The Map Thief by Michael Blanding

Author:Michael Blanding
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-05-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

THE PLEA

FIGURE 15 SAMUEL DE CHAMPLAIN. “CARTE GÉOGRAPHIQUE DE LA NOUVELLE FRANSE.” PARIS, 1613.

2005–2006

THE DIRECTORY ON the building across from Boston’s City Hall had no listing to indicate it was home to the Boston Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, overseeing agency operations in four states. I rode the elevator up to the sixth floor, where two bored-looking officers led me through a metal detector, and a woman behind glass made me surrender my driver’s license and cell phone. Another agent took me into a cramped law library, where I met Special Agent Stephen J. Kelleher. He hardly seemed movie-stock G-man material. Short and gangly, with a shaved head, he wore jeans and a black polo with a shamrock-shaped badge reading “Boston FBI SWAT” on the chest.

“My supervisor came over one day and dropped a file on my desk—Yale has this thing and this guy stole some maps,” he recounted in a Boston accent. “Can you go check it out?”

The case hardly excited him. Prior to joining the FBI, Kelleher had worked as a patrolman in a working-class suburb of Providence, Rhode Island. He had his share of war stories—like the time a guy high on coke had gunned a Ford Explorer into him during a traffic stop and he had to fire a bullet at his assailant, hitting the hood of the car instead. Or the time during a domestic disturbance call, when he tackled a man holding a woman down on the ground with a knife at her throat—he earned a special award for that one.

Compared to those cases, this seemed routine. He drove from the New Haven field office to the Yale Police Department headquarters, and from there walked over to the Beinecke with Detective Martin Buonfiglio. There, they watched the videotape showing Smiley stealing the de Jode map, and looked at the maps Buonfiglio had recovered.

Despite the persuasive evidence, Kelleher saw a problem—there was a difference between Smiley having copies of maps the library was missing and proving Smiley had the missing maps. “You know, they weren’t cars with VIN numbers,” he told me. “Who knows how many copies there were, and when the last time was someone saw it in a book.” He couldn’t even use fingerprints from the crime scene, since Smiley had been given permission to handle the books. He explained all this to library staff as they looked together at de Jode’s world map and his atlas spread out on the table. “Is there anything you can show me to prove that this map came from this book?” he asked.

There was one thing, they said: wormholes. For centuries libraries had been plagued with wood-boring insects that laid their eggs in the stacks. When the larvae hatched, they used the digestive enzymes in their alimentary canals to chew through wood and paper, leaving behind a tiny trail. Somewhere in its 427-year history, the Beinecke’s copy of the Speculum had contracted its own case of pests. In the front of the book,

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