Page 127 of The Librarians
“Altogether, these books should fetch thirty-three million US dollars—again, by conservative estimate.”
Detective Chu, who has read the affidavits signed by the antiquarian experts, carefully lowers the cover ofThe Birds of America. “So you allege that your husband exchanged his Bitcoin for these books?”
“It’s the best conjecture we have at this point.”
That Kit, whether because he felt the law breathing down his neck—cryptocurrency can be seized like any other assets—or because he was worried about crypto’s volatility, decided to exchange his cache for rare and highly valuable books. There is a non-negligible likelihood that the books had been held by criminal elements looking to turn them into more liquid assets—art has been in use as collateral in drug deals for a while; it’s only a matter of time before the same happens with antiquarian books.
Detective Chu reaches toward a volume of theYongle Encyclopedia, a much smaller and slenderer treatise, but changes his mind: The great Ming Dynasty work once comprised over twenty thousand volumes, only four hundred or so of which have survived—and each of the three volumes on the coffee table can command more than two million dollars on the open market.
“My mother is a booklover and a casual collector,” says Hazel, “not of books of this caliber, but she spends a few thousand dollars here and there. I’ve been trying to make a book-themed tabletop game for a while. From time to time, I would borrow a stack of books from my mother’s rare book collection for inspiration.
“This past spring, my grandmother in Austin contracted COVID. When I went to look after her, I took a bunch of those titles with me.”
Detective Chu stands up and retreats to where he placed his cup of coffee,the breakfast table by the glass wall where Hazel and Kit used to sit over their scrambled eggs, at first in affectionate banter, then, as time went by, in greater and greater silence. “The books your American colleague found in the storage room of the library where you’ve been working?”
“Correct. My husband, who visited me in Austin and left before I did, asked if he could help me pack away the books, since I wasn’t working on the game. I said, ‘Yes, thank you.’ He then said he had plenty of room in his luggage and could lug them home for me. I said, ‘Sure, why not.’
“When I got here, I heard from my mother that he’d gone to her house when she was out and entrusted a box of books to her staff. Given what happened soon after that, it was probably the last time anyone gave any thought to the books for a while.”
How strange to think that the stranger before her, an even greater stranger then, had witnessed two of the most trying events of her life—the raid of her apartment and the news of her husband’s death.
“After I went back to Austin in autumn, I saw that I didn’t bring my game in progress. My mother said she hadn’t bothered to unpack the books Kit returned on my behalf in spring, so if I would have someone bring over my game, she would have her staff ship the game and the books to me in Austin.
“I took a look at the package when it arrived, but I only looked at the game, not the books. My American colleague found my mother’s books at the library and brought them to my attention. If Kit donated my mother’s books, then what was in the unopened box I received from her?”
Detective Chu gestured at the books on the coffee table. “These.”
Or rather, some of them—her mother’s staff had chosen not to send the largest and heaviest volumes.
Raindrops pitter-patter against the glass wall—monsoon season isn’t here yet, but the cloud cover hasn’t lifted since her arrival. Has Conrad ever visited Singapore? In her younger days she used to stand on the bridges that spanned the river and imagine him wandering by, a new ex-pat in a city teeming with them.
“Precisely,” she says. “Perhaps at some point Kit wanted to leave these books at my grandmother’s place, but he changed his mind and decided thatmy mother’s house would work better. In any case they escaped the search of this apartment.”
“And now you have brought them back.”
“To hand them in to your keeping, as the only right thing to do for an extremely law-abiding resident of our great city-state.”
Hazel smiles. She can tell her smile makes Detective Chu nervous, because he understands she is about to set conditions.
And he is correct about that.
Hazel is not conversant with how long seized—or surrendered, in this case—assets typically remain in police custody, but with her grandfather’s lawyers acting as go-betweens, they quickly broker a deal.
Kit’s former employer accepts five of the rare books as repayment for the money Kit embezzled. The rest will find buyers through private channels—with some of the proceeds going to repay Conrad, who took over Perry’s loan; some to compensate customers of Kit’s art galleries who bought the fake pop art he peddled; and the remainder to fund scholarships both in the UK and in Singapore.
Originally Hazel thought she would have to budget for the retrieval of Kit’s body. But Kit’s parents do not view a watery grave as an undignified end—both families have sacrificed young men to the wars of the twentieth century and lost a number of them at sea.
“He didn’t live the life we hoped for him,” says his mother, “but maybe his money can still do some good in the world.”
Hazel donates an additional million dollars of her own in the UK, not in Kit’s name but in Perry’s.
Her librarian friends keep her apprised of what they learn about the investigations still going on in Austin, but—not so surprisingly—it is her grandfather who tells her that Alina Kadeev, aka Ayesha Khan, is now answering questions for the NSA, and will later face MI5.
“Don’t put yourself as bait next time. And absolutely stay away from firefights.”
She doesn’t ask how he knows—she’s said not a word about either. “Sorry, Gonggong. At least it didn’t become news here.”
“I’m not worried for my old face,” says Bartholomew Kuang, shaking his head slightly, “but for your safety. What am I going to do without my little girl?”
