Hemingway next. Dos Passos. Wolfe. It’s totally addictive.”

“You obviously moved on to older collectibles, too,” I said, scoping the room.

“I had to teach myself about them. See, the great private libraries have been amassing rare books for centuries.” Krauss crossed the room, pausing in front of the Bloomberg, then continued on to shelves stocked with leather-bound books of all sizes. “I didn’t know Keats from Yeats, Samuel Johnson from Samuel Pepys. But I’m a quick study.”

He stopped in front of a shelf on which an open book rested in a cradle, two matching volumes standing beside it. He picked them up and offered them to Mike and me to admire. Each was bound in black leather, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. “Beautiful, huh?”

The silver writing, embellished with an intricate floral design, announced that we were looking at Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. “Three volumes, 1847. The library has a set of its own, without the inlay. It’s even got the writing desk Brontë used when she traveled.”

His excitement seemed quite genuine, and he clearly wanted us to appreciate the collection.

“Do you have any atlases?” Mike asked. I figured he was testing Krauss about his interest in maps.

“Not my thing,” Jonah Krauss said, as he saw Mercer reach for a book that was displayed on a shelf at the far end of the room. “Whoa, you don’t want to pick that one up, Detective. Some of the pages are loose.”

“Sorry,” Mercer said, replacing the large book on its stand and repeating the title on the spine. “It looks like the court record of an old English trial. The 1828 proceedings against the murderer Aaron Keyes.”

Krauss looked nervous. He stepped in front of Mercer and rested his fingers on the open page. “It’s, uh…different.”

“Different how?” Mercer asked.

“It’s…it’s an anthropodermic binding, Mr. Wallace. Extremely rare. Most unusual to find.”

“Anthropodermic?” Mike asked. “Help me out, Coop. Means what?”

“Don’t know.”

“The binding is made from human skin,” Jonah Krauss said, folding his arms and speaking quietly. “That inquest record is bound in the skin of the murderer, Detective.”

Mike lowered his head. “It doesn’t get much creepier than that.”

“Aaron Keyes raped and killed a young girl in the English countryside. He was sentenced to be hung, and after that his skin was tanned and used to make this binding.”

“Human skin?” Mike asked. “You’re not joking?”

“Not at all, Detective. Most libraries don’t want books like these, of course-although Harvard has a few-but many private collectors do. It’s a very specialized market, human skin. Not for everyone’s taste.”

Krauss turned away from the book and went back to his desk. His lips parted and the whitener on his teeth reappeared. “Lighten up, guys. It’s from the murderer, not the dead girl.”

Mike Chapman wasn’t amused. “Like you said, Mr. Krauss. Your library is your portrait.”