where he was going, I remember that. He,d been talking on the phone long-distance to his friends all over the world. I didn,t think much of it. He was always going, and always coming back. If it wasn,t a dig, then he was off to some foreign library to look at a fragment of manuscript that had just been unearthed in some unpublished collection by one of his many students. He paid them by the dozens. They were always sending information. He lived in his own fully detached and lively world."
"He must have left papers behind," said Reuben, "a man engaged in all that."
"Papers! Reuben, you have no idea. There are rooms upstairs that are filled with nothing but papers, manuscripts, binders, crumbling books. There is so much to be gone through, so many decisions to be made. But if the house sells tomorrow, I,m ready to ship it all to climate-controlled storage and work with it from there."
"Was he searching for something, something in particular?"
"Well, if he was, he never said. One time he did say, ,This world needs witnesses. Too much is lost., But I think it was a general complaint. He financed digs, I know that. And often met with archaeology students and history students who didn,t work for him. I recall them coming and going here. He would give out his own little private grants."
"What a great thing," Reuben said, "to live like that."
"Well, he had the money, as I well know now. There was never any doubt he was rich, but I didn,t know how rich until everything came to me. Come, shall we have a look around?"
How he loved the library.
But it was one of those showplace rooms in which no one ever wrote a letter or read a book. Marchent confessed as much. The old French desk was exquisitely polished and its brass ormolu as bright as gold. It had a clean green blotter, and the floor-to-ceiling shelves were filled with the inevitable classics in leather binding that would have made them awkward to carry in a knapsack or read on a plane.
There was the Oxford English Dictionary in twenty volumes, an old Encyclopaedia Britannica, massive art tomes, atlases, and thick old volumes whose gilded titles had been worn away.
An awe-inspiring room. He saw his father at the desk watching as the light faded from the leaded windows, or sitting in the velvet-padded window seat with a book. The eastern windows of the house along that wall must have been thirty feet wide.
Too dark now to see the trees. In the morning, he,d come into this room early. And if he bought this house, he,d give this room to Phil. In fact, he could bait his father with a description of all this. He noted the oak parquet with its huge intricate inlaid squares, and the ancient railroad clock on the wall.
Red velvet draperies hung from brass rods, and a great large photograph hung over the mantel, of a group of six men, all in safari khaki, gathered together against a backdrop of banana and tropical trees.
It had to have been taken with sheet film. The detail was superb. Only now in the digital age could you blow up a photo to that size without degrading it hopelessly. But this had never been retouched. Even the banana leaves looked engraved. You could see the finest wrinkles in the men,s jackets, and the dust on their boots.
Two of the men had rifles, and several stood quite casually and free with nothing in their hands at all.
"I had that made," Marchent said. "Quite expensive. I didn,t want a painting, only an accurate enlargement. It,s four by six feet. You see the figure in the middle? That,s Uncle Felix. That is the only really current picture I had of him before he disappeared."
Reuben drew closer to look at it.
The names of the men were inscribed in black ink across the mat border just inside the frame. He could barely read them.
Marchent turned on the chandelier for him and now he could see plainly the figure of Felix, the dark-skinned and dark-haired man who stood near the middle of the group, a very agreeable-looking figure really, with a fine tall physique, and the same lean graceful hands he admired so in Marchent, and even something of the same very gentle smile. A likable man surely, an approachable man, with a near-childlike expression: curious, enthusiastic perhaps. He looked to be anywhere from twenty to about thirty-five.
The other men