The Cartographers(92)
“Unbelievable . . . ,” Swann stammered, still staring at the side of the library.
A taxi honked as it passed, seeing potential customers, and Nell jumped at the sound. Francis waved it tensely on.
“Come on,” he’d said. Farther down, too far to make out their features, there were still some guests lingering at the main entrance in between the two giant lion statues, giving interviews to a swarm of news crews. “My car’s around the corner.”
The drive had taken hardly any time at the late hour. Once they reached President Street, Francis parked across the way instead of in Classic’s parking lot and killed the engine and lights. They all waited for a few minutes before climbing out, to see if anything moved in the dark. Lieutenant Cabe’s black undercover police car tailing them—or Wally, perhaps. By now, he’d have gone through Nell’s bag and realized that the Agloe map wasn’t inside. He was probably already out there somewhere, searching for her again.
All the more reason to get away from the library before he returned, and to get away from Classic with the map, before he guessed that might be where she would go next.
“I still can’t believe it,” Swann whispered then, as Nell brushed the dirt from the flowerpot off the key. He looked slightly sick with disbelief that the most valuable map any of them had ever come across was currently stuffed somewhere on Nell’s disorganized desk upstairs, completely unprotected. That of all the places the wayward daughter of scholarly royalty could have hidden something of such immense worth, she’d chosen the junk pile of a shoddy, knockoff home decor shop in Brooklyn.
Just before Nell had left her office earlier that evening to go to her father’s event at the library, she’d taken the Agloe map out of her portfolio, put it in a plain Classic envelope normally reserved for customers’ orders, and hid it in the middle of her in-box’s huge stack of projects.
“I know,” Nell whispered back. “But it worked for my father for decades at the library.” A needle in a haystack of junk. If she hadn’t stumbled upon the Junk Box down in the uncatalogued storage basement completely by accident, the map might have stayed buried there forever, safe from Wally.
“Well, let’s keep up our good luck,” Ramona said. “Classic might be an unlikely hiding place, but Wally has always been very thorough. Bear would do everything he could to stop him if he showed up, but . . .”
The possibility of Humphrey upstairs, hurt and alone, seized Nell’s heart. As quietly as possible, she wiggled the key into its lock and let them inside the darkened building.
They crept across the small ground-floor lobby and up the stairs without turning on a light, in case the glare might attract attention. At the landing, Nell led them over to the door to Classic. The chipped lettering on its glass face glinted dully as they crowded in front of it.
CLASSIC MAPS AND ATLASES?
WE CAN MAKE ANY MAP!
“I’ve never been to your office,” Swann said softly.
“That’s my fault,” Nell replied. Even now, with everything that had happened, and knowing who Humphrey really was, she still felt a twinge of embarrassment that Swann, the Director of Collections for the Map Division of the New York Public Library, as well as a professor from Harvard and a preservationist from Penn State, were about to see the type of maps she’d been working on the last seven years, and the life she’d been living since her expulsion from the library. “I kind of wish you didn’t have to come inside now.”
He put a hand on her arm. “You have nothing to be ashamed of,” he said.
She fed the second key on the ring into the lock, but it was already unlocked.
“Are we too late?” Eve whispered.
Francis peered in first, then shook his head. “It doesn’t look ransacked.”
They stepped inside, leaving the door cracked in case they needed to make a hasty escape. Classic’s office was high enough compared to the bodega, the laundromat, and the row of sagging three-story apartments surrounding it that the moonlight came in through the windows. The pale glow spilled over the silent, cluttered place, a faint blue.
“Here,” Nell whispered, hurrying over. “My desk.”
She watched Swann take it in and then looked at it herself, trying to see it without all its history. It was smaller than her old place at the NYPL, not much more than a little table jammed next to a radiator, with an old computer and a towering pile of paper that had clearly begun in her in-box but had grown to completely overtake half her workspace. Underneath, she could barely see the hint of her huge tablet of grid paper, where she added her flourishes to the map reproductions assigned to her.
Swann picked up the top package from the stack. “Frederik de Wit 1654 Dutch Maritime Atlas: fake creases, water fade, add sea monster version?” he murmured, reading the project title on the envelope.
“Pirate ships are one thing, but you should see my sea monsters.” She shrugged. “You wouldn’t believe how many people want a kraken on their Ptolemy or their Waldseemüller.”
Swann stifled a chuckle—but there was no haughty disdain, no affront at the inaccuracy, in his eyes as he looked at her work. Just love. He touched the little sea monster on the draft affectionately.
Nell found that she was smiling too, to her surprise. For the first time in her life, Classic’s maps only felt sort of funny, not humiliating. They’d just learned about a secret town and maps to places that didn’t exist. What were a few giant squids or some manual crumpling for age effect on a harmless bit of paper that would make someone happy? Their customers were going to look at her artfully exaggerated product in their living room and feel the same sense of wonder and possibility and adventure that she felt when she looked upon any map in the library’s collection—was that really so bad?