“So you think it’s the real deal.”

“This I cannot say without examining the original. In the meantime, I will type out for you a Word document from this Bracegirdle’s letter so you will not have to learn Jacobean secretary hand and you can read what he has to say. Also, I will prepare another Word document based on these supposed enciphered letters so at least you can see what the ciphertext looks like. If you don’t mind, I would like to keep the letters here and run some elementary tests on them. If they are not genuine seventeenth century, of course, we can all have a good laugh and forget the whole thing. In fact, I will do that first, and if they prove genuine I will send to you the two documents by e-mail, and also I will give you the name of a man I know who is interested in ciphers and such things. If we can generate a solution, it gives us a bit of bargaining against Bulstrode. For he has not got these, and they may hold information about the location of the autograph play, do you see?”

Crosetti did. He said, “Thanks, Fanny. I feel like such a jerk.”

“Yes, but as I say all is perhaps not lost. I will be happy to meet this Bulstrode and tell him what I think of his sly tricks. Let me begin with the transcription of the cipher first. It should not take too long. Will you stay?”

“No, I have to get back to work. I don’t know a lot about crypto but maybe it’s a simple substitution. They couldn’t have been all that sophisticated back then.”

“Oh, I think you would be surprised. There are ciphers in French of the ancien régime that have never been broken. Still, we could be lucky.”

“Who’s this cipher expert you mentioned?”

“Oh, Klim? He is a Polish person too, but a more recent immigrant. He was a cryptanalyst with the WSW in Warsaw, that is, military counterintelligence. Now he drives a hearse. If you leave me alone now, I will have this done in a little bit. And don’t feel too bad about yourself, Albert. There was a woman involved, after all, and you are still young.”

Feeling as old as Fanny, however, Crosetti slumped out of the library and took the Madison bus uptown to the bookstore. There was a new woman working there, Pamela, this one genuinely ex-Barnard: short, earnestly intellectual, attractive, well-turned out, engaged to someone on Wall Street. It was as if Carolyn Rolly had never been, except that occasionally Glaser would mention that she had vanished without telling him what she had done with the prints from the Churchill Voyages. When Crosetti entered the shop today, however, Glaser hailed him and ushered him into the little office he kept in the rear of the shop.

“You’ll be interested to know that Rolly has surfaced,” Glaser announced. “Take a look at this.”

He handed Crosetti a brown envelope with the slick crinkly feel that announced it as foreign. It had a British stamp and a London postmark. Inside Crosetti found a letter written in Rolly’s beautiful italic hand, black ink on heavy cream paper. He felt his face grow hot and a pang darted down his center, and he had to restrain himself from raising the paper to his nostrils and sniffing it. He read:

Dear Sidney,

Please forgive me for leaving you in the lurch like this, and for not contacting you to let you know what I was doing. Since I didn’t know when the shop would reopen, I thought it would not be too much of a burden on you and would give you sufficient time to find a replacement. But I was rude not to call you earlier and I am sorry. What happened was that I was called away to London on urgent family business, which then turned into a career opportunity, so it looks like I will be staying here in the UK indefinitely.

The good news, from your perspective, is that I was able to sell the maps and plates from the broken Churchill for what I believe was a far higher price than we would have received on the American market-3,200 British pounds! They seem to have an insatiable appetite here for good-quality prints from their glory days. I enclose an international money order for $5,712.85. I paid the various fees out of my pocket, to make up for any inconvenience you might have suffered.

Do say good-bye to Mrs. Glaser for me and to Albert. You’ve all been far kinder to me than I deserved.

Best,

Carolyn Rolly

Crosetti handed the letter back with lead in his belly. He had to clear his throat heavily before saying, “Well. Good for her. I didn’t know she had family in England.”

“Oh, yes,” Glaser replied. “She once mentioned that the name was originally Raleigh, as in Sir Walter, and she implied that there was some connection to the famous one. Maybe she inherited the family castle. That’s quite a sale, anyway. I always figured our Carolyn was heading for higher things than bookstore clerking. Did you print out those auction notices I wanted?”

“This morning. They should be in your in-box.”

Glaser nodded, grunted an acknowledgment, and walked off, and Crosetti clumped down the stairs to his cave. It was a more pleasant work environment than it had been before the fire, for the insurance had paid for a complete renovation, including neat steel shelves and a new Dell computer with all the latest stuff attached. The cellar now smelled of paint and tile adhesive instead of dust and cooking grease, but the improvement did not noticeably help Crosetti’s mood. Each time “How could she?” appeared in his mental theater, the answer came swiftly: “Schmuck! You had one date. What did you expect, love forever? She got a better deal and split.” On the other hand, there was Crosetti’s devout belief that the body never lied, and he could not accept that Rolly had lied to him in that way, that one night. She was a liar, sure, but he could not accept that sort of falsehood. Why should she? To repay him for a nice evening? It made no sense.

And speaking of lies, went the inner voice, that letter was complete horseshit. We know she didn’t break those volumes, therefore didn’t sell the prints. He was as sure of that as he was about the honesty of the flesh. So where did she get the nearly six grand she paid out to Glaser? Answer: someone supplied it, plus the costs of travel to England, and for this the only suspect was Professor Bulstrode, for there was no one else on the scene who both had that sort of money and was in England. She had gone to England with Bulstrode. But why? Kidnapped? No, that was absurd: professors of English did not kidnap people except in the sort of preposterous movies that Crosetti despised. Then why did she go?

Two possibilities presented themselves, one unpleasant, one frightening. The unpleasant possibility was that Carolyn saw the opportunity for a big score, the possibility of actually finding the supposed Shakespeare treasure. She’d read Bracegirdle’s letter and called Bulstrode behind Crosetti’s back (that long wait outside her loft!), set up the sale of the Bracegirdle manuscript, pressured Crosetti to sell, and then-he wanted to think-fallen a little in love but not quite enough to make her willing to miss the opportunity to get out of a life of crushing poverty.

The frightening possibility was that she was acting under duress, that Bulstrode had something on her, a threat far worse than just losing her clerk’s job and having to deal with the cops. No, that was another lie-the cops were not after any Carolyn Rolly, not according to his sister anyway. But maybe it was a little of both, a carrot and a stick. He had to have new information. Information was what allowed you to separate the lies from the truth.

As soon as this thought appeared, Crosetti swiveled in his chair and faced his new computer. He actually did have some new information, and because of the moping he’d been doing lately he hadn’t thought to use it. From the back pocket of his jeans he extracted the two items he had scooped from the street outside Carolyn’s former home. The photograph was a one-hour-photo print of two women and two children, a boy of four or so and a baby girl. One of the women was a younger Carolyn Rolly, with her hair jammed up under a feed cap, and the other woman was a pretty blonde. They were sitting on a bench in some kind of park or playground, in summer sunshine, the trees around them, heavy with leaf, throwing dark shadows on the ground. They were looking at the photographer and smiling, with the sun in their faces making them squint slightly. It was not a good photograph; Crosetti knew that the cheap instant camera it was taken with could not deal with the contrast between bright sun and shade, and so the faces were washed out, especially those of the kids. But Carolyn had kept it and then walked away from it, as if abandoning her life once again. He studied the silvery faces, looking for signs of family connections, but again there was too little information.