“Why?”

“Because he owned the building, or part of it. Able Real Estate Management. Okay, so I had a place to stay and I was a cleaner for over two years, working nights, spending all my spare time in the library reading about bookbinding and about the book business and learning what I had to know to fake a résumé. Then I quit the cleaners and got a job in a midtown restaurant waiting tables because I needed to look at regular people, see how they dressed, how they talked, the gestures. I converted myself to a middle-class person. That took the better part of another year. And then I got the job with Glaser. My sad story. Now, do you want to hear about the manuscript?”

“I do.”

“I knew Bulstrode from before-I think I told you that in New York. Sidney introduced us, and I took a course he gave on manuscripts at Columbia General Studies. As soon as I saw the pages I took out of the Churchill I knew it was a big find.” She sipped at her drink and looked out the window at the black night. “And you want to know why I lied about owning the carcasses, why I pretended it was nothing much, and why I lied about being a fugitive so that you’d sell the pages to Bulstrode for spare change.”

“I’m all ears.”

“Okay, I’m a bookstore clerk who found a manuscript in what’s supposedly a back I bought for pennies from my employer. I have no resources and it’s going to take significant resources to get the thing authenticated and sold at auction and as soon as I go public with it Sidney is going to come out swinging and-”

“What do you mean, swinging?”

“Oh, I see you don’t know Sidney. He’s going to say that I opened the covers and found this manuscript and then swindled him into selling me the books as backs. So there’s immediately a cloud on the title and no auction house will touch it. Sidney’s a big gun in that world and I’m nobody. So I needed a front man and I thought of Bulstrode. I called him while you were waiting in the street that morning, told him what we’d found, and set up what went down in his office. He said that if it was genuine he’d give me five grand for it over and above what he gave you. So then it was Bulstrode’s manuscript. Even if he’d been fooled once, he’s still a major scholar and paleographer with access to tons of manuscript sources. There wouldn’t ever have to be a connection with me or Glaser.”

“Right, but Carolyn, I still don’t get why you didn’t tell me this off the bat.”

“Oh, for God’s sake-I didn’t know you. You could have mentioned it to Glaser the next day-hey, Carolyn found a priceless Jacobean manuscript in those books you sold her for junk, ha-ha. So I had to pretend to involve you in the scam without at the same time letting you know what the manuscript really was.”

“I see. And what happened afterward, that night-that was part of the scam too?”

For almost the first time that evening she looked him right in the face. Crosetti’s father had once told him that pathological liars always looked the interrogator right in the eye and kept the stare for longer than was natural, and he was happy to see that Carolyn did not do this. Her look was tentative and, he imagined, a little ashamed.

“No,” she said, “that wasn’t part of the plan. I knew you were pissed off at me, and I’d told you that porker about Uncle Lloyd and I thought you’d just walk away, and when you didn’t and you did all those nice things…look, in my whole life I never had a single other day like that, someone taking me places, that beautiful music, and buying me things, just because they cared about me as a person and not just because they wanted to paw me…”

“I did want to paw you.”

“I meant someone I wanted to get pawed by, someone my age, someone sweet. I was never a kid, never a teenager. I never hung out at the drive-in with boys. I mean, it was like drugs.”

“So, you like me?”

“Oh, I adore you,” she said, in a tone so matter-of-fact that it was more convincing than any sighing avowal. His heart actually gave a little thump. “But so what? You’re so much too good for me that it’s ridiculous, and that doesn’t even count my kids, you really need to get saddled with that mess, and so I figured, okay, just one night of…I don’t know, what you said, one night of youth, the kind of things regular people do when they’re our age and after that it was like the end of Cinderella, except there was no glass slipper and no prince. The next day I got together with Bulstrode to plan out what to do next, and he said he had a source for the money he needed and we went to meet Shvanov. Did you ever see Osip Shvanov?”

“No. Only people who work for him.”

“Oh, he’s something rare. Very smooth, except around the eyes. He reminded me of Earl Ray Bridger.”

“I’m sorry…?”

“A felon my mom once went out with for a while, who I don’t want to talk about right now. Anyway, I spotted him for a bad guy right away, but poor Bulstrode didn’t have a clue, and for sure I wasn’t going to tip him off. He did his little pitch about the Shakespeare play to Shvanov. He said the Bracegirdle document itself was worth fifty to a hundred grand, but if we found the Shakespeare manuscript, there was no way to calculate how high the price would go. A hundred million? A hundred fifty? And Shvanov would risk nothing because even if we came up empty on that, he’d still have the Bracegirdle to sell. Anyway, Shvanov gave him twenty large and told him to take off for England immediately to research Bracegirdle and Lord Dumbarton and get on the trail of the play. Which he did. And I went with him-”

“Without a good-bye. Don’t you think that was a little harsh?”

“That was the best thing about it, knowing you weren’t ever going to be involved with that son of a bitch.”

“You were protecting me?”

“I thought I was,” she admitted, and then added defensively, “and don’t think you didn’t need it. You don’t know this guy.”

“Speaking of whom-how did a Brit scholar happen to know a thug like Shvanov anyway?”

“I have no idea. A mutual friend hooked them up. I thought it was some loan shark deal-Bulstrode was stony broke and maybe he tried to raise money on the street for this thing and it led him up the chain. God, I’m so tired! Where was I?”

“Leaving on a jet plane, don’t know when you’ll be back again. And no good-byes.”

“Right. Okay, we get to England and go straight to Oxford and we stay with Ollie March. Bulstrode said I had to stay with them, which March didn’t much like, but he said it was for security. I had to get the manuscript dated, so no one would know Bulstrode was involved, and when the dating came back positive, that’s when he really got squirrelly. I wasn’t allowed to make phone calls, and the only reason I got to write that letter to Sidney was I convinced him that it would be more suspicious not to write and make up a story about the plates and send him a check. He was insanely suspicious of me, that I was, like, working for Shvanov and telling him what we were up to, our research and all.”

“But you weren’t.”

“But I was. Of course I was working for Shvanov. I’m still working for Shvanov, as far as Shvanov knows. He gave me a cell phone before I left New York and told me to keep in touch. What was I supposed to say to a man like that? No?”

Crosetti was silent under her defiant look. She snatched the towel from her head and dried her hair so violently that he winced. After a moment, he asked her, “What did Bulstrode say when you told him about the ciphered letters?”

Here she blushed again. “I didn’t tell him. Shvanov did.”

“But you told Shvanov.”

“I confirmed his suspicions,” she admitted quickly. “He knows things, Crosetti. He has people everywhere. Obviously he knew about you from Bulstrode, and he must have checked around. You don’t think he can find out what’s happening at the New York Public Library? He can find out what’s happening in the CIA, for Christ’s sake!”