In the Cards: Murder and Magic in the Library

CHAPTER 5

When Harry first walked through Russell Square via the main hall of the majestic British Museum, he felt euphoric and wished he could stay there forever. The day before, from atop the massive steps of the National Gallery, he gazed over Trafalgar Square, with its magnificent splashing fountains and where Admiral Nelson reigned over the throng from his towering obelisk. Harry had wanted to shout with joy.

The next morning at ten, when the Warburg opened to visitors, and after verifying his credentials, gatekeeper Gerald Clewes issued his green Reader's card that permitted him to roam freely through the crammed stacks of the Warburg. Its seemingly endless shelves were laden with precious books. As always, it was difficult for Harry to maintain a dignified composure. First, however, Clewes directed the apparently dazed new student to the nearby elevator and second floor office of his sponsor, Archivist Richard Pratt.

Virtually tiptoeing his way along the bleak narrow hallway, lined with offices, Harry located the name plate identifying Pratt's office and timidly knocked on the door which was slightly ajar. As he did, the door lurched open, revealing the beefy back, dingy and rumpled gray shirt and disheveled white hair of a preoccupied bureaucrat. Pratt was huddled over a pile of papers on his chaotic desk that faced the window overlooking Woburn Square. Resembling a cell, the narrow dingy office was crammed in every available nook and cranny with precarious stacks of folders and worn books; the beige walls were bare, and the air was laden with visible dust that choked any visitors.

With a dismissive wave of the back of his hand and without bothering to turn around, the faceless body growled, Just a second ... just a second ...

Harry's exuberance and meager confidence deflated, he hovered in the doorway wondering whether and how long to wait. After several minutes that seemed to Harry like an hour, Pratt swiveled around in his battered faux-leather chair. He was obviously annoyed at the intrusion and said, Yes, what can I do for you?

Professor Pratt, I'm Harry Slater ... come from New Zealand ... Harry mumbled.

Ah, yes, Slater. Without getting up or bothering to shake his hand, Pratt cleared another stack of papers and waved him into a rickety side chair. So sorry, I'm swamped and quite forgot you were arriving today. Then without waiting for a response Pratt glanced once again at his desk.

While pleased to hear a familiar accent in an unfamiliar and unsettling cosmopolitan city, where he was hoping to bond with a fellow Kiwi, Harry's spirits shriveled. Although grateful to Pratt for affording his entry to the Warburg, he immediately loathed the rude old crank and began to wonder what he had gotten himself into. Was humiliation the price he had to pay for access to the so-called glories of academia; and if so, was it worth it?

Perhaps it was the downcast eyes and tremulous tone of his voice, but somehow Harry's apparent discomfort seemed at last to penetrate Pratt's oblivion. In fact, in a flash of memories, Pratt recalled his own uneasy first days in London many years ago. He recalled himself as another insecure young Kiwi when he, too, first arrived at the Institute to study with the great Gombrich. And how far he had risen since then! Hired initially as a staff librarian, after he finished his thesis regarding the transposition of Renaissance scholarship to the Colonies, he rose to the position of head of the library. Now, for the past decade, he served as chief archivist of the renowned collection. Indeed it had been a heady journey and no small accomplishment.

Yet even after all these years there lingered in Pratt's mind a sense of inferiority among his more prestigious colleagues, whom he considered disdainful of his provincial background. While director Frida Hilb was unfailingly polite, if brusque; and witty cynical Martin Evans occasionally amusing; no one ruffled his feathers more than dreaded Dame Frances Yates, who since being awarded her DBE had become even more insufferable and demanding.

Yet, unlike prolific Dame Frances—and even if he, like other scholars, considered her notions of the so-called Hermetic Tradition specious—over the decades immersed in one of the great libraries in London, Pratt had never found time and space to crawl out from under the perpetual mountain of papers on his desk to write even one book. Furthermore, try as he might to imitate them, he never managed to lose his provincial accent with its flat r's and always suspected his more polished colleagues mocked him for it.

Perhaps that was why, as a longstanding member of the admissions committee, he had looked with favor at the application of another young man from the outback. Pratt voted for Harry's admission to the graduate program, even if his scholarship was less than exemplary. So for these reasons, and with some sympathy, he surveyed and took pity on the young disheveled compatriot now sitting uncomfortably in his office.

How was your trip? Are you settled at Fellowship House? What can we do to get you started? It's the Pre-Raphaelites that interest you, isn't it? Perhaps we should begin in the library, which because of its unique configuration, is confusing at first. But soon it will begin to make sense. Then we can have some lunch downstairs in the tearoom, where I'll introduce you to some of the staff and your fellow classmates.

