WE HAD MADE no preparations whatsoever for actually selling the book. We’d hardly even thought about it. Once it was in our hands we realized that this was going to be complicated. The mere existence of DODO was a highly classified secret, so we couldn’t very well sell it openly. To make a long and tediously legal story short, we ended up establishing a private trust to act as a front operation for DODO. It was called the East House Trust, and the story was that it was the legal owner and custodian of Rebecca and Frank’s house, with the two of them being its trustees. As such, the trust now became the legal owner of the book, which had, after all, been discovered on the property. Rebecca and Frank named Tristan and me officers of the trust, with authority to conduct certain business operations, and on that authority we opened an account at a bank in Harvard Square and rented a large safe deposit box where we placed the book for safekeeping while we entered into negotiations with various auction houses. Expert advice was that we would get the highest price in New York or London, and that we should wait for a few weeks so that the auction house could advertise the book and spread the word to collectors around the world.
So it was that in the first week of October, Tristan and I flew down to New York, he carrying the book in a locked metal briefcase. Sitting in the window seat, I gazed out at the fall colors sweeping down across the countryside from the north. The forests of Connecticut were nearing their peak in a glorious carpet of fiery red. I couldn’t help thinking of Goody Fitch, who had been dead for over three hundred years, but who to me was every bit as alive as Rebecca and Erszebet and the others. After all, with the assistance of Erszebet and the ODEC, I could go and visit her anytime I wished, and so, to me, she really was alive. How would she and the others in the colonial Boston DTAP look upon the changing of the leaves? Probably as a warning of bitter cold and hard times to come.
The auction house was on Fifth Avenue, across from Central Park, and not too far from the Met. The neighborhood was, of course, where the richest people lived, and had been living for a long time, and so as we walked into the establishment and conducted our business with the proprietors, I had the comforting sense that we had come to the right place.
Our copy of the Bay Psalm Book was the fourteenth and last item on a list of high-priced antiquities that were auctioned off over the course of a couple of hours. I’d grown up in a family that respected books and old things, but I’d never experienced anything remotely like this auction. Sitting there in my new skirt suit from Lord & Taylor and my mom’s best strand of pearls, watching the rich people and their representatives bid millions of dollars on various ancient artifacts, was a view into another world as strange to me as anything we could have visited through the ODEC.
The Bay Psalm Book had clearly attracted the attention of several well-heeled, highly motivated collectors, and so the bidding was intense. In moments it had blown through our expected price of five million dollars and shot upwards from there. Not until we got above ten million did bidders begin dropping out. It came down to a bidding duel between a collector from Los Angeles, who’d been sitting in the front row the whole time, and a man who had walked into the auction house and taken a seat at the back only moments before the bidding had started. In the end, the latter won, calmly nodding to the auctioneer whenever the man from LA raised his bid. The entire process had lasted less than a minute. The book sold for fourteen million dollars.
I assumed that payment, and the physical handover of the book, would be taken care of later, with the buyer and the auctioneer involving lawyers and bankers and so on. But after the auction finished and the room cleared out, the man who had bought the Bay Psalm Book walked up the aisle, pocketing a phone on which he had just finished making a call. He was dressed in an impeccable dove-grey suit, with a vest under the jacket that gave it a distinctive look—either retro or fashion-forward, I had no idea. He was in his fifties, well built, trim. He was groomed meticulously but a bit oddly, with sideburns that were longer than the norm. He wore rimless eyeglasses with tinted lenses. This detail had been noticeable when he had first walked in from the street. I’d guessed at the time that the lenses were those photochromic things that darken automatically in sunlight, and that they would lighten over the course of a few minutes indoors. But they had not changed; his eyes were still just barely visible behind a grey screen of tinted glass.
Tristan and I were standing in the aisle as this man walked by us. “If you would just give me a minute,” he said, on his way by. We were too surprised to answer, so he looked back over his shoulder with a slightly bemused expression. “I won’t be long.”
“Of course,” Tristan said, just to be polite. But I sensed he was a little uneasy. We were here under cover, pretending that DODO didn’t exist, that we were just representatives of the East House Trust. Our job was to hand the book to the auctioneer, watch what happened, and get out. Not to socialize. We had a flight back to Boston in a couple of hours, and a dinner date with our colleagues. But it would be bad manners to bolt out of the place, ignoring a man who had just handed over fourteen million dollars, and so Tristan and I drifted to the back of the room while the buyer conducted a discussion with the auction house staff. We looked out the windows at Central Park, which was glorious, approaching peak color. Strollers and bicyclists were out enjoying the crisp autumn day, and park employees were out in force, raking up leaves and fallen branches.
“Beautiful day, isn’t it?” said the buyer, as if reading my thoughts.
Tristan and I turned away from the window to see him approaching us. He was holding the Bay Psalm Book on which he had just spent fourteen million dollars. “My name is Frederick,” he announced. Then he casually tucked the book under his left arm, as if it were a paperback he’d just bought in an airport bookstore, and extended his right hand to shake.
“Mel,” I said, since it seemed we were operating on a first-name basis.
“Tristan,” said my companion. We shook hands with Frederick. Still keeping the book tucked under his arm, he pulled a nice pair of gloves out of the pockets of his overcoat and pulled them on while moving toward the exit. Tristan held the door open for him, and for me. A fortuitous gap in traffic enabled us to cross Fifth Avenue, and a few minutes later we were strolling in the park together.
“Where on earth did the East House Trust find this remarkable specimen?” Frederick asked. He moved briskly. Tristan kept up with ease; I had to step lively in my borrowed heels.