boiled over with remnants of the past, simmered with the unsolved. His encyclopedic production had long since won him accolades in a publishing world much wider than the academic press. As soon as he finished one work, he turned to another, often an abrupt change of direction. As a result, students from a myriad of disciplines sought him out, and I was considered lucky to have acquired his advisership. He was also the kindest, warmest friend I'd ever had.
"Well," he said, turning on his coffeepot and waving me to a chair. "How's the opus coming along?"
I filled him in on several weeks' work, and we had a short argument about trade between Utrecht and Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century. He served up his fine coffee in porcelain cups and we both stretched back, he behind the big desk. The room was permeated with the pleasant gloom that still came in at that hour, later each evening now that spring was deepening. Then I remembered my antique offering. "I've brought you a curiosity, Ross. Someone's left a rather morbid object in my carrel by mistake and after two days I didn't mind borrowing it for you to take a look at."
"Hand it over." He set down the delicate cup and reached out to take my book.
"Good binding. This leather might even be some kind of heavy vellum. And an embossed spine." Something about the spine of the book brought a frown to his usually clear face.
"Open it," I suggested. I couldn't understand the flickering throb my heart gave as I waited for him to repeat my own experience with the nearly blank book. It opened under his practiced hands to its exact center. I couldn't see what he saw, behind his desk, but I saw him see it. His face was suddenly grave - a still face, and not one I knew. He turned through the other leaves, front and back, as I had, but the gravity didn't become surprise. "Yes, empty." He laid it open on his desk. "All blank."
"Isn't it an odd thing?" My coffee was growing cold in my hand.
"And quite old. But not blank because it is unfinished. Just terribly blank, to make the ornament in the center stand out."
"Yes. Yes, it's as if the creature in the middle has eaten up everything else around it." I'd begun flippantly, but I finished slowly.Rossi seemed unable to drag his eyes from that central image spread before him. At last he shut the book firmly and stirred his coffee without sipping it.
"Where did you get this?"
"Well, as I said, someone left it in my carrel by accident, two days ago. I guess I should have taken it to Rare Books immediately, but I honestly think it's someone's personal possession, so I didn't."
"Oh, it is," Rossi said, looking narrowly at me. "It is someone's personal possession.""So you know whose?"
"Yes. It's yours."
"No, I mean that I simply found it in my - " The expression on his face stopped me. He looked ten years older, by some trick of the light from the dusky window. "What do you mean, it's mine?"
Rossi rose slowly and went to a corner of his study behind the desk, climbing two steps of the library stool to bring down a little dark volume. He stood looking at it for a minute, as if unwilling to put it in my hands. Then he passed it across. "What do you think of this?"
The book was small, covered in ancient-looking brown velvet like an old prayer missal or Book of Days, with nothing on the spine or front to give it an identity. It had a bronze-colored clasp that slipped apart with a little pressure. The book itself fell open to the middle. There, spread across the center, was my - I say my - dragon, this time overflowing the edges of the pages, claws outstretched, savage beak open to show its fangs, with the same bannered word in the same Gothic script.
"Of course," Rossi was saying, "I've had time, and I've had this identified. It's a Central European design, printed about 1512 - so you see it could very well have been set with movable-type text throughout, if there had been any text."
I flipped slowly through the delicate leaves. No titles on the first pages - no, I knew it already. "What a strange coincidence."
"It's been stained by salt water on the back, perhaps from a trip on the Black Sea. Not even the Smithsonian could tell