“What if one of them steals something from the collection? How do you find out who it was if you’ve been scrubbing the servers?” I demanded.
“We have security precautions in place,” Turley said. “I’m not going to share them with you because for all I know, you’re pretending to investigate a murder when really you’ve been hired by one of our more contentious scholars to check up on his competitors.”
Her bland smile seemed to say that she knew she was winding me up. I gave her a sour grimace, but pulled my collection of photographs from my bag and laid them on the counter.
Several more researchers came up to the counter; they gave me and my photo collection sidelong looks while they handed in their request slips to the other librarian.
“Do any of these men look familiar to you? One of them is the real Julius Dzornen; the other three are possible candidates for the imposter.”
“Ms.—” She picked up the card I’d also placed on the counter. “Ms. Warshawski, the privacy of patrons is more fundamental than the law of gravity. I would not tolerate anyone who worked for me giving you a name or telling you if they’d seen one of these people, and I would expect to be fired myself if I did so.”
By this time, everyone in the administrative area was frankly listening—the other staff members, the patrons, even someone from the janitorial staff, who was on a ladder in the corner replacing a lightbulb.
“You’re not concerned about imposters in the library?”
“If someone wanted to be in the library so badly that he created a phony ID, I’d like to shake his hand and ask him to make a public service announcement for the American Library Association,” Turley said. Her coworker nodded emphatically.
When you’ve been beaten on all counts, don’t keep fighting. “In that case, I guess I need to look at the Dzornen papers myself, to see if I can figure out what my unscrupulous competitor is up to. How do I do that?”
“You fill out a research request, with a brief description of what your project is.” Turley typed a few lines. “The Dzornen papers run to sixty-seven boxes; each one has about fifteen files in it. We limit our scholars to two boxes at a time, so why don’t you study the catalog record and see where you’d like to start. We’ve never had anyone list a murder investigation as a project, but we’ll certainly accept that.”
39
BYRONIC ODES
I RETURNED MY ROGUES’ gallery to my briefcase and retreated to a counter with a computer terminal, where I grimly studied the record of Benjamin Dzornen’s papers: sixty-seven boxes (thirty-six linear feet, the catalog added helpfully). There was a personal biographical section that ran to five boxes. His honors, his lectures, his research and his students took up the remaining sixty-two. Many of the headers were in German.
I scrolled through the lists of students and correspondents, looking for names I knew. Martina Saginor was there for the early thirties, as was Gertrud Memler, but neither name cropped up in the later boxes.
When I checked for Ada Byron, I found a letter from her to Dzornen dated May 1969. This was the only mention of her name, but there were many folders that simply listed “Miscellaneous correspondence from Vienna,” or “Family letters from Bratislava,” or “Miscellaneous correspondence with students.” I’d have to go through those. Which meant many, many folders. I tried not to groan out loud.
I needed an intern. I needed Martin Binder—I didn’t think Kitty had ever hired a nanny for him, but maybe Ada Byron was an old lover of Benjamin Dzornen who’d kept an eye on Martin for him. I looked her up online.
According to six million hits on Metar-Quest, she was the long-dead daughter of the poet Byron. Ada played such an important role in the history of computers and programming, they’d even named a computer language for her. Since she’d been dead now for about a hundred sixty years, it was hard to see how she’d written to Benjamin Dzornen in 1969, or to Kitty a mere seven years ago.
Martin knew who she was; he’d disappeared to go look for her. Or he’d been killed, a nasty voice whispered in my inner ear. I rubbed my forehead. The more I learned the stupider I felt.
“Martin, why couldn’t you have laid down a trail of bread crumbs for me?” I snarled.
I went back to the catalog record for Dzornen’s papers, but I’d had an exhausting morning and was having trouble keeping my eyes open. Philip Marlowe depended on his trusty pint of rye to get him going after he’d been sandbagged. My detecting was fueled by espresso. The coffee bar I’d gone to a week ago was only a ten-minute walk away.