The Cartographers(44)
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Look,” she said, pointing at the first scholar in the list of Penn State preservationists.
“Dr. Eve C. Moore?” Felix read.
Nell looked back at him. “One of the other friends in Ramona’s story—along with her and Francis—was named Eve.”
XI
The Park Avenue Armory towered before Nell, a great redbrick behemoth that took up the entire block between Sixty-Sixth and Sixty-Seventh Streets. It had originally been built to function as storage for the Seventh New York Militia Regiment back in 1880, also known as the Silk Stocking Regiment, because so many of its members were from aristocratic families, but as long as Nell had known it, it had been the site of the annual New York International Antiquarian Book Fair—the biggest and most exciting holiday in her and her father’s little household. The first time Nell attended, she’d been no more than a kindergartner, her tiny hand completely engulfed in her father’s as he led her slowly around the booths, pointing at especially rare or old specimens and explaining how the fair worked in hushed tones. All her life, they’d barely marked birthdays, her father almost always forgot Christmas, and they never participated in Thanksgiving, Halloween, or Easter at all—but every year, they would put on their finest clothes and set out for three excruciatingly long days in the dark pits of the Gothic Revival building, peering closely through magnifying glasses under protectively dimmed light at dusty manuscripts and rare texts and maps until she thought she might go blind.
How she had cherished those trips.
Nell pushed away the memory fiercely and tugged on the hem of her ill-fitting blazer. She’d worn it in the hope of looking more professional, but now she worried that she looked even more out of place.
Or perhaps that was only her looking for an excuse to back out.
No, she told herself. Her heart beat quicker. Her father’s event at the NYPL, when she needed to tell Irene what she’d found, was tomorrow night. She didn’t have time to lose her nerve now.
It was almost as strange and painful to be standing outside the armory, about to enter the annual rare books and manuscripts fair after all this time, as it was to stand outside the NYPL a few days ago, about to enter the Map Division again. When she’d been fired from the library and summarily banished from the cartography field, that excommunication had also included industry events like this. She’d known the day she stumbled out of the NYPL’s huge wooden doors for the last time what would happen if she ever did try to mingle again—at the first mention of her name, researchers would be late for meetings, dealers would suddenly have customers to see, specimens would all become on reserve and no longer available for sale or perusal. She’d seen it happen before to other fallen scholars. Nell had even, regrettably, avoided those people herself, the way her father and Swann had gently instructed her to do, for her own professional protection. She’d never imagined then that one day she’d be on the receiving end.
But maybe that all could change, she thought desperately.
With one last nervous tug of her blazer, Nell scampered up the steps and into the armory. Hopefully, she’d changed enough in seven years and the exhibits would be so engrossing that no one would look too closely and recognize her if she kept her head down.
A burst of cool, stale air hit her as soon as she was inside, and Nell sank wistfully into it. It was the smell of ancient pages, of time, of her very soul, if souls could have smells, she thought. She blinked, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the soft light, and then retreated to a dark corner of the lobby so as not to attract too much attention. Cautiously, she let her gaze drift, absorbing the ornamental woodwork, the marble, the stained glass that filled the interior.
Ahead, she could see the entrance to the armory’s drill hall, where the exhibition itself was held. It was over fifty-five thousand square feet—the largest unobstructed space of its kind in New York, her father had once told her.
That was a lot of area to cover to find the Sanborn exhibit, if she didn’t get moving. If she missed the preservationists’ keynote speech and they left the stage, within minutes they could be anywhere inside the fair, pulled this way and that by other researchers seeking an interview or collaboration, and she’d never find this Eve.
And there was also the potential danger of being spotted by someone who knew who she was. Wolff and Pete had already seemed suspicious of her at the funeral, and Francis had been reluctant to speak to her at all—what if the Cartographers knew the Sanborn map she now had was also somehow connected to the General Drafting map, and saw her here?
Nell pushed away the sudden image in her mind of the lurking black car and ducked into the drill hall.
Eyes down, she reminded herself. It had been so long since she’d been among such treasures as these. If she allowed even the most errant glance at the wrong booth, she’d catch sight of something exquisite and be unable to keep going until she’d gone over and examined it. And from there she’d spot something else, and then something else, and it wouldn’t be long until someone recognized her and the whole plan would be blown. Don’t think about all the maps you’re passing, she repeated. All the beautiful, rare, historic, priceless maps, all around her. She knew the Dili Tu, the rarest map from Song dynasty China, would be on display somewhere. And the precious first state of the Ratzen Plan, a colonial-era map of the city. And a stunning Johannes de Laet Americas fourteen-map atlas . . .