The Cartographers(26)
Ramona Wu’s shop sat on the edge of Chinatown, at the border where the neighborhood blended into Little Italy. Dim sum restaurants gave way to wine shops and Italian eateries, languages mingled. The Bowery was a blur of rain puddles, puffs of smoke, and the intoxicating scents wafting from inside each restaurant every time the doors opened. Nell’s mouth watered for the roast duck she passed, strung up and glistening in the window. She’d been in such a rush this morning, eager to get started on her investigation into her father’s map, that she’d forgotten to eat breakfast before she left her apartment, she realized. Barely slept, either. She’d startled awake at the table at one point in the early hours of the morning, still hovering over the map, a pencil in her right hand—of course. She’d been sketching little bits of the map by instinct before she’d dozed off, unable to help herself. It was how she made sense of things. Perhaps it did make a little bit of sense that she’d ended up at Classic after the library.
After that, Nell had dragged herself to bed, where she’d lain for some number of hours, but it had done no good. She couldn’t stop thinking about the map. When her alarm finally went off, she was already up, showered, and dressed, impatient to get started.
Pushing her hunger away, Nell broke off from the chaos of Bowery onto narrow Doyers Street, where the honk of cars and screech of tires suddenly dropped away. She could hear the quiet conversations of couples walking up and down the sidewalk, the clink and clang of pans being moved about the stainless-steel stoves inside kitchens. There was a delivery truck unloading fresh vegetables into Nom Wah Tea Parlor, and a few people in line outside the small post office across the lane.
Nell looked down at the business card in her hands as she walked, checking the little sketch her father had drawn on the back to make sure she was in the right place. She’d realized as she’d set out that morning why he’d done it—the front of the card had Ramona’s name and the title of her shop, but didn’t actually contain an address or phone number. She didn’t know how her father had originally found his way there, but she was glad he’d doodled a little street map on the back of the card to remind himself—and to allow her to follow.
Sure enough, a few steps past Nom Wah Tea Parlor, an old glass front proclaimed in delicate gold lettering: RW Rare Maps.
Nell looked at the business card again and chewed on her lip.
She still couldn’t believe her father would have anything to do with someone with a reputation as shady as Ramona’s. But then again, she also couldn’t believe that one of the most respected scholars in the field of cartography had anything to do with a gas station highway map, either. And she hadn’t managed to dig up anything more—beyond the map’s inexplicable, eye-watering value and its apparent penchant for being stolen—after Felix had left her apartment.
Before heading over to Ramona’s, she’d spent several hours that morning in the Brooklyn Library branch just off Grand Army Plaza, looking into General Drafting Corporation, the company that had made the maps from which this Junk Box specimen came, hoping some clue might jump out at her. But as far as she could tell, it was a small company that focused mostly on highway driving maps, producing them for nearly every state—none of which went for the same kind of prices that hers did—until they were eventually squeezed out of the market when the larger corporations caught up. At some point in the early 1990s, what was left of General Drafting was absorbed by some German media conglomerate and then fizzled out completely.
For a time, though, it seemed General Drafting had been quite the enterprising underdog in the field. The founder, a man named Otto G. Lindberg, had come over to the United States from Finland in the early 1900s with just a few hundred dollars in his pocket and set himself up in New York City as a draftsman. Even though American cartography was dominated at that time by two gigantic mapmakers, Rand McNally and H.M. Gousha—names Nell easily recognized, despite her exclusive focus on antique maps—Otto and his assistant, Ernest Alpers, were the first to invent and produce this type of cheap folding map and gained their own small foothold in the industry for it.
But that was almost all there was. She did find some evidence that there had been a controversy of some sort, and a lawsuit, around the same time that this 1930 edition of her map had been published, but she couldn’t find the outcome of the case, or any information thereafter. And employees who had been working at General Drafting at the time of the suit were all long gone, having died decades before, so there was no one to ask. There weren’t even business records to go through. For a time, there had been physical copies archived in an old historical building in New Jersey, where the company had moved after Manhattan real estate prices soared, but the place had burned down in an accident decades ago, everything lost.
Nell had also called a few of the other libraries and museums that the interinstitution database showed had once owned copies of the same map, but they all had been lost so long ago that almost no one at those places could tell her anything useful, either. There was only one librarian, a now elderly woman who had been working part-time at her local branch in southern Connecticut for decades, who remembered the insignificant little map in question.
It had been the most peculiar thing, she’d said to Nell. The robbery had occurred in 1989 or 1990, she recalled, but the thief was never caught, because the police couldn’t actually prove there had been a break-in at all. None of the doors or windows had been damaged and were all still locked when the librarian had entered the building the next morning. And their simple alarm system, which was set to go off if any of the doors were opened before it was disarmed, had not been triggered.