“Respecting the confidentiality of the trustees, I’ll treat that as a rhetorical question, Frederick,” Tristan answered.
Frederick slowed to a stop and turned toward us. “It’s new,” he remarked.
Both of us must have looked goggle-eyed. This amused him. “The trust, I mean. Only established a few weeks ago. Oh no, I wasn’t referring to the book. The book is obviously quite old!” He pulled it out from his armpit and opened it up, flipping curiously through a few pages.
“You are correct on both counts, Frederick,” I said. I found it strange to be looking at those pages, darkened and mottled with the passage of hundreds of years, which I had seen fresh from the printing press only a few weeks earlier. To be quite honest, it gave me a feeling of satisfaction that bordered on smugness. DODO had come together, as I’ve explained, in a crazily haphazard and chaotic fashion, with many twists and turns, and a few tragedies, that we’d never foreseen. But it had come together. I had traveled back in time, on many occasions. I had achieved my mission. Proof of that was right in front of me, in Frederick’s gloved hands, and in the enormously swollen bank account of the East House Trust.
Frederick turned his back on us, a bit rudely, and resumed walking. He forked off the main path onto a smaller trail that rambled off through a wooded section of the park. We followed him, kicking through fallen leaves. He said, “I suppose you’re going to tell me that this was discovered squirreled away in the attic or something, and once the East-Odas understood its value, they decided to form the trust in order to manage the financial ramifications. I suppose that story hangs together reasonably well.”
Lagging half a pace behind him, Tristan and I exchanged a glance. It was a bit difficult to hear him, because we were approaching an area where some groundskeepers were cleaning up fallen branches and leaves, tossing the debris into a gasoline-powered chipper that reduced everything to confetti and hurled it into the back of a truck. It was noisy. Frederick drew to a halt not far away from this machine and turned to face us again.
I understood. Or I thought I did. He wanted to speak to us privately, without fear of surveillance microphones picking up his words, and so he had moved to a noisy environment.
“Do you know anything about markets?” Frederick asked. “Given your professional backgrounds, Dr. Melisande Stokes and Lieutenant Colonel Tristan Lyons, I’m guessing not really. Oh, you’ve read the odd article in the business section of the New York Times, and, as educated persons, you have some general background on which to draw. I like to think I’m a bit more up to speed on such things, as being related to my profession.”
“What profession is that, Frederick?” Tristan asked.
Frederick had tucked the book under his arm again—a habit I found quite annoying given the rarity and fragility of that artifact. No book collector would have treated it so cavalierly. This had freed his hands. Turning slightly away, he reached up and removed his shaded eyeglasses, folded them up, and slid them carefully into the breast pocket of his overcoat. For a moment he squinted against the bright golden sunlight of the New York autumn, showing creases around his eyes. He blinked a couple of times and then turned to face us. “The sort of profession,” he answered, “that places me in a position to spend fourteen million dollars on a book.”
“Touché,” Tristan said. Then his face went slack with amazement. He was staring at Frederick. I turned to look in the same direction, but didn’t see anything to explain Tristan’s reaction. There was something odd about Frederick’s eyes, which took me a moment to process. They were asymmetrical. His left pupil was dilated to the point where the blue iris could scarcely be seen, but the right pupil was constricted, as you’d expect when outdoors in broad daylight.
“It’s simple,” Frederick said, “but it’s not. Supply, demand, individual transactions, such as the one we have engaged in today—child’s play, on the level of a sidewalk lemonade stand. But when billions of them are integrated over centuries—not so simple at all. The resulting flows of information, encoded as fluctuations in prices, shifts in markets, are far beyond the ability of any one human mind to comprehend. Which is why such things are best left in the hands of professionals with the requisite training and, if I may say so, lineage. Good day.”
Frederick turned his back on us and walked directly toward the wood chipper. The crew members, distracted by their work and rendered deaf by their hearing protectors, didn’t see him coming until he was just a few yards away. Then, sizing him up as a gentleman of a certain bearing, well attired, they straightened up and regarded him with a kind of wary curiosity. Frederick acknowledged them with a polite nod, then took a step closer to the roaring maw of the machine while reaching under his arm. Suddenly I knew what was about to happen, but I could not believe it.
Glancing back over his shoulder to make sure that Tristan and I were watching him, Frederick pulled the Bay Psalm Book out from under his arm and gave it an underhand toss into the chipper. The machine made a brief coughing sound—as did I—and we saw a spume of white confetti spray into the back of the truck.
Frederick walked away into the park.
“There goes one strange fucker,” Tristan remarked. “Let’s go home, Stokes.”