“Thanks,” Avery said.

He sounded like he believed it about as much as Calder meant it.

3.2. Denton Wyle

Denton beat the letter to Zurich by a whole week. Thank God Schwartz was too cheap or too old-fashioned to spring for FedEx. Why Denton went to Zurich—that was something he didn’t examine too closely. He was moving on pure intuition. Schwartz had lied. He had big-time lied.

Kobinski. Ever heard of him?

Could be.

All that feigned disinterest and hypocritical scolding! And for what? What was Schwartz trying to hide? Denton couldn’t wait to find out.

Denton’s stubbornness, once awakened, wasn’t like other people’s: it wasn’t a brick wall; it was more like water, flowing around or through or under all obstacles, seeking its instinctual resting point.

He’d never been fond of Zurich. It was a city of unbridled materialism, more his mother’s style than his. He walked through street after street of glitzy stores, entire shops that sold nothing but gold pens, furs, or crystal stemware. Zurich’s good taste weighed on him like a thumb.

The address he had was in an area that looked older, the stores even posher, if only because they didn’t scream their message. Some of the shops were so discreet you couldn’t even tell what they sold. The address he had was like that. He found himself the only customer in a small room filled with polished, translucent antiques. Sophisticated hand-printed cards rested on each object. He began to question, for the first time, and rather belatedly, what he was doing here.

An elegant elderly man approached him. The man began the formalities in German, moving smoothly into English on hearing Denton’s reply. His name was Gretz and he had a highbrow British accent. Denton buttered him up by admiring the pieces in the shop before sidling, nonchalantly, into his real business.

“Do you work with rare manuscripts, papers, things like that?”

Gretz reappraised him. “As a matter of fact, we do. But you must have heard this from someone, no? Are you looking for anything in particular, sir?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. I’m looking for anything written by Yosef Kobinski.”

Gretz blinked. “That’s quite remarkable.”

“You have something in that line?”

“I do indeed, sir.”

The man waited, his soft, long-fingered hands pressed together. And? Did he want a secret password or something?

“I’d love to see what you have if that’s at all possible.”

“This way, please.”

He led Denton through a curtain to a part of the shop that was—Denton saw at once—the real heart of the place. There were smooth mahogany tables. Bookcases lined two walls and cut-glass display cases held ancient manuscripts. There was a reverent, hushed tone to the room.

“Please be seated.” Gretz donned plastic gloves and retrieved a transparent folder from one of the cases. He carried it over to Denton, drew up a chair opposite him, and, like a jeweler, took a pair of long flat-pronged tweezers and a magnifying glass from a nearby shelf, adjusted a small desk lamp with a protective filter, and turned it on.

With these elaborate preparations met, Gretz carefully turned the folder around, maneuvering it gently by its edges. He handed Denton the magnifying glass. Under the plastic, Denton could see a piece of dirty brown paper marked with characters he didn’t recognize.

“Five pages, written in Hebrew,” Gretz said melodiously. “They were found in 1962 in a metal cylinder buried on the grounds of Auschwitz. Since then they’ve been in private hands. I obtained them three months ago.”

Auschwitz! This had been written in the camp.

“The papers date from approximately 1943. Every page bears the mark ‘YK’ in Hebrew.” He pointed to said mark at the bottom of the page with his tweezers. “The author is a Polish rabbi, Yosef Kobinski, about whom you appear to know.”

Denton studied the identifying mark with an escalating sense of nervous wonder. Maybe it was just the old-world surroundings, or seeing an actual relic of Auschwitz, or the mysterious tinge of secrets that pervaded the room, but he half expected Gretz to say, “Eez eet safe?” like Olivier in Marathon Man.

“Um, yeah, I know something about him. But I’d like to know more.”

“I don’t have a great deal of background on the man myself except that his work was based on kabbalah. He published one book before the war, The Book of Mercy. It had a very small run and is extremely rare. Fragments of his Auschwitz manuscript, titled The Book of Torment, are rarer still. He went to a great deal of effort to hide individual pages.”

Denton nodded, as if he knew all about it.

“As I’m sure you know, prisoners in the concentration camps were not allowed personal property, nor did they have access to writing materials as a rule. Still, the human mind is quite ingenious, yes? These things appear now and then. That’s not to say that they aren’t extremely valuable.”

“Valuable,” Denton echoed. “Are all five pages in this condition?” He asked it because it was something a serious customer would ask.

“Yes. But I must tell you, I have an offer pending for the papers.”

“Ah!”

Denton pretended to study the page, but he wasn’t really seeing it. He was trying to sense the dealer’s attitude, and he decided that there was definitely an open door here somewhere. So the sale wasn’t completely final or perhaps Gretz had something else in mind.

“I’m new to the area of rare manuscripts. I hear there’s a difference between an exclusive and a nonexclusive purchase. Is that right?”

Gretz looked at Denton as if he were being coy, like maybe he was a riverboat gambler asking how many cards to deal. “In the antique business a rare manuscript is considered to be a physical object—an antique—quite a separate thing from the text on the page. Most dealers will photograph any object before selling it and, in the case of written materials, may copy or transcribe the text. You see, the text is usually not what’s important but rather the document itself which has value.”

Had he sensed a door? This was a freaking canyon. “Interesting.”

“And when a buyer purchases an unpublished manuscript such as this, he may opt to buy the physical document only, or he may choose to also purchase all rights to the text. Naturally, purchasing all rights is the more expensive option.”

“In other words, a nonexclusive purchase means someone else could buy a copy of the text?”

“That is the arrangement, yes.”

“Say the pending sale for this document turned out to be a nonexclusive agreement. How much would you want for a copy of it?”

“Five thousand U.S.,” Gretz said, without a moment’s hesitation.

Not to be gauche, Denton didn’t reveal his delight. Five thousand was well below his guilt level. He’d paid nearly as much for the plane tickets.

What was he thinking? He didn’t even know what the pages said.

“Is there a lot of demand for, um, Kobinski’s work?”

The dealer smiled. “Documents from the camps are always in demand, Mr. Wyle, especially documents written by camp prisoners. Though I must say, I’ve only encountered two people who were looking for Kobinski’s writing specifically, and you are one of them.”

That smile glittered with a question that Denton could not have answered even if he wanted to: Why Kobinski?

When he left the shop, Denton had more or less an unspoken agreement with Gretz. Even so, he told himself he’d never return. He didn’t know what was in the manuscript. It probably had nothing to do with the disappearance of Kobinski or anything else of interest to him or the readers of Mysterious World. And it was a fragment. What could anyone say in five pages that would be worth five grand?