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By Root 595 0

tall, with a pleasantly ugly pug face and bright mahogany eyes, deep sunk behind thick round spectacles; her coarse gray hair was drawn back in a librarian’s bun, stuck with the canonical yellow pencil. She had come over as an orphan from Poland after the war and had been a librarian for over fifty years, most of them at the NYPL, specializing in manuscripts for the last twenty or so. Crosetti had known Aunt Fanny for his whole life and considered her the wisest person within his circle of aquaintance, although when complimented upon her encyclopedic brain, she always laughed and said, “Darling [or dolling], I know nothing [nozhing] but I know where to find everything.” When he was a child he and his sisters had tried to think of facts that would be impossible for Aunt Fanny to discover (how many bottles of Coke got sold in Ashtabula in 1928?), but she always defeated them and provided remarkable stories of how the information had been obtained.

So: greetings, questions about his sisters, his mother, himself (although Crosetti was sure she had been elaborately briefed on this by Mary Peg), and swiftly to business. He drew the pages out of the tube and handed over the roll. She carried them to a broad worktable and spread the sheets out in three long parallel rows, the copies of what he had sold Bulstrode and the retained originals.

When she had them spread out she uttered some startled words in what he supposed was Polish. “Albert, these eighteen sheets…they are originals?”

“Yeah, they’re what looks like enciphered letters. I didn’t sell them to Bulstrode.”

“And you are rolling them up like calendars? Shame on you!” She walked off and came back with clear plastic document envelopes, into which she carefully placed the enciphered sheets.

“Now,” she said. “Let us see what we have here.”

Doubrowicz looked at the copies for a long time, examining each sheet with a large rectangular magnifying glass. At last she said, “Interesting. You know there are three separate documents in all. These copies are of two different ones and these originals.”

“Yeah, I figured that part out. Those four sheets are obviously the printer’s copy of some sermons and I’m not interested in them. All the rest is the letter from this guy Bracegirdle.”

“Umm, and you sold this letter to Bulstrode, your mother said.”

“Yeah. And I’m sorry, Fanny, I should have come straight to you.”

“Yes, you should have. Your dear mother thinks you were cheated.”

“I know.”

She patted his arm. “Well, we shall see. Show me the part where you thought he mentioned Shakespeare.”

Crosetti did so, and the little librarian adjusted a goosenecked lamp to cast an intense beam at the bright paper and peered at it through her lens. “Yes, this seems a clear enough secretary hand,” she remarked. “I have certainly had to deal with worse.” She read the passage aloud slowly, like a dim third-grader, and when she reached the end exclaimed, “Dear God!”

“Shit!” cried Crosetti and pounded his fist into his thigh hard enough to sting.

“Indeed,” said Doubrowicz, “you have been well cogged and coney-catched, as our friend here would have said. How much did he pay you?”

“Thirty-five hundred.”

“Oh, dear me. What a shame!”

“I could have got a lot more, right?”

“Oh, yes. If you had come to me and we had established the authenticity of the document beyond any reasonable doubt—and for a document of this nature and importance, that in itself would have been a considerable task—then there’s no telling what it would have fetched at auction. We would probably not be in it, since it’s a little out of our line, but the Folger and the Huntington would have been in full cry. More than that, to someone like Bulstrode, having possession, exclusive possession, of something like this—why, it’s a career in itself. No wonder he cheated you! He must have seen immediately that this thing would place him back in the center of Shakespeare studies. No one would ever mention that unfortunate fake again. It would be like an explosion opening up an entirely fresh field of scholarship. People have been arguing