And without waiting for Harry's answer to any of his perfunctory questions, Pratt stood up, led him down the hall and around the corner into the stacks of Paradise.

CHAPTER 6

To reach Trafalgar and the National Gallery, Harry usually strolled along historic Charring Cross Road, which was lined with rare and used book shops. He stopped to gaze enviously at each and every display window. His lust for books had become insatiable, and nothing gave him more pleasure than rummaging through the musty chaos of Rupert's Bookshelf with its basement carts overflowing with a tidal wave of used books for one pound each

At first it didn't occur to him to take books from the Warburg, but the inviting open stacks were literally a license to steal. After only a day or two, he couldn't help but notice how lax security procedures were at the Institute. In the mornings, anyone entering had to show a reader's card and sign the register. In the evenings, all departing academics, as well as staff, had to only open their briefcases for inspection. But the skinny old man on duty at the reception desk always had his nose in his book and barely bothered to really look through the papers inside. It would be so easy, Harry couldn't help but contemplate, to hide a book underneath the papers or, better yet, under a coat or sweater. Pull strings attached to lights inferred that electronic sensors on books were not coming to the Warburg Institute anytime in the near future.

Furthermore the convoluted catalog system and the ease with which any visiting scholar could hold rare books at his study carrel for an indefinite amount of time—simply by leaving a cardboard file card with his name noted in its customary place on the shelf—meant that numerous rare books were virtually floating somewhere around the library at any given time. But if a name weren't recorded ... Harry quickly surmised.

So one evening, when he wanted to continue perusing a small book of Ripa's images that night in his room at Fellowship Hall, Harry decided to attempt a test-run past the front desk. With the volume tucked under the left armpit of his windbreaker, he stood in the short line of others leaving for the evening and opened his briefcase for Gerald Clewes, who stood and glanced fleetingly through his stack of messy papers and waved him on. The frisson of pleasure he experienced lasted all the way back to Fellowship House. After dinner, he crawled between his thin smelly covers and in the dim shadows cast by the pale tiny nightlight over his bed, he savored his new treasure, which of course he had no intention of ever returning to the Warburg.

CHAPTER 7

One day a few weeks after he had begun his studies at the Warburg, Harry was sleuthing once again among the used bookstores along Charring Cross Road and landed at riotous Grorck's, a dimly lit and dusty shop overflowing with mountains of volumes stacked ceiling high on shelves, in cartons, and stacks on the floor. Bliss! Never had Harry encountered another shop like it. Before he had managed to work his way past the first kiosk, he had selected an inexpensive slightly bruised paperback of Sherlock Holmes mysteries—perfect relief when he craved a break from academic study.

Perched like a monarch on a high stool behind the elevated platform that served as his desk sat proprietor Charles Grorck. Like his emporium, he was overstuffed, bald with half-glasses perched at the end of his bulbous porous nose. Riotous overgrown white eyebrows and a few wisps growing out of his ears amounted to what hair he had left. From that desk blanketed with a crazy-quilt of chaotic manila folders, Grorck welcomed each pilgrim who ventured into his court.

As he scouted deliriously through the stacks—from fiction of seemingly every nation (Canadian Emily Carr and even from New Zealand, Alan Duff's grim Once Were Warriors); to poetry, archaeology, art and seemingly the history of every time and place—Harry wondered how Grorck managed to build such a dense collection. After nearly an hour of wandering like a dazed errant knight through a kind of magic forest of books, Harry found himself once again before Grorck's podium. He felt himself a supplicant and couldn't help but say to the daunting presiding monarch, What an amazing collection! I've never seen anything like it. By any chance are you Mr. Grorck?

Indeed it is I, young man, Grorck, ebullient and flattered by any recognition or compliment responded cordially. Relieved to have some conversation amidst the perpetually silent volumes, he expounded, I am pleased you appreciate our little emporium. Where do you come from? Do I detect a provincial accent?

My name is Harry Slater, Mr. Grorck. I am from New Zealand and here in London to study at the Warburg Institute.

At the mention of the Warburg, Grorck's beady dark eyes lit up behind his glasses. Certainly you are a most fortunate young man. The Warburg houses one of the finest collections in London! Over the years I have had the pleasure of meeting many scholars from the Institute. Just yesterday, as he often does, the archivist Professor Pratt, a regular patron, dropped by on his way to the station. Have you met him?

Only briefly, I arrived in London just last week. But perhaps you know that Professor Pratt is also from New Zealand, and it seems I am indebted to him for my invitation to study at the Warburg and needless to say, I'm looking forward to getting to know him. My advisor is Dame Frances Yates, so I expect I'll be spending some time with her as well.

