The Lost Island

7

Now the stanchions and ropes served another purpose: they allowed the guards to control the seething crowd, which remained sealed in the East Room while security reviewed the situation.

Julia Thrum Murphy found herself herded, along with everyone else, to one side of the room while the half dozen guards secured and examined the Book of Kells and talked animatedly to their counterparts outside the East Room via radio. It became even more obvious to Julia that this was a botched robbery: the flash-bang and smoke used as a cover, the muffled explosion that split the case, the book removed — but the thief had evidently not been able to get the book out of the room before the steel security doors descended. So he’d dropped it and melted back into the crowd.

Which meant the thief was still locked in the East Room with the rest of them — a fact that was clearly evident to the guards as well. It seemed she was in for a long ordeal. While the crowd had grown more orderly, there was still a degree of chaos, with the inevitable hysterics making scenes, along with some enterprising people who appeared to be claiming non-existent injuries, no doubt hoping to make some money. Several doctors in the crowd had already come forward and were examining them.

A part of Julia was actually beginning to enjoy this.

Now a sweating guard moved her and some of the others to another place in the room, and she found herself once again next to the man with the roguish face and dark hair.

He smiled at her again. “Having fun?”

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

“Me too. You realize,” he went on, “the ersatz thief is still in the room.”

Ersatz. She liked a man with a big vocabulary.

“So…” The roguish-looking man smiled. “Take a look around. Let’s see if we can pick him out.”

This was fun. Julia glanced around, scouring the faces of the people. “I don’t see any obvious crooks.”

“It’s always the person you’d least suspect.”

“That would be you,” she said.

He laughed, leaned toward her, and put out his hand. “Gideon Crew.”

“Julia Murphy.”

“Murphy. Irish, by any chance?” He raised an eyebrow comically.

“What about Crew? What kind of a name is that?”

“A distinguished name of Old Welsh origin. Distinguished, that is, until a Crew nicked the bailiff’s moneybox and stowed away to America.”

“Your ancestry is as elevated as mine.”

The guards were already lining people up, organizing them for questioning. A commander — at least he had a couple of stripes on his shoulders — stepped forward and raised his hands.

“May I have your attention, please!”

The general hubbub died down.

“I’m afraid that we can’t let anyone leave this room until everyone has been interviewed,” he announced. “It would greatly speed things up if all of you would please cooperate.”

Murmurings, objections. “I want to get out of here!” one of the hysterics cried, to a scattered chorus of agreement.

The commander raised his hand. “I promise you, we’re going to get you out of here as soon as possible. But to do that, we need your help. We’ve just had an attempted robbery of the Book of Kells, and there are certain protocols that must be followed. So I ask for your patience.”

More murmuring, complaining, expostulation.

“So what do you do?” Gideon asked.

“I teach at Bryn Mawr. Romance languages — French, Italian, Spanish, and some Latin.”

“Bryn Mawr,” he said. “A professor. Nice.”

“And you?”

The man hesitated. “Until recently, I worked at Los Alamos National Lab. I’m now on leave.”

Julia was startled, taken aback even. “Los Alamos. You mean, where they build nuclear weapons?”

“Not build. Design.”

“Is that what you do? Design bombs?”

“Among other things.”

Was he joking? No, he wasn’t. She didn’t know whether to be impressed or horrified. At least he wasn’t just another dumb, good-looking male.

“I know,” he went on, defensively. “Maybe my profession sounds a little sketchy. But really, I’m an American doing my duty to keep my country safe and all that.”

Julia shook her head. “I can just see you talking like that at a faculty sherry at Bryn Mawr. Oh, God, they’d label you a killer.”

“And what do you think?”

She gave him a level gaze. “Do you care what I think?”

He returned the gaze, and she was a little taken aback by its intensity. “Yes.”

He gave this a peculiar emphasis that caused her to blush, and as she became aware she was blushing, she only turned redder. “I’m not sure what I think,” was all she could say.

They were silent for a few minutes. She glanced over to where the book had been placed back within its cradle. Several guards were hunched over it, examining it with enormous care — turning the pages with white-gloved hands. They seemed to be getting more and more agitated. Moments later they called out to the commander, who bustled over. A short, intense confab took place, and then the commander spoke furiously into his radio. The crowd, noticing the change, fell into a hush.

The commander raised his arm again. “I need your attention. It appears a page has been cut from the Book of Kells and is missing.”

A gasp from the audience.

“The page must still be in this room. So I am afraid to say that no one can be allowed out without being questioned and searched. We’re obtaining the necessary warrants as I speak. The security door must remain closed until we recover the missing page. I apologize for the inconvenience, but there’s nothing else we can do. We cannot let anyone out of this room without a thorough search.”

“Wow,” said Julia. “The plot thickens.”

Gideon Crew was peering around the room, lips pursed, his blue eyes sparkling. “Identified the thief yet?”

“I still think it’s you. You come from a line of thieves and you do look a bit of a rogue. And…you look nervous.”

He laughed. “And I’m sure you’re the thief. A professor of romance languages from Bryn Mawr — talk about the perfect cover.”

People were now being fed through the stanchions to where the guards had set up a makeshift screening area, behind a bookcase draped with a heavy curtain. Those who had been searched were being led into another holding area, the two groups kept separate. The room remained sealed in steel.

Several people were continuing to protest, and the temperature in the room was climbing. “We’re going to be here all afternoon,” Julia said. The novelty was starting to wear off. She had a long drive back to Bryn Mawr. Maybe she should stay in the city and drive back on Monday. She would miss morning classes, but at least she had a good excuse. She glanced over at Gideon and wondered, idly, if he had an apartment in the city.

“Seriously, I don’t see any obvious crooks in here,” he told her. “Just a lot of boring old white people with names like Murphy and O’Toole.”

Suddenly there was a shout. One of the guards, who had been searching the room, was calling out and gesturing frantically. He was kneeling at a bookcase, the glass door of which was open. The commander and other guards went over, and they all bent down to examine something. It looked to Julia like a piece of paper shoved between two volumes. More activity, discussion, and finally — with gloves — the thing was removed. It was a sheet of vellum, and it looked very much like a page from the Book of Kells. It was brought over to the volume, now back on its stand, and a long examination and a second whispered confabulation ensued.

Once again, the commander gestured to the crowd for quiet. “It appears,” he said, “that we’ve recovered the page cut from the Book of Kells.”

A large murmur of relief.

“I’m afraid, however, that we’re still going to have to question and search each and every one of you before we can open that security door.”

A smattering of angry expostulations.

“The sooner you all get with the program,” the commander said wearily, “the sooner all of us will be out of here.”

A collective groan. “Oh, God,” said Julia. “At this rate, I won’t get back to Bryn Mawr until midnight. How I hate driving at night.”

“You could always stay with me. I’ve got a suite at the Gansevoort Hotel, with a view of the High Line.”

She looked at him and, to her mortification, found her heart rate accelerating considerably at the thought. “Is that some sort of indecent proposal?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. We’ll have a wonderful dinner in the hotel restaurant with a good bottle of wine, talk about nuclear physics and French literature, and then we’ll go up to my room and make passionate and indecent love.”

“You’re awfully direct.”

“Vita brevis,” he said, simply. And the Latin, more than anything else, was why she said yes.