Shadow 322 - Dead Man's Chest Fall 1948, The by Maxwell Grant

Author:Maxwell Grant [Grant, Maxwell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Street and Smith
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XIII

THE RIGBY RECORD

THE MARITIME LIBRARY was a massive pile of marble patterned after the Pantheon in Rome. Square-walled, it had a domed roof that formed a great curved skylight filled with panes of frosted glass, except for the exact center which was a circle of bronze. Divided into twelve sections, the glass interior of the dome had been painted with semi-transparent murals representing the signs of the zodiac.

Situated on a secluded East Side avenue, partly surrounded by a marble wall broken only by bronze gates, the edifice was a thing of grace and beauty when viewed from the avenue or the streets in front or back. From the fourth side, which faced toward the east, it was a total loss. There, the building was flanked by a row of decadent brownstone houses against which the marble wall terminated. Though lower than the library, the roofs of those houses cut off a view of it from the east.

It was just another Manhattan story. Some tycoon of the ‘90s had built himself a marble manse, but had neglected to buy the row of brownstones. A business rival who also dealt in multi-millions had grabbed them up at a premium and had kept the houses there for spite. So the man who had planned to dwell in marble halls had announced that he would use the building for his mausoleum instead of his home.

This had been blocked by one generation of heirs who had turned the edifice into a private library instead. The next generation, confronted by heavy taxes, had turned it into a public library rather than spend money tearing it down. By then, nobody cared about the spiteful brownstones.

In order to make the building a quasi-public institution, the estate had invited the Maritime Library to occupy it. This was a nice deal, because few people ever bothered to browse around the Maritime Library and there was plenty of extra space where the present heirs could keep the rare volumes belonging to the original owner, none of which could be sold until the year 1968. It was just another case of a dead man’s outdated whims pestering the progress of posterity.

Doug Lawton, however, was very glad it all had happened. Otherwise, the building would still be known as the Greckendorfer Memorial, in honor of the builder’s third great-grandfather, who had been scalped on this very spot by Indians who discovered that he had watered six barrels of rum which he was swapping them for Governor’s Island. Having become the Maritime Library, it now housed all sorts of obscure records including the only known copy of a booklet called “Strange and Unaccountable Nautical Experiences” which included the log of the Nancy Lee.

The ground floor of the building was actually a museum, for it was filled with great glass showcases that formed a transparent labyrinth. In these cases were models of ships dating from Carthaginian triremes to ocean liners, with samples of everything belonging to the centuries between. The models were sizeable, some more than six feet in length, with many of lesser proportions.

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