Frances Yates! Grorck exclaimed. The one and only—what a doubly fortunate young man you are! Although I have never had the good fortune to meet her in person, whenever I manage to obtain them, her books virtually fly out the door, especially if they were written in her earlier years. Single-handedly she has popularized the so-called Hermetic Tradition. Do you happen to know what she is working on these days?

Harry had attended the first session of Frances' new seminar. Well, for some reason, which frankly I don't understand, she seems to be examining various decks of Tarot cards from the Renaissance for signs of the Hermetic Tradition. Honestly, since this is my first class at the Warburg, I wish it were something more akin to my own field of interest which is the art of the Pre-Raphaelites.

Both worthy topics, I'd say, Grorck responded. Tarot is another popular subject among my clients, and there is an entire shelf of books about it in the back corner of the shop. He indicated the direction with a vague backward wave of his hand. Still, Mr. Slater, you are a fortunate young man to study anything with Frances Yates. You've heard the expression, I'm sure, ‘Even if she were talking about the phone directory ...’

Chagrined, Harry's cheeks reddened. Of course I meant no disrespect to Dame Frances and don't at all take the opportunity to study at the Warburg for granted. In fact, whenever I wander through the stacks, I can't quite believe I'm allowed free access to the treasures on the shelves. Why, some of the volumes are nearly five-hundred years old!

By now, Grorck, a longtime practitioner of his craft had assessed his prey: a young naïve foreigner, who, based on his careless appearance and reticent manner was living in London on a limited budget. In all likelihood, he was perpetually hungry for food, as well as books. Grorck made his move.

Mr. Slater, he eased masterfully into his topic, I wonder if by any chance you'd be interested in becoming an agent of sorts for Grorck's. Obviously our conversation is confidential; and, if ever asked to do so, I will deny that it ever took place or even that we've met; but over the past years, other students at the Warburg have managed to obtain certain volumes from the library for which I have many eager clients. It's my understanding that security at the Institute is somewhat lax; and if that is still the case, and you were inclined to participate in my enterprise, I would reimburse you—in cash—with no questions asked.

Stunned, Harry couldn't believe his ears. He smiled wryly at the unexpected invitation. Based on his recent successful Ripa caper, the wheels in his head began to whirl briskly. How hard could it be to tuck more books at the small of his back secured with his belt, or under his arm between his shirt and jacket? Truth be told, it was a technique he had mastered long ago in bookstores and libraries in Dargaville and Aukland, and now in London—to be paid for it! He couldn't believe his good fortune.

Indeed, Mr. Grorck, I am both flattered and very pleased with your offer. When and how shall we launch our business arrangement? Are there any specific books you are interested in?

Delighted, Mr. Slater. Grorck acknowledged with satisfaction. Now that you ask, and coincidentally, I happen to have a client who is very interested in anything to do with the Tarot.

CHAPTER 8

Soon, for extra cash and the downright thrill of the game, Harry began selling a volume or two each month to Grorck, who, immediately recognizing their value, eagerly accepted each of his offerings. He paid Harry absurdly little, but he knew it was much needed cash—or gave him credit for more of the books he knew his new agent craved. A master of his trade, Grorck understood Harry's need for food, as well as his addiction to books.

In London, there was always a vibrant underground market—no questions asked—for rare books. And Charles Grorck had long ago established himself as an authority among London's insatiable, ethically-challenged, and notorious bibliophiles.

As he refined his métier, Harry at first concentrated on books that were smaller in size and easier to conceal. He brought in volumes such as Lull's Antologia Filosofico and Vico's Autobiografia. Even though he wasn't sure it was worth much when he first noticed it on the table in the carrel of a fellow student, a know-it-all American woman, he took a copy of the Comtesse of Chambrun's 1927 volume on Shakespeare. Compared to his other selections, it was relatively recent; yet nonetheless it appeared to please Grorck, who noted with satisfaction: A very interesting selection—female scholarship is becoming increasingly in vogue these days.

But, as Harry explained, the volumes of Tarot were larger in size and, accordingly, would require some ingenuity and additional time to remove from the library.

CHAPTER 9

It was 9 P.M. and the Warburg Institute on Woburn Square appeared mostly darkened when Inspector Stuart Drummond of Scotland Yard rang the bell an hour after receiving the call from headquarters reporting Richard Pratt's death. As soon as he and his assistant Sgt. Katherine Strickland, whom everyone called Kate, stepped inside the murky and starkly appointed reception entry, Drummond was reminded of an Agatha Christie