Felix went through the police notes, looking for mentions of damage, but they had confirmed that the lobby cameras hadn’t been tampered with—only the one in the ceiling of the Map Division. And they were all on the same system, so any attempts to hack them before the breakin would have brought the whole network offline, which clearly hadn’t happened, because Felix had been able to watch the burglar prowl the Map Division.
The only explanation he could come up with was that somehow, the burglar hadn’t gone into the lobby at all. But then how had they gotten into an exhibit room whose only entrance and exit was a single door directly off the lobby hallway? Felix double-checked the notes again, but there had been no glass broken in the windows or drill holes found in the walls either.
It just didn’t make any sense. How could a burglar break in to a building without actually breaking in to a building?
VII
Ramona Wu’s shop sat on the edge of Chinatown, at the border where the neighborhood blended into Little Italy. Dim sum restaurants gave way to wine shops and Italian eateries, languages mingled. The Bowery was a blur of rain puddles, puffs of smoke, and the intoxicating scents wafting from inside each restaurant every time the doors opened. Nell’s mouth watered for the roast duck she passed, strung up and glistening in the window. She’d been in such a rush this morning, eager to get started on her investigation into her father’s map, that she’d forgotten to eat breakfast before she left her apartment, she realized. Barely slept, either. She’d startled awake at the table at one point in the early hours of the morning, still hovering over the map, a pencil in her right hand—of course. She’d been sketching little bits of the map by instinct before she’d dozed off, unable to help herself. It was how she made sense of things. Perhaps it did make a little bit of sense that she’d ended up at Classic after the library.
After that, Nell had dragged herself to bed, where she’d lain for some number of hours, but it had done no good. She couldn’t stop thinking about the map. When her alarm finally went off, she was already up, showered, and dressed, impatient to get started.
Pushing her hunger away, Nell broke off from the chaos of Bowery onto narrow Doyers Street, where the honk of cars and screech of tires suddenly dropped away. She could hear the quiet conversations of couples walking up and down the sidewalk, the clink and clang of pans being moved about the stainless-steel stoves inside kitchens. There was a delivery truck unloading fresh vegetables into Nom Wah Tea Parlor, and a few people in line outside the small post office across the lane.
Nell looked down at the business card in her hands as she walked, checking the little sketch her father had drawn on the back to make sure she was in the right place. She’d realized as she’d set out that morning why he’d done it—the front of the card had Ramona’s name and the title of her shop, but didn’t actually contain an address or phone number. She didn’t know how her father had originally found his way there, but she was glad he’d doodled a little street map on the back of the card to remind himself—and to allow her to follow.
Sure enough, a few steps past Nom Wah Tea Parlor, an old glass front proclaimed in delicate gold lettering: RW Rare Maps.
Nell looked at the business card again and chewed on her lip.
She still couldn’t believe her father would have anything to do with someone with a reputation as shady as Ramona’s. But then again, she also couldn’t believe that one of the most respected scholars in the field of cartography had anything to do with a gas station highway map, either. And she hadn’t managed to dig up anything more—beyond the map’s inexplicable, eye-watering value and its apparent penchant for being stolen—after Felix had left her apartment.
Before heading over to Ramona’s, she’d spent several hours that morning in the Brooklyn Library branch just off Grand Army Plaza, looking into General Drafting Corporation, the company that had made the maps from which this Junk Box specimen came, hoping some clue might jump out at her. But as far as she could tell, it was a small company that focused mostly on highway driving maps, producing them for nearly every state—none of which went for the same kind of prices that hers did—until they were eventually squeezed out of the market when the larger corporations caught up. At some point in the early 1990s, what was left of General Drafting was absorbed by some German media conglomerate and then fizzled out completely.