The Book of Air and Shadows Read Online Free PDF Page B

industrialist for nearly forty years and then I purchased it at auction last month. It was perfect, not a trace of wear or foxing or…oh, well. Impossible to recover. They’ll have to be broken for the maps and illustrations.”
    “Oh, no!” exclaimed Rolly. “Surely they can be restored.”
    Glaser peered at her over his thick half-glasses. “No, it simply doesn’t make economic sense, when you calculate what restoration would cost and what we might realize from a rebound and doctored set.” He paused, cleared his throat: “No, we’ll have to break them, I’m afraid.” This in the tone of an oncologist saying “stage four melanoma.”
    Glaser issued an immense sigh and waved his hands weakly, as if chasing gnats.
    “Caro, I’ll leave it in your hands; do it quickly before the mold starts.” He shuffled away to his private office.
    “He wants you to break the volumes?” Crosetti asked.
    “It’s not a complex task. But we have to dry the set out,” she replied, a distracted look on her face. “Look, the fact is I’m going to need some help.” She seemed to notice him again, and an appealing expression came to her face, a look he rather liked. He mimed searching for someone behind him and said, “Oh, not me! Man, I failed finger painting. I never once colored completely inside the lines.”
    “No, this involves handling paper towels. The drying operation has to go on all day and night, maybe for days.”
    “What about our jobs?”
    She gestured broadly to the environs. “This place’ll be closed for a month while they fix it up, and you can run the mail-order operation from any computer, can’t you?”
    “I guess. Where are you going to work out of?”
    “My place. I have a good deal of space. Let’s go.” She hoisted two of the folio volumes onto her hip.
    “You mean now?”
    “Of course. You heard what Glaser said: the faster we begin, the less damage from the damp. Get the rest of them. We’ll wrap them in paper for the trip.”
    “Where do you live?” he asked, lifting the ruined volumes up against his chest.
    “In Red Hook.” She was already at the shipping desk, stripping brown paper from a large roll.
    “You come from Red Hook on a bicycle?” Crosetti had never been to Red Hook, a region on the southeastern coast of Brooklyn behind what used to be the Brooklyn docks. There are no subway stops in Red Hook, because until the shipping industry moved to New Jersey, everyone in the area worked longshore jobs and walked to work, nor was there any reason for outsiders to go there, unless they wanted their heads busted.
    “No, of course not,” she replied as she wrapped volume six. “I bike over to the river and take the water taxi from the Thirty-fourth Street pier.”
    “I thought that was real expensive.”
    “It is, but my rent is cheap. You should put those in plastic.” Crosetti looked at the book he was holding. It had oozed a sooty liquor down the front of his tan trousers. For the first time he regretted not dressing entirely in black, like so many of his hipper peers; or like Carolyn. She excused herself and went upstairs, leaving him to wrap the rest of the volumes.
    When this had been done, the two of them took off east, with their burden stuffed into the wire panniers of Rolly’s bike, a heavy, worn vehicle of the type favored by food delivery personnel or, some years ago, by the Vietcong. His few attempts to make conversation being greeted by short answers, he fell silent; we’re not on a date, bub, seemed to be the message. On the other hand, it was a fairly pleasant day, in the low eighties, the humidity somewhat less than tropical, and being paid to stroll across town with even a silent Carolyn Rolly beat the hell out of doing inventory in a grease-smelling basement. Crosetti looked hopefully ahead to what might occur in the woman’s apartment.
    Crosetti had never been on a water taxi. He found traveling on one greatly superior to a subway journey. Rolly secured