The Lost Island

6

Julia Thrum Murphy, thirty-two years old, had driven all the way from Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, where she was an assistant professor of romance languages, to see the Book of Kells on its last weekend in the States. It was a glorious Sunday afternoon, if a bit warm in the city, and what she had feared turned out to be true: the exhibition was jam-packed.

At the ticket desk, she was informed by a harried attendant that the wait just to get into the East Room was about forty-five minutes. And then there was a long, slow-moving line within the room itself, which might take another thirty minutes or more.

An hour and fifteen minutes. Hearing this, Julia almost decided to skip it and head up to the Cloisters to see the unicorn tapestries instead. But then she decided to wait. This, she knew, would be her only chance to see the Book of Kells outside of Ireland.

So she bought the twenty-five-dollar ticket, checked her handbag and camera, went through the metal detectors, and got in line. As people exited the East Room, more were let in, and the line moved slowly. Finally, after forty minutes, she reached the head of the initial line and was given the nod to enter the East Room.

Inside the room it was almost worse. The crowd moved snake-like between sets of stanchions and velvet ropes that would have done an airport security gate proud. Viewers were given less than a minute to ogle the book before guards began polite murmurings for them to keep moving, keep moving.

An hour-and-fifteen-minute wait for one minute of pleasure. This was a bit like sex, she thought, feeling disgruntled as she moved along through the serpentine line.

Just then, a fellow about her age, a bit ahead of her, passed going the other way in the queue and gave her a smile, a little warmer than mere politeness would dictate. She was startled by his roguish good looks and the combination of jet-black hair and blue eyes: a type her mother would call “Black Irish.” As his smile lingered, Julia looked away. She was used to this; it was her good fortune to be born not only with brains but also with a certain willowy beauty, which she maintained with a regimen of Pilates, yoga, and jogging. Even though she was a professor, she was not at all attracted to the crop of flabby, self-important, and often pretentious men who were her peers at Bryn Mawr. Not that there was anything seriously wrong with them: the type, frankly, didn’t turn her on. At the same time, it was hard to find a man who was her intellectual equal outside of academia. She could imagine herself marrying a poor man, or even an ugly man — but never, ever, would she marry a man who was less intelligent than she was.

As she thought about this, the line shuffled forward, and the man who had smiled at her approached again. When they drew side by side, he leaned over and spoke to her, sotto voce: “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.”

While the line was hardly original, she laughed. He didn’t look stupid, at least.

He moved on as the parallel lines inched forward. She found herself anticipating his next pass, her heartbeat even accelerating a little. She glanced around the dense but orderly crowd in the East Room, looking for him. Where was he? This was crazy, her getting all a-flutter about some random stranger. She had been celibate way too long.

And then, quite suddenly, it happened. A flash of light, followed by a terrific bang, so loud it made her heart leap in terror, and she threw herself to the floor amid a chorus of shrieking and screaming. Immediately, she thought terrorist attack, and even as this went through her mind the alarms went off and the room abruptly filled with a thick smoke, totally opaque, that transformed her world into a hellish brown twilight in which she could see nothing, only hear the useless hysterical screams and cries of her fellow museum-goers.

Then came the hollow boom of what sounded like steel meeting steel, immediately followed by the crump of another, muffled explosion.

She lay on the ground, cheek by jowl with a dozen others, maintaining a defensive fetal position, protecting her head, as the hysterical screaming continued. She remained silent and, somewhat to her surprise, collected. After a few moments she could hear some shouted orders — security, trying to calm people down — along with sirens and the sudden roar of forced air.

Rapidly the fog thinned out and the light came back up. Almost by magic, the smoke was gone, sucked into forced-air grates now exposed in the ceiling by the withdrawal of painted panels.

The screaming began to subside, and she sat up, looking around to see what was happening. The first thing she noticed was that the glass cube holding the Book of Kells had been cleaved, a corner of the cube dirtied by what must have been a detonation of some kind. The book was not in the cube — it had been stolen. But no, not stolen, because there it was, on the floor next to the cube, open and in disarray.

And then she realized they were locked in: the only door into the East Room was now a slab of stainless steel.

The next thought that came to her mind, with some relief, was that this whole thing was nothing more than a botched robbery.