Felix opened the portfolio, and his gaze jumped to the bottom, to a little rectangular shape pressing against the inner pocket where she’d hastily shoved it—the USB drive Swann had given Nell before she left the library.
“Inconclusive how?” he asked, as he went to pry it free.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “He didn’t tell me. I think he doesn’t want to influence you before you view it.”
“Does this go with it?”
Nell looked up. “What?”
“There’s something else here.” Felix was working something else out of the same pocket, where it had been jammed so deep Nell hadn’t noticed it. “I think when you stuffed the USB drive in, it helped dislodge it a little.” He finally yanked it free and held it out to her—a little piece of paper.
A note from her father?
“It’s a business card,” she said. It was faded and creased from where it had been stuck for years. There was a scribble on the back, a hastily sketched map of some city streets downtown in the Chinatown area, she guessed, perhaps done by her father as a way to remind himself of where the business the card advertised was located.
She turned it over.
RW Rare Maps
By Appointment Only
They both gasped at the same time as they read the words.
“No way,” she choked.
“Your father . . .” Felix rubbed his face in amazement. “Your father was doing business with Ramona Wu?”
Nell shuddered at hearing the name out loud. She’d never met Ramona Wu in person, back when she was still moving in industry circles, but she didn’t have to—Ramona’s reputation far preceded her. And it was not a good one.
Ramona was technically a private rare and antique maps dealer, a consultant who worked with wealthy clients to help them build their personal collections, but dealer was not what her father and Swann called Ramona on the rare occasions she came up in conversation.
Deceitful was the word they used.
There were plenty of dealers they did like. They often even worked with them to convince clients to loan or donate some of their most historically significant pieces to the Map Division for temporary exhibits. But throughout the industry, Ramona was known to operate on the more slippery side of the line. It seemed she could find any map a collector wanted—the provenance papers just didn’t necessarily follow.
For anyone as scrupulous as Nell’s father or Swann, and for most of the amateur collectors who knew even a little about the field, that alone would have been enough to convince them that the maps Ramona acquired were stolen or fakes. For anyone with any kind of standing to maintain, they would never be caught dead dealing with Ramona. Nell’s distinguished father most of all.
But then why did he have Ramona’s business card tucked away? And in his special portfolio, no less?
“Folding . . . gas station . . . highway . . . map,” Felix mumbled. He had pulled out his phone and was typing the words into the HabSearch browser open on his screen. The device’s sleekness bordered on obscene, like some kind of a sci-fi gadget. “You didn’t happen to already Hab this, did you?”
Nell rolled her eyes. “No, Felix, I haven’t Habbed it yet. I’ve been a little busy with my father dying and the library getting robbed and worrying about Swann. Besides, if the map really was that significant, don’t you think we already would have heard about it somewhere? It’s not like we did this for a living or anything.”
He held up a hand in surrender before they spiraled into another argument, then went back to typing. “I was just asking because Haberson is testing a new search algorithm. Still in the beta phase, but it’s way better than the general HabSearch, because it can cloak to trawl the dark web at the same time.”